"Forester, C S - Hornblower 07 - Flying Colours" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forester C S)

"No, no, of course not," said the Governor hastily and out of countenance, like a parent denying to a child that a prospective dose of medicine would be unpleasant.
He looked round for some way of changing the subject, and fortunate chance brought one. From far below in the bowels of the fortress came a muffled sound of cheering - English cheers, not Italian screeches.
"That must be those men of yours, Captain," said the General, smiling again. "I fancy the new prisoner must have told them by now the story of last night's affair."
"The new prisoner?" demanded Hornblower.
"Yes, indeed. A man who fell overboard from the admiral's ship - the Pluto, is it not? - and had to swim ashore. Ah, I suspected you would be interested, Captain. Yes, off you go and talk to him. Here, Dupont, take charge of the captain and escort him to the prison."
Hornblower could hardly spare the time in which to thank his captor, so eager was he to interview the new arrival and hear what he had to say. Two weeks as a prisoner had already had their effect in giving him a thirst for news. He ran down the ramp, Dupont puffing beside him, across the cobbled court, in through the door which a sentry opened for him at a gesture from his escort, down the dark stairway to the iron-studded door where stood two sentries on duty. With a great clattering of keys the doors were opened for him and he walked into the room.
It was a wide low room - a disused storeroom, in fact - lit and ventilated only by a few heavily barred apertures opening into the fortress ditch. It stank of closely confined humanity and it was at present filled with a babel of sound as what was left of the crew of the Sutherland plied questions at someone hidden in the middle of the crowd. At Hornblower's entrance the crowd fell apart and the new prisoner came forward; he was naked save for his duck trousers and a long pigtail hung down his back.
"Who are you?" demanded Hornblower.
"Phillips, sir. Maintopman in the Pluto."
His honest blue eyes met Hornblower's gaze without a sign of flinching. Hornblower could guess that he was neither a deserter nor a spy - he had borne both possibilities in mind.
"How did you come here?"
"We was settin' sail, sir, to beat out o' the bay. We'd just seen the old Sutherland take fire, an' Cap'n Elliott he says to us, he says, sir, 'Now's the time, my lads. Top'sls and to'gar'ns.' So up we went aloft, sir, an' I'd just taken the earring o' the main to'gar'n when down came the mast, sir, an' I was pitched off into the water. So was a lot o' my mates, sir, but just then the Frenchy which was burnin' blew up, an' I think the wreckage killed a lot of 'em, sir, 'cos I found I was alone, an' Pluto was gone away, an' so I swum for the shore, an' there was a lot of Frenchies what I think had swum from the burning Frenchy an' they took me to some sojers an' the sojers brought me here, sir. There was a orficer what arst me questions - it'd 'a made you laugh, sir, to hear him trying to speak English - but I wasn't sayin' nothin', sir. An' when they see that they puts me in here along with the others, sir. I was just telling 'em about the fight, sir. There was the old Pluto, an' Caligula, sir, an' -"
"Yes, I saw it," said Hornblower, shortly. "I saw that Pluto had lost her main topmast. Was she knocked about much?"
"Lor' bless you, sir, no, sir. We hadn't had half a dozen shot come aboard, an' they didn't do no damage, barrin' the one that wounded the Admiral."
"The Admiral!" Hornblower reeled a little as he stood, as though he had been struck. "Admiral Leighton, d'you mean?"
"Admiral Leighton, sir."
"Was - was he badly hurt?"
"I dunno, sir. I didn't see it meself, o' course, sir, seein' as how I was on the main deck at the time. Sailmaker's mate, he told me, sir, that the Admiral had been hit by a splinter. Cooper's mate told him, sir, what helped to carry him below."
Hornblower could say no more for the present. He could only stare at the kindly stupid face of the sailor before him. Yet even in that moment he could take note of the fact that the sailor was not in the least moved by the wounding of his Admiral. Nelson's death had put the whole fleet into mourning, and he knew of half a dozen other flag officers whose death or whose wounding would have brought tears into the eyes of the men serving under him. If it had been one of those, the man would have told of the accident to him before mentioning his own misadventures. Hornblower had known before that Leighton was not beloved by his officers, and here was a clear proof that he was not beloved by his men either.
