purpose of my own, up Broad Way, past the wretched, makeshift shelters
that were taking the place of many fair homes destroyed in the great
fire of ’76, past Trinity Church standing as a ghostly ruin on the
left, its walls only partly down and a corner of its bell tower still
rearing itself high above the fire-killed trees in the churchyard.
Beyond the church I made a détour to the westward to get a glimpse of
the river. It was not very rough as yet, but a heavy swell was running
up with the tide to tell of rough weather to the southward. I recalled
the light craft which must be our dependence. It would do very well in
a seaway, always provided there was not enough wind to make the waves
break over its low gunwale. There were as yet no white-caps to show
their teeth on the black and heaving expanse, so I turned back to my
errand with rising hope.
As on the former occasion, it was the old negro servant who admitted
me to the Vandeventer house and took Arnold’s letter above-stairs;
and almost before I had had time to feel the cheer of the fire in the
luxurious little reception-room whither I went to await whatever answer
there might be, the door opened to show me, not Mistress Margaret, nor
yet Beatrix, but Mistress Julianna Pettus, Jack’s aunt, and Beatrix’s
cousin, once removed.
Now, truly, Beatrix had told me very plainly that she was expecting
“Cousin Ju”; was delaying her departure for Virginia only until that
good lady should come over from Philadelphia to accompany her. But
this fact, like some others, had gone completely out of my mind, else
I think I should never have had the courage to come within speaking
distance of the Vandeventer house that night. For Cousin Julianna was
fair, fat and forty, with a mind of her own and a tongue sharper than
any whip-lash; and being my own second cousin on my mother’s side, she
had a sense of proprietorship in me which she had exercised impartially
since she stood godmother for me in the old church in Williamsburg.
“Well, Dick Page!” she cried. “So you have come to show me your new
clothes, have you? Was there no other ditch that you could wallow in,
but you must be the first to disgrace a long line of honorable Virginia
gentlemen? Merciful suz! Shame, hot shame on you, boy--to make us all
hide our heads this way! Beatrix Leigh will never marry you now; her
father would disinherit her flat, and so, too, would I. And you’ve
fairly thrown her into Howard Seytoun’s arms, brute beast as he is!
No, don’t try to explain it; there is no explanation--there can’t be!”
What could I do, other than bow my head to the righteous storm and
let it exhaust itself, if it would? It raged--oh, how scathingly it
raged!--for a full quarter of an hour, I believe, during which time I
could scarcely get a word in edgewise; but when the hurricane had blown
itself out, my cousin sat down and condescended to ask me news of Jack,
and of the doings in the camps on the Hudson, remembering herself now
and then to flay me afresh for the coat I was wearing.
I told her all she asked to know, and was as meek as mush, hoping she
would come finally to telling me something of her plans and Beatrix’s,
as she did. And it was very comical, too, if I had been in any laughing
mood, for, when she had told me that the rescued Leigh tobacco had
been put aboard of a certain coasting schooner named the _Nancy Jane_,
Captain Elijah Sprigg, and that her passage to the James River, and
Beatrix’s, had been taken on board the same vessel, she remembered
suddenly that she was telling all this to a king’s officer, and her
threatenings of me, and her alarm for the safety of the tobacco, were
equally matched.
“You’ll never go and tell on us, Dick Page!” she half pleaded, half
commanded. “You wouldn’t be such an abandoned and despicable villain as
that!”
“Why,” said I, teasing her a little, “haven’t you just been telling me
that nothing was too hang-dog and mean for me to do, since I am wearing
the king’s coat? Isn’t it my duty--my new duty--to go straight down
to Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters with the news that you mean to run the
blockade with a contraband cargo of tobacco?”
“Oh, you’d never, _never_ do that, Dickie Page!” she protested,
wringing her hands in distress. “Mr. Vandeventer says we are ‘winked
at’; that because Beatrix is a brave girl, and the friend of Margaret
Shippen, she will be allowed to take her tobacco and go home. But I
don’t trust them--any of them. They’ll stop us; send us to prison!
Dick, you’ll never be so cruel?”
“I’ll make a bargain with you, Cousin Ju,” I laughed. “Get me speech
with Beatrix, and I’ll promise you never to lisp a syllable to a living
soul about the tobacco.”
“Oh, but Dick! she protests she will never look on your face again--and
serve you right, too! She’ll never come down to you for my urging.”
“Yes, she will. Tell her it’s the price of her cargo of tobacco.”
“You promise?”
“Most faithfully, I assure you.”
