Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

IT IS little less than marvelous how the mind’s eye sweeps all the horizons instantly at the apexing point of a crisis. Seytoun’s cursing hail, the sheering cut-water hiss of the well-manned boat as it drove out to head me off, the panic helplessness of my attempt to escape—none of these was distracting enough to cloud the picture of the frightful consequences which would follow my overtaking.

Mr. Hamilton might save me from a deserter’s death; I supposed he would find means to do that much, though all the army would be clamoring for vengeance on me. But every other humiliation the wrath of man could devise would be mine; and in all the mad hurry of the moment one grim determination stood apart in my brain and held itself in readiness to act. I would never be taken alive. If the bullets which would presently begin to spit from the muskets in the watchboat should not put me out of misery, I could at least go overboard with the skiff’s anchor stone to hold me under for the necessary choking time.

The bullets came quickly enough, a ragged fire of them buzzing high overhead to emphasize Seytoun’s second warning. If the marksmen in the watchboat had been my men, I thought I should have a word to say to them about holding well down on a target when powder and lead were worth their weight in gold—as they were with us in that winter of 1780. They wasted a dozen shots on me, I think, before a long drum-roll boomed across the water to tell me that now the camp was aroused and more boats would be coming.

That was only an incident, however. My business was to put my heart and soul into the oars and to keep the narrow gap between me and Seytoun’s boat from closing any more swiftly than it had to. It was closing certainly enough, and by leaping boat-lengths, when my straining ears caught the sound of other oars rolling in muffled row-locks, and a guarded hail came from somewhere in the darkness just ahead of me. I dared not turn around to try to descry the fresh peril. Seytoun’s marksmen were doing better now, and coincident with the low-toned hail ahead a bullet struck the stern of my shallop and neatly stuck a splinter in the calf of my leg.

Another volley from the guardboat would have settled matters, but the volley was never fired—at me. At the flint-snapping crisis my boat’s bow crashed in among banked oars, dark shapes loomed suddenly all around me, and a gruff voice shouted, “Avast there, you lubber! Heave to, or we’ll sink you!”

I needed no command to stop me. The collision with the banked oars, and a dozen hands gripping the gunwales of my shallop, did that for me. What I most needed was the discretion to throw myself flat in the bottom of my boat to escape the storm of lead that was promptly hurled at my pursuers—and that I had, too.

When it was all over, and Seytoun’s boat had turned tail to claw out of harm’s way in frantic haste, I learned to what I owed my opportune deliverance. I had pulled straight into the midst of a British boat expedition (one of the many since Admiral Sir George Rodney had come to Sir Henry Clinton’s aid), sent up from New York to take a chance of surprising some one of our outpost camps. I was rejoicing secretly that my ill-luck had killed the chance of such a surprise, when I was brought roughly to book by the officer in command of the expedition.

“Now, sir, who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?” were his shot-like questions, when my craft had been passed back to the long-boat which served as the flag-ship of the flotilla.

I gave my name and standing briefly, and was adding a hypocritical word of thanks for my rescue when he cut me off abruptly.

“A deserter, eh?” he rasped. “It’s a thousand pities we didn’t let them take you. An officer, too, you say? Then the pities are ten thousand. I would to God some of your fellows in that boat had shot straighter!”

His sentiments were so soldierly and worthy that I loved him for them, and was able to pull the splinter from my leg and laugh.

“You don’t follow your commander-in-chief’s lines very closely, sir,” I ventured. “We gentlemen who are sick of our bargain with General Washington and the Congress get a warmer welcome from Sir Henry Clinton than you are giving me. But there are deserters and deserters; some who are traitors in fact, and some who are merely coming to a better sense of their duty as they see it. My conscience is clear, sir.”

I hoped he would not suspect the double meaning in my answer; as, indeed, he did not. As well as I could make him out in the darkness, he was a bluff, hearty bully of a man; a sea officer, I took it.

“We’ll take you back with us, since that is what you want,” he rejoined crustily; adding: “And I’d hang you to a yard-arm when we get there, Captain Page—as Sir Henry Clinton doubtless will not. To the rear with you, and consider yourself a prisoner. Pass the captive astern, Bannock, and take the oars out of his boat,”—this last to the ensign in command of the long-boat.

