said in confirmation of the tribute to his courage.
At this the brow-wrinkling grew into a wintry laugh.
“That was five long years ago, and the times and manners have changed
much since then. In Mr. Washington’s camp, now, they would be quoting
Shakespeare at me, saying that ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us
all.’ Do you read Shakespeare, Captain Page?”
“Not that part of him,” I laughed; adding: “Nor do you, General Arnold.”
“Perhaps not. Yet I find myself growing thoughtful now, where I once
took no thought,” he said reflectively; “as in the present instance.
You are fresh from Washington’s camp, Captain. Have you ever heard it
said that he would give the half of his Virginia estates to lay his
hands upon me?”
I could truthfully say “No,” to this.
“It has been told me,” he went on moodily again. “Also that he has his
hired desperadoes here in these streets waiting their chance to kidnap
me. I am no coward, Captain Page; so much I think I may say without
boasting. Yet there is something in that Scripture that speaks of the
terror of the arrow that flieth by day and the pestilence walking
in the darkness. It will go hard with any or all of these assassin
emissaries of Mr. Washington’s if I can ferret them out.”
“It should, if you can catch them,” I agreed. “But in the meantime, you
should take no risks, General; your safety means too much to the king’s
cause. You may call it a flattery if you will, but it is the simple
truth that the King’s Army on this side of the water does not hold
another commander who could fill your place, sir,” I said, meaning, of
course, that there was no other base enough.
“Oh, as to that,” he said, slipping on his air of grandeur as if
it had been a coat. “It would hardly become me to agree with you,
Captain Page. Still, what I have done for the Congress and Mr.
Washington, I can do for Parliament and King George, I suppose. But
we are wandering from the point. I was about to say that one of our
friends gives a farewell rout and supper to the officers of the Loyal
Americans to-night, and I thought that perhaps, partly because of Mr.
Washington’s hired Mohawks, and partly from a desire to show your
maiden uniform, you would walk with me, Captain Page.”
I said I would be blithe to go; which was both false and true. I
thought it hard that I should have to show myself as a Virginia Page in
public places wearing the feathers of a carrion bird. But on the other
hand, I was ready to bind myself to Sir Iscariot by every tie that
offered itself.
So, when he had buttoned himself into a great watchcoat, thrusting, as
I observed, a pair of short, thick-barreled dueling pistols into the
outer pockets, we took the stair for it, and so came down to the steps
where the crusty soldier stood at attention and saluted as we passed
him.
Before we had gone many steps in the street I thought I heard this
soldier’s footfalls, or another’s, close behind. Thinking it was a good
time to show my bodyguard watchfulness with little hurt to anybody, I
said, “One moment, General,” clapped hand to sword-hilt, and made as if
I would face about and charge the man who was following us. But Arnold
restrained me.
“No, not this time, Captain,” he said lightly. “It is only our
door-keeping sentry, and he has orders to keep in touch with us. The
streets are dark, and if there should be an attack, three of us might
be none too many.”
Having the information that I wanted, I caught the step again, and when
we had gone a little farther on our way, I made bold to ask who our
soldier-follower was.
“You should know him, as I take it, Captain Page,” was the calm reply.
“It is Sergeant Champe, late of the rebel Henry Lee’s Light Dragoons.”
V
A KISS AND A MAN’S LIFE
OUR walking route, Arnold’s and mine, lay over the ground we had
covered together in the forenoon, and was of an equal length. But
with my brain afire with the possibilities suddenly opened up by
the knowledge that Champe was only a step or two behind us--that we
two, bent upon the same object, had the traitor practically in our
hands--the distance we traversed was all too short to let me invent a
way to take advantage of the Heaven-sent opportunity.
Now came the time when I bitterly regretted the headlong rashness that
had led me to put the cart before the horse in all the day’s work. It
was clear now that Champe was the only building basis for any rational
plot to take the traitor; he it was who was in communication with Major
Lee, without whose timely cooperation in providing means of escape for
us from the town our mere seizing of Arnold would be but a flash in the
pan. My first and biggest care should have been to make myself known
in my true character to Champe; and a sharp attack of self-abasement
followed the reflection that it might easily have been done at our
breakfast-table meeting. A nod, a hint, a wink--any signal that might
have given him a clue, would have sufficed. And I had tossed the
chance aside like a spendthrift, telling myself that the day was yet
young!
