



Produced by Clare Graham and Marc D'Hooghe at
http://www.freeliterature.org (Images generously made
available by the Internet Archive.)





THE VINTAGE

_A Romance of the Greek War of
Independence. By_ E. F. BENSON
_Author of "Limitations" "Dodo"
"The Judgment Books" etc._

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

"And the wine-press was trodden without the
city, and blood came out of the wine-press"



HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1898


[Illustration: "'COME AND SIT DOWN'"]


THIS ROMANCE

DEALING WITH THE REGENERATION OF HER PEOPLE

IS DEDICATED BY PERMISSION

TO

HER MAJESTY

OLGA

QUEEN OF THE HELLENES



CONTENTS


PART I

THE VINEYARD


    I.  The House on the Road To Nauplia
   II.  The Coming of Nicholas Vidalis
  III.  The Story of a Brigand
   IV.  The Midnight Ordeal
    V.  Mitsos Picks Cherries for Maria
   VI.  The Song from the Darkness
  VII.  The Port Dues of Corinth
 VIII.  The Mending of the Monastery Roof
   IX.  The Singer from the Darkness


PART II

THE EVE OF THE GATHERING

    I.  Mitsos Meets His Cousins
   II.  Mitsos and Yanni find a Horse
  III.  Mitsos Has the Hysterics
   IV.  Yanni Pays a Visit to the Turk
    V.  The Vision at Bassae
   VI.  Three Little Men Fall Off their Horses
  VII.  Mitsos Disarranges a House-roof
 VIII.  The Message of Fire

PART III

THE TREADING OF THE GRAPES

    I.  Te Deum Laudamus
   II.  Two Silver Candlesticks
  III.  The Adventure of the Fire-ship
   IV.  The Training of the Troops
    V.  The Hornets' Nest at Valtetzi
   VI.  The Entry of Germanos
  VII.  The Rule of the Senate
 VIII.  The Song from Tripoli
   IX.  Private Nicholas Vidalis
    X.  The Fall of Tripoli
   XI.  Father and Daughter
  XII.  The Search for Suleima
 XIII.  Nicholas Goes Home
  XIV.  The House on the Road to Nauplia



ILLUSTRATIONS

"'COME AND SIT DOWN'"
"'I AM FATHER ANDREA,' HE SHOUTED"
"HALF CARELESSLY SHE THREW INTO THE BOAT THE ROSES SHE HAD PICKED"
"SHE KISSED HIM LIGHTLY ON THE FOREHEAD"
"MITSOS SURVEYED HIM WITH EASY INDIFFERENCE"
"YANNI WAS STRUGGLING IN THE GRASP OF TWO MEN, THE GREEK AND THE TURK"
"KATSI AND A FINE SELECTION OF COUSINS ACCOMPANIED THE TWO"
"AFTER SUPPER MITSOS EXPOUNDED"
"IN THE CENTRE OF THE GREAT CHAMBER STOOD ONE WHOM IT DAZZLED HIS EYES
    TO LOOK UPON"
"'AH, BUT IT IS GOOD TO BE WITH YOU AGAIN'"
"MITSOS TORE UP GREAT HANDFULS OF UNDERGROWTH AND THREW THEM ON"
"MIXED WITH THE NOISE OF THE SINGING, ROSE ONE GREAT SOB OF A THANKFUL
    PEOPLE BORN AGAIN"
"BOTH THE BOYS, SEIZING THEIR OARS, ROWED FOR LIFE"
"CASTING HIMSELF DOWN THERE, IN AN AGONY BITTER SWEET, HE PRAYED"
"MITSOS, FLYING AT HIM LIKE A WILD-CAT"
"BORNE IN A CHAIR ON THE SHOULDERS OF FOUR MONKS"
"HE HAD CLAMBERED UP AND DROPPED DOWN ON THE OTHER SIDE"
"UNBUCKLING HIS SWORD, HE LAID IT ON THE TABLE"
"YANNI WAS BY HIM WITH A BRILLIANT SMILE ON HIS FACE"
"'WOULD YOU SLAY ME, FATHER?' SHE CRIED AGAIN"
"BY AN EFFORT HE RAISED HIMSELF ON HIS ELBOW"
"'SULEIMA!' CRIED MITSOS"




