Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

OUR walking route, Arnold’s and mine, lay over the ground we had covered together in the forenoon, and was of an equal length. But with my brain afire with the possibilities suddenly opened up by the knowledge that Champe was only a step or two behind us—that we two, bent upon the same object, had the traitor practically in our hands—the distance we traversed was all too short to let me invent a way to take advantage of the Heaven-sent opportunity.

Now came the time when I bitterly regretted the headlong rashness that had led me to put the cart before the horse in all the day’s work. It was clear now that Champe was the only building basis for any rational plot to take the traitor; he it was who was in communication with Major Lee, without whose timely cooperation in providing means of escape for us from the town our mere seizing of Arnold would be but a flash in the pan. My first and biggest care should have been to make myself known in my true character to Champe; and a sharp attack of self-abasement followed the reflection that it might easily have been done at our breakfast-table meeting. A nod, a hint, a wink—any signal that might have given him a clue, would have sufficed. And I had tossed the chance aside like a spendthrift, telling myself that the day was yet young!

Now, however, as we strode along through the ill-lighted streets, the laggard afterwit spared me no stab. Somewhere in the darkness behind us—never near enough for me to signal to—tramped the sullen-faced sergeant-major, ready enough to get into action, no doubt, but firmly convinced that he was following two traitors instead of one. For all I knew, the time might be fully ripe for the striking of the blow. The difficulties hitherto, as Mr. Hamilton had explained them, had turned upon successive failures in fitting together simultaneously the two halves of the plot, Champe’s and Major Lee’s. What if the tangle had been straightened out and got into working order in the one-day interval, and I was merely obstructing instead of helping?

The thought was maddening, and yet I dared not risk all by collaring my man and shouting to Champe for help, and so, perhaps, making another blunder; one which would cost Champe’s life as well as mine. The better hope, it seemed, lay in retrieving the prime error of the day at the earliest possible instant; and I was still racking my brain to devise some way of communicating quickly with Champe when we came to the end of our walk.

The house of entertainment, as it appeared, was on the opposite side of the open space from the one which Arnold had visited in the forenoon. It was a mansion, as mansions go in the North, with a narrow lawn, clipped hedges and box-borderings, and it was well illuminated in our honor. I thought we should be early; at that hour our Virginia dames and damsels would be just waking from their beauty naps. But there was music within, and the dancing had begun, though guests were still arriving in pairs and groups.

Some half-dozen or more reached the door of welcome just as we did, and here I hoped to get the chance of speaking the necessary word to John Champe. But though I was sure he had followed us through the gate, he was nowhere to be seen; and when Arnold’s name was called out by the footman in waiting, my own was coupled with it, and again the chance vanished.

Our entry was into a large and brilliantly lighted hall, which was well filled at the moment with the arriving guests; bewigged civilians carrying the solid Dutch pomp bequeathed to their successors by the New Netherlanders; high-bred dames with powdered hair and patches, which, however much they pique the charms of the younger women are, to my mind, a blemish on the face of maturity; officers and their ladies, not so many of the gentlemen wearing the uniform of the Loyal Americans as I had expected to see, yet still a fair sprinkling of them.

I missed the name of my hostess, though I afterward learned that it was the roof of Chief Justice Smith, brother of the Joshua Pett Smith who had been the aider and abetter of the Arnold treason from the beginning, that sheltered us. But this and kindred trivialities were but the first few drops before the storm which was presently to make me forget them.

I was still saying empty nothings to an elderly lady to whom I had been passed on, with my brain busy, as it had been for a good half-hour, upon the Champe blunder, when I began to have a growing sense of impending disaster. It was as if I had groped my way into a dark room, believing it to be empty, and had suddenly been warned, by that sixth sense which is yet unnamed in the books, of the presence of another and vaguely threatening occupant.

It is curious how the instinct of self-preservation bobs first to the surface, like a submerged bottle-cork, in an emergency. The impulse was to duck and run, without waiting to see what menaced me, and following it, I bowed and made way for a snuffy old gentleman who was ready to take my entertainer off my hands. But being no better than a blind man in a strange house, I went straight into the thick of the peril. The ballroom lay beyond the broad stair running by easy stages from the upper story, and my thought was to go into the great room and so to lose myself in the throng.

At the turning of the newel-post, when the way seemed altogether clear, a bevy of young women came down the stair, and I stepped back and hung my head and gave them precedence. They fluttered past, with only a glance for the spick-and-span new uniform—all save one. And when I looked up to find the reason it was flashing down upon me in scorching contempt from the eyes of Mistress Beatrix Leigh.

She was standing on the next to the lowest step, leaning with one hand lightly on the stair-rail, and though she was at the instant the very spirit and image of the goddess of scorn and indignation, I never saw her when she was more distractingly beautiful or more to be desired. But she gave me little time to admire her.