Now, however, as we strode along through the ill-lighted streets, the
laggard afterwit spared me no stab. Somewhere in the darkness behind
us--never near enough for me to signal to--tramped the sullen-faced
sergeant-major, ready enough to get into action, no doubt, but firmly
convinced that he was following two traitors instead of one. For all
I knew, the time might be fully ripe for the striking of the blow.
The difficulties hitherto, as Mr. Hamilton had explained them, had
turned upon successive failures in fitting together simultaneously the
two halves of the plot, Champe’s and Major Lee’s. What if the tangle
had been straightened out and got into working order in the one-day
interval, and I was merely obstructing instead of helping?
The thought was maddening, and yet I dared not risk all by collaring my
man and shouting to Champe for help, and so, perhaps, making another
blunder; one which would cost Champe’s life as well as mine. The better
hope, it seemed, lay in retrieving the prime error of the day at the
earliest possible instant; and I was still racking my brain to devise
some way of communicating quickly with Champe when we came to the end
of our walk.
The house of entertainment, as it appeared, was on the opposite side of
the open space from the one which Arnold had visited in the forenoon.
It was a mansion, as mansions go in the North, with a narrow lawn,
clipped hedges and box-borderings, and it was well illuminated in our
honor. I thought we should be early; at that hour our Virginia dames
and damsels would be just waking from their beauty naps. But there
was music within, and the dancing had begun, though guests were still
arriving in pairs and groups.
Some half-dozen or more reached the door of welcome just as we did, and
here I hoped to get the chance of speaking the necessary word to John
Champe. But though I was sure he had followed us through the gate, he
was nowhere to be seen; and when Arnold’s name was called out by the
footman in waiting, my own was coupled with it, and again the chance
vanished.
Our entry was into a large and brilliantly lighted hall, which was
well filled at the moment with the arriving guests; bewigged civilians
carrying the solid Dutch pomp bequeathed to their successors by the New
Netherlanders; high-bred dames with powdered hair and patches, which,
however much they pique the charms of the younger women are, to my
mind, a blemish on the face of maturity; officers and their ladies, not
so many of the gentlemen wearing the uniform of the Loyal Americans as
I had expected to see, yet still a fair sprinkling of them.
I missed the name of my hostess, though I afterward learned that it
was the roof of Chief Justice Smith, brother of the Joshua Pett Smith
who had been the aider and abetter of the Arnold treason from the
beginning, that sheltered us. But this and kindred trivialities were
but the first few drops before the storm which was presently to make me
forget them.
I was still saying empty nothings to an elderly lady to whom I had been
passed on, with my brain busy, as it had been for a good half-hour,
upon the Champe blunder, when I began to have a growing sense of
impending disaster. It was as if I had groped my way into a dark room,
believing it to be empty, and had suddenly been warned, by that sixth
sense which is yet unnamed in the books, of the presence of another and
vaguely threatening occupant.
It is curious how the instinct of self-preservation bobs first to the
surface, like a submerged bottle-cork, in an emergency. The impulse was
to duck and run, without waiting to see what menaced me, and following
it, I bowed and made way for a snuffy old gentleman who was ready to
take my entertainer off my hands. But being no better than a blind man
in a strange house, I went straight into the thick of the peril. The
ballroom lay beyond the broad stair running by easy stages from the
upper story, and my thought was to go into the great room and so to
lose myself in the throng.
At the turning of the newel-post, when the way seemed altogether clear,
a bevy of young women came down the stair, and I stepped back and hung
my head and gave them precedence. They fluttered past, with only a
glance for the spick-and-span new uniform--all save one. And when I
looked up to find the reason it was flashing down upon me in scorching
contempt from the eyes of Mistress Beatrix Leigh.
She was standing on the next to the lowest step, leaning with one hand
lightly on the stair-rail, and though she was at the instant the very
spirit and image of the goddess of scorn and indignation, I never saw
her when she was more distractingly beautiful or more to be desired.
