Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

WHEN Arnold gave me his climax by pronouncing Castner’s name, I saw at once to what conclusion he had been working all through my story of the night’s happenings. He had imagined Castner and some accomplice of his under my figuring of the two who were really Champe and myself.

It must not be set down as hypocrisy if I say that I was sorry. While it was doubtless true that Castner was doing his best to convict us of treachery, I knew that he believed Askew’s story, and that in seeking to have us apprehended he was merely doing what appeared to be—and what certainly was—his plain soldier duty. For that reason it pained me to see him involved, even in a traitor’s imaginings; but there was no help for it.

Having shown me his mind, Arnold next proceeded to lay his commands upon me; and now I saw how his good angel, if he ever had one, had deserted him entirely.

“With Sergeant Champe for your subordinate, you will constitute yourself my bodyguard from this time on until we join the army in the fleet, Captain Page,” he said, when we had thrashed out the matter of the attempt upon his liberty to the final straw. “The convoy frigate will return in two or three days at the farthest, but until I go aboard, I wish to be assured of the presence of men upon whom I can rely.”

If I bowed very low at this, it was only because I feared he might see and read the exultation in my face. Now, indeed, I thought, the Lord had delivered this traitor helpless into my hands. Alone in the house with him at night, and with the sunken boat raised and fitted for service, it would go hard with us now if we could not wring complete success out of all the foregone failures.

Conning all this over afterward, it seemed passing strange that no hint of a rising obstacle, bigger than any we had yet encountered, came to me at that time. War and its cruel necessities are frightful levelers, breaking down many ideals and brushing aside all the finer scruples. Though I was far from recognizing it at the moment, the desire to carry out the kidnapping purpose had come to be a purely brutal obsession, recking nothing of the common humanities, and completely losing sight of the fact that Arnold, by his misguided trusting of us, no less than by his many kindnesses to me, was making an unconscious appeal too strong to be disregarded. But at that moment there was nothing in me to which the appeal could address itself; nor could there be until an angel from heaven should bring me the fire to re-light the candle which the war-winds had blown so gustily into extinguishment.

When I was released and suffered to go below-stairs, I could scarcely wait to get Champe thoroughly awake before beginning to coach him in the new part he must play. But when he sensed the astounding turn things had taken, his loud guffaws made me clap a hand over his mouth.

“Silence, you oaf!” I commanded. “One unguarded word—one lifting of an eyelid too few or too many—and the balance tips the other way. I tell you, John Champe, I have been through the valley of the hot plow-shares itself since I left you snoring here!” And then I told him of Arnold’s discoveries, and how, in our breaking and entering, we had left a trail a blind man could follow when we thought we were leaving none at all.

He was sober enough when I finished, and, soldier-like, asked for his orders. I told him he might sleep again till I called him; that he must be fresh for the night.

“Then you are still for trying it on, Captain Dick?—in spite of everything?”

“It would be flying in the face of Providence not to try, and keep on trying until we succeed. We are many miles nearer the goal by what I have just told you, Sergeant.”

But now he was shaking his head dubiously.

“We shall never do it,” he objected; “never, in this world, Captain Dick. I saw that written out on the walls of his room last night. Something will stop us; I feel it in my bones.”

“But you won’t leave the plow in the furrow?” I protested. “We are equals in this, Champe: I can not command you against your convictions, or even against your wish.”

“You can command me, and you shall,” he rejoined. “You will tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. But we shall fail.”

That set me to thinking how far I was justified in involving another man in a desperate affair for which he had apparently lost his stomach; an affair in which my responsibility as his superior officer would be doubled. I did not wish to shirk, God knows, or even to divide the responsibility with my companion. But his new attitude of dejection made me tenderer of his safety than I had been before. In the last resort, I thought it might be possible to let one bankrupt pay the total cost of failure.

“I’ll take you up on that, Sergeant Champe,” I said calmly. “From this time forth you will consider yourself a mere machine. Will you obey me to the letter?”

“As I would Light Horse Harry Lee, himself, Captain Dick,” was his answer.

