The Capsina. An Historical Novel

The day continued gray and unseasonably cold; from time to time a little sprinkle of mingled sleet and rain pattered on the chilled deck, and Mitsos stamped up and down the bridge cursing the delay of the dead wind, for as soon as they had settled the remaining three vessels their work in the gulf would be over, and he had a hundred schemes whereby they might pass the guns of Lepanto and be off. They had already been six weeks on the trail, and now, as he knew so well, the warmer March winds and the blinks of spring sunshine would be beginning to open the flowers of the plain of Nauplia. For himself flowers were no great attraction, but Suleima, accustomed to the luxuriant Turkish gardens, had planted row upon row of scarlet anemones under the orange-trees, and it seemed to Mitsos that Suleima's flowers were among the fundamental things of the world. Long winter afternoons he had spent in a glow of grumbling content at her womanish fads in digging up the roots on the hill-side, and evening by evening he had come back again grimed with soil and washed with the winter rains, and with a great hunger in his stomach, while Suleima turned over the spoils of the afternoon, always saying that there were not yet near enough. Once out of the gulf he would go home again, if only for a week or two, for the Capsina, as she had told him, was meaning to join the Greek fleet on its spring cruise, and till it started on that even she confessed there was no further work to hand.

Towards evening the sleet, which had been continuous all the afternoon, grew intermittent between the showers, and the air was hard and clear as before a great storm; fitful blasts of a more icy wind scoured across from the north, and Mitsos, feeling the sea-weed barometer which hung in the cabin, found it moist and slimy. Supper was ready, and on the moment the Capsina came down flushed with the stinging air.

"More rain," said Mitsos; "I wish the devil might take it to cook the grilling souls of those Turks we have sent him. The sea-weed is as if you had dipped it in an oil-jar."

The Capsina felt it.

"You have a trick of smelling the wind, Mitsos," she said. "Can you smell the wind?"

"I have smelled strong wind all day, and it has not come for all my smelling," said Mitsos, sulkily.

As if to exculpate the deceptiveness of his weather, almost before they had sat down the rigging began to sing, and before Mitsos had time to get on deck the song was a scream. The Capsina followed him, and he looked rapidly round.

"Still north," he said; "and may the saints tell us what to do! Look there;" and he pointed over the hills above Galaxidi. The sun had not quite set – a smudge of dirty light still smouldered in the west. To the north the sky lowered blackly, and a tattered sheet of cloud was spreading and ripping into streamers as it spread over the heavens. Even as he spoke a snake's tongue of angry lightning licked out of the centre of it, followed at a short interval by a drowsy peal of thunder.

"We must beat out to sea," he continued. "God knows what is coming; the wind may chop round, and Heaven save us if we are within two miles of shore!"

But the Capsina felt suddenly exhilarated. The prospect of some great storm which should take all their wits to fight braced her against her secret trouble. Here was a more immediate employment for her thoughts.

"Out to sea, then, while we may!" she cried. "Oh, Mitsos, it is a fine thing to be in the hand of God and all His saints! But what if the Turks slip by us?"

"There will be rocks and big waves for the Turks," said Mitsos, laconically. "Hoist jib and staysail; she cannot stand more than that. Where are Kanaris and the Sophia?"

"Kanaris is as wise as we, and will get sea-room for himself," said the Capsina. "There, that is done. Come back to supper, little Mitsos."

Mitsos looked round again.

"I think not yet," he said; "but go you down. I will stop here till there is a spoonful or two more water between us and land."

"I am with you," said the girl, and they began pacing up and down the deck together.

Night fell like a stroke of a black wing feathered with storm-cloud. As a sponge with one wet sweep will wipe out the writing from a slate, so that black cloud in the water sucked the light from the sky, and the wind screamed ever higher and more madly. Once again the angry fire licked out and was gone, and the thunder clapped a more immediate applause, and with that they were the centre of an infinite blackness. Land, sea, and sky were swallowed up and confounded in one terrific tumult of unseen uproar. Fast as the brig scudded before the storm, the waves seemed ever to be going the faster, as if to reach some terrible rendezvous where they would wait for her. In Mitsos's mind the present fear was that the wind would veer, as so often happens on those inland seas, and before they were sufficiently far from land would be forcing them back on to the lee shore. Then he knew there would be before them a night's work of battling with the wind that yelled in exultation as it took them back, of losing ground inevitably, and of desperately fighting every inch until the storm blew itself out.

