He stretched his hand toward the teeming quay. “They have waited for him as for the Messiah. All the chiefs, except Ulysses, who has always plotted for control—and his spies are in the town at this moment!—will defer to him. With a united front what could Greece not do! The Turk could never enslave her again. With no supreme head, her provinces are like the untied bundle of sticks—easily broken one at a time!”
They watched in silence while the rowers drew nearer across the shallows.
“I did not hope to see you here, Pietro,” Mavrocordato said affectionately, as they started toward headquarters.
Gamba answered simply: “She sent me—to guard him if I could.”
Ten minutes more and the boat was at the landing.
The instant its bow touched the masonry before line of picked troops, a single bell rang out from the Greek church. Other iron tongues took it up. The walls shook with rolling salvos of artillery, the firing of muskets and wild music, as the man in the scarlet uniform, colorless and strangely composed amid the tossing agitation, stepped on shore to grasp the hand of Prince Mavrocordato, standing with a long suite of European and Greek officers.
As his gaze swept over the massed soldiery, the frantic people, the women on roofs and balconies, the houses hung with waving carpets,—a rainbow motley of color,—a great shout rolled along the embankments, a tumult mingled with hand-clapping like a silver rain, that drowned all words. Women in the multitude sobbed, and on the balconies little children were held up in stronger arms to see their deliverer. Every eye was on that central figure, with face like the Apollo Belvedere and a step that halted as if with fatigue, but with a look clear and luminous and the shadow of a smile moulding his lips.
“Panayeia keep him!” sobbed a weeping woman, and threw herself between the lines of soldiers to kiss the tassel of his sword.
The metropolitan, his robes trailing the ground, lifted before him a silver eikon glittering in the sun.
The soldiers presented arms.