The effect of this order was to turn me adrift without any means of locomotion, and my shallop dropped away from the flotilla on the slowly ebbing tide until the British boats became a shadowy blur in the night. There was some huddling of them for a hasty council of war, I judged, and if so, an order to retreat was all that came of it. With our forces on either side of the river aroused and alert, as the firing would ensure, there was little else to be done.

My masterless craft had drifted a mile or more when the boat expedition overtook me. With no more ado my boat was taken in tow, and I chuckled inwardly. I love a boat and the water as I love a good horse; but it is worth something to have your enemy drag you where you expected to drag yourself, and when the shadows of the great western cliffs were blackening thick upon the waters, I kicked the rowing seat out of the way, and stretched myself at ease in the shallop’s bottom to get a soldier’s nap before the sun should rise upon my further adventures.

The day was dawning coldly when I awoke and found that my rescuers—or my captors—were debarking at the town landing-place under the guns of Fort George. It was a raw morning, my leg was stiff and sore from the splinter wound, and the ensign who ordered me to tumble out had evidently taken his cue from his gruff commander and cursed me heartily because I did not move as quickly as he thought I should.

It is remarkable how the morning after takes the fine edge off the enthusiasm and daring of the night before. When I set foot upon the landing-stage and remembered all that I had undertaken to do in this British stronghold of New York, remembered, also, how at this very moment, most likely, Jack and Seytoun, and—save Mr. Hamilton alone—every friend and enemy I had left behind me in the camp at Tappan was cursing the very day of my birth, my teeth chattered with the morning’s cold, and I would have given many broad acres of the Page tobacco lands to be well out of the wretched tangle into which my desperate mission had led me.

My first near-hand view of the lower town, obtained after I had been turned over to one of Sir Henry Clinton’s aides—who was my host or guard, I could not tell which—brought a decided shock. My memories of the city, carried over from a visit made with my uncle Nelson when I was a hobbledehoy of sixteen, were rudely swept away. The great fire of the night of September 20th, 1776, just after the British General Robertson had driven our army back upon Harlem Heights, had made a ruin of what had been the best-built portion of the lower town. Starting near Whitehall Slip, it had left blackened ruins all the way across to the Bowling Green and for some distance up on both sides of Broad Way, and but little in the way of rebuilding had been done during the four years of British occupation. Instead, some of the ruins had been converted into makeshift dwelling places by using the chimneys and parts of the walls that were still standing, eked out with spars from the ships and old canvas for shelter.

It was a dreary prospect that was revealed as we, my guard-host and I, came around the western bastion of the fort and so into the lower end of Broad Way. The fire had spared some few houses on the left, and in one of these, so Mr. Hamilton had told me, Arnold had his headquarters and living-rooms. It was to an inn just beyond these houses, and on the edge of the ruined district, that my walking companion led me; and by the time we were inside and were breaking our fast in the blaze-warmed coffee-room, the hue of things had become less somber, and I could laugh and crack a joke with my entertainer much as if he had been Jack Pettus masquerading in a red coat.

“You do good justice to the commissary, Captain Page,” said my youth in the red coat, when I had begged his leave to order more of the ham and eggs that reminded me most gratefully of Virginia and home.

“If you could know how I have been starved, Mr. Castner,” I retorted. “All you have to do for us—for the rebels, I mean—is to hold them still for a few months longer, and hunger will do for them what your arms have somehow seemed unable to do.”

“Is it that bad, Mr. Page?” he asked.

“Worse than I can describe, I do assure you. I doubt not we of the turncoat legion assign all sorts of reasons for our forsaking of the cause, but I am telling you the bald truth—as I shall tell Sir Henry. We are hungry, and an empty stomach knows neither king nor Congress.”

But my young lieutenant laughed in a most friendly way and shook his head at this.

“You are carrying it off as a brave man should, Mr. Page, and making a jest of it. But you are like a good many of the others; a true Loyalist at heart, with only the eleventh-hour determination to turn your back upon whatever influences swung you first in the wrong direction. Confess, now; are there not many others in the same case, and lacking only the eleventh-hour courage to come over?”

