CHAPTER XV
With these important works wrecked and dismantled, with the destruction of great stores of ammunition and artillery which obviously placed the system of defence in an imperfect condition, with the difficulty of repair and supply which time and distance and insufficiency of transportation rendered insurmountable, with the elation of victory that so dashing an exploit, so thoroughly consummated, must communicate to the Confederate troops, an attack by them in force was daily expected. The capture of Roanoke City was considered an event of the near future, anticipated with joy or gloom, according to the several interests of the varied population, but in any case regarded as a foregone conclusion. Daily the Northern trains, heavily laden, bore away passengers who had no wish to become citizens of the Southern Confederacy. Perishable effects, stocks of goods of the order that a battle would endanger or destroy, were shipped to calmer regions. Reinforcements came by every train, by every boat, till all the resources of the country were strained to maintain them, and still the Southerners had not advanced to the opportunity. It was one of those occasions of the Civil War when the hand that took was not strong enough to hold. The Confederate force near the town was inadequately supplied to enable it to do more than seize the advantage, which must needs be relinquished. Its slim resources admitted of no permanent occupation of the town, and the empty glory of the capture of Roanoke City would have been offset by the disastrous necessity of the evacuation of the post. Gradually the Federal lines were extended until they lay almost as before the raid on the works. The Confederate ranks had been depleted to furnish reinforcements to a more practicable point. They were falling back, and now and again sudden sallies brought in prisoners from such a distance as told the story.
The town was once more secure, work was begun on the dismantled fortifications, and daily the question of how so hazardous an enterprise could have been devised and executed revived in interest. The commanding general had not the loss of the town itself to account for, as at one time was probable, but for the destruction of a great store of ammunition, as well as the loss of life, of guns, of the works themselves, representing many thousands of dollars and the labor of regiments. All, however, seemed hardly commensurate with the disaster he would sustain in point of reputation. That such a dashing, destructive exploit could be planned and consummated under his own ceaselessly vigilant eyes appeared little short of the miraculous, and for his own justification he looked needfully into its inception.
It was discovered that there was a natural subterranean passage from the grove of Judge Roscoe's place to a cellar, a portion of which had constituted the powder magazine on the Devrett hill, and that this had been exploded by means of a slow match through the grotto, previously prepared, enabling the raiders to effect their escape. It was further ascertained that Julius Roscoe, who had led the enterprise, had been in hiding for some time at his father's home, and had been seen as he issued thence covered with blood, evidently fresh from some personal altercation with a Federal officer, for weeks a guest in the house. Although bruised and bleeding, this officer could offer no account of his wounds save a fall, impossible to have produced them; he had raised no alarm, and had given no report of the presence of an enemy, whose intrusion had wrought such damage and disaster to the Union cause.
One detail led to another, each discovery unveiled cognate mysteries, the disclosure of trifles brought forward circumstances of importance. The claim of the sentinel posted at Judge Roscoe's portico that he had fired the first shot which raised the alarm, evoked the fact that an earlier sentry had told Captain Baynell that he had heard marching feet—a moving column in the cadenced step, he described it now—near, very near, that murky night, and that Captain Baynell had waived it away with the suggestion of "a corporal of the guard with the relief"—at that hour!—when the next relief would not be due till nearly midnight,—and had gone back into the parlor, where Mrs. Gwynn had begun to sing, "Her bright smile haunts me still."
This account reminded several of his camp-fellows that, having been in town on leave, they had met that dark night on the turnpike a force marching in column, and naturally thinking this only the removal of Federal troops from some point to another, here, so far within the lines, they had quietly stood aside and watched the shadowy progress. Nothing amiss had occurred to their minds. The men had all their officers duly in position, and they were marching silently and with great regularity. But by reference to the various written reports, it was easily ascertained that there was no shifting of troops that day, no assignment of a company to any duty which would have taken them out at that hour, no detail reporting for service. Still following in the footsteps of this column, something more was learned from a young negro, who had been out to fish that night, which was the delight of the plantation darkey at this season of the year, and had cast his lines from under the bluff near Judge Roscoe's place; the night being foggy, he had not noticed, till they were very near, the approach of three or four large open boats, filled with soldiers, to judge by the rifles, who were rowing very fast and hard against the current and keeping close in to the shore. When they landed and beached the boats they were very quiet, fell into order, and marched off without a word, except the necessary curt commands. It had never occurred to him to give the alarm. He had taken none. They had rowed so close in to shore, he thought, to avoid such a collision as had happened in the mists earlier in the night, when a large barge was run down by a gunboat and sunk. Doubtless if they had passed the picket boats, the misty invisibility of all the surface of the water protected them, but for the most part the patrol of the river pickets was further down-stream. As they had come, so they had gone, and the matter remained a nine days' wonder. The commanding general almost choked when he thought of it.
"This is going to be a serious matter for Baynell," said Colonel Ashley, one day. He had called at Judge Roscoe's partly because he did not wish to break off with abrupt rudeness an acquaintance which he had persisted in forming, and partly because he was not willing in the circumstances that had arisen to seem to shun the house.
Judge Roscoe was not at home, but Mrs. Gwynn was in the parlor. Ashley had asked her to sing. There was something "delightfully dreary," as he described it, in the searching, romantic, melancholy cadences of her sweet contralto voice. He had not intended to open his heart, but somehow the mood induced by her singing, the quiet of the dim, secluded, cool drawing-rooms, with the old-fashioned, high, stucco ceiling, and the shadowy green gloom of the trees without, prevailed with him, and he spoke upon impulse.
"What matter?" she asked. She had wheeled half around on the piano-stool, and sat, her slim figure in its white dress, delicate and erect, one white arm, visible through the thin fabric, outstretched to the keyboard, the hand toying with resolving chords.
He had been standing beside the piano as she sang, but now, with the air of inviting serious discussion, he seated himself in one of the stiff arm-chairs of the carved rosewood "parlor set" of that day, and replied gravely:——