But she gave me little time to admire her.
“They told me,” she said most cuttingly, “that there would be a Captain
Page here to-night; one of our Virginia Pages come at this late day to
his proper sense of loyalty. I could not tell them they lied, because
I was their guest; and now--oh, Dick! how could you do it!” she ended,
with a pitiful quivering of the sweet lip and a sudden upspringing of
tears to the beautiful eyes.
The human mind shuffles its cards quickly at such a crisis. Had my
secret been my own, she should have had it there and then, and all
would have been well. I knew I could trust her, notwithstanding the
fact that she was Margaret Arnold’s friend--and her fellow-guest in the
house across the square, I feared.
But the secret was not mine, and with the second thought came the
enlightening glimpse of how horribly it would distress and embarrass
her if she should have even a hint of my true reason for this miserable
masquerade. So I hung my head and refused to say the word which would
have cleared me, though it broke my heart to keep silence, in the face
of the lip-quivering and the tears and the reproachful exclamation.
I could feel that the tears had been driven back and that the glorious
eyes were flashing again when she went on.
“You knew I should be here to-night, Mr. Page?” she asked, giving me
the courtesy prefix for the first time in all our life-long knowing of
each other.
“No,” I replied dumbly. “How could I know it? Your letters told me
nothing of this--of your coming to New York.”
“Yet you saw me this morning,” she said accusingly.
“I know now that I did; yet I could not believe it then--nor later,
when I tried to think it out. You saw me?”
“I did; and I have been telling myself all day long that I did not. I
said it could not be. By so much, Mr. Page, your friends think better
things of you than you think of yourself.”
“That may always be true of the worst as well as the best of us,” I
said, not knowing what else to say.
She drew herself up proudly.
“I never thought to have it to say for Mr. Richard Page. Will you be
good enough to let me pass, sir?”
I stepped back, and she came down the two steps with her face averted.
I thought I could let her go; it was my plain soldier duty. But when
the fragrance of her was in my nostrils I lost my hold on duty and all
else.
“One word, Beatrix, for God’s sake!” I muttered, praying that the words
might go to her ears alone. “I must see you before you quit this house,
if only for five little minutes! You can’t deny me this!”
She left me without the promise, without a word, without the slightest
inclination of the proud head, and I sank fathoms deep into the pit of
wretchedness. And, as if to make my punishment the sharper, in another
minute I saw her chatting gaily with a little whipper-snapper British
coxcomb of an ensign whom I could most joyously have broken in two
across my knee.
As may readily be imagined, there was a miserable hour or two for me
after this; it might have been a longer or a shorter time, I do not
know. The clocks were all stopped for me, and I know that I lived
ages head-under in the slime-pit of despair, coming to the surface at
intervals, when I had a glimpse of her dancing, as she always danced,
the very poetry of motion, with one or another of the house guests,
each new man transforming himself, or being transformed, into my
bitterest foe because he had my place.
Arnold I saw only once or twice, and scarcely gave him a second
thought; and as for Champe, whom I might easily have hunted out now
since he was probably hanging about the door, I had forgotten the
worthy sergeant-major’s existence. So selfish and single-eyed is a
great love aroused and well convinced that it has lost its all.
During these ages of wretchedness, in which my own dismal misery was
only made the blacker by the lights and the gay company filling the
rooms to overflowing, she never gave me a look or made me a sign to
show that she remembered my presence in the house of merrymaking. But
when I could endure it no longer--it was while she was sitting out a
dance with that same popinjay ensign that I had desired to break in
two--I made my opportunity, passing in plainest view of her on my way
to a hothouse garden pavilion connected by a covered entryway with the
drawing-room where she was sitting.
The air of the hothouse place was dense and heavy with the perfume of
blooming plants, and there was little light save that which filtered
through the glass roof and came from a sort of cresset-lamp bracketed
to the housewall outside and overhead. But with all its pent-up
fragrance, or perhaps, because of it, the glass house was empty, and I
flung myself down upon a settle to wait, hoping against hope that she
would relent and come and give me a word with her, though what that
word should be, I had no more idea than a simpleton.