Half an hour passed and they were still running out to sea, when, suddenly, the wind shifted westward, and the ship for a moment trembled and shook as if she had struck a rock. The two men at the tiller knew their work, and in a moment had the struggling tiller jammed down, and the Revenge checked like a horse, and again slowly made way on the starboard tack.

And at the sight of the obedience of the ship, more like some intelligent beast than a thing of wood, a great thrill of pleasure struck the Capsina. "Well done!" she cried. "Well done, dear ship!"

Then the sky above them burst in a blaze of violet light, and Mitsos, in that flash, though half-blinded, saw two things – the one a ship, some two miles distant, as far as he could judge in that glance, and straight before their bows on the troubled and streaky sea, the other a great gray column rising like a ghost from the waves, not more than four hundred yards away, and which was the more dangerous, he knew.

The Capsina, too, had seen it, and called out to him:

"Saints in heaven! What is it? What is it?" she cried. "No, not the ship – the other. Is it the spirits of those from Elatina?"

But Mitsos was no longer there. He had seen that great gray column, and known it for a water-spout, and, without a moment's pause, he had rushed forward and told them to load the six-pounder in the starboard bow. Ammunition was stored forward, and, though it seemed to him that he waited through the suspense of a lifetime, in a few seconds the gun was loaded, and he waited again, the fuse in his hand.

The darkness was intense; from the blackness came only the hoarse scream of the wind and the threats and buffets of the sea. But soon he saw against the blackness the glimmering column of gray, and he could hear above the riot of the storm a drip as from a thousand house-roofs. It came on in a slightly slanting direction, and, waiting till it began to cut across the muzzle of the gun, he fired.

And with a crash of many waters the gray column vanished.

The Capsina had followed him forward, and as the smoke cleared away he saw her eye dancing, and she slapped the brazen side of the gun.

"There will be more work for you to-night!" she cried. "Well, Mitsos, gone is the gray ghost. But the ship remains."

Mitsos sat still a moment, the strain and responsibility of his aim left him unnerved. But almost instantly he recovered himself.

"You will give chase to-night?" said he, incredulously.

"Why not?"

"Because God is blowing a great gale. There is no light, and who knows where we shall drive to?"

Again the violent sheet of flame blazed from the cloud overhead, and the Capsina laughed.

"No light? Is that no light, when the clouds are bursting to give it us? I saw her quite plainly then. Oh, lad, what is the wind for except to sail on? Would you chase the Turks in a calm? There again!"

Now whether it was from the mere infection of the excitement which possessed the Capsina, or whether his nerves were strung by the electricity in the air to that shrill pitch when a man will do and dare anything, in any case something of the irresponsible recklessness of the girl was on Mitsos, and it seemed to him a fine piece of play – something between a dream and a drunkard's idea – to go a-hunting of Turks in this wild storm. The flashes of lightning, repeated and again repeated with redoubled quickness, kept showing them the ship which, since they first sighted it, had furled all sail and lay rolling on the water simply weathering the storm. The Revenge was carrying jib and staysail, and while the Turk drifted eastward, was rapidly diminishing the distance between them.

Mitsos rubbed his hands exultantly.

"She will be as safe as a hare in a gin," he said, "when once we get her between us and the land, for no power on earth will let her sail out in the teeth of the wind. But, Capsina, where is the Sophia, and where are the other two Turks?"

"Signal the Sophia," said the girl; "Kanaris will be on the watch, and if he is near enough to hear our signals he will soon know what we are about."

The two stern guns on the upper battery accordingly were fired in quick succession, this being the signal agreed on with Kanaris, and before long they saw the answering flash of two guns on their starboard, and five seconds afterwards heard the report.

"He has beaten out farther to sea," said Mitsos, "for, indeed, he is more prudent than we are. Well, we are alone in this piece. The Turks, they say, are afraid of ghosts by night, and so, for that matter, am I. They shall see a phantom ship, and it will speak with them."

