Эдвард Бенсон
The Capsina. An Historical Novel

"Kanaris," she said, "I have found him who will take, your place when you have command of the old Sophia, as you will on this next cruise. Oh, be tender with her, man, and remember, as I have always said, that she must be humored. She will sail to a head wind if you do not overburden her, but too much sail, though no more than others carry, would ever keep her back. Ah, well, you know her as well as I do. What was I saying? Oh yes, Mitsos Codones, the little Mitsos, you know, will join me here; he who gained me a pound this afternoon. He sails with me in place of the Captain Kanaris."

Now the offer of the presidency of Greece would have been less to the taste of Kanaris than the command of the Sophia, and his gratitude, though not eloquent, was sincere. But presently after the Capsina, looking up, saw doubt in his eye.

"Well?" she said.

"It is this," said Kanaris, "though indeed it is no business of mine. Mitsos is but a lad, and, Capsina, what do you know of him? Surely this afternoon he was a stranger to you."

Sophia smiled, and with a wonderful frank kindness in her black eyes.

"And you, Kanaris," she said. "Did not a strange sea-captain come to Hydra one evening? Did he not talk with me – how long – ten minutes? And was not a bargain struck on his words? Was that so imprudent a job? By all the saints, I think I never did a better!"

"But he is so young, this Mitsos," said Kanaris.

"Am I so old? We shall both get over it."

Kanaris filled his glass, frowning.

"But it is different: you are the Capsina."

"And he is of the Mainats. That is as good a stock as ours, though our island proverb says we are the prouder. And, indeed, I am not sure we are the better for that, for I would sooner have Mitsos here than, than Christos."

The Capsina, it must be acknowledged, found an intimate pleasure in putting into plain words what Kanaris could not let himself conjecture in thought.

"Christos?" he said. "Well, certainly. And if, he being a cousin of yours, I may speak without offence, it would be a very bold or a very foolish man who would wish to have Christos only to depend on in the sailing of a war brig."

"And the sailing of my brig will be the work of Mitsos," said Sophia. "Oh, Kanaris, you have lost a pound, and how bitter you are made."

Kanaris laughed.

"Well, God knows he can sail a boat," he said. "My pocket knows it."

"Then why look farther for another and a worse?" said the Capsina.

Kanaris was silent; the Capsina had hinted before that she meant him to command the Sophia in the next cruise, but he had yet had no certain word from her. And, indeed, his ambition soared no higher, and to no other quarter – to command the finest brig but one in the island fleet was no mean thing; but it is a human failing common to man to view slightingly any one who takes one's own place, even when it is vacant only through personal promotion. Kanaris's case, however, was a little more complicated, for the Capsina was to him what he had thought no woman could have been. His habit of mind was far too methodical to allow him the luxury of doing anything so unaccounted for as abandoning himself to another; but there were certainly three things in his soul which took a distanced precedence of all others. Ships were one, destruction of Turks another, and the Capsina was the third. In his more spiritual moments he would have found it hard to draw up a reliable table of precedence for the three.

And certainly he was in one of his more spiritual moments just now, for there were no Turks about, his ambition to command a fine ship was satisfied, and the Capsina seated opposite to him had never so compelled his admiration. To-night there was something triumphant and irresistible in her beauty, her draught of sparkling happiness had given a splendid animation to her face, and that flush which as yet he had only associated in her with anger or excitement showed like a beacon for men's eyes in her cheek. But in her face to-night the heightened color and sparkling eye had some intangible softness about them; hitherto, when it had been excitement that had kindled her, she looked more like some extraordinarily handsome boy than a girl, but to-night her face was altogether girlish, and the terms of comradeship on which Kanaris had lived with her, uncomplicated by question or suggestions of sex, were suddenly and softly covered over, it seemed to his mind, by a great wave of tenderness and affection. The Capsina, the captain of the boat, the inimitable handler of a brig, were replaced by a girl. He had been blind, so he thought; all these weeks he had seen in her an able captain, a hater of Turks – a handsome boy, if you will – and he was suddenly smitten into sight, and saw for the first time this glorious thing. But Kanaris was wrong; he had not been blind, the change was in the other.

But here, coincident with the very moment of his discovery, was the moment of his departure, and he left her with another, a provokingly good-looking lad, the hero of an adventure just after the Capsina's heart, and the subject for the songs of the folk. Was not Mitsos just such as might seem godlike to this girl? In truth he was.

