him. But I did not. My senses had gone blank to all outward happenings
at that mention of an officer of my own fellowship who had made an
appointment with Castner and the spy to insure my undoing. Admitting
that Mr. Hamilton’s secret had leaked out, what man in all the patriot
army hated me cordially enough to do this despicable thing? There was
but one answer to that query: I had come between Howard Seytoun and
the woman of his desire. For no lighter cause would any man turn his
back upon his country, his honor as a soldier, his loyalty to the
brotherhood of the army.
When I listened again, Major Simcoe was saying: “Your word is
sufficient, of course, Mr. Castner. But for the sake of the
formalities, a statement from this officer you speak of would sit well
on the records of this court.”
“I anticipated that,” said Castner promptly. “Under an assurance of
safe-conduct back to his own lines, the officer has accompanied me to
New York.” Then, to one of his men: “Warnock, bring the Continental
captain in.”
The man went out, and when next the door was opened, I saw what I was
fully expecting to see. Seytoun came in, blinking at the lights, his
bloated face flushing purple, and his shifty eyes looking anywhere save
in my direction.
“Will you be good enough to answer a few questions, Captain Seytoun?”
said Simcoe, taking a most gentlemanly tone with this double-dyed
renegade and villain. “You have offered Lieutenant Castner a
corroboration of the charge against Captain Richard Page; namely, the
fact set forth by the man James Askew: that Captain Page came to New
York as a spy and a kidnapper. Is this true?”
“It is,” muttered my accuser in a low tone.
“Upon what grounds do you assert this, Captain Seytoun?” cut in one of
Knyphausen’s aides.
“It is the common talk in our camps.”
“You lie, Captain Seytoun--like the father of lies after whom you
are named,” I said coolly; for now I remembered Askew’s story of his
escape from the guard house at Tappan, and could easily add two and two
together.
Simcoe would have put me down with harsh bluster; but now Phillips,
cold-eyed and haughty, intervened suddenly.
“Can you impeach the witness, Captain Page?” he demanded.
“I can. By his own confession, James Askew lay under sentence of death
in General Washington’s camp at Tappan. He escaped by the connivance of
the officer of the guard. The bribe he offered and paid was the sharing
of a certain secret with that villain who stands there, and the secret
was this highly incredible story upon which you have convicted me,
General Phillips. This man knows nothing but that which the spy, Askew,
told him, and for aught that can be proved now, the story may well have
been nothing more than a tissue of falsehoods, made up for the spy’s
own purpose,” I answered boldly.
Seytoun might have outfaced me in this, if he had been endowed with
the right kind of brazen courage: it was but my word against his. But
his face was an open confession of guilt, and I think they all saw it,
though, as I say, his testimony was a mere matter of court-martial
routine--my fate had been predetermined long before.
A silence fell upon the room, and it was Major Simcoe who broke it.
“Captain Page, your conviction,”--I remarked that he used the
word,--“does not turn upon these preliminaries, which serve merely to
show premeditation and design. Whether you came as Mr. Washington’s
emissary, or upon your own initiative, matters not: the fact remains
that you not only intended to kidnap General Arnold; you have actually
made the attempt. Do you deny that, sir?”
I did not see what good could come of adding lies to lies, at least, in
my own behalf. By this time it must be known that Champe and I were the
two who had eaten our suppers in the Dutch boat-builder’s house, the
two who had stolen the boat, and, quite as inevitably, the two who had
broken into Arnold’s house to find the empty bed. If I hesitated, it
was only because I was striving to devise some way of saving Champe.
“I do not deny it,” I said, when the pause had grown to an impossible
length.
“Ah!” said the major; and the exclamation was echoed in an audible sigh
of relief on all sides. Then, fixing me with a look that was not all
unkindly, Simcoe went on. “Your opportunities for carrying out your
desperate enterprise have been all that you could ask; you have so won
upon General Arnold’s confidence that he has trusted you fully, and
even now, he yields only to the incontestable facts, and would shield
you if he could. You must have had more than one chance of carrying out
your design.”
“I had,” I broke in. “No more than an hour ago, Mr. Arnold was walking
in his garden, alone. Once he came and stood within an arm’s reach of
me; and I had a boat at the river’s edge in which to make my escape.”
