Edward Benson - The Vintage - A Romance of the Greek War of Independence

Nicholas paused a moment, and then laughed gently to himself.

"Never in my life shall I forget when we took Mohammed Bey – a fat-belly man, Mitsos, and a devil, with a paunch for two men and a woman's skin. To see him tied on his mule, crying out to Allah and Mohammed to rescue him and his dinner from the infidels, as if Mohammed had nothing better to do than look after such swine! I told him that he would only spend a day or two with us in the mountains until his friends ransomed him, adding that we would do our best to make him comfortable. But he wept tears of pure oil and said that Mohammed would avenge him, which, as yet, the Prophet has omitted to do. But there is one drawback to that sort of life, little Mitsos – one cannot keep clean. Sometimes, if one is travelling or being pursued, one has to go a whole day, or more, without water to drink, much less to wash in. Once, I remember, we had been all day without water, and could not find any when we stopped for the night; but there was a heavy dew, and, though it was a cold night, we all sat without our shirts for an hour, laying them on the ground until they were wet with dew, and then wrung them out into our mouths. Ah, horrible! horrible!"

Nicholas spat over the side of the boat at the thought, and then went on.

"For the most part we lived up in the mountains to the north of Arcadia, but somehow or other when summer came we all began to head southward again. We never spoke to each other of where we were going, for we all knew. And one evening, just before sunset, we were on the brow of a big wooded hill above Dimitzana and looked at our homes again. Homesickness and want of water – these were the two things which made me suffer, and I would drink the wringings of a shirt sooner than be sick for home.

"All next day we stopped there, sitting on that spur of wooded hill looking at home as if our eyes would start from our heads. Now one of us and then another would roll over, burying his face in his hands, and the rest of us would pretend not to notice. I cannot say for certain what the others did when they buried their faces like that; for myself I can only say that I sobbed – for some had wives there, and some children. And it hurts a man to sob unless he is a Turk, for Turks sob if the coffee is not to their taste.

"That evening I could not bear it any longer, and I said to the others, 'I must go down and see my house again.' They tried to stop me, for it is a foolish thing for an outlaw to go home when there is a price on his head; but I would not listen to them.

"And I went down to the village and walked up the street, past the fountain and past the church. I met many Greeks whom I knew, but I made signs to them that they should not recognize me. Luckily for me the garrison of Turks had been changed, and though I passed several soldiers in the street, they stared at me, being a stranger, but did not know who I was.

"Then I went up past the big plane-tree and saw my house. The windows were all broken and the door was down, for that, too, had the Turks done in their malicious anger at not finding me there. And on the door-step my father was sitting. He was very old, eighty or near it, and he was playing with a doll that had belonged to my daughter."

Nicholas paused a moment.

"Mitsos," he went on, "you do not know what it is to feel keen, passionate joy and sorrow mixed together like that, ludicrously. It is not right that a man should have to bear such a thing, for when I saw my father sitting there nursing the doll I could not have contained myself, not if ten companies of angels had been withstanding me or twenty of devils; and I ran up to him and sat down by him, and kissed him, and said, 'Father, don't you know me?' But he did not say anything. He only looked at me in a puzzled sort of way, and went on nursing his doll.

"It is odd that one remembers these little things, but the stupid face of the doll, somehow, I remember better than I remember the face of my father.

"I stopped in the village for an hour, perhaps more, and I swore an oath which I have never yet forgotten and which I will never forget. In the church we have a shrine to the blessed Jesus and another to His mother, and one to St. George, and to each of them I lit tapers and prayed to them that they would help me to accomplish my oath. They have helped me and they will help me, and you, Mitsos, can help me, too."

The boy looked up.

"What was your oath, Uncle Nicholas," he said, "and how can I help you?"

He laid his hand on Nicholas's knee, and Nicholas felt it trembling. The story was going home.

"I will tell you," he said; "but, first, I must tell you how it was I became an outlaw. This was the way of it:

"You never knew my wife: she died before you were born. She was the most beautiful and the best-loved of women. That you will not understand. You do not know yet what a woman is to a man, and your cousin Helen, to whom the doll belonged, would have been as beautiful as her mother. A fortnight before I became an outlaw there came a new officer to command the garrison at Dimitzana. He was a pleasant-seeming man, and to me, being the mayor of the village, he paid much attention. He would sit with us all in the garden after dinner. Sometimes I asked him to take his dinner with us; sometimes he asked me to dine with him. But Catharine always disliked him; often she was barely civil to him. He had been in the place nearly a fortnight when I had to go away for a night, or perhaps two, to Andritsaena for the election of the mayor, for I had some little property there, and therefore a vote in the matter. I left about midday, but I had not gone more than four hours from the town when I met a man from Andritsaena, who told me that the election would be an affair of form only, as one of the two candidates had resigned. So I turned my horse round and went home.

"It was dark before I got to the village, and I noticed that there was no light in my house. However, I supposed that Catharine was spending the evening with some friend, and I suspected nothing. But it got later and ever later and she did not come, so at last I went out and called at all the houses where she was likely to be. She was not at any of them, and no one had seen her. Then unwillingly, and with a heart grown somehow suddenly cold, I determined to go to the officer's quarters and ask if he had seen her. There was a light burning in one of the upper windows, but the door was locked.

"It was when I found that the door was locked that I drew my pistol from my belt and loaded it, and then I waited a moment. In that moment I heard the sound of a woman sobbing and crying from inside the house, and the next minute I had burst the door open. The room inside was dark, but a staircase led up from it through the floor of the room above, and I made two jumps of it. Helen – she was only seven years old – ran across the room, perhaps knowing my step, crying 'Father, father!' and as my head appeared the officer fired. He missed me, and shot Helen dead.

"Before he could fire again I fired at him. He fell with a rattling, broken sound across the floor, and never spoke nor moved. Catharine was there, and she came slowly across the room to me.

"'Ah, you have come,' she said; 'you are too late.'

"I sat down on the bed, and my throat was as dry as a sirocco wind, and laid the double-barrelled pistol, still smoking, by me. Neither of us, I am sure, gave one thought to the man who was lying there, perhaps hardly to Helen, for dishonor is worse than death; and for me I could say no word, but sat there like a thing broken.

"'You are too late,' she repeated; 'and for me this is the only way.'

"And before I could stop her she had taken up the pistol and shot herself through the head.

"The shots had aroused the soldiers, and two or three burst in up the stairs. With the officer's pistol, for I had no time to reload mine, I killed the first, and he went bumping down the stairs, knocking one man over. Then I opened the window and dropped. It was not more than ten feet from the ground, and I had only a few feet to fall."