spitefully savage. It was comforting to know that our nobler enemies
detested Arnold’s treachery, carrying their aversion to the extent of
despising any one who wore his regimental colors. But, on the other
hand, the slight had to pass through me on its way to hit the mark, and
I was never good at paying penalties for another’s sins.
So, when there were covert sneers and back-turnings enough to make
a man sick, I began to strut and sneer in self-defense, twitting
a lieutenant of Hetheridge’s whose line was the first to break at
Monmouth, and a captain of Knyphausen’s whose Hessian devils had cut a
troop of our horse to pieces at Tappan after it had surrendered.
This was all very hot-headed and rash, and would doubtless have
involved me in trouble enough if a diversion had not come in the shape
of Mr. Justice Smith’s new London-made hackney coach drawn by four
horses which, for their postilions and trappings, might have been taken
out of a crack artillery troop.
The coach came to a stand before Arnold’s door, and, as may be
imagined, I left the quarreling Hessian captain without ceremony when I
saw the faces of Margaret Shippen and Mistress Beatrix Leigh behind the
window-panes.
“I have come to see the general, Captain Page,” said Mistress Arnold,
when I had opened the coach door. “Will you be my _avant coureur_?”
“Most gladly,” I replied. And when I had found Arnold at his
writing-table, and had his command to fetch his wife up to him, I went
back to show Mistress Margaret the way.
“You will undertake to keep Beatrix from stagnating for the few minutes
I shall need, Captain Page?” said this dear lady, when I was leaving
her at Arnold’s office door; and I said I would try, and was thanking
her when she bade me hasten before some of the other officers had cut
me out.
I was minded to hasten fast enough, though not specially for the reason
given by Mistress Margaret. I thought it would be a much more inclement
day than this seventeenth day of December, Anno Domini, 1780, when I
could not hold my own against a handful of redcoat popinjays who picked
flaws in a man because he did not happen to be wearing a shoulder-knot
to their liking.
But alas! pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before
destruction. When I reached the street here was my lady Beatrix
laughing and chatting most amiably with the little ensign who had been
one of her partners at Mr. Justice Smith’s rout, and there were only
a cool little nod and a blank smile for my hasty return. All of which
put me on my mettle so that I stayed at the ensign’s elbow, and trod
on his toes, and apologized therefor, and was pleasantly rude and
insulting until he finally gave me, though not without black looks and
a smothered curse or two, my place at the open door of the hackney
coach.
“Pray where did you learn your new boorishness, Captain Page; in the
Dutch Highlands?” queried my lady, in the gentle tone she used when the
lightning is about to flash.
“I learned to fight for my rights in Old Virginia,” I retorted gaily;
“and I shall not soon forget the lessons you have taught me touching
them.”
“I decline to be your sponsor--in that or in anything else, Captain
Page,” she declared, regarding me critically.
Now here was a pretty change of climate, I thought. The night before,
when she believed I was going off to the wars with Arnold, there were
sympathy and anxiety and tenderness, and even a little love, perhaps.
And now, merely because I had not gone quite so suddenly as the program
called for, the wan December sunshine could not have held itself more
chillingly aloof.
“What have I done to-day that I had not done before last night,
Beatrix?” I asked, shifting my position at the coach step so that I
could keep one eye on Sir Henry Clinton’s door--for the possible coming
of the twiddler of watch-seals was sorely dividing my attention, or
diverting it.
“You are wearing a coat that I do not like,” she announced, going back
to the original cause of quarrel.
“It is as good a coat as the one Ensign Brewster is wearing,” I
ventured.
“It is not!” she retorted. “He is wearing the coat of his king and
country, and in his case it fits honestly.”
“Well, then; this is the same coat I wore last night,” I urged,
presuming rashly where I should have had more sense.
“Last night is not to-day: and I have lived half a lifetime since last
night.”
“Then you think more of a cause than you do of a man?” I asked; and I
would never have said such a thing to her if I had not been hag-ridden
by my responsibility for one James Askew.
“You are quibbling!” she returned. “The cause is much--God knows how
much it is to our stricken country: but truth and faith and loyalty are
more. I could honor you in spite of your colors, Dick, if you fought
under them as honestly as Ensign Brewster does.”
“I may be fighting more honestly than you think,” I broke out, pushed
to the wall, as I was likely to be in any controversy with her.
She took me up so quickly that I had no breathing space.
