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.