THE VINTAGE

Part I

THE VINEYARD




CHAPTER I

THE HOUSE OF THE ROAD TO NAUPLIA


Nauplia, huddled together on the edge of its glittering bay, and
grilled beneath the hot stress of the midsummer noon, stood silent as a
city of the dead. Down the middle of the main street, leading up from
the quay to the square, lay a scorching ribbon of sunshine, and the
narrow strips of shadow, sharp cut and blue, spoke of the South.

Along one side of the square ran the barracks of the Turkish garrison
of occupation, two-storied buildings of brown stone, solid but airless,
and faced with a line of arcade. These contained the three companies of
men who were stationed in the town itself, less fortunate in this oven
of heat than the main part of the garrison who held the airier fortress
of Palamede behind, overlooking the plain from a height of five
hundred feet. Down the west side stood the quarters of the officers,
and opposite, the prison, full as usual to overflowing of the native
Greeks, cast there for default of payment to the Turkish usurers of
an interest of forty or fifty per cent. on some small loan; for these
new Turkish laws of 1820 with regard to debt had made the prisons more
populous than ever. A row of shops and a couple of cafes along the
north struck a more domestic note.

A narrow street led out of the square eastwards, and passing the length
of the town, burrowed through the wall of Venetian fortification in
the manner of a tunnel. On the right the outline of the gray fortress
hill, precipitously pitched towards the town in a jagged edge like
forked lightning, rose steep and craggy, weathered by the wind in
places to a tawny red, and peppered over with sun-dried tufts of grass.
Along the base of this the road ran, cobbled unevenly in the Turkish
fashion, and after passing two or three villas which stood white and
segregate among their gardens of flowering pomegranate and serge-clad
cypress, struck out into the plain. Vineyards and rattling maize fields
bordered it on one hand; on the other, beds of rushes and clumps of
king-thistles, which peopled the little swamp between it and the bay.
The spring had been very rainless, and these early days of June saw the
country already yellow and sere. The clumps of succulent leaves round
the base of the asphodels were dried and brown; only the virile stems
with their seeding sprouts remained green and vigorous.

The blinding whiteness of the forenoon gave place before one of the day
to a veiled but unabated heat, and sirocco began to blow up from the
south. Furnace-mouthed, it raised mad little whirlwinds, which spun
across the road and over the hot, reaped fields in petulant eddies,
and powdered all they passed with fine white dust. Two or three hawks,
in despair of spying their dinner through this palpable air, and being
continually blown downwind in the attempt to poise, were following
the example of the rest of the world, and seeking their craggy homes
on the sides of Palamede till the tempest should be overpast. A few
cicalas in a line of white poplars by the wayside alone maintained
their alacrity, and clicked and whirred as if sirocco was of all airs
the most invigorating. The hills of Argolis to the north were already
getting dim and veiled, and losing themselves in an ague of heat.

By the roadside, a mile from the town, stood a small wine-shop, in
front of which projected a rough wooden portico open to the air on
three sides, and roofed with boughs of oleander, plucked leaf and
flower together. A couple of rough stools and a rickety table stood
in the shade in order to invite passers-by to rest, and so to drink,
and the owner himself was lying on a bench under the house wall in
wide-mouthed sleep. A surly-looking dog, shaggy and sturdy, guarded his
slumbers in the intervals of its own, and snapped ineffectually at the
flies.

Directly opposite the wine-shop stood a whitewashed house, built in
a rather more pretentious style than the dwellings of most Greek
peasants, and fronted by a garden, to which a row of white poplars
gave a specious and private air. A veranda ran around two sides of
it, floored with planks, and up the wooden pillars, by which it was
supported, streamed long shoots of flowering roses. A low wooden
settee, cushioned with two Greek saddle-bags, stood in the shade of the
veranda, and on it were sitting two men, one of whom was dressed in the
long black cassock of a priest--both silent.