“Ah!” he said again, and this time the exclamation was a sharp
indrawing of the breath. “You spared him; will you tell us why, Captain
Page? It can make no difference for or against you, now.”
“It is easily explained,” I said, smiling to give dissimulation the
proper mask. “There were two of us; and at the crucial instant one of
the two could not, or rather would not, rise to his opportunity--when
he found out what that opportunity really meant.”
Simcoe nodded, and I marked the swift glance of intelligence that
passed from one to another of my judges. Once more I had been able to
impose upon them. They were saying to themselves that at the crisis the
loyal sergeant had refused to be dragged into the kidnapping--which was
as I had hoped. After which, Phillips took me up.
“Add a little more to your frankness, Mr. Page, and earn the
satisfaction that comes from doing a worthy deed at the last,” he said
austerely. “Do you confess that you have made a tool of Sergeant Champe
in all this conspiracy?”
“I confess it,” I said, striving to keep the keen joy of the success
of my stratagem out of the words. “In all the twistings and turnings
of the last three days, the sergeant has been merely a well terrified
common soldier acting under compulsion coupled with threats to have him
hanged for a spy if he refused to obey me. It was I who plotted to keep
him ashore when he came as your letter carrier, Major Simcoe; and in
all subsequent matters, he has straitly obeyed my orders, doing what
he was told to do in the fear of death, and disobeying me only in the
final critical moment I have just been telling you about.”
It was here that I was made to feel the curious prickings that come
upon getting the credit for a good deed when the credit is not fairly
earned.
“You know that the sergeant denounced you, and pointed out the place
of your concealment to Lieutenant Castner?” queried the major of Sir
Henry’s staff.
“I do, and I applaud his resolution, sir. That is the kind of loyalty I
should be rejoiced to discover in my own men. He but did his duty, as
he saw it.”
Then this major, whose name I have never known, rose up in his place
and gripped my hand most heartily.
“You are a true man and a gentleman, Captain Richard Page,
notwithstanding the fact that we shall have to hang you presently,”
he said, with bluff good nature; and I thanked him gravely, with that
curious prickling that I speak of tingling in my finger-ends.
After this, Major Simcoe asked if I had anything further to say before
I should be remanded under guard, and I rose and said I had, if the
gentlemen present would bear with me. At General Phillips’s nod, I went
on.
“One thing I wish to say is this: as Lieutenant Castner has explained,
the spy, James Askew, went to his long account by an accident. But Mr.
Castner’s sword has merely saved your hangman an item in his day’s
work. I had speech with Askew two days since, as he may or may not have
confessed to Lieutenant Castner. In the course of that interview he
admitted to me, inadvertently, that he was the man who sold Major André
to those who took him.”
The effect of this little shot was quite what I had expected. There
were deep and bitter oaths of satisfaction at Askew’s death, and more
than one word of thanks to me for setting this matter, which had been
in doubt, finally at rest. This emboldened me to go on, for I had a
boon to ask.
“That is one thing, General Phillips,” I said, addressing the highest
authority I could reach. “Another is in the nature of a condemned man’s
final request. I have an unfinished engagement with Captain Howard
Seytoun, an engagement entered into before I left the camp at Tappan,
and I pray you to grant me a short quarter-hour with him on the fort
parade or in a guarded room, under such restrictions as you may see fit
to impose.”
I don’t know what might have come of this request if Seytoun had held
his peace. The British officers of Sir Henry Clinton’s military
family were great sticklers for the point of honor, notwithstanding
the well-known opposition of the knight himself to the common practise
of dueling. But Seytoun must needs draw himself up scornfully and say
that he had no cause of quarrel sufficient to make him wish to give
satisfaction to a condemned spy.
At this, I went rage-mad, of course, like a hot-headed fool, and sprang
across the intervening space and struck him; after which I was hustled
off under guard, as I deserved to be for so greatly offending the
dignity of the court; hustled out, and across the parade ground, and
into a cold, bare barracks room, where Castner came to find me a few
minutes later.
“Well?” I said, rightly guessing that he was the bearer of news.
