Flying Colours h-9

by Cecil Scott Forester

  Hornblower tried to explain that it was at a point where a by-road ran down to the river’s edge, six kilometres on the farther side of Nevers. Haltingly, he went on to describe the conditions of his escape, the silencing of Colonel Caillard, and the wild navigation of the river in the darkness.

  “That must have been about six o’clock, I presume?” asked the Count.

  “Yes.”

  “It is only midnight now, and you have come twenty kilometres. There is not the slightest chance of your escort seeking you here for some time. That is what I wanted to know. You will be able to sleep in tranquillity to-night, Captain.”

  Hornblower realized with a shock that he had long taken it for granted that he would sleep in tranquillity, at least as far as immediate recapture was concerned; the atmosphere of the house had been too friendly for him to feel otherwise. By way of reaction, he began to feel doubts.

  “Are you going to—to tell the police we are here?” he asked; it was infernally difficult to phrase that sort of thing in a foreign language and avoid offence.

  “On the contrary,” said the Count. “I shall tell them, if they ask me, that you are not here. I hope you will consider yourself among friends in this house, Captain, and that you will make your stay here as long as is convenient to you.”

  “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much,” stammered Hornblower.

  “I may add,” went on the Count, “that circumstances—it is too long a story to tell you—make it quite certain that the authorities will accept my statement that I know nothing of your whereabouts. To say nothing of the fact that I have the honour to be mayor of this commune and so represent the government, even though my adjoint does all the work of the position.”

  Hornblower noticed his wry smile as he used the word ‘honour,’ and tried to stammer a fitting reply, to which the Count listened politely. It was amazing, now Hornblower came to think about it, that chance should have led him to a house where he was welcomed and protected, where he might consider himself safe from pursuit, and sleep in peace. The thought of sleep made him realize that he was desperately tired, despite his excitement. The impassive face of the Count, and the friendly face of his daughter-in-law, gave no hint as to whether or not they too were tired; for a moment Hornblower wrestled with the problem which always presents itself the first evening of one’s stay in a strange house—whether the guest should suggest going to bed or wait for a hint from his host. He made his resolve, and rose to his feet.

  “You are tired,” said the Vicomtesse—the first words she had spoken for some time.

  “Yes,” said Hornblower.

  “I will show you your room, sir. Shall I ring for your servant? No?” said the Count.

  Out in the hall, after Hornblower had bowed good night, the Count indicated the pistols still lying on the side table.

  “Perhaps you would care to have those at your bedside?” he asked politely. “You might feel safer?”

  Hornblower was tempted, but finally he refused the offer. Two pistols would not suffice to save him from Bonaparte’s police should they come for him.

  “As you will,” said the Count, leading the way with a candle. “I loaded them when I heard your approach because there was a chance that you were a party of réfractaires—young men who evade the conscription by hiding in the woods and mountains. Their number has grown considerably since the latest decree anticipating the conscription. But I quickly realized that no gang meditating mischief would proclaim its proximity with shouts. Here is your room, sir. I hope you will find here everything you require. The clothes you are wearing appear to fit so tolerably that perhaps you will continue to wear them to-morrow? Then I shall say good night. I hope you will sleep well.”

  The bed was deliciously warm as Hornblower slid into it and closed the curtains. His thoughts were pleasantly muddled; disturbing memories of the appalling swoop of the little boat down the long black slope of water at the fall, and of his agonized battle for life in the water, were overridden by mental pictures of the Count’s long, mobile face and of Caillard bundled in his cloak and dumped down upon the carriage floor. He did not sleep well, but he could hardly be said to have slept badly.

  Chapter Eight

  Felix entered the next morning bearing a breakfast tray, and he opened the bed curtains while Hornblower lay dazed in his bed. Brown followed Felix, and while the latter arranged the tray on the bedside table he applied himself to the task of gathering together the clothes which Hornblower had flung down the night before, trying hard to assume the unobtrusive deference of a gentleman’s servant. Hornblower sipped gratefully at the steaming coffee, and bit into the bread; Brown recollected another duty and hurried across to open the bedroom curtains.

