this dear lady. Here was a thing I had never bargained for, even in my
wildest imaginings of the crookings and turnings of the way into which
I had set my feet. And now, again, Mr. Hamilton’s qualifying words came
back to me. How much farther could I go and have any semblance of
honor left? But Mistress Margaret was waiting for her answer, and I am
glad she can never know what it cost me to give it.
“I shall not serve the general any the less faithfully for any word you
have spoken, be assured, dear madam,” I said, descending once more, and
still more reluctantly, to the despicable double meanings.
“I shall sleep the easier for that assurance,” she said warmly, flaying
me afresh; and then continuing with the sweet archness of the Margaret
Shippen I had met in her father’s home: “I know you, Captain, better
than you know me--having Beatrix Leigh for a fellow guest under this
same roof.”
“Mistress Beatrix would never say a word for me,” I blurted out.
“Oh, no; certainly not for you in person,” was the half-quizzical
retort. “But for your family. One would think, to hear her talk, that
the Pages,--always excepting yourself, of course, Mr. Richard,--were
the lords of the manor and the first gentlemen of Virginia. I promise
you, she has given you a name to live up to.”
Now was my time, and I did not let the opportunity slip.
“I wish she might be prevailed upon to give me a little sight of
herself--for my leave-taking--Mistress Arnold. Could you--would you--”
She was shaking her head in despair--mock or real, I could not tell
which.
“You are a most blundering lover, Captain,” she protested. “After I had
plotted and planned to persuade her to show herself at Mr. Justice
Smith’s last night--she didn’t want to, I assure you; she is such a
spiteful little patriot--after all that, and my telling the general he
must bring you; then you go and say or do something that sends her to
me in a perfect passion, telling me one moment that she hates you, and
the next that she will die of shame and misery. What did you do, Mr.
Page? I am curious to know.”
“What did I do? Why, Mistress Margaret, I--that is, I--I asked her how
she did, and--” I was as tongue-tied as a schoolboy trying to say his
first piece.
“I think you must have,” she said, demurely. “Beatrix is just the
person to fly into a rage because you asked her how she did.”
I went dumb at this, but my desire was just as clamorous none the
less. So, after we had looked the fire out of countenance for another
minute or two, I essayed again. “Think of it, Mistress Margaret; it is
desperate hard for me to be this near to her--and on the verge of going
to I know not what fate--and not to have a chance to--to--”
“Oh, you young lovers!” she smiled. “Here you are writhing and
prickling to have me go, Mr. Richard Page--to be quit of me--and yet
you are in a terrible fright lest I should go without promising to
send Beatrix to you. Well, I’ll go; but I shan’t promise you she will
come--even for a farewell sight of your handsome face and soldierly
figure. Stay where you are for ten minutes by the clock. If she does
not come by that time, you will have to think on your sins, whatever
they may be, and go without your leave-taking.”
I said I would wait, and thanked her, and felt, when she gave me
her hand again for her own leave-taking, as if I were twice the
hypocritical villain her husband had ever dared to be.
When she was gone, and I had walked the floor of that pretty room a
full half-hour, as it seemed to me, I fell to wondering how her mere
mention of the time could make the tall clock in the corner go on
wagging its pendulum in sly malice while its hands made hours of the
minutes. We speak of killing time: I could have wrecked that lying
time-piece more than once, and was, I think, standing before it and
shaking my fist in its brazen face, when I first heard the hesitant
opening of the door.
No, it was not Mistress Margaret, coming back to tell me she had
failed. It was Beatrix, and she had waited thus long so that she might
curve her lip and train her eyes to flash and look me down, as I had
seen her go and hide herself to do many a time when we were children
together and had quarreled, as children will.
“Well?” she said, much as she had said it the night before, when she
had come into the glass rose-house to make me think she despised me.
“I have come to bid you good-by,” I told her, picking out the most
inane word that came to hand. And she would not let even that poor word
stand.
“No,” she contradicted; “you came to bring a letter for Margaret. You
came to fetch and carry for that dreadful man--as his lackey!”--and
here the beautiful eyes burnt me, they were so indignant hot.
“I should have come anyhow,” I asserted. “But I was glad to bring
Mistress Margaret her letter: that was a service to her rather than to
Mr. Arnold.”
“Call him ‘General,’ Mr. Page; he is your general, isn’t he?” she
scoffed.
