"It is the Capsina's order," he said, "and we must not leave the ships without good garrison. But," and his eyes twinkled, "when I am after some fat brute, who trips in the brushwood, and calls on the prophet who shall be very slow to help, I will think of you, Dimitri. Meantime you have your hands full. Board the Turkish ships, one by one, with three-quarters of the men from theSophiaandRevengetogether, for they have no boats, and cannot reach us, and make ready supper, for I doubt we shall get no dinner to-day, except only food for joy. They will not have left more than half a dozen men on each ship."
"And those half dozen?" asked Dimitri, completing the question with a look.
"Yes, it must be so," said Mitsos. "And now off with you!"
The second boatload and the third came racing to land, and using for greater expedition the deserted Turkish boat to disembark the men, in less than half an hour the whole contingent, some four hundred and fifty, were ranged ready to start. Mitsos had in vain endeavored to persuade the Capsina not to come with them; they would have a run fit to make a man burst, he said, up the hills, and at the end God knew what rough-and-tumble fighting. But the girl, breeched like a man, and carrying musket and pistol, scornfully refused to be left behind, and, indeed, she seemed fit for any work. Mitsos looked at her with candid admiration as she trotted briskly along up the slope from the beach by his side, and:
"It is like being with Yanni again," he said. "When the lad found his legs too short for the pace, why, he would lean on me, so," and he drew the Capsina's arm within his own, and bade her give him of her weight. And the Capsina, flushed and panting a little, did as he told her.
Mitsos had been intrusted with the ordering of this raid of the raiders, and he called a halt as they got to the edge of the pine-wood, and repeated his instructions. The men were to form a long open file on each side of the path leading up the hill, so that should the Turks have turned and scattered through the woods on the signal of recall they might not slip past them. Fifty men were to stop there on patrol at the edge of the wood so as to intercept any who might have passed the advanced body, who, if they marched through the pine-wood which extended to within a mile of Vilia without encountering the enemy, were to form again on the open ground.
"And this, too," said Mitsos, in conclusion, with a voice of most joyful conviction: "the Turks are certainly a work of the devil. Therefore, it is entirely our business to hate them and to kill them. This is the last raid of these men. God has willed it so, and has made them short of leg and the more easily overtaken, short of arm and the easier to deal with at close quarters. Therefore"—and he raised his voice—"open out right and left as I gave the order."
And the men, with mouths full of laughter at the little Mitsos's homily, opened out.
The pine-wood through which they hoped to hunt the "turbaned pigs" grew thick and tall above them, and the ground was muffled with the fallen needles. Here and there, in spaces where the pines grew thinner, sprouted a tangle of scrub and brushwood, but for the most part the ground was bare of undergrowth. The track, a cobbled Turkish road, wound round the contours of the hill, and thus those in the wood on each side had to march the more slowly, allowing for the deviousness of the path. The morning was as if borrowed from the days in the lap of spring; the mid-day sun shone with the cheerfulness of April, peeping like a galaxy of warm-rayed stars through the clusters of needles on the pines, and the west wind, fresh and vigorous from the sea, gave briskness to the going of the blood. Glimpses of the snows of Cithaeron far and high in front carried the foot on after the eye, and the steepness of the ascent melted fast under vigorous feet. As the line went forward up the mountain-side, the sea, like a friend, rose with it, as if to watch and guard its foster-children, till a ravine cut crossways through the mountain hid that cheerful presence from the eye though its crispness lingered in the limb. Here the trees grew somewhat thicker, a spring had flushed the hill-side with a more stubborn growth of low creeping things, and owing to the windings of the road those who marched on either side were hanging on their footstep to allow the followers of the path to keep up with them, when the Capsina beckoned to Mitsos, who was forcing his way through a belt of young poplar which grew in the open. He paused, and, seeing what she had seen, crawled into cover of the pines and passed the word down to halt, and that those on the path should leave it for shelter of the bushes.
The slope of the ravine opposite them was thickly covered with trees, but high upon it, three hundred feet above them, and a mile away, was a little group of glittering points, winking and flashing among the trees, like the dance of the sun on water, and moving down towards them. Now and then, as if the sun had disappeared behind a cloud, they would be hidden from sight by a thickness in the pines, to burst out again in a fleet of bright moving spots where the ground was clearer. The advancing line of the Greeks had halted, those on the path had made concealment of themselves under the trees; and but for the bright specks opposite the mountain-side seemed tenanted only by the whispering pines, and only watched by a few high-circling hawks.
The Capsina was standing by Mitsos, and the lad's eyes blazed with a light that was not the fury of hate which the burned ruins of Elatina had kindled, nor veiled by the softening of pity for a man hung at his own yard-arm, but the clear, sparkling madness of the joy of fighting—the hungry animal joy of scenting the desired prey.
"Oh," he whispered, and "oh," again, and with that he looked up and saw the circling hawks. "They will be nearer before night," he said, "and fat with pickings. It is all as clear as sea-water, Capsina, and easier than smoking. We wait here exactly where we are, but closing up a little, and very still, till the Turks strike the bottom of the ravine below us. Then a volley, perhaps two, and, for they will break and scatter, then every man to feed his own knife and pistol. If it please you, I will give the order."
"And think you Vilia is safe?" asked the Capsina.
"Oh, woman, how can I tell? But, safe or not, there is nothing to do but what we are doing. We only know that the devils are not in Vilia now and are coming to us. We deal with them first. Is it an order?"
"Surely."
Mitsos passed the word right and left and sat down, taking no notice of the girl, but drawing his finger along the edge of his long knife. Once or twice he drove the point tenderly and lovingly into the bark of a tree, but for the most part sat smiling to himself, purring, you would say, like some great cat. Suddenly he turned to the Capsina.
"Get you back to the ships," he said. "This is no work for a woman that we have on hand. I would not have a woman see it."
The Capsina laughed softly.
"In truth, little Mitsos, you know not much about women. Who told you that women have soft hearts and fear blood? Some man, no doubt, for it is not so."
"It will not be fit for you," said Mitsos again. "Will you not go back?"
"Certainly I will not."
Mitsos sat still a moment frowning.
"It is true that I do not know much about you. But—"
"But then I am not like a woman, you think?" asked the girl, with a sudden anguish at her heart.
"Yet I would there were more women like you," said Mitsos. "So be it, then. Look, they are getting closer."
Meantime the Greek line had closed up, and Mitsos stole away in cover of the trees to give the orders. The signal for firing was to be one musket-shot from the Greek line, given by himself. If the Turks stood their ground, the firing was to continue; if they broke each man was to be his own general, and his business was to kill. Turks were good marksmen, but they were slow of foot; and the wood was thick, and knives were the gift of God. The Greeks would collect again (and Mitsos smiled like an angel militant), when the work was done, in the place they now occupied.
Then came the space of quivering delay, when men could have found it in their hearts to shriek aloud with the straining tension, pulling like pincers at their flesh, while they were compelled to stand still and watch in silence that little glittering patch dancing and shining down the mountain-side. Mitsos for his own part was conscious of no thought but an agonized desire for tobacco, and to Kanaris the fact that he had left three if not four piastres lying loose on his cabin table was the source of an immeasurable regret; a stray lock of the Capsina's hair, which had escaped from her cap, and blew now and again against her cheek, was an annoyance of nightmare intensity, but all watched the growing, glittering patch. In another ten minutes it was nearly opposite them on the hill-side in front, some quarter of a mile away, and they could see that the men were hurrying along, half running, half marching unencumbered by booty or captives; and at that Mitsos drew a sigh of relief, for he knew that they had not reached Vilia when the signal of recall turned them back. Then he took his musket up from the ground where he had laid it, and holding it ready, with finger on the trigger, looked round at the Capsina.
