“I am sure it would,” I agreed brazenly. But I immediately took the edge off by adding: “For the king’s cause, of course. Mr. Arnold has his abilities; no one will deny that. But however honest he may be in his—ah—convictions, let us say, the obloquy that attaches to eleventh-hour repentances in the popular mind will hamper him, and through him the cause for which he fights.”
Castner smiled leniently.
“You are a strange young man, Mr. Page. You discuss such matters as if they were as remote from you as the stars. Yet you come under Mr. Arnold’s ban—if it be a ban—yourself.”
“Not quite,” I countered hardly. “I have convictions, you see, and I was never living up to them more faithfully than I am at this moment. But now I must beg your leave to go. I am due at Mr. Arnold’s quarters at six o’clock.”
It was but a short walk in the starlit evening to the house next door to Sir Henry Clinton’s. There was a soldier on guard at Arnold’s door now, a tall man standing stiffly in the way to stop me until he saw my Loyal American uniform and the captain’s shoulder-knot. Then he let me pass without a word, and also, as I observed, without the salute.
Arnold was writing again when I ascended to the working room, and with a nod to me and a wave of the shapely hand toward a chair, he went on for a full hour, I should think, filling sheet after sheet with industrious application and singleness of purpose. It was certainly no lightening of my responsibility that made me sleepy when the quill-scratching grew by and by into a soothing lullaby. But there had been a strenuous night and a none too restful day to follow it, and before I realized that I had been asleep, I awoke to find Sir Judas standing over me, with the gloomy scowl of half-aroused suspicion wrinkling his brow, his hands behind him, and his attitude that of a spy at the windows of the unsuspecting.
It is none so easy to come out of a sound sleep in full possession of all the faculties. My first half-waking impression was that something, a word muttered in my sleep, perhaps, had betrayed me, and the impulse that went with it prompted me to spring up and throttle the traitor before he could give the alarm. In good fact, I was starting from my chair with this same insane purpose tugging at me, when his word reassured me.
“You sleep soundly, Captain Page, and I am old enough and burdened enough to envy you the gift of it,” he said moodily. And then, with a touch of sympathy that made me wish he would always show me only the hateful side of him: “I was about to command your attendance for the evening, but you will be needing rest to fit you for to-morrow’s duties, which will be arduous enough.”
Having a good grip upon my senses by this time, I protested at once that I was fit and much refreshed by my sleep, which I found, to my astonishment, had stretched above an hour. Also, I expressed a willingness, which was entirely unfeigned, to accompany him wherever he was going, and I thought his somber eyes lighted a little at that.
“Have you ever heard me spoken of as a timid man, Captain Page?” he asked, with a lifting of the brow that was meant for a smile.