ought to be until he looks into the crystal mirror of a good woman’s
soul. You are prodigiously to be pitied, Captain Page--but not more
than you are to be envied. A little respite--time granted you for a
meeting and a parting with this young woman who hates me well but hates
dishonor more--possibly my word to Sir Henry Clinton would run thus
far. Shall I try it, sir?”
I shook my head and said, no. Apart from the added agony of such a
meeting and parting, I hoped against hope that the good fates and
Captain Elijah Sprigg had already made it impossible by putting
Beatrix safely a-sea, though I feared the New Englander might wait to
get word of me first.
“Then I can only bid you farewell, Captain, and wish with all my heart
that I might put a sword in your hand and tell you to fight your way to
death like a soldier!”
With that he gripped my hand again and went quickly to the door; and
I think Warnock or another must have been waiting for him, for when I
looked again the door had opened and closed, and I was alone.
Call it a weakness if you will, but after he was gone I wasted some
precious minutes sitting on the bunk-bed with my head in my hands
and my heart mellowing in a sudden rush of meliorating softness. It
is so easy to fall into the rut of the harsh rigidities, judging all
humankind by unbending formulas of right and wrong and making no
allowances for the thousand and one battling influences which are
always dragging the human atom hither and yon. This man whose name had
become a hissing and a reproach was neither an angel nor a devil; he
was merely a human being, swayed now by the good and now by the evil.
If he had shown himself capable of the basest political treachery, he
here and now had also shown that he could be magnanimous and truly
generous to a fallen enemy.
It was another key-grating in the door-lock that roused me from the
softening reverie and I sprang up, shocked for an instant by the
thought that I had spent all my little respite and that midnight
was come. That shock was followed by another when the door opened
and Champe, with a face so haggard and wrought upon that I scarcely
recognized him, came stumbling in to fall upon his knees at my feet.
“Champe!” I cried, thinking nothing but that they had sifted the truth
out of him in some way, and that he was to die with me.
“Aye,” he mumbled, “I’ve come, Captain Dick. Strangle me with your bare
hands--burn my eyes out with the candle--do what you will to me and
I’ll never cheep nor whimper nor lift a finger. They’ve told me what
you did; how you stood up and took it all upon yourself, after I had
gone crazed with rage and disappointment and betrayed you like another
Judas! Let me hang in your place; or if I can not, I’ll hang with
you--I swear it!”
“Hush!” I commanded harshly, for I could not trust myself to speak
otherwise. And then: “You need not reproach yourself. They would have
caught me anyway before the night was over, and there is no sense in
two hanging where one will serve. But tell me: how did you get here?”
“Warnock is corporal of the guard, and one night I saved him from
being found asleep at sentry post. He told me what you said to General
Phillips; how you--” his voice broke and again I had to be rough with
him to save my own self-possession.
“Name of the devil!” I cut in snappishly. “Dry your eyes, Sergeant, and
take the crack out of your voice. You are the man of all others who can
do me a service, and here you come to me whimpering and crying like a
whipped dog!”
“Say it, Captain Dick,” he pleaded. “Give me my orders, and I’ll--”
“--And you’ll carry them out: of course, you will,” I finished for him.
“Now listen, and I’ll tell you what you are to do.”
A plan had been shaping itself with lightning-like swiftness in my
brain since he had told me enough to make it plain that he was still
free to go and come in the town; that he had not yet been put under
guard to be sent to the ships, as Arnold had said he would be.
First I plied him with questions which he answered with rare
intelligence, giving me the exact location of the powder-room prison
cell in relation to its surroundings, and telling me what lay beyond
the fortress walls behind it--a ravelin, a ditch, outworks, and then
the beach. Then I gave him his instructions.
“You remember the sea-captain who sent you to fetch me to the tavern?”
Champe nodded.
“He is with us, though he claims to be a neutral and is allowed to go
and come as a trader, under some surveillance. His schooner lies in
the East River, ready to put to sea, if it has not already sailed.
Your task is to find the ship and the man, if they are within finding
distance. Tell the captain what has befallen me, and you may add that
I’m going to try to break jail. If I succeed, a few stout friends, to
be waiting on the beach at the southeastern angle of the fort at half
an hour before midnight, might turn the scale for me.”
“I’ll find him if I have to go to hell to make the search a thorough
one. But what hope have you of breaking out of this, Captain Dick?”
