The two passed through the garden and into the veranda. The house-door was open, as Suleima had left it in her flight, and on the threshold she paused for the Capsina to enter first.
"You are welcome," she said; and then, in the courteous phrase she had heard in Abdul's house; "The house is yours."
Suleima would have made a bed for the Capsina in Father Andréa's room, who was away in Nauplia, but the girl asked if she might sleep with her, and instead they went together to Suleima's room. A big double mattress on a wooden frame was the bed; a little cot for the baby stood at the foot of it. Mitsos's great plank washtub stood in a corner, and there was a press for clothes. The moon shone full in at the window, making a great splash like a spill of milk on the floor, and there was no need for other light.
"THE SPIRIT OF THE STILLNESS TOUCHED THE CAPSINA'S SOUL"
"THE SPIRIT OF THE STILLNESS TOUCHED THE CAPSINA'S SOUL"
Suleima was tired and soon fell asleep, but the Capsina lay long with eyes closed, but intensely awake. A mill-race of turbulent, unasked-for thoughts whirled and dashed down the channels of her brain; she clinched her hands and bit her lips to keep them away—to keep her even from crying aloud. The blood and flesh of her, young, tingling, and alert, was up in revolt, lashing itself against the hard, cruel bars of circumstance. She ought never to have come here to sleep where he had slept; she had done a stupid and sweet thing, and she was paying for it heavily. At last she could stand it no longer, and rising very quietly for fear of disturbing Suleima, she dressed again and let herself out of the house.
The hour of her weakness was upon her, and she lived back into the years of childhood, when one thing will make the world complete and its absence is an inconsolable ache. Like a child, too, she abandoned herself to the imperativeness of her need; nothing else would satisfy; nothing else was ever so faintly desirable. Yet she could only stretch out her hands to the night, every fibre of her tingling, and the silent cry, "I want, I want!" went up beseechingly, hopelessly, into the indifferent moonlight, a dumb, dry litany of supplication, not only to Heaven, but to all the cool sleeping earth; to tree, bush, stream—all that knew him. But after a while she saw and scorned herself. Where were all the great schemes and deeds in which she shared? Was their magnificence a whit impaired because she, an incomparably small atom, was in want of one thing? And by degrees made sane, and weary with struggle, she came to herself, and going back into the house, lay down again by Suleima; and when morning came Suleima was loath to wake her, for she slept so sound and peacefully, so evenly her bosom marked her quiet breathing.
Waking brought an hour of sweet and bitter things to the girl; washing and dressing the boy was almost wholly sweet, and never before had that sunny child of love been so laughed over and kissed. The Capsina showed what was to the experienced mother the strangest ignorance of the infant toilet, and even the adorable creases in his own pink skin and the ever-new wonder of his ten divisible and individual toes palled in grave interest to the owner before these new and original methods. Sweeter even than that was the unprompted staccato, "Cap-sin-a, Cap-sin-a," "like a silly parrot," so said Suleima. Indeed, the girl was truly a woman, though the profound judge, Mitsos, had given her a sex all to herself, and the little household duties so lovingly done by Suleima were a keen pleasure to her to watch and assist in. And after they had breakfasted she still lingered.
"Let me wait a little longer," she said to Suleima; "but I will not wait unless you promise to do all you would do if I was not here."
So Suleima, to whom the mending and patching of Mitsos's clothes was a Danaid labor, went into the house, and came out again on to the veranda with an armful of his invalid linen. There were holes to be patched in trousers, tears to be sewn in shirts, and places worn thin to be pieced.
"This is what I do when I have nought else to do," she said. "Yet if I had twenty hands, and no work for any of them, I believe I should never get to the end. The great loon seems never to sit down except as on a nail. Last month only he put his pipe, all alight, into his coat-pocket. Right through the lining went the burn, and right through his shirt, and he never knew it until the fire nipped him."
The Capsina laughed.
"How like him! Oh, how very like him!" she said. "May I help you? Yet, indeed, I think I have forgotten how to sew."
Suleima gave her a shirt to mend, off the arm of which Mitsos had torn a great piece—"as like as not to light the pipe that burned him," said his wife—and a very poor job she made of it. She held it up to Suleima in deprecating dismay when she had finished it, and Suleima laughed to choking.
"No, you shall not better it," she said, as the Capsina prepared to rip off the piece again. "Indeed, it shall stop as it is, and Mitsos shall wear it like that. He shall know who did it, and then perhaps he will think the higher of my fingers."
And she snatched it out of the Capsina's hands and ran with it into the house, where she put it among the finished linen, where he should find it, and stare in wonder at this preposterous housewifery.
The Capsina had not tried her hand at any further job when she returned, and presently after she rose.
"I must get back," she said, "for at ten we must be on the road to Nauplia. Oh, Suleima!" She paused, and the unshed tears stood in her black eyes. "I have not skill at speaking," she said, "and when the heart is full the words choke each other. But it is this: you have made me different; you have made me better."
Suleima stood a moment with that brilliant, happy smile in her eyes, her mouth serious and sweet. Then she threw her arms round the girl's neck and kissed her.
"You will be happy," she said, with her face close to hers and looking in her eyes. "Promise me you will be happy, for indeed that is among the first things I desire."
The Capsina shook her head.
"I cannot promise that," she said, "and I do not know if it matters much. But I will be brave, or try to be, and I will try to be good. Luckily I have much to do."
"You will take Mitsos again?" asked Suleima.
"If he will come—if you will let him come."
"I let him come?" and she laughed. "I think I have not made myself plain."
They stood there a moment longer, cheek to cheek, and then the Capsina gently drew away.
"Good-bye," she said. "But I will come again before I leave Nauplia."
And she went quickly down the garden path, paused a moment at the gate, looking back, then stepped out along the white sun-stricken road.
Kolocotrones and his followers had had no hand in the destruction of Dramali's army—indeed, the only share he had taken in that great and bloody deed was to let the Albanian guard pass on their way unmolested; but whether on the grounds of that merciful act, or because he had been appointed generalissimo of the Greek forces, he claimed, and in fact secured, a very considerable share of what Niketas had taken. Nor had he been idle during the amnesty at Nauplia, having supplied immense amounts of grain and other supplies to the beleaguered garrison at starvation rates. Ali of Argos, who was in command of the Turks, had seen that something had miscarried in the conduct of the fleet, and was provident enough to purchase very considerable provisions, almost satisfying the greed of Kolocotrones. And now that the Turks were in no danger of being starved out, the generalissimo absented himself from the besieging force, and executed several very neat and profitable raids along the shores of the Corinthian gulf. Certainly for a month or two the town was amply provided, while the Greek fleet cruising in the mouth of the gulf of Spetzas would prevent any immediate relief being brought by the Turkish ships. When the provisions were exhausted, Kolocotrones intended to try and do a little more provision dealing, and if, as seemed possible, the temper of the army would no longer countenance this marketing, he would certainly be on the spot when the Turks surrendered, to take possession of the town in the name of the republic, and of as much treasure as he could lay hands on in his own.
