Part 4

“Like many another who knows you even less well than I do, Mr. Arnold, I owe you a debt of gratitude. But for your courageous example, not a few men who are now faithfully serving the king would still be in Mr. Washington’s riff-raff army, fighting for that jack-o’-lantern thing called liberty. And, but for that same act of yours, I can most truthfully say that I should not be here this morning, trespassing on your good nature, sir.”

It was very gross, and I do think Mr. Dick Sheridan himself could not have made the _doubl’ entendre_ more dramatic. Yet this gentlemanly turncoat, whose vanity was even greater than his villainy, gulped it down as I have seen our good Dominie Attlethorpe, of Williamsburg, swallow a luscious oyster.

“You are either the most astute of young scapegraces, or the kindliest, Mr. Page,” he retorted, with the moral glutton’s satisfaction in every intonation. And then: “Have you breakfasted, sir?”

I told him I had; whereupon he asked me to walk with him, saying that we could come at my business as well in that way as in any other, if I would so far indulge him.

I laughed in my sleeve, and gave him the wall, as a poor dependent on his bounty should; and, reckoning again without my host, wondered how long it would take poor Champe to get within such easy gripping distance of his quarry. As we passed northward and eastward, quite to the other side of the town, and well beyond the burned area Arnold put me through my deserter’s catechism, which now, since I had danced through it gaily once for Castner, and again for Sir Henry, came off the tongue as glibly as a schoolboy’s lesson.

It was in front of a rather stately house facing an open space that we paused finally, and I saw a woman come and open the door and close it again quickly when she saw there were two of us. I had but a glimpse of the woman’s face, but that was enough. No one who had ever seen Margaret Shippen would fail to recognize her even though she appeared, as she did to me in that door-opening glimpse, in the guise of a sweet young woman prematurely saddened and aged by sorrow unnamable.

But another thing I saw which disturbed me even more than the sight of poor Peggy Shippen’s face; disturbed me so greatly that I scarcely heard the traitor’s question which gave me the opportunity I had been flattering him for. The distracting thing was a fleeting glimpse of another fair face at an upper window of the house; a clean-cut profile appearing for a single instant behind the leaded panes, and then vanishing so quickly that I began to doubt that it had been there. Now I could have sworn upon a stack of Bibles that there was only one face in all the world that could have flung that profile outline upon any window that was ever glazed, and that face I had left safely behind me in Virginia.

Could it be possible--but no, it was only a fancied resemblance, I told myself; and then I flogged my wits into line again in time to answer Arnold’s leave-taking query that had been all but lost in the sudden jangle of emotions.

“What can you do for me, Mr. Arnold?” I echoed. “That is for you to determine. From what Sir Henry Clinton said, or rather hinted at, I hoped you might be able to make use of me in some way. But I shall be at my best if you keep me near your person, sir. Of that I am very sure.”

Again he swallowed the bait like a greedy gudgeon.

“You shall come to me at my headquarters this afternoon, Mr. Page,” he said, with the air of one of the great ones of earth dealing out largesse to a reverent and admiring vassal; and then he ascended the steps and the door was opened quickly for him by the woman who stood inside.

Some things were made plain to me on my chilly walk back to the southward, with its opportunity for quiet reflection. One was that I had not overrated Arnold’s appetite for flattery, which was in truth even grosser than I had imagined. Another developed out of the side-glimpse given me of the traitor’s domestic affairs. It was not passing strange that Arnold should not wish to have his family with him in the house in the lower town where, as Castner had told me, he ate and slept and had his regimental rendezvous. But I saw more than disinclination in the town-wide severing. It spoke eloquently of the traitor’s social isolation that Arnold should be only a daylight visitor at the house where his wife and child were, without doubt, the guests of family friends of the Shippens.

