"I'll give Mr Bush his."
Hornblower's stomach resisted a protest at the suggestion of food.
He would have liked to refuse, but that would have been too obvious a confession of weakness in front of a subordinate.
"When I've washed my hands," he said loftily.
It was easier to eat than he had expected, when he sat down to force himself.
He managed to choke down enough mouthfuls to make it appear as if he had eaten well, and with the passage of the minutes the memory of the revolting task on which he had been engaged became rapidly less clear.
Bush displayed none of the appetite nor any of the cheerfulness which had been noticeable last night; that was the obvious result of his fever.
But with free drainage to his wound it could be hoped that he would soon recover.
Hornblower was tired now, as a result of his sleepless night the night before, and his emotions had been jarred into a muddle by what he had had to do; it was easier to sleep to-night, waking only at intervals to listen to Bush's breathing, and to sleep again reassured by the steadiness and tranquillity of the sound.
CHAPTER SIX
After that day the details of the journey became more blurred and indistinct — up to that day they had had all the unnatural sharpness of a landscape just before rain.
Looking back at the journey, what was easiest to remember was Bush's convalescence — his steady progress back to health from the moment that the ligature was withdrawn from his wound.
His strength began to come back fast, so that it would have been astonishing to anyone who did not know of his iron constitution and of the Spartan life he had always led.
The transition was rapid between the time when his head had to be supported to allow him to drink and the time when he could sit himself up by his own unaided strength.
Hornblower could remember those details when he tried to, but all the rest was muddled and vague.
There were memories of long hours spent at the carriage window, when it always seemed to be raining, and the rain wetted his face and hair.
Those were hours spent in a sort of melancholy; Hornblower came to look back on them afterwards in the same way as someone recovered from insanity must look back on the blank days in the asylum.
All the inns at which they stayed and the doctors who had attended to Bush were confused in his mind.
He could remember the relentless regularity with which the kilometre figures displayed at the posting stations indicated the dwindling distance between them and Paris — Paris 525, Paris 383, Paris 287; somewhere at that point they changed from Route Nationale No. 9 to Route Nationale No. 7.
Each day was bringing them nearer to Paris and death, and each day he sank farther into apathetic melancholy.
Issoire, Clermont-Ferrand, Moulins; he read the names of the towns through which they passed without remembering them.
Autumn was gone now, left far behind down by the Pyrenees.
Here winter had begun.
Cold winds blew in melancholy fashion through the long avenues of leafless trees, and the fields were brown and desolate.
At night he was sleeping heavily, tormented by dreams which he could not remember in the morning; his days he spent standing at the carriage window staring with sightless eyes over a dreary landscape where the chill rain fell.
It seemed as if he had spent years consecutively in the leathery atmosphere of the coach, with the clatter of the horses' hoofs in his ears, and, visible in the tail of his eye, the burly figure of Caillard riding at the head of the escort close to the offside hind wheel.
During the bleakest afternoon they had yet experienced it did not seem as if Hornblower would be roused from his stupor even by the sudden unexpected stop which to a bored traveller might provide a welcome break in the monotony of travel.
Dully, he watched Caillard ride up to ask the reason; dully, he gathered from the conversation that one of the coach horses had lost a shoe and gone dead lame.
He watched with indifference the unharnessing of the unfortunate brute, and heard without interest the unhelpful answers of a passing travelling salesman with a pack-mule of whom Caillard demanded the whereabouts of the nearest smith.
Two gendarmes went off at a snail's pace down a side track, leading the crippled animal; with only three horses the coach started off again towards Paris.
Progress was slow, and the stage was a long one.
Only rarely before had they travelled after dark, but here it seemed that night would overtake them long before they could reach the next town.
Bush and Brown were talking quite excitedly about this remarkable mishap — Hornblower heard their cackle without noticing it, as a man long resident beside a waterfall no longer hears the noise of the fall.
The darkness which was engulfing them was premature.
Low black clouds covered the whole sky, and the note of the wind in the trees carried with it something of menace.
Even Hornblower noted that, nor was it long before he noticed something else, that the rain beating upon his face was changing to sleet, and then from sleet to snow; he felt the big flakes upon his lips, and tasted them with his tongue.
The gendarme who lit the lamps beside the driver's box revealed to them through the windows the front of his cloak caked thick with snow, shining faintly in the feeble light of the lamp.
Soon the sound of the horses' feet was muffled and dull, the wheels could hardly be heard, and the pace of the coach diminished still further as it ploughed through the snow piling in the road.
Hornblower could hear the coachman using his whip mercilessly upon his weary animals — they were heading straight into the piercing wind, and were inclined to take every opportunity to flinch away from it.
Hornblower turned back from the window to his subordinates inside the coach — the faint light which the glass front panel allowed to enter from the lamps was no more than enough to enable him just to make out their shadowy forms.
Bush was lying huddled under all his blankets; Brown was clutching his cloak round him, and Hornblower for the first time noticed the bitter cold.
He shut the coach window without a word, resigning himself to the leathery stuffiness of the interior.
His dazed melancholy was leaving him without his being aware of it.
"God help sailors," he said cheerfully, "on a night like this."
That drew a laugh from the others in the darkness — Hornblower just caught the note of pleased surprise in it which told him that they had noticed and regretted the black mood which had gripped him during the last few days, and were pleased with this first sign of his recovery.
Resentfully he asked himself what they expected of him.
They did not know, as he did, that death awaited him and Bush in Paris.
What was the use of thinking and worrying, guarded as they were by Caillard and six gendarmes?
With Bush a hopeless cripple, what chance was there of escape?
They did not know that Hornblower had put aside all thought of escaping by himself.