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 the _Revenge_ to
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! The _Revenge_ sails 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 the
_Revenge_ like 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 the _Revenge_ not 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 the _Revenge_
came on board armed to the teeth, while Mitsos, the Capsina, and the
reluctant captain returned to the _Revenge_.
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.