I was wondering upon what footing he stood in this house, and if he were only tolerated there as he seemed to be elsewhere, when the recollection of the face I had seen at the upper window came to haunt and perplex me again. My last letter from Beatrix Leigh had pictured her hived up in the great house at Sevenoaks, in County Warwick, her father and brothers gone to the south with General Greene,--in whose campaign against Cornwallis she was patently more interested than she was in our humdrum New York fuse-sputterings,--and her mother and all the other women-folk of the tidewater homeland shuddering in anticipation of the long-threatened descent of the British upon the Virginia coast.

She had given me no hint of any intended desertion of Sevenoaks, and though she had many friends in Philadelphia, where her schooling had been, I thought it the height of improbability that she would get even that far on the way to New York in these troublous times. Weighing all these things in the mental balance, I saw how absurd it was to let a momentary sight of a beautiful face at a window run me so far aside from the beaten path of calm reasoning. In sober fact the fancied identification proved nothing but this: that Beatrix Leigh’s face was so constantly present in my mind and heart that I was ready to find and adore it under any suggestive guise.

Having now some little time to call my own, I first secured a lodging at the tavern where the ham had made me homesick for the smoke-houses of Virginia, and then set out to find Sergeant Champe. That I should chance upon him readily enough, I had no doubt; but with the town full of soldiers it proved a more difficult thing than I had foreseen, so difficult that the noon hour found me still groping for my accomplice. But one thing I did find, namely, the barracks of the “Loyal American Legion,” and, with due respect for any true Loyalists there may have been in this traitor-built corps, I never saw a more hang-dog shuffling of men than these who were shortly to call our Judas “General.” They were a curst lot, too, for in all my introductory foregathering with them, I could not find more than three or four who would join me in a soldierly pot of wine.

Castner joined me at the midday meal at my inn, this time as my guest; and now I began to regret my knowing of this fine young fellow, who was condoning in me what must have appeared to him as the most deplorable wickedness a soldier can be guilty of. I foresaw complications, if our acquaintance should go on ripening into friendship; I must use him, or any other man coming in my way, to forward the great end in view, and already the idea of making the young, fine-faced, upright lieutenant an innocent accessory was growing repugnant to me. So I thought it no more than right to give him his warning--which I did.

“You have rooms in the barracks, Mr. Castner?” I asked when we had come to the long-stemmed pipes after the meal in the inn common-room.

“No,” he replied. “Being on detached duty as one of Sir Henry’s aides, I live as I please.”

“And where does it please you to live, if I may ask?”

“In this house at the present time. It is not so good as the best, perhaps; but it is far better than the worst.”

Here was a promise of more complications. My necessary meetings with Champe, which I had thought this tavern so near the fort might shelter, could scarcely come under the same roof with Castner and not awaken suspicion. Yet I reflected that I was not tied to the tavern looking down Broad Way to Sir Henry Clinton’s headquarters with any string; I could break loose whenever I chose.

“It is very good, indeed,” I allowed, thinking still of the breakfast ham and eggs. Then quite abruptly: “You have taken a fancy to me, Mr. Castner, and it does you little credit. You will live longer and have more money and a better digestion, if you give me the cold shoulder.”

The young Briton’s smile was altogether good-natured.

“If I were inclined to be suspicious, which I trust I am not, I might wonder why you particularly wish to be quit of me, Mr. Page,” he said mildly.

“I don’t, on my own account,” I denied bluntly. “But I am telling you the truth--for your own good. Have you ever fought a duel, Lieutenant?”

He admitted that he had, and had come off second best. But it was a mere point of honor with a brother officer, and no life-and-death affair.

“Then you are committed to the code? You think a challenged man should fight?”

“I think a challenged gentleman will always fight,” he corrected.

I hooked an arm over the back of my chair and looked him full in the face.

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Castner--always for your own good, you will remember. Yesterday, about this time or a little later, I slapped a man’s face. He sent his friend to my friend, and this morning at daybreak, as I have reason to suppose, a party of three which should have been a party of four, met in a grassy cove on the riverside just below the town of Nyack. At that hour, or possibly a short time afterward, I was breakfasting very pleasantly here with you, as you will recall.”