Cousin Julianna went away in haste, and I was still laughing over her
absurd fears when the door opened to admit Beatrix. And I do think
she was more beautiful and winsome and alluring than I had ever seen
her, as she stood in the doorway, trying to make me believe she was
angry--as she was not.
“So you threaten me, do you, Mr. Page? If I don’t dance when you pipe,
you will turn informer. Did Cousin Ju tell me straight?”
“If Cousin Ju told you that I was ready to put my soul in pawn for
another sight of you, she had the straight of it. I owe you an apology
for--”
“You owe me ten thousand of them--and more. You ran from me yesterday
afternoon when I was waiting in the coach for Margaret as if I had had
the plague!”
“I was on duty and was obliged to go. It was imperative. I might say
that the lives of two men hung in the balance of my haste at that
particular moment.”
She was leaning against the door-post and regarding me steadily.
“Dick,” she said; “what has come over you since the days when we were
children together? Then you were as truthful and transparent as they
say Mr. Washington used to be when he was a little lad and would rather
be punished than lie; but now.... Listen, sir. Our carriage did not
move for five full minutes, and I saw you: you talked easily with a
little gentleman in gray, and afterward took his arm and walked away
with him to the tavern--and the tap-room, I suppose--without so much as
another look in our direction. And now you would tell me--”
“I have told you the exact truth, as far as it went, Beatrix,” I
interrupted. “The man in gray held two men’s lives in the hollow of his
palm. If I had not caught him on the instant--well, no matter; that was
Sir Henry Clinton’s door he was meaning to enter.”
“More mysteries,” she complained, though not so impatiently now, I
fancied. “What would have happened if he had gone to see Sir Henry?”
“An almost certain chance that the Gallows Hill squad last night would
have been increased by two more unfortunates.”
“How terrible!” she murmured. “Is it possible that you live from day to
day in the midst of such frightful perils, Dick? These two endangered
men--are they friends of yours?”
I grinned. “One of them I may call my friend: the other--well, there
are those who will tell you that the other has always been Dick Page’s
own dearest enemy.”
Her keen wit pounced instantly upon the truth before I could bite my
tongue for its foolish rashness.
“Yourself? Oh, Dick! what is this wretched web you have become
entangled in? Tell me--tell me!”
“I can not,” I said, realizing too late that I had brought all this
upon myself.
“You mean you will not: then you do not love me, Dick Page!”
“Perhaps it is because I love you too well, sweetheart. Can’t you
believe that?”
“No, I can not. Where there is love, there is confidence and trust. You
don’t trust me!”
“I do trust you. But this you are asking me to tell you is not my
own secret and, besides, it would only add to your burdens without
lightening mine; indeed, it would make mine immeasurably heavier--too
heavy to be borne, I fear.”
She sat down and began to look into the heart of the crackling fire on
the hearth, as she had done that other night.
“How little you know of women, Dick,” she said musingly. “You ask my
love, and yet you deny that love its first privilege--the right to
share your dangers and perplexities. More, you would even lie to it--by
implication. But you have not succeeded wholly in doing that. Some
things I have found out for myself, and one of them is--that you are
not the traitor you seem to be, Richard.”
“Hush--for heaven’s sake!” I interposed. “One whisper of that overheard
in this house where Margaret Shippen is a guest--”
“Poor, dear Margaret!” she said, and now she was all sympathy and pity.
“I doubt if even she would betray you, Dick; and all the others in this
house are secretly our friends. But what could have tempted you, a Page
and an officer, to become a--a spy?”
“That is what I can not--dare not--tell you, Beatrix,” I protested.
“And that is not for my sake, but for your own. Won’t you believe me,
heart of mine?”
“I’ll never believe you love me as you say you do until you are willing
to let me share your hazard, whatever it is,” she retorted.
“You would not be sharing the hazard; you would merely be miserable,
Beatrix dear.”
“Then I claim the privilege of being miserable for your sake, Dick:
please!” and her arms went out to me in a pleading gesture that no
lover could withstand--for long.
It was Cousin Julianna who saved me. There was a light tap at the door,
and she entered in a fluster of alarm.
“A lot of redcoat soldiers have just come into the yard and are
surrounding the house!” she announced. “Is this some of your doing,
Dickie Page?”
I told her it was not, but I did not add that it would probably prove
my eternal undoing. I could think of but one explanation: by some means
Castner had prevailed upon Sir Henry Clinton to reestablish the order
for my arrest, and the lieutenant had traced me hither. But I had no
intention of letting the two women know what was awaiting me.
