Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

IF THERE were nothing else to recall the day and date, December 14, 1780, I should still be able to name it because it chanced to be my twenty-second birthday, and Jack Pettus, of the Virginia Hundreds, and I were breaking a bottle of wine in honor of it in the bar of old Dirck van Ditteraick’s pot-house tavern at Nyack.

The afternoon was cold and gray and dismal. The wine was prodigiously bad; and the tavern bar, lighted by a couple of guttering candles in wall sconces, was a reeking kennel. I was hand-blistered from my long pull down the river from Teller’s Point; and Jack, who had ridden the four miles from General Washington’s headquarters at Tappan to keep the mild birthday wassail with me, was in a mood bitter enough to kill whatever joy the anniversary might be supposed to hold for both or either of us.

“I’m telling you, Dick, we’re miles deeper in the ditch than we’ve been any year since this cursed war began!” he summed up gloomily, when we had chafed in sour impatience, as all men did, over the sorry condition of our rag-tag, starving patriot army. “Four months ago we had eight thousand men fronting Sir Henry Clinton here in the Highlands; to-day we couldn’t muster half that number. Where are all the skulkers?”

“Gone home to get something to eat,” I laughed. “We need to hang a few commissary quartermasters, Jack.”

“It isn’t all in the commissary,” he contended, “though I grant you there are empty bellies enough among us. But above the belly-pinching, it’s the example set by that thrice-accursed traitor, Arnold, in his going over to the enemy. Not a night passes now but some troop breaks the number of its mess by losing a man or two to the southward road.”

“But not Baylor’s,” I qualified. Pettus was a lieutenant in Major Henry Lee’s Light Horse Legion, and I a captain in Baylor’s Horse, at the moment posted at Salem on scouting duty.

“Our record is broken,” he confessed, staring soberly at his wine-cup. “Some time back, John Champe, our sergeant-major, took the road at midnight, beat down the vidette with the flat of his sword, and galloped off, with Middleton and his troop in hot pursuit. They rode till dawn, and were in good time to see Champe take to the river at Bergen and swim out to a king’s ship anchored off-shore.”

“We of Baylor’s are whole yet, thank God, save for the potting of a man or so now and then by the Cow-boys,” I boasted.

“The Light Horse is stirred to the very camp-followers by Champe’s desertion,” Pettus went on, with growing bitterness. “It’s the honor of the South.” Then, Van Ditteraick’s vile vintage getting suddenly into his blood, he clapped bottle to cup again and sprang to his feet. “A toast!” he cried. “Fill up and drink with me to the honor of Virginia!”

“Always and anywhere, and in any pot-liquor, however bad,” said I; and when he let me have the bottle I filled the cup, and was glad to note that my hand was still steady.

“Now, then--standing, man, standing!” he bellowed, waving me up: “Here’s to the loyalty of the Old Dominion, and may the next Virginian who smirches it, though that man be you or I, Dick Page, live to lose the woman he loves, and then die by inches on a gibbet, with crows to pluck his eyes out!”

If I smiled in my cup it was at the naming of a woman in the curse, and not at Jack’s extravagance, nor at the savage sentiment. For we of Baylor’s had privately agreed and sworn to flay alive and burn the first man caught deserting the colors, no matter what his name should be nor how high his standing.

After drinking his terrible toast, Jack dropped into his chair and relapsed into silence; whereat I had a chance to look about me, and to gather myself for the question which, more than the mere drinking of a birthday bottle with Pettus, had brought me to the point of asking Colonel Baylor’s leave to ride and row from our camp at Salem to Nyack on this raw December day.

“Jack,” I began, when the silence had sufficed, “are you sober enough to thread a needle for me in that matter of Captain Seytoun’s?”

“Try me and see, Dick,” he said promptly, sitting up and pushing the bottle aside.

“Word came to me yesterday, through Martin, the orderly who rode with despatches from the commander-in-chief to Colonel Baylor, that Seytoun had been talking again,” I went on, trying to keep the rage tremor out of my voice. “Martin had it that he had been revamping that old lie about the Pages and the ship-load of loose-wives sent over to Virginia in Charles II’s time. Is this true?”

Pettus shook his head, not in denial, I made sure, but in deprecation.

“This is no time to be stirring up past and gone private quarrels, Dick,” he said. “The good cause needs every sword it has; Bully Seytoun’s, as well as yours.”