During his absence, however, certain changes took place in the conduct of the siege. The other leaders, tired, perhaps, and a little ashamed of all this juggling with treaties that they never meant to abide by, and of this haggling over prices with their enemies, or else knowing that if Kolocotrones was there he would take the lion's share of the spoils, made a spirited though ineffectual attempt, since Ali had broken off negotiations, to bring the siege to a conclusion in his absence. During the spring many volunteers from England and France had offered their services to the revolutionists; there had even been formed a corps of Philhellenes, and several of these, notably Colonel Jourdain, a French artilleryman, and two Englishmen, Hastings and Hane, had put themselves at the disposal of the Greek troops in Nauplia. Jourdain, an ingenious but impractical young man, had urged the Greeks to try firing combustible shot at the town. He held out good hope that they would set the town on fire—with luck they might even demolish the enemy's powder-magazine and burn their provision houses, full of the provisions which had just been sold to them. And the captains, jingling with the gold of the payment, found this plan humorous.
The fort standing on the island in the bay had been put into the hands of the Greeks at the first pseudo-surrender of the town, and though Ali declared that the treaty which gave it them being null and void, as they had not done their part in providing transport-vessels, it should be returned to the Turks, the answer that the Greeks gave was, "Come and take it." And as the Turks were not in a position to come and take it, it was obviously misplaced Quixotism to let it stand empty. From there the ingenious Jourdain suggested that the combustible shot should be fired, but his ingenuity further served him to relieve himself of the responsibility of the attempt, and Hastings and Hane, though without much faith in the method, obtained leave of the Greek captains to do it themselves.
Accordingly, Hastings was made captain of the fort garrison, which consisted of twenty boatmen from Kranidi, who knew about as much of artillery as of astronomy, and he surveyed his men with some amusement, and spoke pithily:
"We are to make Nauplia as full of holes as a net and as hot as hell," he said. "Train the guns, if you know what that means. You do not? I will teach you."
There were half a dozen 32-pounders and three 68-pounders of seven-inch bore. The fort was an old Venetian work, tottery and unstable as Reuben, commanded by the guns of Nauplia; and Hastings, surveying it, turned to Hane.
"From the town I could engage to knock this place into biscuits in ten minutes by a stop-watch," he said.
Hane laughed.
"We shall knock it to bits ourselves in not much longer with the concussion of our own guns if the Turks don't hit us," he said. "I would as soon sail across the Bay of Biscay in a paper boat."
Jourdain's combustible balls were made to be fired from the smaller guns, and the two spent a sulphurous morning. They made good shooting with them, and it is true that they discharged immense volumes of smoke when they struck, but there seemed no truth in the proverb that where there is smoke there is also fire. Jourdain had manufactured some twenty of them, and in an hour they had used them all up. The breeze was blowing from the town, and volumes of vile-smelling vapor were wafted on it. Hane was a man of few and pointed words.
"So here is the last of the Froggy's stink-pots," was all his comment when the last of the shells was fired.
But the Greeks were in raptures of delight. It seemed impossible that so magnificent a firework should be ineffective, and they strongly recommended a repetition of the display; but Hastings meant business, and, after some parley, was allowed to make another attempt, not with the "stink-pots," but with ordinary shot from the 68-pounders; for the 32-pounders were, so he believed, of too light a calibre to be effective at the distance.
Next day the heavier cannonade went on. The Turks returned the fire with vigor, but without much success, and, as Hastings had anticipated, the chief risk was from the concussion of their own artillery, which dangerously shook the faulty and ill-built walls. After the first day it was found impossible to fire the bigger guns, and the 32-pounders, with their light shells, were soon seen to be useless; Hastings, however, kept up the cannonade for two days more, partly to give practice to the untrained gunners, partly because he was of a nature that groans to be doing nothing.
At the end of the third day the Turkish fire ceased altogether, for the flight and destruction of Dramali's army had become known, and it was no longer possible to hope that by a show of resistance and brisk firing, they might encourage the timid Serashier to march from Argos and attempt to raise the siege. Had he known it, the town was now so well supplied with provisions that, even if they had to evacuate it, they could have joined forces with him and marched to Corinth. But now, as throughout the war, what seemed blind chance, but what was really the legitimate result of cowardly and hesitating policy, once more combined to fight against them.
So the Turkish fire ceased, and as it was proved to satiety that the smaller guns of the island fort were no more than a summer rain to the fortification of the town, Hastings ceased his fire too, and with Hane made a detailed examination of the fort, with a view to strengthening the walls, and enabling them to stand the concussion from the heavier guns. With a little pulling down, a little patching, and a rubble buttress or two, it seemed easily possible to strengthen one bastion which held two of the 68-pounders, so that they might fire without the risk of bringing down the walls on their own heads. But that afternoon a message arrived from the captain, Poniropoulos: their firing had ceased, the guns produced no impression on the fortifications. The Greeks were infinitely obliged to them, but they must not hope to share in the plunder from Nauplia, nor would rations be any longer supplied to them. For the present it was not the intention of the commanders to continue this gun practice. Dramali's army had gone; the fleet had not come; they would sit down and wait the inevitable end.
Hastings chucked this note into the sea.
"There is no answer," he said to the boatman who had brought it.
He turned to Hane.
"It is no use waiting here if we are not to use the guns," he said. "They say we need not expect plunder from Nauplia. Do they think we are all like the old man in the brass helmet?"
Mitsos returned home after the destruction of Dramali's army, arriving there the day after the Capsina had left. Suleima met him at the gate.
"Oh, welcome, Mitsos!" she cried, in a hurry. "And I, too, have seen her. She has been here."
"I seem of little account," said Mitsos; "but who may 'she' be?"
"When you talk of 'she,' do I not know whom you mean? You are less wise than I. And she saved my life and that of the littlest."
"The Capsina?" cried Mitsos.
"Yes, slow one."
And Suleima told him how she had fled to Tiryns, and how the Capsina had concealed her and the little one till the Turks had been routed; only she did not tell that which it was not for Mitsos to know.
"So come in now, Mitsos, and you shall eat and wash—and indeed you are as dusty as a hen—and in the evening you shall go to Nauplia, and thank her, if so be you are pleased at what she did."
Suleima went to the bedroom and laid out for him a clean fustanella and shirt, the one on which the Capsina had used her unaccustomed needle, and went out smiling to herself. In a little while came Mitsos's voice, calling her, and back she went very grave.
He held out a ragged sleeve, with stitches loose and large.
"I have a fine housewife," said he, very sarcastically.
Suleima examined the shirt.
"Indeed, it was torn much," she said; "but it does not seem to me badly mended."
Mitsos shrugged his shoulders hugely.
"It is as I have always said," he remarked; "a woman cannot even mend a shirt."
"Who mends your things when you are cruising, Mitsos?" she asked.
"I don't know. They are always well done. The Capsina is excepted; she can do everything."
Suleima could not keep the corners of her mouth from breaking down, and next moment she burst out laughing.
"It was she did who it," she said; "I swear to you it was she."
Mitsos had half slipped off the shirt, but on it went again in a twinkling.
"It is not badly mended," said Suleima, still laughing, "but I could do it better. Take another one, Mitsos. I will mend this again. Ah, it is less good than I thought. See how big and bad are those stitches. Oh, it is shocking! Off with it! I will not have for a husband one they would think was a beggar."
Mitsos looked at her darkly and sideways.
"This, no doubt, is the best way to mend a shirt, though I know nought of shirt-mending," he said. "Do not be too proud to take example, Suleima. See how fine and big are the stitches. Why, she would mend ten shirts while you mended one."