He was evidently shocked, as I meant him to be, and for a little while he was unable to find the fitting word. When he did find it, it was a most gentlemanly word, I had to admit.

“You have your reasons for telling me this, Mr. Page, and you will pardon me if I say that they do not appear upon the surface. I will ask you one question--which you may answer or not, as it pleases you: Does Sir Henry Clinton know of this?”

“I told him, as nearly as I can remember, in much the same words.”

“Yet he condoned this--this----”

“The poltroonery?” I cut in, helping him out. “Yes, in a way. But his way made a just and even-handed discrimination between a brave man and a coward. You will observe that he did not billet me with his own people; he turned me over to Mr. Benedict Arnold. Now will you give me the cold shoulder, Mr. Castner?”

He took time to think about it, regarding me now a bit wistfully, I thought, and again, angrily. It was a test that a tried friend might have balked at, and he was only an acquaintance of a few hours.

“You have neither the face nor the carriage of a coward,” he said at length, speaking slowly. “Moreover, you are from the South, where your kinsmen would brand you for a deed such as you have described. No, Mr. Page, I shall not cold-shoulder you, because I know very well that you have carefully kept back the key to your riddle. Some day you will think well enough of me to let me have it.”

What could I do with this generous, noble-minded fellow who would not believe ill of me on my own word? There seemed to be nothing for it but to take him as he stood; to make the best of his abounding nobility of character and friendly loyalty. Yet it was now all the harder to deceive him and to play upon this very friendship, as I feared I might be obliged to. I have heard of those who are said to pray, sometimes, to be delivered from their friends, and I have always had a hot corner of despising saved for these cold-blooded ones. But now I found myself on the brink of saying the same unthankful prayer in my own behalf.

When we rose from the table, Castner asked me very kindly if I would walk abroad with him, saying that we might visit the fortification, if I wished. But here I laid down a rule which I meant to adhere to: a spy I might be; a spy I surely should be in every way that might in the future prove helpful to our side. But I did not need to make this friendly lieutenant a blind accomplice, and I would not.

So I pleaded my afternoon engagement with the arch traitor, and was glad I had it to plead; and I went to keep it, a little later, leaving Castner to smoke another pipe by himself before the fire in the tavern bar.

Arnold was writing at his table in the front room of the upper suite when his man, who, as I noted, wore the uniform of the new legion, marshaled me in. Though the event proved that I was expected, Arnold went on with his writing without so much as a look for me, and again I had a chance to mark the deepening furrows in his brow and the brooding look in the moody eyes.

When he was quite through he dropped the quill with a sigh and turned to me.

“Well, Mr. Page, you find me serving myself as I can,” he said. “None the less, I will serve you, too, as I may. Will you take a commission in the new legion?”

I wondered a little at his reckless haste. Had I been in his shoes, I think I should have considered well before confiding in a man whose very presence was a proof of his perfidy to others. But at that time I had yet to learn that the enlisting of the “Loyal American” Legion had proved a stupendous task for our traitor, and one which tried him to the last reserve of his ambitious will. There were privates in the ranks who scorned to serve under him; and when it came to the officering, the difficulties were almost insurmountable. No British regular would go with him willingly, and the few he had were under peremptory orders from Sir Henry Clinton. So now, when he had a chance to secure a subaltern whose fame as a troop leader was not, if I do say it, altogether of the worst, he caught at it.

I made no bones of accepting the commission, meaning that there should be no occasion for my holding it longer than the kidnapping purpose should require; and so I told him, with more flattery, that myself and my sword were at his disposal, or, if he desired, I would place myself in the ranks, as possibly many a better man had done.

“No, no, Mr. Page,” he made haste to say. “We don’t value you so lightly as that. You shall have a captain’s commission when we are ready to sail, and in the meantime, if you please, you may serve as my aide.”

It was here that my wonder burst into speech. Was the man gone totally blind on the side of caution?