  “Gale’s pretty nigh dropped, sir,” he said. “I think what wind there’s left is backing southerly, and we might have a thaw.”

  Through the deep windows of the bedroom Hornblower could see from his bed a wide landscape of dazzling white, falling steeply away down to the river which was black by contrast, appearing like a black crayon mark on white paper. Trees stood out starkly through the snow where the gale had blown their branches bare; down beside the river the willows there—some of them stood in the flood, with white foam at their feet—were still domed with white. Hornblower fancied he could hear the rushing of water, and was certain that he could hear the regular droning of the fall, the tumbling water at whose foot was just visible over the shoulder of the bank. Far beyond the river could be seen the snow-covered roofs of a few small houses.

  “I’ve been in to Mr. Bush already, sir,” said Brown—Hornblower felt a twinge of remorse at being too interested in the landscape to have a thought to spare for his lieutenant—“and he’s all right an’ sends you his best respects, sir. I’m goin’ to help him shave after I’ve attended to you, sir.”

  “Yes,” said Hornblower.

  He felt deliciously languorous. He wanted to be idle and lazy. The present was a moment of transition between the miseries and dangers of yesterday and the unknown activities of to-day, and he wanted that moment to be prolonged on and on indefinitely; he wanted time to stand still, the pursuers who were seeking him on the other side of Nevers to be stilled into an enchanted rigidity while he lay here free from danger and responsibility. The very coffee he had drunk contributed to his ease by relieving his thirst without stimulating him to activity. He sank imperceptibly and delightfully into a vague day-dream; it was hateful of Brown to recall him to wakefulness again by a respectful shuffling of his feet,

  “Right,” said Hornblower resigning himself to the inevitable.

  He kicked off the bedclothes and rose to his feet, the hard world of the matter-of-fact closing round him, and his daydreams vanishing like the cloud-colours of a tropical sunrise. As he shaved and washed in the absurdly small basin in the corner, he contemplated grimly the prospect of prolonged conversation in French with his hosts. He grudged the effort it would involve, and he envied Bush his complete inability to speak any other tongue than English. Having to exert himself to-day loomed as large to his selfwilled mind as the fact that he was doomed to death if he were caught again. He listened absentmindedly to Bush’s garrulity when he went in to visit him, and did nothing at all to satisfy his curiosity regarding the house in which they had found shelter, and the intentions of their hosts. Nor was his mood relieved by his pitying contempt for himself at thus working off his ill temper on his unoffending lieutenant. He deserted Bush as soon as he decently could and went off in search of his hosts in the drawing room.

  The Vicomtesse alone was there, and she made him welcome with a smile.

  “M. de Graçay is at work in his study,” she explained. “You must be content with my entertaining you this morning.”

  To say even the obvious in French was an effort for Hornblower, but he managed to make the suitable reply, which the lady received with a smile. But conversation did not proceed smoothly, with Hornblower having laboriously to build up his sentences before
hand and to avoid the easy descent into Spanish which was liable to entrap him whenever he began to think in a foreign tongue. Nevertheless, the opening sentences regarding the storm last night, the snow in the fields, and the flood, elicited for Hornblower one interesting fact—that the river whose roar they could hear was the Loire, four hundred miles or more from its mouth in the Bay of Biscay. A few miles upstream lay the town of Nevers; a little way downstream the large tributary, the Allier, joined the Loire, but there was hardly a house and no village on the river in that direction for twenty miles as far as Pouilly—from whose vineyards had come the wine they had drunk last night.

  “The river is only as big as this in winter,” said the Vicomtesse. “In summer it dwindles away to almost nothing. There are places where one can walk across it, from one bank to the other. Then it is blue, and its banks are golden, but now it is black and ugly.”

  “Yes,” said Hornblower.

  He felt a peculiar tingling sensation down his thighs and calves as the words recalled his experience of the night before, the swoop over the fall and the mad battle in the flood. He and Bush and Brown might easily all be sodden corpses now, rolling among the rocks at the bottom of the river until the process of corruption should bring them to the surface.

