“Go away, Hebe,” she said, calmly. “I shall not need you yet.” And she turned back to Hornblower, but the spell was broken. He had seen himself in a new light, grovelling furtively on a couch with a passenger. He was blushing hotly, angry with himself, and already wondering how much the officer of the watch and the man at the wheel had heard of their murmurings through the open skylight. “What are we to do?” he asked feebly.
“Do?” she replied. “We are lovers, and the world is ours. We do as we will.”
“But —,” he said, and again “but —”
He wanted to explain to her in half a dozen words the complications he could see hedging him in. There was a cold fit on him; he wanted to tell her of how he dreaded the ill-concealed amusement of Gerard, the utterly tactless tactfulness of Bush, and how the captain of a ship was not nearly as much his own master as she apparently thought, but it was hopeless. He could only stammer, and his hands flapped feebly, and his face was averted. He had forgotten all these practical details in those mad dreams of his. She put her hand on his chin and made him turn to her.
“Dear,” she asked. “What is troubling you? Tell me, dear.”
“I am a married man,” he said, taking the coward’s way out.
“I know that. Are you going to allow that to interfere with — us?”
“Besides —,” he said, and his hands flapped again in the hopeless effort to express all the doubts which consumed him. She condescended to sink her pride a little further.
“Hebe is safe,” she said, softly. “She worships me. Nor would she dare to be indiscreet.”
She saw the look in his face, and rose abruptly. Her blood and lineage were outraged at this. However veiled her offer had been, it had been refused. She was in a cold rage now.
“Please have the kindness, Captain,” she said, “to open that door for me.”
She swept out of the cabin with all the dignity of an earl’s daughter, and if she wept when in the privacy of her own cabin, Hornblower knew nothing of it. He was pacing the deck above, up and down, up and down, endlessly. This was the end of his fine dreams. This was how he showed himself a man to whom danger and risk only made a plan more attractive. He was a fine lady-killer, a devil of a buck. He cursed himself in his shame, he jeered at himself as a man who could face the wrath of the Wellesleys in imagination and who flinched from the amusement of Gerard in practice.
It all might have come right in the end. If the calm had persisted for two or three days, so that Lady Barbara could have forgotten her wrath and Hornblower his doubts, more might have happened. There might have been an echoing scandal in high life. But as it was, at midnight a little wind began to blow — perhaps it was Crystal’s clasp-knife which had summoned it — and Gerard came to him for orders. Again he could not flout public opinion. He could not face the thought of the suspicions which would arise and the secret questions which would be asked if he gave orders for the ship to be put about and to head away from St Helena at a time when the wind held fair.
Chapter XXIV
“There’s the devil of a lot of shipping there,” said Bush, his glass to his eye, as they opened up the roadstead in the dawn. “The devil of a lot. Men o’ war, sir. No, Indiamen. Men o’ war and Indiamen, sir. There’s a three decker! It’s the old Téméraire, sir, or I’m a Dutchman, with a rear-admiral’s flag. Must be the rendezvous for the homeward bound convoy, sir.”
“Pass the word for Mr Marsh,” said Hornblower.
There would be salutes to be fired, calls to be paid — he was caught up in the irresistible current of naval routine, and he would be too busy now for hours to have a word with Lady Barbara even if she condescended to allow him one. He did not know whether to be glad or sorry.