I dragged him across the room and showed him the outlined door in the
earthward wall.
“You are to smuggle me something to dig with,” I told him, and
instantly he searched in his pockets and found a huge clasp-knife.
“Will that do, think you?” he asked.
“I’ll make it do for the brickwork, though, the good Lord knows, I may
need a pick and shovel for anything this bricked-up door tells me of
what is beyond it. But never mind; go you and do your part, Sergeant.
And one other thing: Captain Sprigg has either gone to sea, or is about
to go, as I have told you, and his errand is to convey two women home
to Virginia. One of those women is my cousin, and the other--”
“The other will be somewhat more than a cousin, if you live to get free
of this: I take you, Captain.”
“Good. Then you will see to it yourself that whatever may be done
toward helping me, there must be a sufficient guard left to protect the
women. That is all, I believe, though I would give much for a weapon of
some sort bigger than this pocket-knife to even me with those who will
seek to stop me after I burrow out.”
At that Champe unbuttoned his great watchcoat and showed me my good
Scots rapier hanging by a thong around his neck; and I could have
shouted for joy.
“Where did you find it?--and how could you pass the guard with it?” I
demanded.
“I found it in the barracks, where one of Warnock’s men had flung it
aside,” he explained. “I thought first to bring your own horse-saber,
which I was wearing, but Warnock made me put it away before he would
let me see you. I did put it away, but I hid this other in my coat at
the same time.”
With midnight coming nearer at every breath we drew, I gave Champe his
final word.
“Do your errand quickly, Sergeant,” I adjured him. “On two counts you
have little time to spare: Sprigg’s vessel, if it be not already gone,
will be ready to go at any minute; and after all you may be too late.
The other count is your own. You will be ordered to rejoin the legion
before the night is out; I have Arnold’s own word for that.”
“They’ll not take me down the bay alive before my errand is done; I
promise you that, Captain Dick.”
While he was hammering at the door for Warnock to come and let him out,
I hid the rapier in the blankets of the bed; and no sooner was the door
opened for Champe, and closed behind him with the bolt shot, than I
fell to work with the great clasp-knife, digging as for dear life.
It took no little time to loosen the first brick, toil as I would,
and when it was withdrawn, the thrust-in candle showed nothing but
a shallow, earth-smelling burrow behind the wall, with its farther
extremity stopped up by a stout wooden boarding.
This was sufficiently discouraging, since it indicated that the old
sally-port through the powder-room to the outworks had been sealed up
at both ends. How thick the outer barrier might be, I had no means of
determining; and before I could remove any more bricks, I heard the
key rattling in the lock again, and there was barely time to stand the
clumsy little table before the tell-tale breach beginnings, to kick
the floor rubbish over the mortar powderings that whitened it, and to
slip the clasp-knife into my pocket, when the bolt was shot and Castner
marched in.
Now was the time when it took the final ounce of fortitude in the
good old Page reserves to make me face him and say carelessly, “Is it
midnight, at last, Lieutenant? By all the hours that ever struck, I
thought it would never come!” For, truly, and for the second time that
night, I made sure that my short respite had slipped away unheeded, and
that he had come for me.
“No, Captain Page,” he rejoined soberly; “it wants two good hours of
midnight yet, and I’ve come on a different errand. You have spoken
twice in my hearing of a postponed engagement with your--with this
Captain Seytoun who has come so far out of his way to do you an ill
turn: are you still wishing it might be kept?”
I made my laugh sound as lightly as it should have sounded if the
meeting with my cousin Devlin’s slayer were the last unfulfilled desire
of a man who was about to die.
“You saw how hard I tried to make him wish it. My dear Castner, he is
little better than a brute beast. I doubt if the rope stout enough to
drag him to a fair field of honor has ever been twisted.”
The lieutenant’s eyes were fixed upon one of the holes in the ceiling
masonry.
“It would be little loss to the reb--to the American cause if he should
never return to Tappan?” he suggested.
“It would be small loss, as you say. Though you will not look at it
in that light, the man is a traitor at heart; a man who, to satisfy a
purely personal grudge, does not scruple to betray his trust, his cause
and his commanders.”
Castner looked me full in the eyes.