"Even so," said Suleima; "indeed, if she mended a dozen while I did one, it would not surprise me, or more than that even. And see how convenient on a hot day like this; the wind will blow coolly on your arm through the stitches."
Mitsos broke out laughing.
"She shall see me in it," he cried. "And, oh little wife, I am pleased to be home again. Dust and hot wind were the drink in the Larissa, so see that there is wine to fill even me. Oh, I love wine!" he cried.
"Ah, it is for the wine alone you would be home again," said Suleima, with the light of love returned in her eyes.
Mitsos bent down from his great height, and put his face to hers.
"Yes, for the wine alone," he said, softly, "the wine of many things. And are you not wine to my soul, my own dear one?"
Soon after they had dinner, and, dinner finished, Mitsos set off into Nauplia. TheRevengewas fretting at her anchor in the land-breeze as a horse, eager to be off, plays with its bridle, but close under the fort where Hastings and Hane had fired the incombustible balls he saw the Capsina's boat, a light caique, in which she sailed on her hurricane errands when in port, which would go like a fish if there was wind, and could be pulled by one man. Even Mitsos, used as he was to over-canvassed boats, used to feel certain qualms when the little cockleshell, with its tower of sail, was scudding through a broken sea. But the Capsina, knowing this, used to watch his face for any sign of apprehension, till he, seeing her, would exclaim:
"It is as a bird with wings and no body, and that is not the safer sort of bird; and oh, Capsina, drowning is a cold manner of death. Oh yes, hoist more sail, by all means, and I shall pray the while."
It was the day after Poniropoulos had told Hastings that his services were no longer required, and both Poniropoulos and the gunners under Hastings were feeling a thought disconcerted. The Capsina had approved very warmly of that silent and iron man, and when, on going that morning to the fort, she had found Hastings gone she sailed across with dipping gunwale to Poniropoulos and demanded where and why he had disappeared.
Thus Poniropoulos learned her true opinion of him, and she went back to the island where Mitsos found her.
"Ignorant folk," she had been saying, "always think that no one is so wise as they. When you came here you knew nothing. You have been taught to fire off a gun without getting in front of it, and you think you know all. Why did you let Hastings go? What did he care about the plunder of Nauplia? If you had asked him to stop, he would have stopped. You know that as well as I. He saw that if you continued to fire the big guns the fort would tumble about your long ears. So what have you done since? Eaten garlic and talked about piasters! Oh, I will teach you!"
To her, shaking her fist, Mitsos appeared in the doorway. She looked up once, dropped her eyes, and looked up again. Then she turned to the gunners.
"Go away, pigs, all of you!" she cried. "He and I will talk things over, and there will soon be orders. The place must be repaired at once."
And she stood there, looking out of the window, till the men had filed out.
Then Mitsos approached.
"Capsina," he said, "I have seen Suleima. She has told me—"
He did not pause in his speech, but as he said those words, the color was already struck from the girl's face, leaving it as white as a lamp-globe when the light is extinguished, for, for the moment, she thought Suleima had told him all. She turned a little more away from him.
"She has told me what you have done for me and mine," he went on, "how you saved her; how you put yourself between her and death. And I—God made me so stupid that I cannot even find words to thank you."
It was a glorified face that turned to him one smile.
"Oh, little Mitsos!" she said. "Surely we do not need words for such things. When you saved my life at Porto Germano, did I thank you for it? I think I only said, 'How slow you are,' when you picked up my knife for me. So that is finished. We had a long talk, we washed and dressed the littlest one, and he said 'Capsina.' That pleased me in an extraordinary manner, but you remember that I like children. And Suleima is a fine woman, a woman, yet not foolish, the sort of woman that does not make one wish to be a man, and those are rare. So I approve, but I doubt whether she is severe enough to you. A wife should not be too full of care for the husband."
"Indeed, I have been speaking to her to-day," said Mitsos, "saying she is not careful enough of me. A wife should be able to sew and mend, should she not? And see what a shirt she has given me."
And Mitsos pulled his shirt-sleeve round till the patch was shown, and made a marvellously poor attempt to look grave; and, each seeing that the other knew, they burst out laughing, and the Capsina gave Mitsos a great slap on the shoulder.
"Boy and baby you will always be," she said. "And now, do you know anything of fortification work?"
"Not a thing."
"Nor do I. So we will patch up this fort, learning, as is right, by experience, and may the Virgin look to those within when we have done our mending. It is as safe as a tower of bricks that a child builds. Lad, Hastings is a brave man to stand firing the guns here with his hands in his pockets."
"The others are as brave."
"No. They did not know the danger; in fact, they knew nothing. Look at that piece of wall there! If you look hard, it will fall down like a Turk. Oh, Mitsos, if you had given the time you spend in tobacco to learning building, you might be of some use this day."
"If you wish, I will push it, and it will fall," remarked Mitsos.
The Capsina looked at his great shoulders and sighed.
"If only I had been born a man!" she said. "Oh, I should have liked it! If I pushed it now—"
"If you pushed it," said Mitsos, "you would push with all your weight. So when it fell out, you would fall with it, eight feet to the beach below; also your petticoats would fly."
The Capsina struggled with inward laughter for a moment.
"It is likely so," she said. "Therefore show me how to push it."
The fragment of wall which Mitsos was to push outward was a rotten projecting angle once joining a cross-wall, but now sticking out helplessly, in the decay of the others, into space. It was some six feet high, and the top of it on a level with Mitsos's nose. He looked at it scornfully a moment, and then at the Capsina.
"It shall be as you will," he said, "but I shall dirty my beautiful clean shirt, even tear it perhaps on the shoulder, and who shall mend it again for me?"
"Push; oh, push!" said the Capsina. "Be a little man."
Mitsos braced his shoulder to it, wedged his right foot for purchase against an uneven stone in the floor, and his left foot close to the wall, so that he could recover himself when it should fall outward. Then with a fine confidence, "You shall see," he said, and butted against it as a bull butts, sparring only half in earnest with a tree. Wall and tree remain immovable.
"That is very fine," said the Capsina. "It nearly shook."
Mitsos put a little more weight into it, and felt the muscles tighten and knot in his leg, and the Capsina sighed elaborately.
"It would have saved time to have picked it down stone by stone," said she. "But never mind now; no doubt it is trembling. What a great man is Mitsos!"
Half vexed—for, with all his gentleness, he was proud of his strength—and half laughing, he put his whole weight from neck to heel into it, doing that of which he had warned the Capsina, and felt the wall tremble. Then pausing a moment to get better purchase with his right foot, once more he threw himself at it, making a cushion of the great muscles over the shoulder. This effort was completely successful; the wall tottered, bowed, and fell; and Mitsos, unable to check himself, took a neat header after it and disappeared in a cloud of dust.
The Capsina, who had perfect faith in his power of not hurting himself, peered over the ledge with extreme amusement. Mitsos had already regained his feet, and was feeling himself carefully to see if he was anywhere hurt.
"Little Mitsos!" she cried, and he looked up. "You will want a new petticoat as well as a shirt," said she.
