At this very moment they were dismantling one of the entrance batteries, and the guns were being ferried out to the Lydia one by one. Already he had a broadside battery which could fire, a ship which could manoeuvre, and he could snap his fingers at every Spaniard in the Pacific. It was a glorious sensation. He turned and found Lady Barbara on the quarterdeck beside him, and he smiled at her dazzlingly.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he said. “I trust you found your cabin comfortable again?”
Lady Barbara smiled back at him — in fact she almost laughed, so comical was the contrast between this greeting and the scowls she had encountered from him during the last eleven days.
“Thank you, Captain,” she said. “It is marvellously comfortable. Your crew has worked wonders to have done so much in so little time.”
Quite unconsciously he had reached out and taken both her hands in his, and was standing there holding them, smiling all over his face in the sunshine. Lady Barbara felt that it would only need a word from her to set him dancing.
“We shall be at sea before nightfall,” he said, ecstatically.
She could not be dignified with him, any more than she could have been dignified with a baby; she knew enough of men and affairs not to resent his previous preoccupation. Truth to tell, she was a trifle fond of him because of it.
“You are a very fine sailor, sir,” she said to him suddenly. “I doubt if there is another officer in the King’s service who could have done all you have done on this voyage.”
“I am glad you think so, ma’am,” he said, but the spell was broken. He had been reminded of himself, and his cursed self-consciousness closed in upon him again. He dropped her hands, awkwardly, and there was a hint of a blush in his tanned cheeks.
“I have only done my duty,” he mumbled, looking away.
“Many men can do that,” said Lady Barbara, “but few can do it well. The country is your debtor — my sincerest hope is that England will acknowledge the debt.”
The words started a sudden train of thought in Hornblower’s mind; it was a train he had followed up often before. England would only remember that his battle with the Natividad had been unnecessary; that a more fortunate captain would have heard of the new alliance between Spain and England before he had handed the Natividad over to the rebels, and would have saved all the trouble and friction and loss which had resulted. A frigate action with a hundred casualties might be glorious, but an unnecessary action with a hundred casualties was quite inglorious. No one would stop to think that it was his careful obedience to orders and skill in carrying them out which had been the reason of it. He would be blamed for his own merits, and life was suddenly full of bitterness again.
“Your pardon, ma’am,” he said, and he turned away from her and walked forward to bawl orders at the men engaged in swaying an eighteen pounder up from the launch.
Lady Barbara shook her head at his back.
“Bless the man!” she said to herself, softly. “He was almost human for a while.”
Lady Barbara was fast acquiring, in her forced loneliness, the habit of talking to herself like the sole inhabitant of a desert island. She checked herself as soon as she found herself doing so, and went below and rated Hebe soundly for some minor sin of omission in the unpacking of her wardrobe.
Chapter XXI
The rumour had gone round the crew that the Lydia was at last homeward bound. The men had fought and worked, first on the one side and then on the other, without understanding the trend of high politics which had decided whom they should fight and for whom they should work. That Spaniards should be first enemies, and then friends, and then almost hostile neutrals, had hardly caused one of them a single thought. They had been content to obey orders unthinkingly; but now, it seemed certain, so solidly based was the rumour, that the Lydia was on her way home. To the scatter-brained crew it seemed as if England was just over the horizon. They gave no thought to the five thousand stormy miles of sea that lay before them. Their heads were full of England. The pressed men thought of their wives; the volunteers thought of the women of the ports and of the joys of paying off. The sun of their rapture was not even overcast by any cloud of doubt as to the chances of their being turned over to another ship and sent off half round the world again before ever they could set foot on English soil.