Out in the hall, after Hornblower had bowed good night, the Count indicated the pistols still lying on the side table.
"Perhaps you would care to have those at your bedside?" he asked politely.
"You might feel safer?"
Hornblower was tempted, but finally he refused the offer.
Two pistols would not suffice to save him from Bonaparte's police should they come for him.
"As you will," said the Count, leading the way with a candle.
"I loaded them when I heard your approach because there was a chance that you were a party of refractaires — young men who evade the conscription by hiding in the woods and mountains.
Their number has grown considerably since the latest decree anticipating the conscription.
But I quickly realized that no gang meditating mischief would proclaim its proximity with shouts.
Here is your room, sir.
I hope you will find here everything you require.
The clothes you are wearing appear to fit so tolerably that perhaps you will continue to wear them to-morrow?
Then I shall say good night.
I hope you will sleep well."
The bed was deliciously warm as Hornblower slid into it and closed the curtains.
His thoughts were pleasantly muddled; disturbing memories of the appalling swoop of the little boat down the long black slope of water at the fall, and of his agonized battle for life in the water, were overridden by mental pictures of the Count's long, mobile face and of Caillard bundled in his cloak and dumped down upon the carriage floor.
He did not sleep well, but he could hardly be said to have slept badly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Felix entered the next morning bearing a breakfast tray, and he opened the bed curtains while Hornblower lay dazed in his bed.
Brown followed Felix, and while the latter arranged the tray on the bedside table he applied himself to the task of gathering together the clothes which Hornblower had flung down the night before, trying hard to assume the unobtrusive deference of a gentleman's servant.
Hornblower sipped gratefully at the steaming coffee, and bit into the bread; Brown recollected another duty and hurried across to open the bedroom curtains.
"Gale's pretty nigh dropped, sir," he said.
"I think what wind there's left is backing southerly, and we might have a thaw."
Through the deep windows of the bedroom Hornblower could see from his bed a wide landscape of dazzling white, falling steeply away down to the river which was black by contrast, appearing like a black crayon mark on white paper.
Trees stood out starkly through the snow where the gale had blown their branches bare; down beside the river the willows there — some of them stood in the flood, with white foam at their feet — were still domed with white.
Hornblower fancied he could hear the rushing of water, and was certain that he could hear the regular droning of the fall, the tumbling water at whose foot was just visible over the shoulder of the bank.
Far beyond the river could be seen the snow-covered roofs of a few small houses.
"I've been in to Mr Bush already, sir," said Brown — Hornblower felt a twinge of remorse at being too interested in the landscape to have a thought to spare for his lieutenant — "and he's all right an' sends you his best respects, sir.
I'm goin' to help him shave after I've attended to you, sir."
"Yes," said Hornblower.
He felt deliciously languorous.
He wanted to be idle and lazy.
The present was a moment of transition between the miseries and dangers of yesterday and the unknown activities of to-day, and he wanted that moment to be prolonged on and on indefinitely; he wanted time to stand still, the pursuers who were seeking him on the other side of Nevers to be stilled into an enchanted rigidity while he lay here free from danger and responsibility.
The very coffee he had drunk contributed to his ease by relieving his thirst without stimulating him to activity.
He sank imperceptibly and delightfully into a vague day-dream; it was hateful of Brown to recall him to wakefulness again by a respectful shuffling of his feet,
"Right," said Hornblower resigning himself to the inevitable.
He kicked off the bedclothes and rose to his feet, the hard world of the matter-of-fact closing round him, and his daydreams vanishing like the cloud-colours of a tropical sunrise.
As he shaved and washed in the absurdly small basin in the corner, he contemplated grimly the prospect of prolonged conversation in French with his hosts.
He grudged the effort it would involve, and he envied Bush his complete inability to speak any other tongue than English.
Having to exert himself to-day loomed as large to his selfwilled mind as the fact that he was doomed to death if he were caught again.
He listened absentmindedly to Bush's garrulity when he went in to visit him, and did nothing at all to satisfy his curiosity regarding the house in which they had found shelter, and the intentions of their hosts.
Nor was his mood relieved by his pitying contempt for himself at thus working off his ill temper on his unoffending lieutenant.
He deserted Bush as soon as he decently could and went off in search of his hosts in the drawing room.
The Vicomtesse alone was there, and she made him welcome with a smile.
"M. de Gracay is at work in his study," she explained.
"You must be content with my entertaining you this morning."
To say even the obvious in French was an effort for Hornblower, but he managed to make the suitable reply, which the lady received with a smile.
But conversation did not proceed smoothly, with Hornblower having laboriously to build up his sentences beforehand and to avoid the easy descent into Spanish which was liable to entrap him whenever he began to think in a foreign tongue.
Nevertheless, the opening sentences regarding the storm last night, the snow in the fields, and the flood, elicited for Hornblower one interesting fact — that the river whose roar they could hear was the Loire, four hundred miles or more from its mouth in the Bay of Biscay.
A few miles upstream lay the town of Nevers; a little way downstream the large tributary, the Allier, joined the Loire, but there was hardly a house and no village on the river in that direction for twenty miles as far as Pouilly — from whose vineyards had come the wine they had drunk last night.