THE
SECRET DISPATCH;

OR,

THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN BALGONIE.

BY

JAMES GRANT,

AUTHOR OF "ROMANCE OF WAR," "SCOTTISH CAVALIERS,"
ETC. ETC.

NEW EDITION.

LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.

TO

PROFESSOR SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON, BART.,

M.D., D.C.L., &C., &C.,

THIS TALE,
FROM RUSSIAN MILITARY HISTORY,
IS INSCRIBED,
AS A MEMORIAL OF ADMIRATION AND SINCERE REGARD.

PREFACE.

I need scarcely inform the reader of history, that most of the events narrated in the subsequent pages actually occurred in the manner stated; and I have done much to soften, or subdue, the actual barbarity of the story, though such barbarity was consonant enough to the days of her, whose "lust of power and contempt of all moral restraint" won her the name of "the Semiramis of the North."

For the betrothal of the young Lieutenant of the Valikolutz Infantry to his cousin, it may be mentioned that a dispensation was necessary, as the Russian Church—like the Catholic—forbids all marriages within four degrees of relationship.

As stated in the text, the little song of the gipsy is one of many current enough in Russia, where the destruction of the Crescent is always fondly predicted; but never so confidently as during our late Crimean War: and even at this very time, an aged Muscovite, named Alexis Alexandrovitch, after a seclusion of many years in the district of Samara, has come forth as a prophet on the same subject, and is now proceeding from place to place, like another Peter the Hermit, foretelling and preaching the downfall of "the sick man" at Stamboul, and the speedy substitution of the Russian Cross for the Turkish Crescent on the dome of St. Sophia.

26, DANUBE STREET, EDINBURGH.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
[The Lost Traveller]

CHAPTER II.
[The Castle of Louga]

CHAPTER III.
[Natalie]

CHAPTER IV.
[Corporal Podatchkine]

CHAPTER V.
[The Dagger of Bernikoff]

CHAPTER VI.
[The Palatine]

CHAPTER VII.
[The Soldier of the Czarina]

CHAPTER VIII.
[In Love]

CHAPTER IX.
[Deluded]

CHAPTER X.
[The Corporal in his own Trap]

CHAPTER XI.
[Olga, the Gipsy]

CHAPTER XII.
[St. Petersburg]

CHAPTER XIII.
[What the Secret Dispatch contained]

CHAPTER XIV.
[Charlie's first day in Schlusselburg]

CHAPTER XV.
[The Imperial Prisoner]

CHAPTER XVI.
[The Tratkir]

CHAPTER XVII.
[The Wood of the Honey Tree]

CHAPTER XVIII.
[Doubt and Dread]

CHAPTER XIX.
[The Night of the 15th September]

CHAPTER XX.
[Morning of the 16th September]

CHAPTER XXI.
[Underground]

CHAPTER XXII
[Over their Wine]

CHAPTER XXIII.
[Will he Succeed?]

CHAPTER XXIV.
[Conclusion]

[L'Envoi]

THE SECRET DISPATCH.

CHAPTER I.
THE LOST TRAVELLER.

"Heaven aid me! here am I now—which way shall I turn—advance or retire?" exclaimed Balgonie, as his horse came plunging down almost on its knees, amid wild gorse and matted jungle.

A cold day in the middle of April had passed away; a pale and cheerless sun, that had cast no heat on the leafless scenery and the half-frozen marshes that border the Louga in Western Russia, had sunk, and the darkness of a stormy night came on rapidly. The keen blast of the north, that swept the arid scalps of the Dudenhof (the only range of hills that traverses the ancient Ingria), was bellowing through a gorge, where the Louga poured in foam upon its passage to the Gulf of Finland, between steep banks that were covered by gloomy pines, when the speaker, a mounted officer in Russian uniform, who seemed too surely to have lost his way, reined up a weary and mud-covered horse on the margin of the stream, and by the light that yet lingered on the tops of the tall pines, and gilded faintly the metal-covered domes of a distant building on the opposite bank, looked hopelessly about him for the means of crossing the dangerous river.

"Where am I?" he repeated, almost despairingly; for, as Schiller sings in his "Song of the Bell,"—

"Man fears the kingly lion's tread;
Man fears the tiger's fangs of terror;
And still the dreadliest of the dread
Is man himself in error!"

Though clad in the uniform of the Russian Regiment of Smolensko, which was raised in the famous duchy of that name, the traveller was neither Muscovite nor Calmuck, Cossack nor Tartar, but a cool, wary, and determined young Briton, one of the many Scottish officers whom misfortune or ambition had drawn into the Russian service, both by sea and land, from the time of Peter the Great down to the beginning of the present century; for many Scottish officers served in the Russian fleet with Admiral Greig at the famous bombardment of Varna: and it was such volunteers as these that first taught the barbarous hordes of the growing empire the true science of war and the necessity for discipline.

The rider's green uniform, faced with scarlet velvet and richly laced with gold, was covered by a thick grey pelisse (like our present patrol-jackets), trimmed with black wolf's fur: he wore a scarlet forage cap with a square top, long boots that came above the knee, and a Turkish sabre that had once armed a pasha of more tails than one.

"Swim the river I must," he muttered, after having traversed the valley in vain, looking for a bridge, boat, or raft of timber; "but, egad, death may be the penalty. Well," he added, with a gleam of ire in his dark grey eyes and a bitter smile on his lip, "there was a time, perhaps, when I little thought that I, Charlie Balgonie, would find a nameless grave in this land of timber, hemp, and salted hides, where caviare is a luxury, train-oil a liqueur, and the air of Siberia deemed healthy for all who have any absurd ideas of political freedom, or are silly enough to imagine that a man may be the lord of his own proper person."

To add to his troubles and discomfort, though the month was April—usually the most serene of the year in Russia—snow-flakes were beginning to fall, rendering yet greater the gloom of the gathering night.