“Then listen: we will discuss ways and means, and work together, as heretofore, straight through to our end. But if anything happens—if, say, we should be taken in the act—you must not scruple to turn against me; to save yourself if you have to catch and hold me while they tie my hands. Will you promise to do this?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “I could never do that, Captain Dick. There is only one thing that would ever make me an enemy of yours—and then there would be no feigning about it: if you should turn softhearted of a sudden, and spare Sir Judas—”

“Why do you say that?” I demanded. “Have I shown a soft heart, thus far?”

“No; but—but—your pardon, Captain Dick, but there is a woman in this tangle of ours; two of them; and one of them would willingly die in this man’s place, and the other—”

“Never say it, John Champe!” I interposed. “When it comes to that, I shall want you for my enemy; and you must not spare me the shrewdest blow you can strike. But in the other event, you must save yourself if you can, remembering this one thing—that I shall hang a great deal the easier and more comfortably if I hang alone.”

“I’m too sleepy still to argue that point out with you,” he protested; and I think he was nodding again, to make up the arrears of the night, before I had ascended the stair to take my place at Arnold’s door.

The traitor never left his house all that afternoon, and when I was not dozing in my chair in the corridor, I could hear his pen scratching steadily, hour upon hour. For a brevet-commander who was, in truth, no more than the colonel of a regiment, Arnold did more writing than any lawyer’s clerk, and sometimes I have wondered if his treasonable correspondence did not have its first beginnings in his insatiable thirst for letter-writing. But no: it was his vanity again, which ever loves to dribble from a pen’s point, that made him such a slave of the ink-pot.

The house darkened early in the afternoon, and when I went to the corridor window to look at the sky, there were promises of a storm. Here was Champe’s prophecy of further obstacles on its way to fulfillment hours ahead of any possible move we could make. Inclement weather, rain, snow or cold, we might brave, but not a wind which would raise a sea.

I looked at the heavens long and earnestly. There was a gray sky, but the clouds were lower than I liked to see them. Rain or snow it would be, I decided, with a chance of wind from the southeast. That was nothing, so long as it did not blow too hard.

It was near about dusk, and the serving man had brought me my supper on a tray, when Arnold opened the door for the first time and found me at my post.

“Lord, Captain Page!” he said. “Have you been here all the afternoon? You took me too literally. Go down to the dining-room and have yourself served in some comfort. Afterward, you may come and get a letter for Mistress Arnold, leaving Sergeant Champe on duty in the lower hall. We are in no such peril as to need a death watch.”

That matter of carrying another letter to Margaret Shippen set me to blowing hot and cold in the same instant; elate with the thought that I might see Beatrix again, and apprehensive from the fear that if I should see her, I must be put to it harder than ever to defend my secret. Also, there was another thing to add a chill, if not of apprehension, at least of decent reluctance. How could I brazenly face the dear lady, who was so good to Beatrix and me, with a lie in my eyes and false words on my lips, carrying her husband’s love-billets on the very eve of a deed which would crush her into the dust of affliction?

I was half minded to ask Arnold to make Champe his messenger, pressing the resolve so far as to inquire of the sergeant if he could find the way in the dark to a certain house across the open square from Mr. Justice Smith’s. When he was doubtful about it, I braced myself and said I would go; which, when I had posted Champe in the lower hall, and had got the letter from Arnold, I did.

The promise of a bad night weather-wise was beginning to come to pass when I set out—a bit warily for the sake of Lieutenant Castner’s shrewd and watchful enmity—to thread the poorly lighted streets. A cold rain was falling and the wind off the bay was sharp-edged, with a threat of more to follow.

Though it was not the shortest way to my destination, I went, for a purpose of my own, up Broad Way, past the wretched, makeshift shelters that were taking the place of many fair homes destroyed in the great fire of ’76, past Trinity Church standing as a ghostly ruin on the left, its walls only partly down and a corner of its bell tower still rearing itself high above the fire-killed trees in the churchyard. Beyond the church I made a détour to the westward to get a glimpse of the river. It was not very rough as yet, but a heavy swell was running up with the tide to tell of rough weather to the southward. I recalled the light craft which must be our dependence. It would do very well in a seaway, always provided there was not enough wind to make the waves break over its low gunwale. There were as yet no white-caps to show their teeth on the black and heaving expanse, so I turned back to my errand with rising hope.

