Part 8

Notwithstanding, some inkling of this was beginning to dawn on me, and like a voice out of the air Colonel Hamilton’s words came back to me “--But to go as you must go, and use guile and subterfuge ... truly, Captain Page, you must sort this out for yourself; to determine how far in such a cause an officer and a man of honor may go. I lay no commands upon you.” I was thinking hard, trying to do as Mr. Hamilton had given me leave to do: to determine how far a decent sense of honor would let me go, when Arnold’s voice broke into my reverie.

“You will go with the letter, and take your own time--so much time as she shall require of you,” he directed, giving me the sealed packet. “If you should not find me on your return, Lieutenant Castner will meet you at the shipping wharf and assign you to your vessel.”

This was my dismissal, and I took it gladly for more than one reason. I hoped I should never see this man again until I could more honestly hate him as he deserved--another wish for which I was to pray God’s forgiveness in the time to come.

The streets were quiet as I took my solitary way through them, and over the fort the sky was reddened as if a bonfire were burning on the parade ground. Passing the green I saw the pedestal upon which the lead-gilt equestrian statue of King George had stood, the statue that the men of ’76 had pulled down in their jubilation over the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence, and which had afterward been melted into bullets to be fired at this same Third George’s soldiery.

My way also led past the gloomy sugar-house prison where, in the frightful summer of ’77, so many patriots were confined that not a third of them could get breathing space at the deep port-hole windows; where our brave fellows stayed and rotted and died a dozen in the day rather than purchase their freedom by enrolling themselves in the king’s army, as they were given leave to do.

The sight of the grim, fortress-like stone building, and the thought of the torments for which it stood as a reminder, put me in a sterner frame of mind toward our enemies and went far toward excusing the double-faced part I found myself compelled to play. Yet I tried to hold myself sufficiently aloof so that I should not visit the sins of the husband, and of those men who had suborned him, upon the sorrowful woman I was going to see.

Having been twice over the route in daytime, and twice at night, I had no difficulty in finding the house which sheltered Arnold’s wife and child. A negro house-servant opened to my knock, and upon my asking for Mistress Arnold, admitted me, though not too willingly I fancied. Once indoors, I was shown to a richly furnished room opening off the hall, and was told to warm myself at the fire while the lady was making ready to see me.

I meant to have my duty over with first, and then to see Beatrix afterward, if anything short of force would secure me a sight of her. But as to that, it seemed only fair to borrow a little of the probabilities. If I could make my standing good with Mistress Margaret Shippen, I might be able to persuade her to act as my intercessor.

The lady, whose name was on the letter I carried, did not keep me waiting long: and coming, she entered the room so quietly that she surprised me sprawling like a mannerless trooper before the fire; for which I quickly begged her pardon when I found my feet and made my best bow. Whereupon she was good enough to give me her hand like an old acquaintance, and to say that we poor soldiers had little enough comfort to be denied the ease a cheerful fire afforded.

At this I handed her the letter and she sat down to read it. I gave her all the privacy there was, staring so hard into the heart of the blazing logs, and thinking so pointedly of my own love-affair that I did not know when she finished.

“This is your night for sailing, Captain Page?” she asked gently, and her low voice called me back suddenly from the love-dream backgrounded by the mellowing fire.

I said it was; and after that she sat for a long time gazing with me into the glowing embers. When she began to speak again, I knew why she had hesitated.

“Your place is to be near General Arnold, isn’t it, Mr. Page?” she asked, saying it as one who feels the way carefully.

“I hope so,” I replied, hating myself for saying the double-meaning words for her ears. Then I added: “I am still detached; I have no command; and Mr.---the general--is having me serve as his aide while we are here in New York.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “He promised me you should be near him.” And then I knew who was the “unimpeachable authority” and that she had vouched for me, and was straightway humbled and made horribly ashamed and remorseful.

“You spoke for me? You should not have done that, dear lady,” I said quickly. So much, at least, I owed to common manhood, I thought.