"I was to have found a bridge here. Can that Livonian villain, Podatchkine, have deluded, and then left me to my fate?"

He knew that in his rear, the way by which he had come, lay half-frozen morasses, heathy wastes, and forests of spruce, larch, and silver-leaved firs—vast natural magazines for supplying all Europe with masts and spars—the haunt of the wolf and bear; he knew that to linger or to return were worse than to advance, and that he must cross the stream and seek quarters and guidance at the château, the name of which was yet unknown to him.

This was, if possible, the worst season for passing the Louga, which is always deepest and most navigable in spring. It rises in the district of Novgorod; and, after traversing a country full of vast forests for more than 180 miles, falls into the Gulf of Finland.

Balgonie buttoned tightly his holster-flaps, hooked up his sabre, assured himself that an important dispatch with which he was entrusted was safe in an inner pocket, and prepared seriously for the perilous task of swimming his horse across the stream.

Again he looked anxiously at the château, the abode evidently of some wealthy noble or boyar. Its outline had almost disappeared in the increasing obscurity; the last faint gleams of the west had faded away on the onion-shaped roofs of its turrets, and a central dome of polished copper, which was cut into facets like the outside of a pine-apple (for there is much of the Oriental in the old Russian architecture); but lights were beginning to sparkle cheerfully through its double-sashed windows upon the feathery and the funeral-like foliage of the solemn pine woods.

Could those who were comfortably, perhaps luxuriously seated within, but know that there was a poor human being on the eve, perhaps, of perishing helplessly amid the dark flow of that deep and roaring river!

"Courage, friend Charlie!" said the rider to himself; and then he hallooed loudly, as if to attract attention, but did so in vain. The night was becoming a very severe one; the flakes of snow fell thicker and thicker on the gusty and cutting blast.

"Ah! if I should perish here—such a fate!" thought he, shuddering. "Shall I be swept down this black and horrid stream, the Louga, to be cast a drowned corpse upon its banks, to be found stripped and buried by wondering but unpitying serfs and boors; or shall I be torn and mangled by bears and wolves; or borne even to the Gulf of Finland, far, far away, having thus an obscure and wretched fate, without winning the name I had hoped to gain—forgotten even by those who wronged me in Scotland, the land that never more shall be a home to me!"

He did not say all this aloud; but certainly some such painful surmises flashed upon him as he forced his snorting and reluctant horse, by a vigorous use of the spurs, through the thickly interwoven brushwood that grew on the bank of the river, the dull and monotonous rush of which, encumbered as it was by large pieces of ice, was sufficient to appal even a stouter heart than that of this young Scottish soldier of fortune.

With a brief invocation on his lips, he gave his horse the reins and gored it with the rowels. A strong, active, and clean-limbed, but somewhat undersized animal from the steppes of the Ukraine, with a fierce and angry snort, it plunged into the torrent, and breasted the icy masses bravely.

The slippery fragments that glided past, struck at times both horse and rider, forcing them to swerve down the stream; others were dashed by the whirling eddies against the projecting pieces of rock or roots of old trees; but after twice nearly despairing of achieving the passage, and believing himself lost, his horse trod firmly on the opposite bank. It emerged, panting, snorting, dripping, and trembling in every fibre, from the flood, and then Captain Balgonie found that he had escaped with life, and had safely passed the swollen waters of the Louga!

Leading his sturdy little steed by the bridle and caressing it the while, he made his way up the opposite bank, guided only by the lights in the mansion (or castle); but he proceeded with extreme difficulty, for the underwood was thick and dense as that which grew round the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty; ere long, however, he reached a plateau, the border of a park or lawn, and saw the snow-whitened walls and turrets of the edifice towering before him.

Rising from a balustraded terrace, with an arched porte-cochère in front, the façade was square, and three storied, having a central dome like an inverted punchbowl, and several little angular towers, tall and slender like minarets; these cut the sky-line, and were surrounded each by a broad cornice or gallery, and terminated by a bulbous-shaped roof, exactly like an onion with its acute end in the air.

The lights in its many windows, the red and yellow coloured curtains within, all indicated warmth and comfort; while with the snow flakes freezing on his sodden and saturated uniform, his limbs benumbed, and his teeth well-nigh chattering, Balgonie hastily led his horse under the porte-cochère, and applied his hand vigorously to the great brazen knocker on the front door.

It was speedily opened, and a white-bearded dvornick, or porter, wearing a long flowing shoubah, or coat of fur, lined with red flannel, admitted him with many humble genuflections, at the same time summoning a groom to take charge of his horse.

By the bearing of these lackeys, one might almost have thought that the Captain had been expected, or was a friend of the family: but a uniform has ever been an all-powerful passport, and an epaulette the most mighty of all introductions in Russia, where everything is measured by a military standard; thus, in an incredibly short space of time, the wants of rider and horse were alike hospitably attended to.

CHAPTER II.
THE CASTLE OF LOUGA.

Captain Balgonie, of the Regiment of Smolensko, soon found himself in a comfortable bed-chamber, where the genial glow of a peitchka, or Russian wall-stove, diffused warmth through his chilled frame, and where every current of the external atmosphere was carefully excluded by double window sashes, adorned with artificial flowers between.

When he chose to repose, a couch draped with snow-white curtains, and having a coverlet of the softest fur, awaited him; and above it hung a little holy picture of the Byzantine school, a Holy Virgin, with a halo of shining metal in the form of a horse-shoe round her head, if he chose to be devout and offer up a prayer.

A valet, after supplying him with hot coffee and a good dram of vodka (which somewhat reminded him of his native "mountain dew"), said that the Count, his master, would rejoice to have the pleasure of the visitor's society, after he had made a suitable toilet, and exchanged his wet uniform for a luxurious robe-de-chambre, in the pocket of which he took especial care to secure his dispatch, unseen.