“If I speak freely, Mr. Arnold, it is only a subordinate’s duty,” I began. “As your aide I shall be responsible in some sense for your personal safety. That I can not be, if you take in every piece of flotsam and jetsam that drifts across the lines, as you have me.”

He smiled soberly.

“As I said this morning, Mr. Page, you are either a very shrewd young man, or a very mirror of frankness. Don’t you see that your raising of such a question is the best possible proof of your own purity of motives? But I am not so careless as I may seem. Since we walked together this morning, you have been vouched for by an unimpeachable authority.”

“Now angels and ministers of grace defend us!” said I, to the inward Richard Page: “who in the devil’s name has been thrusting a finger into my pie?” But aloud, I said: “It is a good thing to have friends, Mr. Arnold, even if one can not always thank them for specific favors.”

“Nevertheless, you may soon have an opportunity of thanking this one,” he amended; but after this he left me still bewildered as to the how and when and where, passing at once into detail matters concerning the new legion, telling me of the trouble he had been at to find drillmasters and to get the raw levies whipped into some semblance of an effective fighting force.

After some talk of this nature he began sounding me delicately in the Virginian part of me, and instantly I divined that the new legion was to take the field in that quarter, and that my knowledge of the coast and people was an asset that he was counting on in bribing me with the captain’s commission. Whereupon I had a chance to exercise my inventive faculty again; and what he did not know about Virginia and the temper of her people when I was through--well, it would not have filled Governor Thomas Jefferson’s library at Monticello, perhaps, but it would certainly have furnished matter for a goodish-sized volume in the same, I dare swear.

Yet Arnold took it, or seemed to take it, all as Gospel truth, the more readily, I think, because I taxed him with the purpose of invading my native province; and when he would neither deny nor affirm, fell to pleadings for exemptions for my kinsfolk and others, when he, and our triumphant legion, should be carrying fire and sword into the rebellious colony. And afterward, I prayed most heartily, with my head in the dust, that God would forgive me for this excess of daredeviling, for, as He is my witness, I had no more thought that this consummate villain would live to lead an army into Virginia than I had that he would come back from the gallows-grave in which I hoped to see him comfortably planted.

It was while we were talking that one of Sir Henry Clinton’s aides, not Castner but another, came in with a bulky packet addressed to Arnold. I sat quietly by while he opened it, and when I saw the blue ribbon and the great seal appended to the parchment as he unfolded it, I was at no loss to account for the sudden lighting up of his eyes and the smile--it was almost a smirk--of gratification that went with it.

The parchment was his brevet as brigadier-general in His Majesty’s Army, and I hastened to improve the shining hour for another gentle stuffing of his vanity. Rising quickly from my chair, I stood at attention before him, gave him the graceful British salute in my best style, and said, with a true Virginia bow to go with the words: “Let me be the first to congratulate you, General Arnold.”

He tried to laugh it off, tossing the document carelessly upon the writing-table, and calling it a bauble which wise men valued at its true worth. But the gratified smile was still playing fitfully across his face even as he spoke; and in a little while he left me, going to the alcove at the farther end of the long room, where a new uniform was laid out carefully upon the bed.

His viewing of his finery set me to thinking of my own needs in that direction. As Arnold’s aide, I must have a captain’s uniform, and I was the more anxious to hasten it because it would give me an excuse to carry serviceable weapons, which my civilian’s clothes did not. So I broached this subject to my lord Lucifer Judas when he came back to my end of the room, and said I should be ashamed to serve a general in my citizen’s garmentings, and that I hoped my service was to begin at once.

There was no dispute upon this point, Arnold seeming to be as eager to have a bedecked-out captain to tag him around the town, as I was eager to be the tag. And now it appeared that he had overshot the mark in his quartermaster’s stores, having, as he assured me, several more outfittings than he had officers, and among these possibly a captain’s. Hence, I was shortly afterward sent to the legion barracks with an order for my bedizenry, and a second order upon the regimental tailor to cut and alter and fit the same for me that I might report to General Arnold in full panoply by six o’clock at the latest.