“You have hinted before that you could explain if you would, Dick,” she
said with low-toned eagerness. Then, looking past me to see if any of
the others were within earshot: “Tell me--is it a mask? Are you--”
I made a swift gesture for silence. There are times when the very
stones in the pavement must not be trusted.
“You must not forget that you are speaking to a captain in Benedict
Arnold’s Legion, or”--here I lowered my voice to mate it with her eager
half-whisper--“that a word of what you have just hinted would hang that
same captain higher than Haman!”
“But you do not deny--you do not deny!” she fluttered. “Oh, Dick! give
me one little thread to cling to--one look to tell me that you are--”
I knew her bosom was heaving; that the quick tears had risen to quench
the righteous indignation in the beautiful eyes. And yet I could not
speak to her; could not even look at her. For here was Arnold coming
down the house steps with Mistress Margaret on his arm; and, not fifty
feet away, a smallish man in sober gray was standing before Sir Henry
Clinton’s door, looking curiously up at the higher windows and absently
toying with a great bunch of seals at his watch-fob as he stared.
There was no time to say a word to Beatrix, if I ever hoped to have
time for any future word with her--time and the breath to say it with.
The smallish man in gray, gazing in abstracted indecision at Sir
Henry’s upper windows, was twiddling my life and Sergeant Champe’s at
his fingers’ ends. Let him take but a single step within the door he
was facing, and we two would be as water spilt on the ground, which can
not be gathered up again.
I scarcely know how I left her; how, for one brief instant, I made way
deferentially for Arnold and his wife, and in the next had come within
gripping distance of the man in Quaker gray. But the thing was done in
some fashion, and after this frenzied taking of the first step, the
next came easily.
“Your name is Askew--James Askew?” I whispered in the spy’s ear; and
if I had put the point of a knife between his ribs he could not have
winced more palpably.
“No, no, Lieutenant--er--Captain, I should say; you are quite mistaken,
sir. Duvall is my name; Harrison Duvall, of--of Pennsylvania.”
“One of your names, perhaps,” I qualified, smiling down on him
meaningly, and now I noted the shifting ferrety eyes whose color Champe
could not recall--the eyes, the black stock and the scratch-wig.
“We need not quarrel over a little matter of names, Mr. Askew,” I
went on rapidly. “Let it be sufficient that I know you and know your
business here. You are in great danger--as great as, or greater than,
that which you were confronting in Mr. Washington’s camp at Tappan no
longer ago than yesterday morning.”
If there had been any doubt as to the man’s double-dealing past, his
carrying of water on both shoulders, his appearance now would have
removed it. His colorless face became tallowy, and fine little beads of
sweat were starting from his forehead. I followed up my advantage like
a swordman who dares not give his antagonist time to gather and parry.
“We know a thing or two about you here,” I continued, speaking softly
and edging between him and the group of officers at Clinton’s door.
“Sir Henry would be most happy to lay eyes on you--happier than you
would be, a few hours later. I say your danger is greater here than
it was at Tappan: our prisoners do not break jail so easily as Mr.
Washington’s do.”
His face was like parchment now, and he had to wet his lips before he
could speak.
“I--I can make my standing good with Sir Henry,” he faltered. “There
was a mistake about that affair of Major André’s. It was not I who told
Paulding and Williams where they were to lie in wait for the major--I
did not!”
Now I thought I had him! Paulding and Williams were two of the three
men who had arrested Major André, and it was common talk in the patriot
camps that some one had first told them where to look for André, though
these two, as well as Isaac Van Wart, the third man, stoutly denied it.
“You will have trouble in proving that mistake, Mr. Askew,” I said;
“great trouble, I fear. But that is for the future; your present risk
is in standing here, where some one who knows you as well or better
than I, may chance to come along.”
He had been casting furtive glances over his shoulder, as if picking
out the way to run; but now that I had him at bay, the time was
ripe for an escape from the dangerous neighborhood of the general
headquarters.
“Come with me,” I commanded hurriedly, linking an arm in one of his.
“You have a piece of news to tell--but not to Sir Henry Clinton. There
is a better market, and a much safer one.”
He yielded, reluctantly, only because he had good reason to be afraid
of every one. I could feel the fear tremor shaking him all the way
to the tavern to which I led him, and a great contempt for the
paltry villain made my gorge rise and the touch of his arm seem like
pollution. He was silent and furtively watchful till I got him into the
inn and up the stair. But on the threshold of my room he hung back and
showed his teeth in a snarl.