As on the former occasion, it was the old negro servant who admitted me to the Vandeventer house and took Arnold’s letter above-stairs; and almost before I had had time to feel the cheer of the fire in the luxurious little reception-room whither I went to await whatever answer there might be, the door opened to show me, not Mistress Margaret, nor yet Beatrix, but Mistress Julianna Pettus, Jack’s aunt, and Beatrix’s cousin, once removed.

Now, truly, Beatrix had told me very plainly that she was expecting “Cousin Ju”; was delaying her departure for Virginia only until that good lady should come over from Philadelphia to accompany her. But this fact, like some others, had gone completely out of my mind, else I think I should never have had the courage to come within speaking distance of the Vandeventer house that night. For Cousin Julianna was fair, fat and forty, with a mind of her own and a tongue sharper than any whip-lash; and being my own second cousin on my mother’s side, she had a sense of proprietorship in me which she had exercised impartially since she stood godmother for me in the old church in Williamsburg.

“Well, Dick Page!” she cried. “So you have come to show me your new clothes, have you? Was there no other ditch that you could wallow in, but you must be the first to disgrace a long line of honorable Virginia gentlemen? Merciful suz! Shame, hot shame on you, boy—to make us all hide our heads this way! Beatrix Leigh will never marry you now; her father would disinherit her flat, and so, too, would I. And you’ve fairly thrown her into Howard Seytoun’s arms, brute beast as he is! No, don’t try to explain it; there is no explanation—there can’t be!”

What could I do, other than bow my head to the righteous storm and let it exhaust itself, if it would? It raged—oh, how scathingly it raged!—for a full quarter of an hour, I believe, during which time I could scarcely get a word in edgewise; but when the hurricane had blown itself out, my cousin sat down and condescended to ask me news of Jack, and of the doings in the camps on the Hudson, remembering herself now and then to flay me afresh for the coat I was wearing.

I told her all she asked to know, and was as meek as mush, hoping she would come finally to telling me something of her plans and Beatrix’s, as she did. And it was very comical, too, if I had been in any laughing mood, for, when she had told me that the rescued Leigh tobacco had been put aboard of a certain coasting schooner named the Nancy Jane, Captain Elijah Sprigg, and that her passage to the James River, and Beatrix’s, had been taken on board the same vessel, she remembered suddenly that she was telling all this to a king’s officer, and her threatenings of me, and her alarm for the safety of the tobacco, were equally matched.

“You’ll never go and tell on us, Dick Page!” she half pleaded, half commanded. “You wouldn’t be such an abandoned and despicable villain as that!”

“Why,” said I, teasing her a little, “haven’t you just been telling me that nothing was too hang-dog and mean for me to do, since I am wearing the king’s coat? Isn’t it my duty—my new duty—to go straight down to Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters with the news that you mean to run the blockade with a contraband cargo of tobacco?”

“Oh, you’d never, never do that, Dickie Page!” she protested, wringing her hands in distress. “Mr. Vandeventer says we are ‘winked at’; that because Beatrix is a brave girl, and the friend of Margaret Shippen, she will be allowed to take her tobacco and go home. But I don’t trust them—any of them. They’ll stop us; send us to prison! Dick, you’ll never be so cruel?”

“I’ll make a bargain with you, Cousin Ju,” I laughed. “Get me speech with Beatrix, and I’ll promise you never to lisp a syllable to a living soul about the tobacco.”

“Oh, but Dick! she protests she will never look on your face again—and serve you right, too! She’ll never come down to you for my urging.”

“Yes, she will. Tell her it’s the price of her cargo of tobacco.”

“You promise?”

“Most faithfully, I assure you.”

Cousin Julianna went away in haste, and I was still laughing over her absurd fears when the door opened to admit Beatrix. And I do think she was more beautiful and winsome and alluring than I had ever seen her, as she stood in the doorway, trying to make me believe she was angry—as she was not.

