And softly, intimately, as though to herself, she began to describe, in frightening detail, the caresses she would lavish on him. It was done in a gentle, murmuring voice, like a kind of sensual incantation, a monologue so full of the poetry of physical passion that it charged the very air with electricity, as though she had been quite alone. And all the while, her long hands were dreamily stroking her body from her hips up to her breasts and cupping them in her palms.
Suddenly, Gilles seemed to see her in the Indian's arms and he sprang out of bed and tried to take her in his own. But she repulsed him angrily.
'Are you still here? Why don't you go? I was wrong to welcome you tonight and you have taught me my error. I must think only of my husband from now on. Go away—'
'Why are you so angry? Can't you understand?'
'No! All I can understand is that the man to whom I belong must also belong to me also. You will not have it so, and therefore I am yours no longer.'
'But only think! The thing you ask is very serious and you should understand that. What man of your people would agree, all in a moment like this, to abandon his brothers in arms, his duty and his people to fly with another man's wife? There may be a way out but you must give me time to think of it. You are not leaving tomorrow.'
He had been drawing gradually nearer to her, now he pulled her to him and this time she did not try very hard to drive him away. After a moment, she started to laugh and put her lips up to his.
'You are right – only, you see, I love you so much already that I cannot face the prospect of ever having to part from you again.'
'I love you too. Don't you know that yet? How could I live without you?'
She pressed herself against him, moulding every inch of her body to his, and very gently, her hips began to sway.
'Then prove it to me once more,' she breathed. 'Soon it will be dawn, and the hours will be long until tonight.'
When, an hour later, he left the warm room and plunged into the damp chill of the early morning, Gilles felt like a conqueror and all sensible thought had been driven from his head. It had cost him untold anguish to wrest himself from Sitapanoki's arms. Her final capitulation had left him swollen with pride for she had been infinitely tender and even humble, begging him to forgive her for presuming to try and deflect him from his duty as a warrior. In that last hour, she had lavished such kisses and caresses on him that the memory of them still clung about him as he walked back to the centre of the village, whistling a martial air and feeling a trifle weak about the knees but radiant in his mind. The night that had passed had finally effaced the last traces of his boyhood, for no man who was the lover of such a woman as Sitapanoki could be other than a man indeed.
He never even guessed at the slim white figure standing motionless and desolate behind one of the dark windows of the Gibsons' house, watching him with eyes full of tears as he cleared the hedge in a single bound.
All that day, Lieutenant Goëlo performed his duties with an absent mind and a remarkable lack of enthusiasm. Remembering his new staff officer's previous experience with Rochambeau, General Washington had requested him, with great practical good sense but a certain absence of psychological insight, to see if he could make some sense of his administrative records and estimate how much in the way of stores – scanty enough – they would have for the winter. The young man himself disliked this clerking very much and his eye kept turning to the clock on the mantelpiece as he sat with his pen in the air and his mind a long way away, contemplating prospects that were far removed from gallons of beer and bags of flour.
The only time he really emerged from his sensual daydreams was when he bade a half-hearted farewell to Tim, who was going back to Newport, bearing messages from Washington to the French commanders and glad enough in his heart to be renewing his courtship of Martha Carpenter, whom he was conscious of having somewhat neglected of late.
The last stroke of nine o'clock found Gilles making his way through the dogwoods with one eye on the glow in the window behind which his mistress was waiting for him. The door was no sooner closed behind him than she was in his arms, and all was as it had been the night before.
The nights that followed were filled with the same blazing madness. Sitapanoki loved making love. She was familiar with all the devious refinements whose powerful effect she had proved on her husband, though he was a man of great wisdom and good sense. With this handsome youth, full of strength and ardour, she attained sublimity. In between snatches of sleep, in which even then they were not divided, the lovers made love with a passion which only increased their infatuation night by night.
The Indian had not renewed her proposal that Gilles should fly with her and when he broached the subject amid the ravages of their bed she closed his lips with a long kiss.
'Let be. It will all come right… we shall find a way.'
But, little by little, she was binding him in the invisible web of her embraces. Her beauty, heightened still more by passion, slowly became a powerful drug which he craved more and more. Sitapanoki knew how to make herself ardent, commanding and submissive by turns, abasing herself like a magnificent black panther, purring with contentment, stretching herself in his arms with little moans of happiness. And with every dawn the parting became more difficult and his mood more sombre. The little room had become a world for him, like a heavenly paradise in which the lovely Indian reigned in her glorious nakedness, Eve and the serpent in one, the lovely Indian who had sworn to have him all to herself for always.
She knew that she had won one morning when, as they were kissing goodbye, he crushed her to him more passionately even than usual. All night long, he had made love to her with a kind of desperation which he would not explain. Then, just as he was about to leave her, he murmured with his lips against her neck: 'The General has decided it is time you went, Sita. In three days you are to return to your husband's camp.'
She shuddered and went rigid.
'In three days?' she said, her voice suddenly small and sad. 'Only three days?'
