"UP THE STEPS CAME THE SINGER, FROM THE SEA AND THE SUN"
"UP THE STEPS CAME THE SINGER, FROM THE SEA AND THE SUN"
She stood up, a tall, stately figure, yet girlish, still looking out to sea. He had left his boat below the wall; he had said he would be back soon, and she meant to wait his coming. The wind was strong, and a coil of her glorious hair came unfastened, and she raised her hands to pin it up again; her skirt was blown tight and clinging against the long, slim lines of her figure, her jacket doubled back against itself by the wind, and like Mitsos, perhaps with thinking of him, her face was one smile.
The sun had quite set, but over the sky eastward came the afterglow of the day, turning the thin skeins of cloud to fiery fleeces, and flooding the infinite depth of the sky with luminous red. Behind her the town flushed and glowed, and the white houses were turned to a living gold. After a while she faced round again, for she heard steps coming, and seemed to know that it was Mitsos back again.
"Oh, Anastasi!" cried a voice, "but is there not a fool waiting behind that corner with a good fish to throw and waste? Take it home to your supper, man, and thank God for a dinner you have not earned except in that you have a large face easy to hit. Eh, do you think I cannot see you? You'll be thought a fine hand at hiding, will you?"
Mitsos advanced cautiously, for he was meaning to go to his boat, where he had left his coat and shoes, and the boat lay behind a corner most convenient for a hiding man. The Capsina was standing close by, and Michael bared his teeth as Mitsos came up.
"Fool, Michael!" said the Capsina; "is it not he?"
Then as Mitsos got within speaking distance—
"Anastasi has gone," she said; "you were over quick, were you not, at seeing him?"
Mitsos laughed, but paused a moment as Michael made the circuit of him, sniffing suspiciously.
"This is what I never entirely enjoy," he said, standing still. "Now no man can go sniffing round my bones and have a sound head on his shoulders. But there is less sport, so I take it, in fighting a dog. Ah, he is satisfied, is he? That is for the good. But where is fishy Anastasi?"
"He went to the market with Constantine Kanaris to buy provisions."
"Is Constantine Kanaris here?" asked the boy. "No, I know him not; but Nikolas Vidalis, the best man God ever made, and my uncle, knew him for a fine man. But why, if Kanaris is here she is here, for he serves with her."
"She! Who?"
"Who but the Capsina? I would give gold money to see her. Why—" Mitsos stopped short, and Sophia laughed.
"Thus there is double pleasure," she said, "for I, too, have often wished to see the boy of whom the people sing. Yes, I am the Capsina; why not?"
Mitsos's big eyes grew round and wide.
"What must you have thought of me?" he said. "But indeed I did not know—" and he bent down from his great height and would have kissed the hand she held out to him.
"Not so!" she cried, laughing; "they of Maina and we are equal."
"That is true," said Mitsos, standing upright a moment; "but where is her equal who took three Turkish ships?" and bending again he kissed it.
"Yet a lad I have heard of burned a ship of war," said she.
Mitsos flushed a little under his brown skin.
"That was nothing," he said, "and, indeed, but for my cousin Yanni there would have been no burning." Then changing the subject quickly: "You came to-day only, Capsina? Surely you will not go again to-morrow." Then, "Ah," he cried, "but I, too, am going to sea, so I may say, with you, for I am to be of the crew of the Turk you brought in here. But you will have a fleet soon!"
"I cannot have too many brave men to work with," said Sophia. "But you under me! Lad, you could sail a double course while I sailed single. Though I have known you perhaps ten minutes, yet you have made me the richer," and she held out the Turkish pound she had won from Kanaris, telling him how she had gained it.
Mitsos grinned with pleasure.
"Well, I think I do know this bay," he said, "for indeed I must have been more hours on it than in the house. But, oh, Capsina, when will that Turkish ship you took be ready for sea, for indeed it eats my heart to go catching fish when I should be catching Turks."
"They tell me in six weeks," she said, "but they seem a little slow about it all. They want more speediness. See you, Mitsos," she said, then stopped.
Mitsos looked up.
"See you," she said again. "Kanaris after this takes command of the oldSophia. I want some one who knows the sea, and who is better at home on a ship than on his own feet, to be under me: or it is hardly that—to be with me, as Kanaris will tell you. Come. I sail from here to-morrow, or I will even wait for two days or three: or if that is not time sufficient for you—yet what do you want, for your hands and feet you carry with you?—you can join me as soon as maybe at Hydra. So. It is an offer."
"Then to none other shall it now be offered," said Mitsos. "And what shall I want with two days or three? See, I will sail home now on the instant across the bay, to say good-bye to those at home, and they I know will be blithe to let me go, or rather would think scorn of me if I stopped and went not; and what does a man want with two days or three days to sigh or be sighed over? For my life I could never see that. Oh, Capsina, may God send us great winds and many Turks! I am off now; I am a fool with words, and how gratefully I thank you I cannot tell you. And Dimitri has never paid me my day's wage. May he grow even fatter on it!"
The Capsina laughed with pleasure.
"You go quick enough to please me," she said, "and that is very quick. And I hope, too, I may be found satisfactory, for indeed you do not stop to think what sort of a woman I may be to get on with."
"You are the Capsina," said Mitsos, with sturdy faith.
"You find that good guarantee? So do I that you are Mitsos; little Mitsos, they call you, do they not? That will be the name you'll hear from me, for indeed you are very big."
"And growing yet," said Mitsos, going down the steps to his boat. "Well, this is a fortunate day for me. I will be at your ship again in three hours, or four, if this wind does not hold. My homage, Capsina."
"And mine, little Mitsos."
He shoved his boat out from the wall, and she stood with sails flapping and shivering till he pulled her out from under shelter. Then with a heel over and a gathering whisper of water she shot out into the bay, and faded, still followed by the Capsina's gaze, into the dim starlit dusk.
So he was coming—he. Surely there could be no mistake about it all. A stranger, she had seen a stranger at sunset on the quay, and her heart had embraced him as its betrothed. Only an hour, less than an hour, had passed, and as if to confirm the certainty, all arrangements had been made, and this very night he would be on her ship. Day after day they would range the great seas together with one aim and purpose.
How could it fail that that welding should leave them one? Had not her soul leaped out to him? How strange such a meeting was, yet not strange, for it was the inevitable thing of her life. How impossible that they should not have met, and met, too, at this very time, she in the height of her freedom and success—yet, oh, how ready to be free no longer!—he, just when he hungered to be up and throwing himself against the Turk. Michael, too, surely Michael knew, for when Mitsos was going off again, he had walked down to the bottom step above the water and watched him set off, wagging his tail in acceptance of him. She would have wagered herself and the brig and Michael that they were all going up to heaven.
Presently after came Kanaris from the market, and he whistled across to the ship that it should send a boat to take them off. He was surprised to find the Capsina still on shore, supposing she would have gone back to supper on the ship, or would be with some friend in Nauplia. Indeed, a friend had gone seeking her on her ship, bidding her to sup with him, but she, wishing still to be alone, had said she was just going home. This was half an hour ago, and she lingered yet on the quay with Michael for guard. As they sat watching for the boat, hearing the rhythmical and unseen plash of oars getting nearer, this struck Kanaris.
"You have supped, Capsina?" he asked.
She looked up.