“Your sentence has been passed, Captain Page, and now that I know you
better, I am truly sorry to be General Phillips’s messenger. You are to
be confined in a cell under the battlements of the fort until midnight,
at which hour you will be taken to Gallows Hill and hanged. It is a
terrible short road for you, Captain, and I begged them to make it a
little longer, but--”
He choked, and could say no more; and truly, I think I may say without
boasting that I was sorrier for this clean-hearted, noble young fellow
than I was for myself, just at the moment. But that sorrow, and my
own, and all things else were quickly swept out of my mind by a most
miserable anxiety for Beatrix. Had Simcoe’s troopers been ordered to
the ships? There was one chance in a thousand that Castner might know,
and I put the question to him as he was turning me over to the fort
prison guard.
“Tell me, Lieutenant,” I said hurriedly; “do you chance to know if the
Queen’s Rangers have been given their embarking orders yet? You will
betray no trust in telling a dead man.”
He answered without hesitation.
“They have been embarking this evening since supper,” he said, little
thinking what a stone he rolled upon my soul in these few words. And
then: “Is there anything else, Captain Page?”
“Yes. From what was said in the court room yonder you doubtless
gathered how much, or rather how little, Sergeant Champe has been to
blame in all that he was made to bear a part in. Because you are a
soldier and a gentleman, Lieutenant Castner, I know you have small
respect for Benedict Arnold; but for the same reason I am sure you will
say a word to him for this poor fellow who, after all, was your best
means of bringing me to book. Will you say that word?”
But now Castner swore savagely and said he would not--to Arnold, though
if any move were made to question Champe he would come between as he
could.
“That is all I ask,” I interposed. “Champe is but an unlettered fellow,
and if you were to put him upon the rack, he would be helpless. I shall
hang the easier if you promise that he will be spared.”
“Champe will be sent to the fleet to-night to rejoin his legion: I’ll
see it done, myself,” was Castner’s promise, and that promise, which
was carried out some hours later, did, indeed save Champe from the
hangman’s halter, though it sent him with Arnold’s legion to the
Virginia ravaging and was, besides, the father to all of the poor
sergeant’s wanderings and perils through the weary weeks and months
which were to intervene before he could make good his escape and rejoin
our army, a ragged, half-starved fugitive, in far-away Georgia.
XXII
IN THE POWDER-ROOM
WHEN Castner turned me over to the guard I was taken to a high-arched,
brick-walled chamber buried in the battlements of the fort beyond the
barracks. By its location I took the cell to be the powder-room of
the old Dutch fortress antedating Fort George by a century or more;
guessing at this because the place was too spacious to figure as a
dungeon, and much too gloomy to be put to any other use.
By all the obligations of a decent upbringing at the hands of godly
parents, I suppose I should have gone down on my two knees to spend the
few hours that were left in making my peace with God. Certain it is
that there were sins enough to be repented of, though I hope and trust
they were chiefly soldier sins, and not the kind that make a sniveling
craven of the sinner at the last. As to this, however, these death-hour
penitences have always seemed to me to be a rather pitiful and unworthy
begging of the Great Question; and, besides, hope dies hard in vigorous
youth, especially when it is fed by anxiety for the unknown fate of a
loved one.
So, when I heard the big key grate in the lock at the outgoing of
Corporal Warnock, my jailer, I took the candle which Warnock’s, or
Castner’s, kindness allowed me, and began a searching review of my
dungeon.
From the furnishings, a blanketed bunk-bed in one corner, a small
table untidy with candle drippings, and a heavy three-legged stool, I
judged that the place had been lately used by the British occupiers
as a guard-room for the detention of petty military offenders. Beyond
this there was little to be remarked save that the bricks in the walls
were old and crumbling, that the arch of the ceiling had fallen out in
several places to litter the earthen floor with débris, and that the
door was strong and new and solid enough to stop a battering-ram.
After a careful scrutiny of the door and its massive lock there seemed
to be little left for hope to build upon. Having been designed for a
magazine, the brick-lined cavern had no window or other outlet; as,
indeed, it could not well have, being sunk in the earthwork. Hence,
a second tour of the place, in which I made use of the heavy little
stool to sound the walls, promised nothing, you would say. Yet to this
seemingly fruitless proceeding hope owed the fresh lease of life which
was to carry it in some fashion over the high crisis of despair.
