“And logwood?”
“They extract a dye from it. A bright red dye.”
“You are my unfailing source of information, dear,” said Barbara, “as well as everything else in life for me.”
“Here’s Their Excellencies coming, My Lord,” warned Gerard, arriving at the deckhouse door.
That meant the final goodbyes, in the dying evening. A painful, sad moment; much shaking of hands; kisses on each cheek for Barbara from Lady Hooper; the word ‘goodbye’ repeated over and over again, overwhelming in its finality. Goodbye to friends and to acquaintances, goodbye to Jamaica and to the command-in-chief. Goodbye to one life, with the next still to disclose itself. Goodbye to the last shadowy figure disappearing in the darkness of the quay, and then to turn again to Barbara standing beside him, permanent in these transitions,
In the first light of next morning Hornblower could hardly be blamed for being on deck, feeling oddly awkward with the necessity for keeping out of the way, watching while Knyvett warped the Pretty Jane away from the quay, to catch the land breeze and head out of the harbour. Luckily Knyvett was made of sturdy stuff, and was not in the least discomposed at having to handle his ship under the eye of an Admiral. The land breeze filled the sails; Pretty Jane gathered way. They dipped the flag to Fort Augusta, and then, with the helm hard over, came round to leave Drunken Cay and South Cay on their port side before beginning the long reach to the eastward. And Hornblower could relax and contemplate the new prospect of breakfasting with his wife on shipboard.
He surprised himself at the ease with which he accustomed himself to being a passenger. At first he was so anxious to give no indication of interference that he did not even dare to look into the binnacle to note their course. He was content to sit with Barbara in two hammock chairs in the shade of the deckhouse – there were beckets to which the chairs could be hooked to prevent them sliding down the deck to leeward as Pretty Jane heeled over – and think about nothing in particular, watching the flying fish furrowing the surface, and the patches of yellow Sargasso weed drift by, gold against the blue, and an occasional turtle swimming manfully along far from land. He could watch Captain Knyvett and his mate take their noon sights and assure himself that he had no interest at all in the figures they were obtaining – and in truth he was really more interested in the punctuality of mealtimes. He could crack an idle joke with Barbara to the effect that Pretty Jane had made this run so often she could be trusted to find her way home without supervision; and his mind was lazy enough to think that funny.
It was actually his first holiday after three years of strenuous work. During much of that time he had frequently been under severe strain, and during all of it he had been busy. He sank into idleness as a man might sink into a warm bath, with the difference that he had not expected to find this relaxation and ease in idleness, and (more important, perhaps) in the cessation of responsibility. Nothing mattered during those golden days. He was the person least concerned in all the ship, as Pretty Jane thrashed her way northward, in the burning question as to whether the wind would hold steady to enable her to weather Point Maysi, without having to go about, and he did not care when they did not succeed. He endured philosophically the long beat to windward back towards Haiti, and he smiled patronisinglv at the petty jubilation on board when they succeeded on the next tack and passed through the Windward Channel so that they might almost consider themselves out of the Caribbean. A persistent northward slant in the Trades kept them from attempting the Caicos Passage, and they had to hold away to the eastward for Silver Bank Passage. Caicos or Silver Bank – or for that matter Turks Island or Mouchoir – he did not care. He did not care whether he arrived home in August or September.