Hospitality such as this, was not merely then a characteristic of the people, but was the result, perhaps, of a meagre population, and the absence of inns; thus the arrival of a stranger, especially an officer on duty, at this Russian mansion, created little or no surprise among its inmates.

He was ushered into the presence of Count Mierowitz, whose name at once inspired him with confidence and satisfaction; for, by one of those singular coincidences "which novelists dare not use in fiction, but which occur daily in actual and matter-of-fact life," he had arrived at a mansion where he was not altogether unknown.

"I have to apologise to your High Excellency for this apparent intrusion," said he; "but I have been misled or abandoned by my guide. I am Captain Balgonie, of the Regiment of Smolensko, and have the good fortune to number among my friends your son, Lieutenant Basil Mierowitz, the senior subaltern of my company."

"For Basil's sake, not less than your own, Captain, are you most welcome to the Castle of Louga," replied the Count, lifting and laying aside his cap.

He was a man well on in years; his stature was not great, neither was his presence dignified; he stooped a little and was thick set, with a venerable beard, undefiled by steel; for, like a true old Muscovite, he contended that man was made in the image of God, and should neither be cut or carved upon. His eyebrows were white, but his eyes were dark, keen, quick, and expressed a spirit of ready impulse, for laughter or for ferocity—one, who by turns could be suave or irritable, especially when under the influence of wine, which generally made him fierce and stupid; for never, in all his life, had he suffered control or had his will disputed.

His silver hair was simply tied behind with a black ribbon; in his hand he carried a little cap of black wolf's fur, adorned by rudely set jewels; he wore a queerly cut coat of dark red cloth trimmed with fur, and wore breeches of the same stuff, and lacked but a dagger and pistols with brass Turkish butts at his girdle, to seem what he really was, in disposition and character, a type of the boyar of the old school, who preferred quass to champagne, ate his pancakes with caviare, and was proud of being a specimen of the old Russian noble, as he existed in the time of Peter the Great, when his class first united some of the vices and luxuries of Western Europe to their native lawlessness and hardy ferocity.

Such was Count Mierowitz.

"When did you last see my son?" he asked, in tone more of authority than of anxious inquiry.

"Some three months since, Excellency: he has been detached on the Livonian frontier."

"And you, Captain—"

"I am proceeding on urgent imperial service from Novgorod where my regiment is stationed in the old palace of the Czars."

"To whither?"

"Schlusselburg."

The host changed countenance and almost manifested signs of discomposure on hearing of that formidable fortress and prison—the veritable Bastille of St. Petersburg, and he said:

"A name to shudder at—by St. Nicholas it is!"

"And, but for the feather in the wax of my dispatch," resumed Balgonie (showing a red government seal in which a piece of feather twitched from a pen was inserted, the usual Russian emblem of speed), "I had not, perhaps, tempted the dangers of the Louga, but sought a billet on the other side, if such could be found."

"You know not, perhaps, that my woods are full of wolves; but this is not the way to St. Petersburg."

"Yet I was so directed, Excellency."

"You have been misled, and are only some seventy versts or so from the place you have left."

"You amaze me, Count," exclaimed the perplexed Captain; for in the Russian service, an error becomes a crime.

"Captain, you should have gone by Gori, Oustensk, Spask, and so on."

"That devil of a Podatchkine, an orderly of General Weymarn, who sent him specially with me, has either deluded or abandoned me."

"Yet we must thank your Podatchkine, in so far that he has procured us the pleasure of your society in this lonely place—my daughter and my niece, Captain Ivanovitch Balgonie," continued the Count, introducing two young ladies who came through the curtains of a species of boudoir, "Natalie and Mariolizza Usakoff. Our visitor, Natalie, is that Ivanovitch Balgonie of whom Basil has spoken so much and so kindly."

Without being a vain man, Balgonie felt at that moment considerable satisfaction in the conviction that he was—as his glass had often informed him—decidedly a good-looking young fellow, with regular features, fine dark eyes, curling brown hair, and a smart moustache; for Natalie Mierowna, like her cousin Mariolizza, was one of the most attractive women at the dangerous Court of the Empress Catharine II.; for it was during her reign that the story and the atrocities we have unfortunately to record took place; when among us, in more civilised Britain, the grandfather of her present Majesty, old George III., was king, and the arts of peace and war grew side by side.

"The friend and comrade of my brother Basil is welcome," said Natalie, presenting her hands (very tiny and delicate they were) to Balgonie, who bowed and touched them lightly with his lips; "he has often written to us concerning you and your adventures together in Silesia."

"I am but too fortunate to be remembered thus."

"Nay," rejoined Natalie, "we could scarcely forget that daring act of yours, which won you the rank you hold at present. Ah, Basil told us all about that when he was last here," she added, with a beautiful smile, of which she knew that many had already felt the power.

"You mean my reconnoitring the enemy's position and avoiding being taken by them?"

"Yes, pray tell me about it?" said Mariolizza, her blue eyes dilating with pleasure; "my brother was there too—Apollo Usakoff, a lieutenant in the Regiment of Valikolutz."

"It was a very simple matter," replied Balgonie, bowing to each of the cousins, and not sorry to have a good personal anecdote to relate of himself, one which was certain to make him appear to advantage in the estimation of two very attractive women. "It was only a ruse de guerre, and occurred when our Regiment of Smolensko was with the combined armies in Silesia, and before the King of Prussia attacked Count Daun at the Heights of Buckersdorff. An exact account of the Austrian position was required by our general, who had not then received the orders of the Empress to fall back upon the Russian frontier. The task was one of extreme peril; so I being a soldier of fortune, having all to win, and nothing to lose——"

"Save your life!" interrupted Natalie.

