Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

THE talk in my tavern room with Champe had used up so much time that it was midday and beyond when I joined the group of orderlies and unattached officers lounging before Sir Henry’s door, and had a welcome in strict accordance with the freezing December weather and the uniform I was wearing—cool and contemptuous.

Now this was grateful to me, in a way, and in another way it made me spitefully savage. It was comforting to know that our nobler enemies detested Arnold’s treachery, carrying their aversion to the extent of despising any one who wore his regimental colors. But, on the other hand, the slight had to pass through me on its way to hit the mark, and I was never good at paying penalties for another’s sins.

So, when there were covert sneers and back-turnings enough to make a man sick, I began to strut and sneer in self-defense, twitting a lieutenant of Hetheridge’s whose line was the first to break at Monmouth, and a captain of Knyphausen’s whose Hessian devils had cut a troop of our horse to pieces at Tappan after it had surrendered.

This was all very hot-headed and rash, and would doubtless have involved me in trouble enough if a diversion had not come in the shape of Mr. Justice Smith’s new London-made hackney coach drawn by four horses which, for their postilions and trappings, might have been taken out of a crack artillery troop.

The coach came to a stand before Arnold’s door, and, as may be imagined, I left the quarreling Hessian captain without ceremony when I saw the faces of Margaret Shippen and Mistress Beatrix Leigh behind the window-panes.

“I have come to see the general, Captain Page,” said Mistress Arnold, when I had opened the coach door. “Will you be my avant coureur?”

“Most gladly,” I replied. And when I had found Arnold at his writing-table, and had his command to fetch his wife up to him, I went back to show Mistress Margaret the way.

“You will undertake to keep Beatrix from stagnating for the few minutes I shall need, Captain Page?” said this dear lady, when I was leaving her at Arnold’s office door; and I said I would try, and was thanking her when she bade me hasten before some of the other officers had cut me out.

I was minded to hasten fast enough, though not specially for the reason given by Mistress Margaret. I thought it would be a much more inclement day than this seventeenth day of December, Anno Domini, 1780, when I could not hold my own against a handful of redcoat popinjays who picked flaws in a man because he did not happen to be wearing a shoulder-knot to their liking.

But alas! pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction. When I reached the street here was my lady Beatrix laughing and chatting most amiably with the little ensign who had been one of her partners at Mr. Justice Smith’s rout, and there were only a cool little nod and a blank smile for my hasty return. All of which put me on my mettle so that I stayed at the ensign’s elbow, and trod on his toes, and apologized therefor, and was pleasantly rude and insulting until he finally gave me, though not without black looks and a smothered curse or two, my place at the open door of the hackney coach.

“Pray where did you learn your new boorishness, Captain Page; in the Dutch Highlands?” queried my lady, in the gentle tone she used when the lightning is about to flash.

“I learned to fight for my rights in Old Virginia,” I retorted gaily; “and I shall not soon forget the lessons you have taught me touching them.”

“I decline to be your sponsor—in that or in anything else, Captain Page,” she declared, regarding me critically.

Now here was a pretty change of climate, I thought. The night before, when she believed I was going off to the wars with Arnold, there were sympathy and anxiety and tenderness, and even a little love, perhaps. And now, merely because I had not gone quite so suddenly as the program called for, the wan December sunshine could not have held itself more chillingly aloof.

“What have I done to-day that I had not done before last night, Beatrix?” I asked, shifting my position at the coach step so that I could keep one eye on Sir Henry Clinton’s door—for the possible coming of the twiddler of watch-seals was sorely dividing my attention, or diverting it.

“You are wearing a coat that I do not like,” she announced, going back to the original cause of quarrel.

“It is as good a coat as the one Ensign Brewster is wearing,” I ventured.

“It is not!” she retorted. “He is wearing the coat of his king and country, and in his case it fits honestly.”

“Well, then; this is the same coat I wore last night,” I urged, presuming rashly where I should have had more sense.

“Last night is not to-day: and I have lived half a lifetime since last night.”

“Then you think more of a cause than you do of a man?” I asked; and I would never have said such a thing to her if I had not been hag-ridden by my responsibility for one James Askew.

“You are quibbling!” she returned. “The cause is much—God knows how much it is to our stricken country: but truth and faith and loyalty are more. I could honor you in spite of your colors, Dick, if you fought under them as honestly as Ensign Brewster does.”

“I may be fighting more honestly than you think,” I broke out, pushed to the wall, as I was likely to be in any controversy with her.

She took me up so quickly that I had no breathing space.

“You have hinted before that you could explain if you would, Dick,” she said with low-toned eagerness. Then, looking past me to see if any of the others were within earshot: “Tell me—is it a mask? Are you—”

I made a swift gesture for silence. There are times when the very stones in the pavement must not be trusted.