“And why not, pray? If you could know, Mr. Page, how it comforts me to have the assurance that General Arnold has at least one honorable gentleman near him--”

“Good heavens, madam!” I ejaculated, forgetting all prudence in the smarting of her unconscious stab; “you take a frightful risk in recommending any one in these uncertain times, and especially one who is himself a forsworn--” I stopped in mid-career, remembering that I was treading upon doubly dangerous ground in thus pointing out my own unfitness to the woman who was the wife of the chief forswearer of his age.

“Ah, you are modest, Mr. Page,” she said, being so good and gentle herself as to be unable to see guile in others. And then she added: “You must not try to draw me into the King-and-Congress of it. I used to think I could know and take sides; but now I leave those things to others, and try to rise above them. When this bitter war is over and become a thing of the past, we shall see more clearly than we do now.”

“I would to God it were over at this moment,” I rejoined gloomily.

“I can credit you in that wish: though you are young and eager and a soldier, Mr. Page. War is a very terrible thing, full of peril and danger to those we love; full of weary heart-strainings for us poor women who can only stand and wait. You will serve the general well, will you not, Captain Page?”--this most wistfully.

This time I could have cried out with the pain it gave me to deceive this dear lady. Here was a thing I had never bargained for, even in my wildest imaginings of the crookings and turnings of the way into which I had set my feet. And now, again, Mr. Hamilton’s qualifying words came back to me. How much farther could I go and have any semblance of honor left? But Mistress Margaret was waiting for her answer, and I am glad she can never know what it cost me to give it.

“I shall not serve the general any the less faithfully for any word you have spoken, be assured, dear madam,” I said, descending once more, and still more reluctantly, to the despicable double meanings.

“I shall sleep the easier for that assurance,” she said warmly, flaying me afresh; and then continuing with the sweet archness of the Margaret Shippen I had met in her father’s home: “I know you, Captain, better than you know me--having Beatrix Leigh for a fellow guest under this same roof.”

“Mistress Beatrix would never say a word for me,” I blurted out.

“Oh, no; certainly not for you in person,” was the half-quizzical retort. “But for your family. One would think, to hear her talk, that the Pages,--always excepting yourself, of course, Mr. Richard,--were the lords of the manor and the first gentlemen of Virginia. I promise you, she has given you a name to live up to.”

Now was my time, and I did not let the opportunity slip.

“I wish she might be prevailed upon to give me a little sight of herself--for my leave-taking--Mistress Arnold. Could you--would you--”

She was shaking her head in despair--mock or real, I could not tell which.

“You are a most blundering lover, Captain,” she protested. “After I had plotted and planned to persuade her to show herself at Mr. Justice Smith’s last night--she didn’t want to, I assure you; she is such a spiteful little patriot--after all that, and my telling the general he must bring you; then you go and say or do something that sends her to me in a perfect passion, telling me one moment that she hates you, and the next that she will die of shame and misery. What did you do, Mr. Page? I am curious to know.”

“What did I do? Why, Mistress Margaret, I--that is, I--I asked her how she did, and--” I was as tongue-tied as a schoolboy trying to say his first piece.

“I think you must have,” she said, demurely. “Beatrix is just the person to fly into a rage because you asked her how she did.”

I went dumb at this, but my desire was just as clamorous none the less. So, after we had looked the fire out of countenance for another minute or two, I essayed again. “Think of it, Mistress Margaret; it is desperate hard for me to be this near to her--and on the verge of going to I know not what fate--and not to have a chance to--to--”

“Oh, you young lovers!” she smiled. “Here you are writhing and prickling to have me go, Mr. Richard Page--to be quit of me--and yet you are in a terrible fright lest I should go without promising to send Beatrix to you. Well, I’ll go; but I shan’t promise you she will come--even for a farewell sight of your handsome face and soldierly figure. Stay where you are for ten minutes by the clock. If she does not come by that time, you will have to think on your sins, whatever they may be, and go without your leave-taking.”

I said I would wait, and thanked her, and felt, when she gave me her hand again for her own leave-taking, as if I were twice the hypocritical villain her husband had ever dared to be.