“So he says, and so he thinks, and so I call him, when I have to.
But you must not think, because I am wearing this coat, that I am
over-proud of it, or of my service in what we have lately been calling
the ‘Traitors’ Legion,’ on the other side of the Neutral Ground.”
“Then, why are you in it?” she demanded. “Why, why, _why_?”
“It is a long story,” I stammered, “and there is less time for telling
it now than there was last night. But tell me; how is it that you are
here in New York, when I thought you were safe in Virginia?”
“It is a long story,” she mimicked, “and there is less time for telling
it now than there was last night, Mr. Richard Page.”
“But I shall stay until I have heard it,” I retorted hardily.
“Oh, if I must ask Mistress Vandeventer to give you the guest-room
otherwise, you may know; there is no such mighty mystery about _my_
goings and comings,” she said, with a toss of the pretty head. “There
was a ship-load of the Leigh tobacco snapped up by one of the British
ships and brought here as a prize. But word came to us at Sevenoaks
through good Mr.--no, on second thought, I won’t tell you our friend’s
name--through a gentleman of Philadelphia, that it could be ransomed
if any Leigh were bold enough to venture for it. There was no one else
to venture, so I came. And I have got my prize redeemed, and I am going
home again in a few days, or as soon as Cousin Julianna Pettus comes
from Philadelphia to sail with me. There now--make the most of it, Mr.
Turncoat British-officer Page! Or will you turn traitor to me, too, and
have my father’s tobacco seized again?”
It was all very hard; doubly hard now, because my mission, which only a
day earlier had held out hopes of a speedy despatching, now stretched
out into an indefinite future, and was by so much the more unspeakable
to her or to any living soul. But I set her mind at rest about the
retrieved tobacco; if, indeed, she thought so small of me as to suspect
for a moment that, even as a turncoat, I would turn informer.
“I am no exciseman, whatever else you have written against me in your
black books,” I said, and if half the gloom I felt was in the words,
she should have pitied me.
Perhaps she did, for from standing, she took the chair lately occupied
by Margaret Shippen, and nodded me airily to my own.
“I must not forget my manners, even if Mr. Page does sometimes forget
his,” was her wording of the permission to sit beside her.
Now that ravished kiss of the night before sat lightly on my heart,
but not so easily on my conscience. God knows, my love for her was big
enough to excuse the loving violence ten times over; but it stuck in
my throat that, but for my imminent peril, I might not have had the
courage to do it. Confession was the thing; but how could I confess
enough without confessing too much?
“I came here to-night to beg your forgiveness, Beatrix,” I began,
plunging into the middle of the thing because there was no guide-post
to show me any beaten highway leading up to it.
She did not pretend to misunderstand.
“Oh; so you are properly ashamed, are you? I think you should be,
Richard Page!”
“No, not ashamed: but I shall be sore-hearted if I have to go away and
leave you angry at me. But are you angry, Beatrix?”
“Desperately.”
“Would anything I could say--”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Not if I tell you that--” I paused on the brink of the horridest
chasm that ever opened before a halting lover in this world of lovers’
pitfalls. If I confessed that the kiss saved my life--as well it
may have--how could I make her understand--but I could never make
her understand. She would hold me as the paltriest coward that ever
breathed if I should so much as hint at the thing which had given me
the kissing courage at that perilous moment.
“What could you tell me, if you were so disposed, Mr. Page?” she asked,
and now I thought the sarcasm was only half-hearted.
“I could tell you what I have told you a hundred times before, Beatrix;
that I love you: that I am never near you without having to fight most
desperately for even decent self-control.”
“But I do not love you, Dick Page.”
I jerked my chair around to face her.
“Is it because you do love Seytoun?” I demanded, full of jealous wrath
in an instant.
“Foolish boy! Do you say that because I won’t let you quarrel with
Captain Seytoun? There may be better reasons why I wish you to keep the
peace in that quarter, sir.”
“Yet you say you do not love me?”
“I don’t, Mr. Richard Page--not in the coat you are wearing.”
My arms went out to her, and she moved her chair well out of my reach
before she went on.
“No; don’t assume that the coat is a little thing, lightly to be
ignored. It is not, for a Leigh. I shall gladly die a spinster before
I’ll ever wed it, I do assure you, Dick.”
All this time she was looking steadily into the fire, and I was
wondering where her heart-broken sorrow of the night before had gone.
