Kitabı oku: «The Capsina. An Historical Novel», sayfa 19
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.
"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.