"It is nearly over," he whispered. "Indeed, I am in a hurry to-day," and she smiled in answer.
Slowly and now with perfect steadiness, though five minutes before his hand had been like some ague-stricken thing, he raised the musket to his shoulder, and picking out one of the foremost men who were coming down the path opposite, kept him balanced on the sight of the gun, for, with the thriftiness of his race, he saw no reason why his signal to the others should not be in itself of some little use, and as the man stepped on to the little arched bridge that crossed the stream below, fired. The man spun round and fell, and a volley from right and left indorsed his shot.
He shook some powder out of his flask into his hand.
"That is a good omen," he said. "Oh, Capsina, I am most exceedingly happy!"
The Turks had halted for a moment, and a few fired wildly into the trees. A bullet struck the ground at Mitsos's feet, burying itself in the pine-needles, and the lad ripped up the ground with his knife, and put the bullet he was going to ram home on the top of his charge into his wallet again.
"To be returned," he said, and fired, and there was joy in his heart.
A second rather straggling volley came from the almost invisible Greeks, and at that the Turks stood no longer, but broke in all directions, some following the stream in its course to the valley, some charging up the hill where the Greeks were posted in order to get back to the ships, some rushing up the hill-side again in the direction of Vilia.
"Shall we go, little Mitsos?" said the Capsina, as if she would ask him to take a turn about deck.
They were standing not far from the path, and Mitsos for answer pushed the Capsina behind a tree.
"Fire at those coming up the path," he said, "and for the sake of the Virgin remember that I am in the brushwood not far in front," and he jumped over a low-growing bush.
About fifty Turks had kept together, and were coming up the path towards them at a double. Some two dozen Greeks had already begun running down the path after the others, and there were a few moments' tussle and fighting, two or three falling on both sides, but the Turks struggled through them and hurried on. Mitsos, the Capsina, and a few others fired coolly and steadily at them from cover, but they soon passed them and were lost in the wood behind. Mitsos threw his musket down.
"The knife and pistol for me," he said. "Come. The patrol outside will talk to those."
For the first few minutes the odds were largely against the Greeks, for many of the Turks, despairing of escape, had hidden themselves in clumps of brushwood, which, as the Greeks came on, spurted and bristled with fire, and some number were wounded, but a few only killed. But when once they got the ambushed Turks out of the nearer hiding-places, and on the move again, the odds were vastly the other way. The trees were so thick that, as Mitsos had seen, muskets were of little use, and it was hand-to-hand fighting, or pistols at close quarters. Pistols, however, required reloading, and time was precious, for the main object was to prevent the Turks from reforming, or gaining open ground where they could make an organized resistance. But knives were always ready to the hand, and needed no charging but the arm-thrust, and in a little while only occasional shots were heard, and hurrying steps slipping on the muffled floor of pine-needles, or the short-drawn gasp of the striker or the groan of the struck. Now and then a couple of figures, with perhaps two more in pursuit, would hurry across a piece of open ground, and but for that a man on the slope opposite would have seen only the hill-side, green and peaceful, and heard the whispering of the trees above his head, or what he would take to be the sound of the wild boars routing and tramping in the undergrowth, and have suspected nothing of that dance of death raging under the aromatic pines. He would, perhaps, have noticed that the hawks were wheeling in large numbers, and very silently, without their usual shrill pipe, above the trees, and would have said truly to himself that there was carrion somewhere below them.
Mitsos and the Capsina had kept close together, but Kanaris, cool and business-like as ever, had lost them almost at once among the trees, for he had turned aside a moment to investigate a musket-barrel which pointed out of a clump of oleander by the stream, and had been rewarded for his curiosity by having his hair singed by the fire which passed close to his temple. Mitsos had paused a moment and laughed as he saw Kanaris draw back a step or two and jump with knife raised into the middle of the clump.
He shouted "Good-luck!" to him, and turned in time to see the Capsina fly, like some furious wild-cat, holding her pistol by the barrel in one hand and her long knife in the other, at a man who was crossing her between two trees just in front. He saw the Turk's lips curl in a sort of snarl, and he put his hand to his belt a moment too late, for the next the Capsina's knife had flickered down from arm's-length to his throat, and the butt of her pistol caught him on the temple. He fell sprawling at her feet, and she had to put one foot on his chest as purchase to pull the knife out again.
"Yet she is a woman," muttered Mitsos to himself, and, wheeling round, "Ah, would you?" he cried, and another Turk, rushing at the Capsina, who was still tugging at her knife, got Mitsos's weapon between his shoulder-blades.
The girl turned. "Thanks," she said. "I owe you one. Pull my knife out for me, little Mitsos—pull; oh, how slow you are!"
Even in so short a time the tide had completely turned, and the Turks were but as game driven from one cover to another. The Greeks who had gone off in pursuit of those who had fled down the bed of the stream were returning, for no more of them were left to be slain, and the fight was centring round a copse of low-growing trees more in the open and higher up the hill. The majority of those Turks who were not yet slain had taken refuge here, and already the place had proved expensive to the Greeks, for more than twenty lay dead round it. The brushwood was so thick that it was impossible to see more than a yard or two, and while a man was forcing his way in after some Turk in front of him, a shot would come from the right or left, or from closer at hand a knife would lick out like a snake's tongue, and while he turned to his new enemy, the pursued became the pursuer.
Such was the state of things when Mitsos and the Capsina came up. The latter had received a nasty cut across her left arm, and Mitsos had tied it up roughly for her, being unable to persuade her to stop quiet out of harm's way while the work was finished. But she refused, laughing wildly, for drunkenness of blood was on her, and the two went forward together.
She paused a moment some fifty yards from the edge of the copse. From the ground above it every now and then a Turk would make a dash for the cover, sometimes getting through the Greeks, who were fighting on the outskirts, sometimes knifing one on his way, or more often falling himself; and once from behind them a man ran swiftly by, cutting at Mitsos as he passed, and disappeared with a bound into the trees. The Capsina looked round at the dead who were lying about, and her face grew set and hard.
"What fool's work is this?" she cried. "We are in the open, they in shelter. Smoke them out."
She caught up a handful of dry fern, and firing a blank charge into it obtained a smouldering spark or two, which she blew into flames. Half a dozen others standing near did the same, and fixing the burning stuff on her knife she rushed forward to the very edge of the ambush, while from without half a dozen muskets cracked the twigs above her, and rammed it into the heart of the thick tangled growth. Other fires were lighted along the west side of the copse, the dried raffle of last year's leaves caught quickly, and the wind took the flame inward. The greener growth of spring cast out volumes of stinging smoke, and when the place was well alight she drew off the men, stationing them round the other three sides, advancing as the flame advanced, for escape through the choking smoke and fire was impossible. Then, at first by ones and twos, the Turks came out like rabbits from a burrow, some bursting wildly out and occasionally passing the line of Greeks, some standing as if bewildered and trying to steal away unobserved, others running a few steps out and then turning back again. An hour later the whole copse was charred ash and cinders.
It remained only to search for the dead and wounded of the Greeks. The dead, whom they accounted happy, they buried there on that smiling hill-side, so that the preying beasts of the mountain and the carrion-feeding birds might not touch them, but only next spring the grasses and flowers would grow the more vivid on their resting-places; the wounded they carried back tenderly to the ships. And how thick the Turks lay there the hawks and eagles know.