The Revenge was still going south at about right angles to the wind, and as the coast trended eastward was every moment getting more sea room. The Turk, as they knew, was drifting due east, but for five minutes or so after the word to run out the guns was given no lightning broke the black and streaming vault, and they waited in thick, tense silence for another flash. But while above them the clouds remained pitchy and unilluminated, once and again to the south there came a flash distant and flickering like the winking of an eye, showing that another storm was coming up from that quarter.

Mitsos stamped with angry impatience.

"That is what I feared," he said; "the wind will shift farther south and we shall have to look to ourselves. Holy Virgin, send us a flash of lightning and west wind for half an hour more."

He and the Capsina were standing together on the bridge, Mitsos bareheaded and tangle-haired to the streaming rain, she with the brilliantly colored shawl wrapped round her head. Once he shifted his position, and putting forward his hand on the rail to steady himself, laid it on the top of hers, and she could feel the blood pulsing furiously through the arteries in his fingers. She stood perfectly still, not withdrawing her hand, and, indeed, he seemed unconscious that it was there. At last what they had been waiting for came; a furious angry scribble leaped from west to east over their heads, and peering out into the darkness they saw the Turk to leeward of them, some four hundred yards distant. At that Mitsos grasped the girl's hand till she could have cried out with the pain.

"There she is!" he cried. "We have her. We have her. Let go the helm and be ready to furl the sails on the instant. Oh, Capsina, this hour is worth living."

But the tumult in the girl's mind did not allow her to speak; the moment was too crowded even for thought, and she could only strain her eyes in the darkness to where they had seen the Turk. She felt not mistress of herself, and Mitsos, as she knew, was nigh out of his mind. Who could say what the next hour might bring? Death, shipwreck, victory, lightning, love, and madness chased each other through her brain. Meantime the ship, left to itself, spun round like a top into the wind, and under the hurricane that followed it dipped and fled like a bird born and bred to tempest after the other. But after a few headlong seconds Mitsos cried the order to furl all sail, and the canvas came dripping and streaming onto the deck. The men were at the guns with orders to fire the moment the lightning showed the ship, and as the spark leaped through the clouds again the forward guns on the port side of the Revenge, from all three decks, added their bellowing to the succeeding thunder. Anything approaching to accurate shooting was out of the question. They had some two seconds, for the flash was vivid and far leaping, for the sighting, and they simply fired into the heart of the loud and chaotic darkness.

Mitsos saw the Capsina standing not far from him after the first round, behind the fore-port gun on the main deck, and he took a step across the reeling ship to her side.

"Oh, Capsina, assuredly we are both madder than King Saul!" he said, "yet I find it glorious, somehow."

"Glorious!" and the girl's voice was trembling with passion and excitement. "I am living a week to the minute. Ah!" she cried, as another flash flickered overhead. "Again, again!"

The wind fell a little, but the violence and frequency of the lightning doubled and redoubled, and the guns answered it. The thunder no longer broke with a boom on some distant cloud-cliff, but with a crash intolerably sharp and all but simultaneous with the light. Some cross-current in the sea had swung the bows of the Revenge more southward, and Mitsos sent Christos flying aft to tell the stern guns on the port side to be ready to fire. From the enemy, in reply to their two first discharges, had come no response, but at the third they were answered, and a couple of oversighted balls went whirring overhead through the rigging like a covey of grouse. Then came two flashes of lightning in rapid succession, and by the second they could see a hole crash open in the side of the Turk from the balls they had fired by the light of the first. There was not time, nor near it, to load the guns twice, yet the Capsina in the frenzy of her excitement cuffed one of the gunners over the head, calling him a slow lout. The man only laughed in reply, and the Capsina laughed back in answer. Again and again the heavens opened, and this time a ball from the Turks came in through the port-hole of one of their guns, breaking the muzzle into splinters and ricochetting off on to the man to whom the Capsina had just spoken. He was shot almost in half, but his mouth still smiled, showing his white teeth. The ball which had killed him whistled on, striking a stanchion on the starboard side and plopped out again overboard, and Mitsos, with a great laugh, threw his cap after it.