They spent an hour or two in the place, deciding on what should be patched up, and what pulled down, and the Capsina took Mitsos back with her to theRevengeto sup before he went home. The two were alone. Mitsos had much to tell of the siege of the Larissa and the destruction of Dramali's army, and to the Capsina so much still remained of that spell of soothing which Suleima, and even more the child who stammered her own name, had cast upon her, that she listened with interest, excitement, suspense, to his tale, and even half forgot that it was Mitsos who told it. But when it was over and they were on deck, half-way between silence and continuous speech, she began to think again of that which filled her thoughts. She was sitting on a coil of rope, and he half lay, half sat, at her feet, leaning against the fore-mast. The night was very hot and dark, for the moon was not yet up, and the starlight came filtered through a haze of south wind. Mitsos smoked his narghile, and as he drew the smoke in his face was illumed intermittently by the glowing charcoal, lean and brown and strong, and the jaw muscles outstanding from the cheek, and again as he stopped to talk he would go back into darkness, and the words came in the voice which she thought she knew even better than his face. Sometimes in a crowd of faces she would think she caught sight of him, but never in a company of voices did she catch note of a voice like his. And though she knew that when he had gone, for every moment he had sat close to her in the warm, muffled dusk she would sit another minute alone, helplessly, hopelessly, with his voice ringing in the inward ear, she still detained him, laughing down his laughing protests, saying that he thought of himself far higher than Suleima thought of him.
At last he rose to go in earnest, and she went with him to the boat.
"Soon the Turkish fleet will be here," she said, "and then there will be work for us, little Mitsos. Shall we work together again?"
Mitsos raised his eyebrows and spoke quickly:
"How not? Why not?" he said. "Will you not take me again?"
"I? Will you come?" she asked.
"Yes, surely. But I thought you spoke as if, as if—"
"As if what?" asked the girl.
"As if you thought we should not be together."
"Oh, little Mitsos, you are a fool," she said. "While theRevengeis afloat there is need for you here. Good-night. Kiss Suleima for me, as well as for yourself, and promise you will make the adorable one say 'Capsina.'"
"Indeed he shall, and many times. But when will you come yourself? I have not yet welcomed you in my home, and for how many days have I been made welcome in this swift house of yours! You will come to-morrow? Let me tell Suleima so."
The Capsina nodded and smiled.
"Till to-morrow then," she said.
But Mitsos had construed her tone aright. Even in the very act of speaking she had hesitated, wondering if she were firm enough of purpose to sail without him, and wishing, or rather wanting, that she were; and in the same act of speech she had known she was not, and the question had halted on her tongue. But it had been asked and answered now, and she was the gladder; for the pain of his presence was sweeter than the relief of his absence.
Most of the sailors were on shore, a few only on the ship, and when Mitsos had gone she went down to her cabin, meaning to go to bed. The ripple tapped restlessly against the ship's side; occasionally the footstep of the watch sounded above her head, and human sounds came through the open port-hole from the Greek camp. The night was very hot, and the girl lay tossing and turning in her bed, unable to sleep. It was at such times when she was alone, and especially at night, that the fever of her love-sickness most throbbed and burned in her veins. Now and then she would doze for a moment lightly, still conscious that she was lying in her cabin, and only knowing that she was not awake by the fact that she heard Mitsos talking or saw him standing by her. Such visions passed in a flash, and she would wake again to full consciousness. But this night she was too aware of her own body to doze even for a moment; it was a struggling, palpitating thing. Her pulse beat insistently in her temples; her heart rose to her throat and hammered there loud and quick. The port-hole showed a circle of luminous gray in the darkness, and cast a muffled light on the wall opposite; the waves lapped; the sentry walked; the ship was alive with the little noises heard only by the alert. Her bed burned her; her love-fever burned her; she was a smouldering flame.
She listened to the tread of the watch, growing fainter as he walked to the bows; he paused a moment as he turned, and the steps came back in a gradual crescendo, till he was above her head, then died away again till they were barely audible. Again he paused at the turn, again came his steps crescendo, and so backward and forward, till she could have cried aloud for the irritation of the thing. Other noises were less explicable; surely some one was moving about in the cabin next hers, the cabin Mitsos used to occupy, some one who went to and fro in stockinged or bare feet, but with heavy tread. Then Michael, who lay outside her door, stirred and sat up, and began to scratch himself; at each backward stroke his hind-leg tapped the door, and the Capsina vindictively said to herself that he should be washed to-morrow. But he would not stop; he went on scratching for ten hours, or a lifetime, or it may have been a minute, and she called out to him to be quiet. He lay down, she heard, with a thump, and, pleased with the sound of her recognized voice, banged his tail against the bare boards. Then he began to pant. At first the sound was barely audible, but it seemed as if he must be swelling to some gigantic thing, for the noise of his breathing grew louder and louder, till it became only the tread of the sentry above. No, it was not the sentry; he walked a little slower than the panting—why could the man not keep time?—and still next door the padded footstep crept about.
Flesh and blood could not stand it, and getting up, she kindled her lamp at the little oil-wick below the shrine of the Virgin at the end of her cabin, and opened the door. Michael hailed her with silent rapture and wistful, topaz eyes. She paused a moment on the threshold, and then opening the door of Mitsos's cabin, went in, knowing all the time that the tread of the stockinged feet was only a thought of her own brain made audible inwardly.
The cabin was empty, as she expected, and she sat down for a moment on the bare boards of his bunk, with the lamp in her hand, looking round the walls vaguely but intently, curiously but without purpose. Some pencil scratches above the head of the bed caught her eye, and, examining them more closely, she saw they were sprawling letters written upsidedown and written backward. She frowned over these for a moment, and then the solution drew a smile from her; and putting the lamp on the floor, she lay down on the bed, looking up. Yes, that was it. He must have written them idly one morning lying in bed. And she read thus:
"This is Mitsos's cabin.... Suleima!... Capsina!... Oh, Capsina!... Oh, Mitsos Codones!... Suleima!..."
Again and again she read them, then continued to look at them, not reading them, but as one looks at a familiar picture, half abstractedly. The lamp, unreplenished with oil, burned low; Michael sank on to his haunches, and then lay down. Through the open cabin door filtered a silvery grayness of starlight, but before the lamp had gone quite out the girl was asleep on the bare, unblanketed bed, her face turned upward as she had turned it to read the little pencil scratches.
During the last two months the Greek fleet had been playing a waiting game, necessary but inglorious. The Sultan, as has been seen, had sent out in the spring a great army and a great navy, which were to relieve Nauplia simultaneously. Of the army the hills of the Dervenaki knew; the navy had cruised to Patras to take on board the new capitan pasha succeeding him who was the victim of Kanaris's fire-ship, and now in September it was coming back in full force, under its new commander, in tardy execution of its aim. It had left Patras before the news of Dramali's destruction had arrived, and the Turks still knew nothing of the miscarriage of the Sultan's scheme. Round it day by day, but out of distance of its heavy guns, hovered and poised the petrel fleet of the Greeks, neither attacking nor attacked. The Greek navy had been reorganized in the spring, and the supreme command given to Admiral Miaulis, still only in his thirtieth year, brave, honest, and judicious, and distracted by the endless quarrels and pretensions of his charge. It was no part of his purpose to give battle to the Turks on the open levels of the sea, but to wait till they turned into the narrower gulf outside Nauplia, where the cumbrous Turks would be hampered for sea-room, while his own lighter vessels, born to shifting winds and at home among shoals and the perils of landlocked seas, would reap the fruits of their breeding. All the latter part of August, a month of halcyon days in the open sea, they drifted and sailed in the wake of the Turks returning with Kosreff from Patras, and each day brought them but little nearer Nauplia. Often for two days or three at a time they would be utterly becalmed, sometimes taken back by the northward-flowing current, with sails flapping idly and mirrored with scarcely a tremor on a painted ocean.
