took me,” I continued, making sure that his next question would knock
my boat of truth into splinters, leaving me floundering in a sea of
lies. And, truly, I did not feel equal to such a swimming match with
him, now, with every drop of blood in me nudging its neighbor to keep
awake.
“You found all quiet at the tavern?” he demanded, fixing me with his
gaze as I have seen a cruel boy pin a fly to the wall.
“As quiet as a graveyard. The barman was only half awake, and the
waking half of him went to sleep after he had mulled me a cup of wine.”
“Strange!” he said; and then he fell to walking the floor, and I had
time to catch my breath and to get a fresh grip on myself before he
began again.
“After your cup of wine, Captain Page? What happened then?”
“I went up-stairs to the room they had given me. But my sleep was bad.”
“Ha!” said he; “now we are coming to it. What disturbed you?”
It was worse than groping in the dark; it was like groping without the
sense of touch to guide me. But I had to go on, though I saw that my
road might easily end on Gallows Hill.
“First I heard, or dreamed I heard, a noise as of men fighting. A
little later I’m sure I heard a great deal of loud talk and some oaths,
and tramplings in my corridor and on the stair. After that, I was awake
most of the time, I think, but I heard no more of the inn noises.”
He sat down behind his writing-table and waved me to a chair.
“Sit down, Captain Page, and you shall have the explanation of all
this,” he said, and the sudden change in his tone relaxed my strain
so violently that I fairly reeled into a chair. “I sent for you thus
early to question you before you had the news from other sources,” he
went on. “Make a note of it, Captain, and when you wish to examine a
witness, get hold of him before his impressions have been distorted out
of shape by his confusing of them with the impressions of others. You
recall what I was saying last night about the Washington plot against
my person?”
I bowed.
“I think I owe my liberty, and perhaps my life, to you, Captain Page;
or at least to your presence here up to midnight. There are suspicious
circumstances enough to warrant the belief that a plot was laid
against me, to be sprung last night. I was in hopes that you might
be able to add further information; but your items only confirm the
story of the inn people. They thought, however, that the sounds of the
scuffle came from your room.”
“If I had been as sound asleep as I needed to be, a battle royal
might have been fought in my room without my knowing it,” I replied,
regaining something of my self-possession.
“This squabble in the inn seems to have been an aftermath,” he
continued; “possibly”--and here I thought he looked sharply at me
again--“a meeting of the plotters to jangle over their failure. Which
points to a traitor among us, Captain, since there are no suspicious
characters quartering at the tavern whose room could have been used
for a rendezvous. But one thing is certain: one of the janglers was a
soldier of the Loyal American Legion in uniform. A horse-boy saw him
slip into the tavern and go up-stairs.”
My heart came into my mouth, and, by the bones of all the Pages, I had
to swallow twice to get it down again. Champe was surely skating upon
the thinnest ice that ever held the weight of a man, and if he broke
through, I should be quite as far from the shore as he.
“But--but the other circumstances, sir,” I prompted, hoping to turn him
back from this aftermath business, as he called it, in the tavern.
“They are quite conclusive. All day yesterday a troop of rebel
horse was in hiding on the Jersey shore, evidently waiting for some
prearranged event to come off. Late in the evening the schooner _Nancy
Jane_ dropped a boat, manned by a single pair of oars, and then stood
up and down the river for several hours. The dropped boat was seen more
than once by our sentries, and it was always hanging in the tideway at
the same place.”
“Surely, all this was most suspicious!” I exclaimed, as heartily as I
could.
“It was; but this was only the groundwork of the plot. You remember the
loose board in the fence at the back of my garden? That board had been
removed for a purpose. Captain. At the very moment when you remarked
it, there were men in the garden waiting their chance to attack me.
They were hidden under the cedars, and it was one of them who coughed
or sneezed loud enough for me to hear him.”
“Heavens!” I ejaculated. “What a desperately narrow escape you have
had, General Arnold!”
“I think so myself,” he observed quite coolly. And then, without a sign
or a word of warning, he struck my slowly recovering self-possession
the most treacherous back-blow it ever had. “Captain Page, I owe you
something, as I have admitted. But you must be frank with me. The
soldier who climbed the stair in the tavern last night was Sergeant
Champe, and the door he entered was yours.”
