locomotion, and my shallop dropped away from the flotilla on the slowly
ebbing tide until the British boats became a shadowy blur in the night.
There was some huddling of them for a hasty council of war, I judged,
and if so, an order to retreat was all that came of it. With our forces
on either side of the river aroused and alert, as the firing would
ensure, there was little else to be done.
My masterless craft had drifted a mile or more when the boat expedition
overtook me. With no more ado my boat was taken in tow, and I chuckled
inwardly. I love a boat and the water as I love a good horse; but it
is worth something to have your enemy drag you where you expected to
drag yourself, and when the shadows of the great western cliffs were
blackening thick upon the waters, I kicked the rowing seat out of the
way, and stretched myself at ease in the shallop’s bottom to get a
soldier’s nap before the sun should rise upon my further adventures.
The day was dawning coldly when I awoke and found that my rescuers--or
my captors--were debarking at the town landing-place under the guns
of Fort George. It was a raw morning, my leg was stiff and sore from
the splinter wound, and the ensign who ordered me to tumble out had
evidently taken his cue from his gruff commander and cursed me heartily
because I did not move as quickly as he thought I should.
It is remarkable how the morning after takes the fine edge off the
enthusiasm and daring of the night before. When I set foot upon the
landing-stage and remembered all that I had undertaken to do in
this British stronghold of New York, remembered, also, how at this
very moment, most likely, Jack and Seytoun, and--save Mr. Hamilton
alone--every friend and enemy I had left behind me in the camp at
Tappan was cursing the very day of my birth, my teeth chattered with
the morning’s cold, and I would have given many broad acres of the
Page tobacco lands to be well out of the wretched tangle into which my
desperate mission had led me.
My first near-hand view of the lower town, obtained after I had been
turned over to one of Sir Henry Clinton’s aides--who was my host or
guard, I could not tell which--brought a decided shock. My memories of
the city, carried over from a visit made with my uncle Nelson when I
was a hobbledehoy of sixteen, were rudely swept away. The great fire
of the night of September 20th, 1776, just after the British General
Robertson had driven our army back upon Harlem Heights, had made a ruin
of what had been the best-built portion of the lower town. Starting
near Whitehall Slip, it had left blackened ruins all the way across
to the Bowling Green and for some distance up on both sides of Broad
Way, and but little in the way of rebuilding had been done during the
four years of British occupation. Instead, some of the ruins had been
converted into makeshift dwelling places by using the chimneys and
parts of the walls that were still standing, eked out with spars from
the ships and old canvas for shelter.
It was a dreary prospect that was revealed as we, my guard-host and I,
came around the western bastion of the fort and so into the lower end
of Broad Way. The fire had spared some few houses on the left, and in
one of these, so Mr. Hamilton had told me, Arnold had his headquarters
and living-rooms. It was to an inn just beyond these houses, and on the
edge of the ruined district, that my walking companion led me; and by
the time we were inside and were breaking our fast in the blaze-warmed
coffee-room, the hue of things had become less somber, and I could
laugh and crack a joke with my entertainer much as if he had been Jack
Pettus masquerading in a red coat.
“You do good justice to the commissary, Captain Page,” said my youth in
the red coat, when I had begged his leave to order more of the ham and
eggs that reminded me most gratefully of Virginia and home.
“If you could know how I have been starved, Mr. Castner,” I retorted.
“All you have to do for us--for the rebels, I mean--is to hold them
still for a few months longer, and hunger will do for them what your
arms have somehow seemed unable to do.”
“Is it that bad, Mr. Page?” he asked.
“Worse than I can describe, I do assure you. I doubt not we of the
turncoat legion assign all sorts of reasons for our forsaking of the
cause, but I am telling you the bald truth--as I shall tell Sir Henry.
We are hungry, and an empty stomach knows neither king nor Congress.”
But my young lieutenant laughed in a most friendly way and shook his
head at this.
“You are carrying it off as a brave man should, Mr. Page, and making a
jest of it. But you are like a good many of the others; a true Loyalist
at heart, with only the eleventh-hour determination to turn your back
upon whatever influences swung you first in the wrong direction.
Confess, now; are there not many others in the same case, and lacking
only the eleventh-hour courage to come over?”