It was in that end of the oblong cell directly opposite the door
that I came upon a section of the wall which seemed to give back a
hint of hollowness to judicious thumpings with the stool. This set
me to examining that part of the brickwork with greater care. In
this area the bricks were newer, and by passing the candle back and
forth I found the reason for the fresher brickwork. A low doorway in
the original wall had been filled up and its outlines were plainly
traceable.
On my knees before this bricked-up door I sought to recall all I had
ever heard of the earlier fortalice--the old Fort Amsterdam of the
Dutch. Somewhere, in some Dutch settler’s house on the upper Hudson, I
had once seen a sketch plan of Fort Amsterdam; in that plan there were
outworks shown beyond the walls, though they were not so extensive as
those constructed later by the British rebuilders. Had the Dutchmen
used this tunnel passage to supply their outer works with ammunition?
It seemed altogether logical and reasonable to assume that they had.
Having reasoned thus far, the next step was clearly obvious. Beyond
the bricked-up door there would be a passage leading to what was now
the southeastern ravelin. True, the passage might have been filled up
when the doorway was stopped; but the hollow sound given back by the
newer wall encouraged the more hopeful conclusion. Taking the existence
of the passage for granted, the next thing in order was--or should
have been--a tool to dig with. But a cat with clipped claws could
scarcely have been more helpless in this respect than I was. The most
painstaking search of the littered floor revealed nothing in the way of
a bit of metal that would scratch the mortar of the joints in the later
masonry, much less a practicable digging tool.
I was sitting on the edge of the bunk-bed with my chin in my hand
and fairly at the end of any fruitful invention, when there came
muffled sounds beyond the door to warn me of an approaching intrusion.
Presently the key squeaked in the rusty lock and the door swung open to
admit a visitor. By the light of the one poor guttering candle on the
table I did not make him out at first, though I supposed, of course,
it would be Castner. But when I looked again I found myself staring in
astonishment into the gloomy eyes of Benedict Arnold. I knew what he
had come for, or thought I did; and once more I strung myself up to the
task of deceiving him yet further--for John Champe’s sake.
“So,” he said, and his voice was so low that it was almost gentle; “the
long road of equivocation has found its fatal turn at the last, has it,
Captain Page?”
I thought he had come to gloat over me, as would have been most
natural, but never was a prefiguring worse mistaken. Coming closer
until I could almost feel the auger-boring of the moody eyes, he went
on in the same low monotone.
“You doubtless think that you, of all living men, are the most to be
pitied, Captain. You are young; you have scarcely tasted of life; you
have been permitted to look into the eyes of love with the good hope
that in the days to come there would be happy fruition; you have an
honorable name and forebears to whom your children might look back with
honest pride; and in a few short hours all this will be blotted out for
you forever. Tell me, sir; was it worth this stupendous sacrifice--the
bare chance of taking a broken, disappointed fellow-man back to die
this same death which is now confronting you?”
I saw now that he was not meaning to rejoice in my downfall, and I took
time for my answer.
“A good soldier should not measure the weight of sacrifice in a
question of duty.”
His hands went apart in a sudden gesture of impatience.
“What is duty? A man, by some blunderings of chance or perhaps by his
own crafty chicanery, becomes your superior officer. Are you to lay
aside all your convictions of justice and mercy and common manly honor
merely because he holds up before you a fetish of soldierly obedience?
Remember, he is but a man, as you are. Stripped of his rank and all the
artificial contrivances which have made him for the moment figure as
your superior, he becomes only a fellow human being, standing high or
low in your estimation only as his heart is sound or depraved.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Arnold,” I put in; “pardon me if I say that you are
beclouding the issue. The matter of duty, as I have conceived it, does
not rest upon the question of obedience to a ranking superior. It has
a better foundation in the love of country. I will be very plain with
you. It seemed to me to be for the best good of my poor distracted
country that you should be made to go back and pay the penalty for
the blow you have struck it. Acting upon that conviction, I came
here--voluntarily, you must understand, and not upon the command of any
superior whomsoever.”
He took another step forward and laid a hand on my shoulder.
“You did this from your own conception of your duty, and yet when the
chance came you spared me. Captain Page. Why did you change your mind?
Was it because you found me something less than the despicable piece of
gallows-meat you had been told I was?”
