The Capsina: An Historical Novel

by E. F. Benson

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.