“I’ll go out and see what is preparing to happen,” I offered lightly.
“So much my red coat may do for you, Cousin Ju.”
But now Beatrix sprang up and threw her arms around my neck and clung
to me, protesting that I should not go--that I must not go; and I do
think our good cousin was more deeply scandalized than I ever saw her.
The little hubbub gave me a chance to whisper in my loved one’s ear:
“You must let me go, Beatrix; it may be nothing. And if they have come
for me, I could not escape. Be brave, dear, for my sake--and for the
honor of the Leighs!”
She loosed me, and though Mistress Pettus was looking on, I took the
sweet face between my hands and kissed the trembling lips. Then I went
out quickly to live or die, as it might befall, caring little, just at
that moment, for the worst that any one could do to me.
It was a false alarm, as I was able to assure the two women after I
had spoken to the sergeant in charge of the detail. Properly counted,
Cousin Julianna’s “lot of redcoat soldiers” dwindled to a half-dozen
men, sent out by Arnold to guard the house where his wife lay--this in
view of the disturbing rumors which might reach her ears. It was to
advise her of this that he had sent the letter by my hands, as Margaret
Shippen, herself, came down to tell us.
I take no shame for saying that I made haste to leave when Mistress
Arnold came upon the scene; and as it was, her sweet patient face, as
reproachful to me as an accusing angel’s, went all the way with me in
the storm-breasting return to the lower part of the town, with the wind
howling overhead and a sleety rain driving in level stinging volleys.
Champe was alone in the lower hall when I gave the password to the
sentry at the door and entered.
“It is a bad night?” he said, most grimly.
“It is,” I admitted, struggling out of my dripping watchcoat.
“There will be shipping lost, think you?” he queried meaningly.
“No small craft will venture out,” I returned, matching his hyperbole.
“Anything sitting less deeply than a fifty-four would founder in the
launching.”
“I thought so,” he said gloomily; and after that we sat in silence
before the fire, listening to the wind yelling in the huge chimney.
It was still early in the evening when Arnold came down to us, treading
the stair so lightly that his appearance was all but a surprise. His
brow was clouded, but there was a dull glow in the depths of his eyes
to tell of the passions slumbering in his heart.
“A word with you privately, Captain Page,” he said, drawing me aside.
“Make your dispositions for the night so that the house will seem
unguarded. If our intruders return, I would wish them to find the way
to my bedside unhindered--but with two good men close behind them and
ready to act at the critical moment. You understand me?”
I bowed. “You think there will be another attempt made--to-night? And
if so, you desire to have the kidnappers taken in the very act?”
“There will be another attempt, Captain; of that I am sure,” he
answered. “I told you this morning that Lieutenant Castner was
missing--absent without leave. He is still unheard of. When he returns,
I wish to see him a prisoner in your hands, Mr. Page.”
With that, he left us and went up-stairs; and when I looked at Champe,
the sergeant was scowling fiercely at our handful of fire.
“You heard him?” I asked, when Arnold’s door had closed; and Champe
nodded.
“We are more likely to be Castner’s prisoners, than he ours, don’t you
think, Captain Dick?” he said.
“Much more likely,” I admitted; adding: “I don’t like this mysterious
disappearance of Mr. Charles Castner just at this time.”
“What does it argue, think you?”
“Trouble for us. He was not able to get James Askew’s story fully
believed, though he believes it himself. If you were Castner, what
would you do under the circumstances, Sergeant Champe?”
“Get the proof, if it were to be had,” said Champe.
“Exactly. And that is probably what Castner is trying to do. It has
become a point of honor with him. If he can find any one who will vouch
for the spy’s story, or for some part of it, or for the spy, himself--”
“I see,” said the sergeant, rising and reaching for his sword-belt.
“Which means that the present moment is ours--and it is all we are sure
of. With your good leave, Captain Dick, I’ll go down and have a look at
the river.”
He was back in a short while, shaking his head and slinging the water
from his hat.
“No boat as small as ours would live a minute in it,” he said briefly;
and so, with hope lying dead again, we sat down to wait for morning;
for the breaking of another day and the probable return of Lieutenant
Castner.
XIX
MINE HONOR’S HONOR
THE rain had abated by morning, but the wind was still blowing rather
more than half a gale out of the southeast when the watery sun rose
over the housetops.
With the reporting of the first orderly for the day, a young man
from Clinton’s staff-family whom I had not seen before, I went out,
ostensibly for a breath of fresh air, but really for news--news of
Castner. The tap-room of the tavern offered the most promising source,
and thither I went to hobnob with the barman.