Then came the end; the ships were at close range, and a ball from the Revenge, delivered from a port gun, struck the Turk just on the water-line, opening a raking tear in her side, and when next they could see her she was already listing to starboard, and with the rattle of the thunder mingled hundreds of human voices. The giddy, complete drunkenness of blood was on them; all the men laughed or shouted, or went back to their supper and drank the health of the dead and their portion in hell; and Mitsos, forgetting all in the frenzy and fury of culminated excitement, opened his arms, and flung them round the Capsina and kissed her as he would have kissed Yanni at such a moment.

"Another, another!" he cried; "thank God, another shipful will feed the fish of the gulf!"

"Mitsos, oh, little Mitsos!" cried the girl, and she kissed him on the cheek and on the lips.

The next moment they had started asunder, knowing what they had done, and the Capsina, burning with an exulting shame, turned from him and, without a word, went to her cabin.

CHAPTER IX

During the four months of Mitsos's absence the progress of the war in the Peloponnese had been checked by a thousand petty and ill-timed jealousies on the part of the chiefs and primates, and more than ever it was becoming the work of the people. It had been agreed in the preceding autumn that the Peloponnesian senate instituted at Tripoli should be dissolved at the fall of that fortress, which took place in October, and that a national assembly, now that the war was a business in which the whole nation, north and south alike, had taken up arms, should direct the supreme conduct of affairs. But this suited very ill with the greed and selfish ambitions of many of the military leaders and primates. Their places in the Peloponnesian senate were assured, and having a voice in its transactions, and for the most part a singular unanimity of purpose, their object being to get as much plunder as possible, it was not at all their desire to be superseded in power by deputies chosen from the whole of Greece. But until the national assembly was formed all power was vested in them, and with a swift insight – cunning, to use no uglier word, rather than creditable – they passed a resolution that the deputies to the national assembly should be elected by themselves.

Now the prince Demetrius Hypsilantes, though weak and indecisive, and altogether incapable of initiative action, had, at any rate, in the Peloponnesian senate that power which an honest and upright man will always hold in an assembly where the ruling motive is personal greed. But his curiously infirm mind clutched, like a child with a bright toy, rather at the show of power than at power itself, and now that the development of the war, with the demand for a more representative assembly, threatened to deprive him of that, he threw in his lot with the primates and captains of the Morea, preferring to retain the presidency of the Peloponnesian senate, and to be a roi mort, rather than take a subordinate part in the national assembly. For it seemed certain that Prince Mavrogordatos, who had been appointed governor-general in northwest Greece, would be elected President of Greece, and this for more than one reason. In the first place, he had not as yet shown himself too patently unfit for the office, while Hypsilantes had; in the second place, the Peloponnesian senate was far too heavily faction-ridden to co-elect out of their own body except on the barest majority against other candidates singly; and, in the third, they unanimously preferred to have as a president a man who, it was understood, would go back to his command in north Greece, leaving them to their own control, which was just equivalent to no control at all.

This national assembly met at Epidaurus in January; it shouted itself hoarse over many high-sounding declarations, loud and empty as drums; it conferred titles and honors; it devised banners and legislative measures, all highly colored, it presented Kolocotrones, the old chieftain and leader of an enormous and disorganized band of brave and badly armed men, with a brass helmet and the title of commander-in-chief in the Morea, and congratulated itself on having put things on a firm and orderly basis. Furthermore, it resolved to take the fortress of Nauplia without loss of time, with the effect that in May the siege was still going on, without any prospect of a calculable termination. Mavrogordatos, elected President of Greece and confirmed in his command of the northwest province, went back to his duties, and engaged on a series of futile manoeuvres which, as he had no acquaintance of any kind with military matters, ended in a disastrous defeat at Petta. Hypsilantes chose a new aide-de-camp in place of Mitsos, who had departed without leave to the Gulf of Corinth with the Capsina; and Kolocotrones put on his brass helmet and went on small marauding expeditions, returning now and then to Nauplia to see how the siege had got on, as a man watches a pot over a slow fire. Such were the main results of the great council of Epidaurus, and thus passed the days from January to May; till May the Greek fleet was idle, though a dozen ships at double pay blockaded Nauplia by sea in order to prevent its relief by the Turkish fleet, which every one very well knew was still at Constantinople. On land the lower town was in the hands of the insurgents, who, however, made no attempt to take the fortress, but waited for nature, in the shape of starvation, to act unaided. Petrobey, disgusted at the appointment of Kolocotrones as commander-in-chief, retired with the growling Mainats into his own country to wait till, as he hoped, the voice of the people should recall him, or, if not, until some one should be appointed commander-in-chief whom he could with honor serve under. For Kolocotrones, so he openly said, had brought dishonor on Greece by his disgraceful trafficking with the besieged in Tripoli, and was no more than a brigand chief weighing the honor of the nation against piasters, and finding the piasters the worthier.