I said there were, doubtless—and hoped most fervently that it was the lie I firmly believed it to be. Then, after I had answered freely all his questions about our camp at Tappan—with more and more ingenious lies, you may be sure—I ventured upon the ground of my own perilous debate.

“There have been rumors in the Highlands of Mr. Arnold’s raising of a regiment of his own here in New York. Is that so, Mr. Castner?” I asked guardedly.

The lieutenant nodded, and there was a graver look in his eyes when he asked, in turn, “Do you know Mr. Arnold, Captain Page?”

“I haven’t that honor, as yet,” I replied. “My short service in the Continental Line has been in the horse; and he, as you know, has been lately in garrison at West Point.”

He bowed thoughtfully. “A strange man, Mr. Page; and growing stranger to all of us, I think, as the days pass. He has not come over to us for any overmastering love of the king or the king’s cause, I fear.”

“No?” said I.

“It is little likely. If I read him aright, he is burned and seared through and through with his own ambition.”

It was no part of my plan to be drawn into open criticism of the man I was shortly to approach in the character of an outspoken fellow traitor.

“We must not judge too hastily, Mr. Castner,” I put in placably. “Arnold was greatly respected by his former subordinates, and, truly, he did many things to win their regard, I am told. But that is neither here nor there: this legion he is enrolling—is it horse or foot?”

“Foot. It is called the ‘Loyal American,’ and is pretty largely composed of—of men who, like yourself, Mr. Page, have changed flags.”

“Are the lists full?” was my next query.

The lieutenant smiled.

“Would you take service under your country’s bitterest enemy, Captain Page?”

I laughed.

“Beggars mustn’t be choosers. And as for my country’s enemies; my country is the king’s, or at least, he says it is, though you must confess, Mr. Castner, that the standing-places where a Loyalist may hear the whipping of the royal standard above his head have become sadly few and restricted.”

Once again the lieutenant was shaking his head in mild deprecation.

“You must teach your tongue a better trade, Captain Page,” he said quite good-naturedly. “There are those in this town who would find fault with that last speech of yours.”

I saw at once, what I should have seen at the outset; that this frank-faced lieutenant was not one to be played with in double-meaning rashnesses. So I went back to Arnold and his “American Loyalists,” or “Loyal Americans,” or whatever lying phrase it was that headed his regimental book.

“You have not told me yet of Mr. Arnold’s conscript lists,” I reminded him.

“Nor do I know,” he replied, and was going on to say more when a tall, harsh-visaged fellow, wearing the insignia of a recruiting sergeant, looked in at the door, swept the apartment with a shrewd glance, as if in search of material for his trade of whipper-in, and was turning away when the lieutenant marked him and said to me: “There is a man who can tell you more than I can.” And then to the soldier: “Hey, Sergeant, a word with you!”

It was not until the man stood at our table-end and was near enough to shock me heartily that I recognized him as Major Lee’s emissary, John Champe; the man I had come to drag out of the peril he had blundered into.

Lieutenant Castner smiled at my start of surprise, and he was further edified, I suppose, by Champe’s drawing back with a muttered oath at his recognition of me. There was humor in the situation, but I was in no frame of mind to appreciate it just then.

It was Champe who first broke the awkward little silence. “You called me, sir?” he asked, saluting Castner, and turning his back on me.

I shall never forget how the young redcoat lieutenant played the gentleman at this crisis. Had there been a trace of malice in his heart he might have flung us two flag-changers at each other’s throats and stood aside to see the sport. Instead, he replied to Champe, quite gravely.

“Yes; your lists for the Loyal Americans—are they filling well, Sergeant?”

“They are closed,” said Champe, with his dour face as expressionless as a slab of wood.

“Ah,” said Castner; and then, with a hand-wave of dismissal for the sergeant, which Champe obeyed instantly: “That answers your question, Captain Page. I hope it does not seriously change your plans.”

I assured him that it did not; telling him that I had no plan beyond seeking an audience with Sir Henry Clinton at the earliest possible hour.

“Then your inclination matches with the necessities,” laughed my jailor. “I should be obliged to put you under guard, conveying you to Sir Henry forcibly, if you were not minded to go of your own accord.”