I said there were, doubtless--and hoped most fervently that it was the
lie I firmly believed it to be. Then, after I had answered freely all
his questions about our camp at Tappan--with more and more ingenious
lies, you may be sure--I ventured upon the ground of my own perilous
debate.
“There have been rumors in the Highlands of Mr. Arnold’s raising of a
regiment of his own here in New York. Is that so, Mr. Castner?” I asked
guardedly.
The lieutenant nodded, and there was a graver look in his eyes when he
asked, in turn, “Do you know Mr. Arnold, Captain Page?”
“I haven’t that honor, as yet,” I replied. “My short service in the
Continental Line has been in the horse; and he, as you know, has been
lately in garrison at West Point.”
He bowed thoughtfully. “A strange man, Mr. Page; and growing stranger
to all of us, I think, as the days pass. He has not come over to us for
any overmastering love of the king or the king’s cause, I fear.”
“No?” said I.
“It is little likely. If I read him aright, he is burned and seared
through and through with his own ambition.”
It was no part of my plan to be drawn into open criticism of the man I
was shortly to approach in the character of an outspoken fellow traitor.
“We must not judge too hastily, Mr. Castner,” I put in placably.
“Arnold was greatly respected by his former subordinates, and, truly,
he did many things to win their regard, I am told. But that is neither
here nor there: this legion he is enrolling--is it horse or foot?”
“Foot. It is called the ‘Loyal American,’ and is pretty largely
composed of--of men who, like yourself, Mr. Page, have changed flags.”
“Are the lists full?” was my next query.
The lieutenant smiled.
“Would you take service under your country’s bitterest enemy, Captain
Page?”
I laughed.
“Beggars mustn’t be choosers. And as for my country’s enemies; my
country is the king’s, or at least, he says it is, though you must
confess, Mr. Castner, that the standing-places where a Loyalist may
hear the whipping of the royal standard above his head have become
sadly few and restricted.”
Once again the lieutenant was shaking his head in mild deprecation.
“You must teach your tongue a better trade, Captain Page,” he said
quite good-naturedly. “There are those in this town who would find
fault with that last speech of yours.”
I saw at once, what I should have seen at the outset; that this
frank-faced lieutenant was not one to be played with in double-meaning
rashnesses. So I went back to Arnold and his “American Loyalists,” or
“Loyal Americans,” or whatever lying phrase it was that headed his
regimental book.
“You have not told me yet of Mr. Arnold’s conscript lists,” I reminded
him.
“Nor do I know,” he replied, and was going on to say more when a tall,
harsh-visaged fellow, wearing the insignia of a recruiting sergeant,
looked in at the door, swept the apartment with a shrewd glance, as if
in search of material for his trade of whipper-in, and was turning away
when the lieutenant marked him and said to me: “There is a man who can
tell you more than I can.” And then to the soldier: “Hey, Sergeant, a
word with you!”
It was not until the man stood at our table-end and was near enough to
shock me heartily that I recognized him as Major Lee’s emissary, John
Champe; the man I had come to drag out of the peril he had blundered
into.
Lieutenant Castner smiled at my start of surprise, and he was further
edified, I suppose, by Champe’s drawing back with a muttered oath at
his recognition of me. There was humor in the situation, but I was in
no frame of mind to appreciate it just then.
It was Champe who first broke the awkward little silence. “You called
me, sir?” he asked, saluting Castner, and turning his back on me.
I shall never forget how the young redcoat lieutenant played the
gentleman at this crisis. Had there been a trace of malice in his heart
he might have flung us two flag-changers at each other’s throats and
stood aside to see the sport. Instead, he replied to Champe, quite
gravely.
“Yes; your lists for the Loyal Americans--are they filling well,
Sergeant?”
“They are closed,” said Champe, with his dour face as expressionless as
a slab of wood.
“Ah,” said Castner; and then, with a hand-wave of dismissal for the
sergeant, which Champe obeyed instantly: “That answers your question,
Captain Page. I hope it does not seriously change your plans.”
I assured him that it did not; telling him that I had no plan beyond
seeking an audience with Sir Henry Clinton at the earliest possible
hour.
“Then your inclination matches with the necessities,” laughed my
jailor. “I should be obliged to put you under guard, conveying you to
Sir Henry forcibly, if you were not minded to go of your own accord.”