"Supped?" she said. "I don't think I have. Indeed, I am sure I have not. I am hungry. I got to looking at the sky and the water, Kanaris, as one does on certain days, when there is no wind at sea, and it is certain I forgot about supper. Surely I have not supped. We will sup on the ship when we get back, and, as we sup, we will talk. Yes, I have been thinking a big cargo of thought. I will tell you of it."
They were rowed back across the plain of polished harbor water, and went on board in silence. Supper was soon ready—a dish of eggs, a piece of the broiled shoulder of a roe-deer, which the Mayor Dimitri had sent to the Capsina with a present of wine and cakes made of honey. And when they had eaten, Sophia spoke of her plans.
"Kanaris," she said, "I have found him who will take, your place when you have command of the oldSophia, as you will on this next cruise. Oh, be tender with her, man, and remember, as I have always said, that she must be humored. She will sail to a head wind if you do not overburden her, but too much sail, though no more than others carry, would ever keep her back. Ah, well, you know her as well as I do. What was I saying? Oh yes, Mitsos Codones, the little Mitsos, you know, will join me here; he who gained me a pound this afternoon. He sails with me in place of the Captain Kanaris."
Now the offer of the presidency of Greece would have been less to the taste of Kanaris than the command of theSophia, and his gratitude, though not eloquent, was sincere. But presently after the Capsina, looking up, saw doubt in his eye.
"Well?" she said.
"It is this," said Kanaris, "though indeed it is no business of mine. Mitsos is but a lad, and, Capsina, what do you know of him? Surely this afternoon he was a stranger to you."
Sophia smiled, and with a wonderful frank kindness in her black eyes.
"And you, Kanaris," she said. "Did not a strange sea-captain come to Hydra one evening? Did he not talk with me—how long—ten minutes? And was not a bargain struck on his words? Was that so imprudent a job? By all the saints, I think I never did a better!"
"But he is so young, this Mitsos," said Kanaris.
"Am I so old? We shall both get over it."
Kanaris filled his glass, frowning.
"But it is different: you are the Capsina."
"And he is of the Mainats. That is as good a stock as ours, though our island proverb says we are the prouder. And, indeed, I am not sure we are the better for that, for I would sooner have Mitsos here than, than Christos."
The Capsina, it must be acknowledged, found an intimate pleasure in putting into plain words what Kanaris could not let himself conjecture in thought.
"Christos?" he said. "Well, certainly. And if, he being a cousin of yours, I may speak without offence, it would be a very bold or a very foolish man who would wish to have Christos only to depend on in the sailing of a war brig."
"And the sailing of my brig will be the work of Mitsos," said Sophia. "Oh, Kanaris, you have lost a pound, and how bitter you are made."
Kanaris laughed.
"Well, God knows he can sail a boat," he said. "My pocket knows it."
"Then why look farther for another and a worse?" said the Capsina.
Kanaris was silent; the Capsina had hinted before that she meant him to command theSophiain the next cruise, but he had yet had no certain word from her. And, indeed, his ambition soared no higher, and to no other quarter—to command the finest brig but one in the island fleet was no mean thing; but it is a human failing common to man to view slightingly any one who takes one's own place, even when it is vacant only through personal promotion. Kanaris's case, however, was a little more complicated, for the Capsina was to him what he had thought no woman could have been. His habit of mind was far too methodical to allow him the luxury of doing anything so unaccounted for as abandoning himself to another; but there were certainly three things in his soul which took a distanced precedence of all others. Ships were one, destruction of Turks another, and the Capsina was the third. In his more spiritual moments he would have found it hard to draw up a reliable table of precedence for the three.
And certainly he was in one of his more spiritual moments just now, for there were no Turks about, his ambition to command a fine ship was satisfied, and the Capsina seated opposite to him had never so compelled his admiration. To-night there was something triumphant and irresistible in her beauty, her draught of sparkling happiness had given a splendid animation to her face, and that flush which as yet he had only associated in her with anger or excitement showed like a beacon for men's eyes in her cheek. But in her face to-night the heightened color and sparkling eye had some intangible softness about them; hitherto, when it had been excitement that had kindled her, she looked more like some extraordinarily handsome boy than a girl, but to-night her face was altogether girlish, and the terms of comradeship on which Kanaris had lived with her, uncomplicated by question or suggestions of sex, were suddenly and softly covered over, it seemed to his mind, by a great wave of tenderness and affection. The Capsina, the captain of the boat, the inimitable handler of a brig, were replaced by a girl. He had been blind, so he thought; all these weeks he had seen in her an able captain, a hater of Turks—a handsome boy, if you will—and he was suddenly smitten into sight, and saw for the first time this glorious thing. But Kanaris was wrong; he had not been blind, the change was in the other.
But here, coincident with the very moment of his discovery, was the moment of his departure, and he left her with another, a provokingly good-looking lad, the hero of an adventure just after the Capsina's heart, and the subject for the songs of the folk. Was not Mitsos just such as might seem godlike to this girl? In truth he was.
She filled his glass again, and he sat and drank in her beauty. She seemed different in kind to what she had ever looked before—her eyes beat upon his heart, and the smile on her beautiful mouth was wine to him. He looked, weighing his courage with his chance, opened his mouth to speak, and stopped again. Truly such perturbation in the methodical Kanaris touched the portentous.
The Capsina had paused after her question, but after a moment repeated it.
"So why look farther for another and a worse?" she said again.
"Don't look farther," he said, leaning forward across the table, and twisting the sense of her question to his own use; "look nearer rather. Look nearer," he repeated; "and, oh, Capsina—"
The smile faded from her mouth but not from her eyes, for it was too deeply set therein to be disturbed by Kanaris.
"What do you mean?" she said.
"It is that I love you," said he.
But she sprang up, laughing.
"Ah, spare yourself," she said. "You ought to know I am already betrothed."
"You betrothed?"
"Yes, betrothed to the brig. No, old friend, I am not laughing at you. You honor me too much. Let us talk of something else."
Mitsos meantime was on his way back to the Capsina's betrothed. He had sailed rapidly across the bay, and made the anchorage close to the house in no longer than half an hour. His father, Constantine, had died two months ago, and since then he and Suleima had lived alone. Just now, however, Father Andréa was with them, staying a few days on his way to Corinth, where he was summoned by the revolutionists, and Mitsos, going through the garden to the house, saw him walking up and down by the fountain, smoking his chibouk.
"Ah, father," he said, "I am late, am I not? But I must be off again. I met the Capsina to-day in Nauplia, and she has offered me a place on her brig—the place Kanaris held under her, or rather with her, she says. She sails to-morrow morning. Suleima is in the house?"
"Yes, with the child, to whom the teething gives trouble. This is very sudden; but, lad, I would not stop you, nor, I think, will Suleima. Go to her, then."
Suleima had heard voices, but she was trying to persuade the baby to go to sleep, while the baby, it seemed, preferred screaming and struggling. She was walking up and down the room with it, crooning softly to it, and rocking it gently in her arms. She looked up smiling at her husband as he entered.
"I heard your voice," she said, "and I would have come out, but I could not leave the adorable one. Poor manikin, he is troubled with this teething!"
"Give me the child," said Mitsos; and the baby, interested in his own transference from one to the other, stopped crying a moment, and Mitsos bent over it.
"Oh, great one," he said; "is heaven falling, or are the angels dead, that you cry so? How will you be able to eat good meat and grow like the ash-tree, unless there are teeth to you? And how should there be teeth unless they cut through the gums—unless, like an old man, you would have us buy them for you?"
