It was enough, and I took her in my arms and kissed her, saying, because it had to be said, sooner or later:
“Good-by, dearest. The parting time has come. In the larger matter I can’t promise; but I’ll do what lies in me. If I am strong enough to rise to your high plane, I’ll come to you, if I can—when I can—with clean hands. But if I am not great enough, I shall not ask you to marry the fragments.”
“But I love the fragments,” she said simply; and this was her word of leave-taking.
Once more out in the keen cold air of the December night and I was face to face with the moment of decision. Love, duty, honor, and vindictive hatred of Benedict Arnold all dragged me their several ways; but when at last I won back unhindered to the house of doom, and to the guard-room where John Champe was pacing moodily back and forth before a cold hearth, the decision was no longer trembling in the balance. As if a veil had been swept aside I saw into what depths vindictive rage and soldier patriotism had plunged me. Mr. Hamilton, himself, I felt sure, would be the first to call me back if he could know that I must sink myself neck-deep in a mire of perfidy too foul to be borne if I were to accomplish now the thing he had sent me to do.
XX
TRAITORS ALL
IT WAS still early in the evening when I reentered the ground-floor room of Arnold’s house—the room of the cold hearth—on my return from the soul-searching, but most heart-warming interview with Beatrix Leigh. Champe wheeled quickly to face me at the door-closing, and I saw that his day-long moodiness had vanished to give place to suppressed excitement.
“My God!” he said grittingly. “I thought you’d never come!—or that the provost-guard with the handcuffs would get here first. Sir Judas has played fairly into our hands at last. For a good half-hour past he has been walking in the garden—alone!”
“Ah?” said I, seeing how poignantly the matter had climaxed in my short absence, and not seeing, in the suddenness of it, what course I ought to steer. “So you think our chance has come?”
“Think?” he echoed; “think? Why, Captain Dick, isn’t it the very bone and marrow of the thing we’ve been praying for? We’ve but to go quietly and raise the boat from the river-bottom where we sank it, to make all ready, nab him, and away up-river in the darkness. The very night belongs to us—black dark, and with the wind quartering right to blow us where we wish to go. Come; we are wasting the precious minutes!” And while he was struggling into his watchcoat he kept on saying over and over again: “Good God—if he will only give us time!”
He was out and away before I could say more to him, and I followed more leisurely, turning over in my mind a dozen expedients which might serve in the last resort to make this climaxing broadside flash in the pan. For now there was no more hesitation. In the open field, or even with the poor chance that the hunted fox has, after he has heard the dogs baying at his heels, I would have flung myself upon the traitor to take him, or let him kill me as I tried. But to win his confidence, as I had, and then to steal up and garrote him like a wretched footpad was no longer among the possibilities for an officer and a gentleman—and a Virginian.