The bells broke forth again, and amid their jubilant ringing the wearer of the red uniform passed slowly, with Prince Mavrocordato by his side, into the stone building which rose above the quay—the military headquarters of the revolutionary forces of Western Greece.
CHAPTER LVIII
THE ARCHISTRATEGOS
Missolonghi had become the center of European attention. The announcement of the English Committee which followed Blaquiere’s return to England was on every tongue.
The Courier had printed a single sneering paragraph in which had been compressed the rancor of William Godwin, the bookseller. This stated that George Gordon was not even in Greece, that he was in reality living in a sumptuous villa on one of the Ionian Islands, with the Contessa Guiccioli, writing a companion poem to “Don Juan.” But before the stringent disapproval with which this bald fabrication was received, the Courier slunk to shamefaced silence.
Thereafter, in the columns of newspaper, pamphlet and magazine, there was to be distinguished a curious tension of reserve. It was the journalistic obeisance to a growing subterranean yet potent revulsion of feeling. Dallas had soon found himself the recipient of invitations from influential hosts desirous to hear of his visit to Italy. In the clubs the committee’s bulletins were eagerly discussed. The loan it solicited found subscriptions and the struggle of the Cross with the Crescent—the cause whose beating heart was now Missolonghi—began to draw the eyes not of London but of England; not of England but of Europe; not of Europe but of the world.
To the company gathered in the citadel of this little marshy port on the Greek sea-shallows, where freedom stirred in the womb of war, outer comment came only after multiplied reverberations. They toiled ceaselessly—a nucleus of hard-working general officers culled from everywhere—planning, drilling, gathering stores, preparing for the inevitable attack of the Turkish armies massing at Lepanto, trying to knit into organization the tawdry elements of brigandage to which centuries of Turkish subjection had reduced a great nation. They labored under a single far-sighted leadership: that of the archistrategos of the Greek forces, whose eye seemed sleepless and his brain indefatigable.
Gordon foresaw that Greece’s greatest enemy was not the Turks, but her own dissensions. Unification of spirit and authority was necessary before all. When Ulysses, the recalcitrant, sent him an obsequious embassy it bore back a terse answer: “I come to aid a nation, not a faction.” Ulysses cursed in his beard and sent Trevanion, for whom he had found more than one cunning use, to seduce the Suliote forces camped within the insurgent lines.
Meanwhile, the money Gordon had brought melted rapidly. He had contributed four hundred pounds a week for rations alone, besides supporting batteries, laboratories and an entire brigade, settling arrears and paying for fortification. However large his private resources, they must soon be exhausted. Could the English loan fail? And if not, would it come in time? If it was too long delayed, disaster must follow. Discipline would lapse. The diverse elements on the point of coalescing, would fly asunder. The issue would be lost. This thought was a live coal to him night and day.
The rainy season set in with all its rigors. Missolonghi became a pestilential mud-basket beside which the dikes of Holland were a desert of Arabia for dryness. An unknown plague fastened on the bazaar and terrified the townspeople. But in all conditions, Gordon seemed inspirited with a calm cheerfulness.
He thought of Teresa continually. Oddly enough, she stood before him always as he had once seen her on a square in Venice, with moonlight tangling an aureole in her gold hair, her face now not frozen with mute horror—that picture had vanished forever!—but serene with love and abnegation. This face lighted the page as he labored with his correspondence. It went with him on the drenching beach when he directed the landing of cannon sent by the German committee—more dimly seen this day, for a peculiar dizziness and lethargy which he had battled for a fortnight, was upon him.