The baby ceased crying at the deep, soothing voice, and in a moment or two it was asleep.
"It is wonderful," said Suleima, taking it back from Mitsos, and laying it in the cot; "but, as you know, I have always said you were often more a woman than all the women I have ever seen."
Mitsos laughed.
"A fine big skirt should I want and a double pair of shoes," he said. "And, oh, Suleima, but it were better for the Turks I had been just a chattering woman."
"Eh, but what a husband have I got," said she, pinching his arm. "He thinks himself the grandest man of all the world. But what is there you have to tell me?—for I read you like father reads a book—there is something forward, little Mitsos."
"Yes, and indeed there is," said Mitsos, "but what with you and the child, and all this silly, daffing talk, it had gone from my mind. But this it is, most dear one, that the Capsina is here, and she has offered me the post just under her on the new ship she has built, that one you and I saw put in this morning. Eh, but it is grand for me! She will sail to-morrow."
"To-morrow! Oh, Mitsos!" Then, checking herself. "Dearest one, but your luck is still with you. She is a fine, brave lass they say, and handsome, too, and, so Dimitri told me, her ship is the fastest and best in Greece. So go, and God speed you, and I will wait, and the little one shall make haste to grow! You will stop here to-night? No? Not even to-night? Come, then, I must look out your clothes for you at once, for you must have your very best, and be a credit to the housewife."
She held Mitsos's hands for a moment, and put up her face to his to be kissed.
"Blessed be the day when first I saw you!" she whispered.
"And blessed has been every day since," said Mitsos.
"Even so, dearest," and she clung to him a moment longer. Then, "Come," she said, "we must make much haste if you are to go to-night, and indeed you shall leave behind that shirt you are wearing, to find it clean and fresh and mended when you come back. I will not have you going ragged and untidy, and oh, Mitsos, but your hair is a mop. Who has had the cutting of it? Sit you down and make no more words, and be trimmed."
Suleima got a pair of scissors, and clapping Mitsos in a chair, put the light close, and trimmed and combed out his tangled hair, with little words of reproof to him.
"Eh, but she will think you a wild man of the woods, fit only to frighten the birds from the crops. Sure, Mitsos, you will have been rubbing your head in the sand, and it was only yesterday you were scrubbing and soaping all afternoon. Well, what must be, must. Shut your eyes now and sit still," and clip went her scissors along the hair above the forehead.
"It is like cutting the pony's mane," she went on. "Such horse-hair I never saw yet. Well, the stuffing is half out of the sofa-cushion, and this will all do fine to fill it again. Now, stop laughing, lad, or an oke of hair will fall down that throat of yours, and so you will laugh never more. There, you are a little less of a scare-man. Get up and shake, and then change that shirt and trousers."
In an hour Mitsos was ready, and with a big rug on his shoulder in which his clothes were wrapped, he and Suleima set off to the little harbor below the house. The boy was going with him in order to take the boat back again, but Mitsos had sent him on ahead, and he and Suleima walked slowly down to the edge of the bay beneath a sky thick sown with stars.
"Mitsos," she said, "it will be with a heavy heart and yet a very light one that I shall say good-bye; heavy because we love one another, and yet for that reason very light. And, however far you are from me, yet you are here always in my heart, and the child is daily more like you. And, indeed, how should I love one who sat at home and went not out on these great quests? Where should I have been now, think you, oh foolish one, if you had not gone catching fish and then Turks? so do not contradict me. And oh, Mitsos, I am going to say a very foolish thing for the last. You are so dear to me that I can scarcely speak of you to others, for so I seem to share you with them; and it would please me if I thought that you too would be very sparing of my name, for so I shall feel that, as on those beautiful nights together on the bay, we enjoyed each other in secret, and none knew. And now we are come to the boat—look!—and the boy has made ready. It is very bravely that I say good-bye to you, for with my whole heart I would have you to go. Oh, most beloved!"
For a minute, or perhaps two, they stood there silent, and though the smile on Suleima's mouth was a little tremulous and her eyes were over-brimmed, it was for very love that the tears stood there. And Mitsos kissed her on the eyes and on the mouth, and yet again; and though his voice was betwixt a whisper and a choke, his heart was light even as hers, and full of love.
The news of his coming was brought to the Capsina as they sat in the cabin by Michael's furious barking at the boat, which he heard drawn up alongside.
The Capsina got up when she heard that, and again her face so glowed that Kanaris wondered.
"That will be the little Mitsos," she said, "for a thousand pounds. He will want supper it may be," and she went on to the main deck to let a ladder down to him, for most of the crew were on shore still.
"Ahoy! ahoy!" shouted Mitsos from his boat. "Oh, Michael, be still! Am I a robber?" and he shouted again.
"Yes, I am coming," cried the Capsina, in answer. "It is you, is it not, Mitsos? Wait a moment, and I will let down a ladder to you."
Mitsos climbed up with his bundle on his shoulder, and bade the lad put back for home again. "So I am here," he said to the Capsina.
"And you are welcome—doubly welcome," said the Capsina, with a sparkling eye. "Oh, Mitsos, take care of your head. Are you not a size too large for my boat? I never thought of that. Come down to the cabin and have your supper; Kanaris and I have eaten, but we will sit with you."
She blew on her whistle, and gave Mitsos's bundle in charge to be taken to his cabin, and led the way.
"You know Kanaris? No?" she asked. "Ah, I remember you saying you did not. He is of the best of my friends. This way, little Mitsos. Here we are."
Though Kanaris had been disposed to think with jealousy of his successor, it was not in the nature of man to resist Mitsos. For he had all the ardor of a boy, as befitted his years, and with that an experience beyond them; and the modesty that comes from having done great deeds mixed with none of the conceit of the imagination that sees oneself acting greatly, should the chance come, and neither man nor woman could look in his face, as frank and cheerful as the eyes of a dog, and feel no impulse of friendliness. And Kanaris was not a man who from habitual reserve would distrust a friendly impulse when it came, and so it was that in half an hour they were all chatting together, like children, of ships and fish and winds and waves and the hundred healthy things that made the environment of the life of all of them. As the evening wore on they heard the crew coming merrily back from Nauplia, but they sat talking late, like friends who have met again.
Their three cabins were close together, and the Capsina, after showing Mitsos his, went to her own and sat there in the dark, too happy to think or sleep. She heard Michael's nails tapping along the wooden floor outside, and then with a soft thump he curled himself up outside her door, according to his custom. From Mitsos's cabin she heard the rattle of shoes, and soon after the partition wall between them creaked as he curled himself up in his berth against it. Then there was silence, and still she sat in the darkness of her cabin, looking out from the port-hole towards the quay of Nauplia, black beneath the stars, and seeing the lights from the town cast in long unwavering reflection over the calm water, and filled with a rapturous uncontent.
She was on deck next day, while yet night was mixed with morning, fresh as a flower, though having slept but little, and before six she gave the order to hoist sail, for a fair wind was blowing, and they could clear the harbor without need of boat or tow-rope. Day was coming infinitely clear and sweet; overhead there still burned a big star or two, which got paler and paler every moment till they seemed white and unluminous, like candles in the sunshine, and by degrees the pale primrose strip of sky in the east flushed with color before the upvaulting of the sun. The flush spread to the zenith, and was answered by the surface of the bay, and before they cleared the point of Palanede the sunrise was on them. She turned just as the first rays struck the ship, and saw Mitsos just coming on to the deck a few yards away; and the sun shining on her face, and Mitsos gladdening her eye, gave a radiance to her beauty that drew his eyes to her in a long gaze.