There was no news--which was good news. Castner had not been in his
room or at the inn since his morning meal there of the day before the
yesterday; though the barman had seen him later that same day, crossing
the green in company with a smallish man in citizen’s clothes. Pressed
more closely, my tap-turner was sure he had seen the smallish man in
gray at some other time; and after more brain cudgellings: “Sure, then!
’twould be the same man you’d be taking up to your room, either befoor
or afther--I’d not be remimbering which.”
This was explicit, as far as it went, though it was anything but
reassuring. I had known Castner but a little while, yet one of his
characteristics, patient pertinacity, was written out large in his
sturdy jaw and steadfast gray eyes for the merest passer-by to read.
I thought he would hang on to whatever clue he had found, and pull
and tug at it until he had drawn it out to some workable length. And,
according to the barman’s story, the clue--James Askew by name--was
fairly in his hands.
One other bit of news the barman gave me that was also disconcerting.
The night gale, which had blown too hard for our enterprise, Champe’s
and mine, had blown the war-ships back to New York from whatever port
they had been calling at; and now, my news-vendor told me, the sailing
of the fleet waited only on a favorable shift of the wind.
“Two chances against us--Castner and the fleet-sailing,” I said to
myself, faring back to my prison cell in Arnold’s house, and breakfast,
“both of them more than likely to ripen before we see another night.
Truly, the devil fights for his own!”
It was Arnold himself who gave me leave to go out again after the
morning meal had been despatched, coming down to us in one of his
kindly moods, and saying that we need not confine ourselves so closely
to the house during the day. I hated him most cordially when he gave
himself the air of a simple-hearted, kindly gentleman, as he very well
could. It seemed unfair that he should so often remind me of the thorn
of reluctance that was pricking me; a hurt that went deeper with every
gentlemanly thing that he did, and every fresh trust he reposed in me.
For, charge it to what account of self-love, or pride, or vanity,
I would in the man, he had assuredly been indulgent to us and had
unquestionably saved our two lives; and while he was a traitor and
false to his oath and his soldier honor, a vague and disquieting wonder
was beginning to stir in me, asking if I supposed that, with all his
oath-breakings, he would consent to do what I was doing.
So, when he told me I was free to go abroad in the town, I replied,
rather churlishly, as I remember, that I knew my duty and would try to
do it; after which I spent the better part of the day before the fire
in the orderly-room, going to the windows now and again to see if there
were any signs of Castner coming to hang me, and behaving so sourly to
Champe that the sergeant finally took the privilege Arnold had given
us, and went out.
He had been gone something over an hour when he returned with a piece
of news. Hanging about the waterside, and keeping an eye out for
anything that might bring grist to our mill, Champe had been accosted
by a man, a stranger and a sailor, as the sergeant described him, and
a New Englander by his speech. This man had asked for me by name, and
had pitched upon the first soldier he saw wearing the Loyal Americans’
uniform for information of me. He claimed to have urgent business,
going so far as to say to Champe that I would rue it smartly if I
denied him an interview.
“Where did you leave him?” I asked, when the sergeant had finished his
tale.
“In the tap-room of the tavern. And I made sure he had no following.”
“Damn his following!” I growled, well-nigh desperate from the day-long
grinding of the mill of reflection; “I’ll fight him, or any dozen of
him, at the dropping of a handkerchief, if that is what he wants!” And
with that snappish word of thanks for Champe’s loyal forethought, I
strode off to the tavern.
For once in a way, Champe’s description personal had been accurate
enough. The man who was awaiting me was a sailor, and he hailed from
Massachusetts. What the sergeant had omitted to mention was that he was
as curst and crabbed by nature as I was at that moment by my mood.
For the first few minutes, as I recall it, we merely bickered at each
other, snarling like a fair of unfriendly dogs. Then some shrewd, dry,
verbal slap of his jarred a laugh loose in me; after which we got on
better.
“I want no truck with ye, nor with any of your kind, Captain,” he
warned me, when the ice was broken, “but I was told to come and find
ye, and so I have. You’re from Virginia, and they tell me that ye have
no schoolmasters in those parts: would it be too much to wonder if ye
could read a smitch o’ writing?”
“Give me the letter,” I said, ignoring the gibe and knowing now that he
was somebody’s messenger.
