“Go on, Captain Page,” said my inquisitor, most grimly non-committal.
“There is little else to tell you, General Arnold. When I had him sobered a little, I saw him past the tavern bar and farther in safety; and when I quitted him I had his promise that he would go to his barracks and behave himself. I confess I would have kept all this from you, if I could. John Champe, sober, is as good a soldier as ever picked a flint, and since I had given him his beating, I thought to spare him a worse thing. So long as your questions did not touch the man’s loyalty—or mine—I felt warranted in holding back this tale of his stumble into the ale-pot. Soldiers will be soldiers, General, and that officer can get the most out of them who first beats them and then overlooks their little peccadilloes.”
I was in cruel doubt for five age-long minutes as to whether I had made my case or signed my death-warrant. No man was ever better able to hide his mind behind his face save in his sudden upblazes of passion, than was this same Benedict Arnold; and when he rose to walk the floor in gloomy meditation, with his head hanging and his fingers tightly locked behind him, I lived a dozen lifetimes and could well-nigh feel the hemp drawing tight around my neck.
But at the end he let me off with a caution and a veiled threat.
“You should have two lessons out of this, Captain Page,” he said at length, stopping abruptly to stand over me. “One is that it is never worth your while to play fast and loose with me in matters of information. Make your mind a looking-glass for me, or better still, a window-pane, for, sooner or later, I shall always be at the bottom of your profoundest secret. The other lesson is this: your adhesion to the king’s cause is but a day old. Until it gains a little age and dignity, it will be well for you to avoid even the appearance of evil.”
I rose, feeling as any man would who had been given his reprieve after the black cap had been fairly drawn down over his eyes.
“I should have known better, General,” I said, feigning the meekest humility and self-reproach. “And now, sir, if you have orders for me—”
He broke into my tender of services with the welcomest word I had heard in many a day.
“Go to your quarters, Captain Page, and finish the sleep I interrupted. Your rest has been sufficiently broken of late to justify some rebellion in nerve and muscle. The embarkation begins to-day, but we shall do well enough without you.”
It was not more than ten minutes from this early-morning tight-rope dance that I once more tumbled into bed in the barn-like upper room at the tavern, and I was sinking sweetly into the lap of the goddess whose charms we never appreciate until a wakeful night or two makes them precious, when I started up with a cold sweat breaking out in a frost rime all over me. In all the tight-rope business, I had never once thought of Arnold’s questioning Champe, or of how little any story of his would be likely to fit in with mine!