The crowds of people clustered along the town’s front cheered wildly. Every day for weeks they had been watching: blue-eyed, dusky Albanians, with horse-hair capotes and pistoled girdles; supple lighter complexioned Greeks in the national kirtle; Suliotes, whose mountain wildnesses were reflected in their dress; and a miscellaneous mixture of citizens of every rank and age.
For this vessel bore the coming savior of the Grecian nation, the great English peer whose songs for years had been sung in their own Romaic tongue, whose coming had been prated of so long by their primates—he who should make them victorious against the Turk. Was it not he who, in Cephalonia, on his way hither, had fed from his own purse the flying refugees from Scio and Patras, and sent them back with arms in their hands? Was he not the friend of their own Prince Mavrocordato, who in this same stronghold of Missolonghi had fought off Omer Pasha with his twenty thousand troops, and now controlled the provisional government of Western Greece? Was it not he who had sent two hundred thousand piastres to outfit the fleet before whose approach Yussuff Pasha’s squadron had withdrawn sullenly to Lepanto?
They had known of Gordon’s departure from Cephalonia from the forty Mariotes he sent ahead to be his own body-guard, and who strutted it about the fortifications, boasting of the distinction. His consort vessel had arrived, after narrowly escaping capture. His own brig, chased by the Turks, had been driven on the rocky coast. This they had learned from a surly Arab-like Englishman, his arm in a sling from an unhealed bullet-wound, who had been in the vessel and had found a footsore way overland.
The metropolitan had called a special service in the church for his lordship’s deliverance. Now his ship, escaping rocks and the enemy, had anchored safely in the night, and the roar of salutes from the Speziot brigs-of-war that lay in the harbor had waked the sleeping port. Since daylight the shore had been a moving mass, sprinkled with brilliant figures: soldiery of fortune, wearing the uniform of well-nigh every European nation.
There was one who watched that pushing, staring multitude who did not rejoice. As he listened to the tumult of gladness, Trevanion’s heart was a fiery furnace. His hatred, fostered so long, was the “be-all and end-all” of his moody existence, and the benefit Gordon had conferred when he delivered him from Cassidy’s marines, had become at length insupportable. With a perversion of reasoning characteristically Asiatic, he had chosen to wipe it from the slate and make the favor naught. He went to Leghorn and to the amaze of Cassidy, surrendered himself to the Pylades.
This voluntary act, perhaps, made vigilance lighter. He watched his chance, leaped overboard in the foggy morning, and would have got safe to shore but for one well-aimed musket. Chance put the departing brig in his way. He had been delirious in the forecastle for days from his wound, and knowledge of Gordon’s presence and mission had not come to him till the Grecian shore was in sight.
In his durance on the Pylades his hair and beard had grown; he fancied himself unrecognized. Hour by hour, watching Gordon covertly, seeing him living and sleeping on deck in all weathers, eating the coarse fare and enduring every privation of his sailors, Trevanion’s blood inflamed itself still more. He owed the other nothing now! He raged within himself at the celebrity the expedition and its leader acquired at Cephalonia. In the pursuit of Gordon’s vessel by the Turks he had hoped for its capture. When she ran upon the rocks he deemed this certain, and forsook her jubilantly. He had no fear of making his way afoot to Missolonghi; strangely enough, years before, during the Feast of Ramazan, he had fled over this same path to escape a Mohammedan vengeance, and pursued by the memory of a Greek girl abandoned to the last dreadful penalty because of him—a memory that haunted him still.
To-day, as Trevanion saw the vessel that held his enemy, his eyes gleamed with a sinister regard.
“Bah!” sneered a voice behind him in the Romaic tongue. “An English noble! Who says so? Mavrocordato. There are those who say he is a Turk in disguise who will sell the country to the sultan.”
The man who had spoken wore the dress of a chieftain of lower rank. His comrade answered with an oath: