At half-past ten o'clock the officers went ashore. When they had left the ship, the others returned to the cabin.
"I should not take it to heart, Mr. Beveridge," Will Martyn said cheerfully, seeing how depressed his employer looked at the news he had heard. "Of course the Greeks have behaved badly--horribly badly; but you see it is because the poor beggars are not much better than savages, and never will be better as long as they are kept down by the Turks. All these things will right themselves in time. As you said, they are no worse than the French when they rose, or than the Spanish peasantry whenever they got a chance, or the Irish peasantry, and we must not look at it from our own standpoint; once they are free they will get a settled government and become a nation again, and that is what we have got to help them to do. We are not going to land and take part in massacres. All we have got to do is to look out for a Turkish ship of war, and pull down her colours whenever we get a chance. But even more than that, what I want specially to do as soon as we can is to get rid of some of that cargo in our hold. That is what is bothering me at present."
"Thank you, Martyn," Mr. Beveridge said, holding out his hand to him. "It is trying to hear of a glorious cause being disgraced by such horrible atrocities, but the cause remains the same, and the atrocities are, as you say, such as have occurred among other peoples when their blood has been heated to boiling point. This will not shake my determination to aid Greece in her struggle for freedom."
The next two days Mr. Beveridge and Horace spent entirely on shore. Speaking modern Greek fluently, they were able to converse with people of all classes from the mainland, and they learned from their reports that Captain O'Grady's account of the utter confusion existing from end to end of the country was in no way exaggerated. As soon as the Greeks perceived that Mr. Beveridge was a well-wisher to their cause, and judging him from his possession of a large yacht to be a wealthy man, innumerable schemes were proposed to him, all involving his placing himself in the hands of the proposer and advancing him a considerable sum of money. These projects Mr. Beveridge resolutely turned a deaf ear to, his resolution being greatly strengthened by Horace, who distrusted all these plausible adventurers profoundly.