Then for the first time a human note overscored the thundering of
the hot wind, and a small gray cat scuffled round the corner of the
veranda, pursued by a great long-limbed boy, laughing to himself. He
was dressed in a white linen tunic and tight-fitting linen trousers;
he had no shoes, no socks, and no hat. He almost fell over the settee
before he saw the two men, and then paused, laughing and panting.

"She was after the fish," he explained, "and I was after her. She shall
taste a slapping."

One of the two men looked up at the boy and smiled.

"You'll get into mischief if you run about in the heat at noonday
without your cap on," he said. "Come and sit down. Where are your
manners, Mitsos? Here is Father Andrea."

Mitsos knelt down, and the priest put his hand on the boy's rumpled
black hair.

"God make you brave and good," he said, "and forgive all your sins!"

"Now sit down, Mitsos," said his father. "Who is going to taste a
slapping?"

The boy's face, which had grown grave as he received the priest's
blessing, dimpled into smiles again.

"Why, my cat, Psepseka," he said. "The greedy woman was going down to
the cellar where I put the fish, and I went after her and caught her by
the tail. She spit at me like a little she-devil. Then she scratched
me, and I let go. But soon I will catch her again, and she shall pay
for it all twice over, Turkish fashion. See!"

He held out a big brown hand, down which Psepseka had scored three red
lines.

"What a fierce woman!" said his father. "But you're overbig to run
about after little cats. You're eighteen now, Mitsos, and your uncle
comes here this evening. He'll think you're a boy still."

The boy looked up from his examination of his hand.

"Uncle Nicholas?" he asked.

"Yes. Go and wash your hand, and then lay the table. Put some eggs to
boil, and get out some bread and cheese, and pick some cherries."

Mitsos got up.

"Will the father eat with us?"

"Surely; and put your shoes on before you come to dinner."

And without waiting the boy was off into the house.

The priest looked up at Mitsos' father as he disappeared.

"He is full young yet," he said.

"So I think, and so perhaps Nicholas will think. Yet who knows what
Nicholas thinks? But he is a good lad, and he can keep a secret. He is
strong too; he walked from here to Corinth last week, and came back
next day, and he grows like the aloe flower."

The priest rose and looked fiercely out over the garden.

"May the God of Justice give the Turks what they have deserved!" he
cried. "May He send them bitterness to eat and death to drink! May
their children be fatherless and their wives widows! They had no mercy;
may they find none! The curse of a priest of God be upon them!"

Mitsos' father sat still watching him. Eleven years ago Father Andrea
had been obliged to make a journey to Athens to settle about some plot
of land belonging to his wife, who had lately died, and, if possible,
to sell it--for under the Turkish taxes land was more often an expense
than a revenue. He had taken with him his only daughter, a girl of five
or six years of age, pretty even then, and with promise of wonderful
beauty to come. On his way home, just outside Athens, he had been
attacked by some half dozen Turks, and, after a desperate, hopeless
resistance, had been left on the road more dead than alive, and his
daughter had been carried off, to be trained, no doubt, to the doom of
some Turkish harem. He must have lain there stunned for some hours,
for when he awoke again to an aching consciousness of soul and body,
the day was already reddening to its close, and the shadow of the
hills of Daphne had stretched itself across the plain to where he lay.
Wounded and bleeding as he was, and robbed of the money he had got
for the land, he had dragged himself back to Athens, and stayed there
for weeks, until his hope of ever finding his Theodora again had faded
and died. For it was scant justice that was given to the Greeks by
their masters, who treated them as a thoughtless man will scarce treat
an animal that annoys him. Rape, cruelty, robbery was their method of
rule, and for the unruly a noose.

