“You’ll only just have time,” said Elliott, looking at the sky as Hornblower prepared to go down into his barge.
“Yes indeed,” said Hornblower. His main anxiety was to get away from the Pluto before anyone noticed that he was leaving Villena behind — the latter, with no understanding of the English conversation, was hanging back on the quarterdeck, and Hornblower was able to scramble down into the boat without anyone thinking of him.
“Give way,” said Hornblower, before he was fairly seated, and the barge shot away from the Pluto’s side.
With an admiral and his staff on board the accommodation, three-decker though she was, must already be strained. The presence of a Spanish colonel would mean that some unfortunate lieutenant would be rendered extremely uncomfortable. But Hornblower could harden his heart to the troubles of the unknown lieutenant.
Chapter XVI
The thunder was already rolling on the horizon when Hornblower set foot on the Sutherland’s deck again, although the heat showed no signs of diminishing at present and the wind had dropped away almost to nothing. The black clouds had stretched over the sky nearly overhead, and what blue was left was of a hard metallic tint.
“It’ll be coming soon, sir,” said Bush. He looked complacently upwards; the Sutherland’s sail had already been reduced by his orders to topsails only, and now the crew were busy taking a reef in them. “But where it’ll come from, God only knows.”
He mopped his sweating forehead; the heat was frightful, and the ship, with no wind to steady her, was heaving painfully on the uneasy sea. The blocks were chattering loudly as she rolled.
“Oh, come on, blast you,” grumbled Bush.
A breath of air, hot as though from a brick kiln, stole upon them, and the Sutherland steadied for a moment. Then came another, hotter and stronger.
“There it comes!” said Bush pointing.
The black sky was suddenly split by dazzling lightning, followed almost instantaneously by a tremendous crash of thunder, and the squall came racing down upon them; they could see its hard, metallic line on the surface of the grey sea. Almost taken aback, the Sutherland shuddered and plunged. Hornblower bellowed orders to the helmsman, and she paid off before it, steadying again. The shrieking wind brought hail with it — hailstones as big as cherries, which bit and blinded and stung, rattling with an infernal din on the decks, and whipping the sea into a yeasty foam whose hiss was audible even through the other noises. Bush held the big collar of his tarpaulin coat up round his face, and tried to shield his eyes with the brim of his sou’wester, but Hornblower found the keen wind so delicious that he was unconscious of the pain the hailstones caused him. Polwheal, who came running up on deck with his tarpaulin and sou’wester, had positively to jog his elbow to attract his attention and get him to put them on.
The Pluto, hove to, came drifting down two cables’ lengths clear of the Sutherland’s starboard bow; the big three-decker was even more unhandy and made more leeway than the Sutherland herself. Hornblower watched her and wondered how Villena was feeling now, battened down below with the timbers groaning round him. He was commending himself to the saints, presumably. The Caligula was still up to windward under reefer topsails, her man o’ war pendant blown out stiff and as straight as a pole. She was the most weatherly of the three ships, for her British designers had had in mind as principal object the building of a ship to contend with storms — not, as in the case of the Pluto, of cramming the utmost artillery into a given length and beam, nor, as the Dutch designers had been compelled to do in the case of the Sutherland, to give the minimum of draught compatible with a minimum of sea-worthiness. Almost without warning the wind whipped round four whole points, and the Sutherland lurched and plunged, her storm canvas slatting like a discharge of guns, before she paid off again. The hail had given place to torrential rain now, driven along almost horizontally by the howling wind, and the sudden change in the wind called up a short, lumpy sea over which the Sutherland bucked and plunged in ungainly fashion. He looked over to the Pluto — she had been caught nearly aback, but Elliott was handling her well and she had paid off in time. Hornblower felt that he would rather command the flat-bottomed old Sutherland than a clumsy three-decker ninety-eight guns and thirty-two pounders and first-rate’s pay notwithstanding.