The fourth day after saw the two brigs returned in peace to Galaxidi again, an expenditure of time which had cost the Capsina much misgiving and impatience, but for which to the reasonably minded there was an undeniable necessity. For the crews of both ships had lost somewhat heavily in the battle at Porto Germano, and even the girl herself was bound to admit that they wanted more men. Again, they had on their hands three empty Turkish vessels, all fully equipped for war, which they could not leave behind lest they should again fall into the hands of the enemy, and which it would have been a glaring and inconceivable waste to destroy. For there was on board a large quantity of ammunition and shot, three or four hundred muskets, and, in all, eighteen guns; and, though the Capsina grumbled that the powder was damp and the guns would burst if used, and even offered to stand forty paces in front of each of them in turn while Mitsos fired them at her, her remarks were rightly felt to be merely rhetorical, and to express her extreme impatience at the enforced delay and nothing further. So Mitsos was put in command of one Turkish ship, Dimitri of another, and Kanaris's first-officer of the third; Christos, chiefly because he rashly expressed a wish to be transferred with Mitsos, was retained by the Capsina on board theRevenge, and he stepped ashore at Galaxidi looking battered. "God made the tigers and tigresses also," was his only comment to Mitsos when the latter asked how he had fared.
The Capsina was already vanished on some hurricane errand by the time Mitsos had brought his ship to anchor, and Christos and he being left without orders or occupation took refuge in a café, where they sat awhile smoking and playing draughts, for outside the day was nought but a gray deluge of driven rain. To them at a critical moment in the game entered the Capsina, and words adequate for the occasion failed her. But Mitsos, seeing that her eye betokened imminent chaos, took a rapid mental note of the position of the remaining pieces on the board. Then he said, hurriedly, to Christos: "It's my move, remember, when we get straight again," and stood up. Christos shrunk into a corner.
"Mitsos Codones, Ibelieve?" remarked the Capsina, with a terrifying stress on the last word, and a burning coldness of tone.
"And I believe so, too," said Mitsos, genially.
"Whom I engaged to play draughts in low cafés," said the Capsina, with a wild glance, "and to waste his time—Oh, it is too much," and the draughtsmen described parabolas into inaccessible places. "God in heaven! is it not too much," cried the girl, "that I have to go hunting you through the villages of Greece, up and down the Lord knows where, to find you playing draughts with that pigeon-livered boy? And theRevengeis pulling at her hawser, while Mitsos plays draughts; and the Greeks are being murdered all along the coast, and Mitsos plays draughts!"
An interminable grin spread itself over Mitsos's face. "And the Capsina, I doubt not, goes to see a strange baby, while the Greeks are murdered all along the coast. And theRevengestrains at her hawser, and the Capsina spends her time in abusing her own first officer," he said. "Oh, Capsina, and where is there a choice between us? Do not be so hasty; see, I shall have to pick up all these draughts, for finish the game I shall and will, and as you very well know we do not start till to-morrow. It was my move, Christos, and these pieces were so—eh, but there is another. Is it up your sleeve, Capsina?"
The Capsina glared at Christos a moment as if she were a careful mother who had discovered him luring a child of hers into some low haunt and directed the torrent of her grievance against him.
"Never did I see such a lad," she said; "if you were of the clan I should set you to the loom and the distaff like the women. He would sit and look at the sea by the hour, Mitsos; he would throw bread to the gulls. Gulls, indeed!"
Mitsos fairly laughed out.
"Oh, Capsina," he cried, "sit down and watch us play. There is nothing we can do, you know it well. The new men have volunteered—Kanaris had the choosing of them; you settled that yourself, and theRevengecannot start before morning. Then how does it assist the war to stamp up and down through the villages of Greece, as you say, and call me and Christos bird-names? There, I am cornered; I knew that would happen; and the pigeon-livered wins. Move, pigeon."
Mitsos shook back his hair from his eyes and looked inquiringly at the Capsina.
"Does not that seem to you most excellent sound sense?" he said.
The Capsina stood a little longer undecided, but the corners of her mouth wavered, and Mitsos, seeing his advantage, clapped his hands.
"Coffee for the Capsina!" he cried to the shopman. "Is it not so, Capsina?" He fetched her a chair. "Now watch us finish, and then Christos will play you, and I will take your side. Thus we stand or fall together, and may it ever be so with us. Christos is the devil of a cunning fellow, for be it known to you I am pretty good myself, and see what there is left of me."
"Oh, fool of a little Mitsos!" said the girl, and she looked at him a shade longer than a friend would have done and sat down.
"There came a caique in from Corinth this afternoon," she said, "with news of the other three ships, and with news, too, from overland—from Nauplia!"
Mitsos paused with his finger on a piece.
"What is the news?" he asked.
"The three Turkish ships tried to put in there, but they could not make the harbor."
"No, I mean the news from Nauplia?"
The Capsina looked up, raising her eyebrows.
"Are they at home so dear? Yet you have been with me a month now, Mitsos, and except only that you want to say good-bye to those at home before starting, I know not if you have father or mother. And it is bad manners," said she, with her nose in the air, "to ask for what one is not given."
"But what is the news?" repeated Mitsos.
"Good news only: the town is blockaded by land and sea, so that no Turk can go out or in. The Greek women and children with the men who do not serve—but there are few such—all left the town the night before the blockade began and have encamped on the mound of Tiryns. But in the spring the Turks will send a fresh army south, in time, they hope, to raise the siege."
"Praise the Virgin!" said Mitsos; "but Nauplia will be starved out before that. I move, and my king goes as straight as a homing honey-bee into the mouth of the pigeon-livered. But there is no other way, oh, your Majesty!"
The Capsina laughed.
"Surely there has never been a lad yet so single of purpose," she said. "To him there is nothing in all the world but a little wooden king."
"Even so, if only the news from Nauplia is good!" said Mitsos, smiling half to himself, "and if the little Turks will be kind and sail northward to us."
"Yet still you do not tell me," said the girl, "and I will throw my manners away and ask. Have you a mother, Mitsos?"
"No, nor father either," and he stopped, remembering what he and Suleima had said to each other as they walked beneath the stars down to the boat.
"Then who is it who is so dear?" she asked, and with a sudden uprising of anxiety waited for the answer.
"It is Suleima!" said Mitsos, "the little wife, and he the adorable, so she calls him, the littlest one."
The Capsina stared a moment in silence.
"So," she said, at length, "and you never told me that! Little Mitsos, why have you so greatly made a stranger of me?"
She rose from where she sat, and with that the flame in her eyes was quenched, and they were appealing only as of a chidden dog.
"Indeed, Capsina," and again "Indeed," he said; but the girl turned quickly from him and went out of the place, leaving her coffee untouched, into the dark and rain-ruled night.
She walked up the quay and down again, hardly conscious of the driving rain. On the right the water below the harbor wall hissed and whispered to itself like an angry snake under the slanting deluge. TheSophiaandRevengelay side by side some two hundred yards out; from nearer in she could hear the rattle of the crane which was unloading the Turkish ships which they had captured, and a great oil flare under the awning flickered and flapped in the eddying draughts. The wind kept shifting and chopping about, and now and then the drippings from off the houses would be blown outward in a wisp of chilly water across her, and again the spray from the peevish ripples in the harbor would be cut off and thrown like a sheet over the quay. But in the storm of her soul she heeded not, and that chill and windy rain played but a minor part in the wild and bitter symphony of her thoughts. At first it seemed an incredible thing to her: ever since she had seen Mitsos come up out of the sunset from his boat, her conviction had been unchanged, that this was he, the one from the sea and the sun, who was made to fulfil her life. As if to put the seal on certainty, that very night he had joined her on the ship; they had tossed together to the anger of the Ægean, together they had played like children on a holiday, and they had been together and as one, comrade with comrade, in the work to which they had dedicated themselves. Comrade to comrade! That was exactly Mitsos's view of it, but to her the comradeship was her life. Yanni, the cousin of whom he had often spoken, Kanaris, the lad Christos—she was to Mitsos as they were, perhaps a little less than they, for she was a woman.
