THE MAN IN THE RED UNIFORM
From a vessel lying beyond the shallows that stretched three miles from
the Greek shore, a puff of smoke broke balloon-like, to be followed, a
moment after, by a muffled report.
The crowds of people clustered along the town’s front cheered wildly.
Every day for weeks they had been watching: blue-eyed, dusky Albanians,
with horse-hair _capotes_ and pistoled girdles; supple lighter
complexioned Greeks in the national kirtle; Suliotes, whose mountain
wildnesses were reflected in their dress; and a miscellaneous mixture
of citizens of every rank and age.
For this vessel bore the coming savior of the Grecian nation, the great
English peer whose songs for years had been sung in their own Romaic
tongue, whose coming had been prated of so long by their primates--he
who should make them victorious against the Turk. Was it not he who, in
Cephalonia, on his way hither, had fed from his own purse the flying
refugees from Scio and Patras, and sent them back with arms in their
hands? Was he not the friend of their own Prince Mavrocordato, who in
this same stronghold of Missolonghi had fought off Omer Pasha with his
twenty thousand troops, and now controlled the provisional government
of Western Greece? Was it not he who had sent two hundred thousand
piastres to outfit the fleet before whose approach Yussuff Pasha’s
squadron had withdrawn sullenly to Lepanto?
They had known of Gordon’s departure from Cephalonia from the forty
Mariotes he sent ahead to be his own body-guard, and who strutted it
about the fortifications, boasting of the distinction. His consort
vessel had arrived, after narrowly escaping capture. His own brig,
chased by the Turks, had been driven on the rocky coast. This they had
learned from a surly Arab-like Englishman, his arm in a sling from
an unhealed bullet-wound, who had been in the vessel and had found a
footsore way overland.
The metropolitan had called a special service in the church for his
lordship’s deliverance. Now his ship, escaping rocks and the enemy, had
anchored safely in the night, and the roar of salutes from the Speziot
brigs-of-war that lay in the harbor had waked the sleeping port. Since
daylight the shore had been a moving mass, sprinkled with brilliant
figures: soldiery of fortune, wearing the uniform of well-nigh every
European nation.
There was one who watched that pushing, staring multitude who did not
rejoice. As he listened to the tumult of gladness, Trevanion’s heart
was a fiery furnace. His hatred, fostered so long, was the “be-all and
end-all” of his moody existence, and the benefit Gordon had conferred
when he delivered him from Cassidy’s marines, had become at length
insupportable. With a perversion of reasoning characteristically
Asiatic, he had chosen to wipe it from the slate and make the favor
naught. He went to Leghorn and to the amaze of Cassidy, surrendered
himself to the _Pylades_.
This voluntary act, perhaps, made vigilance lighter. He watched his
chance, leaped overboard in the foggy morning, and would have got safe
to shore but for one well-aimed musket. Chance put the departing brig
in his way. He had been delirious in the forecastle for days from his
wound, and knowledge of Gordon’s presence and mission had not come to
him till the Grecian shore was in sight.
In his durance on the _Pylades_ his hair and beard had grown; he
fancied himself unrecognized. Hour by hour, watching Gordon covertly,
seeing him living and sleeping on deck in all weathers, eating the
coarse fare and enduring every privation of his sailors, Trevanion’s
blood inflamed itself still more. He owed the other nothing now! He
raged within himself at the celebrity the expedition and its leader
acquired at Cephalonia. In the pursuit of Gordon’s vessel by the
Turks he had hoped for its capture. When she ran upon the rocks he
deemed this certain, and forsook her jubilantly. He had no fear of
making his way afoot to Missolonghi; strangely enough, years before,
during the Feast of Ramazan, he had fled over this same path to escape
a Mohammedan vengeance, and pursued by the memory of a Greek girl
abandoned to the last dreadful penalty because of him--a memory that
haunted him still.
To-day, as Trevanion saw the vessel that held his enemy, his eyes
gleamed with a sinister regard.
“Bah!” sneered a voice behind him in the Romaic tongue. “An English
noble! Who says so? Mavrocordato. There are those who say he is a Turk
in disguise who will sell the country to the sultan.”