But he only hugged her closer, as though trying to draw her into himself.
'Yes – but I will come for you, tomorrow night! We will fly together, wherever you wish – to the great river you told me of.'
It was so sudden, so unexpected that it almost frightened her. She held him from her gently, looking anxiously into his face which was drawn with worry and fatigue.
'You – you really want to take me? To abandon your whole life?'
'You are my life! I cling to you more with every hour that passes. I love you, Sita. I love you to distraction. I cannot stay here, endlessly scratching away at pieces of paper, while you go away for ever. You cannot know how much I love you!'
'I love you, too,' she said gravely. 'I did not think that I would come to love you so much. I liked you and I wanted you, but now I can no longer imagine life without you. You are my master. But will you not regret the things that you are leaving? Can you bear—?'
'There is only one thing I could not bear, Sita, and that is to know that you were with someone else, in another man's arms, in another man's bed.'
'But your country, your family – your career?'
'I have no family now, if I ever had one. In my own country, I am nothing and it is long now since I have wished to become an adopted son of this land. As for my career – Washington has given me a commission but the only weapons I wield are a pen and inkwell. Once the war is over, I shall be nothing again. No, Sita, I shall leave without regret if I have you. I will come tonight at the usual time, but I will bring with me a suit of men's clothes for you to put on. Then we will make our escape.'
She longed too deeply to believe him to doubt her victory any longer.
'I will spend my whole life trying to make you happy. You shall see how good it is to live a free life in the forest where the great rapids leap down the rocks. One day, the war will be over and then we will become colonists, we will have children and lands of our own to till, and a house where I
will try to be a good wife according to the manner of your people. We will have an empire, perhaps… This land of ours is vast and all things are possible. And I will love you, I will love you as no man was ever loved by woman before!'
Gilles took the beautiful face with its great, lambent eyes, between his hands and gazed at it with infinite tenderness.
'Perhaps none of that will happen. Perhaps we shall find death at the end of the road, if your husband should catch up with us. But perhaps that is the supreme happiness, to die together, for then there can be no regrets and no remorse. Until tonight, then.'
The kiss that passed between them then was wholly chaste, the kiss of a true betrothal, driving out all calculation and all fleshly lust. There was no longer either victor or vanquished in that passionate contest in which both had been striving unconsciously to bend the other to their will, there was nothing but two beings who had chosen to set aside all that stood between them, all that, in the last resort, counted for less than their love, who had chosen to belong only to one another. She had ceased to be an Indian princess as he had ceased to be a Breton, a soldier of King Louis and an officer in the rebel army of the young United States. They were two brand new beings in the dawn of the world. Their bodies, welded together by desire, had drawn their hearts after, even when their owners had least expected it.
For once, the day passed like a dream. Gilles applied himself to the task which only twenty-four hours previously had been the bane of his life as he had never done before. Then he got together a few things, including a suit of man's clothing for Sitapanoki, some provisions and the weapons necessary to anyone bent on travelling through the virgin forest. After that, he wrote three letters to leave behind. One was for Washington, one for Rochambeau and one for Tim, whose help, he knew, would always be his to command. Finally, instead of dining in the company of the other officers of the headquarters staff, he ate alone in a corner of the inn's common room and smoked a leisurely pipe until it was time to go to meet his mistress.
He felt curiously lighthearted, with the sense of release that often comes when a difficult decision has been made. Everything had suddenly become so simple. He had only to say no to ambition, to ordinary life, to the old world which, bound in its ancient, rigid, monarchical framework, could offer him nothing but a narrow, limited existence, and, finally, to Judith who, supposing that her challenging tryst had been genuine, would wait for him in vain. The little red-haired siren of the Blavet had faded like the early morning dreams that fade with the first ray of the sun. She was tucked away in his memory as a whiteness with little of the flesh about it, a scentless flower, a fleeting image in the water… She, too, had been vanquished.
As darkness fell and the trumpets sounded for lights out, he left the inn, bowing carelessly to the company in general on his way out, and made for the churchyard where he had hidden his baggage in a hollow under a hedge. Hoisting it on to his shoulder, he turned his steps towards the minister's house. He felt as light as a bird. In fact, it had made things a great deal easier for him that he had not seen Washington all day. The commander-in-chief had left on a tour of inspection with Colonel Hamilton and Gilles was glad of it because he was not at all sure how he could have sustained the General's direct gaze.
He saw the window shining in the distance, like a gold star in the night, and passing through the hedge ascended the stair as noiselessly as a cat. As he pushed the door open in the familiar way, he was already smiling at the scene he knew that he would find within. Sita would be waiting for him, as she did every night, reclining in front of the fire, like a siren on the edge of the waves, although tonight, no doubt, she would still be wearing her clothes, for lovemaking formed no part of their plans in the hours ahead.
He threw the door wide open, ready to take her in his arms. 'Come in,' said a cold voice.