“You must not forget that you are speaking to a captain in Benedict Arnold’s Legion, or”—here I lowered my voice to mate it with her eager half-whisper—“that a word of what you have just hinted would hang that same captain higher than Haman!”

“But you do not deny—you do not deny!” she fluttered. “Oh, Dick! give me one little thread to cling to—one look to tell me that you are—”

I knew her bosom was heaving; that the quick tears had risen to quench the righteous indignation in the beautiful eyes. And yet I could not speak to her; could not even look at her. For here was Arnold coming down the house steps with Mistress Margaret on his arm; and, not fifty feet away, a smallish man in sober gray was standing before Sir Henry Clinton’s door, looking curiously up at the higher windows and absently toying with a great bunch of seals at his watch-fob as he stared.

There was no time to say a word to Beatrix, if I ever hoped to have time for any future word with her—time and the breath to say it with. The smallish man in gray, gazing in abstracted indecision at Sir Henry’s upper windows, was twiddling my life and Sergeant Champe’s at his fingers’ ends. Let him take but a single step within the door he was facing, and we two would be as water spilt on the ground, which can not be gathered up again.

I scarcely know how I left her; how, for one brief instant, I made way deferentially for Arnold and his wife, and in the next had come within gripping distance of the man in Quaker gray. But the thing was done in some fashion, and after this frenzied taking of the first step, the next came easily.

“Your name is Askew—James Askew?” I whispered in the spy’s ear; and if I had put the point of a knife between his ribs he could not have winced more palpably.

“No, no, Lieutenant—er—Captain, I should say; you are quite mistaken, sir. Duvall is my name; Harrison Duvall, of—of Pennsylvania.”

“One of your names, perhaps,” I qualified, smiling down on him meaningly, and now I noted the shifting ferrety eyes whose color Champe could not recall—the eyes, the black stock and the scratch-wig.

“We need not quarrel over a little matter of names, Mr. Askew,” I went on rapidly. “Let it be sufficient that I know you and know your business here. You are in great danger—as great as, or greater than, that which you were confronting in Mr. Washington’s camp at Tappan no longer ago than yesterday morning.”

If there had been any doubt as to the man’s double-dealing past, his carrying of water on both shoulders, his appearance now would have removed it. His colorless face became tallowy, and fine little beads of sweat were starting from his forehead. I followed up my advantage like a swordman who dares not give his antagonist time to gather and parry.

“We know a thing or two about you here,” I continued, speaking softly and edging between him and the group of officers at Clinton’s door. “Sir Henry would be most happy to lay eyes on you—happier than you would be, a few hours later. I say your danger is greater here than it was at Tappan: our prisoners do not break jail so easily as Mr. Washington’s do.”

His face was like parchment now, and he had to wet his lips before he could speak.

“I—I can make my standing good with Sir Henry,” he faltered. “There was a mistake about that affair of Major André’s. It was not I who told Paulding and Williams where they were to lie in wait for the major—I did not!”

Now I thought I had him! Paulding and Williams were two of the three men who had arrested Major André, and it was common talk in the patriot camps that some one had first told them where to look for André, though these two, as well as Isaac Van Wart, the third man, stoutly denied it.

“You will have trouble in proving that mistake, Mr. Askew,” I said; “great trouble, I fear. But that is for the future; your present risk is in standing here, where some one who knows you as well or better than I, may chance to come along.”

He had been casting furtive glances over his shoulder, as if picking out the way to run; but now that I had him at bay, the time was ripe for an escape from the dangerous neighborhood of the general headquarters.

“Come with me,” I commanded hurriedly, linking an arm in one of his. “You have a piece of news to tell—but not to Sir Henry Clinton. There is a better market, and a much safer one.”

He yielded, reluctantly, only because he had good reason to be afraid of every one. I could feel the fear tremor shaking him all the way to the tavern to which I led him, and a great contempt for the paltry villain made my gorge rise and the touch of his arm seem like pollution. He was silent and furtively watchful till I got him into the inn and up the stair. But on the threshold of my room he hung back and showed his teeth in a snarl.

“I don’t know who you are, or where you are taking me!” he burst out; and then he tried to twist his arm free, developing sudden and unlooked-for strength in the momentary struggle.

“Quiet, you dog!” I ordered, and then I thrust him in ahead of me and followed to shut and bar the door.

He stood where I had pushed him, in the middle of the floor, and made no resistance when I felt him over for weapons and found two dueling pistols and a keen-edged flesher’s knife hidden under his waistcoat. For a man so well provided, he was surely the abjectest craven I ever saw.

“Now you can go a little more comfortably into that matter I spoke of,” I remarked, breaking the blade of the knife over an andiron, and shaking the powder primings out of the pans of the pistols. “You were saying that you had news to sell—”

“I said nothing of the kind,” he flashed back. “Let me out of this, or I—I swear I’ll raise the house on you!”