The man who had spoken wore the dress of a chieftain of lower rank. His
comrade answered with an oath:
“Or to the English. _Kalon malubdi!_ Give me a chief like Ulysses! In
six months he would have gained the whole Peloponnesus, but for the
coming of this foreigner--may a good ball find him!”
To Trevanion the malediction was as grateful as a draft of cool beer to
the scorched palate of a waking sot. He spoke in the vernacular: “There
are English, too, who would drink that toast! Who is Ulysses?”
His faded sailor’s rig had been misleading. Both clapped hands to their
belts as, “One who will sweep this puppet of Mavrocordato’s into the
gulf!” the first replied fiercely.
“May I be there to help!” exclaimed Trevanion, savagely. “Take me to
this leader of yours!”
The two Suliotes looked at him narrowly, then conferred. At length the
chief came closer.
“If you would serve Ulysses,” he said, “meet me beyond the north
fortifications at sunset.”
Trevanion nodded, and they turned away, as a shout went up from the
assembled people. A boat had swung out from the brig’s davits. It
carried a flag--a white cross on a blue ground--the standard of New
Greece.
The man with the disabled arm flushed suddenly, for his dark, sullen
gaze had fallen on the sea-wall, where stood His Highness, Prince
Mavrocordato, with Pietro Gamba. The latter had followed Gordon to
Cephalonia and from there had come on the _Hercules’_ consort. A
slinking shame bit Trevanion as he recalled the day when his poisoned
whisper would have fired that young heart to murder; he wheeled and
plunged into the human surge.
The couple on the sea-wall watched eagerly. The lowered boat had been
rapidly manned. A figure wearing a scarlet uniform took its place in
the stern-sheets. The crowd buzzed and dilated.
The prince lowered his field-glass. “Thank God, he is safe!” he
exclaimed in earnest Italian. “We have been in desperate straits,
Pietro. With the General Assembly preparing to meet, when all the
western country is in such disorder, with these untamed mountain chiefs
flocking here with their clans, with Botzaris killed in battle, and
only my paltry five thousand to keep dissensions in check, I have been
prepared for the worst. Now there is hope. Look!”
He stretched his hand toward the teeming quay. “They have waited
for him as for the Messiah. All the chiefs, except Ulysses, who has
always plotted for control--and his spies are in the town at this
moment!--will defer to him. With a united front what could Greece not
do! The Turk could never enslave her again. With no supreme head, her
provinces are like the untied bundle of sticks--easily broken one at a
time!”
They watched in silence while the rowers drew nearer across the
shallows.
“I did not hope to see you here, Pietro,” Mavrocordato said
affectionately, as they started toward headquarters.
Gamba answered simply: “She sent me--to guard him if I could.”
Ten minutes more and the boat was at the landing.
The instant its bow touched the masonry before line of picked troops,
a single bell rang out from the Greek church. Other iron tongues took
it up. The walls shook with rolling salvos of artillery, the firing of
muskets and wild music, as the man in the scarlet uniform, colorless
and strangely composed amid the tossing agitation, stepped on shore to
grasp the hand of Prince Mavrocordato, standing with a long suite of
European and Greek officers.
As his gaze swept over the massed soldiery, the frantic people, the
women on roofs and balconies, the houses hung with waving carpets,--a
rainbow motley of color,--a great shout rolled along the embankments,
a tumult mingled with hand-clapping like a silver rain, that drowned
all words. Women in the multitude sobbed, and on the balconies little
children were held up in stronger arms to see their deliverer. Every
eye was on that central figure, with face like the Apollo Belvedere
and a step that halted as if with fatigue, but with a look clear and
luminous and the shadow of a smile moulding his lips.
“_Panayeia_ keep him!” sobbed a weeping woman, and threw herself
between the lines of soldiers to kiss the tassel of his sword.
The metropolitan, his robes trailing the ground, lifted before him a
silver _eikon_ glittering in the sun.
The soldiers presented arms.
The bells broke forth again, and amid their jubilant ringing the wearer
of the red uniform passed slowly, with Prince Mavrocordato by his
side, into the stone building which rose above the quay--the military
headquarters of the revolutionary forces of Western Greece.