But perhaps Barbara had loved him. She had at least married him. Hornblower forced himself to speak, to bear himself naturally.
"That will do," he said, curtly, and then looked round to catch his coxswain's eye. "Anything to report, Brown?"
"No, sir. All well, sir."
Hornblower rapped on the door behind him to be let out of prison, to be conducted by his guard back to his room again, where he could walk up and down, three steps each way, his brain seething like a pot on a fire. He only knew enough to unsettle him, to make him anxious. Leighton had been wounded, but that did not mean that he would die. A splinter wound - that might mean much or little. Yet he had been carried below. No admiral would have allowed that, if he had been able to resist - not in the heat of a fight, at any rate. His face might be lacerated or his belly torn open - Hornblower, shuddering, shook his mind free from the memories of all the horrible wounds he had seen received on ship board during twenty years' service. But, coldbloodedly, it was an even chance that Leighton would die - Hornblower had signed too many casualty lists to be unaware of the chances of a wounded man's recovery.
If Leighton were to die, Barbara would be free again. But what had that to do with him, a married man - a married man whose wife was pregnant? She would be no nearer to him, not while Maria lived. And yet it assuaged his jealousy to think of her as a widow. But then perhaps she would marry again, and he would have to go once more through all the torment he had endured when he had first heard of her marriage to Leighton. In that case he would rather Leighton lived - a cripple, perhaps mutilated or impotent; the implications of that train of thought drove him into a paroxysm of too-rapid thinking from which he only emerged after a desperate struggle for sanity.
In the cold reaction which followed he sneered at himself for a fool. He was the prisoner of a man whose empire extended from the Baltic to Gibraltar. He told himself he would be an old man, that his child and Maria's would be grown up before he regained his liberty. And then with a sudden shock he remembered that he might soon be dead - shot for violation of the laws of war. Strange how he could forget that possibility. Sneering, he told himself that he had a coward's mind which could leave the imminence of death out of its calculations because the possibility was too monstrous to bear contemplation.
There was something else he had not reckoned upon lately, too. If Bonaparte did not have him shot, if he regained his freedom, even then he still had to run the gauntlet of a court martial for the loss of the Sutherland. A court martial might decree for him death or disgrace or ruin; the British public would not hear lightly of a British ship of the line surrendering, however great the odds against her. He would have liked to ask Phillips, the seaman from the Pluto, about what had been said in the fleet regarding the Sutherland's action, whether the general verdict had been one of approval or not. But of course it would be impossible to ask; no captain could ask a seaman what the fleet thought of him, even if there was a chance of hearing the truth - which, too, was doubtful. He was compassed about with uncertainties - the uncertainties of his imprisonment, of the possibility of his trial by the French, of his future court martial, of Leighton's wound. There was even an uncertainty regarding Maria; she was pregnant - would the child be a girl or a boy, would he ever see it, would anyone raise a finger to help her, would she be able to educate the child properly without his supervision?
Once more the misery of imprisonment was borne in upon him. He grew sick with longing for his liberty, for his freedom, for Barbara and for Maria.

CHAPTER THREE
Hornblower was walking next day upon the ramparts again; the sentries with their loaded muskets stood one each end of the sector allotted to him, and the subaltern allotted to guard him sat discreetly against the parapet so as not to break in upon the thoughts which preoccupied him. But he was too tired to think much now - all day and nearly all night yesterday he had paced his room, three paces up and three paces back, with his mind in a turmoil. Exhaustion was saving him now, he could think no more.
