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.