When she was gone, and I had walked the floor of that pretty room a full half-hour, as it seemed to me, I fell to wondering how her mere mention of the time could make the tall clock in the corner go on wagging its pendulum in sly malice while its hands made hours of the minutes. We speak of killing time: I could have wrecked that lying time-piece more than once, and was, I think, standing before it and shaking my fist in its brazen face, when I first heard the hesitant opening of the door.

No, it was not Mistress Margaret, coming back to tell me she had failed. It was Beatrix, and she had waited thus long so that she might curve her lip and train her eyes to flash and look me down, as I had seen her go and hide herself to do many a time when we were children together and had quarreled, as children will.

“Well?” she said, much as she had said it the night before, when she had come into the glass rose-house to make me think she despised me.

“I have come to bid you good-by,” I told her, picking out the most inane word that came to hand. And she would not let even that poor word stand.

“No,” she contradicted; “you came to bring a letter for Margaret. You came to fetch and carry for that dreadful man--as his lackey!”--and here the beautiful eyes burnt me, they were so indignant hot.

“I should have come anyhow,” I asserted. “But I was glad to bring Mistress Margaret her letter: that was a service to her rather than to Mr. Arnold.”

“Call him ‘General,’ Mr. Page; he is your general, isn’t he?” she scoffed.

“So he says, and so he thinks, and so I call him, when I have to. But you must not think, because I am wearing this coat, that I am over-proud of it, or of my service in what we have lately been calling the ‘Traitors’ Legion,’ on the other side of the Neutral Ground.”

“Then, why are you in it?” she demanded. “Why, why, _why_?”

“It is a long story,” I stammered, “and there is less time for telling it now than there was last night. But tell me; how is it that you are here in New York, when I thought you were safe in Virginia?”

“It is a long story,” she mimicked, “and there is less time for telling it now than there was last night, Mr. Richard Page.”

“But I shall stay until I have heard it,” I retorted hardily.

“Oh, if I must ask Mistress Vandeventer to give you the guest-room otherwise, you may know; there is no such mighty mystery about _my_ goings and comings,” she said, with a toss of the pretty head. “There was a ship-load of the Leigh tobacco snapped up by one of the British ships and brought here as a prize. But word came to us at Sevenoaks through good Mr.--no, on second thought, I won’t tell you our friend’s name--through a gentleman of Philadelphia, that it could be ransomed if any Leigh were bold enough to venture for it. There was no one else to venture, so I came. And I have got my prize redeemed, and I am going home again in a few days, or as soon as Cousin Julianna Pettus comes from Philadelphia to sail with me. There now--make the most of it, Mr. Turncoat British-officer Page! Or will you turn traitor to me, too, and have my father’s tobacco seized again?”

It was all very hard; doubly hard now, because my mission, which only a day earlier had held out hopes of a speedy despatching, now stretched out into an indefinite future, and was by so much the more unspeakable to her or to any living soul. But I set her mind at rest about the retrieved tobacco; if, indeed, she thought so small of me as to suspect for a moment that, even as a turncoat, I would turn informer.

“I am no exciseman, whatever else you have written against me in your black books,” I said, and if half the gloom I felt was in the words, she should have pitied me.

Perhaps she did, for from standing, she took the chair lately occupied by Margaret Shippen, and nodded me airily to my own.

“I must not forget my manners, even if Mr. Page does sometimes forget his,” was her wording of the permission to sit beside her.

Now that ravished kiss of the night before sat lightly on my heart, but not so easily on my conscience. God knows, my love for her was big enough to excuse the loving violence ten times over; but it stuck in my throat that, but for my imminent peril, I might not have had the courage to do it. Confession was the thing; but how could I confess enough without confessing too much?

“I came here to-night to beg your forgiveness, Beatrix,” I began, plunging into the middle of the thing because there was no guide-post to show me any beaten highway leading up to it.

She did not pretend to misunderstand.

“Oh; so you are properly ashamed, are you? I think you should be, Richard Page!”