I could not tell if this were merely the undying vanity of the man
fishing for compliments on the edge of the grave, or some better
prompting; but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“I found you as I expected to find you, a most misguided man, as I
still hold you to be; but yet a man, and neither greatly better nor
worse than others, Mr. Arnold. The discovery that I made--or rather
that was made for me--was in myself.”
“Ah? And that was--?”
“It was the discovery that there are lengths to which a man and a
gentleman may not go, even to compass the greatest apparent benefit to
his fellow-men and his country. You put it within the truth when you
say that I spared you. At this very moment, had I willed it so, you
might be lying bound and gagged in the bottom of a rowboat and well
on your way to the camp at Tappan. I have told you the simple truth,
Mr. Arnold; I assumed the task of kidnapping you voluntarily, and
voluntarily I relinquished it.”
“I know,” he rejoined abruptly, and then he turned from me and began to
pace the floor as if in a repressed passion. After a time he broke out
bitterly.
“Like others, you know nothing of the conditions. You saw only a man
turning his back upon a cause to which he had given as much or more
than any, and straightway you set him down as the basest traitor,
measuring the depth of his depravity, it may be, by that very standard
of loyal service which he himself had set. What can you know of the
slights and evasions, the refusal to recognize just claims, the spite
and envy of those who drag others down so that they themselves may
climb the higher?” Then, stopping suddenly to face me: “Captain Page,
they even put a cloud upon my honesty in money matters!”
Now I had heard that there had been charges of irregularity in his
official reports; it was common talk in the army, though I think none
went so far as to charge dishonesty. His repute had been that of a
high-stomached officer who could as little bear criticism as he could
a rebuff to his ambition. But I said nothing. I could do no less than
pity a man who felt that he must come and try to justify himself to a
condemned spy whose confessed object was, or had been, a most deadly
one. But he fell to pacing again without waiting for my reply.
“You did not believe that scandal about the regimental accounts,
Captain Page?” he said, after another pause.
“No; I did not believe it, and I think there are few in our army who
do. But that is nothing, Mr. Arnold; you are well hated for a much
greater thing.”
“What is done, is done,” he broke in moodily. “I did not come here to
argue with you, Captain; I came to ask what I may do to make your fate
more easily met. Your life I can not save; that matter has gone beyond
me now, however much I might wish to intervene. But any last request
you may have to make--”
There were two, and on one of them, the safe departure of Beatrix, my
lips were sealed. But of the other I spoke freely.
“You have not mentioned Sergeant Champe in all this, and I would not
have my sins charged to his score,” I began: “I do not know how much or
how little you are involving him--”
He interrupted with gesture expressive of complete understanding and
appreciation.
“Champe is but a common soldier, and a most fanatical patriot, like
yourself, Captain Page. I have known this last, or suspected it, from
the beginning. There will be no punishment for him greater than that
which will be the greatest for a man of his stamp--to be obliged upon
a warrant of life or death to make good his lately sworn oath of
allegiance in battle. He rejoins the legion to-night, and when the
fleet sails he will go with it, to live or die as he fights or refuses
to fight.”
I stood up, hoping he would take it as a hint that I desired to be
alone.
“There is nothing more, then, I believe,” I said. “Due report of this
night’s doings will be sent to Colonel Baylor, I trust; and I shall
be glad if the charge against me shall stand without reference to my
self-appointed errand. I ask this as much for your sake as for my
own, Mr. Arnold. Others might not understand why I found my mission
impossible at its final turning point.”
“You mean that the report shall go out that you were executed merely as
a spy caught within the enemy’s lines?”
“That was my meaning; yes.”
In a flash he held out his hand, and I forgot that he was a traitor to
the cause I loved and grasped it heartily.
“You are a man in all your inches, Captain Page,” he declared warmly;
and then: “I would to God I could do you a real service, sir! You think
there will be only one woman to be broken-hearted, but I assure you
there will be two. I shall ill know how to face the second one when I
have to tell her that you spared me of your own free will, and that yet
you had to die!”
“Let your gratitude to the other woman nerve you to that task, Mr.
Arnold,” I put in quietly. “It was Mistress Beatrix Leigh who showed me
my duty to her--and to myself.”