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.