And in pain and rapture together she looked at him, and her heart exulted in its noble and self-rendered slavery.
For a moment neither spoke; then, and with an effort:
"So you have slept well, little Mitsos? And you do not repent our sudden bargain? There is time yet to put you ashore."
"I have slept all night and I repent nothing."
The Capsina did not answer at once, but looked out to sea, and wetting her finger, held it up into the wind and glanced at the compass.
"The wind is due north," she said, "and only light. The channel of Spetzas, through which we pass, is east-southeast. The distance you should know. Give the order, little Mitsos."
Mitsos smiled and scratched his head.
"Eh, but I do not know the ship," he said.
"Look at it, then."
Mitsos looked at the lines of the vessel, then at the canvas she was carrying.
"First hoist jib and halyards," he said. "We can carry more sail than this."
"And then?"
"Oh, Capsina," he cried, "but you want to find me ignorant! However, I should say, go right across to within a mile of Astra, squaring the sails ever so little, and then make the channel in one run. And now, God defend me from having said a very foolish thing."
"I think your prayer is heard," said the Capsina. "Therefore, it is time to have breakfast," and she called Mitsos's orders.
"Come down," she said; "the ship is running free and fine, and it will be an hour yet before we put on the second tack. Ah, here is Michael. He knows you, does he not? That always seems to me a thing of good omen, for indeed I trust Michael more than I trust myself. He welcomed Kanaris so, and I never had a better friend. Is Kanaris not up yet? He knows he is only a passenger now, and will have his lie in bed. Well, we will breakfast all the same."
When they had breakfasted, Sophia took Mitsos a tour of the ship. She was a brig of three hundred and fifty tons, very long for her beam, and deep-keeled. On her upper deck she carried six nine-inch guns—two forward under the forecastle, two amidships, and two astern. Both forward and stern guns were mounted on a carriage, which revolved nearly half a circle and looked from a very wide port, so that the stern guns could be trained on a point due astern, or be used for a broadside, or could fire forty-five degrees ahead, and the bow guns in the same way could fire straight ahead, or in any direction up to forty-five degrees behind them. The main-deck was armed in a similar manner with six guns, placed not directly below the upper-deck guns, but some ten yards horizontally from them, so that the smoke from the lower should not rise directly and interfere with the sighting of the upper. Mitsos, to the Capsina's great delight, saw and commended this arrangement, which was new to him. On the main-deck the forward and stern guns—four-inch, not six-inch—could not fire right astern or right ahead, but they had a wide broadside range. Below the deck the battery consisted of twelve guns, six on each side; the four guns in the centre of each side being of the same weight as those on the upper deck, but those in the bows and stern being four-inch guns. Thus in all she carried twenty-four guns—sixteen six-inch and eight four-inch—and it was a sight that made Mitsos lick his lips with blood-thirstiness.
"You would say she was a fortress," he said.
The two chattered like children over a new toy all their own, and Kanaris, who soon joined them, seemed to each to be like an elder who had outgrown enthusiasm; yet even to him the toy seemed flawless. The Turkish men-of-war and cruisers alike were contemptibly inferior in point of speed, and the men-of-war, which were armed with much heavier guns, carried all their strength in the broadside, while the Capsina's ship had two guns which could shoot straight ahead or astern, and six which could fire on either diagonal.
Meantime the ship was nearing Astra, and the wisdom or foolishness of Mitsos's tactics would soon be patent. But while they were still three miles off he turned to the Capsina.
"I have made a mistake," he said. "If we go about at once we shall still make the channel. For indeed she could go as an arrow goes."
The Capsina smiled with a thrill of pleasure in her ship.
"I won a pound over you yesterday," she said; "and if Kanaris will bet again, I will stand to win another. Give your orders, little Mitsos."
Kanaris looked incredulous.
"Kranidi is a very fine place," he said; "but I take it we want to sail between Spetzas and the land."
"Will you bet?" asked the Capsina.
Kanaris paused a moment, and heard Mitsos giving the order in a voice extraordinarily confident.
"I think I will not bet," he said.
After that there was the sailing-gear of the ship to be gone through. To Mitsos, used as he was to the big schooner sail, these square canvases seemed a thought unwieldable, but the foresails, the jib, and halyards had taken his fancy at once.
"It is a rein to a horse," he said; "it must go as you will."
"And it is according to your will that it shall go," said Sophia.
The hours of the golden day went by; they had made eight knots in the first hour, and nine in the second; and about ten in the morning, Kranidi, a grain of sparkling salt in the gray stretch of hill, appeared small and very distant. And at that Mitsos frowned.
"Again I was wrong," he said; "we might have put about a mile sooner. But, indeed, how was I to know?"
They were through the channel of Spetzas before noon; but presently, after the wind dropped altogether, and for a couple of hours, they lay becalmed on a windless sea, but swept slowly northward by the current running up the coast. The Capsina chafed at the delay, for though she would have waited two days or three at Nauplia, as she had said, for Mitsos, the loss of a few hours now seemed wholly disproportionate, for she was very eager to get off again on the fresh cruise. Kanaris remembered the morning he had spent with Nikolas on the Gulf of Corinth, and said to the Capsina:
"I was with Nikolas Vidalis in just such a position as this, and he said what seemed to me a very wise thing, Capsina: 'I am never in a hurry,' says he, 'when I am going as fast as I can.'"
"Ah, he was a man," said the Capsina; "but when did you ever know a woman who thought that? Why, it is only when we are going as fast as we can that we are in a hurry; if we are not going our quickest, we are not in a hurry."
Mitsos was lying on the deck, with his cap pushed over his eyes, and his back against the mast.
"That is not what Uncle Nikolas meant," he remarked.
The Capsina laughed.
"Wisest little Mitsos, explain to me, then."
"He meant—he meant—Oh, surely you see what he meant," said Mitsos, feeling too sleepy to express himself.
"Well, anyhow, his nephew is not in a hurry," said Sophia, looking at his lazy length.
"His nephew is completely comfortable," said Mitsos. "It is very good to be on this ship, and my bones are sweet to me."
Sophia felt a trifle irritated with him. It had been extraordinarily pleasant to her to see him make himself so readily at home the evening before, but just now she felt a little ill-used at his entire contentment with the brig and her and himself. She would have preferred a little feeling of some sort to any amount of pure content. But a moment afterwards he looked up quickly.
"There is a breeze coming," and he got up. "Yes, there it comes," he said, pointing southward. "We shall have to square sails till we get round again. Shall I give the order, Capsina?"
"Please." Then when he joined her again: "How did you know the breeze was coming, little Mitsos?"
"I don't know. Perhaps I smelt it. Really, now you ask me, I find I can't tell you."
"That is curious," said the Capsina. "I had heard there were men who could do that, but I put it down to folks' tales. Michael, I think, knows sometimes, and now I look at you I notice your nostrils grow big and small like a dog's."
"They are as God made them," said Mitsos, piously.
The Capsina laughed. "Oh, inimitable boy!" she cried. "Come, let us look round the ship again. Yes, it is good to be at sea, is it not? Here comes the breeze indeed. There! Did you see her shake herself as if she woke up suddenly, this beautiful shining ship, all ours! See how quickly she gathers way! We shall be at Hydra by five if this holds. Of course you will live with me there till we start, but I expect we shall be on the ship more than off. You might well have smelt the breeze, Mitsos, for surely it smells very good, and there is more to come, or I am the more mistaken."