If I ever have a son, I shall pray God to endow him with an alert
brain, the choicest gift a man can have. If I had hesitated a single
instant as to the course I should pursue, if I had winked a wink too
many or drawn a breath a thousandth part of a second too long--well,
there would have been a midnight walk for me to the top of Gallows Hill
to keep a tryst with some Tory Jack Ketch, with Mistress Beatrix left
to cry her pretty eyes out, if she cared anything for poor Dickie Page.
But I did none of these fatal things. Instead, I flushed, sought for
the exact face of innocent guilt, and said, “General Arnold, I do most
humbly beg your pardon for deceiving you, though I beg you to believe
that, as far as I went, I told you the precise truth.” Here I let
him see my eyes for long enough to drive that nail well home. “But
beyond the time of my going to bed, I hoped you would not press me too
closely. Champe did come to my room. He had been making a night of it
with some of the other men--their last night ashore--and his temper
even when he is fully sober, is none of the best, as you may have
already observed.”
He gave me a slow nod, and I went on, gaining a little now in the race
with the hangman, I hoped.
“He was most quarrelsome and abusive. He had sought me out, it seems,
because he had a drunken notion that I was responsible for your leaving
him outside of Mr. Justice Smith’s house last night, and so exposing
him to the gibes of those horse-boys and others of the regular line
who hate our legion uniform wherever they see it. There was more than
a squabble; it was a pitched battle, and I had to beat a little sober
sense into him before I could quiet him, and even then he went on
babbling foolishness and curses until I was afraid he would have the
house about our ears.”
“Go on, Captain Page,” said my inquisitor, most grimly non-committal.
“There is little else to tell you, General Arnold. When I had him
sobered a little, I saw him past the tavern bar and farther in safety;
and when I quitted him I had his promise that he would go to his
barracks and behave himself. I confess I would have kept all this from
you, if I could. John Champe, sober, is as good a soldier as ever
picked a flint, and since I had given him his beating, I thought to
spare him a worse thing. So long as your questions did not touch the
man’s loyalty--or mine--I felt warranted in holding back this tale of
his stumble into the ale-pot. Soldiers will be soldiers, General, and
that officer can get the most out of them who first beats them and then
overlooks their little peccadilloes.”
I was in cruel doubt for five age-long minutes as to whether I had made
my case or signed my death-warrant. No man was ever better able to hide
his mind behind his face save in his sudden upblazes of passion, than
was this same Benedict Arnold; and when he rose to walk the floor in
gloomy meditation, with his head hanging and his fingers tightly locked
behind him, I lived a dozen lifetimes and could well-nigh feel the hemp
drawing tight around my neck.
But at the end he let me off with a caution and a veiled threat.
“You should have two lessons out of this, Captain Page,” he said
at length, stopping abruptly to stand over me. “One is that it is
never worth your while to play fast and loose with me in matters of
information. Make your mind a looking-glass for me, or better still, a
window-pane, for, sooner or later, I shall always be at the bottom of
your profoundest secret. The other lesson is this: your adhesion to the
king’s cause is but a day old. Until it gains a little age and dignity,
it will be well for you to avoid even the appearance of evil.”
I rose, feeling as any man would who had been given his reprieve after
the black cap had been fairly drawn down over his eyes.
“I should have known better, General,” I said, feigning the meekest
humility and self-reproach. “And now, sir, if you have orders for me--”
He broke into my tender of services with the welcomest word I had heard
in many a day.
“Go to your quarters, Captain Page, and finish the sleep I interrupted.
Your rest has been sufficiently broken of late to justify some
rebellion in nerve and muscle. The embarkation begins to-day, but we
shall do well enough without you.”
It was not more than ten minutes from this early-morning tight-rope
dance that I once more tumbled into bed in the barn-like upper room at
the tavern, and I was sinking sweetly into the lap of the goddess whose
charms we never appreciate until a wakeful night or two makes them
precious, when I started up with a cold sweat breaking out in a frost
rime all over me. In all the tight-rope business, I had never once
thought of Arnold’s questioning Champe, or of how little any story of
his would be likely to fit in with mine!
