1CHURCH bells were jangling and Hornblower lay and listened to them. It was not a noise that usually brought any gratification to his tone-deaf ear, but now he was content to lie and listen to it with vague satisfaction. He was not even sure at first that he was listening to church bells; he was not sure of anything. His mind, as he listened, filled with memories of other vague noises which he seemed to have heard lately, undercurrents of sound acting as accompaniments to some main motive which was not plain in his mind. He could remember the peal upon peal of guns, and then the monotonous beat of horses’ hoofs, and then the interminable squeaking of wheels; but he was too comfortable and peaceful to try to sort these memories out. Brown’s face kept appearing and disappearing through the mental pictures, and then other strange faces, and then horrible gloomy memories like thunderclouds on the horizon.

2But those really were church bells to which he was listening, jangling away as if in a world at peace. At peace! That was something to think about. Church bells would never ring like that except in a place where there was no war. He must be somewhere on land far from any fighting. And this cool delightful thing under his chin was a linen sheet, and here under his head was a feather pillow in a linen pillowcase, and he stretched out his legs languorously and luxuriously in the dawning knowledge that he lay in a feather bed. His eyes began to focus; above him was the gilded canopy superbly carved, but the green silk curtains were not drawn and he could look out from his bed into the room. There were some impressive articles of furniture there, desks and tables and chairs and couches, all gilded and carved and inlaid with tortoise shell and brass. The walls were hung with a red and gold tapestry wherein horsemen in three-cornered hats sounded horns and followed a pack of hounds after a stag. It could hardly be less than a palace he was in, and although Hornblower, with an effort, realised that his last exact memory was of a bleak hillside patched with snow he was much too comfortable to attempt to explain the transition to himself. He shut his eyes on the buhl furniture and dozed off again.

3Later he woke to a slight noise to find Brown standing hesitating by the bed with a tray in his hand, obviously in two minds about whether to disturb him or not. Similarly Hornblower was at first in two minds about whether to let him go or not, until he found himself to be so acutely hungry that there was nothing that he would have disliked more than to let that steaming tray disappear from his sight. He struggled to sit up while Brown put the tray down on the bedside table. Then Brown put a firm arm behind his back to support him while with the other hand he presented a spoonful of what seemed extraordinarily delicious broth to Hornblower’s lips. Hornblower sucked it down thirstily, looked for more, and then, not satisfied with the slow rate of spoon feeding, reached out for the cup. Brown held it to his lips indulgently and the delicious life-giving stuff ran warmly down into Hornblower’s interior. He remembered to be nonchalant as he looked about him and spoke.

4“I suppose this is a palace?” he said—his voice sounded odd and childlike in his ears.

5“Yes, sir,” said Brown, “the King of Prussia’s palace.”

6“Where?”

7“Königsberg, sir.”

8There was a good deal to digest in that information. If he were a prisoner he would not be in a state bedroom. So the King of Prussia must have changed sides, following the example of his army. There was something else he must know at once, with the immediate instinctive reaction of the naval officer.

9“Is the harbour frozen?” he asked.

10“Not yet, sir. There’s just a scum of ice.”

11Of course Königsberg would freeze a good deal later than Riga, which was both farther north and farther up the Baltic. That suggested the next question.

12“Where’s the squadron?”

13“It sailed for home, sir, under Cap’n Bush’s orders, after you was certified too ill to command. But Clam’s just come in with despatches, sir.”

14“Has she, by God!”

15All sense of languor and comfort disappeared; all his restless spirit reasserted itself. He made to throw off the bedclothes and climb out of bed.

16“Easy, sir, easy,” protested Brown, replacing the bedclothes, and somehow it seemed better to yield to him and sink back again. But he could still give orders.

17“My compliments to the captain of the Clam and I’d like him to visit me at his earliest convenience.”

18“Aye aye, sir. And I’ll have the doctor come in to you, sir.”

19“You’ll do what you’re told.”

20“Aye aye, sir.”

21Still delaying, Brown picked up a comb and a hand mirror; the latter he put into Hornblower’s hand while he passed a comb through Hornblower’s hair. Hornblower glanced into the mirror and recoiled with surprise.

22“Good God!” he said, the exclamation torn from him despite his self-control.