Oh, it was impossible! God could not be so unkind. She who spent her days, and risked her all—and oh, how willingly!—fighting against His enemies, was this her wage? Who was this Suleima? A Turkish name by the sound. Some moon-faced, pasty girl, no doubt, fat, fond of sweet things, a cat by the fire, what could she be to Mitsos? The littlest one, Mitsos's son—and at the thought impotent, incontinent jealousy and hatred possessed her soul. Mitsos was not hers but another's, pledged and sealed another's—and she walked the faster. Michael, who had accompanied her without murmur, since such was the duty of a dog, stood a moment under the protecting eaves of a house, with his head on one side, looking at her in reproachful protest, for even his shaggy coat was penetrated by the whipping rain. But she still walked on, and he shook himself disgustedly from head to tail and went after her. Opposite the café again she hung on her step, looking in through the rain-slanted window-panes. Mitsos was bent over his little wooden kings, absorbed and sheltered, while she was outside rain-drenched, with anguish for a heart. Ah, what a humiliation! Why could she not have lived like the other women of her class, have married Christos the cousin, and long ago have settled down to the clucking, purring life, nor have looked beyond the making of jam, the weaving of cloth, marriage among the domestic duties? She had thought herself the finest girl God had made, one who could treat with scorn the uses and normal functions of her sex, one who had need of no man except to serve her, one who thought of woman as a lower and most intensely foolish animal, whose only dream was to marry a not exacting man, and settle down to an ever-dwindling existence of narrowing horizons. Yet, where were all those fine thoughts now? She had sailed her own ship, it was true, and sent a certain number of the devil's brood to their account, but what did that profit her in the present palpable anguish? Her pain and humiliation were no less for that. The clucking women she despised were wiser than she; they at any rate had known what they were fit for; she alone of all had made a great and irrevocable mistake. She, the Capsina, was brought down to the dust, and Mitsos played draughts with the little wooden kings. Her flesh and blood, her more intimate self, and that childish need for love which even the most heroically moulded know, cried out within her.
Then pride, to her a dominant passion, came to her rescue. At any rate none knew, and none should ever know, for thus her humiliation would be at least secret. She would behave to Mitsos just exactly as before: not one tittle of her companionship, not an iota of her frank show of affection for him should be abated. And, after all, there was theRevenge, and—and with that, her human love, the longing of the woman for the one man came like a great flood over the little sand and pebbles of pride and jealousy and anger, and she cried out involuntarily, and as if with a sudden pang of pain, bringing Michael to her side.
They had reached the end of the quay; on one side of the road was a little workman's hut, erected for the building of the Capsina's "custom-house," and, entering, she sat down on a heap of shingle, which had been shot down there for the making of the rough-cast walls of the building. Michael, cold and dripping, but too well bred to shake himself when near his mistress, stood shivering by her, with a puzzled amazement in his eyes at the unusual behavior of the pillar of his world. The girl drew him towards her, and buried her face in his shaggy, dripping ruff.
"Oh, Michael, Michael!" she sobbed, "was not one to come from the sea—all sea and sun—and we, were we not to be his, you and I and the brig, and was not heaven to fly open for us? Indeed, it is not so: one came from the sea and the sun, but it was not he. I was wrong. I was utterly wrong, and now the world holds no other."
The rain had ceased, and from outside came only the sullen drumming of the waves breaking on the shingle beyond the harbor, followed rhythmically by the scream of the pebbly beach, dragged down by the backwash, and the slow, steady drip from the sodden eaves. Suddenly these noises became overscored with the rise and fall of voices, and the Capsina drew Michael closer to her and hushed his growling.
"So, indeed, you must not mind, Christos," said Mitsos's voice, "for there is none like her. Her eyes but grow the brighter for the excitement, when, to tell the truth, my heart has been a lump of cold lead. It is an honor to us that we are with her, that she trusts us—she even likes us—which is more than she did for any of those in Hydra. Eh, but it will be rough to-morrow. Look at the waves! I suppose she has gone back to the ship."
"I expect so," said Christos; "let us go, too, Mitsos."
"No, but wait a minute. There is nothing like the sea at night, unless it be the Capsina. It is strong, it is ready to knock you down if you come too near, yet it will take you safely and well if you only make yourself—how shall I say it?—make yourself of it. The fire-ship—did ever I tell you about the night of the fire-ship? Of course I did not, for I never told any but Uncle Nikolas, nor am I likely to, except to one only. Yes, so it is; I admire her more than I admire the rest of this world rolled into one—always, so I think, I would do her bidding. She might chide me—I would crawl back to her again; I would even bring Suleima, too, on her knees, if so it pleased the Capsina. She must know Suleima. I feel she does not know me, nor I her, until she knows Suleima. Well, come; let us get back. I think the good news from Nauplia must have made me drunk. Surely I was anxious and knew it not. Did I ever tell you how the Capsina and I ... Oh, she is of finer mould than all others!" And the voices were caught and drowned in the riot of the sea.
Obedience, admiration, liking—that was all. And she would have given them all at that moment—for at that moment the devil and all his friends were lords and masters of her soul—for one flash of the human longing and desire of flesh and blood felt by him for her. No matter in what form it came, a moment's heightened color, the sudden leap of the enchanted blood, an involuntary step towards her, hands out-stretched, and eyes that longed, she would have given all for that; let him hate her afterwards, or be as indifferent as the Sphinx, to have once called out that which must call itself out, yet never tarries when its own call comes, would be sufficient for her. That he should for one second forget Suleima, remembering her, that he should be unfaithful to Suleima and before the accuser could pronounce the word turn faithful again, would be enough. And the evil thoughts suddenly shot up like the aloe loftily flowering, and she clutched Michael till the dog whimpered.
She drove not her thoughts away, but picked those bright and evil flowers, pressing them to her bosom: she tended them as a shepherd tends his sheep, and like sheep they flocked into her soul, on the instant a familiar abiding-place. If Suleima should die; better even if she should not die, but live bitterly, for, no doubt, she too loved him. He would come to her, how well she could picture in what manner, great and awkward and burning and beyond compare, saying little but letting all be seen. Not content with that picture, she went on to put specious, despicable words into his mouth. Suleima, he should say, would soon get over it; for him he was simply one of the sea, and Suleima hated the sea; she would live with Mitsos's friends—a man's friends were always kind to women who had wearied him. No, it was not her fault nor his either—she had wearied him, he had wearied of her. Besides, he loved. And even as she imagined him saying such sweet and terrible things, her heart rose against him, and her better self spat out like an evil taste the false image she had conjured up of him.
Sullen and windless rain began again outside, and fell hissing and spitting like molten lead into the harbor water, yet somehow to her it was a baptism and a washing of the soul. And she rose, and with quick step and firm went back to opposite theRevenge, and blew her whistle for the boat. And strangely sweet and bitter was it to hear Mitsos's voice shouting an order, and to see him beneath the flare bareheaded to the rain clamber quickly down the ship's side into the boat and row with all the strength of those great limbs to come and fetch her, himself and alone.