She filled his glass again, and he sat and drank in her beauty. She seemed different in kind to what she had ever looked before – her eyes beat upon his heart, and the smile on her beautiful mouth was wine to him. He looked, weighing his courage with his chance, opened his mouth to speak, and stopped again. Truly such perturbation in the methodical Kanaris touched the portentous.

The Capsina had paused after her question, but after a moment repeated it.

"So why look farther for another and a worse?" she said again.

"Don't look farther," he said, leaning forward across the table, and twisting the sense of her question to his own use; "look nearer rather. Look nearer," he repeated; "and, oh, Capsina – "

The smile faded from her mouth but not from her eyes, for it was too deeply set therein to be disturbed by Kanaris.

"What do you mean?" she said.

"It is that I love you," said he.

But she sprang up, laughing.

"Ah, spare yourself," she said. "You ought to know I am already betrothed."

"You betrothed?"

"Yes, betrothed to the brig. No, old friend, I am not laughing at you. You honor me too much. Let us talk of something else."

Mitsos meantime was on his way back to the Capsina's betrothed. He had sailed rapidly across the bay, and made the anchorage close to the house in no longer than half an hour. His father, Constantine, had died two months ago, and since then he and Suleima had lived alone. Just now, however, Father Andréa was with them, staying a few days on his way to Corinth, where he was summoned by the revolutionists, and Mitsos, going through the garden to the house, saw him walking up and down by the fountain, smoking his chibouk.

"Ah, father," he said, "I am late, am I not? But I must be off again. I met the Capsina to-day in Nauplia, and she has offered me a place on her brig – the place Kanaris held under her, or rather with her, she says. She sails to-morrow morning. Suleima is in the house?"

"Yes, with the child, to whom the teething gives trouble. This is very sudden; but, lad, I would not stop you, nor, I think, will Suleima. Go to her, then."

Suleima had heard voices, but she was trying to persuade the baby to go to sleep, while the baby, it seemed, preferred screaming and struggling. She was walking up and down the room with it, crooning softly to it, and rocking it gently in her arms. She looked up smiling at her husband as he entered.

"I heard your voice," she said, "and I would have come out, but I could not leave the adorable one. Poor manikin, he is troubled with this teething!"

"Give me the child," said Mitsos; and the baby, interested in his own transference from one to the other, stopped crying a moment, and Mitsos bent over it.

"Oh, great one," he said; "is heaven falling, or are the angels dead, that you cry so? How will you be able to eat good meat and grow like the ash-tree, unless there are teeth to you? And how should there be teeth unless they cut through the gums – unless, like an old man, you would have us buy them for you?"

The baby ceased crying at the deep, soothing voice, and in a moment or two it was asleep.

"It is wonderful," said Suleima, taking it back from Mitsos, and laying it in the cot; "but, as you know, I have always said you were often more a woman than all the women I have ever seen."

Mitsos laughed.

"A fine big skirt should I want and a double pair of shoes," he said. "And, oh, Suleima, but it were better for the Turks I had been just a chattering woman."

"Eh, but what a husband have I got," said she, pinching his arm. "He thinks himself the grandest man of all the world. But what is there you have to tell me? – for I read you like father reads a book – there is something forward, little Mitsos."

"Yes, and indeed there is," said Mitsos, "but what with you and the child, and all this silly, daffing talk, it had gone from my mind. But this it is, most dear one, that the Capsina is here, and she has offered me the post just under her on the new ship she has built, that one you and I saw put in this morning. Eh, but it is grand for me! She will sail to-morrow."

"To-morrow! Oh, Mitsos!" Then, checking herself. "Dearest one, but your luck is still with you. She is a fine, brave lass they say, and handsome, too, and, so Dimitri told me, her ship is the fastest and best in Greece. So go, and God speed you, and I will wait, and the little one shall make haste to grow! You will stop here to-night? No? Not even to-night? Come, then, I must look out your clothes for you at once, for you must have your very best, and be a credit to the housewife."

She held Mitsos's hands for a moment, and put up her face to his to be kissed.

"Blessed be the day when first I saw you!" she whispered.

"And blessed has been every day since," said Mitsos.

"Even so, dearest," and she clung to him a moment longer. Then, "Come," she said, "we must make much haste if you are to go to-night, and indeed you shall leave behind that shirt you are wearing, to find it clean and fresh and mended when you come back. I will not have you going ragged and untidy, and oh, Mitsos, but your hair is a mop. Who has had the cutting of it? Sit you down and make no more words, and be trimmed."

Suleima got a pair of scissors, and clapping Mitsos in a chair, put the light close, and trimmed and combed out his tangled hair, with little words of reproof to him.