“I don’t know who you are, or where you are taking me!” he burst
out; and then he tried to twist his arm free, developing sudden and
unlooked-for strength in the momentary struggle.
“Quiet, you dog!” I ordered, and then I thrust him in ahead of me and
followed to shut and bar the door.
He stood where I had pushed him, in the middle of the floor, and made
no resistance when I felt him over for weapons and found two dueling
pistols and a keen-edged flesher’s knife hidden under his waistcoat.
For a man so well provided, he was surely the abjectest craven I ever
saw.
“Now you can go a little more comfortably into that matter I spoke
of,” I remarked, breaking the blade of the knife over an andiron, and
shaking the powder primings out of the pans of the pistols. “You were
saying that you had news to sell--”
“I said nothing of the kind,” he flashed back. “Let me out of this, or
I--I swear I’ll raise the house on you!”
“No, you won’t,” I replied coolly. “Nothing is farther from your
present intentions, Mr. James Askew, and the fact that I know this is
your best assurance of safety.”
“I don’t know you,” he raged. “What have you got me here for?”
“That is better,” I said, pushing him into a chair and drawing up
another for myself. “First, I brought you here to tell you that your
news outran you. I can repeat to you, word for word, the information
you were going to try to sell to Sir Henry Clinton.”
I saw, the moment the words were uttered, that I had made the rashest
blunder. This spy was no ordinary tale-bearer to be hoodwinked
or bullied out of his cunning. The lines of his face grew more
hatchet-like and the sharp little eyes dwindled to pin-points.
“Ha!” he said, with a shrill indrawing of his breath. “I thought your
voice seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place it at once. You had a
much better reason than the one you gave me for getting me to come away
from the headquarters, Captain Richard Page.”
His naming of me was enough, and my stomach rebelled at the thought
that I would have to turn butcher and kill him, even as Champe had
planned to kill him. Yet I resolved to give him the benefit of the
doubt, if indeed, there were any doubt.
“Tell me plainly what you think you know,” I said, looking away from
him.
“I know that two men, a captain in Baylor’s Horse and a sergeant of
the Continental Army, are here in New York for the purpose of seizing
Benedict Arnold and carrying him back to Tappan. The sergeant I met
this morning, thanks to a two-faced gentleman who shall pay dearly for
his meddling; and the captain--”
“Well,” said I; “and the captain?”
His eyes lighted with a blaze of triumphant cunning.
“You are a good actor, Captain Page, but not quite good enough. Will
you unbar the door and let me go? Or shall I call for help?”
“Neither,” I rejoined briefly, drawing my sword and laying it across my
knees. “A movement out of your chair, or a tone louder than you have
been using, and you are a dead man, Mr. James Askew.”
The threat quelled him, or rather I should say, it put him the keener
upon his wits. I saw nothing for it now but a bloody murder, and was
trying to nerve myself to it when he spoke again, smoothly insinuating.
“We seem to have arrived at what our friends the French would call an
_impasse_, Captain Page,” he said quietly. “I can hang you; therefore
you dare not let me go. The alternative is for you to pass that shining
slip of steel through me two or three times; and that, too, has its
drawbacks. You don’t come of murdering stock, Captain Page, though I
don’t doubt you have killed your antagonist often enough in hot blood.”
“I was thinking more of what I should do with your carcass after the
fact,” I objected bluntly.
“Ah; that is another drawback--one which I overlooked at the moment. It
would be inconvenient to have a dead man in your room, with no way of
getting rid of the _corpus delicti_. But if I might offer a suggestion;
the river is not far away, and under cover of night you and your
sergeant might compass the funeral--though not without a possible risk.”
His coolness, now that the real pinch had come, was amazing. I could
hardly believe this was the same man whom I had frightened into teeth
chatterings before Sir Henry Clinton’s door but a few minutes ago.
“No,” he went on, in the same even tone, “the disposition of my poor
body is not what deters you. It is that other thing I mentioned--your
reluctance to premeditated blood-shedding. Now that is purely
conventional, if I may say so. To kill is to take life; and the mere
manner of its taking can make but little difference to the slayer, and
none at all to the victim. Yet the traditions are strong; and I am
relying quite confidently upon them, Captain Page.”