If my stripping for bed had been swift, the reversal of the process
left the disrobing as far behind as if it were a tortoise racing the
fleetest hound that ever gave tongue on fox’s scent. In frantic haste
I dressed and left the inn and made my way to the legion barracks.
The embarkation had already begun, they told me, and when I mentioned
Champe’s company, it was added that it had gone aboard among the first.
On the face of it, this seemed as if it might be a danger past, but I
thought it best to make assurance doubly sure and to that end dragged
my weary legs down to the boat-landing where the lighters were putting
off to the ships.
It was well indeed that I took this final precaution. Not a stone’s
throw from the landing I met Champe, that minute come ashore in one of
the returning boats on a peremptory summons from Arnold. Beckoning him
aside, I told him hurriedly what was before him, and drilled him upon
the story I had invented till he begged for mercy and swore he could
say it backward.
That was all very well, but I have learned that a cat killed is a cat
safely dead only after it is well buried, with the earth tramped down
solidly upon it. So, when I had kept sight of Champe until Arnold’s
door opened to swallow him, I found a spying place and watched--and had
no trouble in keeping awake, either, I promise you--until I saw him
come out again.
He gave me the countersign in passing, as he was on his way back to his
ship. It was only a single word, “Hoodwinked,” but it lifted a load
from my shoulders that was all but crushing me; lifted the load and
let me, for the third time that morning, seek the bed that seemed to
have a spiteful grudge against a weary soldier of fortune.
This time there were no cold-sweat alarms to snatch me from the brink,
and when next I opened my eyes, the room was dark, and I knew not what
day or night of the week it was.
IX
IN WHICH I PAY A DUTY CALL
CASTNER was at the supper-table in the tavern common-room when I went
up-stairs, and I found that I had slept the clock only once around.
To my surprise, the lieutenant was wearing a uniform to match my own,
and I saw now why he had been so sore at my pointless joke. He was
to accompany the Arnold expedition; and I was not long in divining
the reason when he told me sourly that he had been detailed to act as
aide to General Arnold. For all he had paid good king’s gold and a
commission in the king’s army for his prize traitor, Sir Henry Clinton
was afraid to trust him, and my friend Castner was going along as a
sort of amiable spy in Arnold’s military household.
“You don’t seem to take your promotion very joyfully,” I laughed,
drawing a chair opposite and sitting down to help him with the cold
roast.
“It’s a dirty business,” he blurted out; and then he shut his mouth on
his meat and I was left to guess whether he meant his own sending, or
the proposed descent of an armed force upon a defenseless coast.
A little later three or four other officers came in for their suppers,
among them Major Simcoe, who had commanded the Queen’s Rangers at
Germantown. Their talk, which comfortably ignored me either as a
deserter and as beneath their notice, or as an untried recruit, turned
upon the ship expedition and the secret of its destination, which
latter seemed to have been well guarded, inasmuch as none of those
present appeared to know where the fleet would cast anchor.
I surmised that Major Simcoe’s ignorance was assumed, however. He was
deep in the counsels of Sir Henry Clinton, and was a well-trusted
officer. I noticed that he kept his face pretty well in his plate and
joined in the conversation only as he had to, letting the younger men
keep the ball rolling.
From this table talk I learned that the work of putting the troops and
stores aboard the ships had been going on all day, and was likely to
dig deep into the night, though when the actual sailing order was to be
given, did not appear. I was concerned about this on only one point,
namely, the hope that there might be time for a visit, hurried or
otherwise, to the house where I had seen Margaret Shippen’s face at the
door and Beatrix Leigh’s at the upper window.
What excuse I should have for intruding into a house whose owner’s
name, even, was still unknown to me, I could not imagine. But that the
thing must be compassed admitted of no question. After what I had done
in Mr. Justice Smith’s glass-roofed rose-house, I should be either a
knave or a coward to run away in silence. Moreover, I had not learned
why Mistress Beatrix was in New York, or how long she meant to stay,
or any of the hundred things her presence at the Smith mansion had put
question-marks after.
From what I heard at the supper-table, I judged my time was short. It
was Major Simcoe who said that when the troops were all embarked, the
officers would have shore leave only until the ebb tide would serve to
let the ships drop down the bay. It was here that I ventured to ask
about the wind, and if it were favorable; and the major said it was
not, but that the fleet would come to anchor in the lower bay to wait
for it.