It was still an hour before the sunset when they cast anchor in the harbor of Hydra, for the wind had got up and promised a stormy night. The clan welcomed the Capsina's new importation with fervor when they heard who it was; and certain of the primates wondered whether she would demand another seat in the assembly. But in truth the Capsina had other things to think of; for the Hydriot fleet was not going to cruise again till the spring, while she was going to make all speed to be off, with Kanaris on theSophia, and she and Mitsos on theRevenge, for so had the new ship been named. And in these things there was much food for many thoughts.
TheRevengeand theSophiawere ready for sea by early in February. Even the clan, who were accustomed to the habitual fever of the Capsina's energy, found themselves wondering whether she was a woman or a whirlwind. No job was too big for her, no detail too small, and she would be superintending the storage of the powder in theSophiaone moment, and the next would be half-way across to the anchorage of theRevenge, to see whether they had planed away the edge of her cabin door, which would not shut properly, and had sent from the wicker-makers the cages for the fowls. There seemed, indeed, to be only one person on the island, for the population were just tools in the hands of the Capsina—machines for lifting weights or stowing shot. She reduced her foreman to a mere wreck, for the unfortunate man had to stay up three consecutive nights doing the Capsina's business, and was roundly abused when she found him asleep after dinner the fourth day. Kanaris fared little better, and Mitsos alone seemed capable of dealing with the girl. She would find him sitting at a café after dinner smoking a pipe and playing draughts; and when she asked him whether he had done this or seen to that, he would say:
"I have worked ten hours to-day, Capsina, and I have not smoked ten minutes."
"Smoke, smoke!" cried the Capsina; "smoking and drinking is all that men are fit for!"
And Mitsos, with a face conspicuously grave, raised his voice and called for a pipe and a glass of wine for the Capsina, and an awed silence fell for the moment on those round, for this seemed little short of blasphemy; but the Capsina only glanced at Mitsos's demure face, burst out laughing herself, and was off again.
Kanaris and Mitsos lodged in her house, but until the last evening, when all was ready, and there was positively nothing left for her to do, she was never there except occasionally for supper and for sleep. Even on the last evening of all, as soon as supper was over, she started up.
"We are ready," she said; "why not sail to-night? What is the use of wasting time here?"
Mitsos, who had not finished, slowly laid down the mouthful he was raising to his lips.
"Oh, Capsina!" he said; "be it known to you that for my part I will not go till to-morrow. Yes, this is mutiny, is it not? Very well, put me in irons; but for the sake of all the saints in heaven, let me finish my supper!"
The Capsina looked at him a moment.
"Little Mitsos," she said, "you are a gross feeder."
And with that she sat down again, and filled both their glasses and her own.
"To the little Mitsos's good digestion!" she cried, and clinked her glass with his.
Mitsos smiled, but drank to his own digestion.
"And there is yet another toast," he said. "It is to the tranquil Capsina. Hurrah!"
They were going south round the capes, then north again, up the west coast of Greece, to cruise in the Corinthian Gulf, for there, as they knew, were Turkish vessels, which sailed from village to village along the coast, massacring and burning and destroying the Greek maritime population. The events of the last summer and autumn had made it clear even to that indolently minded enemy that if once Greece got command of the sea the war would be over, for on land the cause of the Revolution daily gained fresh recruits, and, if once the ports and harbors were in the hands of the insurgents, it would no longer be possible to send in fresh men and arms, except by the long and dangerous march through the disaffected mountains of north Greece. There, as the Turks had found to their cost, it was impossible to bring on a pitched engagement, for true to the policy of Petrobey, the villagers pursued a most harassing, baffling policy of guerilla warfare. The invaders could burn a village, already empty before their approach, but next day as they marched, suddenly the bare and rocky hill-sides would blaze, large bowlders would stream down the ravines and upset the commissariat mules, and during the livelong night dropping shots would be kept up, and a sentry, firing back at the uncertain aim of the momentary flash of a musket, would be bowled over from the other direction. But as long as the sea remained in the hands of the Turks they had little to fear; regiment after regiment could be poured into the country, and the end would be sure. With this object, several Turkish vessels were cruising among the clustering villages on the gulf, burning ships and depopulating the men of the sea. But it was an ill day for them when the news of their doings came to Hydra. It had been arranged that some fifteen brigs should follow the Capsina in the spring, and part would close the mouth of the gulf while the others joined her. Tombazes had in vain urged her to wait, for no Turkish fleet would be sent out from Constantinople till spring; the Greeks would have the start of them leaving Hydra, and no sane man would think of cruising in the winter. But all remonstrance was useless, for the Capsina only said:
"Then I suppose Kanaris, Mitsos, and I are mad. That is a sore affliction, father. Besides, you would not have us stop; Turkish ships, you know, are in the gulf."
For more than a week after they started they were the butt of violent and contrary winds, but the Capsina was impatient of delay no longer. Indeed, on the surface she was "the tranquil Capsina" to whom Mitsos had drunk, and he at any rate had no cause to know of the unrest that stormed below her tranquillity. They had set out from Hydra about eleven of the morning, and almost immediately after leaving the harbor they had taken a somewhat different course to theSophia. She made a wider tack to port, while theRevengesailed closer to the wind, and after they had turned the southern end of the island, and there was open sea, with the main-land lying like a cloud to the west, Sophia and Mitsos left the bridge. Just as they went down she looked round: Kanaris was far away to the offing, Hydra was sinking down to the north, there was only sea and Mitsos. And with an uncontrollable impulse she held out her hands to him.
"At last!" she cried, and before the pause was perceptible—"at last we are off!"
She loved these fierce winds and heavy seas which kept them back; it was a fierce and intimate joy to her to wake at night and know that Mitsos was there, to wake in the morning for another day of that comradeship, which was in itself already the main fibre of her life. The huge gray seas from the south hissed and surged by them, with dazzling, hungry heads of lashed foam, now and again falling solid on the bows with a shower of spray, and streaming off through the scuppers back into the sea. The wind shrilled and screamed through the rigging; the buffeted ship staggered and stood straight again, then plunged head-foremost with a liquid cluck and crunch into the next water-valley; the bowsprit dipped in the sea, then raised itself scornfully with a whiff of spray twenty feet above the crest of the wave; and every wave that beat them, every squall that whistled aloft, every flash of raking sunlight that fled frightened across the deck was for the two of them; they stood side by side, wrapped in tarpaulins, and watched the beautiful labor of the ship; they sat in the swaying, rolling cabin, and it was like a game to pluck at the food as it bowed and coquetted away from their hands; like a game, too, the scramble and rush across the deck, laid precipitously towards the seas rushing by, or the house-roof climb up it as it rose staggering to the next billow, or the watching Michael as he toiled or slipped after them, sometimes sliding gravely down on his haunches, sometimes doing tread-mill work up the wet incline; but for one of them at least the game was one at which the stake was serious. They would amuse themselves with the most childish sports, watching themselves to see who could stand the longest on one foot when the ship was pushing and shouldering its way along through the cross sea, the one finding pleasure in such things because he was just a boy with a double portion of animal spirits, the other because anything that was shared with him was passionately well worth doing. Often and often Mitsos wondered that this was the same girl who had nigh driven the Hydriots to death, doing more than any of them, yet indefatigable; and she that this was the Mitsos who had brought hot death to that Turkish ship in the harbor at Nauplia.