The little room seemed suddenly to have shrunk. Sitapanoki had mysteriously vanished. In her stead, the tall figure of General Washington stood framed against the firelight. His back was turned and he was stirring up the fire.
The familiar crackle of the logs filled the sudden silence. Everything was as usual. The warm, resinous scent of burning pine logs, the white curtains with their silly frills and the rag rug which was no longer quite the same when adorned by nothing more than the General's buckled shoes. And yet the world seemed to have turned upside down and paradise without Eve was like a narrow purgatory.
'Shut the door,' Washington commanded. 'There's an icy draught. And you may put that bundle in the corner.'
He laid down the poker and brushed his hands together to get rid of the dust. They were long and beautiful below their immaculate cuffs of white lawn and he took the greatest care of them.
'Where is she?' Gilles demanded, wasting no pains on unnecessary politeness.
'The wife of Chief Sagoyewatha is on her way back to her husband. I sent her off unobtrusively very early this morning and as a mark of respect I went with her myself for the first few miles. Have you anything against it? Or have you quite forgotten what the woman stands for, to say nothing of the fact that we are at war and you are a soldier? What is your commanding officer to call what you were about to do with the baggage you were carrying?'
'Desertion,' Gilles retorted boldly.
'And what does that deserve?'
'Death. Shoot me, then. Or hang me, since that seems to be the current fate of soldiers.'
'I do not advise you to be insolent. What have you to say for yourself?'
'Nothing. Except that I love the woman and she loves me.'
'So? Who are you to interfere with my plans? The last thing we need in our present situation is another Trojan War to set the whole of the Six Nations in arms against us. You are no Paris, nor she a Helen! Why in the name of damnation must you French always be putting love before all else? You brandish it like a flag, you wear it like a medal—I have no time for love! Liberty is what interests me and I had thought it was the same with you, or I should not have given a Don Juan a commission in my army. But then, perhaps, in spite of appearances, you may be a coward after all—'
Gilles whitened and clenched his fists as though he would have fallen upon Washington.
'Kill me, General, but do not insult me.'
'You may stop badgering me to make away with you. I've too much need of living men to see any use in making one more corpse. Now, just you listen to me. No one but myself knows that you were on the point of giving us the slip. It proves that I was right not to let you form one of the woman's escort, for you would not have returned, but I was wrong to put you to work with me. You were made for action. In a fight you think straight and do not play the fool. Would you like to see some fighting?'
'It's all I've ever wanted, that and—'
'I forbid you to think of her more! Go home and make your preparations. We have discovered through a spy, a man named Champ, exactly where Arnold is to be found. General La Fayette who, like yourself, cannot get over Andre's death, is leaving at dawn with a detachment of riflemen to try and capture him. You shall go with them.'
When Washington used a certain tone of voice and a certain turn of phrase he could be irresistible, for his knowledge of men was unequalled. Beaten but unreconciled, Gilles drew himself up, clicked his heels and bowed correctly.
'Your servant, General, and thank you for being good enough to overlook what has passed. If I can prove my gratitude with my life, I will. Now I have only to return to my billet and there burn certain letters which are of no further interest.'
Washington laughed suddenly and strolling over to the younger man gave him an easy buffet on the arm.
'Stubborn mule of a Breton! I've just been exerting myself to explain to you why I want you alive. Besides—' His voice softened but took on a graver note, although the smile still lurked in his eyes. 'Besides, no man of talent should destroy his future for the sake of any woman, however beautiful, believe me. They are not worth it. Ask Arnold, if you find him. But for his excessive devotion
to his wife, the fair Peggy, he might still be an honest man and a hero.'
Chapter Thirteen
Pongo
With the brave red feather of La Fayette's troops stuck in his hat, Lieutenant Goëlo plunged into war like a prisoner plunging into a shark-infested sea, to emerge a free man or not at all. With the spy, Champ, as their guide, they succeeded, after facing a host of perils, in approaching Fort Constitution, on the bay of New York, where the traitor was said to be living, only to discover that the bird had flown. In a raging temper and thirsting for vengeance, Arnold had been unable to face the thought of spending the winter shut up in another fortress. He had obtained Sir Henry Clinton's permission to join the English army in the south and had just left for Virginia, determined to make Washington's countrymen pay dearly for the humiliating position in which he found himself through no fault but his own.
The expedition returned to Tappan empty-handed and all the more angry on that account. La Fayette and Gilles both fell on Washington, demanding his permission to pursue the traitor into Virginia. But the General would not hear of it.
'We are besieging New York, gentlemen, which you seem to have forgotten, and I have no troops to spare. Do me the favour of remaining here and carrying out my orders to the letter.'
There was a still more searing disappointment awaiting Gilles, for Mr Gibson and the escort deputed to accompany Sitapanoki back to the Susquehanna had returned during his absence, much sooner than expected, having failed to complete their journey. The Indian girl had slipped away one night while they were encamped near Dingman's Ferry on the Delaware. She had simply vanished without trace.
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