“No, not ashamed: but I shall be sore-hearted if I have to go away and leave you angry at me. But are you angry, Beatrix?”

“Desperately.”

“Would anything I could say--”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Not if I tell you that--” I paused on the brink of the horridest chasm that ever opened before a halting lover in this world of lovers’ pitfalls. If I confessed that the kiss saved my life--as well it may have--how could I make her understand--but I could never make her understand. She would hold me as the paltriest coward that ever breathed if I should so much as hint at the thing which had given me the kissing courage at that perilous moment.

“What could you tell me, if you were so disposed, Mr. Page?” she asked, and now I thought the sarcasm was only half-hearted.

“I could tell you what I have told you a hundred times before, Beatrix; that I love you: that I am never near you without having to fight most desperately for even decent self-control.”

“But I do not love you, Dick Page.”

I jerked my chair around to face her.

“Is it because you do love Seytoun?” I demanded, full of jealous wrath in an instant.

“Foolish boy! Do you say that because I won’t let you quarrel with Captain Seytoun? There may be better reasons why I wish you to keep the peace in that quarter, sir.”

“Yet you say you do not love me?”

“I don’t, Mr. Richard Page--not in the coat you are wearing.”

My arms went out to her, and she moved her chair well out of my reach before she went on.

“No; don’t assume that the coat is a little thing, lightly to be ignored. It is not, for a Leigh. I shall gladly die a spinster before I’ll ever wed it, I do assure you, Dick.”

All this time she was looking steadily into the fire, and I was wondering where her heart-broken sorrow of the night before had gone. But it came, even while I was seeking for words in which to hint that my present Judas-coat might not always stand between us; the trembling of the sweet lips, the welling up of the tears.

“Oh, what madness possessed you, Dick?” she wailed; “you, who were the bravest, the most devoted, the most cheerful when all was darkest!”

I rose and settled my sword-belt. There was more love-violence ahead if I should stay; that, and the certain breaking of my promise to Mr. Hamilton.

“I have greatly overstayed my time; I must go, Beatrix, dear,” I said, and I scarcely knew the sound of my own voice. And when she rose, I caught her in my arms before she could escape. “Kiss me, sweetheart, and bid me God-speed,” I begged.

“For a boon, I will, Captain Page,” she said quickly, holding herself at arm’s length; and now, though her eyes were still wet, she was not weeping. “Tell me where this expedition of yours will land!”

Now that was something I could and would tell her gladly. But when my mouth was open to let the words out, she came close and put her hand over my lips, and hid her face against that cursed coat of double-dealing, saying with a half sob: “Oh, no, no! I would have made you turn traitor again! Kiss me, Dick, and go--go quickly. I--”

She was faint and dizzy--my strong one!--when I led her gently to a cushioned settee and made her lie down with a pillow at her head. Then I sent the negro hallman up for Margaret Shippen; and when Mistress Arnold came hurriedly, I went away, softly, and with a heart that was strangely light and tender. For now I knew that I need not kill Captain Seytoun for any chance he stood to take my darling from me.

X

IN WHICH A WALL HAS EARS

THE red bonfire glow tinting the sky over the parade ground of Fort George had faded into the night when I won back to the lower town. Passing the sentries on the outer scarp of the fort I made my way down to the water-front to look for Castner, and to get my embarking directions.

At the landing-stage, which was lighted by a pair of cresset torches flaring gustily on stakes thrust into the ground, I found the lieutenant. He was forwarding the last few boat-loads of stragglers, and while he busied himself with orders to the ensigns in command of the ships’ boats, I had speech with the quartermaster of the fort garrison, who told me that the greater part of the expeditionary fleet was already standing down the bay.

But Castner had other news for me when he was free to impart it; news which set me aflame with fresh invention fires.

“Good evening to you again, Captain Page,” he said, when he lounged up from the despatching of the last of the boats. “Did you come by the headquarters on your way?”

“No,” said I. “I went on a mission for General Arnold in the town and was told to come directly here.”