But it came, even while I was seeking for words in which to hint that
my present Judas-coat might not always stand between us; the trembling
of the sweet lips, the welling up of the tears.
“Oh, what madness possessed you, Dick?” she wailed; “you, who were the
bravest, the most devoted, the most cheerful when all was darkest!”
I rose and settled my sword-belt. There was more love-violence ahead
if I should stay; that, and the certain breaking of my promise to Mr.
Hamilton.
“I have greatly overstayed my time; I must go, Beatrix, dear,” I said,
and I scarcely knew the sound of my own voice. And when she rose, I
caught her in my arms before she could escape. “Kiss me, sweetheart,
and bid me God-speed,” I begged.
“For a boon, I will, Captain Page,” she said quickly, holding herself
at arm’s length; and now, though her eyes were still wet, she was not
weeping. “Tell me where this expedition of yours will land!”
Now that was something I could and would tell her gladly. But when
my mouth was open to let the words out, she came close and put her
hand over my lips, and hid her face against that cursed coat of
double-dealing, saying with a half sob: “Oh, no, no! I would have made
you turn traitor again! Kiss me, Dick, and go--go quickly. I--”
She was faint and dizzy--my strong one!--when I led her gently to a
cushioned settee and made her lie down with a pillow at her head. Then
I sent the negro hallman up for Margaret Shippen; and when Mistress
Arnold came hurriedly, I went away, softly, and with a heart that was
strangely light and tender. For now I knew that I need not kill Captain
Seytoun for any chance he stood to take my darling from me.
X
IN WHICH A WALL HAS EARS
THE red bonfire glow tinting the sky over the parade ground of Fort
George had faded into the night when I won back to the lower town.
Passing the sentries on the outer scarp of the fort I made my way
down to the water-front to look for Castner, and to get my embarking
directions.
At the landing-stage, which was lighted by a pair of cresset torches
flaring gustily on stakes thrust into the ground, I found the
lieutenant. He was forwarding the last few boat-loads of stragglers,
and while he busied himself with orders to the ensigns in command of
the ships’ boats, I had speech with the quartermaster of the fort
garrison, who told me that the greater part of the expeditionary fleet
was already standing down the bay.
But Castner had other news for me when he was free to impart it; news
which set me aflame with fresh invention fires.
“Good evening to you again, Captain Page,” he said, when he lounged up
from the despatching of the last of the boats. “Did you come by the
headquarters on your way?”
“No,” said I. “I went on a mission for General Arnold in the town and
was told to come directly here.”
“We are delayed,” he announced, not very regretfully I thought. “At the
last moment orders came from Sir Henry Clinton detaching our convoy
frigate and two of the sloops of war for temporary service elsewhere.
The troop fleet is to wait in the lower bay for the return of the three
men-of-war, and all officers not on service duty have shore leave
during the interval. How does that set with you?”
It was the part of prudence to let the news appear to be a matter of
indifference to me, and I answered accordingly.
“A soldier should be prepared for anything; and I’ll dare say
the tavern is a fairly good inn--far better than the cabin of an
ill-smelling fishing schooner. I thank heaven I have no active command
to send me down the bay with the musket men.”
Castner grinned. “I’ve been picking some comfort out of that in my
own case,” he admitted. “Do you go back to Mr. Ar--to the general’s
quarters?”
I told him I should not, if he would be good enough to report me: that
I should go across to the tavern to retake my room, where I might be
found if there were any further orders for me. And so we parted at the
northwestern angle of the fort, and I was glad to be alone. For now
the book of the kidnapping possibilities was suddenly reopened, and my
brain was busy with a thousand desperate plots all weaving themselves
upon this most opportune delaying of the expedition.
Wanting nothing so much as a chance to let my mind shuttle connectedly
among the plot threads, I shunned the tavern and kept on around the
northern and eastern escarpment of the fort until I found myself once
more approaching the waterside and the landing-place with its two smoky
torches still flaring in the wind. The spot was deserted, though it
was so close under the guns of the fort that I could hear the tread of
the sentinel as he paced back and forth behind the screen of the outer
ravelin.