  “I have not thanked you and M. de Graçay for your hospitality,” he said, picking his words with care. “It is very kind of the Count.”

  “Kind? He is the kindest man in the whole world. I can’t tell you how good he is.”

  There was no doubting the sincerity of the Count’s daughter-in-law as she made this speech; her wide humorous mouth parted and her dark eyes glowed.

  “Really?” said Hornblower—the word ‘vraiment’ slipped naturally from his lips now that some animation had come into the conversation.

  “Yes, really. He is good all the way through. He is sweet and kind, by nature and not—not as a result of experience. He has never said a word to me, not once, not a word, about the disappointment I have caused him.”

  “You, madame?”

  “Yes. Oh, isn’t it obvious? I am not a great lady—Marcel should not have married me. My father is a Normandy peasant, on his own land, but a peasant all the same, while the Ladons, Counts of Graçay, go back to—to Saint Louis, or before that. Marcel told me how disappointed was the Count at our marriage, but I should never have known of it otherwise—not by word or by action. Marcel was the eldest son then, because Antoine had been killed at Austerlitz. And Marcel is dead, too—he was wounded at Aspern—and I have no son, no child at all, and the Count has never reproached me, never.”

  Hornblower tried to make some kind of sympathetic noise.

  “And Louis-Marie is dead as well now. He died of fever in Spain. He was the third son, and M. de Graçay is the last of the Ladons. I think it broke his heart, but he has never said a bitter word.”

  “The three sons are all dead?” said Hornblower.

  “Yes, as I told you. M. de Graçay was an émigré—he lived in your town of London with his children for years after the Revolution. And then the boys grew up and they heard of the fame of the Emperor—he was First Consul then—and they all wanted to share in the glory of France. It was to please them that the Count took advantage of the amnesty and returned here—this is all that the Revolution has left of his estates. He never went to Paris. What would he have in common with the Emperor? But he allowed his sons to join the army, and now they are all dead, Antoine and Marcel and Louis-Marie. Marcel married me when his regiment was billeted in our village, but the others never married. Louis-Marie was only eighteen when he died.”

  “Terrible!” said Hornblower.

  The banal words did not express his sense of the pathos of the story, but it was all he could think of. He understood now the Count’s statement of the night before that the authorities would be willing to accept his bare word that he had seen nothing of any escaped prisoners. A great gentleman whose three sons had died in the Imperial service would never be suspected of harbouring fugitives.

  “Understand me,” went on the Vicomtesse. “It is not because he hates the Emperor that he makes you welcome here. It is because he is kind, because you needed help—I have never known him to deny help to anyone. Oh, it is hard to explain, but I think you understand.”

  “I understand,” said Hornblower, gently.

  His heart warmed to the Vicomtesse, She might be lonely and unhappy; she was obviously as hard as her peasant upbringing would make her, and yet her first thought was to impress upon this stranger the goodness and virtue of her father-in-law. With her nearly-red hair and black eyes she was a striking-looking woman, and her skin had a thick creaminess which enhanced her looks; only a slight irregularity of feature and the wideness of her mouth prevented her from being of dazzling beauty. No wonder the young subaltern in the Hussars—Hornblower took it for granted that the dead Vicomte de Graçay had been a subaltern of Hussars—had fallen in love with her during the dreary routine of training, and had insisted on marrying her despite his father’s opposition. Hornblower thought he would not find it hard to fall in love with her himself if he were mad enough to allow such a thing to happen while his life was in the hands of the Count.

  “And you?” asked the Vicomtesse. “Have you a wife in England? Children?”

  “I have a wife,” said Hornblower.

  Even without the handicap of a foreign language it was difficult to describe Maria to a stranger; he said that she was short and dark, and he said no more. Her red hands and dumpy figure, her loyalty to him which cloyed when it did not irritate—he could not venture on a fuller description lest he should betray the fact that he did not love her, and he had never betrayed it yet.

  “So that you have no children either?” asked the Vicomtesse again.

  “Not now,” said Hornblower.