23A wildly hairy face gibbered at him from the glass, bristle-bearded to the eyes. The inch-long hairs seemed all to be sticking straight out from his face. He looked like a baboon. Curiosity overcame him sufficiently to make him look more closely. There were grey hairs among the brown, making him in his own eyes more obscene than ever. The lofty expanse of bare forehead added to this effect. He had no idea he could look so hideous.

24“How long has this been going on?” he demanded.

25“Nigh on four weeks, sir.”

26“Get me a barber at once, before Mr. Freeman comes in.”

27“Aye aye, sir. Mr. Freeman, a barber, and the doctor, sir.”

28There was no use arguing with Brown. The first person to come in was the doctor, whose sword and cocked hat indicated that he was a court official. He talked to Hornblower in barbarous French, hauled up his nightshirt with hands whose nails bore black semicircles, and laid his ear on Hornblower’s chest. Hornblower caught a glimpse before the bedclothes were replaced of his prominent ribs, and belly fallen away to nothing. His thighs and legs were like sticks.

29“What has been the matter with me?” asked Hornblower.

30“The typhus,” said the doctor.

31The typhus. Gaol fever. The scourge of armies and fleets.

32“You have lived through it,” said the doctor; “others have died. Thousands. Tens of thousands.”

33From the doctor’s lips Hornblower heard a little of the story of the contending armies on their frightful march from Moscow back across Poland; how hunger and cold and disease had slain the Grand Army—and the Russian army as well—until at this present moment only a few thousand Frenchmen out of the half million who had started were still on their feet plodding back towards Germany. All East Prussia, every part of Germany not held down by a Napoleonic garrison, was in a fever of revolt.

34“Then my work is done here,” said Hornblower. “I must return to England.”

35“In two months time, perhaps,” said the doctor.

36“Tomorrow,” said Hornblower.

37The barber was both cleaner in his person and more efficient at his business than the doctor. He clipped off Hornblower’s beard and then shaved him. The keen edge of the razor felt delightful against his cheeks. With a flourish the barber held the mirror for Hornblower to see. It was something like the old face that Hornblower remembered, but still very different. For the first time in twenty years the sunburn had disappeared, leaving him a prison pallor which combined with his sunken cheeks to throw his jaws and cheekbones into unwonted prominence. The last time he had looked he thought he looked like a baboon, but now he thought he looked like a death’s-head.

38Freeman came rolling in, short and square and swarthy, his long hair hanging in greasy curls over his collar.

39“What are your orders?” demanded Hornblower, cutting short Freeman’s anxious questionings.

40“To sail for any home port for which the wind may serve, sir,” was the reply. “I am to wait for despatches as long as I can without risking being frozen in, and then—Leith, Yarmouth, or Sheerness, sir.”

41“Will you have room for an invalid?”

42“Of course, sir. But—”

43Brown and the doctor had obviously warned Freeman that this was what Hornblower would ask. Hornblower swept aside Freeman’s protests.

44“You will take me back with you,” he said. “Those are my orders, personally given, and you disobey them at your peril. Have you heard them?”

45It was pleasant to give orders like that, even though it was not so pleasant afterwards, to sink back on his pillow when he was alone again, and to find himself weak and almost light-headed with the effort. He was still weak two days later when they put him on a stretcher, spread a great bearskin rug over him, and carried him down a tortuous staircase out into the courtyard and down to the quay. A wagon creaked and groaned past them on their way, its piled-up load concealed by a tarpaulin, but from under the tarpaulin, over the side of the wagon, dangled a naked human arm. Brown, who was supervising the carrying of the stretcher, tried to interpose his burly figure between Hornblower’s eyes and the wagon, but too late.

46“The death cart, I suppose,” said Hornblower; despite the horror of the sight it was well to show Brown that he was not as clever as he wanted to be.

47“That’s so, sir,” said Brown, “they’re still dyin’ in thousands.”