Suleima was busy to and fro in the veranda and garden of the house, one May afternoon, her hands full, as behooved a good housewife, with the woman's part. The littlest one, now seven months old, was tucked away in his cot for his mid-day sleep, under the angle of shadow cast by the corner of the veranda, and every now and then Suleima would pause in her work and let her eyes rest on him a moment. The child slept soundly, one creased little hand lay on the wicker side of the cradle, a pink little nose pointed absurdly to the roof.

"He is altogether quite adorable," said Suleima to herself, pausing to look, and with a smile of utter happiness went back to her work.

The other corner of the veranda was covered with wooden trays, over each of which was stretched a confining sheet of gauze. In the trays were spread fresh shoots of mulberry-leaves, on which reposed hundreds of silk-worm moths of the fairer and fatter sex busy laying eggs, as in duty bound, and, it must be conceded, fulfilling their duty with the utmost profuseness. The males, smaller and rather duller in color, fluttered about against the gauze or walked drone-like across the leaves, taking rude short cuts over their wives when they happened to find those estimable women in their way. Outside the gauze on the floor of the veranda lay another tray full of shoots of mulberry-leaves eaten bare by the broods of young caterpillars already hatched, or still covered with the eggs, which looked like a rash of minute gray spots. Suleima was behindhand with her work, for the eggs should have been transferred to the mulberry-trees before they hatched, and she moved quickly backward and forward from the row of young trees in the garden which spring had clothed in their new gowns of green, carrying the egg-laden twigs in her hand. These she either tied to the living shoots or, where the foliage was thicker and no sudden gust of wind could blow them away, she merely put it in the middle of the growing leaves. Round the trees, below the lowest output of branches, was painted a band of lime to prevent the caterpillars straying. She sang gently to herself out of a happy heart as she moved on her errands, stopping every now and then on the step from the veranda, and looking out over the shining shield of the bay towards Nauplia with eyes eager for the ruffling land-breeze which should bring a ship, which she waited for, climbing up wave after wave against it as a man climbs a ladder rung by rung.

Outside in the garden the air was still windless, and the trees stood with leaves drooping and motionless as if in sleep. Only near the fountain the alder, whose finer fibre perceived a moving air where others let it pass unnoticed, whispered secretly to itself. The spring had been late in coming, but in a day, so it seemed, the sun grew warm and sluices of mellow air were flung open to flood the land, and from hour to hour the anemones and little orchids had multiplied themselves by some vast system of progression along the hill-side as the stars grow populous in the heavens at the fall of night. Already Suleima's red anemones, sheltered from north winds by the house, and more forward than those fed by the thinner soil of the moorland, were over; one blossom only still held its full-blown petals, and to Suleima it seemed a thing of good omen that there should be just one left for Mitsos on his return. For this morning the Revenge, recognizable by its area of canvas, vaster than that of other ships, and the raking line of its bows, and flying the Greek flag, had been sighted out in the gulf, from the village of Tolo, heading for Nauplia. But to the sea-breeze had succeeded a dead calm, and she was yet some three miles out, mirrored in the sea as still as a ship in a picture till the land-breeze should awake. Father Andréa had set off for Nauplia after the mid-day dinner to welcome Mitsos home, and to catch a glimpse of the Capsina.