The night was still, the air sopped with recent rain, the sky piled with sluggish cloud-strata through whose rifts the half-moon glimpsed obliquely, making the sea-beach that curved above Missolonghi an eerie checker of shine and shade.
Between hill and shore a lean path, from whose edges the cochineal cactus swung its quivers of prickly arrows, shambled across a great flat ledge that jutted from the hill’s heel to break abruptly above a deep pool gouged by hungry tempests. On the reed-clustered sand beyond the rock-shelf were disposed a body of men splendidly uniformed, in kirtle and capote, standing by their hobbled horses. On the rocky ledge, in the flickering light of a torch thrust into a cleft, were seated their two leaders conversing.
They had ridden far. The object of their coming was the safe delivery of a letter to the one man to whom all Greece looked now. The message was momentous and secret, the errand swift and silent. In Missolonghi, whose lights glowed a mile away, clanging night and day with hurried preparation, none knew of the presence of that company on the deserted shore, save one of its own number who had ridden, under cover of the dark, into the town’s defenses.
“This is a journey that pleases me well, Lambro,” averred one of the primates on the rock. “I wish we were well on our way back to the Congress at Salona, and the English lordos leading us. What an entry that will be! But what if he doubts your messenger—suspects some trickery of Ulysses? Suppose he will not come out to us?”
“Then the letter must go to him in Missolonghi,” said the other, “Mavrocordato or no Mavrocordato. He will come properly guarded,” he added, “but he will come.”
“Why are you so certain?”
“Because the man I sent to him an hour since is one he must trust. It was his sister the Excellency saved in his youth from the sack. Their father was then a merchant of the bazaar in this same town. Do you not know the tale?” And thereupon he recited the story as he had heard it years before, little dreaming they sat upon the very spot where, on that long-ago dawn, the Turkish wands had halted that grim procession. “I would the brother,” he closed, “might sometime find the cowardly dog who abandoned her!”
They rose to their feet, for dim forms were coming along the path from the town—a single horseman and a body-guard afoot. “It is the archistrategos,” both exclaimed.
The younger hastily withdrew; the other advanced a step to meet the man who dismounted and came forward.
Gordon’s face in the torch-light was worn and haggard, for the inward fever had never left him since that fierce convulsion—nature’s protest against unbearable conditions. Day by day, with the same unyielding will he had fought his weakness, pushing forward the plans for the assault on Lepanto, slaving with the gunners, drilling musket-men, much of the day in the saddle, and filching from the hours of his rest, time for his committee correspondence, bearing always that burning coal of anxiety—the English loan which did not come.