For three days the southwest wind blew half a gale, and the sky was one driven rack of scudding rain-clouds. Sometimes a squall would sweep across the sea, the torrent hissing audibly into the water, and more loudly than the scream of the wind as it approached. The windward sea would become a seething caldron; the broken wave-tops were scarce distinguishable from the churning of the rain—all was furious foam. Then the squall would charge slanting across the deck, pass, and perhaps for half an hour the wind would seem to moderate, but again the humming of the rigging would change to a moan, and the moan to a shriek; and so another night they would sail, scarce making any way, but, tacking wide out to sea, return again, having won but a dozen miles in half a dozen hours. All the time theSophiakept a wider and more seaward course, now and then getting close to them at the end of her starboard tack, and then standing out again.
But on the fourth morning they woke to a sky washed clean by the rain, and of an incredibly soft blue. The gray, angry waves became a merry company of live beings which sparred in jovial play with the ship. The wind was still fresh, but it had veered round to the north, and mid-day saw the two ships close together, rattling along close-hauled in the channel between Cerigo and Cape Malea. To the south the island lay green and gray and fringed with white, and, to the north, promontory after promontory, each grayer and bluer than the last, melted into the bay of Gythium. It was a morning on which those in whose veins the joy of life is flowing are conscious from toe to finger-tip, from finger-tip to the end of the hair, of the indubitable goodness of life, and the smallest thing was a jest to them, and the largest a jest also. Michael, in particular, caused many mouthfuls of laughter; for his dinner was thrown out of its bowl by a sudden lurch of the ship, and he ran after the various bones as they rolled away, growling and ill-pleased, till he too was laid on his back, and picked himself up with the air of not being hungry and having fallen down on purpose. And the perception of the shallowness of this seeming, combined with a half-swallowed piece of orange, reduced Mitsos to a choking condition, and the Capsina thumped him on the back.
"Thank you, yes, I am altogether recovered," says he; "but, oh, Capsina, you have a very strong arm."
"Little Mitsos, it was for your good," said the Capsina, a thought sententiously, setting her white teeth in the peel of her orange.
"I suppose so; things that are good for one, I have noticed, make one a little sore."
"What do you know about things that are good for you?" asked she.
"That only; that they make one sore. For indeed I do not think that things that are good for onearegood for one. You understand?" he added, hopefully.
"Perfectly," said the Capsina, and they laughed again, causelessly.
The evening brought calmer weather, and to them somewhat calmer spirits, and that night after supper they talked quite soberly.
"Oh, but it is a strange world," said the Capsina; "to think that a week ago I had never set eyes on you, and now—well, there is no one in the world I know better. I have taken you as I found you, and you me; we have asked no questions of father or mother, and here we are. Oh, it is a strange world!" she said again.
Now there was perhaps no subject in the world to which Mitsos had dedicated less thought than the strangeness of the world. So he waited in silence.
"Is it not so?" went on Sophia. "What could have been less likely than the chance that put your boat in to Nauplia that night, and on the one tack. For, indeed, if you had taken two tacks, and so I had lost my pound to Kanaris, I should not have stopped there."
"Then should I at this hour have been catching the little fish in the bay," said Mitsos, "and that is only worth the doing when there is nothing forward. Yet I like the bay," he added, thinking of Suleima, "for I have had many good hours there. See, there is Taygetus, all snow! You would say she was a bride," he added, with an altogether unusual employment of metaphor.
He got up and leaned over the bulwarks looking out to the north, where the top of Taygetus appeared above a bank of low-lying cloud, itself bright in the evening sunshine. The sea had gone down considerably in the last hour, and they moved with a steady swing over the waves, no longer torn and broken. In the lessening wind they had been able to put on all sail, and the ship, with its towers of fresh snowy canvas, seemed like some great white seabird, now skimming, now dipping in the waves. From where she sat, Sophia could see the sky reddening to sunset under the arched foot of the main-sail, and when the bows rose to a wave Taygetus would appear as in a frame between the ship and the sail. Mitsos was leaning on the side, in front of the main-mast, bareheaded and blown by the wind, his face turned seaward, so that she saw only the strong clear line of brow and cheek. And the sight of him, listless, contented, and unconscious of her, filled the girl with a sudden spasm of anger and envy. The last week, which had so welded itself into the essentials of her life, seemed no more to him than the sound of the wind which had buffeted them, or the hiss of some spent wave which had struck them yesterday; she had been mad, so she thought, to have so let herself go, abandoning herself like that to the childish pleasure of the hour. It seemed the one moment incredible that he had not guessed that this child's-play was something far different to her, at the next impossible that it should have seemed to the boy to be anything else. They had played, laughed, chattered together, and to him the play had been play, the laughter and the chattering mirth only. Yet she counted the cost and regretted nothing, and waited with an eager patience for the fierce deeds in which their hands would be joined, and therein surely draw closer to each other. The affection and delighted comradeship of the boy was hers; hers too, so she promised herself, should be the keener, inevitable need for her when they did a man's work together.
That evening they passed round Cape Malea, keeping close in to the land, and Mitsos, as they turned northward, watched with all the pleasure of recognition the near passing of the coast where he and Yanni had made their journey with the messages for the mills. Sophia listened eagerly to the story, making Mitsos tell over again of the fight in the mill, and she sat silent awhile after he had finished.
"That explains you," she said at length; "for these last days you have been just a child, but I suspect that when there is work forward you are made a man; and there will soon be work forward for you and me, little Mitsos," she added to herself.
Two days after this they were nearing Patras and the entrance to the Corinthian Gulf, and being no longer in the open and empty seas, it was necessary to use some circumspection in their advance. They lay to some eight miles outside Patras, and Kanaris came on board to consult. The fortress of Patras was in the hands of the Turks; but they would give this a very wide berth, so Kanaris suggested, and pass Lepanto, another Turkish fortress in the narrows of the gulf, at night. It was there the greater risk awaited them. Lepanto was a heavily armed place, the gulf was less than three miles broad, shoal water lay broad on the side away from the fortress, and the channel close below its walls. Further, it was ludicrously improbable that either theSophiaor theRevengewould be allowed a passing unchallenged, for indeed the resemblance of either to peaceful trading brigs was of the smallest. But Sophia, with the support of Mitsos, demurred: it were better to seek a weed in a growing cornfield than to go into the gulf without some guidance as to the position the Turkish cruisers were in, but beyond doubt Germanos or some other of the revolutionists at Patras could give them information.
"For, indeed," said the Capsina, with asperity, "I have not come a pleasure sail in a little rowboat with a concertina to sing to."
"But do you mean to put in to Patras," asked Kanaris, "and say to the Turks who hold the fort, 'Tell me where is Germanos, for I wish to know where the Turkish cruisers are'? Will they not guess your business when they see the ship?"
"No, I shall not do that," said the Capsina, "nor shall I put out a great notice in Greek and Turkish that all may read, saying I am the Capsina and carry four-and-twenty guns. Oh, speak," she said, turning to Mitsos, "and do not sit as round-eyed as an owl at noonday!"
Mitsos grinned.
"Never mind the compliments," he said, "and give me time, Capsina, for it is my way to think slow."
"If they know that you are at Patras," continued Kanaris, "word will go to the Lepanto, and we shall see nought of the gulf but the bottom of it."