  This was torment. He told of how little Horatio and little Maria had died of smallpox in a Southsea lodging, and then with a gulp he went on to say that there was another child due to be born in January next.

  “Let us hope you will be home with your wife then,” said the Vicomtesse. “To-day you will be able to discuss plans of escape with my father-in-law.”

  As if this new mention of his name had summoned him, the Count came into the room on the tail of this sentence.

  “Forgive my interrupting you,” he said, even while he returned Hornblower’s bow, “but from my study window I have just seen a gendarme approaching this house from a group which was riding along the river bank. Would it be troubling you too much, Captain, to ask you to go into Monsieur Bush’s room for a time? I shall send your servant in to you, too, and perhaps then you would be good enough to lock the door. I shall interview the gendarme myself, and you will only be detained for a few minutes, I hope.”

  A gendarme! Hornblower was out of the room and was crossing over to Bush’s door before this long speech was finished, while M. de Graçay escorted him thither, unruffled, polite, his words unhurried. Bush was sitting up in bed as Hornblower entered, but what he began to say was broken off by Hornblower’s abrupt gesture demanding silence. A moment later Brown tapped at the door and was admitted, Hornblower carefully locking the door after him.

  “What is it, sir?” whispered Bush, and Hornblower whispered an explanation, still standing with his hand on the handle, stooping to listen.

  He heard a knocking on the outer door, and the rattling of chains as Felix went to open it. Feverishly he tried to hear the ensuing conversation, but he could not understand it. But the gendarme was speaking with respect, and Felix in the flat passionless tones of the perfect butler. He heard the tramp of booted feet and the ring of spurs as the gendarme was led into the hall, and then all the sounds died away with the closing of a door upon them. The minutes seemed like hours as he waited. Growing aware of his nervousness he forced himself to turn and smile at the others as they sat with their ears cocked, listening.

  The wait was too long for them to preserve their tension; soon they relaxed
, and grinned at each other, not with hollow mirth as Hornblower’s had been at the start. At last a renewed burst of sound from the hall keyed them up again, and they stayed rigid listening to the penetrating voices. And then they heard the clash of the outside door shutting, and the voices ceased. Still it was a long time before anything more happened—five minutes—ten minutes, and then a tap on the door startled them as though it were a pistol shot.

  “Can I come in, Captain?” said the Count’s voice.

  Hurriedly Hornblower unlocked the door to admit him, and even then he had to stand and wait in feverish patience, translating awkwardly while the Count apologized to Bush for intruding upon him, and made polite inquiries about his health and whether he slept well.

  “Tell him I slept nicely, if you please, sir,” said Bush.

  “I am delighted to hear it,” said the Count. “Now in the matter of this gendarme—”

  Hornblower brought forward a chair for him. He would not allow it to be thought that his impatience overrode his good manners.

  “Thank you, Captain, thank you. You are sure I will not be intruding if I stay? That is good of you. The gendarme came to tell me—”

  The narrative was prolonged by the need for interpreting to Bush and Brown. The gendarme was one of those posted at Nevers; every available man in that town had been turned out shortly before midnight by a furious Colonel Caillard to search for the fugitives. In the darkness they had been able to do little, but with the coming of the dawn Caillard had begun a systematic search of both banks of the river, seeking for traces of the prisoners and making inquiries at every house and cottage along the banks. The visit of the gendarme had been merely one of routine—he had come to ask if anything had been seen of three escaped Englishmen, and to give warning that they might be in the vicinity. He had been perfectly satisfied with the Count’s assurance upon the point. In fact, the gendarme had no expectation of finding the Englishmen alive. The search had already revealed a blanket, one of those which had been used by the wounded Englishman, lying on the bank down by the Bec d’Allier, which seemed a sure indication that their boat had capsized, in which case, with the river in flood, there could be no doubt that they had been drowned. Their bodies would be discovered somewhere along the course of the river during the next few days. The gendarme appeared to be of the opinion that the boat must have upset somewhere in the first rapid they had encountered, before they had gone a mile, so madly was the river running.