“No, you won’t,” I replied coolly. “Nothing is farther from your present intentions, Mr. James Askew, and the fact that I know this is your best assurance of safety.”

“I don’t know you,” he raged. “What have you got me here for?”

“That is better,” I said, pushing him into a chair and drawing up another for myself. “First, I brought you here to tell you that your news outran you. I can repeat to you, word for word, the information you were going to try to sell to Sir Henry Clinton.”

I saw, the moment the words were uttered, that I had made the rashest blunder. This spy was no ordinary tale-bearer to be hoodwinked or bullied out of his cunning. The lines of his face grew more hatchet-like and the sharp little eyes dwindled to pin-points.

“Ha!” he said, with a shrill indrawing of his breath. “I thought your voice seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place it at once. You had a much better reason than the one you gave me for getting me to come away from the headquarters, Captain Richard Page.”

His naming of me was enough, and my stomach rebelled at the thought that I would have to turn butcher and kill him, even as Champe had planned to kill him. Yet I resolved to give him the benefit of the doubt, if indeed, there were any doubt.

“Tell me plainly what you think you know,” I said, looking away from him.

“I know that two men, a captain in Baylor’s Horse and a sergeant of the Continental Army, are here in New York for the purpose of seizing Benedict Arnold and carrying him back to Tappan. The sergeant I met this morning, thanks to a two-faced gentleman who shall pay dearly for his meddling; and the captain—”

“Well,” said I; “and the captain?”

His eyes lighted with a blaze of triumphant cunning.

“You are a good actor, Captain Page, but not quite good enough. Will you unbar the door and let me go? Or shall I call for help?”

“Neither,” I rejoined briefly, drawing my sword and laying it across my knees. “A movement out of your chair, or a tone louder than you have been using, and you are a dead man, Mr. James Askew.”

The threat quelled him, or rather I should say, it put him the keener upon his wits. I saw nothing for it now but a bloody murder, and was trying to nerve myself to it when he spoke again, smoothly insinuating.

“We seem to have arrived at what our friends the French would call an impasse, Captain Page,” he said quietly. “I can hang you; therefore you dare not let me go. The alternative is for you to pass that shining slip of steel through me two or three times; and that, too, has its drawbacks. You don’t come of murdering stock, Captain Page, though I don’t doubt you have killed your antagonist often enough in hot blood.”

“I was thinking more of what I should do with your carcass after the fact,” I objected bluntly.

“Ah; that is another drawback—one which I overlooked at the moment. It would be inconvenient to have a dead man in your room, with no way of getting rid of the corpus delicti. But if I might offer a suggestion; the river is not far away, and under cover of night you and your sergeant might compass the funeral—though not without a possible risk.”

His coolness, now that the real pinch had come, was amazing. I could hardly believe this was the same man whom I had frightened into teeth chatterings before Sir Henry Clinton’s door but a few minutes ago.

“No,” he went on, in the same even tone, “the disposition of my poor body is not what deters you. It is that other thing I mentioned—your reluctance to premeditated blood-shedding. Now that is purely conventional, if I may say so. To kill is to take life; and the mere manner of its taking can make but little difference to the slayer, and none at all to the victim. Yet the traditions are strong; and I am relying quite confidently upon them, Captain Page.”

“You seem to be,” I muttered grimly. “But there is a point beyond which the traditions do not run. Setting aside the instinct of self-preservation—which is stronger than any blood or breeding—your life is justly forfeit. If you had your deserts, you would be lying in some shallow grave beside Major André at this present hour. If I am what you say I am, it is neither more nor less than my duty to carry out the sentence of the court-martial which condemned you to hang as a spy.”

“But if you put that sentence into execution, Captain Page, you have still failed to recapture your escaped secret,” he said.

“How is that? Who else besides yourself knows it?”

“The officer in the camp at Tappan who connived at my escape. I gave it to him as the price of his help.”

“Which is all the more reason why I should kill you, here and now, Mr. Askew,” I insisted.

“True; very true,” he rejoined musingly. “Yet you will not do it, Captain Page.”

“Why won’t I?” I demanded.

“Chiefly because of the traditions we speak of. I am an unarmed man—ah, my dear sir, you rashly lost a point in your own favor when you took my poor weapons away from me—I am unarmed, as I say, and can offer no more resistance to a man of your youth and weight than a harmless, necessary cat. No, you will not break with the time-honored code of your order—not even to save your life.”

Slowly it was borne in upon me that the man was coolly braving me; nay, more, he was daring me, taunting me. Yet all that he was saying was most bitingly true.

“What are you leading up to?” I asked shortly; and he spread his hands in polite deprecation.

“Did I not say that we were at the impassable point, Mr. Page?”

“Yes; but you did not believe it. You are not talking to hear the sound of your own voice.”