"Eh, but she will think you a wild man of the woods, fit only to frighten the birds from the crops. Sure, Mitsos, you will have been rubbing your head in the sand, and it was only yesterday you were scrubbing and soaping all afternoon. Well, what must be, must. Shut your eyes now and sit still," and clip went her scissors along the hair above the forehead.

"It is like cutting the pony's mane," she went on. "Such horse-hair I never saw yet. Well, the stuffing is half out of the sofa-cushion, and this will all do fine to fill it again. Now, stop laughing, lad, or an oke of hair will fall down that throat of yours, and so you will laugh never more. There, you are a little less of a scare-man. Get up and shake, and then change that shirt and trousers."

In an hour Mitsos was ready, and with a big rug on his shoulder in which his clothes were wrapped, he and Suleima set off to the little harbor below the house. The boy was going with him in order to take the boat back again, but Mitsos had sent him on ahead, and he and Suleima walked slowly down to the edge of the bay beneath a sky thick sown with stars.

"Mitsos," she said, "it will be with a heavy heart and yet a very light one that I shall say good-bye; heavy because we love one another, and yet for that reason very light. And, however far you are from me, yet you are here always in my heart, and the child is daily more like you. And, indeed, how should I love one who sat at home and went not out on these great quests? Where should I have been now, think you, oh foolish one, if you had not gone catching fish and then Turks? so do not contradict me. And oh, Mitsos, I am going to say a very foolish thing for the last. You are so dear to me that I can scarcely speak of you to others, for so I seem to share you with them; and it would please me if I thought that you too would be very sparing of my name, for so I shall feel that, as on those beautiful nights together on the bay, we enjoyed each other in secret, and none knew. And now we are come to the boat – look! – and the boy has made ready. It is very bravely that I say good-bye to you, for with my whole heart I would have you to go. Oh, most beloved!"

For a minute, or perhaps two, they stood there silent, and though the smile on Suleima's mouth was a little tremulous and her eyes were over-brimmed, it was for very love that the tears stood there. And Mitsos kissed her on the eyes and on the mouth, and yet again; and though his voice was betwixt a whisper and a choke, his heart was light even as hers, and full of love.

The news of his coming was brought to the Capsina as they sat in the cabin by Michael's furious barking at the boat, which he heard drawn up alongside.

The Capsina got up when she heard that, and again her face so glowed that Kanaris wondered.

"That will be the little Mitsos," she said, "for a thousand pounds. He will want supper it may be," and she went on to the main deck to let a ladder down to him, for most of the crew were on shore still.

"Ahoy! ahoy!" shouted Mitsos from his boat. "Oh, Michael, be still! Am I a robber?" and he shouted again.

"Yes, I am coming," cried the Capsina, in answer. "It is you, is it not, Mitsos? Wait a moment, and I will let down a ladder to you."

Mitsos climbed up with his bundle on his shoulder, and bade the lad put back for home again. "So I am here," he said to the Capsina.

"And you are welcome – doubly welcome," said the Capsina, with a sparkling eye. "Oh, Mitsos, take care of your head. Are you not a size too large for my boat? I never thought of that. Come down to the cabin and have your supper; Kanaris and I have eaten, but we will sit with you."

She blew on her whistle, and gave Mitsos's bundle in charge to be taken to his cabin, and led the way.

"You know Kanaris? No?" she asked. "Ah, I remember you saying you did not. He is of the best of my friends. This way, little Mitsos. Here we are."

Though Kanaris had been disposed to think with jealousy of his successor, it was not in the nature of man to resist Mitsos. For he had all the ardor of a boy, as befitted his years, and with that an experience beyond them; and the modesty that comes from having done great deeds mixed with none of the conceit of the imagination that sees oneself acting greatly, should the chance come, and neither man nor woman could look in his face, as frank and cheerful as the eyes of a dog, and feel no impulse of friendliness. And Kanaris was not a man who from habitual reserve would distrust a friendly impulse when it came, and so it was that in half an hour they were all chatting together, like children, of ships and fish and winds and waves and the hundred healthy things that made the environment of the life of all of them. As the evening wore on they heard the crew coming merrily back from Nauplia, but they sat talking late, like friends who have met again.

Their three cabins were close together, and the Capsina, after showing Mitsos his, went to her own and sat there in the dark, too happy to think or sleep. She heard Michael's nails tapping along the wooden floor outside, and then with a soft thump he curled himself up outside her door, according to his custom. From Mitsos's cabin she heard the rattle of shoes, and soon after the partition wall between them creaked as he curled himself up in his berth against it. Then there was silence, and still she sat in the darkness of her cabin, looking out from the port-hole towards the quay of Nauplia, black beneath the stars, and seeing the lights from the town cast in long unwavering reflection over the calm water, and filled with a rapturous uncontent.

