Part 19

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.”

“Ah, these women!” he said gently. “A man never sees himself as he 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.