Hearing my footsteps, the sentry stopped and would have challenged me,
I suppose, if his attention had not been drawn at the same minute to
a ship’s small boat which was approaching the landing. His challenge
went for that, instead, and when I heard the answer I stood quickly
aside and waited for what should follow. For, by all the good luck that
ever fell upon a perplexed and half-desperate plotter, the man who
stepped from the stern-sheets of the small boat and made answer to the
challenging sentry was none other than my fellow conspirator, Sergeant
Champe.
“A courier from the fleet, with letters for General Arnold,” was his
reply to the fort’s watch-dog; and when he had taken the few strides
necessary to carry him out of earshot from the ravelin and from the
two sailors in his boat, I waylaid him, telling him in twenty words
how fortune--and Sir Henry Clinton--had given us one more chance to
retrieve ourselves.
“Plot for it, then,” was his gloomy response. “I see nothing beyond my
going back to the ships presently with the answer to the letter I’m
carrying.”
“That you shall not do,” I replied hastily. “We must think up some
excuse to keep you ashore. Leave that to me and go on your errand. I’ll
wait for you here and have my plan ready against your return.”
The plan, decided on in a half-hour’s chilly marching back and forth
across the green while I waited for Champe to come back, was not
very complicated. When the sergeant made his appearance I took the
despatches and sent him over to the tavern to reengage my room for me,
telling him to pose as my soldier-servant therein. Meanwhile, I told
him, I would take his place as Arnold’s courier, and it would go hard
with me if I should not account for his detention on shore when I could
have speech with those on shipboard who had sent him.
Passing on to the landing-place in my new character of despatch
carrier, I found the sailors willing enough to exchange the sergeant
they had brought ashore for a captain; and at my order to give way,
they pulled off to one of the rear-guard vessels of the fleet, where,
to my dismay, I found I had to deal with Major Simcoe, whose letters to
Arnold had been the despatches carried ashore by Champe.
Quite naturally, the major’s first question was for his messenger, and
I was glad that the light of the ship’s lantern was so poor that he
could not see my involuntary recoil when I saw who it was with whom I
had to fence.
“I am General Arnold’s aide,” I replied guardedly. “Were you expecting
some one else, Major Simcoe?”
“I sent a man from the Loyal American detail on board, a sergeant
named Champe,” he explained. “Did he return with you, Captain?”
“No. Possibly the general made other use of him,” I suggested.
“Possibly,” said the major, eying me shrewdly from beneath his bushy
brows. “But in that case he must have changed his mind after this
letter was sent. You will see that it is superscribed to me ‘By the
hands of Sergeant Champe,’” and he held the letter so that I might read
the writing on the back.
There was no help save in a stout lie quickly told; and even this might
have disastrous after-consequences if the major should come ashore
later on and follow it up.
“General Arnold is my superior officer, and I do not presume to
question his reasons for writing another man’s name on the letter which
he gives me to deliver, Major Simcoe,” I said boldly, adding, with
even greater impudence: “If you do not wish to receive the general’s
despatches at my hands, let me have them again and I’ll so report to
General Arnold.”
“Oh, there is no need for any heat about it, Captain Page,” was his
even-toned retort. “Only, when you go ashore, I shall be glad if you
will look up my sergeant and send him off to me. You shall have the
boat’s crew as long as may be necessary.”
Now this was not satisfactory, either, since it made me responsible for
the boat’s crew, and, indirectly, for Champe’s return. So I took the
high-and-mighty stand again.
“Egad, Major Simcoe,” I protested, “I’m afraid you will have to hold
me excused. General Arnold would not be greatly pleased to have one of
his aides detailed by you to bring in your stragglers.”
At this the doughty major came close and looked me in the eyes as the
poor light would let him.
“Hark you, Captain Page,” he said, speaking so those who stood about
should not hear; “you seem bent on quarreling with me when there
is no need for it. That is your privilege, sir, and if you were a
king’s officer I should be the last man in the army to deny you. As
it is--well, a polite word or two may go far with a gentleman in your
situation, and I wonder you are so slow in perceiving it. Now, sir,
will you report to the general in command that I am short a sergeant,
and that I shall be greatly pleased to have the proper steps taken to
find and send him off to me?”
If there is one good quality above another in the Page make-up it is
the instant knowledge of the precise moment when the trumpet should
sound the retreat. I saw now that I had taken the wrong tack with the
tart major, and that I must butter him well if I wished to come off
without loss.