48Freeman had had the after hatch enlarged and the companion removed, and they lowered Hornblower, stretcher and all, down below with a whip rove through the main topping-lift block. It was a giddy moment as he swung up from the quay, and when he found himself safely in the cabin Hornblower was content to lie back and let the official farewells pass unregarded over his head. Excitement was exhausting, but he could not help feeling keenly pleasurable anticipation as he heard the bustle when Clam cast off and warped away from the quay. The southwesterly wind was not quite foul for Pillau and the open sea; lying in his cot Hornblower could feel each time the Clam went about as she made first a long board and then a short board, beating down the channel. The boom which had guarded the entrance to the Haff, on which he had climbed so long ago—in another existence it seemed—had been removed now that Prussia was England’s ally, and Clam was able to pass the entrance before nightfall and start the long beat down the Baltic. Even though the wind stayed foul and they had to beat about off Malmo for two mortal days before they got a slant of wind to carry them down The Sound, Hornblower refused to allow himself to fret. Sweden was England’s firm ally now, and there was no danger to be anticipated as they kept to the Swedish side. As they ran for The Skaw he had himself helped on deck and was able to sit in a chair, enveloped in the bearskin rug, in the bleak wintry day, smiling secretly at Freeman’s nervousness at having to handle his ship under the eye of a commodore. Beyond The Skaw a northerly gale was waiting for them, blowing freezing from the Norwegian uplands, and sent them flying homeward triple-reefed. Before it blew itself out they had to lie-to for half a day, and then it backed round westerly.

49“We’re bearing up for Sheerness, sir,” reported Freeman.

50“Very good,” said Hornblower, and that was when the first great thrill of excitement surged up in his strengthening body. For of all the places in England which the Clam could have reached, Sheerness was the nearest to Smallbridge. Smallbridge, where Barbara was waiting, and where Richard was making mud pies in the shrubbery. It was eight months since he had seen them last.

51It was eight months since he had seen England; it seemed like a dream as he sat under his bearskin rug and saw the grey sands and then the low green hills of the Essex shore. It was logical, as in a dream, that a fortunate slant of wind should carry them up with the tides of Sheerness, and that in the nick of time, under the urging of Freeman, the hands were able to sweep her in round Garrison Point to the dockyard, where the smoke rose hazily from the chimneys of Blue Town. It was even logical that the admiral—Sir Dennis Clough, Vice Admiral of the Red—should come down to greet him the moment he heard of his presence on board, and should offer him hospitality for that night.

52Sitting up at the admiral’s big mahogany table was a little tiring, and while this feeling of being in a dream persisted it was not easy to pretend an interest in the admiral’s professional conversation, even though it was directed to matters that most intimately concerned him. Clough was delicately complimentary about Hornblower’s exploits in the Baltic; he spoke about the tide of war sweeping back across the continent, and discussed the chances of the allies being in Paris before midsummer.

53“That fellow Braun they saddled you with turned out a pretty bad character,” said Clough, lifting a white eyebrow at Hornblower across the table.

54“Yes,” said Hornblower noncommittally.

55“If you’d come home two months ago you’d have seen the last of him as you came in. His bones only fell apart a few weeks back.”

56Hornblower looked a question.

57“They hanged him on Execution Point,” explained the admiral. “We had him there for a couple of months, and he’d have lasted longer than that if they’d tarred him properly.”

58“We were short of Stockholm tar at that time, until Hornblower brought Sweden in on our side,” chuckled one of the captains lower down the table.

59It was a harsh world, as Hornblower assured himself for the ten-thousandth time in his life. He still thought it harsh in the bleak grey morning, despite the admiral’s kindness in lending him his own barge to take him up to Rochester. The busy Medway was chill and grey, and even Brown’s concealed excitement did not seem to affect Hornblower as they treaded their way through the lively shipping.

60“Thirty miles from Smallbridge, sir,” said Brown as they stepped on shore.

61That was as it should be, something destiny had preordained. It was market day in the town, and the streets were crowded as they walked slowly to the Crown. Hornblower sat over the fire in the coffee room with the conversation of garrulous farmers surging round him while Brown was hiring the post-chaise. Then they clattered out over the cobbles, up the great road between the wintry fields.

62The lodge-keeper who opened the gates stood with gaping mouth at the sight of Hornblower, but his surprise was nothing compared with that of Wiggins when he threw open the door in answer to Brown’s thundering upon it. He could not even say a word but stood yammering before he drew aside to admit his master. There was the sound of singing in the hall, which was gay with holly and bright with candles. Apparently Barbara was entertaining the village carol singers.

63“Glad ti—idings of com—fort and joy,” sang the carolers.

64There was a rush of feet, and here was Barbara, and Barbara’s arms were about his neck and Barbara’s lips were upon his. And here came Richard, his steps hesitating a little, big-eyed and solemn and shy at the sight of this strange father of his. Hornblower caught him up in his arms, and Richard continued to inspect him solemnly at close range.

65“Glad tidings of comfort and joy,” said Barbara, her hand on his arm.