disaffected; his French regulars were outnumbered by well over five to one; and his navy was blockaded by an overwhelming force of ships. His only concern was to delay General Abercrombie's advance until his surrender should meet certain arcane military requirements, so that he should be able to justify his conduct at home and obtain honourable terms at Port-Louis for himself and his men.
He succeeded to admiration, and Abercrombie particular praised his orderly retreat on the night of Thursday, when his flanking battalions fell back from Terre Rouge and the Long Mountain, changing face at the double in the most professional way. 'That is real soldiering,' said the General.
While these rural gestures were being made the emissaries passed to and fro, and although Port-Louis was still nominally French Stephen Maturin walked up to the military hospital without his usual detour; and there he found McAdam on the verandah. 'How is our patient this morning?' he asked.
'Och, the night was good enough, with your draught,' said McAdam, though with no great satisfaction. 'And the eye shows some wee improvement. It is the neck that keeps me so anxious--slough, slough and slough again, and this morning it looked as ugly as ever. He will pluck at the dressing in his sleep. Dr Martin suggests sewing flaps of healthy skin across the whole morbid area.'
'Martin is a fool,' said Stephen. 'What we are concerned with is the artery wall itself, not the gross exfoliation. Rest is the answer, clean dressings, lenitives and peace of mind: there is physical strength in galore. How is the agitation?'
'Fair enough this morning; and he has been sleeping since my early rounds.'
'Very good, very good. Then we must certainly not disturb him; there is nothing like sleep for repair. I shall come back about noon, bringing the Commodore. He has a letter from Lady Clonfert at the Cape; he wishes to deliver it himself, and to tell Clonfert how the fleet praises his noble defence of the Nereide.' McAdam whistled and screwed up his face. 'Do you think it imprudent?' asked Stephen.
McAdam scratched himself: he could not say--Clonfert had been very strange these days--did not talk to him--no longer opened his mind--remained silent, listening for gunfire hour after hour. 'Maybe it would be best if you was to come a few minutes ahead. We can sound him out, and if we judge the excitement would not be too much, the Commodore can see him. It might do him a world of good. He liked seeing you,' said McAdam with a burst of generosity that he instantly balanced by asking in a sneering voice, 'I suppose your Big Buck Aubrey is prancing about on shore, the lord of creation? How are things going along down there, will you tell me?'
'Much as we had expected. Mr Farquhar has landed from the Otter, and I dare say the capitulation will be signed before dinner.'
They talked about other wounded Nereides: some were doing well, some were at death's door. Young Hobson, a master's mate emasculated late in the battle, had passed through it that night, thankful to go. Stephen nodded, and for a while he watched two geckoes on the wall, paying some attention to McAdam's account of the French surgeon's words ' about the impossibility of saving patients when the vital spring was gone. After a long pause he said, 'McAdam, you know more about this aspect of medicine than I do: what do you say to a patient with no physical injury, no tangible lesion, who loses all real concern with his life? Who takes a disgust to the world? A scholar, say, who has edited Livy, Livy his sole study and his delight: he stumbles on the lost books, carries them home, and finds he has not the courage, the spirit, to open even the first. He does not care about Livy's lost books, nor about his books that are known, nor about any books or authors at all. They do not interest him. He will not lift the cover; and he sees that very soon his own animal functions will not interest him either. Do you understand me? Have you seen cases of this sort in your practice?'
'Certainly I have. And they are not so rare, neither, even in men that are kept busy.'
'What is the prognosis? How do you see the nature of the malady?'
'I take it that here we are to leave grace to one side?'
'Just so.'
'As to the nature, why, I believe he perceives the void that has always surrounded him, and in doing so he falls straight into a pit. Sometimes his perception of the void is intermittent; but where it is not, then in my experience spiritual death ensues, preceding physical death sometimes by ten years and more. Occasionally he may be pulled out by his prick.'
'You mean he may remain capable of love?'
'As between men and women I use the term lust: but call it what you like: desire, a burning desire for some slut may answer, if only he burns hard enough. In the early stages, however,' said McAdam, leering at the geckoes, 'he may tide himself over with opium, for a while.'
'Good day to you, now, Dr McAdam.'
On his way down through the growing heat Stephen overtook two crippled boys, the one with his leg taken off at the knee, the other with an empty sleeve pinned over his breast, midshipmen of the Nereide. 'Mr Lomax,' he cried, 'sit down at once. This is madness: your stitches will burst. Sit down at once on that stone: elevate your limb.'
Pale young wraithlike Lomax, propped by his crutch and his companion, hopped to the stone, the mounting stone outside a rich-looking house, and sat upon it. 'It is only another hundred yards, sir,'he said. 'All the Nereides are there. You can see the ship from the corner; and we are to go aboard the minute her colours go up.'
'Nonsense,' said Stephen. But having considered for a while he knocked at the door: a little later he came out with a chair, a cushion, and two stout anxious care-worn black men. He put Lomax into the chair, properly padded, and the black men carried it down to the turn in the road where the little group of mobile survivors looked down on their frigate, tight-packed among the Indiamen, the merchant ships and the men-of-war in Port-Louis harbour. Some of their eager life seeped into him. 'Mr Yeo,' he said to a lieutenant with a great bandage covering most of his face, 'you may do me an essential service, if you will be so kind. I was obliged to leave a valuable bolster in your ship, and I should be most grateful if you would order the strictest search when you go aboard. I have already mentioned it to the Admiral and the Commodore, but--'His words were cut off by cheering away to the right, a cheering that spread as the French colours came down on the citadel, and that redoubled when the union flag replaced them. The Nereides cheered too, thin and piping, a poor volume of sound that was lost in the salvoes of artillery and then in a deep rolling thunder from the guns of the fleet.
'I shall not forget, sir,' said Yeo, shaking Stephen by the hand. 'Pass it on, there: the Doctor's bolster to be preserved.'
Stephen walked on, now quite through the town, where the closed shutters gave an impression of death, and where the few white people in the streets looked oppressed, as though the plague were abroad; only the blacks, whose lot could scarcely change for the worse, showed any liveliness or curiosity. He attended to various points of