“Saying nothing of your allusions, Major Simcoe,--which we may well
take up at some other time and place,--I beg your pardon on the
sergeant’s account,” I said, with no more than the proper touch of
offended dignity. “You put me upon my mettle, seeming to question my
right to bring you a letter--which you may take as the reason why I did
not tell you plainly in the beginning that Champe was sent upon another
errand after your letter had been written and superscribed. I am sure
you do not question the commanding general’s right to use a warrant
officer of his own legion as he sees fit.”
“I beg your pardon, Captain Page,” said the major crisply. “I am
a soldier, sir, and I was thinking only of the man’s possible
disobedience. Of course, if Mr. Ar--if the general required him, I have
nothing more to say,” and he drew aside and read his letter.
Now I had another twinge or two to suffer while I waited, for fear
Arnold might possibly have made some mention of Champe in the letter.
But in a minute or two the major turned and gave me my dismissal quite
courteously, telling me that there was no answer other than to convey
his duty to the commanding officer, and to say, if it came in my way,
that he, Major Simcoe, would report at the headquarters sometime during
the following day--a thing I prayed my good angel to prevent, if it
could be done without setting the entire cosmic plan of the universe
ajee.
Having thus been given leave to vanish, I made good use of it before
any other untoward thing should happen; and with a coin apiece for my
two sailor oarsmen at the landing, I answered the sentry challenge from
the fort and made my way swiftly to the tavern.
Here I learned that my portmanteau had not been taken away, and that
a soldier, calling himself my servant, was waiting for me in the room
above. Meaning to give the Royalist barman no chance to think that I
cared a rap about any common soldier who might be sitting up for me, I
ordered a cup of wine and a pipe of tobacco, and sat quietly before the
fire in the supper-room, sipping the one and smoking the other for a
full half-hour before paying my score and going above-stairs.
In the barn-like room Champe was improving the interval soldier-wise;
which is to say that he had taken the covers from my bed, rolled
himself in them, and was sound asleep on the floor. He roused at my
incoming, however, and was broad awake by the time I had thrown a log
on the smoldering fire he had made.
“Well, and how did you carry it off with the major?” he asked when he
had rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.
“Not so handsomely as I should have, had you told me it was Major
Simcoe I should have to hoodwink,” I retorted. “But you are safe for
the time being--which means until Major Simcoe and Arnold meet each
other and fall to comparing notes.”
“And then?” queried my sergeant.
“Then Simcoe will learn that I have lied to him, and Arnold may not
be able to remember that he sent you on an errand that prevented your
return to the ship with his letter to the major,” I rejoined shortly.
“Which means that we have purchased--how many hours, Captain Dick?”
“God knows; and I do not. But we must make the most of what time we
have. No one seems to know where our convoy ships of war have gone, or
when they are to return. But with the fleet waiting in the lower bay,
the interval can not be long. What we do, we must do quickly.”
“Aye,” said Champe; “and what will that be?”
I had been culling the plots out patiently ever since Castner’s
announcement of the delay had set them weaving, and now there was but
one that offered any promise of success--and that a desperate one. With
the uncertain time-factor we had to count on, it was useless to think
of trying to get word to Major Lee in the camp at Tappan. What we did
must be done without help from the outside; and upon this hard-and-fast
pivot the temerarious enterprise must be made to turn.
“What we thought we might accomplish with a corporal’s guard of Major
Lee’s men to help us, we must still do, and do it with our hands, John
Champe,” I said.
“Take him forcibly in his house, you mean?”
I nodded.
“I’m with you, Captain Dick,” was the stout sergeant’s rejoinder. “But
afterward?”
“That is what it may take us all the time we have, and maybe more, to
provide for. The river is our only way out, and we must have a boat,
the lightest and swiftest we can find. Do you pull an oar, Sergeant?”
“No so comfortably as I do a bridle rein. But I shall make out when it
comes to that. What is your plan?--or have you drawn any picture of it
in your mind?”
“It is as simple as knocking a beef yearling in the head with a stone,”
I admitted, nettled that I could contrive nothing subtler. “We find
our boat, beg, buy or steal it, and place it as near at hand as may be
convenient. That done, we lay hands on Sir Judas, sleeping or waking,
and then for the river and a long pull with the tide or against it, as
fortune chances to smile or frown upon us in fixing the hour.”
“Aye,” said Champe, quite without enthusiasm, “it’s surely simple
enough, Captain Dick.”
“Think of a better, then,” I snapped curtly.