"One in my position, among a foreign army, must not value that too much," said the Captain, in a tone not untinged with melancholy.

"Well?"

"I volunteered for it, despite all that your son, Count, my friend could say to dissuade me. Well armed, at midnight, I set out upon my solitary mission, unattended and alone, without relinquishing my uniform; for if taken prisoner when otherwise attired, I would infallibly be hanged as a spy; but ere long I found, that in such a dress, there were insuperable difficulties to making the reconnoissance required.

"At the cottage of a Silesian boor, near the base of the Eulanbirge (or mountain of the owls), I stopped to make some inquiries. The fellow proved to be partially tipsy; the contents of my pocket-flask, potent vodka, completed his happy condition, and after a few jests I prevailed upon him to change dresses with me. He donned the green coat, epaulettes, and boots of the Regiment of Smolensko; I, the ample canvas caftan and girdle of a Silesian boor,—a fur cap, and a visage daubed with grime, completed my costume. Thus attired, and retaining only my pistols, I reconnoitred safely and unheeded the Austrian position, noting the defences, trenches, fascine batteries, cannon, and general disposition; but I had a narrow escape, for when returning to the cottage of my new friend the boor, a party of Count Daun's Imperial Cuirassiers, who had been patrolling the Eulanbirge, overtook me, and at once perceiving I was not a Silesian, questioned me rather closely and curiously.

"I succeeded in passing myself off as a Pomeranian, and pointing to the cottage, told them that there was concealed an officer of the famous Regiment of Smolensko. They at once galloped off and surrounded it, while I stole away to a thicket, and climbed into a tree, from whence I could see the poor boor, clad in my uniform, and still labouring under the influence of his late debauch, dragged a prisoner—despite all his bewildered protestations and denials—towards the camp of Count Daun, while I, under cover of night, reached in safety the lines of the allies, and made my report to General Weymarn, then commanding our division of the army.

"It proved of no use to us, as we fell back next day; but it enabled our ally, the King of Prussia, to storm with signal success the Heights of Buckersdorff, to drive back Count Daun, and invest Schwiednitz. He offered me rank in his army; but I declined, on which the Empress sent me the commission of Captain in her Regiment of Smolensko, thus enabling me to rank as a noble of the ninth class."

"May you soon rank as one of the sixth," said the Count, patting the Captain on the shoulder frankly.

"Ah, Excellency, it may be long ere I become a colonel; yet," he added, almost as if talking to himself, "when I got the letter of the Empress addressed to me, Carl Ivanovitch Hospodeen* Balgonie, I could not but smile at the thought of how such a title would have sounded in the ears of my good father, old John Balgonie, of that Ilk!"

* Equivalent to Monsieur or Esquire.

"Let me repeat that you are most welcome," said the Count, who totally failed to understand the meaning of the last remark; "and luckily you have arrived just as the ladies and I were about to proceed to the supper-table."

To Balgonie it had become apparent that each time he mentioned the name of the Empress, the proud pink nostrils of Natalie seemed to dilate, and that a decidedly dangerous expression glittered in her splendid dark eyes.

Natalie Mierowna, whose beauty had caused such jealousy at Moscow and St. Petersburg (two duels are spoken of concerning her), had ever shone brilliantly in the "follow-my-leader" kind of dance, now so well known among us as the Mazurka,—the old Sclavonian measure, in which all succeeding couples have to imitate the motions of the first; and the chief Russian peculiarity of the dance consists still in the circumstance of the ladies selecting their own partners—the brilliant Natalie, we say, having twice sportively, or in a spirit of coquettish bravado, chosen a handsome young aide-de-camp, whom the Empress was supposed to view with favour, led to her abrupt exile from Court, and to the detaching of Captain Vlasfief, of the Imperial Guards, to irksome and secluded duty at the state prison of Schlusselburg. This unmerited affront filled her brother, Basil Mierowitz, with such fiery indignation, that but for the dread of compromising his whole family, he would have cast his commission at the feet of the imperious Catharine, and quitted the Russian army; but flight or exile must at once have followed the act.

As it was, though detached and distant on the Livonian frontier, he was now conceiving a scheme for vengeance, much more perilous to himself and to all concerned, and which actually aimed at the dethronement of the Empress Catharine!

CHAPTER III.
NATALIE.

There are few Russian ladies now, who do not speak with equal facility, German, French, and English; but Natalie Mierowna and her cousin were then each mistress of them all,—and this was in the comparatively barbarous time of Catharine II.

Thus their acquaintance with European literature enabled them to excel in an easy and well-supported conversation of which the old bovar, their kinsman, could make nothing; and which they could embellish by their wit and power of quotation, and with an exquisite finesse d'esprit peculiarly their own. When this dangerous charm was added to the great beauty of Natalie, she could not but prove a perilous acquaintance for the young Scottish wanderer.

Her loveliness was indeed great.

She was a large, showy, and snowy-skinned beauty, almost voluptuous yet very graceful in form, with fine dark eyes, that were dreamy or sparkling by turns as emotion moved her; long-lashed they were, and perhaps too heavily lidded. Her hair was of the darkest brown, almost black; her lips were full, but flexible, small and pouting when in repose, almost too large when she smiled, which was frequently.

It was when she spoke of the Empress, that her white bosom heaved, and a fiery expression seemed to pervade her whole features. She said little, and that little was generally said with assumed gentleness or real reserve, for language cannot be too guarded in Russia; but her dark eyes flashed, her delicate nostrils dilated, her short upper lip quivered, she threw back her proud head, and more than once Balgonie saw her white hands clenched; for all the dove-like softness of her nature seemed to depart, when she thought of the affront that exile from Court had put upon her, and her whole family, even to delaying the marriage of her cousin Mariolizza to her brother Basil, to whom she was engaged—solemnly betrothed by a religious ceremony.