She did come, after what seemed like another full age of suspense;
and when I saw her dear face above the intervening hothouse roses,
I thought it was fairer than any flower that ever bloomed, and so I
should have told her if she had not frozen me so that I could only
stand before her and try to stammer some word of thanks for her coming.
“Well?” she said, chilling me with a look of quiet scorn.
I tried to face her as I had faced my enemies in the field, but it was
no manner of use; she had me beaten at my own game, and that before the
game was begun.
“How can I say what I’d like to say when you look at me that way?” I
protested. “Is it fair to condemn me unheard?”
“I have come to let you say that word you spoke of,” she announced, and
her tone was most discouraging.
“You put me a thousand miles off!” I raged. “I can’t shout across the
world at you!”
“There is no need to shout or to lose your temper, Mr. Page. You can
tell me in ten words, perhaps, why you have thought it proper to change
your coat and your flag, when--” she broke down at this and put her
face in her hands, and I could hear her saying over and over again
softly, “Oh, the disgrace of it!--the miserable, wretched disgrace of
it!”
“It is no disgrace, Beatrix,” I burst out hotly. “If I could tell
you--if I dared tell you--”
There was no scorn in her eyes when she uncovered them for me. But
there were tears.
“Yes; if you could tell me, Dick,” she repeated after me, eagerly.
If I had looked at her another second she would have had it all out of
me, in spite of my pledge to Mr. Hamilton, or my life or John Champe’s
or any other thing that might be jeopardized. So I had to star-gaze
at the flaring lamp beyond the glass roof when I said: “There may be
reasons--good reasons, Beatrix. Can’t you trust me to tell you them
when we have a better time and--and place than this?”
“There can be no reason at all that will stand in the breach for you,
Dick. You know it, and that is why you try to put me off. But there
must have been a cause, a most bitter cause, to bring you here in that
coat, and as the friend of that unspeakable man whose mere presence
makes me lock myself in my room when he comes to see poor Margaret.”
She was pleading now; I knew it, and must still be obdurate and hard.
“There was a cause, as you say,” I retorted. “There must have been,
since I have fought and spilt blood on the other side. But I can tell
you nothing to-night without forswearing myself more than I had to, to
wear this coat you dislike so heartily. But I had a cause,” I repeated,
going back to the beginning like a clock wound up to strike all its
hours over again.
“You are bitter, Dick,” she said, and now she made no secret of her
anxious sympathy. “You were always a hot-head, ready to quarrel and
fight and take offense where none was meant. But I’ll do you the
justice to say that heretofore you’ve always made reparation like a
gentleman when your mad fit had passed. But now this dreadful thing is
beyond repair--or is it?”
I could lie joyously enough to forward the enterprise which Mr.
Hamilton had sent me on, but I could not lie to her who was the heart
of my heart, even by implication.
“No,” I said; “it is not beyond repair.”
She caught eagerly at my reply.
“Then you have already repented of this rashest, most wretched
passion-flight you ever made, Dick?--you have thought of--of going back
to your--to Colonel--”
I laid a finger on my lips and slipped past her to see that the door in
the passageway to the drawing-room was fully closed.
“What you are asking me to say would find me a rope very quickly if
it came to other ears,” I cautioned, lowering my voice. Then in the
same hurried half-whisper, and fearing every moment lest we should be
interrupted: “What I have admitted thus far has been the truth in every
word. But you must trust me, Beatrix; trust me in spite of everything.
And you must not ask me to tell you more.”
“But you’ll promise me, Dick,--” she began.
There was the sound of a gently-closing door and steps in the
passage--warnings she did not hear. Again there came that quick
shuttling of the mind that covers all the moves of a desperate game
in an eye-sweep that can not be measured for its lightning-like
swiftness. She was a daughter of the Virginia Leighs, with a father and
three brothers in the patriot army. I was a deserter and always to be
suspected until I had actually drawn blood in the king’s service. For
any of the Tory revelers to find us here together in cool converse....
I saw the shadow of the gibbet hanging plainly over me when I took her
suddenly in my arms and stopped what might have been my death-warrant
with a kiss on the sweet lips of pleading.