Almost before the sun was up next morning they prepared to put to sea. The rain had again fallen heavily during the night, but it ceased before daybreak, and Mitsos, stumbling sleepily on deck, was soon awakened by the chilly breeze from the mountains which should take them out of the harbor. The deck was dripping and inclement to the bare feet, and his breath trailed away in clouds like smoke in the cold air. Land and sea and sky were all shades of one neutral gray, more or less intense and strangely sombre. The tops of the hills to the west were pale and pearly, reflecting the more illuminated clouds eastward, and deepened gradually without admixture of other color into the lower spurs and ridges behind the village. The sea which had grown calm again during the night was but a mirror of the low-hanging clouds overhead, and to the south it faded so gradually and with so regular a tone into the sky that the horizon line eluded the eye. Even the ripple which broke against the wall of the quay seemed in the misty air to be woolly in texture, as if drawn from the ooze of the bottomless sea and to have lost the sparkle of foam. But early as he was the Capsina had come on deck before him, and before he had stood more than a few seconds on the bridge she joined him, nodded him a greeting in silence, and they waited side by side, Mitsos occasionally shouting an order while the ship cleared the harbor mouth.
Then Mitsos yawned, stretched himself, and rubbed his eyes.
"This is no proper hour," he said; "it is neither night nor morning, even as the jelly-fish is neither plant nor animal; and oh, Capsina, but it is extraordinarily cold."
He turned and looked at her, and something arrested his gaze. She had slept but little, but the added touch of pallor only lent a more potent brilliance to her black eyes; the courage of a resolution but newly taken was there, and the animation which effort to be herself gave her. She had twisted a brilliantly colored shawl round her head, but her hair just loosely coiled showed in two broad bands over her forehead, and it was wet and sparkling with fine drops of condensed mist. Surrounded on all sides by the endless gray of the enormous morning she seemed to him more vivid than ever, and her beauty, for he was a man with eyes and blood, rose and smote him. Then throwing back his head he laughed for very pleasure, not from the lips only, but from head to heel—the whole man laughed.
"But you are splendid," he said; "indeed, there is none like you!"
She looked up at him quickly; was this the leap of the blood, the sudden step nearer which she had told herself would be sufficient for her? And again, more quickly than the upward sweep of her eyelids, she indorsed that thought. But even before she looked her heart told her that it was not thus he spoke of Suleima, nor thus he would speak to her. The admiration in his voice, the involuntary tribute so merrily paid, all the appreciation he gave, all that he had to give, but one thing only, did not make up that little more, which is so much. For he was not, so she thought, one who would make pretty speeches, or play at love-making with one woman while he thought of another, and, indeed, she would not have accepted such a travesty of the heart's deed. But let him come to her but once, were it only with a glance, or a handshake, involuntary and inevitable—that was a different matter. And she answered him without pause, speaking from the heart, while he thought she spoke from the lips only.
"Indeed, little Mitsos," she said, "but you are very sleepy. Surely you are but half awake, and are dreaming of Suleima."
Mitsos laughed.
"Surely Suleima would not know me if I spoke to her like that," he said.
"What, then, do you say to Suleima?"
"Oh, nothing, or a hundred things, all sorts of foolishness; for some mornings she will do nothing but stare at the baby by the hour and just say at the end that it will be a tall lout like me, and for answer I say it will be like to its mother. Other mornings she will be shirt-mending and do no more than grunt at me. Yet you and I, too, talked only silly things for the first week of our voyage, Capsina, so there is excuse for Suleima and me."
The Capsina turned away a moment with a sudden gasping breath. "Look, the sun is up," she said, "and it is getting warmer. Also our coffee will be getting cold. Come down, little Mitsos. And is the lazy Christos abed yet?"
"He shall soon not be," said Mitsos, taking a flying leap down the stairs. "Ohé, Christos!" he cried.
But Christos appeared to be not yet on deck, and Mitsos went down to his cabin, and a moment after cries for mercy mingled themselves with the Mitsos's voice raised in solemn reproof.
"Is it not a shame," he said, "that the Capsina and I should have our eyes grow dim with the midnight watches and the Greeks be murdered all along the coast, as she herself said, while you lie here—no, away comes that blanket thing—and that we should burn our fingers making coffee for those fine ladies who lounge in bed? This shall not be, indeed it shall not. Christos, there are more uses for a slipper than to put on a foot; them shall you learn. Lord, what a wardrobe of clothes the lad has! it is enough for a Turk and his harem. Here is a red sash, if it please you, and a gay waistcoat; a razor, too—what in the name of the saints does the smooth-faced Christos want with a razor? Suleima will be wanting me to buy her a razor next, or perhaps the little Nikolas. Let go that rug, Christos, and be turned out of bed cool and peaceful, or sharper things will be done to you. Now be very quick, for I shall continue to drink coffee, and thus there may be none left in ten minutes, for I do not drink slowly."
Mitsos, having once spoken of "the little wife" to the Capsina, spoke of her more than once again that morning, and to his secret surprise he found the girl extraordinarily sympathetic, and as if much pleased and interested in being told of her. And this was beyond measure an astonishing thing to him, for heretofore his intercourse with her had been either of adventure past or to come, or they had, as at first, been no more than two children at play. But any matter touching the heart had been so remote from the talk on the board that Mitsos had never thought of her as a human woman, one to whom these things could or rather must be of any concern. She, to her bitter cost, had seen him merely as a great, strong, and silly boy, boyish altogether, though to her a magnet for the heart; and of the more intimate lore of man and woman, so she had planned it, they were to learn together. And the surprise to him of finding that she was clearly willing to hear him talk thus was perhaps hardly less strong than the shock to her of finding that he had known too well what she had thought they would learn together. And thus, with a strange flush of pleasure to the boy and a new bond between them, he told her of the ride from Tripoli, the finding of Suleima at home. Only of the anguish of the night of the fire-ship he spoke not at all. There was no intimacy but one only close enough for that. So to all the admiration and affection he felt for the girl, this added a tenderness to his thoughts of her, and without knowing it the knowledge of the thing itself, which had severed them irrevocably in the Capsina's mind, was the very cause of a new tie binding Mitsos to her, and the strands of it were of a fibre more durable and more akin to that which she now despaired of than any that had bound them yet.
They sailed a southeasterly course, for the ships that had put out from Corinth had gone, according to their information, north, and it was not unlikely that they were on their way to join the three which the Capsina had already accounted for at Porto Germano, and which were now being made ready, in hot haste, to take the sea again under the flag of the cross instead of the crescent. It was at any rate certain that they would keep close to the coast, unless driven out to sea by bad weather, destroying as they went, and thus the Greeks had a winning chance of falling in with them at the narrow end of the gulf. But after a breezy morning, at mid-day the wind had died down and they lay a mile or so off shore, with canvas flapping idly, and Mitsos whistled the "Vine-digger's Song" to stir the heavens, but the wind came not for all his whistling.
The day continued gray and unseasonably cold; from time to time a little sprinkle of mingled sleet and rain pattered on the chilled deck, and Mitsos stamped up and down the bridge cursing the delay of the dead wind, for as soon as they had settled the remaining three vessels their work in the gulf would be over, and he had a hundred schemes whereby they might pass the guns of Lepanto and be off. They had already been six weeks on the trail, and now, as he knew so well, the warmer March winds and the blinks of spring sunshine would be beginning to open the flowers of the plain of Nauplia. For himself flowers were no great attraction, but Suleima, accustomed to the luxuriant Turkish gardens, had planted row upon row of scarlet anemones under the orange-trees, and it seemed to Mitsos that Suleima's flowers were among the fundamental things of the world. Long winter afternoons he had spent in a glow of grumbling content at her womanish fads in digging up the roots on the hill-side, and evening by evening he had come back again grimed with soil and washed with the winter rains, and with a great hunger in his stomach, while Suleima turned over the spoils of the afternoon, always saying that there were not yet near enough. Once out of the gulf he would go home again, if only for a week or two, for the Capsina, as she had told him, was meaning to join the Greek fleet on its spring cruise, and till it started on that even she confessed there was no further work to hand.
