“Ah? And that was—?”
“It was the discovery that there are lengths to which a man and a gentleman may not go, even to compass the greatest apparent benefit to his fellow-men and his country. You put it within the truth when you say that I spared you. At this very moment, had I willed it so, you might be lying bound and gagged in the bottom of a rowboat and well on your way to the camp at Tappan. I have told you the simple truth, Mr. Arnold; I assumed the task of kidnapping you voluntarily, and voluntarily I relinquished it.”
“I know,” he rejoined abruptly, and then he turned from me and began to pace the floor as if in a repressed passion. After a time he broke out bitterly.
“Like others, you know nothing of the conditions. You saw only a man turning his back upon a cause to which he had given as much or more than any, and straightway you set him down as the basest traitor, measuring the depth of his depravity, it may be, by that very standard of loyal service which he himself had set. What can you know of the slights and evasions, the refusal to recognize just claims, the spite and envy of those who drag others down so that they themselves may climb the higher?” Then, stopping suddenly to face me: “Captain Page, they even put a cloud upon my honesty in money matters!”
Now I had heard that there had been charges of irregularity in his official reports; it was common talk in the army, though I think none went so far as to charge dishonesty. His repute had been that of a high-stomached officer who could as little bear criticism as he could a rebuff to his ambition. But I said nothing. I could do no less than pity a man who felt that he must come and try to justify himself to a condemned spy whose confessed object was, or had been, a most deadly one. But he fell to pacing again without waiting for my reply.
“You did not believe that scandal about the regimental accounts, Captain Page?” he said, after another pause.
“No; I did not believe it, and I think there are few in our army who do. But that is nothing, Mr. Arnold; you are well hated for a much greater thing.”
“What is done, is done,” he broke in moodily. “I did not come here to argue with you, Captain; I came to ask what I may do to make your fate more easily met. Your life I can not save; that matter has gone beyond me now, however much I might wish to intervene. But any last request you may have to make—”
There were two, and on one of them, the safe departure of Beatrix, my lips were sealed. But of the other I spoke freely.
“You have not mentioned Sergeant Champe in all this, and I would not have my sins charged to his score,” I began: “I do not know how much or how little you are involving him—”