I went willingly enough, being glad to escape from the company of a man who stirred up all the evil I ever owned and made my fingers itch to lay hold of him. And because the afternoon was half spent when I began, and because the fussy little Dutch tailorman had to measure and fit and try and measure again, I lost another chance of finding John Champe, and thereby sealed his fate as well as my own, as will appear a little farther on.

Since I was ordered to report to Arnold at six o’clock, I had an early supper at my tavern, and expected to miss Castner. But he came in and sat down at my table before I was through, and I was sure I saw scorn in his honest blue eyes for my new plumage.

“I like you better otherwise,” he said, when I had laughingly given him leave to open his mind. “I hate to see you in that--gentleman’s livery.”

“What!” I retorted; “after I have told you how emphatically it fits me?”

“Yes; even after that.”

“Well,” said I; “I hope you may never have to wear it, Mr. Castner, since you dislike it so warmly.”

“Zounds, man!” he cried, leaping from his chair as if I had pricked him with a sword’s point, “do you know everything?”

Of course, I modestly disclaimed the charge, and begged him to sit down and be at his ease again; but he began to walk the floor of the small snuggery where I had my supper served, biting his lip and giving a very fair imitation of a man too deeply enraged to be able to swear it off easily.

Naturally, I was curious to know how I had unwittingly stirred the mud in the depths of his soul-pool, but I would not question him. Apart from having no special claim upon his confidence, I knew he would tell me of his own accord when the rage-pot became hot enough to boil over.

But the way in which he began to tell me was with a sober question.

“Mr. Page,--Captain Page, I should say,--for the honor of the king’s service you must advise me how you came to know a thing which, I am solemnly assured, has never been mentioned outside of Sir Henry Clinton’s cabinet. If we have traitors that near to us, we must know it.”

Now I was able to laugh at him and once more to beg him to sit down and to compose himself.

“I know nothing; less than nothing, Lieutenant Castner,” I protested. “What did I say to stir you so?”

“You do know!” he insisted. “I saw it in your eyes when you wished that I might not have to wear the uniform of Mr. Arnold’s Loyal Americans. I must know how you found out!”

I laughed again. “So you are to wear it?” I asked. “I’m sure I could not desire a better fellow officer. Yet I think you need not borrow trouble in advance, if it be Mr. Arnold you object to.”

He sat down and rested his elbows on the table, and tried to look me through and through with eyes that were only meant to see out of, and to be read by others.

“More mysteries,” he fumed. And then he added: “They are dangerous, Captain, most peculiarly dangerous for a man in your situation.”

“This is no mystery,” I replied boldly, never letting him loose the eyehold for an instant. “Have you never heard that Mr. Arnold’s health is most precarious? It is, I promise you; every one on the other side of the Neutral Ground knows it well. He will drop off very suddenly some day, Mr. Castner. I may go so far as to say, in strictest confidence to you, that I marked some of the symptoms while I was with him to-day.”

“You surprise me,” he said; but I saw that the nail was holding. Then he asked in a tone that was almost sympathetic, what the malady was.

“It has never been written out in any doctor’s book, I believe,” I rejoined gravely. “It is an obscure thing, coming suddenly and tying a man in knots, so that at the last he can move neither hand nor foot.”

I had him fairly mesmerized by this time, and his voice was hushed when he said: “And you say Mr. Arnold has this--this disease?”

“There is little doubt of it. Indeed, I overheard two men, officers they were in our--in the rebel army, speaking of it only last night, and, naturally, they were lamenting that it had not carried him off before he carried himself off. One of those men had known Mr. Arnold from the beginning, I believe.”

For a long minute Castner was silent, and he seemed to have forgotten the supper that the pretty serving maid had brought him. When he spoke he was plumbing me again with the honest eyes--or he thought he was.

“It is a hard thing to say, Captain Page,” he said, speaking like a man who has been digging in the very bottom layer of his convictions, “but sometimes I think that an outcome like this which you say is threatening would be the best for all concerned.”