"And so will the little Mitsos be among his little fish again," said the Capsina.
"The devil take the little fishes!" said Mitsos. "Why will you not let me be, to think slow, and tell you some very wise thing in the end? I shall go think by myself." And he went forward.
"How can you be so imprudent, Capsina?" said Kanaris. "Yes, I am at your orders completely: I need not remind you of that, and where you go I go. But you have ever told me to say my mind."
"You are quite right," said the Capsina, "but we will wait to hear what this slow thinker says."
In ten minutes or so Mitsos returned, still owl-like, but, so said the Capsina, with a blush of intelligence on his face.
"I am thinking I shall have to be a peasant lad again, with a mule and a basket of oranges. For I take it that both you and Kanaris are in the right, Capsina."
"The oranges will help us very much," remarked the Capsina, but the owl still sat in Mitsos's eyes.
"For thus," he continued, "even as in the days of the mill fight, I will go into Patras and find Germanos and speak with him."
"But how are you to get to Patras?" asked Kanaris.
"I have in my mind that there is a place called Limnaki, three miles this side Patras, and the foulest spot God ever made, being one pestilent marsh. Now my thought is that our brig could sail close in there, while the other waited about on the alert. That shall be this afternoon, and before it is dark I can be with Germanos. Then he will tell me where these Turks are in the gulf, and before morning I shall be at Limnaki again. So far I am with the Capsina, but then let us do as Kanaris says, and pass the guns of Lepanto at night."
"Hoot, hoot! so the owl speaks!" said Sophia; "and I think the owl is right. You know Germanos, do you not, little Mitsos?"
"Surely. I was at Tripoli."
It was so arranged, and Kanaris returned to his ship, while theRevengeput about, and in an hour's time had got close in to the shore opposite Limnaki. It was a starved little village, feverish and unhealthy, and the chance of Turks being there was too small to reckon with. Mitsos got into peasant's dress, and as time was short, omitted the oranges and the mule, and after being landed quietly, set off an hour before sunset over the hill towards Patras. Barefooted, and with a colored handkerchief for a cap, he passed without remark through the gate of the town, and mingled with the loiterers in the market-place.
The citadel of Patras was still in the hands of the Turks, and the Turkish garrison there, and the Greek revolutionists who held the monastery hill both lived in a state of semi-siege, while meantime the rest of the Greeks and Turks in the town continued to pursue the usual trade, finishing up six days out of the seven with a little mutual massacring in the streets; and Mitsos's object was to get to the Greek camp without involving himself in any street row. The monastery was but a quarter of an hour's walk from the square, and he reached the outposts of the Greek lines in safety, and demanded to be taken at once to Germanos. He gave his name, and stated that he was on the business of the Capsina.
Germanos received him immediately with kindness and courtesy, though the little Mitsos, remembering the affairs at Tripoli, was as stiff as the soul of a ramrod. But, to Germanos's credit be it said, his manner suffered no abatement of geniality, and when he had heard Mitsos out, he spoke:
"There are nine Turkish vessels in the gulf," he said. "Three are coming along the north coast, and left Lepanto only two days ago. They attacked a village called Sergule yesterday, and, I should think, would move on again to-day or to-morrow. Three more were at Corinth two days ago, and, I have just heard, were going northward; the other three are somewhere along the south coast, but I do not know where. But how are you going to get in, little Mitsos?"
"We are going to sail in," said Mitsos, curtly.
Germanos looked at him a moment in silence. Then, "That is not very courteously said, little Mitsos," he answered. "Yes, I know you think that has passed which passes forgiveness. Yet Nikolas forgave me, did he not, and do you not know that I was sorry and ashamed, and did I not say so publicly? That was not very easy to do. But I do not wish to interfere; if you desire to know more that I can tell you, you are welcome to my knowledge, and, if you will, my counsel; if not, I can only regret that I can be of no more service to you, and wish you God-speed—that with all my heart."
Mitsos stood a moment with eyes downcast. Then with a wonderful sweet frankness of manner he spoke:
"You are right, father," he said, "and I am no better than a sulky child. I ask your forgiveness."
"You have it very freely, nephew of Nikolas, for indeed Nikolas forgave even me," said the proud man.
Mitsos's face dimpled with a smile, both genial and sorry.
"So, that is good," he said. "Well, father, here we are, still outside the gulf, and we want, if we can, to pass in to-night, so that they in Lepanto shall not see us."
Germanos thought a moment.
"I can help you," he said, "and it is pleasure to my soul to do so. You do not see all your difficulties. You can depend on getting past Lepanto with the land-breeze in the evening, which blows off the hills out of Lepanto, and a little up the gulf. Now the land-breeze drops by an hour after sunset, and so by then, therefore, must you be past Lepanto. That is to say, you must pass Patras in broad day. You will be seen from the citadel, a man on horse will reach the straits before you are there, and word will go across to the fortress. It is now after sunset, and it is hopeless to attempt it to-night. But to-morrow I can help you, and this promise I give you, that to-morrow afternoon we make a sortie, and hold the two city gates on the east, so that no man passes out. Thus word cannot be sent to Lepanto. For, believe me, if you are seen, as you must be seen passing here, the straits will be guarded, and you will never get in. But, little Mitsos, what a scheme! Is it the Capsina's? For how will you pass out again; for when once they know you are there, the straits will be guarded. They have ships at Lepanto."
"In a month the fleet leaves Hydra," said Mitsos; "till then we have plenty of work in the gulf. But that is a wise thought and a kind one of yours, father."
Germanos got up and walked about; he was much moved.
"If this is the spirit of the people," he said, "it will be no long time before not a Turk is left in Greece."
"The people are not all as the Capsina, father," said Mitsos.
"It is splendid! splendid!" cried Germanos. "Whenever did a man hear of so noble a risk? To shut herself up in a trap for six weeks, fighting like a wild beast at bay. And, indeed, there is cause; five villages already have been exterminated—they are no more. We on land cannot touch the ships. None know where they will come next, and it is out of possibility to garrison all the villages of the gulf. God be praised for giving us such a girl!"
"Indeed there is none like her," said Mitsos. "But it is borne in upon me that she is waiting off Limnaki, and she does not like waiting."
"I will have you seen safely out of the town," said Germanos, "for, indeed, we cannot spare you either, little one. How is the wife and the baby?"
"The one is as dear as the other," said Mitsos, "and they are both very dear."
Mitsos was escorted out of the town and set on his way by a dozen men, to defend him from the street brawls, and before midnight he was down again on the shore at Limnaki, where he found the boat waiting to take him off. The Capsina had come ashore, and was pacing up and down like a hungry animal. Mitsos told her how he had sped; she entirely approved the primate's scheme, the ship was got under way, and they went north again, with a fitful and varying breeze, to join Kanaris.
All next morning they lay some eight miles out to sea, waiting until the time came for them to move up the gulf. A west wind was blowing, and now one and now the other beat a little out to sea, in order to keep their distance from the land. On the Capsina's ship an atmosphere of nerves was about, for all the men knew what they were to attempt, and the waiting was cold matter for the heart. Mitsos alone possessed himself in content and serenity, and smoked a vast deal of tobacco. Michael had caught the prevailing epidemic, and followed the Capsina about on her swift and aimless excursions fore and aft with trouble in his eye.
At length the Capsina came and sat down by Mitsos, who had chosen a snug berth under the lee of the forecastle, where he was sheltered from the wind and warmed by the winter sun.