“They told me,” she said most cuttingly, “that there would be a Captain Page here to-night; one of our Virginia Pages come at this late day to his proper sense of loyalty. I could not tell them they lied, because I was their guest; and now—oh, Dick! how could you do it!” she ended, with a pitiful quivering of the sweet lip and a sudden upspringing of tears to the beautiful eyes.

The human mind shuffles its cards quickly at such a crisis. Had my secret been my own, she should have had it there and then, and all would have been well. I knew I could trust her, notwithstanding the fact that she was Margaret Arnold’s friend—and her fellow-guest in the house across the square, I feared.

But the secret was not mine, and with the second thought came the enlightening glimpse of how horribly it would distress and embarrass her if she should have even a hint of my true reason for this miserable masquerade. So I hung my head and refused to say the word which would have cleared me, though it broke my heart to keep silence, in the face of the lip-quivering and the tears and the reproachful exclamation.

I could feel that the tears had been driven back and that the glorious eyes were flashing again when she went on.

“You knew I should be here to-night, Mr. Page?” she asked, giving me the courtesy prefix for the first time in all our life-long knowing of each other.

“No,” I replied dumbly. “How could I know it? Your letters told me nothing of this—of your coming to New York.”

“Yet you saw me this morning,” she said accusingly.

“I know now that I did; yet I could not believe it then—nor later, when I tried to think it out. You saw me?”

“I did; and I have been telling myself all day long that I did not. I said it could not be. By so much, Mr. Page, your friends think better things of you than you think of yourself.”

“That may always be true of the worst as well as the best of us,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

She drew herself up proudly.

“I never thought to have it to say for Mr. Richard Page. Will you be good enough to let me pass, sir?”

I stepped back, and she came down the two steps with her face averted. I thought I could let her go; it was my plain soldier duty. But when the fragrance of her was in my nostrils I lost my hold on duty and all else.

“One word, Beatrix, for God’s sake!” I muttered, praying that the words might go to her ears alone. “I must see you before you quit this house, if only for five little minutes! You can’t deny me this!”

She left me without the promise, without a word, without the slightest inclination of the proud head, and I sank fathoms deep into the pit of wretchedness. And, as if to make my punishment the sharper, in another minute I saw her chatting gaily with a little whipper-snapper British coxcomb of an ensign whom I could most joyously have broken in two across my knee.

As may readily be imagined, there was a miserable hour or two for me after this; it might have been a longer or a shorter time, I do not know. The clocks were all stopped for me, and I know that I lived ages head-under in the slime-pit of despair, coming to the surface at intervals, when I had a glimpse of her dancing, as she always danced, the very poetry of motion, with one or another of the house guests, each new man transforming himself, or being transformed, into my bitterest foe because he had my place.

Arnold I saw only once or twice, and scarcely gave him a second thought; and as for Champe, whom I might easily have hunted out now since he was probably hanging about the door, I had forgotten the worthy sergeant-major’s existence. So selfish and single-eyed is a great love aroused and well convinced that it has lost its all.

During these ages of wretchedness, in which my own dismal misery was only made the blacker by the lights and the gay company filling the rooms to overflowing, she never gave me a look or made me a sign to show that she remembered my presence in the house of merrymaking. But when I could endure it no longer—it was while she was sitting out a dance with that same popinjay ensign that I had desired to break in two—I made my opportunity, passing in plainest view of her on my way to a hothouse garden pavilion connected by a covered entryway with the drawing-room where she was sitting.

The air of the hothouse place was dense and heavy with the perfume of blooming plants, and there was little light save that which filtered through the glass roof and came from a sort of cresset-lamp bracketed to the housewall outside and overhead. But with all its pent-up fragrance, or perhaps, because of it, the glass house was empty, and I flung myself down upon a settle to wait, hoping against hope that she would relent and come and give me a word with her, though what that word should be, I had no more idea than a simpleton.

She did come, after what seemed like another full age of suspense; and when I saw her dear face above the intervening hothouse roses, I thought it was fairer than any flower that ever bloomed, and so I should have told her if she had not frozen me so that I could only stand before her and try to stammer some word of thanks for her coming.

“Well?” she said, chilling me with a look of quiet scorn.

I tried to face her as I had faced my enemies in the field, but it was no manner of use; she had me beaten at my own game, and that before the game was begun.

“How can I say what I’d like to say when you look at me that way?” I protested. “Is it fair to condemn me unheard?”

“I have come to let you say that word you spoke of,” she announced, and her tone was most discouraging.

“You put me a thousand miles off!” I raged. “I can’t shout across the world at you!”