“He hates you well, Captain Page. I had no thought save to have James
Askew’s story confirmed by some one in authority. I was astounded when
the spy told me that, upon a few hours’ notice, an officer of Major
Lee’s Legion would meet us at a certain spot on the Tarrytown road
and confirm his information word for word. We rode out to the Neutral
Ground to the place indicated by Askew, and there we met this precious
troop-captain. He not only did all that Askew had promised for him; he
was anxious to come and testify in person. I had little choice but to
give him the safe-conduct necessary.”
“No, no,” I hastened to say. “I’m never blaming you, my dear
Lieutenant. Don’t think it for a moment.”
“Thank you,” he returned. “Duty is a hard schoolmaster at times; never
harder for me than in the present instance, Captain Page. But to return
to this poltroon captain of horse; I am beginning to suspect that he
had another object in asking for his safe-conduct, eager as he is to
see you effaced. He has been making inquiries of me about a lady.”
“Ah?” said I; and then: “I’ll name her for you--Mistress Beatrix Leigh,
of Virginia?”
“The same. She is here on some business for her Virginia estates--a
tobacco cargo that fell into the hands of our Philistines. Some
influence has been brought to bear upon Sir Henry Clinton to make him
wink at the blockade-running of this confiscated cargo, provided it can
be done without bringing it to public notice. Seytoun tells me of this,
lodges an information against one Elijah Sprigg, captain of Mistress
Leigh’s ship, and urges me to lay the affair by the heels.”
“You mean to do it, Lieutenant Castner?” I demanded angrily.
“Not upon that cur’s prompting, you may be sure,” was the hearty
rejoinder. “But this is all far beside the mark. One other request
Seytoun makes of me, and that is that he be permitted to see you,
alone, before you--before your--”
“Before my hanging, you would say; don’t boggle at so harmless a little
word, my good friend: I don’t. You’ll let him come?”
“That rests with you,” he announced quietly. “Do you still wish to keep
your--that broken engagement with him?”
I fear my smile at this was cynical.
“You needn’t approach it so cautiously, Lieutenant. He merely wishes
to come and triumph over a fallen enemy. I know him. I’m beginning to
think there is no fight in him.”
“By heavens! I’d make him fight!” burst out my quiet lieutenant, in a
most unprecedented upflash of rage. “See here, Captain Page; by all the
gods, I’m going to take the chance of having my commission canceled,
and send him to you! Here is my sword”--he drew it and flung it upon
the bed. “You’ll promise me that you will not use it in a way to make
me sorry that I trusted you?”
“Most willingly,” I replied, smiling at his sudden ardor, and added:
“But he won’t fight, Mr. Castner.”
“Then kill him!” he snapped vindictively; and turned to kick hotly at
the door for the guard to come and let him out.
Not to lose any of the precious minutes I fell into furious labor on
the hole in the wall as soon as the door clanged behind Castner. When
at length the aperture was large enough to let me squeeze through,
nothing was revealed save the crumbling sides of a damp earth-tunnel,
with the wooden bulkhead stopping its farther end.
I did not dare to creep into the tunnel for a better investigation of
the _cul de sac_. If Seytoun had not changed his mind, he might be
admitted at any moment, and remembering this, I hastily replaced the
loosened bricks, and moved the table, with the candle on it, against
the wall. Happily, I had made the breach so low that the table hid it;
which was more by hit than good wit, since I had not thought of having
to conceal it.
These preparations were barely completed when the door-bolt clicked,
and my enemy was come. Between the bolt shooting and the swinging of
the door, I had time to drop down upon the edge of the bunk-bed, and to
put my face in my hands; so Seytoun found me as I wished he should find
me--in an attitude of the deepest dejection.
He took instant advantage of it, as I made sure he would, laughing
harshly and slapping his leg, and saying it was as good as a comedy
to see me sniveling like a whipped schoolboy because, forsooth, I was
going to be choked presently with a bit of cord!
At first I took no notice of him, wishing to see him climb the ladder
of triumph so high that the fall, when it should come, would jar his
teeth loose. He climbed fast enough, in all conscience, pouring out the
most obscene imprecations upon me, telling me how he should live to
see me dancing upon nothing; how he would marry Beatrix now in spite
of hell and all the base-born, light-mothered Pages that ever mewled
in their nurses’ arms; how, in one stroke, he would be avenged for all
that I had ever done to him.
When he had run the full gamut of abuse, and was fairly at a stand for
fresh epithets, I took him up, not angrily, for, strange as it may
seem, I could not for the life of me stir the hot rage that had twice
or thrice made me so eager to kill him.