My heart beat a little less steadily at this. Was it possible that Mr. Hamilton’s plot had leaked so swiftly?—that word of my coming, or of my planned-for coming, had already reached the British commander-in-chief? It was a soul-destroying thought, but Castner’s next word relieved me.

“It is a general order,” he explained. “Sir Henry wishes to see each of you gentlemen—our friends from the other side, you know—as soon as may be after your arrival. If you have finished your breakfast we may as well go at once. I don’t know how your late staff headquarters keeps its hours, but our Sir Henry is an early riser.”

There was no reason on my part for delay, and every reason for haste without the appearance of haste. So I made ready to go with the lieutenant, and we presently fared forth into the crisp December morning and took our way to the row of Dutch-fashioned houses with their sides to the street and facing the Green, the row lying a little to the right of Fort George as you face the harbor.

Before one of the houses a sentry stood on guard, and with a stiff presenting of his duty salute to my officer, the man passed us up the steps.

Castner put me into the audience chamber of the man who stood, for us of the patriotic side, as the embodiment of British duplicity and tyranny, without a word to me by way of preparation; and in introducing me I thought there was a twinkle of grim humor in his grave boyish eyes.

“Sir Henry, I have the honor of presenting to you Mr. Richard Page, late Captain Richard Page, of Baylor’s Horse, in Mr. Washington’s army, and the newest of our new friends.”

His handicapping of me in these few words of introduction was most embarrassing—as perhaps it was meant to be—and for the moment I could only stare at the great man sitting calmly behind his writing-table, which, as I remember, was well littered with papers.

At first sight the British commander was disappointing. He was short, fat and stodgy, with the heavy face of a good feeder, and his nose was aggressively prominent. His eyes, as I saw them, were cold and calculating, and I could never fancy them lighting with enthusiasm or mellowing into anything like good-fellowship. And, indeed, it was told me afterward that he was a man to take his pleasures stolidly, warming neither to wine nor women. Washington, Greene, Hamilton, Lee—all of our leaders, were soldiers and they looked it. But this broad-girthed little man with the great nose and the chilling eyes was a soldier and he did not look it.

To my relief, the interview was short, and to my still greater relief it was not made harder for me by the lieutenant’s presence, that gentleman having disappeared after presenting me. Naturally, Sir Henry wanted news of Washington’s army, his dispositions, his plans and intentions; and having by this time come to my own in my heritage of the Page impudence, I lied to him as freely and joyously as I had to Castner, taking care only to make the lies dovetail neatly with what I had told the lieutenant over the inn breakfast-table.

But my cross-examiner saved his shrewdest question for the last, as if he had been a lawyer.

“Now, for yourself, Mr. Page,” he said finally, fixing me with that cold stare that seemed to read my inmost thoughts. “What brought you here?”

This was a harder thing to lie out of than any of the others. My family, and my own record, for that matter, were too well known to let me dish him up some plausible story of how we were all merely waiting the chance to come over to the king’s side. I must invent some personal grievance, and with those chilling eyes upon me it was a task to make the blood thicken in my veins—at a time when it should have been galloping most freely.

It was at this point that I had an inspiration. There is no lie so compelling as the truth, when the truth can be made to serve the purpose of a lie. I had heard that Sir Henry frowned like a straight-laced Puritan upon dueling; that he put it under the ban for his own officers, punishing for it as he would for any other infraction of orders.

My resolve was taken on the spur of the moment.

“Aside from one other cause, which was great enough in itself to make me wish to change flags, I ran away from a duel,” I told him, returning the stare as hardily as I dared.

“How is that, sir?” he demanded, a shade less coldly.

At that I gave him the story of the quarrel with Seytoun, coloring it only so much as to make it appear that dueling was the accepted code in our army, and that the entire ostracising pressure of my late fellow officers had been put upon me to drive me into a corner from which there was no escape save in the course I had taken.

“You have conscientious scruples, Mr. Page?” he asked, after what seemed an interminable weighing and balancing of my tale.

“You may call them so, if you wish, Sir Henry,” I replied gravely. “I have no desire to kill or to be killed in such a cause. And since, if I had stayed, I should certainly have had to fight this Captain Seytoun, I put this with the other, and possibly better, reason, and crossed the lines.”