“So you threaten me, do you, Mr. Page? If I don’t dance when you pipe, you will turn informer. Did Cousin Ju tell me straight?”

“If Cousin Ju told you that I was ready to put my soul in pawn for another sight of you, she had the straight of it. I owe you an apology for—”

“You owe me ten thousand of them—and more. You ran from me yesterday afternoon when I was waiting in the coach for Margaret as if I had had the plague!”

“I was on duty and was obliged to go. It was imperative. I might say that the lives of two men hung in the balance of my haste at that particular moment.”

She was leaning against the door-post and regarding me steadily.

“Dick,” she said; “what has come over you since the days when we were children together? Then you were as truthful and transparent as they say Mr. Washington used to be when he was a little lad and would rather be punished than lie; but now.... Listen, sir. Our carriage did not move for five full minutes, and I saw you: you talked easily with a little gentleman in gray, and afterward took his arm and walked away with him to the tavern—and the tap-room, I suppose—without so much as another look in our direction. And now you would tell me—”

“I have told you the exact truth, as far as it went, Beatrix,” I interrupted. “The man in gray held two men’s lives in the hollow of his palm. If I had not caught him on the instant—well, no matter; that was Sir Henry Clinton’s door he was meaning to enter.”

“More mysteries,” she complained, though not so impatiently now, I fancied. “What would have happened if he had gone to see Sir Henry?”

“An almost certain chance that the Gallows Hill squad last night would have been increased by two more unfortunates.”

“How terrible!” she murmured. “Is it possible that you live from day to day in the midst of such frightful perils, Dick? These two endangered men—are they friends of yours?”

I grinned. “One of them I may call my friend: the other—well, there are those who will tell you that the other has always been Dick Page’s own dearest enemy.”

Her keen wit pounced instantly upon the truth before I could bite my tongue for its foolish rashness.

“Yourself? Oh, Dick! what is this wretched web you have become entangled in? Tell me—tell me!”

“I can not,” I said, realizing too late that I had brought all this upon myself.

“You mean you will not: then you do not love me, Dick Page!”

“Perhaps it is because I love you too well, sweetheart. Can’t you believe that?”

“No, I can not. Where there is love, there is confidence and trust. You don’t trust me!”

“I do trust you. But this you are asking me to tell you is not my own secret and, besides, it would only add to your burdens without lightening mine; indeed, it would make mine immeasurably heavier—too heavy to be borne, I fear.”

She sat down and began to look into the heart of the crackling fire on the hearth, as she had done that other night.

“How little you know of women, Dick,” she said musingly. “You ask my love, and yet you deny that love its first privilege—the right to share your dangers and perplexities. More, you would even lie to it—by implication. But you have not succeeded wholly in doing that. Some things I have found out for myself, and one of them is—that you are not the traitor you seem to be, Richard.”

“Hush—for heaven’s sake!” I interposed. “One whisper of that overheard in this house where Margaret Shippen is a guest—”

“Poor, dear Margaret!” she said, and now she was all sympathy and pity. “I doubt if even she would betray you, Dick; and all the others in this house are secretly our friends. But what could have tempted you, a Page and an officer, to become a—a spy?”

“That is what I can not—dare not—tell you, Beatrix,” I protested. “And that is not for my sake, but for your own. Won’t you believe me, heart of mine?”

“I’ll never believe you love me as you say you do until you are willing to let me share your hazard, whatever it is,” she retorted.

“You would not be sharing the hazard; you would merely be miserable, Beatrix dear.”

“Then I claim the privilege of being miserable for your sake, Dick: please!” and her arms went out to me in a pleading gesture that no lover could withstand—for long.

It was Cousin Julianna who saved me. There was a light tap at the door, and she entered in a fluster of alarm.

“A lot of redcoat soldiers have just come into the yard and are surrounding the house!” she announced. “Is this some of your doing, Dickie Page?”

I told her it was not, but I did not add that it would probably prove my eternal undoing. I could think of but one explanation: by some means Castner had prevailed upon Sir Henry Clinton to reestablish the order for my arrest, and the lieutenant had traced me hither. But I had no intention of letting the two women know what was awaiting me.