“You say I am a coward, Seytoun, and that is a harsh word to fling at
a dying man. What have I ever done to you, more than to post you in
the tidewater country for killing my cousin Devlin Page over a game
of cards without giving the poor lad a tenth of a chance to defend
himself?” I asked.
“You posted me, and you have struck me twice without giving me a chance
to kill you!” he raged. “On top of that you have eaten insults that
would have made a horse-boy fight!”
“Um,” said I. “If I have eaten at your table, I have also made you
eat at mine. And I had a much better cause than you, Wolf Seytoun,”
I added, giving him the name he went by in Virginia. “The woman who
loves me, and who will loathe and despise you to her dying day for
this night’s work, begged me to spare you--for the sake of our common
country--and I gave her my promise.”
“By heaven!” he shouted, “you’ll taunt me with that? I tell you,
Beatrix Leigh will--”
“Hold on,” I warned, raising a hand in deprecation. “That makes twice
you have used her name to me within five minutes. Don’t do it again!”
“What’s to stop me if I name her a hundred million times?” he bellowed.
“This,” I said, taking up the sword that Castner had flung upon the
bed. And still I was not angry.
His first act was the craven cur’s: a swift glance over his shoulder to
see if haply the door had been left ajar to let him run; his next was
the trapped wolf’s: a whipping-out of his saber, and a lightning-like
launching of his great body in a rush that was meant to slay me before
I could get upon my feet.
The attack failed only because I was fully expecting it; but the
warding of the murderous saber cut snapped my borrowed weapon short
off at the hilt. It was here that John Champe’s devotion surely saved
my life. But for his smuggling of the Scots rapier under his coat, I
should have been left unarmed and helpless, and Seytoun would certainly
have slain me like a dog.
But the rapier was at hand, and I made shift to snatch it out of its
hiding-place beneath the blankets, to spring aside from the second
saber sweep, and to face my antagonist in some equality.
Then began a battle the like of which I hope never to have part in
again. Seytoun’s face was the face of a demoniac, and he fought with
the coward’s courage, the frenzy of a madman. For a time I could do
nothing but strive to keep out of his way, and never before had I been
made to feel the bitter inadequacy of the lighter weapon when opposed
to the heavier troop saber. I dared not try to parry his sweeping
slashes, and my only hope lay in winding him.
This result came in time, helped on by his reckless wasting of his
strength, and by the heavy coat he was wearing. Then it was my turn,
and I began to press him slowly backward, changing my defense into an
attack, and crowding him to make good before he should recover and
catch his second wind. Round and round the narrow cell we went, and
still the heavy saber rose and fell, and the slender rapier darted in
and out, and never a drop of blood was drawn.
“End it!” I cried; “why don’t you end it, you brute beast?”
He took me at my word, or tried to. In a fierce rush he backed me all
across the room, and when he had me in a corner, stooped, caught up the
heavy stool in his left hand and hurled it at my head. It was a base
advantage to take of a lighter-armed antagonist, but I forgave him. For
at the instant of missile-hurling I found my opening, and the rapier
flashed in over the momentarily neglected guard; darted in and found
its mark and pierced it.
I did not thrust a second time; did not need to. While the clock could
tick twice, he stood looking at me with a sort of shocked wonder in
his bloodshot eyes. Then he turned away slowly, and fell face downward
across the bunk-bed, and I think he never stirred afterward.
XXIII
OPEN FIELD AND RUNNING FLOOD
I CONFESS, with some prickings of remorse, that I did not stay to help
Seytoun live or die. Fiercely swift as the fight had been, it had cut
deeply into the little time I could count on, and no sooner was it
ended than I was down on my knees under the table, and burrowing out
through the breach in the wall.
Once in the earth kennel, with the candle, and my sword and the
clasp-knife, I replaced the bricks hurriedly in the breach and began
to sound the wooden bulkhead. To my dismay, it seemed as solid as the
earth itself, and I saw nothing for it but to try to dig a passage
around it. This might well be the work of hours; but after the moment
of despair it gave me, I fell upon the task furiously, digging with the
knife, with my hands, and at last with the rapier, boring it around to
cut out futile little cones of the crumbling clay.