Four ships had gone hack to Hydra to guard the harbor and carry news if another detachment of Turks was sent from Constantinople. The beacon-hill, rising black and barren above the town, was a watch-tower day and night, but the days added themselves to weeks, and still no sign came from the south or north. One out of the four belonged to Tombazes, who was for a time at Hydra, and two to Father Nikola, wrinkled and sour as ever, but since the night of his encounter with the Capsina less audibly malevolent. Sometimes ships would put in from Peiraeus, or other ports, and these brought news of fresh risings against the Turks, of fresh outrages, and of fresh successes. Occasionally there would be on board men who had escaped from Turkish slavery, less often women. Then if the ship happened to come from any port near Athens, Father Nikola would hasten down to the quay with peering eyes, hoping against hope; but the faces of those who had escaped were always strange to him.
Kanaris only, who was the cousin of his wife, was in his secret, and knew why the old man pinched and hoarded with such unwavering greed, and while others cursed him for his grasping and clutching, felt a pity and sympathy in the man's devotion to one purpose. He would not have shrunk from pain, bodily or mental; he would not have shrunk from crime, if pain or crime would have enabled him to buy back his wife from the Turks in Athens; and had the devil come to Hydra, offering him her ransom for the signing away of his soul, he would have snapped his fingers in Satan's face and signed.
Sometimes Kanaris would sup with him, and while Father Nikola gave his guest hospitable fare, he would himself eat only most sparingly and drink nothing but water. He would sit long silent, playing with his string of beads, peering at the other.
Then, after a time, he might say:
"You were very like her when you were a boy, Kanaris; she had the same eyes as you. Have you finished drinking? If so, I will put the wine away."
And Kanaris, who would often have wished for more, would say he had finished.
One such evening, towards the end of July, Kanaris came up with news.
"You have heard?" he asked.
"I have heard nothing," said Nikola. "But I dropped a fifty-piaster piece to-day; I know not where or how."
"Athens has capitulated."
Father Nikola rose and brought his hands together with a palsied trembling, and then sank back in his chair again.
"Wine! Give me some wine!" he said. And he gulped down a glassful, holding it in a shaking hand and spilling much. Unused as he had been for so long to anything but water, it was strength and steadiness to him, and he got up again, renewed and firm, his own man.
"I must go, then," he said; "I must go."
"Not to Athens," said Kanaris. "A caique put in this evening. There has been a massacre of Turks, but little fighting. The Peiraeus, they say, was full of women and others who escaped from the houses of the Turks. Some have sailed to their homes; others are sailing. She was taken, was she not, at Spetzas? If she is still alive she may be there, or she may have heard you have gone to Hydra. I will help you, for she is cousin to me, and I will sail to Spetzas to-night while you wait here."
Nikola took him by the shoulder, almost pushing him from the room.
"Go then," he said. "Oh, be quick, man! Stay, do you want money? Take what you will; it is all for her."
And he walked across the room to the hearth, and wrenched up two of the stones. Below opened a space some three feet square filled with little linen bags all tied up. He took out a handful of them.
"Each is a hundred piasters," he said. "Take what you will; take three, four, all. For the time has come for me to use them."
But Kanaris, with a strange feeling of tenderness and pity, kissed the old man's hand and refused.
"I, too, will do something for my kin," he said, "She belongs to me as well as you."
"No, no!" cried Father Nikola. "She belongs to no one but me—to me only, I tell you. I will pay you as I would have paid the Turk. Oh, take the money, but go."
Kanaris shook his head.
"Very well; she is yours only. I will go. Wish me good luck, father."
But Father Nikola could not speak. He threw down the bags into their place again, and put back the stone. Then he went to his bedroom and took out his best clothes. He washed, trimmed his beard, and put on his purple cloak lined with fur, his big gold ring, and his buckled shoes.
"I am an old man," he thought to himself, "but at least I can make myself less forlorn a sight for a woman's eyes. Ah, but no woman was ever like her!"
And his old drooping mouth trembled into a smile.
Sometimes when he went out he would notice, not with pain, but with hatred, that people shrank from him, that boys called him by opprobrious miser-names, but to-night, as he went down to the quay, he noticed nothing; he walked on air, unseeing. The crucial hour was at hand, the hour that would leave him rich and alone, or a primate no more, but with another. She was his wife; that vow at least he had not broken. He would not be hissed out of his office; blithely would he go; he would have to leave Hydra; he would shake the dust of it from his feet. He would ask pardon of Economos, whom he had foully schemed to murder; he would give all but bare livelihood to the service of the war; and he would be a happier man. The little well of tenderness and humanity, which had so long been choked by the salt and bitter sands of the soul in which it rose, suddenly swelled and overflowed. Surely God was very good. He had taken him again by the hand after decades of sour and hating years; He would lead him into a green and quiet pasture.
The quay was loud and humming with the news from Athens. Tombazes was there, all red face and glory, and he clapped Nikola hard on the shoulder.
"Oh, is it not very fine!" he said. "And you, too, are fine! Oh, my silver buckles and fur cloak!"
But Nikola laid a trembling hand on his arm.
"Where are those who have escaped from Athens?" he asked. "I knew—a—a person there who had been taken by the Turks, and whom I would be glad to see again."
Tombazes giggled unprelatically.
"Some girl on a spring day," he said, "when you were a boy; oh, a very long time ago. I beg your pardon, father. But I am silly with joy to-night. Also I drank much wine because of the news. So you expect a woman from Athens, who had better not come to Hydra? Well, well, we are all miserable sinners! Go and hide, father. I will say you are not on the island, that you are dead, and that we have never heard of you. Ay, one must stand up for one's order! Did I ever tell how, ever so long ago—well, it's an old story, and tedious in the telling. The refugees from Athens? Yes, a boatful is expected. They left with those who brought the news, but they sailed less fast. Ah, is not that a caique rounding the harbor now. It will be they!"
It was nearly sundown when the first boat with the news had arrived, and by now the sun had set, but the western sky still flamed with the whole gamut of color, from crimson to saffron yellow, and the sea was its flame reflected. A breeze, steady and singing, blew from the main-land, just ruffling the water, and the caique sped on by it, came black and swift over the shining plain of water, crumpling and curling the sea beneath her bows, cutting her way through the crimson and the yellow, and the shadow of deep translucent green which lay ever before her. On the quay the crowd gathered and thickened, but grew ever more silent, for none knew what friend or relative, lost for years and only a ghost to memory, the ships might bring or carry the news of. The most part of the men of Hydra were away with the fleet, and it was women chiefly, old and gray-headed folk, and children who waited there. Deep water ran close up to the quay wall, and when the ship furled all sail and swung round to come to land, it was in silence that the rope was flung from the ship and in silence that those on shore made it fast. Then the anchor plunged with a gulp and babble into the sea, and she came alongside.