It was while we were still at table that an orderly came with a summons
for me. I was to report to Arnold at my earliest convenience,--I marked
the word and took courage from it,--and I might delay so long as would
be necessary to make all my preparations for going aboard beforehand,
to the end that I should not be obliged to return to the tavern later
on if time pressed.
I showed Arnold’s note to Castner, and the lieutenant very kindly
offered to expedite my affair by looking after my impedimenta; which
was light enough, since I had only the clothes I stood in, the
civilian’s suit I had bought of the Dutch Jew, and my patriot homespun.
I was the more willing to turn Castner loose in my room for the packing
up, because there were no papers, plans of fortifications or any other
spy’s death-sentences for him to stumble on, and it lent a fine air of
sincerity to my new pledge to give him my keys and to tell him to take
or leave what he chose.
This left me free to accompany the orderly who had brought Arnold’s
note, and the young man, a fine young gentleman who was a son of that
Colonel Hetheridge who was killed at the battle of Monmouth, walked
with me to the door of Arnold’s quarters.
I found the traitor busily writing, as he seemed always to be at my
entrances. And, as on a former occasion, he waved me to a chair and
went on pushing the quill like a regimental clerk who had got behind in
his records. When he had folded, sealed and superscribed his letter,
he turned to me, and I saw that Sergeant-Major Champe had not failed
either himself or me in the cross-questioning of the early morning.
“You are quite refreshed, Captain Page?” he began most kindly; and
again I caught myself wishing that he would not so persistently show me
the likeable side of him. “You are fortunate in having no family ties
to break when we turn our backs upon New York. Will you take it as an
older man’s weakness if I say that I shall leave my heart behind me
when we sail, Captain Page?”
I said that his sentiment did him honor; adding that I had once had the
pleasure of meeting Mistress Arnold while she was yet Mistress Margaret
Shippen in Philadelphia.
“A dear lady, with a heart of pure gold,” he said half musingly. And
then more pointedly to me: “She remembers you, Captain--which is the
chief reason why I am going to let you be the bearer of this farewell
note of mine. You can find the house again?”
“Surely,” I replied; and for the instant I forgot my sworn purpose in
sudden gratitude to him for putting me so easily and naturally on the
way to a fulfilment of my own desires.
“She will see you--as she might not wish to see another,” he continued.
“Tell her only cheerful things, Captain Page. Though she does not
know our destination or our purposes, she is weighed down with a
presentiment of evil to come. That is why I am writing and sending you.
There are limits to the sternest fortitude, and I--”
He broke off abruptly, and I could have sworn there were honest tears
in his eyes. But by this time I was clinging blindly to the kidnapping
purpose that was my only reason for the present hazards, telling myself
if that should fail I should see another side of him soon enough, when
he should be leading his ravages against my home land. At twenty-two
I had yet to learn that no man, however despicable he may be, is all
villain; that there will be some meliorating drop of blood in the worst
criminal that was ever righteously hanged for his sins.
Notwithstanding, some inkling of this was beginning to dawn on me, and
like a voice out of the air Colonel Hamilton’s words came back to me
“--But to go as you must go, and use guile and subterfuge ... truly,
Captain Page, you must sort this out for yourself; to determine how far
in such a cause an officer and a man of honor may go. I lay no commands
upon you.” I was thinking hard, trying to do as Mr. Hamilton had given
me leave to do: to determine how far a decent sense of honor would let
me go, when Arnold’s voice broke into my reverie.
“You will go with the letter, and take your own time--so much time as
she shall require of you,” he directed, giving me the sealed packet.
“If you should not find me on your return, Lieutenant Castner will meet
you at the shipping wharf and assign you to your vessel.”
This was my dismissal, and I took it gladly for more than one reason.
I hoped I should never see this man again until I could more honestly
hate him as he deserved--another wish for which I was to pray God’s
forgiveness in the time to come.