“I’ll go out and see what is preparing to happen,” I offered lightly. “So much my red coat may do for you, Cousin Ju.”

But now Beatrix sprang up and threw her arms around my neck and clung to me, protesting that I should not go—that I must not go; and I do think our good cousin was more deeply scandalized than I ever saw her. The little hubbub gave me a chance to whisper in my loved one’s ear: “You must let me go, Beatrix; it may be nothing. And if they have come for me, I could not escape. Be brave, dear, for my sake—and for the honor of the Leighs!”

She loosed me, and though Mistress Pettus was looking on, I took the sweet face between my hands and kissed the trembling lips. Then I went out quickly to live or die, as it might befall, caring little, just at that moment, for the worst that any one could do to me.

It was a false alarm, as I was able to assure the two women after I had spoken to the sergeant in charge of the detail. Properly counted, Cousin Julianna’s “lot of redcoat soldiers” dwindled to a half-dozen men, sent out by Arnold to guard the house where his wife lay—this in view of the disturbing rumors which might reach her ears. It was to advise her of this that he had sent the letter by my hands, as Margaret Shippen, herself, came down to tell us.

I take no shame for saying that I made haste to leave when Mistress Arnold came upon the scene; and as it was, her sweet patient face, as reproachful to me as an accusing angel’s, went all the way with me in the storm-breasting return to the lower part of the town, with the wind howling overhead and a sleety rain driving in level stinging volleys.

Champe was alone in the lower hall when I gave the password to the sentry at the door and entered.

“It is a bad night?” he said, most grimly.

“It is,” I admitted, struggling out of my dripping watchcoat.

“There will be shipping lost, think you?” he queried meaningly.

“No small craft will venture out,” I returned, matching his hyperbole. “Anything sitting less deeply than a fifty-four would founder in the launching.”

“I thought so,” he said gloomily; and after that we sat in silence before the fire, listening to the wind yelling in the huge chimney.

It was still early in the evening when Arnold came down to us, treading the stair so lightly that his appearance was all but a surprise. His brow was clouded, but there was a dull glow in the depths of his eyes to tell of the passions slumbering in his heart.

“A word with you privately, Captain Page,” he said, drawing me aside. “Make your dispositions for the night so that the house will seem unguarded. If our intruders return, I would wish them to find the way to my bedside unhindered—but with two good men close behind them and ready to act at the critical moment. You understand me?”

I bowed. “You think there will be another attempt made—to-night? And if so, you desire to have the kidnappers taken in the very act?”

“There will be another attempt, Captain; of that I am sure,” he answered. “I told you this morning that Lieutenant Castner was missing—absent without leave. He is still unheard of. When he returns, I wish to see him a prisoner in your hands, Mr. Page.”

With that, he left us and went up-stairs; and when I looked at Champe, the sergeant was scowling fiercely at our handful of fire.

“You heard him?” I asked, when Arnold’s door had closed; and Champe nodded.

“We are more likely to be Castner’s prisoners, than he ours, don’t you think, Captain Dick?” he said.

“Much more likely,” I admitted; adding: “I don’t like this mysterious disappearance of Mr. Charles Castner just at this time.”

“What does it argue, think you?”

“Trouble for us. He was not able to get James Askew’s story fully believed, though he believes it himself. If you were Castner, what would you do under the circumstances, Sergeant Champe?”

“Get the proof, if it were to be had,” said Champe.

“Exactly. And that is probably what Castner is trying to do. It has become a point of honor with him. If he can find any one who will vouch for the spy’s story, or for some part of it, or for the spy, himself—”

“I see,” said the sergeant, rising and reaching for his sword-belt. “Which means that the present moment is ours—and it is all we are sure of. With your good leave, Captain Dick, I’ll go down and have a look at the river.”

He was back in a short while, shaking his head and slinging the water from his hat.

“No boat as small as ours would live a minute in it,” he said briefly; and so, with hope lying dead again, we sat down to wait for morning; for the breaking of another day and the probable return of Lieutenant Castner.