"Here, Brown," he said rising, "sit down and eat your supper while it's still hot."
Brown now at the age of twenty-eight, had served His Majesty in His Majesty's ships from the age of eleven, and during that time he had never made use at table of other instruments than his sheath knife and his fingers; he had never eaten off china, nor had he drunk from a wineglass.
He experienced a nightmare sensation as if his officers were watching him with four eyes as large as footballs the while he nervously picked up a spoon and addressed himself to this unaccustomed task.
Hornblower realized his embarrassment in a clairvoyant flash.
Brown had thews and sinews which Hornblower had often envied; he had a stolid courage in action which Hornblower could never hope to rival.
He could knot and splice, hand, reef, and steer, cast the lead or pull an oar, all of them far better than his captain.
He could go aloft on a black night in a howling storm without thinking twice about it, but the sight of a knife and fork made his hands tremble.
Hornblower thought about how Gibbon would have pointed the moral epigrammatically in two vivid antithetical sentences.
Humiliation and nervousness never did any good to a man — Hornblower knew that if anyone ever did.
He took a chair unobtrusively over beside Bush's stretcher and sat down with his back almost turned to the table, and plunged desperately into conversation with his first lieutenant while the crockery clattered behind him.
"Would you like to be moved into the bed?" he asked, saying the first thing which came into his head.
"No thank you, sir," said Bush.
"Two weeks now I've slept in the stretcher.
I'm comfortable enough, sir, and it'd be painful to move me, even if — if —"
Words failed Bush to describe his utter determination not to sleep in the only bed and leave his captain without one.
"What are we going to Paris for, sir?" asked Bush.
"God knows," said Hornblower.
"But I have a notion that Boney himself wants to ask us questions."
That was the answer he had decided upon hours before in readiness for this inevitable question; it would not help Bush's convalescence to know the fate awaiting him.
"Much good will our answers do him," said Bush, grimly.
"Perhaps we'll drink a dish of tea in the Tuileries with Maria Louisa."
"Maybe," answered Hornblower.
"And maybe he wants lessons in navigation from you.
I've heard he's weak at mathematics."
That brought a smile.
Bush notoriously was no good with figures and suffered agonies when confronted with a simple problem in spherical trigonometry.
Hornblower's acute ears heard Brown's chair scrape a little; presumably his meal had progressed satisfactorily.
"Help yourself to the wine, Brown," he said, without turning round.
"Aye aye, sir," said Brown cheerfully. There was a whole bottle of wine left as well as some in the other.
This would be a good moment for ascertaining if Brown could be trusted with liquor.
Hornblower kept his back turned to him and struggled on with his conversation with Bush.
Five minutes later Brown's chair scraped again more definitely, and Hornblower looked round.
"Had enough, Brown?"
"Aye aye, sir.
A right good supper."
The soup tureen and the dish of stew were both empty; the bread had disappeared all save the heel of the loaf; there was only a morsel of cheese left.
But one bottle of wine was still two-thirds full — Brown had contented himself with a half bottle at most, and the fact that he had drunk that much and no more was the dearest proof that he was safe as regards alcohol.
"Pull the bellrope, then."
The distant jangling brought in time the rattling of keys to the door, and in came the sergeant and the two maids; the latter set about clearing the tables under the former's eye.
"I must get something for you to sleep on, Brown," said Hornblower.
"I can sleep on the floor, sir."
"No, you can't."
Hornblower had decided opinions about that; there had been occasions as a young officer when he had slept on the bare planks of a ship's deck, and he knew their unbending discomfort.
"I want a bed for my servant," he said to the sergeant.
"He can sleep on the floor."
"I will not allow anything of the kind.
You must find a mattress for him."
Hornblower was surprised to find how quickly he was acquiring the ability to talk French; the quickness of his mind enabled him to make the best use of his limited vocabulary and his retentive memory had stored up all sorts of words, once heard, and was ready to produce them from the subconscious part of his mind as soon as the stimulus of necessity was applied.
The sergeant had shrugged his shoulders and rudely turned his back.
"I shall report your insolence to Colonel Caillard to-morrow morning," said Hornblower hotly.