“You seem to be,” I muttered grimly. “But there is a point beyond
which the traditions do not run. Setting aside the instinct of
self-preservation--which is stronger than any blood or breeding--your
life is justly forfeit. If you had your deserts, you would be lying in
some shallow grave beside Major André at this present hour. If I am
what you say I am, it is neither more nor less than my duty to carry
out the sentence of the court-martial which condemned you to hang as a
spy.”
“But if you put that sentence into execution, Captain Page, you have
still failed to recapture your escaped secret,” he said.
“How is that? Who else besides yourself knows it?”
“The officer in the camp at Tappan who connived at my escape. I gave it
to him as the price of his help.”
“Which is all the more reason why I should kill you, here and now, Mr.
Askew,” I insisted.
“True; very true,” he rejoined musingly. “Yet you will not do it,
Captain Page.”
“Why won’t I?” I demanded.
“Chiefly because of the traditions we speak of. I am an unarmed
man--ah, my dear sir, you rashly lost a point in your own favor when
you took my poor weapons away from me--I am unarmed, as I say, and
can offer no more resistance to a man of your youth and weight than a
harmless, necessary cat. No, you will not break with the time-honored
code of your order--not even to save your life.”
Slowly it was borne in upon me that the man was coolly braving me; nay,
more, he was daring me, taunting me. Yet all that he was saying was
most bitingly true.
“What are you leading up to?” I asked shortly; and he spread his hands
in polite deprecation.
“Did I not say that we were at the impassable point, Mr. Page?”
“Yes; but you did not believe it. You are not talking to hear the sound
of your own voice.”
“No; nor am I talking to gain time, though it may appear so to you.
Indeed, I fancy there is more safety in haste. If your black-faced
sergeant should happen in.... Now there is your chance, Captain Page.
Sit quietly where you are, with your bare sword to keep me where I am,
until your man comes back. Then you can shirk all responsibility and
the sergeant--lacking a gentleman’s traditions--will do the rest.”
I thought this was the subtlest thrust of all; to point out delicately
that I should be responsible for what Champe might do. But there was no
escaping the conclusion.
“Come to the point of your bargaining, Mr. Askew,” I commanded. “You
see a way out, and I don’t--other than the bloody one.”
“Ah; now we are coming upon some more habitable ground. Outwardly, you
are a Loyalist, Mr. Page, and inwardly, I doubt not, a true patriot.
I am neither. I had thought of asking a hundred guineas for this news
I carry--it is not too much, you would say?--and it doesn’t matter a
boddle to me whose money it is. In other words, your gold will have as
true a ring in my ears as Sir Henry Clinton’s, or even Mr. Arnold’s.”
“Bah!” I said; “you would take my money one minute and sell me to the
highest bidder the next.”
He nodded slowly. “You have pointed out a risk--a certain risk to
yourself. I might not keep faith with you. Still, the chances are
somewhat in your favor. The matter you touched upon while we were
together in the street--the calumny connecting me with Major André’s
misfortune--would have its weight. Having sold you your timely lump of
silence and pocketed my price--”
“You might be willing to let well enough alone and not try to double on
me? I think that is most unlikely, Mr. Askew. Don’t you?”
“It is a nice point,” he said, as if deliberating on it. “On the one
hand, I have my hundred guineas without the risk. On the other, since I
was willing to take the risk to earn them from Clinton or Arnold, why
should I hesitate to try the doubling? Ah, I have it! You have heard
the saying that money is always cowardly, Mr. Page? With your hundred
guineas in my pocket, each cowardly guinea of them will be persuading
me to save its life--and yours.”
I laughed. The thing had risen to the plane of humor. Here was a man
whose life lay in my hand, and he was trying, not to bribe me to
spare him, but to persuade me to give him a handsome present for the
privilege of sparing him!
But when the laugh was over, the dilemma still remained, with its horns
as sharp as before. If I could not kill this scoundrel in cold blood,
neither could I turn him loose, with or without a golden bid for his
silence. I thought it out calmly and saw no middle way. The man must
die, but I would give him an honester man’s chance to die fighting.
My saber was standing in the chimney corner where Champe had left it
the night before. I drew it from the sheath and laid it on the table,
with the hilt to my spy’s hand.
“Take it and do your best,” I said. “We have spent too many words and
too much time.”
But he merely shook his head soberly and locked his hands over one knee.