The missive was from Beatrix, and it voiced--somewhat formally, lest
the letter should fall into the wrong hands--a plaintive little call
for help. It ran:
“Dear Captain Page: We are in deep trouble, and since none of our
friends can help us, we turn to our enemies. The bearer of this is
the captain of the ship we had chartered to take us home. He tells
us now that he is required to hold his vessel at the disposal of
Major Simcoe, of the Queen’s Rangers, for transport service in the
expedition soon to sail, and, for reasons sufficiently known to you,
we are in despair. What do you suggest?”
I turned to the crabbed mariner.
“You are Captain Sprigg, of the _Nancy Jane_?” I asked.
“I’m nobody, of nothing,” he answered. Then he began spitefully to
accuse Beatrix of bad faith. “It’s an ill thing to trust a woman: she
promised me there should be no naming of names, and--”
I crossed over to where he stood and chucked him under the chin to make
him hold up his head and pay attention.
“One word derogatory to the good name, the birth, breeding, beauty or
discretion of that lady, Captain Sprigg, and I shave off your ears,
and split your nose, and otherwise improve your personal appearance
till your own cabin-boy won’t know you. The lady wrote no names in her
letter--having given you her word that she wouldn’t.”
It seems that I had somewhat mistaken my man. While I was bullying and
staring him down, something cold began to press against my stomach,
namely, the muzzle of a huge horse pistol that the captain had fished
out of the folds of his loose coat.
“Keep your chin-chuckin’s for the women-folks; they like it better,” he
said, quite without heat. And then: “I’ve done my errand; what are you
going to do?”
“First tell me a few things,” I suggested, wisely ignoring the pistol
which he rather ostentatiously concealed under the coat flap. “You know
the purport of this letter?”
“Bein’ as I told her how she might fix it, I guess maybe I do.”
“You have the tobacco aboard?”
“All aboard and safe under hatches.”
“Where is your ship?”
He waved a gnarled and tarry hand in the general direction of the East
River.
“She’s hangin’ in the stream, ready to trip her anchor.”
“But you’ve had orders to join the fleet in the lower bay?”
“No; I’ve had orders to hold the schooner ready to take on twenty men
of Major Simcoe’s troop.”
“You have no idea when they’ll come aboard?”
“No more’n a cat with six blind kittens.”
“You are a good sailor and a daring one. Captain Elijah Sprigg, and the
_Nancy Jane_ is not afraid of any weather that blows; so much I know of
you and your ship. Could you get to sea in spite of the gale, the guard
ships, and the fleet, if it were needful?”
“Not in daylight, with women-folks aboard. And you wouldn’t want me to
try it, neither, Captain Page.”
“No,” I agreed thoughtfully. “A chance shot might make me poorer than
any beggar that lives, Captain Sprigg. We must not take that risk.”
“I thought ye wouldn’t want to. But if them soldiers ever get aboard
of me, Miss Leigh’s charter goes glimmering, and so does her daddy’s
tobacco, I guess.”
Again I studied the awkward situation and a possible solution of it
began to take some shape in my mind.
“You could get under way after dark and crawl out of the harbor, do you
think, Captain Sprigg?” I asked; “even if the weather does chance to be
pretty bad?”
“The weather will be no worse to-night than it is now,” he asserted.
“But the frigate has come back, and the fleet will most likely get
sailing orders. That means that my redcoat passengers will be atop of
me sometime to-day.”
At this I gave him some notion of what was in my mind. Champe had
told me that the greater part of Major Simcoe’s command, the mounted
Rangers, was still in the barracks, Sir Henry being reluctant to part
with his best cavalry force until the last moment. Twice within the
last two days the Rangers had been ordered out on the Tarrytown road
to meet and repel incursions from our camps on the Hudson. Possibly a
false alarm might be raised that would send them out again; and when I
got this far, Sprigg interrupted me.
“You’re a man of ideas. Captain Page, I’ll say that for ye, and a
dum’ sight loyaler to your little girl than ye be to the coat you’re
wearin’. I’ve got a man in my crew who lives up Tarrytown way; a good
sharp fellow without any wool in his brains. He’s just back from home
this morning, and I shouldn’t be at all s’prised if he c’d tell some
sort of a yarn about Baylor’s Horse ’r Major Lee’s Legion a-swoopin’
down this way. If we only had a dollar ’r so to kind o’ stimulate his
mem’ry--”
I gave the captain two guineas.
“Will that be enough?”
“More’n enough; you make me recollect that old sayin’ about a fool and
his money, Captain Page.”
“Never mind: this is no time for half-measures. Get your man into
action swiftly, and let him do what he has to without reference to me.
A word to some under officer at the fort will be sufficient; it will
reach Sir Henry Clinton as fast as an orderly can run with it.”
“All right; so far, so good. What next?”