She took the arm of Balgonie, and led the way to the dining-room, which was lit by brilliant crystal girandoles, and heated, of course, by a peitchka, the greatest luxury of civilised life that can be found in a cold climate, and which warms a house more effectually than any grate of coals can do. Built on that side of the large, lofty, and magnificent room which was farthest from the windows, it was formed of solid stone, with several carved apertures, and lined with white shining porcelain; within it, blazed a constant fire of billets and faggots, under the care of the dvornick, or house-porter, and these were furnished by the Count's serfs or woodsmen from the adjacent forests.

All made a sign of the cross in the Greek fashion, and seated themselves; but weary and exhausted by his long ride and recent immersion in a swollen and icy river, Balgonie found it almost impossible to partake of the supper that was pressed upon him: caviare on slices of bread to begin with,—"caviare from the roe of the sturgeons of the Don," as the Count informed him,—roasted capon and jugged hare, dried figs and conserves, prunes, and pastilla of fruit and honey compounded, together with the champagne, Rhine wine, and vodka, in silver tankards and goblets of jewelled Venetian crystal.

The jaded traveller could make only a pretence of eating; but he could drink deeply, for he was athirst; and more than one foaming goblet of sparkling Moselle was filled for him, till he became giddy and confused. Were the fumes of the wine mounting to his head? What was the Count saying in an undertone? Was it of him that the cousins were talking in some strange language, and covertly exchanging smiles with their beautiful eyes? "Courage, Charlie," thought he, "this is a bad beginning!"

Though people were not very particular as to a bumper more or less in those days anywhere, in Russia least of all, an emotion of shame came over the young Scottish, officer; he felt his cheeks and forehead burn, and he made a vigorous effort to rally his senses, but in vain: he heard the voices of Natalie and of Mariolizza; but he knew not what they said or what he replied, for he felt as one in a half-waking dream. They were talking merrily, however, in French, which is always spoken well by the Russians; perhaps because the tongue that can master Russ may achieve anything.

After a time he mustered sufficient energy and sense to beg that he might be permitted to retire, as he had his journey to resume betimes on the morrow; and he was escorted to his chamber by the Count in person. Its four corners seemed to be in rapid pursuit of each other now, and the floor and the ceiling to be incessantly changing places; then his senses reeled, and the light departed from his eyes. He found himself fainting.

The sudden and rapid journey from Novgorod, the lack of food and the toil he had undergone for one night and two entire days, while wandering with the treacherous Podatchkine, the crossing of the Louga, and the bruises he had unconsciously received from several pieces of floating ice, had all proved too much for his system, and brought on a relapse of an old camp fever from which he had suffered once when serving with the army in Silesia,—and in the morning he was delirious.

Though weak, bewildered, scared by the prospect of loitering thus when proceeding on urgent duty (for obedience and discipline become a second nature to the soldier), enduring a raging thirst and a burning pang that shot with each pulsation through his brain, stiff in every joint and covered with livid bruises, he had still strength left as dawning day stole through the double sashes of his windows, to stagger from bed, and search for the dispatch, which, on the hazard of his life, he was to place in the hands of Bernikoff, the Governor of Schlusselburg.

He hurriedly, and with a tremor that increased, examined each of his pockets in succession, then his sabretasche, and lastly the pocket of the robe-de-chambre; but the dispatch—the dispatch of the Empress—entrusted to him as a chosen man by Lieutenant-General Weymarn was gone!

Lost, or abstracted, it was irretrievably gone!

Was he the victim of treachery or of a snare? Was it a dream that the voluptuous and beautiful Natalie, with her snowy skin, her dreamy eyes, and her fascinating smile, had been hovering about him—a dream or a reality?

Alas! he knew not; for again the walls and windows were whirling round him in wild career, and he sank on the floor insensible.

Poor Charlie Balgonie knew not that the morning on which he made this alarming discovery was that of the second day since his arrival at the Castle of Louga.

CHAPTER IV.
CORPORAL PODATCHKINE.

Scarcely had Charlie Balgonie achieved the passage of the Louga, and, in the dark, forced his panting horse up the wooded bank towards the lighted windows of the castle, than his guide and orderly, Corporal Michail Podatchkine, who, for reasons which were his own, and which shall ultimately be explained, had decoyed him many, many versts to the southward of his proper route and then abandoned him, while he still cautiously followed, and watched him plunge into the perilous stream—watched him in the hope that he might perish in its icy current; Corporal Podatchkine, we say, had barely seen that the officer's safety was certain and assured, than he turned his horse's head, and with a hoarse malediction on his bearded mouth, rode away in an opposite direction.

The lighted windows of the Castle of Louga soon darkened and vanished in his rear; the snow-flakes came thicker and faster on the icy blast, whitening his round bearskin cap and fur shoubah or cloak, and the untrimmed mane of his shaggy little horse; but with his long lance slung behind him, his knees up to his saddle-bow, and his fierce, keen eyes peering out the way before him, the amiable Podatchkine, who, though a Livonian by birth, had the honour to hold the rank of corporal in a corps of Cossacks, rode on through the dense fir forest as unerringly as if every tree therein had been planted by his own warlike hands.

Ere long, with a grunt of satisfaction, he struck upon a track that led to the right and left, and he unhesitatingly pursued the latter. There were then none of those verst-posts, about ten feet high or so, such as may now be found by the side of the Russian roads through the forests, or along the open steppe; but Podatchkine rode steadily on, pausing only now and then to unsling and grasp his spear, or give a fierce gleaming glance around him, while the nostrils of his thick snub-nose dilated, when a prolonged and melancholy howl, rising from the woody depths into the chill drear sky of night, announced that some wolf was rousing itself in its lair among the grass, or in its den beside the river.