“You’re not answering my question, Jack,” I retorted, fixing him with hot eyes. “I heard this of Captain Seytoun, and more: it was said that he cursed me openly, and that he dragged in the name of Mistress Beatrix Leigh, swearing that he would take her from me if I were thrice wedded to her.”

“A mere pot-house tongue-loosing when he was in liquor, Dick,” said my friend placably. “It was here, in this very den of Van Ditteraick’s.”

“Then you heard him?”

Pettus nodded. “And can testify to his befuddling.”

“He shall answer for it some day, drunk or sober,” I vowed; and then I stood my errand fairly upon its rightful feet. “That is what fetched me to Nyack to-day, Jack. There must be some accommodation brought about with Captain Seytoun. I am not made of sheepskin like a drumhead--to be beaten upon forever without breaking.”

“‘Accommodation’?” Jack queried, with a lip-curl that I did not like.

“Yes. You are near to Major Lee, who is your very good friend, Jack; a word from you to the major, and from the major to Captain Seytoun----”

Pettus never knew what it cost me to say this, or he would not have countered upon me so fiercely.

“Good heavens, Dick Page! Has it come to this?----are you asking me to go roundabout to Seytoun to cry ‘Enough!’ for you? Where is your Virginia breeding, man!--or have you lost it campaigning in this cursed country of the flat-footed Dutch?”

I smiled. This, you may notice, was my cool-blood Jack Pettus, who, but a moment earlier, had been telling me that the present was no time to be stirring up private quarrels. But my word was passed--as I knew only too well, and as he could not know.

“I can’t fight Captain Seytoun, Jack; but neither can I brook his endless tongue-lashing,” I said, moodily enough, no doubt.

“‘Can’t’ is no gentleman’s word, Dick,” he insisted, still fiercely emphatic upon the point of honor.

“But just now you said that private quarrels----”

“I was drunk then, on this vinegar stuff of Van Ditteraick’s; but I’m sober now. This thing that you propose is simply impossible, Dick. Can’t you see that it is?”

I must confess that I did see it as a miserable choice between two evils. But my chance to win the love of Mistress Beatrix Leigh had not been lightly earned, and though it was but a chance, I dared not throw it away.

“But if I have a good reason--the best of reasons--for not fighting Captain Seytoun at the present time,” I began.

Pettus flung up his hand impatiently.

“You are the judge of that; also of how far a gentleman from Virginia may go in the matter of eating dirt at his enemy’s hands. But don’t ask me to carry your apologies for his insults to this bully-ragging captain, Dick. I’m your friend.”

I made the sign of acquiescence. The war would end, one day, and then I should be free of my fetterings. Since our legion had been sent across the river, I had had no opportunity of collision with Captain Seytoun--the opportunity which had recurred daily while the two legions, Baylor’s and Major Lee’s, had been quartered together below Tappan. If the gossiping orderly had only kept a still tongue in his head--but he had not, and here I was at Nyack, on Seytoun’s side of the river, with my finger in my mouth, like a schoolboy caught putting bent pins on the master’s seat, mad to have it out once for all with my tormentor, but more eager still to get away with a whole conscience.

Matters were at this most exasperating poising-point, with the two of us sitting on opposite sides of the slab drinking-table and glowering at the half-emptied wine-bottle, when the choice was suddenly taken from me. There was a medley of hoof-clinkings on the stones of the inn yard, a great creaking of saddle leather and clanking of accouterments to go with the dismounting, and some four or five officers of Lee’s Horse tramped into Van Ditteraick’s bar and called for refreshment.

Being fathoms deep in an ugly mood, I did not look up until I felt Jack calling me with his eyes. Then I saw that one of the in-comers was none other than this same Captain Howard Seytoun; that his red face and pig-like eyes spoke of other tavern visits earlier in the day; and that the ostentatious turning of his back upon me was merely the insulting preface to what should follow.

What did follow gave me no time to consider. As if he were resuming a conversation that moment interrupted, Seytoun turned to the man next at hand--it was Cardrigg, of his own troop--and began to harp on the old out-worn lie; of how Richard Page, first of the name, had got his wife out of that ship-load of women gathered up by the London Company from God knows where and sent out to Virginia to mate with our pioneers, and how the taint had come down the line to make cowards of the men, and----