I was stabbing thus feverishly at the stubborn earth bank, and
accomplishing little, as I thought, when sounds in the powder-room
behind me made me stop and listen. I heard the door clang back against
the wall; heard footsteps and voices, and then the shout of surprise
when they found Seytoun. I did not need to look at my watch to see the
time: it was midnight and my gallows guard was come for me.
I think it must have been my good angel whispering at my ear--the
prompting to make a last despairing push with the thin-bladed sword in
the clay at the back of the shallow excavation. To my joy the steel
went through, and by wriggling it about I quickly had a hole through
which the keen salt air of the December night poured to refresh me.
Luckily, I was still cool enough and sane enough to be certain that I
should never have time to enlarge the hole so that it would serve to
let me out. I knew it must be only a matter of seconds until those in
the powder-room would find the breach in the wall, and I should be like
a trapped rat. But now my brain was working swiftly and clearly. The
wooden bulkhead stopping the passage was merely covered with a bank of
earth in the ravelin ditch to conceal it. Would my strength suffice to
overturn it?
Dropping the sword, I put my shoulder to the bulkhead and heaved. It
gave--sprung outward at the top and let a little rain of loosened dirt
trickle down upon my head. Again I heaved, lifting until the veins in
my forehead seemed about to burst; and I could hear the men in the
powder-room dragging the table aside, and pulling the loose bricks out
of the breach. Another moment, and--
But that moment was mine. With the final heave the bulwark tilted
outward and fell into the outworks ravelin with a smothered crash,
carrying me with it. There was a shout from behind to follow me out,
and a sentry, pacing his beat on the breast-high banquette beyond the
ravelin, stopped, gave a great cry as if he had seen a ghost, and let
his musket off.
At the musket-fire and the shouts of those who were wriggling through
the breach in the wall of the powder-room, there was a rush of the
outworks sentinels from both directions. Seeing at once that my only
way lay straight before me, I leaped afoot, dragged the dazed gun-firer
from the banquette by his legs, and, with another bound, went over the
breast-height and tumbled into the moat.
Here the palisade, a closely set fence of upright stakes driven into
the ditch-bottom, balked me, but only until I could spring and reach
the top and clamber up. It was here that I nearly got my quittance. If
I should drop into the V-shaped ditch beyond the palisade, there was an
even chance that I should not be able to climb out to the top of the
abattis breast beyond. But if I could balance on the stakes for the
single instant necessary, the gulf could be leaped. I drew myself up,
balancing precariously on the stake tops; there was a roar of musketry
behind me, a sharp twinge in my right shoulder, and I hurled myself
outward into space.
I remember vaguely the fall among the sharpened tree-branch spines of
the abattis, and, more dimly still, a frenzied effort to roll out of
the tangle toward the edge of the sea-slope. After this I knew nothing
till I came back to life at the bidding of a tossing and wrenching that
seemed to be tearing me limb from limb.
The figure was no figure, as I soon discovered. I was in the thick of
a group of men who were running swiftly along the beach, four of them
carrying me. Somewhere in the background of the night, other men were
running, and now and then muskets barked and there came a whining of
bullets overhead.
While I was yet no more than half at myself, a voice I should recognize
anywhere gasped a question.
“How much farther, Captain Sprigg?” the voice said; and I reached out
and laid my hand on the arm of the big fellow running with my bearers.
“Jack!” I shouted feebly.
“The same, Dickie-lad,” he panted back. And then: “Hold the life in you
by main strength, Dick; get a tail-twist on it and hang to it! Beatrix
and Aunt Ju are waiting for us in the boats!” And again to Sprigg: “How
much farther, in God’s name, Captain?”
It was no farther, as it chanced. At Pettus’s eager repetition of his
anxious question, the running group swerved sharply to the waterside,
and my bearers plunged thigh-deep into the icy water and lifted me
gently over the side of a small boat; over the side and into the
keeping of a pair of loving arms that clasped themselves quickly about
me.
“Beatrix!” I cried in utter weakness; and then I felt her tears drop
like warm rain on my face, and heard sounds as of a hand-to-hand
struggle on the beach, in the midst of which our smaller boat put off
and was pulled swiftly to the side of a schooner lying out of musket
range from the shore.
Here again, helping hands were ready to lift me to the deck, where a
spare sail was quickly folded to make a bed for me under the lee of the
high bulwarks, and a ship’s lantern was brought, and loving womanly
hands, four of them now, began to search anxiously for my wound.