“We are delayed,” he announced, not very regretfully I thought. “At the last moment orders came from Sir Henry Clinton detaching our convoy frigate and two of the sloops of war for temporary service elsewhere. The troop fleet is to wait in the lower bay for the return of the three men-of-war, and all officers not on service duty have shore leave during the interval. How does that set with you?”

It was the part of prudence to let the news appear to be a matter of indifference to me, and I answered accordingly.

“A soldier should be prepared for anything; and I’ll dare say the tavern is a fairly good inn--far better than the cabin of an ill-smelling fishing schooner. I thank heaven I have no active command to send me down the bay with the musket men.”

Castner grinned. “I’ve been picking some comfort out of that in my own case,” he admitted. “Do you go back to Mr. Ar--to the general’s quarters?”

I told him I should not, if he would be good enough to report me: that I should go across to the tavern to retake my room, where I might be found if there were any further orders for me. And so we parted at the northwestern angle of the fort, and I was glad to be alone. For now the book of the kidnapping possibilities was suddenly reopened, and my brain was busy with a thousand desperate plots all weaving themselves upon this most opportune delaying of the expedition.

Wanting nothing so much as a chance to let my mind shuttle connectedly among the plot threads, I shunned the tavern and kept on around the northern and eastern escarpment of the fort until I found myself once more approaching the waterside and the landing-place with its two smoky torches still flaring in the wind. The spot was deserted, though it was so close under the guns of the fort that I could hear the tread of the sentinel as he paced back and forth behind the screen of the outer ravelin.

Hearing my footsteps, the sentry stopped and would have challenged me, I suppose, if his attention had not been drawn at the same minute to a ship’s small boat which was approaching the landing. His challenge went for that, instead, and when I heard the answer I stood quickly aside and waited for what should follow. For, by all the good luck that ever fell upon a perplexed and half-desperate plotter, the man who stepped from the stern-sheets of the small boat and made answer to the challenging sentry was none other than my fellow conspirator, Sergeant Champe.

“A courier from the fleet, with letters for General Arnold,” was his reply to the fort’s watch-dog; and when he had taken the few strides necessary to carry him out of earshot from the ravelin and from the two sailors in his boat, I waylaid him, telling him in twenty words how fortune--and Sir Henry Clinton--had given us one more chance to retrieve ourselves.

“Plot for it, then,” was his gloomy response. “I see nothing beyond my going back to the ships presently with the answer to the letter I’m carrying.”

“That you shall not do,” I replied hastily. “We must think up some excuse to keep you ashore. Leave that to me and go on your errand. I’ll wait for you here and have my plan ready against your return.”

The plan, decided on in a half-hour’s chilly marching back and forth across the green while I waited for Champe to come back, was not very complicated. When the sergeant made his appearance I took the despatches and sent him over to the tavern to reengage my room for me, telling him to pose as my soldier-servant therein. Meanwhile, I told him, I would take his place as Arnold’s courier, and it would go hard with me if I should not account for his detention on shore when I could have speech with those on shipboard who had sent him.

Passing on to the landing-place in my new character of despatch carrier, I found the sailors willing enough to exchange the sergeant they had brought ashore for a captain; and at my order to give way, they pulled off to one of the rear-guard vessels of the fleet, where, to my dismay, I found I had to deal with Major Simcoe, whose letters to Arnold had been the despatches carried ashore by Champe.

Quite naturally, the major’s first question was for his messenger, and I was glad that the light of the ship’s lantern was so poor that he could not see my involuntary recoil when I saw who it was with whom I had to fence.

“I am General Arnold’s aide,” I replied guardedly. “Were you expecting some one else, Major Simcoe?”

“I sent a man from the Loyal American detail on board, a sergeant named Champe,” he explained. “Did he return with you, Captain?”

“No. Possibly the general made other use of him,” I suggested.

“Possibly,” said the major, eying me shrewdly from beneath his bushy brows. “But in that case he must have changed his mind after this letter was sent. You will see that it is superscribed to me ‘By the hands of Sergeant Champe,’” and he held the letter so that I might read the writing on the back.