“And that other reason?” he questioned shrewdly. “Speak plainly, Mr. Page. You stand upon the dividing line between some honorable occupation with us on one hand, and the prison hulks on the other.”

I saw that my excuse was not big enough, and tremblingly tore another page out of the book of truth.

“I am ashamed to tell you of the other reason, Sir Henry,” I demurred, with as near the proper shade of wounded self-esteem as I could simulate. “It touches me very nearly, and in a tender spot. You know, without my telling of it, how we Pages, my father’s family, have given everything to the cause which is even now tipping in the balance of defeat?”

“I do know it,” he replied, somewhat grimly I thought.

“With that in view, Sir Henry, imagine my feelings as a gentleman and an officer when proposals were made to me involving a complete and entire surrender of all that a man of honor may be supposed to hold most dear. Do you wonder, sir, that I have thrown myself into the arms of a generous and high-minded enemy?”

“Ha!” said he, relaxing the hold of the freezing stare for the first time in the interview. “They wished you to turn spy, did they? Mr. Page, I thoroughly applaud your courage and resolution, as well as your frankness in telling me this. Not many men in your situation would have dared to do it. But I have long suspected Mr. Washington and his advisers on this score. It is the least honorable part of their stubborn resistance to their king.”

I should have laughed outright if I had had liberty. This from the man, mind you, who had corresponded secretly for months with Benedict Arnold, bribing, suborning and finally protecting the traitor; the man who had sent the brave Major André, his own adjutant-general, into our lines, if not as a spy, at least as a go-between to treat with our Judas of West Point!

“As you say, Sir Henry, it is the least honorable part of warfare,” I agreed mildly, fearful now lest, my case being safely made, I should say too much.

But Sir Henry would not let it rest at that.

“It is greatly to your credit that you were courageous enough to refuse, Mr. Page,” he went on, taking, as I meant he should, my refusal for granted. And then, as if upon a premeditated thought: “Are you acquainted with Mr. Arnold?”

I said I was not; that my arm of the service, the horse, had never chanced to be under his command.

The commander-in-chief found a pen and quickly wrote me a note.

“Take that to Mr. Arnold,” he said almost graciously. “He lodges next door, and his hour is nine o’clock.” And, as I was bowing myself out: “Stay, Mr. Page; shall I give you an introduction to the pay-master?—for present necessities?”

I understood this to be an offer to pay, not for my allegiance, but for the information he had—or thought he had—of me, and I declined as delicately as I could, saying that a soldier’s wants were few, and that I had taken the precaution to provide for myself out of my private funds. This seemed to please him still more, and, on the whole, the Sir Henry Clinton who bade me an affable “Good morning” was greatly less alarming and formidable than had been the one who had gripped me so chillingly in his stony stare while Lieutenant Castner was presenting me.

Castner was waiting for me in the ante-room, as I found, but this time only to pass me beyond the sentry at the door. The fact that I was allowed to depart unhindered seemed to be a sufficient guaranty that I had satisfied his chief; but I owe it to the young aide to say that his manner to me now was neither more nor less cordial than it had been over the ham and eggs in our breakfast tavern.

Having thus crossed my Rubicon, and, as one may say, burned my boats behind me, the next thing was to find Champe and to put that ferocious patriot on a proper footing with me. But first I had to get rid of my uniform as a captain of Baylor’s Horse, and here Castner served me again, quite willingly, going with me to a shop north of the burned region and knocking the sleepy proprietor out of his morning nap to wait on me.

Though I had said that I did not know Arnold personally, I knew enough of him and of his foppish taste in dress to make me drive a gentleman’s bargain with the shop-keeper; and when I was arrayed like the lilies of the field in such ready-made finery as I could purchase, Castner looked me up and down approvingly, and swore it was a pity I had ever forsaken my proper garmenting to don the coarse homespun which we officers of Baylor’s Horse made it a point of honor to wear.

By the time my bargaining was done, it was too late to go in search of Champe if I were to take Sir Henry Clinton’s nine o’clock hint pointing to Arnold. So, rather against my better judgment, I faced southward with Castner again, giving our Judas the preference over the worthy sergeant-major—a mistake which was to carry heavier consequences than I ever dreamed could cluster upon so small a pin-point.