The Capsina. An Historical Novel

"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 the Revenge to 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 the Revenge is 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.

CHAPTER XV

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.