Then, as those on board came ashore, tongues and tears were loosened. Among them was a girl who had been taken only two years before; in her arms was a baby, a heritage of shame. It was pitiful to see how her father started forward to meet her—then stopped, and for a moment she stood alone with down-dropped eyes, and the joy and expectation in her face struck dead. But suddenly from the women behind her mother ran out, with her love triumphing over shame, and she fell on the girl's neck with a sob and drew her tenderly away. Another was a very old man who tottered down the gangway steps; none knew his name and he knew none, but looked round puzzledly at the changed quay and the sprouted town. But there were very few to return to Hydra, for the Turks had always filled their plunderous and lustful hands from places where the men were of softer mould than these stern islanders. Tombazes, with Nikola still close to him, had pushed his way forward to the edge of the quay where the ship was disembarking; a crowd of jovial, whistling sailors poured down the plank, and still Nikola had not seen what he looked for. But at the last came a woman in Turkish dress, and at her he looked longer and more peeringly as she came down the bridge. She had removed the yashmak from her face, and her head, gray-haired, was bare. But surely to another never had the glory of woman been given in such magnificent abundance. It grew low on her forehead and was braided over her ears and done up in great coils behind her head. Her eyebrows were still black, startlingly black against that gray head and ivory-colored face, but her eyes were blacker, and like fire they smouldered, and they pierced like steel. Weary yet keen was her face; expectant and wide her eyes; and expectant her mouth, slightly open, and still young and girlish in its fine curves and tender lines. Among that crowd of merry, strong-built men she seemed of different clay; you would have said she was a china cup among crockery and earthen-ware. And Nikola looked, and his eyes were riveted to her, and they grew dim suddenly, and with a little, low cry he broke from Tombazes and forced his way through those who stood around, so that when the woman stepped ashore off the bridge he stood full in front of her, and his hands were out-stretched; you would have said he held his heart in them, offering it to her. She saw and paused, her lips parted in a sudden surprise and amaze; for a moment her eyebrows contracted as if puzzled, but before they had yet frowned, cleared again, and she took both his hands in hers and kissed him on the lips.
"Nikola," she said, and no more, and for a minute's space there was silence between them, and in that silence their souls lived back for one blessed moment to the years long past. Neither of them saw that the crowd had gone back a little, to give them room, that all were waiting in a pause of astonishment and conjecture round them, but standing off with the instinct of natural effacement, a supreme delicacy, to let these two long sundered have even in the midst of them a sort of privacy. Tombazes saw and guessed, and his honest red face suddenly puckered with an unbidden welling of tears. Nikola was waiting, as he had said, for some one; this woman was she. She was the taller of the two, and laid her hand on his shoulder.
"I have come back, Nikola," she said, and her voice was sweeter and more mellow than the harbor bell. "I have come back old. But I have come back."
Anguish more lovely than joy, joy fiercer than anguish pierced him. The bitter waters were turned suddenly sweet by some divine alchemy; his withered heart budded and blossomed.
"The rest is nothing worth, little one," he said. "You have come back. I too am old."
At that she smiled.
"Little one?" she said, and with the undying love of love which is the birthright of women. "Am I still little one?" she said, and again she kissed him on the lips.
"Let us go," he whispered. "Let us go home."
The lane of faces parted right and left, and in silence they went up across the quay through the deserted streets to his house. Not till they had passed out of the sound of hearing did the silence grow into a whisper, and the whisper into speech. They crowded round Tombazes, but he could only wipe his eyes and conjecture like the rest.
"Old Nikola!" he said; "fancy old Nikola! She can only be his wife. He said he was waiting for a person. Well, you call your sister your sister, and your relations your relations; you only call your wife, when you are not imagined to have one, a person. Old Nikola! That explains a great deal. We thought him a mere old miser, and a sour one at that. I make no doubt he was saving for the ransom. No, don't anybody speak to me. I—I—" and the warm-hearted old pagan primate turned suddenly away and blew his nose violently.
No more was seen of Nikola that evening, but next morning his servant came to Tombazes, asking him if he would dine with him that day. The two met him at the door hand in hand, like children or young lovers, and Nikola, turning to his wife, said:
"Ask Father Tombazes' blessing, little one; and give me also your blessing, father."
Tombazes did so, and observed that Nikola was dressed no longer as a primate, but only as a deacon, and as they dined he told him all—how thirty years ago he broke his celibate vow and, as if in instant vengeance, before a month was passed his wife was carried off from Spetzas by the Turks; how he had moved to Hydra where the story was unknown, and how only yesterday she had come back again.
"And now, father," he said, in conclusion, "will you do me a last favor, and let the people know what has happened. I go among them as deacon, no longer as primate, and, I hope, no longer as a miser or a sour man. The little one and I have talked long together, and indeed I think I have been made different to what I was."
So Father Nikola became Nikola again, and the loss of dignity was gain in all else to him. He and Martha were seldom seen apart, and the island generally, partly because its folk were warm-hearted and ready to forgive, partly because the strange little old-age idyl pleased them, smiled on the two. Nikola's two ships still remained all August in the harbor, and it was matter for conjecture whether, when the time came for them to take the sea again, Martha would go with him, or whether Nikola would give up his part in the war. And the two talked of it together.
"It would be selfish if I tried to keep you here, Nikola," said his wife, "for since I have been in the house of the Turk it has seemed to me that all men have a duty laid on them, and that to root out the whole devil's brood."
"I care no longer, little one," he said, "for have I not got you back?"
Martha got up and began walking up and down the veranda.
"It is good to hear you speak so," she said, "and yet it is not good. There are other wives besides me; other husbands also besides you, Nikola. So do not draw back; it is for me only you draw back. Go! I would have you go!"
She looked at him with shining eyes, her heart all woman, and the noblest of woman—strong, unflinching.
He looked at her and hesitated.
"How can I leave you?" he said. "I cannot start off again."
"Leave me?" she asked. "What talk is this of leaving me?"
"But you would have me go."
"But will I not be with you? Does not your Capsina sail on her ship, and why not I on my husband's?"
"No, no!" he cried, stung out of self. "That were still worse. If I went my comfort would be that you were here safe; that, if I came back, I should still find you here.. Let it suffice then. I go, but alone."
Again she smiled.
"Let it suffice, Nikola," she said; "you go not alone."
He looked up at her with his peering eyes.
"You are greater than ever, little one," he said, "and I find you more beautiful than ever."
She bent down, kissed him lightly on the forehead, and sat by him, while he stretched his hand out to hers and stroked it.
"Would not the boys and girls laugh to see us?" he said. "For, indeed, though I am old, I think you still like to have the touch of me. I am absurd."
"God bless their laughter," said she, "for, indeed, no ill thing yet came from laughter." Then, after a pause, "And are we not enviable? Are we not content? Indeed I am content, Nikola, and content comes once or twice in a lifetime, and to the most of men never. It is the autumn of our age, and the days are warm and calm, and no storm vexes us."
"And I am content," said Nikola.
So during the hot procession of August days the Indian summer of love, coming late to an old man who had long been of peevish and withered heart, and to a woman gray-headed, but with something still of the divine immortality of youth within her, sped its span of days delayed, and lingered in the speeding; for them the wheel of time ran back to years long past, and the years were winged with love and the healing of bitterness. Indeed, a man must have been something more obstinately sour of soul than all that dwells on the earth if he should not have sweetened under so mellow and caressing a touch, for when a woman is woman to the core, there is no man whom she cannot make a man of. Late had come that tender tutelage, but to a pupil who had known the hand before, and answered to it.
