'Alas,' said Stephen, after a long pause, and then his face lightened. 'There she is,' he said, nodding at his 'cello, which stood against the wall on the far side of Laura's piano. 'I fairly longed for her on this last voyage.'
'You think of the 'cello as a woman?' she said. 'It has always seemed to me so masculine. Deep-voiced, perhaps unshaved.'
'Man or woman,' he said, 'let you make us some coffee and eat up your supper, which I have half demolished God forgive me unthinking, and then we might play the piece we crucified last time.'
'Man or woman,' he said as he took the instrument out of its brutish wrapping, or sack, 'what a coil there is between them.'
'What did you say?' she called from the kitchen, and it was evident that she was still eating.
'Nothing, nothing, my dear: muttering was all.' He tuned the 'cello, reflecting upon his feelings for her. Very strong desire, of course; but also tenderness, esteem, liking, an amitie amoureuse carried to a higher degree than he had known it before.
He came out in the street in the first light, detected the watcher with intense satisfaction, and made his thoughtful way down to the quay, there to wait until the dghaisas began to ply for hire. It had been arranged that he should take a room at Searle's, that she should come to him in a domino and a faldetta, and that he should provide her with something to set Lesueur in appetite. Just what should it be?
He stood on the steps of the landing-place turning the wealth of possibilities over in his mind, staring with wide-open unseeing eyes at the degraded Worcester, which, amid the frigid indifference of all who had served in her, had already been turned into a sheer-hulk; and through his musing came the familiar London waterman's cry, 'Up or down, sir?' repeated at intervals. At the third repetition he collected himself, looked at the foot of the steps, and saw the grinning faces of the Surprise's bargemen. 'For the barky, sir?' asked Plaice at bow-oar. 'Captain will be down directly minute. Bonden is just gone up to Searle's: I wonder you did not see him as he passed. But you was in a study, no doubt.'
'Good morning, Doctor," cried Jack, appearing behind him. 'I did not know you were in the hotel.'
'Good morning, sir,' said Stephen. 'I was not. I slept with a friend.'
'Oh, I see,' said Jack. He was pleased, in that Stephen's frailty gave countenance and justification to his own, but at the same time he was disappointed, more disappointed than pleased, since a frail Stephen necessarily fell short of the very highest standard of virtue. Jack regarded him not so much as a saint as a being removed from temptations: he was never drunk, nor was he given to dangling after women in far foreign ports, still less did he go to brothels with the other officers, and although he was notoriously lucky at cards he very rarely played; so this commonplace fall, negligible in another man or in Jack Aubrey himself, took on a heinous aspect. Not without malice Captain Aubrey said, as the boat crossed the misty, steaming harbour, 'Have you seen your letters? We have had a whole sack of mail at last,' meaning 'Diana has written to you: I saw her hand on the covers: I hope it will make you feel guilty.'
'I have not,' said Stephen, with a provoking composure. But he was not in fact at all indifferent to the arrival of the post, and as soon as he had his letters he hurried down to read them in the privacy of his cabin. Diana had indeed written, and at some length for her, describing an intensely-social life: she saw a good deal of Sophie, who had come up to town twice for the children's teeth and had stayed at Half Moon Street each time, and of Jagiello, a young attache at the Swedish embassy who had been imprisoned in France with Jack and Stephen and who sent his love, and of various other friends, many of them French royalists. She also said she positively longed to see him back again, and hoped he was taking care of himself. Then there were several communications from fellow-naturalists in various countries, bills of course, and a statement from his man of business, showing that he was far richer than he had supposed, which quite pleased him. And there was the usual letter from the anonymous correspondent who wished him to know that Diana was deceiving him with Captain Jagiello: they had now taken to 'doing it' in St Stephen's church, standing behind the altar. 'Would that be a man's notion, now, or a woman's?' he wondered, but he did not dwell on the question, because the next letter was from Sir Joseph Blaine, the chief of naval intelligence, a colleague and friend of such long standing that he could mingle news of the learned societies to which they both belonged (Sir Joseph was an entomologist) with veiled comments on various plans and on the progress of their particular war. The whole letter was interesting, but the part that Stephen re-read with unusual care was the observation that 'by now his dear Maturin would no doubt have met Mr Wray, our acting Second Secretary'. Just that and no more: no remarks about Wray's task, no request that Stephen should help him, and a slight insistence upon the word acting. In a man like Sir Joseph these were significant omissions, and coupled with the fact that Wray had brought no personal message they convinced Stephen that although Sir Joseph no doubt thought Wray capable of dealing with an affair like the leakage of naval information at Valletta he had not seen fit to let him into quite all the secrets of the department: it was natural enough, after all, that a recently-appointed and perhaps temporary official, unless he were a man of the most exceptional ability in that line, should not be treated with a complete lack of reserve in the matter of intelligence, where an otherwise unimportant lack of judgment or of discretion might have such disastrous effects. And since Wray did not enjoy Sir Joseph's fullest confidence - since he had presumably not yet been found to be a man of the most exceptional ability as far as intelligence was concerned - it appeared to Stephen that it would be wise to imitate his chief's reserve, and to deal with the case of Mrs Fielding by himself.
He had barely reached this decision before two messages arrived, the one requiring him to repair aboard the Caledonia at fifteen minutes past ten o'clock in the forenoon and the second inviting him to dine at the palace to meet Mr Summerhays, a very wealthy and well-connected botanist, with a civil note from Sir Hildebrand apologizing for the short notice - Mr S was proceeding to Jerusalem tomorrow and would infinitely regret leaving Malta without having heard Dr M. on the plants of Sinai.
The first of these messages necessarily came to him through Captain Aubrey, who said or rather bellowed (the dockyard caulkers were hammering away overhead and both watches were busy scraping the deck the caulkers had already dealt with from the mainmast forward) 'A quarter past ten: my word, you will have to bear a hand to be there in time, Stephen, with your decent uniform on shore.'
'Perhaps I shall not go until tomorrow,' said Stephen. 'Nonsense,' said Jack impatiently, and he called for his coxswain and steward. It took some little time to find them, since they too were fetching the clothes that they had left at the dockyard in the chest they shared, and in the interval Stephen said, 'Brother, I am afraid the post brought you sad, sad news; I have rarely seen you look so down.'
'No,' said Jack. 'It was not the post: they are all well at home, and send their dear love. It is something else. I will tell you: you will not repeat it to anyone." He pointed to a broom in a corner of the echoing cabin and said 'We are to wear that at the masthead.' But seeing that this conveyed no meaning at all he forced himself to put it into plain words. 'Surprise is to be laid up or sold out of the service, and we are to take her home.' Stephen saw the tear well in his eye, and for want of any more adequate remark he said 'It will not affect you professionally?'