My heart beat a little less steadily at this. Was it possible
that Mr. Hamilton’s plot had leaked so swiftly?--that word of my
coming, or of my planned-for coming, had already reached the British
commander-in-chief? It was a soul-destroying thought, but Castner’s
next word relieved me.
“It is a general order,” he explained. “Sir Henry wishes to see each of
you gentlemen--our friends from the other side, you know--as soon as
may be after your arrival. If you have finished your breakfast we may
as well go at once. I don’t know how your late staff headquarters keeps
its hours, but our Sir Henry is an early riser.”
There was no reason on my part for delay, and every reason for haste
without the appearance of haste. So I made ready to go with the
lieutenant, and we presently fared forth into the crisp December
morning and took our way to the row of Dutch-fashioned houses with
their sides to the street and facing the Green, the row lying a little
to the right of Fort George as you face the harbor.
Before one of the houses a sentry stood on guard, and with a stiff
presenting of his duty salute to my officer, the man passed us up the
steps.
Castner put me into the audience chamber of the man who stood, for
us of the patriotic side, as the embodiment of British duplicity and
tyranny, without a word to me by way of preparation; and in introducing
me I thought there was a twinkle of grim humor in his grave boyish eyes.
“Sir Henry, I have the honor of presenting to you Mr. Richard Page,
late Captain Richard Page, of Baylor’s Horse, in Mr. Washington’s army,
and the newest of our new friends.”
His handicapping of me in these few words of introduction was most
embarrassing--as perhaps it was meant to be--and for the moment I could
only stare at the great man sitting calmly behind his writing-table,
which, as I remember, was well littered with papers.
At first sight the British commander was disappointing. He was short,
fat and stodgy, with the heavy face of a good feeder, and his nose
was aggressively prominent. His eyes, as I saw them, were cold and
calculating, and I could never fancy them lighting with enthusiasm or
mellowing into anything like good-fellowship. And, indeed, it was told
me afterward that he was a man to take his pleasures stolidly, warming
neither to wine nor women. Washington, Greene, Hamilton, Lee--all of
our leaders, were soldiers and they looked it. But this broad-girthed
little man with the great nose and the chilling eyes was a soldier and
he did not look it.
To my relief, the interview was short, and to my still greater relief
it was not made harder for me by the lieutenant’s presence, that
gentleman having disappeared after presenting me. Naturally, Sir Henry
wanted news of Washington’s army, his dispositions, his plans and
intentions; and having by this time come to my own in my heritage of
the Page impudence, I lied to him as freely and joyously as I had to
Castner, taking care only to make the lies dovetail neatly with what I
had told the lieutenant over the inn breakfast-table.
But my cross-examiner saved his shrewdest question for the last, as if
he had been a lawyer.
“Now, for yourself, Mr. Page,” he said finally, fixing me with that
cold stare that seemed to read my inmost thoughts. “What brought you
here?”
This was a harder thing to lie out of than any of the others. My
family, and my own record, for that matter, were too well known to let
me dish him up some plausible story of how we were all merely waiting
the chance to come over to the king’s side. I must invent some personal
grievance, and with those chilling eyes upon me it was a task to make
the blood thicken in my veins--at a time when it should have been
galloping most freely.
It was at this point that I had an inspiration. There is no lie
so compelling as the truth, when the truth can be made to serve
the purpose of a lie. I had heard that Sir Henry frowned like a
straight-laced Puritan upon dueling; that he put it under the ban for
his own officers, punishing for it as he would for any other infraction
of orders.
My resolve was taken on the spur of the moment.
“Aside from one other cause, which was great enough in itself to make
me wish to change flags, I ran away from a duel,” I told him, returning
the stare as hardily as I dared.
“How is that, sir?” he demanded, a shade less coldly.
At that I gave him the story of the quarrel with Seytoun, coloring it
only so much as to make it appear that dueling was the accepted code in
our army, and that the entire ostracising pressure of my late fellow
officers had been put upon me to drive me into a corner from which
there was no escape save in the course I had taken.
“You have conscientious scruples, Mr. Page?” he asked, after what
seemed an interminable weighing and balancing of my tale.
