“You spoke for me? You should not have done that, dear lady,” I said quickly. So much, at least, I owed to common manhood, I thought.
“And why not, pray? If you could know, Mr. Page, how it comforts me to have the assurance that General Arnold has at least one honorable gentleman near him—”
“Good heavens, madam!” I ejaculated, forgetting all prudence in the smarting of her unconscious stab; “you take a frightful risk in recommending any one in these uncertain times, and especially one who is himself a forsworn—” I stopped in mid-career, remembering that I was treading upon doubly dangerous ground in thus pointing out my own unfitness to the woman who was the wife of the chief forswearer of his age.
“Ah, you are modest, Mr. Page,” she said, being so good and gentle herself as to be unable to see guile in others. And then she added: “You must not try to draw me into the King-and-Congress of it. I used to think I could know and take sides; but now I leave those things to others, and try to rise above them. When this bitter war is over and become a thing of the past, we shall see more clearly than we do now.”
“I would to God it were over at this moment,” I rejoined gloomily.
“I can credit you in that wish: though you are young and eager and a soldier, Mr. Page. War is a very terrible thing, full of peril and danger to those we love; full of weary heart-strainings for us poor women who can only stand and wait. You will serve the general well, will you not, Captain Page?”—this most wistfully.
This time I could have cried out with the pain it gave me to deceive this dear lady. Here was a thing I had never bargained for, even in my wildest imaginings of the crookings and turnings of the way into which I had set my feet. And now, again, Mr. Hamilton’s qualifying words came back to me. How much farther could I go and have any semblance of honor left? But Mistress Margaret was waiting for her answer, and I am glad she can never know what it cost me to give it.
“I shall not serve the general any the less faithfully for any word you have spoken, be assured, dear madam,” I said, descending once more, and still more reluctantly, to the despicable double meanings.
“I shall sleep the easier for that assurance,” she said warmly, flaying me afresh; and then continuing with the sweet archness of the Margaret Shippen I had met in her father’s home: “I know you, Captain, better than you know me—having Beatrix Leigh for a fellow guest under this same roof.”
“Mistress Beatrix would never say a word for me,” I blurted out.