He welcomed as a distraction a bustle at the main gate, the turning out of the guard, the opening of the gate, and the jingling entrance of a coach drawn by six fine horses. He stood and watched the proceedings with all the interest of a captive. There was an escort of fifty mounted men in the cocked hats and blue-and-red uniforms of Bonaparte's gendarmerie, coachmen and servants on the box, an officer dismounting hurriedly to open the door. Clearly the new arrival must be a man of importance. Hornblower experienced a faint feeling of disappointment when there climbed out of the coach not a Marshal with plumes and feathers, but just another officer of gendarmerie. A youngish man with a bullet black head, which he revealed as he held his cocked hat in his hand while stooping to descend; the star of the Legion of Honour on his breast; high black boots with spurs. Hornblower wondered idly why a colonel of gendarmerie who was obviously not crippled should arrive in a coach instead of on horseback. He watched him go clinking across the courtyard to the Governor's headquarters.
Hornblower's walk was nearly finished when one of the young French aides-de-camp of the Governor approached him on the ramparts and saluted.
"His Excellency sends you his compliments, sir, and he would be glad if you could spare him a few minutes of your time as soon as it is convenient to you."
Addressed to a prisoner, as Hornblower told himself bitterly, these words might as well have been 'Come at once.'
"I will come now, with the greatest of pleasure," said Hornblower, maintaining the solemn farce.
Down in the Governor's office the colonel of gendarmerie was standing conversing alone with His Excellency; the Governor's expression was sad.
"I have the honour of presenting to you, Captain," he said, turning, "Colonel Jean-Baptiste Caillard, Grand Eagle of the Legion of Honour, and one of His Imperial Majesty's personal aides-de-camp. Colonel, this is Captain Horatio Hornblower, of His Britannic Majesty's Navy."
The Governor was dearly worried and upset. His hands were fluttering and he stammered a little as he spoke, and he made a pitiful muddle of his attempt on the aspirates of Hornblower's name. Hornblower bowed, but as the colonel remained unbending he stiffened to attention. He could recognize that type of man at once - the servant of a tyrant, and in close personal association with him, modelling his conduct not on the tyrant's, but on what he fancied should be the correct behaviour of a tyrant, far out-Heroding Herod in arbitrariness and cruelty. It might be merely a pose - the man might be a kind husband and the loving father of a family - but it was a pose which might have unpleasant results for anyone in his power. His victims would suffer in his attempt to prove, to himself as well as to others, that he could be more stern, more unrelenting - and therefore naturally more able - than the man who employed him.
Caillard ran a cold eye over Hornblower's appearance. "What is he doing with that sword at his side?" he asked of the Governor.
"The admiral returned it to him on the day of the battle," explained the Governor hastily. "He said -"
"It doesn't matter what he said," interrupted Caillard. "No criminal as guilty as he can be allowed a weapon. And a sword is the emblem of a gentleman of honour, which he most decidedly is not. Take off that sword, sir."
Hornblower stood appalled, hardly believing he had understood. Caillard's face wore a fixed mirthless smile which showed white teeth, below the black moustache which lay like a gash across his olive face.
"Take off that sword," repeated Caillard, and then, as Hornblower made no movement, "If Your Excellency will permit me to call in one of my gendarmes, I will have the sword removed."
At the threat Hornblower unbuckled his belt and allowed the weapon to fall to the ground; the clatter rang loud in the silence. The sword of honour which the Patriotic Fund had awarded him ten years ago for his heading of the boarding party which took the Castilla lay on the floor, jerked half out of its scabbard. The hiltless tang and the battered places on the sheath where the gold had been torn off bore mute witness to the lust for gold of the Empire's servants.
"Good!" said Caillard. "Now will Your Excellency have the goodness to warn this man of his approaching departure?"
"Colonel Caillard," said the Governor, "has come to take you and your first lieutenant, Mistaire - Mistaire Bush, to Paris."
"Bush?" blazed out Hornblower, moved as not even the loss of his sword could move him. "Bush? That is impossible. Lieutenant Bush is seriously wounded. It might easily be fatal to take him on a long journey at present."
"The journey will be fatal to him in any case," said Caillard, still with the mirthless smile and the gleam of white teeth.
The Governor wrung his hands.
"You cannot say that, Colonel. These gentlemen have still to be tried. The Military Commission has yet to give its verdict."