'Would the gentlemen like their breakfast now?' asked a chambermaid, bawling through the door.'
'If you please, my dear,' said Stephen. 'And listen, child, beg them to make the coffee twice as strong, will you now?'
'I am sure she did,' he said, as he sipped his thin brew. 'There is a Latin tag you are no doubt familiar with, to the effect that men are usually seen to believe what they wish to believe. I was reflecting upon that only the other day,' he went on, staring out of the window at Diana Villiers and Lady Harriet, who were walking along the far pavement, followed by a footman carrying parcels. 'I was reflecting upon that, and upon its corollary, to wit, that often men do not see what they do not wish to see. In all good faith they do not perceive it. I was reflecting because I had a most striking instance of it in myself. For weeks I had the evidence of a given physical condition in front of my eyes, and yet I did not see it. The physician in me must at least have noticed some of the symptoms; and however fleeting and inconclusive each severally may have been he must have seen that the sum, the convergence, was at least significant: but no, the man would have none of it, and was genuinely amazed when the state of which I speak was forced upon his attention. Gnosce teipsum is very well, but how to come to it? We are fallible creatures, Jack, and adepts at self-deception.'
'So my old nurse used to tell me,' said Jack: Stephen could be prosy at times, and Jack's attention had wandered to the accounts next to Sophie's letters.
'You mentioned that damned fellow Kimber,' said Stephen.
'Yes. He is still at his capers - keeps pressing her for money - swears that a few more thousand will save our stake and turn a dead loss into a handsome profit - talks of thousands now, as though they were the natural unit -I cannot make head or tail of the accounts he has shown her, though I am pretty good at figures - wants her to sell Delderwood - I do not think that goddam paper I signed just before we came away can have been a power of attorney, you know, or he could do without her consent.' 'What were the terms of your marriage-settlement?'
'I have no idea. I just agreed to whatever Sophie's mother - or rather her man of business - proposed, and signed my name where I was told: J. Booby, Captain, RN.'
Stephen knew Mrs Williams of old; he drew some comfort from the fact that as one of the most grasping women of his acquaintance she would probably have tied up Jack's property as tight as the most adamantine, Rhadamanthine law, double-twisted, would allow; and he said, 'My dear, long, long ago, when you first heard of this man's doings in the far eastern seas, I begged you to turn your mind deliberately from the question until La Fleche should have carried us home. I urged you not to waste your time and your vital energy in vain conjectures and recrimination, but to set the matter to one side until you might usefully consider it with the necessary data at hand - until you could obtain skilled legal advice, and confront the fellow in the company of a man as adept in business as he. That was sound advice, and now, sir, it is sounder still. There are only a few days or weeks to go, and to spend them in a state of impotent fury, so that you arrive in England with your intellects disordered, would be simple indeed. Only a few days: Captain Broke's dispatch will certainly be sent the moment it is written. The news will be infinitely welcome to Government.'
'Yes, by God!' cried Jack, his face lightening as the recollection of victory blazed up afresh. 'And happy the man who carries it. Stephen, I shall follow your advice: I shall be an old Stoic: I shall preserve an equal mind, and I shall not worry about Kimber. Besides,' he added in a low tone, the light in his eye diminishing, 'I may have enough worries here in Halifax.'
A truer word he never spoke; for although the sling that Stephen insisted upon, and the wound, the low diet, and the physic, excused him from nightly attendance on Miss Smith, her claims upon his company by day, if not upon his person, were painfully insistent. She seemed to take a perverse delight in compromising herself and in advertising their liaison; she would come openly to the inn when he took refuge on his sickbed, and read to him; and when he sought air and exercise, unable to bear any more of Childe Harold in an emphatic, enthusiastic tone, she walked, hanging on his arm, in the more public parts of Halifax, or drove him, inexpertly, round and round the town in her brother's dogcart. He saw that other men, especially his cousin Aldington, did not envy him; and he was obliged to admit that the company of a flighty, histrionic, unsteady, headstrong, extremely active and ill- judging young woman was not particularly enviable - that Miss Smith had an opinion of her value warranted neither by her charms nor her understanding - and that there were times when he wished Lord Nelson had never, never met Lady Hamilton.
At no time did he wish it more ardently than the day he took her to visit the Shannon, when she spoke of the pair with such eagerness and glee that it seemed to him that not even the dullest could fail to take her meaning. None of the Shannon's officers was dull, and he saw a look of intelligence pass between Wallis and Etough. In spite of her protests, her piercing cry that she longed to see where the hero had lain, he took her straight back to the shore. On shipboard some of his natural authority returned; by land he was pitiably weak. For although he was not unacquainted with women, and although he was very far from indifferent to them, so much of his life had been passed at sea that he was comparatively defenceless: he could not bring himself to be deliberately harsh or unkind. In spite of the reputation he had earned in the Mediterranean during his younger days, he was not at heart a rake; he had never worked out any form of strategy for this kind of encounter and he was surprised, concerned and surprised, when it appeared that strategy was called for.
They met quite often at the dinners he was obliged to attend, and she made him wretched and conspicuous with her mistimed solicitude; so much so that he actually cried off from the Commissioner's ball, although this was a grave breach of naval etiquette. There was also the growing likelihood of Major Smith's return; and although few men had more physical courage than Jack Aubrey, he did not relish the idea of an explanation with the soldier at all, not on his present moral footing.
Day after day went by: the Diligence packet came in from England, with a fresh batch of letters and some warm stockings. And day after day she lay at single anchor next to HMS Nova Scotia, and still poor Captain Broke's dispatch remained unwritten.
'He wanders sadly after a few minutes of painful concentration,' said Stephen. 'The wound in his head, the depressed fracture of the skull, is even worse than we had feared, and it would be very wrong, very cruel, to urge him to give a considered statement of his victory for a great while yet.'
'I wonder they don't ask young Wallis to write it,' said Jack.
'They have done so, but he begs to be excused: he does not wish to lessen his captain's glory, nor to encroach upon it, in the least degree.'
'Very right, very honourable in him, I am sure,' said Jack in a discontented tone. 'But there is such a thing as being too scrupulous by half. However, I dare say the senior officer and the Commissioner will fadge up something between them, if Broke don't recover in the next day or so. They must be on fire to send the news home: I know I am. I am with child to be aboard the packet - see her there in the fairway, swinging to the tide, and the wind as fair as you could wish. I wonder they hang about so long.'
'Why the packet, for all love? She is only to carry the duplicate and the mails: Wallis or Falkiner is to go in the Nova Scotia sloop with the original, and in the nature of things the dispatch must arrive before its echo.'
