There was a little tableau among the roses in the glass house, with an audience of only one to see it. While a clock might have ticked twice she lay in my arms like some frightened wild thing. For all we had grown up together, I had never let her see the masterful side of me lover-wise, and I do think she was shocked beyond speech or struggling.
But shamed resistance and the strength to make it came quickly enough when a man’s voice said, “Ah, Captain Page, they told me you were here, but they did not add that you had taken a fair prisoner, sir.” And then, as we stood before him, Mistress Beatrix blushing as she had a good right to, and I playing the part of a fond lover taken in the very act, Arnold spread his hands and made his lowest bow and said: “Your humble and most devoted admirer, Mistress Leigh. I have come to tell you that Margaret is asking for you. And you, Captain, to your duty, sir. We have much overstayed our time in this pleasant house.”
Beatrix had fled before he finished, and afterward he straightened up and looked me over with searchings that seemed to read my inmost thoughts. But his words belied his apparent insight.
“I was troubled when they told me you were here with Mistress Leigh,” he said slowly. “But pshaw! I might have known how it was. You are a warm-hearted lover, Captain, and it does you credit. And love knows no politics, I’ll warrant you. Come, let us be going. There is much to be done before to-morrow, and time and tide wait for no man.”
And so we took our departure from the house of revels, and though I looked passionately everywhere for her in the crowded assembly room, I had no other sight of Beatrix, and had to go at last without knowing whether she forgave me for saving my life with that ravished kiss.
VI
DARK NIGHT
IT WAS not much beyond ten o’clock when we stepped out under the cold December stars and bade farewell to Mr. Justice Smith’s hospitable house of entertainment.
I wondered a little at Arnold’s leaving so early, but the wonder was appeased when he took another way back to the seaward end of the town; a way which led to the Loyal American barracks.
Here, though I stood aside and took no part in Arnold’s talk with a group of his officers, I overheard a thing to shock the plotting part of me swiftly into action. In a breath it was made plain that the time for trapping our Judas had shrunk to a few short hours. Early in the morning the legion was to begin embarking for some destination as yet kept secret, and once on shipboard, all chance of our seizing the traitor would be at an end.
This explained most clearly Arnold’s allusions of the afternoon, and his early quitting of the house of merrymaking. Also his saying to me that there was much to be done before the morrow. Truly, there was much to be done. If our business, Sergeant Champe’s and mine, were not to burst like a pricked bubble it must have its beginning, its middle part, and its ending crammed into the few hours that remained to us.