“M’m,” said Bush, tasting. “Might be worse. Please, sir, don’t let yours get cold.”
Brown brought a chair for his captain to sit at the table, and stood in an attitude of attention beside it; there was another place laid, but his action proclaimed as loudly as words how far it was from his mind to sit with his captain. Hornblower ate, at first with a distaste and then with increasing appetite.
“Some more of that soup, Brown,” said Bush. “And my glass of wine, if you please.”
The stewed veal was extraordinarily good, even to a man who was accustomed to meat he could set his teeth in.
“Dash my wig,” said Bush from the bed. “Do you think I could have some of that stewed veal, sir? This travelling has given me an appetite.”
Hornblower had to think about that. A man in a fever should be kept on a low diet, but Bush could not be said to be in a fever now, and he had lost a great deal of blood which he had to make up. The yearning look on Bush’s face decided him.
“A little will do you no harm,” he said. “Take this plate to Mr Bush, Brown.”
Good food and good wine — the fare in the Sutherland had been repulsive, and at Rosas scanty — tended to loosen their tongues and make them more cheerful. Yet it was hard to unbend beyond a certain unstated limit. The awful majesty surrounding a captain of a ship of the line lingered even after the ship had been destroyed; more than that, the memory of the very strict reserve which Hornblower had maintained during his command acted as a constraint. And to Brown a first lieutenant was in a position nearly as astronomically lofty as a captain; it was awesome to be in the same room as the two of them, even with the help of making-believe to be their old servant. Hornblower had finished his cheese by now, and the moment which Brown had been dreading had arrived.
“Here, Brown,” he said rising, “sit down and eat your supper while it’s still hot.”
Brown now at the age of twenty-eight, had served His Majesty in His Majesty’s ships from the age of eleven, and during that time he had never made use at table of other instruments than his sheath knife and his fingers; he had never eaten off china, nor had he drunk from a wineglass. He experienced a nightmare sensation as if his officers were watching him with four eyes as large as footballs the while he nervously picked up a spoon and addressed himself to this unaccustomed task. Hornblower realized his embarrassment in a clairvoyant flash. Brown had thews and sinews which Hornblower had often envied; he had a stolid courage in action which Hornblower could never hope to rival. He could knot and splice, hand, reef, and steer, cast the lead or pull an oar, all of them far better than his captain. He could go aloft on a black night in a howling storm without thinking twice about it, but the sight of a knife and fork made his hands tremble. Hornblower thought about how Gibbon would have pointed the moral epigrammatically in two vivid antithetical sentences.
Humiliation and nervousness never did any good to a man — Hornblower knew that if anyone ever did. He took a chair unobtrusively over beside Bush’s stretcher and sat down with his back almost turned to the table, and plunged desperately into conversation with his first lieutenant while the crockery clattered behind him.
“Would you like to be moved into the bed?” he asked, saying the first thing which came into his head.
“No thank you, sir,” said Bush. “Two weeks now I’ve slept in the stretcher. I’m comfortable enough, sir, and it’d be painful to move me, even if — if —”
Words failed Bush to describe his utter determination not to sleep in the only bed and leave his captain without one.
“What are we going to Paris for, sir?” asked Bush.
“God knows,” said Hornblower. “But I have a notion that Boney himself wants to ask us questions.”
That was the answer he had decided upon hours before in readiness for this inevitable question; it would not help Bush’s convalescence to know the fate awaiting him.