The Capsina: An Historical Novel

by E. F. Benson

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.