Anon he came to a place where the forest was partially cleared, and there stood a little hut built of squared logs. The walls of this edifice were whitened artificially; but the roof was rendered whiter still by a coat of the fast-freezing snow. A single ray of smoky light streamed from the opening (which passed for a window) near the door, on which Podatchkine, without dismounting, struck three blows with the butt of his lance.

"Nicholas Paulovitch," he exclaimed, "are you within?"

The door was soon unfastened, and thereat appeared a figure, not unlike an Esquimaux, bearing a pine torch. He was a man of great stature and muscular development, clad in a caftan of coarse, thick, and warm material, girt by a broad belt in which a long and rusty knife was stuck; he had on bark shoes and long leggings of sheepskin, which, like Bryan O'Linn's breeches, had "the skinny side out and the hairy side in;" and he cultivated one long lock of grizzled hair behind his right ear in the old fashion of the Black Cossacks; but this appendage was concealed by the hood and tippet of fur which he wore. This man, however, did not belong to any of the nomadic military tribes, but was a species of Russian gipsy, a half-breed.

He held up the pine torch, and its flaring light tipped with a lurid, weird, and uncertain glow his fierce, tawny, and repulsive visage, causing his cunning and almond-shaped eyes to gleam redly, like two carbuncles, from under their thick and impending brows, which were nearly as shaggy as the moustache that blended with his greasy and uncombed beard; and in the same light the head of Podatchkine's lance and the hafts of his sabre, dagger, and pistols glittered at times, being the only bright parts of his remarkably dingy costume.

"Is it you, Michail Podatchkine—and alone?" he asked surlily.

"Yes; even so, alone. Dost think I have the evil eye about me that you stare so, Nicholas Paulovitch?"

"God forbid!" replied Nicholas with a shudder, for this idea is the grossest and the greatest of all Russian superstitious; "but I expected two—yourself and another."

"Who told you so?"

"Olga Paulowna, my sister, who yesterday saw you at Krejko."

"True, I remember. Now listen, old friend and comrade——"

"Hush, the girl is within and may hear you."

"Well," said Podatchkine, lowering his voice, while the other extinguished his torch, half closed the door of his hut, and drew nearer the speaker, "by order of General Weymarn, Governor of St. Petersburg, General of the Cavalry, Director-General of the Canals, Bridges, and Highways——"

"And the devil knows all what more!" said the other impatiently. "Well?"

"I am ordered to guide this Carl Ivanovitch Balgonie, who is a stranger, to the gates of Schlusselburg, as he bears to Bernikoff a dispatch of importance; but I have been promised a heavy sum——"

"Ah! how much say you?"

"I have said nothing yet."

"But you spoke of a heavy sum."

"Two hundred silver roubles."

"Two hundred silver roubles!" exclaimed Nicholas, opening his avaricious eyes with wonder, and then closing them again, so that they looked like two narrow slits.

"Yes, every denusca, if I, by fair means or by foul, prevent the delivery of that paper into the hands of old Bernikoff."

"He whose dagger tickled the throat of Peter III.: and by whom are you offered this, friend Podatchkine?"

"I can trust you: well, by the Lieutenant Apollo Usakoff."

"The grandson of the Hetman Mazeppa!"

"The same; and by Basil Mierowitz——"

"Well, and what the devil have I to do with all this?" growled the half-breed.

"Much: fifty roubles will be yours, Paulovitch, if you will assist me," said Podatchkine in a husky whisper.

"Let us talk over this: dismount, and come in."

"Nay, there is Olga Paulowna: then I have other work to do; but give me a drink, for I am sorely athirst."

The other speedily brought him a painted bowl full of foamy quass, which the Cossack Corporal, for so we may term him, drained to the dregs; though it is a liquor, to any but a Russian, horrible as the water of Cocytus.

"Let us be wary, friend Podatchkine," said the woodman: "the knout is not an angel, but it teaches us to tell the truth alike of ourselves and of others."

Refreshed by his bitter draught, the Corporal shook the gathering snow-flakes from the sleeves of his fur shoubah, and resumed somewhat garrulously:

"My next instructions are, that the dispatch, which is from the Empress herself (whom God and our Lady of Kazan long preserve!), and which bears the imperial seal, shall never be delivered; but must be obtained by me for Basil Mierowitz and the Lieutenant Usakoff, now detached upon the Livonian frontier, and who both know as little as I care, that its bearer is actually their own dearest and most valued friend! I misled the Hospodeen Balgonie, lured him to the river's brink, and left him there, in the hope that he and his horse might become frozen on the steppe or in the forest, where I could rob him at ease; but the man seems made of iron, and, to my astonishment, I saw him swim the Louga. I thought all gone, he, the dispatch, and my 200 roubles, when he plunged his horse into the river; but he stoutly won the opposite bank, and has made his way straight to the dwelling of Count Mierowitz, where now, I doubt not, he is safely housed."

"It seems to me, friend Podatchkine, that you took a great deal of useless trouble when you had your dagger and pistols," said the other, suspiciously.

"Nay, if he was to perish thus, suspicion might too readily fall upon me, for he is a favourite officer of the Empress, and of Weymarn too. My plan is this: I may get the dispatch to-night in yonder castle of Count Mierowitz."

"And if not?"

"Then I shall again lure and mislead Balgonie, and bring him here in the night."

"What then?" asked the woodman doggedly.

"How dull we are, Paulovitch. We shall drug and drown him; thus shall he die without a wound. I will take back the dispatch to Novgorod; and you can carry the body on his horse to St. Petersburg, where a sum will be given you for finding it. The poor stranger, they will say, has perished amid our keen Russian frosts, and that will be all. Nicholas Paulovitch, the carcass will be well worth twenty roubles to thee."

"And thy fifty?"

"You shall receive when the affair is over, and when you come to me at Novgorod, where I am quartered."

