The Capsina: An Historical Novel

by E. F. Benson

"Perfectly," said the Capsina, and they laughed again, causelessly.

The evening brought calmer weather, and to them somewhat calmer spirits, and that night after supper they talked quite soberly.

"Oh, but it is a strange world," said the Capsina; "to think that a week ago I had never set eyes on you, and now—well, there is no one in the world I know better. I have taken you as I found you, and you me; we have asked no questions of father or mother, and here we are. Oh, it is a strange world!" she said again.

Now there was perhaps no subject in the world to which Mitsos had dedicated less thought than the strangeness of the world. So he waited in silence.

"Is it not so?" went on Sophia. "What could have been less likely than the chance that put your boat in to Nauplia that night, and on the one tack. For, indeed, if you had taken two tacks, and so I had lost my pound to Kanaris, I should not have stopped there."

"Then should I at this hour have been catching the little fish in the bay," said Mitsos, "and that is only worth the doing when there is nothing forward. Yet I like the bay," he added, thinking of Suleima, "for I have had many good hours there. See, there is Taygetus, all snow! You would say she was a bride," he added, with an altogether unusual employment of metaphor.

He got up and leaned over the bulwarks looking out to the north, where the top of Taygetus appeared above a bank of low-lying cloud, itself bright in the evening sunshine. The sea had gone down considerably in the last hour, and they moved with a steady swing over the waves, no longer torn and broken. In the lessening wind they had been able to put on all sail, and the ship, with its towers of fresh snowy canvas, seemed like some great white seabird, now skimming, now dipping in the waves. From where she sat, Sophia could see the sky reddening to sunset under the arched foot of the main-sail, and when the bows rose to a wave Taygetus would appear as in a frame between the ship and the sail. Mitsos was leaning on the side, in front of the main-mast, bareheaded and blown by the wind, his face turned seaward, so that she saw only the strong clear line of brow and cheek. And the sight of him, listless, contented, and unconscious of her, filled the girl with a sudden spasm of anger and envy. The last week, which had so welded itself into the essentials of her life, seemed no more to him than the sound of the wind which had buffeted them, or the hiss of some spent wave which had struck them yesterday; she had been mad, so she thought, to have so let herself go, abandoning herself like that to the childish pleasure of the hour. It seemed the one moment incredible that he had not guessed that this child's-play was something far different to her, at the next impossible that it should have seemed to the boy to be anything else. They had played, laughed, chattered together, and to him the play had been play, the laughter and the chattering mirth only. Yet she counted the cost and regretted nothing, and waited with an eager patience for the fierce deeds in which their hands would be joined, and therein surely draw closer to each other. The affection and delighted comradeship of the boy was hers; hers too, so she promised herself, should be the keener, inevitable need for her when they did a man's work together.

That evening they passed round Cape Malea, keeping close in to the land, and Mitsos, as they turned northward, watched with all the pleasure of recognition the near passing of the coast where he and Yanni had made their journey with the messages for the mills. Sophia listened eagerly to the story, making Mitsos tell over again of the fight in the mill, and she sat silent awhile after he had finished.

"That explains you," she said at length; "for these last days you have been just a child, but I suspect that when there is work forward you are made a man; and there will soon be work forward for you and me, little Mitsos," she added to herself.

Two days after this they were nearing Patras and the entrance to the Corinthian Gulf, and being no longer in the open and empty seas, it was necessary to use some circumspection in their advance. They lay to some eight miles outside Patras, and Kanaris came on board to consult. The fortress of Patras was in the hands of the Turks; but they would give this a very wide berth, so Kanaris suggested, and pass Lepanto, another Turkish fortress in the narrows of the gulf, at night. It was there the greater risk awaited them. Lepanto was a heavily armed place, the gulf was less than three miles broad, shoal water lay broad on the side away from the fortress, and the channel close below its walls. Further, it was ludicrously improbable that either the Sophia or the Revenge would be allowed a passing unchallenged, for indeed the resemblance of either to peaceful trading brigs was of the smallest. But Sophia, with the support of Mitsos, demurred: it were better to seek a weed in a growing cornfield than to go into the gulf without some guidance as to the position the Turkish cruisers were in, but beyond doubt Germanos or some other of the revolutionists at Patras could give them information.