There was a little tableau among the roses in the glass house, with an
audience of only one to see it. While a clock might have ticked twice
she lay in my arms like some frightened wild thing. For all we had
grown up together, I had never let her see the masterful side of me
lover-wise, and I do think she was shocked beyond speech or struggling.
But shamed resistance and the strength to make it came quickly enough
when a man’s voice said, “Ah, Captain Page, they told me you were here,
but they did not add that you had taken a fair prisoner, sir.” And
then, as we stood before him, Mistress Beatrix blushing as she had a
good right to, and I playing the part of a fond lover taken in the very
act, Arnold spread his hands and made his lowest bow and said: “Your
humble and most devoted admirer, Mistress Leigh. I have come to tell
you that Margaret is asking for you. And you, Captain, to your duty,
sir. We have much overstayed our time in this pleasant house.”
Beatrix had fled before he finished, and afterward he straightened
up and looked me over with searchings that seemed to read my inmost
thoughts. But his words belied his apparent insight.
“I was troubled when they told me you were here with Mistress Leigh,”
he said slowly. “But pshaw! I might have known how it was. You are a
warm-hearted lover, Captain, and it does you credit. And love knows no
politics, I’ll warrant you. Come, let us be going. There is much to be
done before to-morrow, and time and tide wait for no man.”
And so we took our departure from the house of revels, and though I
looked passionately everywhere for her in the crowded assembly room, I
had no other sight of Beatrix, and had to go at last without knowing
whether she forgave me for saving my life with that ravished kiss.
VI
DARK NIGHT
IT WAS not much beyond ten o’clock when we stepped out under the cold
December stars and bade farewell to Mr. Justice Smith’s hospitable
house of entertainment.
I wondered a little at Arnold’s leaving so early, but the wonder was
appeased when he took another way back to the seaward end of the town;
a way which led to the Loyal American barracks.
Here, though I stood aside and took no part in Arnold’s talk with a
group of his officers, I overheard a thing to shock the plotting part
of me swiftly into action. In a breath it was made plain that the
time for trapping our Judas had shrunk to a few short hours. Early in
the morning the legion was to begin embarking for some destination as
yet kept secret, and once on shipboard, all chance of our seizing the
traitor would be at an end.
This explained most clearly Arnold’s allusions of the afternoon, and
his early quitting of the house of merrymaking. Also his saying to me
that there was much to be done before the morrow. Truly, there was much
to be done. If our business, Sergeant Champe’s and mine, were not to
burst like a pricked bubble it must have its beginning, its middle
part, and its ending crammed into the few hours that remained to us.
So now I was set mad again upon that elusive chase of Champe, and I
had no more idea than a babe unborn what had become of him. Now that
I remembered, it struck me like a blow that I had not seen him at all
since Arnold and I had passed him on our coming out of the headquarters
house in the lower town. After that moment he had been a mere echoing
of footsteps in the rearward dark.
Worse than this, he had not been our rearguard on the retreat from Mr.
Justice Smith’s to the barracks, or if he had, I had not heard him.
Being footloose while Arnold was conferring with his officers about
the morning’s move to the ships, I used my liberty and my eyes in a
painstaking search, scrutinizing every man in sight who wore a legion
uniform. But the sergeant was nowhere to be seen.
This left me to climb desperately into the breach alone--with no
scaling ladder in sight; but lord! what would this life be without its
little excitements and its apparently unsolvable problems? I was still
alive, unhanged, fit and vigorous; with my sweet lady’s kiss--I could
swear she kissed me back again, whether she meant to or no--warm upon
my lips, and with two good hours of the night available before the tide
would turn to oppose an up-river flight.... The biggest battles of the
world had been fought and won in less time, I reflected; and when we
left the barracks, I was planning just how I would clinch my man so
he should not have a chance to get at those flapped coat pockets with
their short-barreled pistols.
The onward faring was made in silence, with one of us, at least,
listening anxiously for footfalls in the rear--footfalls, which,
however, stubbornly refused to become audible. While his moody silence
held, I was afraid Arnold would dismiss me at the house door; on which
chance I should lose him altogether for the night. But at the very
moment of key-fitting he asked me in, saying that there were certain
maps of the southern coast which he would like to have me verify for
him in the figures of the soundings.