The streets were quiet as I took my solitary way through them, and
over the fort the sky was reddened as if a bonfire were burning
on the parade ground. Passing the green I saw the pedestal upon
which the lead-gilt equestrian statue of King George had stood, the
statue that the men of ’76 had pulled down in their jubilation over
the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence, and which had
afterward been melted into bullets to be fired at this same Third
George’s soldiery.
My way also led past the gloomy sugar-house prison where, in the
frightful summer of ’77, so many patriots were confined that not a
third of them could get breathing space at the deep port-hole windows;
where our brave fellows stayed and rotted and died a dozen in the day
rather than purchase their freedom by enrolling themselves in the
king’s army, as they were given leave to do.
The sight of the grim, fortress-like stone building, and the thought
of the torments for which it stood as a reminder, put me in a sterner
frame of mind toward our enemies and went far toward excusing the
double-faced part I found myself compelled to play. Yet I tried to
hold myself sufficiently aloof so that I should not visit the sins of
the husband, and of those men who had suborned him, upon the sorrowful
woman I was going to see.
Having been twice over the route in daytime, and twice at night, I had
no difficulty in finding the house which sheltered Arnold’s wife and
child. A negro house-servant opened to my knock, and upon my asking for
Mistress Arnold, admitted me, though not too willingly I fancied. Once
indoors, I was shown to a richly furnished room opening off the hall,
and was told to warm myself at the fire while the lady was making ready
to see me.
I meant to have my duty over with first, and then to see Beatrix
afterward, if anything short of force would secure me a sight of
her. But as to that, it seemed only fair to borrow a little of the
probabilities. If I could make my standing good with Mistress Margaret
Shippen, I might be able to persuade her to act as my intercessor.
The lady, whose name was on the letter I carried, did not keep me
waiting long: and coming, she entered the room so quietly that she
surprised me sprawling like a mannerless trooper before the fire; for
which I quickly begged her pardon when I found my feet and made my
best bow. Whereupon she was good enough to give me her hand like an
old acquaintance, and to say that we poor soldiers had little enough
comfort to be denied the ease a cheerful fire afforded.
At this I handed her the letter and she sat down to read it. I gave
her all the privacy there was, staring so hard into the heart of the
blazing logs, and thinking so pointedly of my own love-affair that I
did not know when she finished.
“This is your night for sailing, Captain Page?” she asked gently, and
her low voice called me back suddenly from the love-dream backgrounded
by the mellowing fire.
I said it was; and after that she sat for a long time gazing with me
into the glowing embers. When she began to speak again, I knew why she
had hesitated.
“Your place is to be near General Arnold, isn’t it, Mr. Page?” she
asked, saying it as one who feels the way carefully.
“I hope so,” I replied, hating myself for saying the double-meaning
words for her ears. Then I added: “I am still detached; I have no
command; and Mr.---the general--is having me serve as his aide while we
are here in New York.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “He promised me you should be near him.” And
then I knew who was the “unimpeachable authority” and that she had
vouched for me, and was straightway humbled and made horribly ashamed
and remorseful.
“You spoke for me? You should not have done that, dear lady,” I said
quickly. So much, at least, I owed to common manhood, I thought.
“And why not, pray? If you could know, Mr. Page, how it comforts me
to have the assurance that General Arnold has at least one honorable
gentleman near him--”
“Good heavens, madam!” I ejaculated, forgetting all prudence in the
smarting of her unconscious stab; “you take a frightful risk in
recommending any one in these uncertain times, and especially one who
is himself a forsworn--” I stopped in mid-career, remembering that I
was treading upon doubly dangerous ground in thus pointing out my own
unfitness to the woman who was the wife of the chief forswearer of his
age.
“Ah, you are modest, Mr. Page,” she said, being so good and gentle
herself as to be unable to see guile in others. And then she added:
“You must not try to draw me into the King-and-Congress of it. I used
to think I could know and take sides; but now I leave those things to
others, and try to rise above them. When this bitter war is over and
become a thing of the past, we shall see more clearly than we do now.”
“I would to God it were over at this moment,” I rejoined gloomily.
“I can credit you in that wish: though you are young and eager and a
soldier, Mr. Page. War is a very terrible thing, full of peril and
danger to those we love; full of weary heart-strainings for us poor
women who can only stand and wait. You will serve the general well,
will you not, Captain Page?”--this most wistfully.