“No; nor am I talking to gain time, though it may appear so to you. Indeed, I fancy there is more safety in haste. If your black-faced sergeant should happen in.... Now there is your chance, Captain Page. Sit quietly where you are, with your bare sword to keep me where I am, until your man comes back. Then you can shirk all responsibility and the sergeant—lacking a gentleman’s traditions—will do the rest.”

I thought this was the subtlest thrust of all; to point out delicately that I should be responsible for what Champe might do. But there was no escaping the conclusion.

“Come to the point of your bargaining, Mr. Askew,” I commanded. “You see a way out, and I don’t—other than the bloody one.”

“Ah; now we are coming upon some more habitable ground. Outwardly, you are a Loyalist, Mr. Page, and inwardly, I doubt not, a true patriot. I am neither. I had thought of asking a hundred guineas for this news I carry—it is not too much, you would say?—and it doesn’t matter a boddle to me whose money it is. In other words, your gold will have as true a ring in my ears as Sir Henry Clinton’s, or even Mr. Arnold’s.”

“Bah!” I said; “you would take my money one minute and sell me to the highest bidder the next.”

He nodded slowly. “You have pointed out a risk—a certain risk to yourself. I might not keep faith with you. Still, the chances are somewhat in your favor. The matter you touched upon while we were together in the street—the calumny connecting me with Major André’s misfortune—would have its weight. Having sold you your timely lump of silence and pocketed my price—”

“You might be willing to let well enough alone and not try to double on me? I think that is most unlikely, Mr. Askew. Don’t you?”

“It is a nice point,” he said, as if deliberating on it. “On the one hand, I have my hundred guineas without the risk. On the other, since I was willing to take the risk to earn them from Clinton or Arnold, why should I hesitate to try the doubling? Ah, I have it! You have heard the saying that money is always cowardly, Mr. Page? With your hundred guineas in my pocket, each cowardly guinea of them will be persuading me to save its life—and yours.”

I laughed. The thing had risen to the plane of humor. Here was a man whose life lay in my hand, and he was trying, not to bribe me to spare him, but to persuade me to give him a handsome present for the privilege of sparing him!

But when the laugh was over, the dilemma still remained, with its horns as sharp as before. If I could not kill this scoundrel in cold blood, neither could I turn him loose, with or without a golden bid for his silence. I thought it out calmly and saw no middle way. The man must die, but I would give him an honester man’s chance to die fighting.

My saber was standing in the chimney corner where Champe had left it the night before. I drew it from the sheath and laid it on the table, with the hilt to my spy’s hand.

“Take it and do your best,” I said. “We have spent too many words and too much time.”

But he merely shook his head soberly and locked his hands over one knee.

“I should be a greater ninny than I hoped you took me for, to give you so good an excuse for pinking me, Captain Page. I am no swashbuckling horse-soldier, to tangle my legs in a sword, or to know how to use one.”

Here was the impasse again, with no way to circumvent it, that I could see. What was I to do? With the long Scots’ rapier for a walking-staff I began to pace the floor, cudgeling my brain to think of some expedient that would secure our safety, Champe’s and mine, without sinking one or both of us to the level of remorseless assassins. I had not dreamed it would be so hard. Thumbing it over with Champe, the one desirable thing seemed to be to get hold of this scoundrel before he could leak the news that would efface us. But now he was secured, the whole thing was to know what to do with him.

Askew never moved a muscle as I strode back and forth behind his chair. He sat perfectly still, staring into the blackened fireplace as if its soot-covered interior had fascinated him. A dozen times I passed him, and at each facing about he seemed to be staring the harder, with the thin fingers more tightly interlocked over the suspended knee. Then—

I do not know how it came about, or why I spun on my heel and threw the rapier up to guard my head. It was not for any warning either to eye or ear that he gave me, certainly. But when I wheeled, the heavy trooper’s sword was flashing in the air and my instinctive parry served only to break the force of the blow—to turn it flat-bladed when it was meant to be a cleaver-cut such as a butcher would aim at the meat on his block. Then the half-lighted dusk of the long room burst into a thousand scintillating stars, and I knew no more until I came back to life with John Champe kneeling beside me and sopping my head with icy water from the hand-basin.

“The man—Askew?” I gasped, when I could find the words. “Is he gone?”

“I don’t see him anywhere,” said the sergeant, making believe to peer into the gathering shadows. Then he chuckled. “So it was Askew who gave you this goose-egg on your skull, was it? But rest you easy, Captain Dick; he has had time to swim the Hudson corner-wise before this. The blood was dried in your hair when I found you lying here—and that was a good quarter-hour ago.”

I sat up on the floor, and the stars began to twinkle again.

“Help me,” I muttered. “We must get out of this—now—this minute! That double-faced fiend will be back again, with a file of soldiers at his heels. Stir yourself, man, for heaven’s sake! I tell you he knows us both—and knows us for what we really are!”