Towards evening the sleet, which had been continuous all the afternoon, grew intermittent between the showers, and the air was hard and clear as before a great storm; fitful blasts of a more icy wind scoured across from the north, and Mitsos, feeling the sea-weed barometer which hung in the cabin, found it moist and slimy. Supper was ready, and on the moment the Capsina came down flushed with the stinging air.
"More rain," said Mitsos; "I wish the devil might take it to cook the grilling souls of those Turks we have sent him. The sea-weed is as if you had dipped it in an oil-jar."
The Capsina felt it.
"You have a trick of smelling the wind, Mitsos," she said. "Can you smell the wind?"
"I have smelled strong wind all day, and it has not come for all my smelling," said Mitsos, sulkily.
As if to exculpate the deceptiveness of his weather, almost before they had sat down the rigging began to sing, and before Mitsos had time to get on deck the song was a scream. The Capsina followed him, and he looked rapidly round.
"Still north," he said; "and may the saints tell us what to do! Look there;" and he pointed over the hills above Galaxidi. The sun had not quite set—a smudge of dirty light still smouldered in the west. To the north the sky lowered blackly, and a tattered sheet of cloud was spreading and ripping into streamers as it spread over the heavens. Even as he spoke a snake's tongue of angry lightning licked out of the centre of it, followed at a short interval by a drowsy peal of thunder.
"We must beat out to sea," he continued. "God knows what is coming; the wind may chop round, and Heaven save us if we are within two miles of shore!"
But the Capsina felt suddenly exhilarated. The prospect of some great storm which should take all their wits to fight braced her against her secret trouble. Here was a more immediate employment for her thoughts.
"Out to sea, then, while we may!" she cried. "Oh, Mitsos, it is a fine thing to be in the hand of God and all His saints! But what if the Turks slip by us?"
"There will be rocks and big waves for the Turks," said Mitsos, laconically. "Hoist jib and staysail; she cannot stand more than that. Where are Kanaris and theSophia?"
"Kanaris is as wise as we, and will get sea-room for himself," said the Capsina. "There, that is done. Come back to supper, little Mitsos."
Mitsos looked round again.
"I think not yet," he said; "but go you down. I will stop here till there is a spoonful or two more water between us and land."
"I am with you," said the girl, and they began pacing up and down the deck together.
Night fell like a stroke of a black wing feathered with storm-cloud. As a sponge with one wet sweep will wipe out the writing from a slate, so that black cloud in the water sucked the light from the sky, and the wind screamed ever higher and more madly. Once again the angry fire licked out and was gone, and the thunder clapped a more immediate applause, and with that they were the centre of an infinite blackness. Land, sea, and sky were swallowed up and confounded in one terrific tumult of unseen uproar. Fast as the brig scudded before the storm, the waves seemed ever to be going the faster, as if to reach some terrible rendezvous where they would wait for her. In Mitsos's mind the present fear was that the wind would veer, as so often happens on those inland seas, and before they were sufficiently far from land would be forcing them back on to the lee shore. Then he knew there would be before them a night's work of battling with the wind that yelled in exultation as it took them back, of losing ground inevitably, and of desperately fighting every inch until the storm blew itself out.
Half an hour passed and they were still running out to sea, when, suddenly, the wind shifted westward, and the ship for a moment trembled and shook as if she had struck a rock. The two men at the tiller knew their work, and in a moment had the struggling tiller jammed down, and theRevengechecked like a horse, and again slowly made way on the starboard tack.
And at the sight of the obedience of the ship, more like some intelligent beast than a thing of wood, a great thrill of pleasure struck the Capsina. "Well done!" she cried. "Well done, dear ship!"
Then the sky above them burst in a blaze of violet light, and Mitsos, in that flash, though half-blinded, saw two things—the one a ship, some two miles distant, as far as he could judge in that glance, and straight before their bows on the troubled and streaky sea, the other a great gray column rising like a ghost from the waves, not more than four hundred yards away, and which was the more dangerous, he knew.
The Capsina, too, had seen it, and called out to him:
"Saints in heaven! What is it? What is it?" she cried. "No, not the ship—the other. Is it the spirits of those from Elatina?"
But Mitsos was no longer there. He had seen that great gray column, and known it for a water-spout, and, without a moment's pause, he had rushed forward and told them to load the six-pounder in the starboard bow. Ammunition was stored forward, and, though it seemed to him that he waited through the suspense of a lifetime, in a few seconds the gun was loaded, and he waited again, the fuse in his hand.
The darkness was intense; from the blackness came only the hoarse scream of the wind and the threats and buffets of the sea. But soon he saw against the blackness the glimmering column of gray, and he could hear above the riot of the storm a drip as from a thousand house-roofs. It came on in a slightly slanting direction, and, waiting till it began to cut across the muzzle of the gun, he fired.
And with a crash of many waters the gray column vanished.
The Capsina had followed him forward, and as the smoke cleared away he saw her eye dancing, and she slapped the brazen side of the gun.
"There will be more work for you to-night!" she cried. "Well, Mitsos, gone is the gray ghost. But the ship remains."
Mitsos sat still a moment, the strain and responsibility of his aim left him unnerved. But almost instantly he recovered himself.
"You will give chase to-night?" said he, incredulously.
"Why not?"
"Because God is blowing a great gale. There is no light, and who knows where we shall drive to?"
Again the violent sheet of flame blazed from the cloud overhead, and the Capsina laughed.
"No light? Is that no light, when the clouds are bursting to give it us? I saw her quite plainly then. Oh, lad, what is the wind for except to sail on? Would you chase the Turks in a calm? There again!"
Now whether it was from the mere infection of the excitement which possessed the Capsina, or whether his nerves were strung by the electricity in the air to that shrill pitch when a man will do and dare anything, in any case something of the irresponsible recklessness of the girl was on Mitsos, and it seemed to him a fine piece of play—something between a dream and a drunkard's idea—to go a-hunting of Turks in this wild storm. The flashes of lightning, repeated and again repeated with redoubled quickness, kept showing them the ship which, since they first sighted it, had furled all sail and lay rolling on the water simply weathering the storm. TheRevengewas carrying jib and staysail, and while the Turk drifted eastward, was rapidly diminishing the distance between them.
Mitsos rubbed his hands exultantly.
"She will be as safe as a hare in a gin," he said, "when once we get her between us and the land, for no power on earth will let her sail out in the teeth of the wind. But, Capsina, where is theSophia, and where are the other two Turks?"
"Signal theSophia," said the girl; "Kanaris will be on the watch, and if he is near enough to hear our signals he will soon know what we are about."
The two stern guns on the upper battery accordingly were fired in quick succession, this being the signal agreed on with Kanaris, and before long they saw the answering flash of two guns on their starboard, and five seconds afterwards heard the report.
"He has beaten out farther to sea," said Mitsos, "for, indeed, he is more prudent than we are. Well, we are alone in this piece. The Turks, they say, are afraid of ghosts by night, and so, for that matter, am I. They shall see a phantom ship, and it will speak with them."
TheRevengewas still going south at about right angles to the wind, and as the coast trended eastward was every moment getting more sea room. The Turk, as they knew, was drifting due east, but for five minutes or so after the word to run out the guns was given no lightning broke the black and streaming vault, and they waited in thick, tense silence for another flash. But while above them the clouds remained pitchy and unilluminated, once and again to the south there came a flash distant and flickering like the winking of an eye, showing that another storm was coming up from that quarter.