"Have you ever bathed on a cold day?" she asked.
"On many," said Mitsos. "But why?"
"Is there not a moment before one jumps in?" asked the girl, and she set off again to look to the ammunition for the thirtieth time that morning. Mitsos smoked on and soon she returned, having forgotten that for which she had gone.
"It is all this arranging that is a trouble to me," she said. "Had you not gone to see Germanos and take precautions, I should have been as calm—as calm as you, for, indeed, I know nothing calmer. The devil take that silly scheme of yours, Mitsos. But to know that he is taking measures for our safety, and we have to wait till his measures are taken—oh, it beats me!" she cried. "And there are other things."
Mitsos's eye roamed over the sky for inspiration and noticed the sun.
"It is time for dinner," he said; "in fact, it is already late, and my stomach howls to me."
A singing west wind had been blowing all day, and promised to usurp the air of the land-breeze; but, not to run risk, about four o'clock the Capsina signalled to Kanaris, and they both hoisted sail and went eastward. The wind was still holding; they made good sailing, and half an hour before sunset they were off Patras. They were not more than a mile out to sea, and it was possible in that clear air to make out that something unusual was going on. The fort seemed deserted, but they could see lines of men, moving slow and busy like ants, lining the western wall. Now and then a spit of smoke would come from the citadel, followed after an interval by the drowsy sound of the report, and once or twice a long line of white vapor curled along the city wall, and the rattle of musket-fire confirmed it. It was clear that Germanos was as good as his word.
The sun had already set half an hour when they neared Lepanto, but a reflected brightness still lingered on the water, and as they approached they had the lights of the town to guide them, and the Capsina put on all sail. The strength of the wind had risen almost to violence, and Mitsos, standing with the Capsina on the poop, more than once feared for the masts, or to hear the crack of the mainsail. Once he suggested taking a reef in, but the Capsina paid no attention. All afternoon the girl had been strange and silent, as if struggling with some secret anxiety, and Mitsos, seeing she gave no account of it, refrained from asking. Kanaris's orders were simply to follow, but when they had passed the fort, and still the Capsina neither spoke nor moved from her place, Mitsos again addressed her, but with some timidity, for her face was iron and flint.
"We are safe past," he said. "Where do—"
But she interrupted him vehemently.
"Get you below," she said; "this night I sail the ship."
Mitsos wondered but obeyed, and sat up awhile in the cabin; but the ship still holding her course, as he could tell from the rapid swishing of the water, about nine he went to bed. Later the sound of the anchor-chain woke him for a moment, and he waited awake, though laden with sleep, for a minute or two, in case he was wanted. Then there came the unmistakable splash of a boat lowered into the water and the sound of oars. At that he got up, threw on a coat, and went on deck.
It was starlight and very cold; several sailors were standing about, and he asked one of them, who took the duty of first mate, where they were. Dimitri pointed to a faint glow along the shore.
"That is—that was Elatina," he said.
"And what was Elatina?"
"A village the Turks have burned. The Capsina is being rowed there," he said, "and as she got into the boat I saw she was crying."
"Crying? The Capsina?"
"Yes; it was the village her mother comes from," said Dimitri, who was a Hydriot.
Mitsos hesitated a moment, but reasoning that as the Capsina had said nothing of this to him it was a thing outside his own affairs, he went back to bed again.
He woke again in the aqueous, uncertain light of dawn, and in the dimness made his way on deck. The water was a mirror, the sky hard and clear as some precious stone. The Capsina was not returned to the ship; she had been gone ashore all night, and none on board knew anything of her. The boat she had disembarked in had been back once during the night to take more men: they supposed she was trying to save some whom the Turks had left for dead.
Kanaris's ship was lying close, and after taking some coffee, Mitsos rowed across to consult with him. He advised going ashore, and though Mitsos hesitated at first, for if the Capsina had wanted him she would have sent for him, they went together.
The long line of houses along the harbor was still smouldering—though for the most part they had been skeletons of dwelling-places, built only of wood—a heap of charred and blackened beams. Sometimes a breath of moving air came down from the mountain behind, and fanned the burned heaps into a sullen glare of glowing charcoal, or blowing off a layer of white ash, showed that the fire still lived beneath. A row of mimosa-trees fronted the houses, their leaves all singed and wilted with the heat, and as the two landed on the quay the dawn breeze awoke and blew straight down to them across the burned town, hot and stifling, and, what gave to Mitsos a sudden pang of intimate horror, with the smell of burning wood was mingled a smell as of roasting meat. Here and there from a heap of charred ruins protruded a blackened leg or arm, or the figure of a man or woman lay free from the fallen timbers, but with hair consumed to its roots, and holes burned in the clothes, a crying horror and offence to the purity and sweetness of morning. Once, on their way up that street of death, Mitsos turned to Kanaris with ashen lips. "I think I cannot go on," he whispered, but after a moment or two he mastered himself and followed the other. The ghastly hideousness of the sight, now that his blood danced with no fever of war nor was his heart shadowed by an anxiety fiercer than this indiscriminate death, touched some nerve which the shambles at Tripoli had left unthrilled. Here and there from the waters of the harbor the masts of some sunken vessel pricked the surface, and the slope of the beach was strewn with the wreckage, not of ships alone. And by degrees Mitsos's cold horror grew hot with the fiery lust for vengeance; and steeling himself to look and feed on the sight, before long he looked and needed no steeling. The color returned to his lips and inflamed his face, his eye was lit from within with the thought of what should swiftly follow. For beyond a doubt this was the work of the three ships that had sailed from Lepanto only a few days before, and, indeed, they must have been gone not yet a full day.
Curious and pitiful was it to see the dogs still guarding a pile of burned beams which their instinct told them was home; they had returned, no doubt, when the fierceness of the fire was over, and now lay in front of the consumed houses, growling at Kanaris and Mitsos as they passed, or, if they came close, springing up with bared teeth ready to attack. At one house a great gaunt dog rose as they approached and stood with hackles up, snarling; the poor brute stood on three legs, for the fourth was broken and hung down limply. And, seeing that, a sudden poignancy of compassion at this faithfulness in suffering stung Mitsos to the quick, and, drawing his pistol, he put the beast out of his pain.
As yet there had been seen no sign of the Capsina or her party, but the noise of the shot reached them, and next moment two of the sailors came at a run round a corner some small distance up the street. They waited on seeing who the new-comers were, and Kanaris and Mitsos came up with them.
"Where is she?" asked Mitsos.
"At the house of her mother, clearing what is fallen to see if there are any left alive."
Mitsos and Kanaris followed, and, passing through two short streets of ghastly wreckage, found themselves at the house. It was larger than most, and built of stone, so that while the walls still stood the inside was one piled mass of burned beams and fittings of the floors and staircase. As they came near four sailors emerged out of the door with the charred burden of what had been a man. This, covered with a cloth where the face had been, they laid with others like it a little distance off.
The Capsina had kept with her some half-dozen of the men, with whom she was clearing the beams and débris, having sent the remainder off to other houses. She was hacking furiously at a beam too heavy to drag away except in pieces when Mitsos entered. Her dress, hands, and face were all blackened with the work; one hand was bleeding, and round the wrist was wrapped a bandage of linen. Seeing Mitsos, she stopped for a moment and wiped the sweat from her forehead. No tears or sign that she had been weeping was in her eye, only a savage and relentless fury.