“There is no need to shout or to lose your temper, Mr. Page. You can tell me in ten words, perhaps, why you have thought it proper to change your coat and your flag, when—” she broke down at this and put her face in her hands, and I could hear her saying over and over again softly, “Oh, the disgrace of it!—the miserable, wretched disgrace of it!”

“It is no disgrace, Beatrix,” I burst out hotly. “If I could tell you—if I dared tell you—”

There was no scorn in her eyes when she uncovered them for me. But there were tears.

“Yes; if you could tell me, Dick,” she repeated after me, eagerly.

If I had looked at her another second she would have had it all out of me, in spite of my pledge to Mr. Hamilton, or my life or John Champe’s or any other thing that might be jeopardized. So I had to star-gaze at the flaring lamp beyond the glass roof when I said: “There may be reasons—good reasons, Beatrix. Can’t you trust me to tell you them when we have a better time and—and place than this?”

“There can be no reason at all that will stand in the breach for you, Dick. You know it, and that is why you try to put me off. But there must have been a cause, a most bitter cause, to bring you here in that coat, and as the friend of that unspeakable man whose mere presence makes me lock myself in my room when he comes to see poor Margaret.” She was pleading now; I knew it, and must still be obdurate and hard.

“There was a cause, as you say,” I retorted. “There must have been, since I have fought and spilt blood on the other side. But I can tell you nothing to-night without forswearing myself more than I had to, to wear this coat you dislike so heartily. But I had a cause,” I repeated, going back to the beginning like a clock wound up to strike all its hours over again.

“You are bitter, Dick,” she said, and now she made no secret of her anxious sympathy. “You were always a hot-head, ready to quarrel and fight and take offense where none was meant. But I’ll do you the justice to say that heretofore you’ve always made reparation like a gentleman when your mad fit had passed. But now this dreadful thing is beyond repair—or is it?”

I could lie joyously enough to forward the enterprise which Mr. Hamilton had sent me on, but I could not lie to her who was the heart of my heart, even by implication.

“No,” I said; “it is not beyond repair.”

She caught eagerly at my reply.

“Then you have already repented of this rashest, most wretched passion-flight you ever made, Dick?—you have thought of—of going back to your—to Colonel—”

I laid a finger on my lips and slipped past her to see that the door in the passageway to the drawing-room was fully closed.

“What you are asking me to say would find me a rope very quickly if it came to other ears,” I cautioned, lowering my voice. Then in the same hurried half-whisper, and fearing every moment lest we should be interrupted: “What I have admitted thus far has been the truth in every word. But you must trust me, Beatrix; trust me in spite of everything. And you must not ask me to tell you more.”

“But you’ll promise me, Dick,—” she began.

There was the sound of a gently-closing door and steps in the passage—warnings she did not hear. Again there came that quick shuttling of the mind that covers all the moves of a desperate game in an eye-sweep that can not be measured for its lightning-like swiftness. She was a daughter of the Virginia Leighs, with a father and three brothers in the patriot army. I was a deserter and always to be suspected until I had actually drawn blood in the king’s service. For any of the Tory revelers to find us here together in cool converse.... I saw the shadow of the gibbet hanging plainly over me when I took her suddenly in my arms and stopped what might have been my death-warrant with a kiss on the sweet lips of pleading.

There was a little tableau among the roses in the glass house, with an audience of only one to see it. While a clock might have ticked twice she lay in my arms like some frightened wild thing. For all we had grown up together, I had never let her see the masterful side of me lover-wise, and I do think she was shocked beyond speech or struggling.

But shamed resistance and the strength to make it came quickly enough when a man’s voice said, “Ah, Captain Page, they told me you were here, but they did not add that you had taken a fair prisoner, sir.” And then, as we stood before him, Mistress Beatrix blushing as she had a good right to, and I playing the part of a fond lover taken in the very act, Arnold spread his hands and made his lowest bow and said: “Your humble and most devoted admirer, Mistress Leigh. I have come to tell you that Margaret is asking for you. And you, Captain, to your duty, sir. We have much overstayed our time in this pleasant house.”

Beatrix had fled before he finished, and afterward he straightened up and looked me over with searchings that seemed to read my inmost thoughts. But his words belied his apparent insight.

“I was troubled when they told me you were here with Mistress Leigh,” he said slowly. “But pshaw! I might have known how it was. You are a warm-hearted lover, Captain, and it does you credit. And love knows no politics, I’ll warrant you. Come, let us be going. There is much to be done before to-morrow, and time and tide wait for no man.”

And so we took our departure from the house of revels, and though I looked passionately everywhere for her in the crowded assembly room, I had no other sight of Beatrix, and had to go at last without knowing whether she forgave me for saving my life with that ravished kiss.