"By the bones of my tribe, and by the sword that flames in the hand of the holy Michail, I am with you, Podatchkine!" exclaimed the half-breed with ferocious joy, mingling his gipsy cant with that of the Russian church. Then they shook heartily their hard and dingy hands—hands that had wrought many a deed of merciless cruelty.

"And now, Paulovitch, give me a light for my pipe, and let me begone."

A few minutes more and these worthy compatriots had separated.

Podatchkine rode somewhat leisurely to a ford that he knew of lower down the river, believing that in time the whole onus, and perhaps suspicion, of Balgonie's death (if it was necessary) might fall on the woodman, whom he had resolved to cheat of the promised fifty roubles if he could.

"He will play me false," muttered Podatchkine. "Is not the dog a gipsy? Beware of the tamed wolf, of the baptized Jew, and the enemy who has made it up; why should I not delude him who will readily delude me?"

Our enterprising Corporal was correct in his estimate of Nicholas Paulovitch; for, at the same moment, that personage, while wrapped in his filthy sheepskin (caring nothing for the comfort of any other bed than the floor), was considering how he might drug and drown both the officer and his treacherous guide, sell both their bodies at the nearest military post, and, by taking the dispatch to Novgorod himself, obtain the entire reward offered for it by the Lieutenants Mierowitz and Usakoff, or still more, perhaps, by delivering it to the Empress!

There was a third person who had overheard the first savage plot, and who felt her heart stirred with pity and terror for Balgonie, who had given her a silver kopec at Krejko but yesterday,—the gipsy girl, Olga Paulowna, the sister of Nicholas Paulovitch; and she resolved to baffle both conspirators if she could.

It was in perfect ignorance of who might be the bearer of that dispatch (with the contents of which a spy had acquainted them) that the two officers, who were then engaged in an extensive and dangerous political and military conspiracy, contrived to have Podatchkine, in the character of a guide and orderly, sent upon the trail of one who was really their most valued friend and comrade; though, as a foreigner and soldier of fortune, they deemed it proper to keep him as yet in total ignorance of their daring hopes and plans.

CHAPTER V.
THE DAGGER OF BERNIKOFF.

It may now be necessary to afford the reader a little historical insight as to what it was that hinged on this important dispatch of the Scottish officer, Balgonie.

When the Emperor Peter II. died of smallpox (just on the eve of his marriage), closing a short reign of three years of stormy trouble and dark intrigue, the whole male issue of Peter the Great of Russia became extinct.

The Duke of Holstein, son of his eldest daughter, was entitled to the throne; but the Russians, for certain cogent political reasons, filled that perilous seat with Anne, Duchess of Courland, daughter of Ivan, Peter's eldest brother. Governed by her favourite Biron, on whom she bestowed the duchy of Courland, she broke through all the limits which growing civilisation had imposed upon the power of the Czars; she engaged in many useless wars, lost vast treasures and more than a hundred thousand men in strife with the Turks, and closing an inglorious reign, was succeeded by one who will shortly be introduced to the reader, Ivan Antonovitch, or John IV., son of her niece, the Princess of Mechlenburg, an infant only six months old. This Princess sent Biron, the Regent, to the usual place of Muscovite seclusion, Siberia, and assumed the administratorship during the minority of her son.

This state of affairs was but of short duration when Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, having a strong party, seized the crown, banished the entire family of Mechlenburg, and deposing the infant monarch, Ivan IV., confined him for life a prisoner of state in the great Castle of Schlusselburg, where he had been for twenty-three years, at the period when our narrative opens.

To mention him in conversation, and still more to possess a coin bearing his effigy, incurred the guilt and insured the punishment of treason! More than twenty years after the deposition of this transitory emperor, a German tradesman, who had worked long as a cabinet-maker at St. Petersburg, went to Cronstadt, intending then to embark for his native city, Lubeck. As it was not permitted to carry out of Russia above a certain quantity of specie, an officer of customs asked the German "what he had with him?" "Only a few roubles to pay for my passage," he replied; and on being commanded to show them, one was discovered having the effigy of Ivan IV! In vain did the unhappy tradesman protest that he neither knew he had such a coin, nor from whom he had received it. Death was the penalty; but his goods were confiscated, and he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the mines of Siberia.

The Empress Elizabeth died the victim of intemperance; and while poor Prince Ivan, an uncrowned emperor, a prisoner without a crime, was left to pine in the Castle of Schlusselburg, the sceptre was given to the feeble and dissipated Peter III., the husband of the beautiful, voluptuous, and talented Catharine II., daughter of a petty prince, but descended from the ancient house of Servestan,—a woman whom, in three short months after their coronation, he contrived to disgust by his political innovations, and still more by his amatory inconstancy; so it was resolved to get rid of Peter, who was then in his thirty-fourth year.

Peter I. had nearly lost Russia by compelling the people to cut off the tails of their coats; and Peter III. became equally unpopular by ordering them to trim their vast beards, and by putting his troops in the Prussian uniform. Crowned heads should leave such matters to tailors and tonsors; but he certainly abolished the secret tribunal with its contingent horrors, and recalled many a poor exile from Siberia.

A party was formed for his dethronement; so one evening in July, 1762, when he was surrounded by his guard of Holsteiners, and amusing himself with his flower gardens (he was a great botanist), and with some of his beautiful mistresses at the palace of Orienbaum,—particularly the Countess of Woronzow, to whose allurements he had abandoned himself,—the exasperated Empress prepared to strike a final blow for Russia and for herself.

Putting on a uniform of old Russian Guards belonging to her future favourite, Captain Vlasfief, with the most coquettish grace, this young and beautiful, but in some respects terrible, woman borrowed from the nobles around her all the accessories of a complete military toilette: of Basil Mierowitz, a hat; of Count Orloff, a scarf; of Colonel Bernikoff, a belt; of some one else, a sword. Over all, she wore the blue ribbon of the first order of the Empire, which her impolitic husband had laid aside for that of Prussia.

