The name of Sophia moved insistently up into that part of his mind where words took form. He had repressed it as far as he was able ever since he ran for France. He was not a marriageable man: Sophie was as far out of his reach as an admiral’s flag.
She would never have done this to him. In a fit of self-?indulgence he imagined that same evening with Sophie- her extraordinary grace of movement, quite different from Diana’s quickness, the sweet gentleness with which she would have looked at him - that infinitely touching desire to protect. How would he have stood it in fact, if he had seen Sophie there next to her mother? Would he have turned tail and skulked in the far room until he could make his escape? How would she have behaved?
‘Christ,’ he said aloud, the new thought striking him with horror, ‘what if I had seen them both together?’ He dwelt on this possibility for a while, and to get rid of the very unpleasant image of himself, with Sophie’s gentle, questioning eyes looking straight at him and wondering, ‘Can this scrub be Jack Aubrey?’ he turned left and left again, walking fast over the bare Heath until he struck into his first path, where a scattering of birches showed ghastly white in the drizzle. It occurred to him that he should put some order into his thoughts about these two. Yet there was something so very odious, so very grossly indecent, in making any sort of comparison, in weighing up, setting side by side, evaluating. Stephen blamed him for being muddle-?headed, wantonly muddle-?headed, refusing to follow his ideas to their logical conclusion. ‘You have all the English vices, my dear, including muddle-? headed sentiment and hypocrisy.’ Yet it was nonsense to drag in logic where logic did not apply. To think clearly in such a case was inexpressibly repugnant: logic could apply only to a deliberate seduction or to a marriage of interest.
Taking his bearings, however, was something else again:
he had never attempted to do so yet, nor to find out the deep nature of his present feelings. He had a profound distrust for this sort of exercise, but now it was important - it was of the first importance.
‘Your money or your life,’ said a voice very close at hand.
‘What? What? What did you say?’
The man stepped from behind the trees, the rain glinting on his weapon. ‘I said, “Your money or your life,” ‘he said, and coughed.
Instantly the cloak in his face. Jack had him by the shirt, worrying him, shaking him with terrible vehemence, jerking him high off the ground. The shirt gave way: he stood staggering, his arms out. Jack hit him a great left-? handed blow on the ear and kicked his legs from under him as he fell.
He snatched up the cudgel and stood over him, breathing hard and waving his left hand - knuckles split: a damned unhandy blow - it had been like hitting a tree. He was filled with indignation. ‘Dog, dog, dog,’ he said, watching for a movement. But there was no movement, and after a while Jack’s teeth unclenched: he stirred the body with his foot. ‘Come, sir. Up you get. Rise and shine.’ After a few more orders of this sort, delivered pretty loud, he sat the fellow up and shook him. Head dangling, utterly limp; wet and cold; no breath, no heartbeat, very like a corpse. ‘God damn his eyes,’ said Jack, ‘he’s died on me.’
The increasing rain brought his cloak to mind; he found it, put it on, and stood over the body again. Poor wretched little brute - could not be more than seven or eight stone
- and as incompetent a footpad as could be imagined -had been within a toucher of adding ‘if you please’ to his demand - no notion of attack. Was he dead? He was not:
one hand scrabbled in vague, disordered motion.
Jack shivered: the heat of walking and of the brief struggle had worn off in this waiting pause, and he wrapped his cloak tighter; it was a raw night, with frost a certainty before dawn. More vain, irritated shaking, rough attempts at revival. ‘Jesus, what a bore,’ he said. At sea there would have been no problem, but here on land it was different - he had a different sense of tidiness ashore -and after a disgusted pause he wrapped the object in his cloak (not from any notion of humanity, but to keep the mud, blood and perhaps worse off his clothes), picked it up and walked off.
Seven stone odd was nothing much for the first hundred yards, nor the second; but the smell of his warmed burden grew unpleasant, and he was pleased to see that he was near the place he had entered the Heath, within sight of his own lit window.
‘Stephen will soon set him right,’ he thought: it was known that Stephen could raise the dead so long as the tide had not changed - had been seen to do it.
But there was no answer to his hail. The candle was low in its socket, with an unsnuffed mushroom of a wick; the fire was almost out; his note still stood propped against the milk jug. Jack put his footpad down, took the candle and looked at him. A grey, emaciated face: eyes almost closed, showing little crescents of white: stubble: blood over one half of it. A puny little narrow-?chested cove, no good to man or beast. ‘I had better leave him alone till Stephen comes,’ he thought. ‘I wonder whether there are any sausages left?’
Hours; the ticking of the clock; the quarter-?chimes from the church; steady mending of the fire, staring at the flame; the fibres quite relaxed - a kind of placid happiness at last.
The first light brought Stephen. He paused in the doorway, looking attentively at the sleeping Jack and at the wild eyes of the footpad, lashed into a windsor chair.
‘Good morning to you, sir,’ he said, with a reserved nod. ‘Good morning, sir. Oh sir, if you please -, ‘Why, Stephen, there you are,’ cried Jack. ‘I was quite anxious for you.’
‘Aye?’ said Stephen, setting a cabbage-?leaf parcel on the table and taking an egg from his pocket and a loaf from his bosom. ‘I have brought a beef-?steak to recruit you for your interview, and what passes for bread in these parts. I strongly urge you to take off your clothes, to sponge yourself all over - the copper will answer admirably - and to lie between sheets for an hour. Rested, shaved, coffee’d, steaked, you will be a different man. I urge the more strongly, because there is a louse crawling up your collar - pediculus vestimenti seeking promotion to p.capitis - and where we see one, we may reasonably assume the hidden presence of a score.’
‘Pah!’ said Jack, flinging off his coat. ‘This is what comes of carrying that lousy villain. Damn you, sir.’
‘I am most deeply sorry, sir: most heartily ashamed,’ said the footpad, hanging his head.
‘You might take a look at him, Stephen,’ said Jack. ‘I gave him a thump on the head. I shall go and light the copper and then turn in. You will give me a call, Stephen?’
‘A shrewd thump,’ said Stephen, mopping and probing. ‘A very shrewd thump, upon my word. Does this hurt?’