Since that time one thought, and one only, possessed his brain, a
thought which whispered to him all day and shouted to him in sleep--the
lust for vengeance; not on one Turk alone, on those who had carried
Theodora off, but on the whole of that race of devils. For eleven years
he had thought and schemed and worked, at first only with nothing more
than wild words and bloody thoughts, but of late in a soberer belief
that his day would come; for organized schemes of throwing off the
Turkish rule were on foot, and though they were still things only to be
whispered, it was known that agents of the Club of Patriots were doing
sure and silent work all over the country.

Father Andrea was a tall, finely made man, and, to judge from his
appearance, the story that he would tell you, how he and his family
were of pure Greek descent, had good warrant. He came from the
southwest part of Argolis, a rough, mountainous land which the Turks
had never entirely subdued. His father had died five years before, but
when Andrea went home after the capture of his daughter, the old man
had turned him out of the house and refused to see him again.

"A child is a gift which God has given the father," said he; "it were
better for him to lose himself than lose God's gift; and now we, who
are of the few who have not mixed with that devil-brood--we are fallen
even as others. You have brought disgrace on me, and on our dead, and
on our living, and I would sooner have seen you dead yourself than hear
this from your lips!"

"They were six to one," said Andrea, "and they left me for dead. Would
to God they had killed me!"

"Would to God they had killed you," said his father, "and her too."

"The fault was not mine. Will you not forgive me?"

"Yes, when the fault is wiped out by the death of Theodora."

"Of Theodora? What has she done?"

"She will grow up in shame, and mate with devils. Go!"

Five years passed before they met again. But one day Andrea's father,
left lonely in his house, moved by some vague desire which he hardly
understood himself, saddled his mule and went to Nauplia, whither
Andrea had gone. He was very old and very feeble in body, and perhaps
he felt that death could not be far from him; and to Andrea's cry of
welcome and wonder--"I have come to you, my son," said the old man,
"for otherwise we are both alone, and--and I am very old."

Day by day he used to sit looking up and down the road for Theodora.
There was a bend in it some quarter of a mile farther up, and
sometimes, when the spring days were warm to his bones, he would hobble
up to the corner and sit waiting for her there, where he could command
a longer stretch of country. But Theodora came not, and one evening,
when he came back, he sank into a chair without strength and called
Andrea to him.

"I am dying," he said, "and this is no season to waste idle words. When
Theodora comes back"--he always clung to the idea that she would come
back--"tell her that I waited for her every day, for I should have
loved to see her again. And if you find it hard, Andrea, to forgive
her, forgive her for my sake, for she was very little and the fault was
not hers; nor is it yours, and I was hard on you; yet if I had loved
you not, I should have cared the less. But if, when the day comes,
you spare your hand and do not take vengeance on the Turks to the
uttermost, then may my ghost tear you limb from limb, and give you to
the vultures and the jackals."

The old man rose from his chair.

"Vengeance!" he cried; "death to man, woman, and child. Smite and spare
not, for you are a priest of God and they are of the devil. Smite,
smite, avenge!"

He sank back in his chair again, his head fell over on to his shoulder,
and his arms rattled against the woodwork. And with vengeance on his
lips, and the desire of vengeance in his heart, he died.

From that day a double portion of his spirit seemed to have descended
on Father Andrea. One hope and one desire ruled his life--to help in
wiping out from Greece the whole race of Turks. To him innocent or
guilty mattered not; they were of one accursed brood. But though the
longing burned like fire within him, he kept it in, choking it as it
were with fresh fuel. He was willing to wait till all was ready. For
a year or two large organizations had been at work in North Greece
collecting funds, and, by means of secret agents, feeding and fanning
the smouldering hate against their brutal masters in the minds of the
people. Soon would the net be so drawn round them that escape was
impossible. And then vengeance in the name of God.

Mitsos had encouraged a small charcoal fire to heat the water, and he
went to fetch the eggs. Two minutes of puckered brow were devoted to
the number which he was free to boil. His father usually ate two, the
priest--and he cursed his own good memory--never ate more than one, and
he himself invariably ate as many as he could possibly