Often on these sultry mornings, between the death of the breeze from the sea and the birth of the land-breeze, the two would walk up the beacon-hill above the town, where they found a straying air always abroad. Of the years of separation they spoke not at all; for them both they were a time to be buried and no thought given them, to be hidden out of sight. Thus their strange renewed idyl, born out of old age, ran its course.
August passed thus, and the most part of September, but one day, as they sat there looking rather than watching, two masts under sail climbed the rim of the horizon, and, while yet the hull of the ship was down, another two, and yet another. Before long some forty ships were in sight, heading it seemed for Spetzas or the channel between it and Hydra. They sent a lad who was sheep-feeding on the side of the hill to pass the word to Tombazes, and themselves remained to see if more would appear. It was a half-hour before Tombazes came, and in the interval the horizon was again pricked by another uprising company of masts. Then said Nikola:
"The time has come, little one. Those are the fleets. It is the Turks who are now coming into sight. Ah, here is Tombazes."
It was soon evident that Nikola was right, for before long, as the ships drew closer, the first fleet was clearly seen to be of the Greek ships, who had outsailed the Ottomans and were waiting for them at the entrance to the Gulf of Nauplia, like ushers to show them in. As soon as the Turks were once in the narrow sea, with the mouth closed behind them by the Greeks, they were as duellists shut in a room, and the fate of Nauplia this way or that was on the board and imminent. Nikola announced his intention of joining the fleet with one ship, leaving the other, if Tombazes thought good, to help in the defence of the harbor in case the Turks attacked Hydra. Martha sailed with him; and at that Tombazes glowed, and making his action fit his word, "I kiss the hand of a brave woman," he said.
She turned to her husband, flushing with a color fresh like a girl's.
"I sail with a brave man," she said. "It would ill beseem his wife to be afraid."
The other three ships, it was settled, were to stay at Hydra to guard the place, and that evening Nikola and the wife set off down the path of the land-breeze to join the fleet.
In the six weeks that had passed since the Capsina had taken in hand the repairs of the fortifications of the Burdjee, she had so strengthened the place by buttressing it with huge, rough masses of stone and rubble and demolishing dangerous walls that passed her skill to put in a state of safety, that it no longer had much to fear from the Turkish fire and, what was almost the greater testimonial, hardly more from its own. Hastings was still away, superintending the building of a steamship which he was to devote to the national cause, and Jourdain, the proud inventor of the smoky balls, had been seen once only on the island fort. On that occasion, finding there a very handsome girl and not knowing who she was, he had, with the amiable gallantry of his race, incontinently kissed her. For this ill-inspired attention he received so swinging a slap on the ear that his head sang shrilly to him for the remainder of the day, and he did not again set foot on the island while that "hurricane woman"—for so he called her after his reception—remained on it. Hane had come back a day or two before, but he suggested that the somewhat scanty ammunition in the island fort had better be reserved for the Ottoman fleet, in case they reached the harbor of Nauplia, rather than be used up against the walls of the town.
"For, indeed," he said, "we have no quarrel with those walls. As long as the fleet comes not, they pen the Turks inside, and it will be false policy to destroy them, since, if the fleet does not relieve the town, it will soon be a Greek fortress; and a fortress is ever the better for having walls."
The Capsina was on the point of setting off again on theRevengeto join the Greek fleet, and was in a hurry; but though she would have preferred to storm away at Nauplia off-hand, she saw the force of the reasoning.
"You have the elements of good sense," she conceded; "so good-bye, and good luck to you! TheRevengesails to-day, and has a very pretty plan in her little head. Oh, you shall see! If there is a scrimmage between the fleets in the harbor, don't fire unless you are sure of your aim. If you touch my ship, I will treat you as I treated the little Frenchman; at least, I will try to. But you are as big as I."
"I will take my punishment like a man from so fair a hand," said Hane, with mock courtesy. And the Capsina glanced darkly at him.
All next day a distant cannonade took place between the Greeks and Turks—the Greeks, on the one hand, preferring to stand off until their enemies were well inside the gulf, the Turks unwilling to enter the narrow sea with that pack of sea-wolves on their heels. But the approach of the Turkish fleet even at the entrance of the gulf so terrified the Kranidiot garrison on the Burdjee, who were convinced that they would be cut off on the island, that they fled by night to the Greek camp, leaving there only Hane and a young Hydriot sailor, with no means of escape, for they took the boats with them. They had made so silent a departure that neither Hane nor Manéthee knew anything of their flight till day dawned, when they woke to find themselves alone. However, as they both entertained a different opinion of the possibility of the Turks gaining the harbor, they breakfasted with extreme cheerfulness, and sudden puffs of laughter seized now one and now the other at this unexpected desertion. Afterwards they spent the morning in a somewhat unrewarded attempt to catch fish off the rocks away from the town. Manéthee, indeed, was caught by a lobster, which the two subsequently ate for dinner.
Now the Capsina and Mitsos had hatched a very pretty plan between them. Seeing that all the Greek fleet was waiting to attack the Turkish fleet in the rear, it was certain that the latter would send their transport and provision vessels on first. So, with the consent of Miaulis, they had for a whole day and night of almost dead calm edged and sidled up the gulf till they were in front of the Turkish fleet. They coaxed theRevengelike a child; they took advantage of every shifting current up the coast, the least breath of wind they caught in the sails, and added another and another to it, till the sails were full, and she slid one more step forward.
"And once among the transports," remarked the Capsina, "it will be strange if an orange or an egg gets into Nauplia."
Mitsos laughed.
"I have pity for hungry folk," he said. "Listen, Capsina; there are guns from Nauplia."
Again and again, and all that afternoon, the heavy buffets of the guns boomed across the water; for the Turks in Nauplia, seeing that their fleet was even now at the entrance of the gulf, had opened fire on the Burdjee, where Hane and Manéthee were catching fish. Hane had determined not to fire back, for it was better to reserve himself for the Turkish fleet, especially since there were only two of them to work the guns, and so they sat at the angle farthest away from the town, dabbled their feet in the tepid water, and watched the balls, which for the most part went very wide, dip and ricochet in the bay.
For three days the two fleets manoeuvred idly just outside the gulf; the wind was fitfully light and variable, and for the most part a dead calm prevailed, and the Turks were as unable to pursue their way up the gulf as the Greeks to attack them on the open sea. But at the end of the third inactive day the breeze freshened, and a steadier and more lively air, unusual from this quarter in the summer, blew up the gulf. Had the capitan pasha taken advantage of this, risking therein but little—for the night was clear, and moonrise only an hour or two after sunset—he could have run a straight course before the wind and been at the entrance of Nauplia harbor by morning, exposed, indeed, to the fire of the Burdjee guns, had there been any one to work them, but protected by the guns of the fort. The whole Greek fleet, so far as he knew, except for one brig that had gone sidling up the coast, was some eight miles in his rear, and, with so strangely favorable a wind, his own vessels, though clumsy in the tack or in close sailing, would have run straight before it, and the way was open. Instead, he feared travelling by night; or, perhaps, with that sea-pack in his rear, he did not mean to sail at all, and hove to till morning, sending on, however, a slow-sailing Austrian merchantman in the service of the Sultan, laden with provisions, without escort, for he knew that all the Greek fleet, except that one sailing brig, as like as not on the rocks by this time, was behind him, and he proposed—or did not propose, he only knew—to catch up the merchantman in the morning. What he had not observed was that as night fell, and the breeze got up, the floundering brig straightened herself up like a man lame made miraculously whole, and followed his transport up the gulf.