Mitsos stamped with angry impatience.
"That is what I feared," he said; "the wind will shift farther south and we shall have to look to ourselves. Holy Virgin, send us a flash of lightning and west wind for half an hour more."
He and the Capsina were standing together on the bridge, Mitsos bareheaded and tangle-haired to the streaming rain, she with the brilliantly colored shawl wrapped round her head. Once he shifted his position, and putting forward his hand on the rail to steady himself, laid it on the top of hers, and she could feel the blood pulsing furiously through the arteries in his fingers. She stood perfectly still, not withdrawing her hand, and, indeed, he seemed unconscious that it was there. At last what they had been waiting for came; a furious angry scribble leaped from west to east over their heads, and peering out into the darkness they saw the Turk to leeward of them, some four hundred yards distant. At that Mitsos grasped the girl's hand till she could have cried out with the pain.
"There she is!" he cried. "We have her. We have her. Let go the helm and be ready to furl the sails on the instant. Oh, Capsina, this hour is worth living."
But the tumult in the girl's mind did not allow her to speak; the moment was too crowded even for thought, and she could only strain her eyes in the darkness to where they had seen the Turk. She felt not mistress of herself, and Mitsos, as she knew, was nigh out of his mind. Who could say what the next hour might bring? Death, shipwreck, victory, lightning, love, and madness chased each other through her brain. Meantime the ship, left to itself, spun round like a top into the wind, and under the hurricane that followed it dipped and fled like a bird born and bred to tempest after the other. But after a few headlong seconds Mitsos cried the order to furl all sail, and the canvas came dripping and streaming onto the deck. The men were at the guns with orders to fire the moment the lightning showed the ship, and as the spark leaped through the clouds again the forward guns on the port side of theRevenge, from all three decks, added their bellowing to the succeeding thunder. Anything approaching to accurate shooting was out of the question. They had some two seconds, for the flash was vivid and far leaping, for the sighting, and they simply fired into the heart of the loud and chaotic darkness.
Mitsos saw the Capsina standing not far from him after the first round, behind the fore-port gun on the main deck, and he took a step across the reeling ship to her side.
"Oh, Capsina, assuredly we are both madder than King Saul!" he said, "yet I find it glorious, somehow."
"Glorious!" and the girl's voice was trembling with passion and excitement. "I am living a week to the minute. Ah!" she cried, as another flash flickered overhead. "Again, again!"
The wind fell a little, but the violence and frequency of the lightning doubled and redoubled, and the guns answered it. The thunder no longer broke with a boom on some distant cloud-cliff, but with a crash intolerably sharp and all but simultaneous with the light. Some cross-current in the sea had swung the bows of theRevengemore southward, and Mitsos sent Christos flying aft to tell the stern guns on the port side to be ready to fire. From the enemy, in reply to their two first discharges, had come no response, but at the third they were answered, and a couple of oversighted balls went whirring overhead through the rigging like a covey of grouse. Then came two flashes of lightning in rapid succession, and by the second they could see a hole crash open in the side of the Turk from the balls they had fired by the light of the first. There was not time, nor near it, to load the guns twice, yet the Capsina in the frenzy of her excitement cuffed one of the gunners over the head, calling him a slow lout. The man only laughed in reply, and the Capsina laughed back in answer. Again and again the heavens opened, and this time a ball from the Turks came in through the port-hole of one of their guns, breaking the muzzle into splinters and ricochetting off on to the man to whom the Capsina had just spoken. He was shot almost in half, but his mouth still smiled, showing his white teeth. The ball which had killed him whistled on, striking a stanchion on the starboard side and plopped out again overboard, and Mitsos, with a great laugh, threw his cap after it.
Then came the end; the ships were at close range, and a ball from theRevenge, delivered from a port gun, struck the Turk just on the water-line, opening a raking tear in her side, and when next they could see her she was already listing to starboard, and with the rattle of the thunder mingled hundreds of human voices. The giddy, complete drunkenness of blood was on them; all the men laughed or shouted, or went back to their supper and drank the health of the dead and their portion in hell; and Mitsos, forgetting all in the frenzy and fury of culminated excitement, opened his arms, and flung them round the Capsina and kissed her as he would have kissed Yanni at such a moment.
"Another, another!" he cried; "thank God, another shipful will feed the fish of the gulf!"
"Mitsos, oh, little Mitsos!" cried the girl, and she kissed him on the cheek and on the lips.
The next moment they had started asunder, knowing what they had done, and the Capsina, burning with an exulting shame, turned from him and, without a word, went to her cabin.
During the four months of Mitsos's absence the progress of the war in the Peloponnese had been checked by a thousand petty and ill-timed jealousies on the part of the chiefs and primates, and more than ever it was becoming the work of the people. It had been agreed in the preceding autumn that the Peloponnesian senate instituted at Tripoli should be dissolved at the fall of that fortress, which took place in October, and that a national assembly, now that the war was a business in which the whole nation, north and south alike, had taken up arms, should direct the supreme conduct of affairs. But this suited very ill with the greed and selfish ambitions of many of the military leaders and primates. Their places in the Peloponnesian senate were assured, and having a voice in its transactions, and for the most part a singular unanimity of purpose, their object being to get as much plunder as possible, it was not at all their desire to be superseded in power by deputies chosen from the whole of Greece. But until the national assembly was formed all power was vested in them, and with a swift insight—cunning, to use no uglier word, rather than creditable—they passed a resolution that the deputies to the national assembly should be elected by themselves.
Now the prince Demetrius Hypsilantes, though weak and indecisive, and altogether incapable of initiative action, had, at any rate, in the Peloponnesian senate that power which an honest and upright man will always hold in an assembly where the ruling motive is personal greed. But his curiously infirm mind clutched, like a child with a bright toy, rather at the show of power than at power itself, and now that the development of the war, with the demand for a more representative assembly, threatened to deprive him of that, he threw in his lot with the primates and captains of the Morea, preferring to retain the presidency of the Peloponnesian senate, and to be aroi mort, rather than take a subordinate part in the national assembly. For it seemed certain that Prince Mavrogordatos, who had been appointed governor-general in northwest Greece, would be elected President of Greece, and this for more than one reason. In the first place, he had not as yet shown himself too patently unfit for the office, while Hypsilantes had; in the second place, the Peloponnesian senate was far too heavily faction-ridden to co-elect out of their own body except on the barest majority against other candidates singly; and, in the third, they unanimously preferred to have as a president a man who, it was understood, would go back to his command in north Greece, leaving them to their own control, which was just equivalent to no control at all.