“I should be a greater ninny than I hoped you took me for, to give you
so good an excuse for pinking me, Captain Page. I am no swashbuckling
horse-soldier, to tangle my legs in a sword, or to know how to use one.”
Here was the _impasse_ again, with no way to circumvent it, that
I could see. What was I to do? With the long Scots’ rapier for a
walking-staff I began to pace the floor, cudgeling my brain to think of
some expedient that would secure our safety, Champe’s and mine, without
sinking one or both of us to the level of remorseless assassins. I had
not dreamed it would be so hard. Thumbing it over with Champe, the one
desirable thing seemed to be to get hold of this scoundrel before he
could leak the news that would efface us. But now he was secured, the
whole thing was to know what to do with him.
Askew never moved a muscle as I strode back and forth behind his chair.
He sat perfectly still, staring into the blackened fireplace as if its
soot-covered interior had fascinated him. A dozen times I passed him,
and at each facing about he seemed to be staring the harder, with the
thin fingers more tightly interlocked over the suspended knee. Then--
I do not know how it came about, or why I spun on my heel and threw
the rapier up to guard my head. It was not for any warning either to
eye or ear that he gave me, certainly. But when I wheeled, the heavy
trooper’s sword was flashing in the air and my instinctive parry served
only to break the force of the blow--to turn it flat-bladed when it
was meant to be a cleaver-cut such as a butcher would aim at the meat
on his block. Then the half-lighted dusk of the long room burst into a
thousand scintillating stars, and I knew no more until I came back to
life with John Champe kneeling beside me and sopping my head with icy
water from the hand-basin.
“The man--Askew?” I gasped, when I could find the words. “Is he gone?”
“I don’t see him anywhere,” said the sergeant, making believe to peer
into the gathering shadows. Then he chuckled. “So it was Askew who gave
you this goose-egg on your skull, was it? But rest you easy, Captain
Dick; he has had time to swim the Hudson corner-wise before this. The
blood was dried in your hair when I found you lying here--and that was
a good quarter-hour ago.”
I sat up on the floor, and the stars began to twinkle again.
“Help me,” I muttered. “We must get out of this--now--this minute! That
double-faced fiend will be back again, with a file of soldiers at his
heels. Stir yourself, man, for heaven’s sake! I tell you he knows us
both--_and knows us for what we really are_!”
XIV
A CASK OF BITTERS
EXPECTING nothing less than the spy’s return at the head of an
arresting party, we lost no time getting out of the tavern, Champe
going first, and I following when he gave the prearranged signal that
the coast was clear.
Being safely out-of-doors, our next care was to put distance between us
and the threatening trap from which we had escaped. Taking the readiest
way that offered we hurried eastward through the burned district,
avoiding the barracks on one hand and the water-front on the other,
having no particular destination in view at first, and no plan other
than the simple one of losing ourselves as completely and speedily as
possible.
In this dodging flight, on which we ran as the wicked do,--with no man
pursuing,--the sergeant was the file-leader. Having been in the town
for near two months, he knew its byways, and though the short winter
day was drawing on to its early dusk, he seemed never to be at fault in
our various windings and turnings.
We were a good distance from the fort, and had borne eastward and
northward until the houses were growing far apart and scattering, when
Champe led the way to the right and we pressed on until we could hear
the waters of the East River lapping coldly on the shingle. By this
time the stars were coming out, and a thin sickle of a moon in its
first quarter hung in the western sky. In the chill, gray half-light a
house, isolated by its situation, and still farther set apart from its
neighbors by a high-fenced garden, loomed darkly before us, its windows
shuttered and its chimney smokeless.
“Here is our burrow,” announced the sergeant, opening the garden gate
to admit us. Then, as I reeled rather than walked into the enclosure:
“Is Mr. Askew’s love pat still fretting you, Captain?”
I said it was, and made light of it, though my head was buzzing like a
hive of angry bees. I had no notion of where Champe was taking me; and,
what with the pain and the desire to be warmed and at ease, I was not
curious enough to inquire.
Quite as if he were the owner of the house, Champe strode to the door,
fitted a key in the lock, clicked it and bade me enter. But since the
room to which the door gave ingress was as dark as a pocket, I let him
show me the way. The interior was cold and discomforting, with the dead
chill which goes with closed doors and windows and long-extinguished
fires; and when the sergeant had shut and locked the door we were in
darkness thick enough to be cut with a knife.