“You may call them so, if you wish, Sir Henry,” I replied gravely. “I
have no desire to kill or to be killed in such a cause. And since, if I
had stayed, I should certainly have had to fight this Captain Seytoun,
I put this with the other, and possibly better, reason, and crossed the
lines.”
“And that other reason?” he questioned shrewdly. “Speak plainly,
Mr. Page. You stand upon the dividing line between some honorable
occupation with us on one hand, and the prison hulks on the other.”
I saw that my excuse was not big enough, and tremblingly tore another
page out of the book of truth.
“I am ashamed to tell you of the other reason, Sir Henry,” I demurred,
with as near the proper shade of wounded self-esteem as I could
simulate. “It touches me very nearly, and in a tender spot. You know,
without my telling of it, how we Pages, my father’s family, have given
everything to the cause which is even now tipping in the balance of
defeat?”
“I do know it,” he replied, somewhat grimly I thought.
“With that in view, Sir Henry, imagine my feelings as a gentleman and
an officer when proposals were made to me involving a complete and
entire surrender of all that a man of honor may be supposed to hold
most dear. Do you wonder, sir, that I have thrown myself into the arms
of a generous and high-minded enemy?”
“Ha!” said he, relaxing the hold of the freezing stare for the first
time in the interview. “They wished you to turn spy, did they? Mr.
Page, I thoroughly applaud your courage and resolution, as well as your
frankness in telling me this. Not many men in your situation would
have dared to do it. But I have long suspected Mr. Washington and
his advisers on this score. It is the least honorable part of their
stubborn resistance to their king.”
I should have laughed outright if I had had liberty. This from the
man, mind you, who had corresponded secretly for months with Benedict
Arnold, bribing, suborning and finally protecting the traitor; the
man who had sent the brave Major André, his own adjutant-general, into
our lines, if not as a spy, at least as a go-between to treat with our
Judas of West Point!
“As you say, Sir Henry, it is the least honorable part of warfare,” I
agreed mildly, fearful now lest, my case being safely made, I should
say too much.
But Sir Henry would not let it rest at that.
“It is greatly to your credit that you were courageous enough to
refuse, Mr. Page,” he went on, taking, as I meant he should, my refusal
for granted. And then, as if upon a premeditated thought: “Are you
acquainted with Mr. Arnold?”
I said I was not; that my arm of the service, the horse, had never
chanced to be under his command.
The commander-in-chief found a pen and quickly wrote me a note.
“Take that to Mr. Arnold,” he said almost graciously. “He lodges
next door, and his hour is nine o’clock.” And, as I was bowing
myself out: “Stay, Mr. Page; shall I give you an introduction to the
pay-master?--for present necessities?”
I understood this to be an offer to pay, not for my allegiance, but
for the information he had--or thought he had--of me, and I declined
as delicately as I could, saying that a soldier’s wants were few, and
that I had taken the precaution to provide for myself out of my private
funds. This seemed to please him still more, and, on the whole, the Sir
Henry Clinton who bade me an affable “Good morning” was greatly less
alarming and formidable than had been the one who had gripped me so
chillingly in his stony stare while Lieutenant Castner was presenting
me.
Castner was waiting for me in the ante-room, as I found, but this time
only to pass me beyond the sentry at the door. The fact that I was
allowed to depart unhindered seemed to be a sufficient guaranty that
I had satisfied his chief; but I owe it to the young aide to say that
his manner to me now was neither more nor less cordial than it had been
over the ham and eggs in our breakfast tavern.
Having thus crossed my Rubicon, and, as one may say, burned my boats
behind me, the next thing was to find Champe and to put that ferocious
patriot on a proper footing with me. But first I had to get rid of my
uniform as a captain of Baylor’s Horse, and here Castner served me
again, quite willingly, going with me to a shop north of the burned
region and knocking the sleepy proprietor out of his morning nap to
wait on me.
Though I had said that I did not know Arnold personally, I knew enough
of him and of his foppish taste in dress to make me drive a gentleman’s
bargain with the shop-keeper; and when I was arrayed like the lilies of
the field in such ready-made finery as I could purchase, Castner looked
me up and down approvingly, and swore it was a pity I had ever forsaken
my proper garmenting to don the coarse homespun which we officers of
Baylor’s Horse made it a point of honor to wear.