This national assembly met at Epidaurus in January; it shouted itself hoarse over many high-sounding declarations, loud and empty as drums; it conferred titles and honors; it devised banners and legislative measures, all highly colored, it presented Kolocotrones, the old chieftain and leader of an enormous and disorganized band of brave and badly armed men, with a brass helmet and the title of commander-in-chief in the Morea, and congratulated itself on having put things on a firm and orderly basis. Furthermore, it resolved to take the fortress of Nauplia without loss of time, with the effect that in May the siege was still going on, without any prospect of a calculable termination. Mavrogordatos, elected President of Greece and confirmed in his command of the northwest province, went back to his duties, and engaged on a series of futile manoeuvres which, as he had no acquaintance of any kind with military matters, ended in a disastrous defeat at Petta. Hypsilantes chose a new aide-de-camp in place of Mitsos, who had departed without leave to the Gulf of Corinth with the Capsina; and Kolocotrones put on his brass helmet and went on small marauding expeditions, returning now and then to Nauplia to see how the siege had got on, as a man watches a pot over a slow fire. Such were the main results of the great council of Epidaurus, and thus passed the days from January to May; till May the Greek fleet was idle, though a dozen ships at double pay blockaded Nauplia by sea in order to prevent its relief by the Turkish fleet, which every one very well knew was still at Constantinople. On land the lower town was in the hands of the insurgents, who, however, made no attempt to take the fortress, but waited for nature, in the shape of starvation, to act unaided. Petrobey, disgusted at the appointment of Kolocotrones as commander-in-chief, retired with the growling Mainats into his own country to wait till, as he hoped, the voice of the people should recall him, or, if not, until some one should be appointed commander-in-chief whom he could with honor serve under. For Kolocotrones, so he openly said, had brought dishonor on Greece by his disgraceful trafficking with the besieged in Tripoli, and was no more than a brigand chief weighing the honor of the nation against piasters, and finding the piasters the worthier.
Suleima was busy to and fro in the veranda and garden of the house, one May afternoon, her hands full, as behooved a good housewife, with the woman's part. The littlest one, now seven months old, was tucked away in his cot for his mid-day sleep, under the angle of shadow cast by the corner of the veranda, and every now and then Suleima would pause in her work and let her eyes rest on him a moment. The child slept soundly, one creased little hand lay on the wicker side of the cradle, a pink little nose pointed absurdly to the roof.
"He is altogether quite adorable," said Suleima to herself, pausing to look, and with a smile of utter happiness went back to her work.
The other corner of the veranda was covered with wooden trays, over each of which was stretched a confining sheet of gauze. In the trays were spread fresh shoots of mulberry-leaves, on which reposed hundreds of silk-worm moths of the fairer and fatter sex busy laying eggs, as in duty bound, and, it must be conceded, fulfilling their duty with the utmost profuseness. The males, smaller and rather duller in color, fluttered about against the gauze or walked drone-like across the leaves, taking rude short cuts over their wives when they happened to find those estimable women in their way. Outside the gauze on the floor of the veranda lay another tray full of shoots of mulberry-leaves eaten bare by the broods of young caterpillars already hatched, or still covered with the eggs, which looked like a rash of minute gray spots. Suleima was behindhand with her work, for the eggs should have been transferred to the mulberry-trees before they hatched, and she moved quickly backward and forward from the row of young trees in the garden which spring had clothed in their new gowns of green, carrying the egg-laden twigs in her hand. These she either tied to the living shoots or, where the foliage was thicker and no sudden gust of wind could blow them away, she merely put it in the middle of the growing leaves. Round the trees, below the lowest output of branches, was painted a band of lime to prevent the caterpillars straying. She sang gently to herself out of a happy heart as she moved on her errands, stopping every now and then on the step from the veranda, and looking out over the shining shield of the bay towards Nauplia with eyes eager for the ruffling land-breeze which should bring a ship, which she waited for, climbing up wave after wave against it as a man climbs a ladder rung by rung.
Outside in the garden the air was still windless, and the trees stood with leaves drooping and motionless as if in sleep. Only near the fountain the alder, whose finer fibre perceived a moving air where others let it pass unnoticed, whispered secretly to itself. The spring had been late in coming, but in a day, so it seemed, the sun grew warm and sluices of mellow air were flung open to flood the land, and from hour to hour the anemones and little orchids had multiplied themselves by some vast system of progression along the hill-side as the stars grow populous in the heavens at the fall of night. Already Suleima's red anemones, sheltered from north winds by the house, and more forward than those fed by the thinner soil of the moorland, were over; one blossom only still held its full-blown petals, and to Suleima it seemed a thing of good omen that there should be just one left for Mitsos on his return. For this morning theRevenge, recognizable by its area of canvas, vaster than that of other ships, and the raking line of its bows, and flying the Greek flag, had been sighted out in the gulf, from the village of Tolo, heading for Nauplia. But to the sea-breeze had succeeded a dead calm, and she was yet some three miles out, mirrored in the sea as still as a ship in a picture till the land-breeze should awake. Father Andréa had set off for Nauplia after the mid-day dinner to welcome Mitsos home, and to catch a glimpse of the Capsina.
All afternoon theRevengelay dozing on an unwrinkled sea. There was not breeze enough even to make the sails shiver and flap; you would have said the wind was dead. To the Capsina and Mitsos it was strange to lie idle thus, without even the occupation of considering their plans for the morrow, and the girl at times half hoped that the wind would soon come which would bring them to Nauplia and part her from Mitsos, half felt that the interminable procession of days would be only hour after impossible hour without him. The memory of that moment when, forgetting Suleima indeed, yet not remembering her except as in the hour of victory a comrade's heart goes out to a comrade, he had taken her into his arms, was like some devouring thirst which made dry her soul. She was too just to blame him for it; the fierce exultation of that night of battle and thunder had been all that prompted him. At such times a man would kiss a man, and so, and in no other way, had he kissed her; he had but overlooked the fact that she was a woman, had been ignorant she was a woman who loved him. She had returned to him a minute afterwards to find him shy, ashamed, awkward, and knew as well as if her thoughts were his own what was in the lad's mind. He wanted to apologize, thinking that he might have offended her, yet hesitated, lest he might solidify the matter for offence; perhaps he even feared that she imagined he was thinking so light of her as to treat her to a little love-making. Now the Capsina felt sure of the ancestry, so to speak, of that embrace; she was not offended; she knew he was not making love to her, and with a delicate simpleness almost too straightforward to call tact, she had entered into conversation with him so quickly and naturally that he was at his ease again.
But, justice of God, the difficulty and the unfairness of it all! That wild, fierce joy which filled Mitsos at the sinking of the Turkish ship was paid for not alone by those drowning cries, but by her also, and heavily. She had succeeded too well, so she told herself, in her assumption of a perfectly natural manner. Had Mitsos's sudden action been dictated not by the excitement of that moment, but by the spasm of heat of a man for a woman, she had shown herself too disregardent, she had taken it too lightly; she had treated him, so he must have thought, as a boy who had been merely rude to her, but whose rudeness she had overlooked. And she laughed out at the thought, and Mitsos raised his eyebrows and asked what the matter for amusement was.
They were alone, for Christos had been left with his cousins at Patras now more than a week ago. They had passed the guns of Lepanto by night, after hanging about ready to fight their ships if they attacked, but out of range of the fort guns, for nearly a week. But one evening, after the sea-breeze had failed, a sudden wind had got up after midnight, in obedience to the Greek proverb that says, "On the first of spring the wind alone is contrary," and they had sailed out, passing close under the guns of the fort, reaching Patras before daybreak. Certainly the wind had been divinely punctual, for the very next day every sense said that winter was over. March and April had been cold and rainy, smiling sometimes through their tears, but for the most part scolding months, full of peevish weeping. But then, with the early days of May, the change came. The Primavera scattered her flowers broadcast over the land, and every land-breeze was sweet with the promise of budding woodland things. Bees, more than once when they were farther than a mile from land, had flown busy and drunken across the deck, and the superstitious sailors had told the Capsina that surely some very good thing was on its way to her.
To-day they had dined on deck, and after dinner Mitsos, in a ferment of restlessness at the sight of home, had gone more than once to the side of the ship, sniffing to find if he could smell the wind. But the wind yet tarried, and now he had stretched his lazy length along the deck, his head supported by a coil of rope, and smoked his narghile as he talked. He had just received his share of the prize-money—more than a hundred pounds—and this large sum was weighing on his mind when the Capsina's laugh broke in upon his meditations, and he roused himself.