She was on deck next day, while yet night was mixed with morning, fresh as a flower, though having slept but little, and before six she gave the order to hoist sail, for a fair wind was blowing, and they could clear the harbor without need of boat or tow-rope. Day was coming infinitely clear and sweet; overhead there still burned a big star or two, which got paler and paler every moment till they seemed white and unluminous, like candles in the sunshine, and by degrees the pale primrose strip of sky in the east flushed with color before the upvaulting of the sun. The flush spread to the zenith, and was answered by the surface of the bay, and before they cleared the point of Palanede the sunrise was on them. She turned just as the first rays struck the ship, and saw Mitsos just coming on to the deck a few yards away; and the sun shining on her face, and Mitsos gladdening her eye, gave a radiance to her beauty that drew his eyes to her in a long gaze.

And in pain and rapture together she looked at him, and her heart exulted in its noble and self-rendered slavery.

For a moment neither spoke; then, and with an effort:

"So you have slept well, little Mitsos? And you do not repent our sudden bargain? There is time yet to put you ashore."

"I have slept all night and I repent nothing."

The Capsina did not answer at once, but looked out to sea, and wetting her finger, held it up into the wind and glanced at the compass.

"The wind is due north," she said, "and only light. The channel of Spetzas, through which we pass, is east-southeast. The distance you should know. Give the order, little Mitsos."

Mitsos smiled and scratched his head.

"Eh, but I do not know the ship," he said.

"Look at it, then."

Mitsos looked at the lines of the vessel, then at the canvas she was carrying.

"First hoist jib and halyards," he said. "We can carry more sail than this."

"And then?"

"Oh, Capsina," he cried, "but you want to find me ignorant! However, I should say, go right across to within a mile of Astra, squaring the sails ever so little, and then make the channel in one run. And now, God defend me from having said a very foolish thing."

"I think your prayer is heard," said the Capsina. "Therefore, it is time to have breakfast," and she called Mitsos's orders.

"Come down," she said; "the ship is running free and fine, and it will be an hour yet before we put on the second tack. Ah, here is Michael. He knows you, does he not? That always seems to me a thing of good omen, for indeed I trust Michael more than I trust myself. He welcomed Kanaris so, and I never had a better friend. Is Kanaris not up yet? He knows he is only a passenger now, and will have his lie in bed. Well, we will breakfast all the same."

When they had breakfasted, Sophia took Mitsos a tour of the ship. She was a brig of three hundred and fifty tons, very long for her beam, and deep-keeled. On her upper deck she carried six nine-inch guns – two forward under the forecastle, two amidships, and two astern. Both forward and stern guns were mounted on a carriage, which revolved nearly half a circle and looked from a very wide port, so that the stern guns could be trained on a point due astern, or be used for a broadside, or could fire forty-five degrees ahead, and the bow guns in the same way could fire straight ahead, or in any direction up to forty-five degrees behind them. The main-deck was armed in a similar manner with six guns, placed not directly below the upper-deck guns, but some ten yards horizontally from them, so that the smoke from the lower should not rise directly and interfere with the sighting of the upper. Mitsos, to the Capsina's great delight, saw and commended this arrangement, which was new to him. On the main-deck the forward and stern guns – four-inch, not six-inch – could not fire right astern or right ahead, but they had a wide broadside range. Below the deck the battery consisted of twelve guns, six on each side; the four guns in the centre of each side being of the same weight as those on the upper deck, but those in the bows and stern being four-inch guns. Thus in all she carried twenty-four guns – sixteen six-inch and eight four-inch – and it was a sight that made Mitsos lick his lips with blood-thirstiness.

"You would say she was a fortress," he said.

The two chattered like children over a new toy all their own, and Kanaris, who soon joined them, seemed to each to be like an elder who had outgrown enthusiasm; yet even to him the toy seemed flawless. The Turkish men-of-war and cruisers alike were contemptibly inferior in point of speed, and the men-of-war, which were armed with much heavier guns, carried all their strength in the broadside, while the Capsina's ship had two guns which could shoot straight ahead or astern, and six which could fire on either diagonal.

Meantime the ship was nearing Astra, and the wisdom or foolishness of Mitsos's tactics would soon be patent. But while they were still three miles off he turned to the Capsina.