Soon after moonrise the Austrian furled sail too, and Mitsos, who was on the watch, hove to also, and when morning dawned, red and windy, it showed him the Turkish fleet some eight miles off, the Austrian about three miles from the harbor at Nauplia, and theRevengenot more than a mile behind the Austrian.
The Capsina was on deck early, and she surveyed the position with vivid and smiling satisfaction.
"We will not fire," she said to Mitsos, "but we will take her complete. There go her sails up, and there her flag! Why, that is not a Turkish flag."
Mitsos looked at it a moment.
"Two eagles," he said, "and scraggy fowls. It is Austrian, and in the service of the Turk. That is enough, is it not?"
"Quite enough," said the Capsina. "After her!"
It was the swallows to the raven. In a quarter of an hour the Austrian was barely a hundred yards ahead, and Mitsos rather ostentatiously walked forward and took the tarpaulin covering off the very business-like nine-inch gun on the port bow. The bright brass winked pleasantly, with a suggestion of fire, in the sun, and was clearly visible from the deck of the Austrian. He proceeded to sight the gun leisurely to amidships of the chase and just above the water-line, but before he had finished, down came her flag, and her sails followed. The two went aboard and were most cordially received by the captain, a beautiful man with long whiskers and ringleted hair, who spoke no Greek and understood as little. He pointed inquiringly to his own flag, and Mitsos, in reply, merely pointed his finger backward to the Turkish fleet on the horizon and forward to Nauplia. At that the jaw of the beautiful man dropped a little, and he again pointed to the Turkish fleet, and, in eloquent pantomime, washed his hands and tapped his breast, as if to introduce to them the honorable heart which resided there. But again Mitsos shook his head, for if a vessel detaches itself from a fleet, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it has had, or even still has, some connection with that fleet. Then the beautiful man broke into passionate expostulation in an unknown and guttural tongue, and, as further progress could not be made in this conversation, the matter was cut short, and a party of the sailors from theRevengecame on board armed to the teeth, while Mitsos, the Capsina, and the reluctant captain returned to theRevenge.
Then occurred one of those things which brand the character of a man and his ancestors eternally, and his children with an inherited shame. The capitan pasha, who had just given orders to proceed up the gulf, saw from afar the capture of his merchantman, and supposing that another Greek fleet was waiting for him in ambush ahead, without even sending on a detachment to reconnoitre, put about and beat out of the gulf. From that hour the fate of Nauplia was sealed.
The sum of Greek energy, like that of Turkey, had now for many weeks been entirely centred round Nauplia. The Sultan had seen months ago that to command Nauplia and hold it an open port was an iron hand on the Peloponnese, and by degrees the Greeks had learned so too. The town had now been blockaded for four months; irregular but efficient troops had guarded all the passes of communication between Nauplia and Corinth; and now, when the Turkish navy turned back out of the gulf after its abortive effort and disgraceful abandonment of the town, Miaulis did not pursue, but took his fleet up the gulf, so that, should the faint-hearted Turk return, he would find the entrance to Nauplia shut and locked by the whole Greek squadron. There Kanaris joined the Capsina again, and, as both she and Mitsos, as well as he, preferred to cruise after the retiring fleet, in the hope of doing some wayside damage to them, to remaining inactive at Nauplia, they obtained leave to follow. The rest, however, supposing that the fall of the town was inevitable, and justly desiring that they who had prevented the fleet coming to its rescue should share in the spoil, remained in the gulf out of shot of the Turkish guns in the fort, and waited for the end.
So once again theRevengeand theSophiastarted on the Turkish trail in the eastern sea. The Ottoman fleet had passed outside Hydra, giving it a wide berth, for they feared another stinging nest of wasps, and the day after the two Greek ships passed close under its lee, so as to cut off a corner from the path taken by the enemy's fleet, for, having left Hydra, their course was certainly to Constantinople. To the Capsina the island seemed remote and distant from her life, external to it. A lounging lad had come between her and it, and to her he loomed gigantic and larger than life. Yet though he was all her nearer field of vision, she knew him further than all, and when she thought of it an incommunicable loneliness was the food of her heart.
The day after passing Hydra the Turkish fleet, huddled together like a flock of sheep and guarded by its great clumsy men-of-war, which sailed in a half circle, with brigs and schooners as vanguard, again came into sight, advancing slowly northward, evidently heading, as they expected, for Constantinople. Kanaris landed at his native island, Psara, and there bought a couple of rickety and hardly seaworthy caiques. They were good enough, however, for the purpose for which he wanted them, and after spending half a day there purchasing the necessary oil and fuel for a fire-ship they went northward again after the Turks, and caught them up only when they were clear of the archipelago. The two Greek brigs kept well out of range of the big Turkish guns, for their own were but light in comparison, and they would have to come perilously close to the big men-of-war to fire with effect.
Day after day the wind was so light a breath that it would have been impossible to approach with the fire-ships, except very slowly, whereas speed was almost an essential to success; moreover, in the open seas, two caiques coming up from two rakish-looking brigs might have attracted the attention even of the indolently minded. So they waited, keeping out to the west of the Turks, till they should approach the northern group of islands outside the Hellespont. There, with the shelter of the land near, and the probability of squally winds from the high ground of the Troad, a favorable opportunity might offer. Mitsos and Kanaris were to sail the one; the other was intrusted to two Psarian sailors, who professed to know their use.
That month of attendance-dancing on the Turks was strangely pleasant to the Capsina. Since her interview with Suleima her self-control had begun to be a habit with her, a sort of crust over the fire of her passion, which, so to speak, would bear the weight of daily and hourly sociability with Mitsos. For days she had fed herself on a diet of wisdom, taking the dose, like a sick man, in pills and capsules; tasteless it seemed, and useless, yet the course was operative. He, now that the Capsina was a friend of the family, spoke often of his wife to the girl, and by degrees such talk was less bitter to her in the hearing. She had faced the inevitable, and in a manner accepted it, and though the sight of the lad and the touch of him was no less keenly dear, though all that he was held an incomparable charm for her, she knew now that what was so much to her was nothing to him. He, for his part, was in his customary exuberance of boyishness, and she, with a control not less heroical, showed a lightness and naturalness which could not but deceive him, so normal was the manner of her intercourse with him.
By the 1st of November they were passing Lesbos on the east; on the 4th—for day by day went by without more than an hour or two of breeze in its circle of windless hours—the island was still a blue cloud on the southeast. Next day, however, they began to feel the backwater from the current out of the Hellespont which moves up the coast, and Kanaris knew that there was one chance more only before the ships reached the mouth of the straits and were safe under the castles which guarded it.
That day he came on board theRevenge, which towed the two caiques, with the Psarians who were to sail the second, and laid his plans before the Capsina.
"All hangs," he said, "on whether they take the narrow channel between Tenedos and the land or go outside the island. If they go outside, we shall have to make an attempt in the open sea, and that I do not like the littlest bit, for they cannot have failed to see theRevenge, so that we must seem to approach from her; and indeed by now, when a caique comes from a Greek brig, they know what that caique means."
"You mean you will have a long sail first," said the Capsina, "and a long row afterwards."