BOOK III
WHAT HAPPENED AT TEN O’CLOCK
CHAPTER X
CAROLINE MITFORD WRITES A DESPATCH
The War Department Telegraph Office had once been a handsome apartment, one of those old-fashioned, heavily corniced, marble-manteled, low-windowed, double-doored rooms in a public building. It was now in a state of extreme dilapidation, the neglected and forlorn condition somehow being significant of the moribund Confederacy in which practically everything was either dead or dying but the men and women.
A large double door in one corner gave entrance to a corridor. The doors were of handsome mahogany, but they had been kicked and battered until varnish and polish had both disappeared and they looked as dilapidated as the cob-webbed corners and the broken mouldings. On the other side of the room, three long French windows gave entrance to a shallow balcony of cast iron fantastically moulded, which hung against the outer wall. Beyond this the observer peering through the dusty panes could discern the large white pillars of the huge porch which overhung the front of the building. Further away beyond the shadow of the porch were visible the lights of the sleeping town, seen dimly in the bright moonlight.
The handsome furniture which the room had probably once contained, had been long since displaced by the rude telegraph equipment and the heavy plaster cornices and mouldings were sadly marred by telegraph wires which ran down the walls to the tables, rough pine affairs, which carried the instruments. There were two of these tables, each with a telegraph key at either end. One of them stood near the centre of the room, and the other some distance away was backed up against the fine old marble mantel, chipped, battered, ruined like the rest of the room. For the rest, the apartment contained a desk, shelves with the batteries on them, and half a dozen chairs of the commonest and cheapest variety. The floor was bare, dusty, and tobacco stained. The sole remnant of the ancient glory of the room was a large handsome old clock on the wall above the mantel, the hands of which pointed to the hour of ten.
But if the room itself was in a dingy and even dirty condition, the occupants were very much alive. One young man, Lieutenant Allison, sat at the table under the clock, and another, Lieutenant Foray, at the table in the centre of the room. Both were busy sending or receiving messages. The instruments kept up a continuous clicking, heard distinctly above the buzz of conversation which came from half a dozen youngsters, scarcely more than boys, grouped together at the opposite side of the room, waiting to take to the various offices of the Department, or to the several officials of the government, the messages which were constantly being handed out to them by the two military operators.
In the midst of this busy activity there came the noise of drums, faintly at first, but presently growing clearer and louder, while the tramp of many feet sounded in the street below.
“What’s that?” asked one messenger of the other.
“I don’t know,” was the answer, “troops of some kind. I’ll look out and see.”