"I have made a mistake," he said. "If we go about at once we shall still make the channel. For indeed she could go as an arrow goes."

The Capsina smiled with a thrill of pleasure in her ship.

"I won a pound over you yesterday," she said; "and if Kanaris will bet again, I will stand to win another. Give your orders, little Mitsos."

Kanaris looked incredulous.

"Kranidi is a very fine place," he said; "but I take it we want to sail between Spetzas and the land."

"Will you bet?" asked the Capsina.

Kanaris paused a moment, and heard Mitsos giving the order in a voice extraordinarily confident.

"I think I will not bet," he said.

After that there was the sailing-gear of the ship to be gone through. To Mitsos, used as he was to the big schooner sail, these square canvases seemed a thought unwieldable, but the foresails, the jib, and halyards had taken his fancy at once.

"It is a rein to a horse," he said; "it must go as you will."

"And it is according to your will that it shall go," said Sophia.

The hours of the golden day went by; they had made eight knots in the first hour, and nine in the second; and about ten in the morning, Kranidi, a grain of sparkling salt in the gray stretch of hill, appeared small and very distant. And at that Mitsos frowned.

"Again I was wrong," he said; "we might have put about a mile sooner. But, indeed, how was I to know?"

They were through the channel of Spetzas before noon; but presently, after the wind dropped altogether, and for a couple of hours, they lay becalmed on a windless sea, but swept slowly northward by the current running up the coast. The Capsina chafed at the delay, for though she would have waited two days or three at Nauplia, as she had said, for Mitsos, the loss of a few hours now seemed wholly disproportionate, for she was very eager to get off again on the fresh cruise. Kanaris remembered the morning he had spent with Nikolas on the Gulf of Corinth, and said to the Capsina:

"I was with Nikolas Vidalis in just such a position as this, and he said what seemed to me a very wise thing, Capsina: 'I am never in a hurry,' says he, 'when I am going as fast as I can.'"

"Ah, he was a man," said the Capsina; "but when did you ever know a woman who thought that? Why, it is only when we are going as fast as we can that we are in a hurry; if we are not going our quickest, we are not in a hurry."

Mitsos was lying on the deck, with his cap pushed over his eyes, and his back against the mast.

"That is not what Uncle Nikolas meant," he remarked.

The Capsina laughed.

"Wisest little Mitsos, explain to me, then."

"He meant – he meant – Oh, surely you see what he meant," said Mitsos, feeling too sleepy to express himself.

"Well, anyhow, his nephew is not in a hurry," said Sophia, looking at his lazy length.

"His nephew is completely comfortable," said Mitsos. "It is very good to be on this ship, and my bones are sweet to me."

Sophia felt a trifle irritated with him. It had been extraordinarily pleasant to her to see him make himself so readily at home the evening before, but just now she felt a little ill-used at his entire contentment with the brig and her and himself. She would have preferred a little feeling of some sort to any amount of pure content. But a moment afterwards he looked up quickly.

"There is a breeze coming," and he got up. "Yes, there it comes," he said, pointing southward. "We shall have to square sails till we get round again. Shall I give the order, Capsina?"

"Please." Then when he joined her again: "How did you know the breeze was coming, little Mitsos?"

"I don't know. Perhaps I smelt it. Really, now you ask me, I find I can't tell you."

"That is curious," said the Capsina. "I had heard there were men who could do that, but I put it down to folks' tales. Michael, I think, knows sometimes, and now I look at you I notice your nostrils grow big and small like a dog's."

"They are as God made them," said Mitsos, piously.

The Capsina laughed. "Oh, inimitable boy!" she cried. "Come, let us look round the ship again. Yes, it is good to be at sea, is it not? Here comes the breeze indeed. There! Did you see her shake herself as if she woke up suddenly, this beautiful shining ship, all ours! See how quickly she gathers way! We shall be at Hydra by five if this holds. Of course you will live with me there till we start, but I expect we shall be on the ship more than off. You might well have smelt the breeze, Mitsos, for surely it smells very good, and there is more to come, or I am the more mistaken."

It was still an hour before the sunset when they cast anchor in the harbor of Hydra, for the wind had got up and promised a stormy night. The clan welcomed the Capsina's new importation with fervor when they heard who it was; and certain of the primates wondered whether she would demand another seat in the assembly. But in truth the Capsina had other things to think of; for the Hydriot fleet was not going to cruise again till the spring, while she was going to make all speed to be off, with Kanaris on the Sophia, and she and Mitsos on the Revenge, for so had the new ship been named. And in these things there was much food for many thoughts.