By the time my bargaining was done, it was too late to go in search of
Champe if I were to take Sir Henry Clinton’s nine o’clock hint pointing
to Arnold. So, rather against my better judgment, I faced southward
with Castner again, giving our Judas the preference over the worthy
sergeant-major--a mistake which was to carry heavier consequences than
I ever dreamed could cluster upon so small a pin-point.
IV
HOW MY RANK WAS REGAINED
NOTWITHSTANDING Sir Henry Clinton’s voucher for Benedict Arnold’s
receiving hour, we found the man, Castner and I, on his door-step and
apparently just going out, as we came up.
I expected Castner to introduce me at least, but here I had my first
hint of Arnold’s standing, or rather his lack of standing, with the
British officers, which was pointed by the lieutenant striding on with
his head in the air, and leaving me abruptly to my own devices.
Since boldness was the only word I knew, or could know, in all this
business, I ran up the steps, struck my hat to the man I hoped to see
well hanged, and gave him General Clinton’s note. While he was reading
the scrawl--the British knight wrote a most fearful and wonderful
hand--I had time to observe how a few short weeks had changed the
traitor.
Always a handsome man, with a clear transparent skin, intellectual
features, thin nostrils well recurved and sensitive to every changing
mood, and eyes that were almost womanish for size and for a certain
languorous sensuousness, he might still have sat for the portrait of
that Benedict Arnold who had braved the wrath of General Gates to save
the day at the second battle of Stillwater. Yet there was a striking
change, apparent even to one who had seen him as seldom as I had. The
lips were set in thinner lines, the eyes were gloomy, and, when he
turned them upon me, I saw a lurking devil of sullen suspicion in them.
Also the deep furrows in his brow had grown still more marked and they
had taken an upward and outward curve like the suggestion of a pair of
horns.
None the less, his reception of me was bland and cordial, made with
a half-offering of his hand, which, I am happy to say, I found it
possible to seem to overlook.
“You are very welcome, Mr. Page,” he said, smiling with his lips and at
the same time probing me with the eyes of gloomy distrust. “Sir Henry
Clinton says kind things of you here”--waving the letter--“and I trust
we shall go on to a better acquaintance.” Then, a little doubtfully:
“Should I be able to place you more nearly?”
I told him I thought not; that I had probably seen him oftener than
he had me. Then I added the bold word which has slain many a better
man--the word of open flattery.
“Like many another who knows you even less well than I do, Mr. Arnold,
I owe you a debt of gratitude. But for your courageous example, not
a few men who are now faithfully serving the king would still be in
Mr. Washington’s riff-raff army, fighting for that jack-o’-lantern
thing called liberty. And, but for that same act of yours, I can most
truthfully say that I should not be here this morning, trespassing on
your good nature, sir.”
It was very gross, and I do think Mr. Dick Sheridan himself could not
have made the _doubl’ entendre_ more dramatic. Yet this gentlemanly
turncoat, whose vanity was even greater than his villainy, gulped it
down as I have seen our good Dominie Attlethorpe, of Williamsburg,
swallow a luscious oyster.
“You are either the most astute of young scapegraces, or the kindliest,
Mr. Page,” he retorted, with the moral glutton’s satisfaction in every
intonation. And then: “Have you breakfasted, sir?”
I told him I had; whereupon he asked me to walk with him, saying that
we could come at my business as well in that way as in any other, if I
would so far indulge him.
I laughed in my sleeve, and gave him the wall, as a poor dependent
on his bounty should; and, reckoning again without my host, wondered
how long it would take poor Champe to get within such easy gripping
distance of his quarry. As we passed northward and eastward, quite to
the other side of the town, and well beyond the burned area Arnold
put me through my deserter’s catechism, which now, since I had danced
through it gaily once for Castner, and again for Sir Henry, came off
the tongue as glibly as a schoolboy’s lesson.
It was in front of a rather stately house facing an open space that we
paused finally, and I saw a woman come and open the door and close it
again quickly when she saw there were two of us. I had but a glimpse
of the woman’s face, but that was enough. No one who had ever seen
Margaret Shippen would fail to recognize her even though she appeared,
as she did to me in that door-opening glimpse, in the guise of a sweet
young woman prematurely saddened and aged by sorrow unnamable.