Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

CASTNER was at the supper-table in the tavern common-room when I went up-stairs, and I found that I had slept the clock only once around. To my surprise, the lieutenant was wearing a uniform to match my own, and I saw now why he had been so sore at my pointless joke. He was to accompany the Arnold expedition; and I was not long in divining the reason when he told me sourly that he had been detailed to act as aide to General Arnold. For all he had paid good king’s gold and a commission in the king’s army for his prize traitor, Sir Henry Clinton was afraid to trust him, and my friend Castner was going along as a sort of amiable spy in Arnold’s military household.

“You don’t seem to take your promotion very joyfully,” I laughed, drawing a chair opposite and sitting down to help him with the cold roast.

“It’s a dirty business,” he blurted out; and then he shut his mouth on his meat and I was left to guess whether he meant his own sending, or the proposed descent of an armed force upon a defenseless coast.

A little later three or four other officers came in for their suppers, among them Major Simcoe, who had commanded the Queen’s Rangers at Germantown. Their talk, which comfortably ignored me either as a deserter and as beneath their notice, or as an untried recruit, turned upon the ship expedition and the secret of its destination, which latter seemed to have been well guarded, inasmuch as none of those present appeared to know where the fleet would cast anchor.

I surmised that Major Simcoe’s ignorance was assumed, however. He was deep in the counsels of Sir Henry Clinton, and was a well-trusted officer. I noticed that he kept his face pretty well in his plate and joined in the conversation only as he had to, letting the younger men keep the ball rolling.

From this table talk I learned that the work of putting the troops and stores aboard the ships had been going on all day, and was likely to dig deep into the night, though when the actual sailing order was to be given, did not appear. I was concerned about this on only one point, namely, the hope that there might be time for a visit, hurried or otherwise, to the house where I had seen Margaret Shippen’s face at the door and Beatrix Leigh’s at the upper window.

What excuse I should have for intruding into a house whose owner’s name, even, was still unknown to me, I could not imagine. But that the thing must be compassed admitted of no question. After what I had done in Mr. Justice Smith’s glass-roofed rose-house, I should be either a knave or a coward to run away in silence. Moreover, I had not learned why Mistress Beatrix was in New York, or how long she meant to stay, or any of the hundred things her presence at the Smith mansion had put question-marks after.

From what I heard at the supper-table, I judged my time was short. It was Major Simcoe who said that when the troops were all embarked, the officers would have shore leave only until the ebb tide would serve to let the ships drop down the bay. It was here that I ventured to ask about the wind, and if it were favorable; and the major said it was not, but that the fleet would come to anchor in the lower bay to wait for it.

It was while we were still at table that an orderly came with a summons for me. I was to report to Arnold at my earliest convenience,—I marked the word and took courage from it,—and I might delay so long as would be necessary to make all my preparations for going aboard beforehand, to the end that I should not be obliged to return to the tavern later on if time pressed.

I showed Arnold’s note to Castner, and the lieutenant very kindly offered to expedite my affair by looking after my impedimenta; which was light enough, since I had only the clothes I stood in, the civilian’s suit I had bought of the Dutch Jew, and my patriot homespun. I was the more willing to turn Castner loose in my room for the packing up, because there were no papers, plans of fortifications or any other spy’s death-sentences for him to stumble on, and it lent a fine air of sincerity to my new pledge to give him my keys and to tell him to take or leave what he chose.

This left me free to accompany the orderly who had brought Arnold’s note, and the young man, a fine young gentleman who was a son of that Colonel Hetheridge who was killed at the battle of Monmouth, walked with me to the door of Arnold’s quarters.

I found the traitor busily writing, as he seemed always to be at my entrances. And, as on a former occasion, he waved me to a chair and went on pushing the quill like a regimental clerk who had got behind in his records. When he had folded, sealed and superscribed his letter, he turned to me, and I saw that Sergeant-Major Champe had not failed either himself or me in the cross-questioning of the early morning.

“You are quite refreshed, Captain Page?” he began most kindly; and again I caught myself wishing that he would not so persistently show me the likeable side of him. “You are fortunate in having no family ties to break when we turn our backs upon New York. Will you take it as an older man’s weakness if I say that I shall leave my heart behind me when we sail, Captain Page?”

I said that his sentiment did him honor; adding that I had once had the pleasure of meeting Mistress Arnold while she was yet Mistress Margaret Shippen in Philadelphia.

“A dear lady, with a heart of pure gold,” he said half musingly. And then more pointedly to me: “She remembers you, Captain—which is the chief reason why I am going to let you be the bearer of this farewell note of mine. You can find the house again?”

“Surely,” I replied; and for the instant I forgot my sworn purpose in sudden gratitude to him for putting me so easily and naturally on the way to a fulfilment of my own desires.

“She will see you—as she might not wish to see another,” he continued. “Tell her only cheerful things, Captain Page. Though she does not know our destination or our purposes, she is weighed down with a presentiment of evil to come. That is why I am writing and sending you. There are limits to the sternest fortitude, and I—”

He broke off abruptly, and I could have sworn there were honest tears in his eyes. But by this time I was clinging blindly to the kidnapping purpose that was my only reason for the present hazards, telling myself if that should fail I should see another side of him soon enough, when he should be leading his ravages against my home land. At twenty-two I had yet to learn that no man, however despicable he may be, is all villain; that there will be some meliorating drop of blood in the worst criminal that was ever righteously hanged for his sins.

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.