The drums beat to arms: in this strange guise she showed herself to the troops, who were now mustered to the number of twenty thousand men in the great square of St. Petersburg, where the sight of the uniform of the old guard, which had been forced to give place to Peter's cherished Holsteiners, raised bursts of acclamation, quite as much as the appearance of Catharine, who was then "in the full flower of her robust beauty, perfectly elegant in figure, and purely feminine from her shoulders to her feet, which were remarkably handsome, and of which she was very proud." Her nose was aquiline, her eyes blue with black lashes, and her hair, a brilliant auburn, was curling on her shoulders. Thus has an eyewitness described her.

The regiments began to file off against the Emperor, and little knowing the end of the expedition, among the troops on this night marched Charlie Balgonie, with the colours of the Regiment of Smolensko on his shoulder.

Everywhere the rebellious Empress was received with enthusiasm, and the Great Chancellor Woroslaff, who was sent against her, was among the first to join her party.

The Emperor, abandoning his flowers and his fair ones, fled to his yacht or galley, which was rowed to Cronstadt, of which his enemy, the High Admiral Talizine, had already made himself master. The imperial galley (relates M. Rulhière in his "Histoire sur la Révolution de Russie") came under the ramparts in the night, while the great alarm bells rung, the drums were beaten and scarlet rockets ascended in showers from the dark mass of the Castle of Kronslot; and then, all along the line of fortifications, Peter saw two hundred port-fires shedding their weird unearthly glare through the yawning embrasures upon the twilight sea and sky—each port-fire beside a loaded cannon—loaded against himself!

This was at ten o'clock; but ere the great oars of the galley were laid in, or the anchor dropped, a sentinel challenged:

"Who comes there?"

"His Imperial Majesty the Emperor," replied the Captain of the galley, who was standing on its gilded prow.

"There is no longer any Emperor!" was the stern reply of some one on the ramparts.

"'Tis false! I am here—I, Peter Antonovitch," said the Emperor, growing pale at these daring and terrible words, as he stood up and threw back his cloak to show himself and his well-known Prussian star, by the clear, lingering twilight of the northern evening.

"Sheer off," shouted the Admiral Talizine, "or, by our Lady of Kazan, I will fire on you!"

"We are going—give us but time," cried the Captain hopelessly, through his speaking-trumpet.

At that moment a thousand voices on the ramparts shouted on the still twilight air—

"Long live the Empress Catharine II.!"

On hearing this, Peter burst into tears, and fell back into the arms of his attendants, saying—

"The conspiracy is general—from the first days of my short reign I have seen it coming!"

He was soon after abandoned by all, even by his obnoxious Holstein Guards, who surrendered to the Regiments of Smolensko and Valikolutz; and then he was committed by his wife, prisoner of state, to the Castle of Robsch, in a solitary place, eighteen miles from St. Petersburg. Six days afterwards had only elapsed, when it was suggested that though young Ivan was still lingering a captive at Schlusselburg, and some were not without hopes of replacing him on the throne, tranquillity could not be perfectly restored while Peter lived, though lonely and abandoned now.

His wife's lovers and favourites came to this decision speedily; so late one afternoon, three horsemen arrived at the residence of the fallen Emperor. They were Count Orloff, who had in his breast a laced handkerchief of the Empress, the grim Colonel Bernikoff, and a Hospodeen or gentleman, who announced that they had come to sup with him; and, according to the Russian fashion, glasses of brandy were served round before they sat down.

In that given to the Emperor was poison.

Whether, adds the historian we quote, they were in haste to carry back their dark tidings, or whether the horror of the deed made them anxious to finish it, none can know; but to hasten their terrible work, they insisted on giving him another glass.

Already the subtle poison was diffusing itself through the vitals of the unhappy Emperor; and now, struck by the pallor of their faces and the ferocious expression of their eyes, he started back, refused the proffered glass, and despairingly summoned assistance.

They then flung themselves upon him, and Count Orloff, pulling from his breast the handkerchief he had concealed there, threw it over the mouth of Peter, to gag him and stifle his cries. He was dashed again and again to the floor, where he defended himself against his assassins with all the fury that terror of death and despair could inspire.

Two young officers of the guard now rushed in, and, as the orders of all were to slay Peter without a wound, they knotted the handkerchief round his neck to strangle him, while the Count pressed his knees upon his breast.

Still the dying Emperor struggled so fearfully that the ferocious Bernikoff, losing all patience, plunged a dagger into his throat; and thus, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled, he expired without further resistance.

A few hours after this, pale, dishevelled, and covered with blood, dust, and perspiration, with torn garments and disturbed bearing, Count Orloff appeared before the Empress. "She arose in silence," says M. Rulhière, "and passed into an inner room, whither he followed her. Some minutes after, she called Count Panin, who was already named her minister, and informed him that the Emperor was dead, and consulted with him upon the mode of announcing his demise to the people."

It was given out that he had died a natural death.

The wound inflicted by Bernikoff's dagger was carefully sewed up; the orifice was neatly covered by a piece of gold-beater's skin; and the body, in an old green regimental coat, with four wax candles as a funeral state, was exposed for three days to the people. The Russians were permitted to wear their beards; the Empress poured out her afflictions in a ukase, and offered up her prayers, as became a widow, in the church of our holy Lady of Kazan.

And it was in the service of this charming people,

"——this new and polished nation,
Whose names want nothing but pronounciation,"

—a people, who, in the arts of peace, were little better than the Scots when James I. was butchered in the Black Friary at Perth, or the men of "Merry England" when her crook-backed Dick was smothering the royal babies in the Tower—that, by an adverse fate, our hero found himself a soldier of fortune, when, as before stated, old George III. was King of the British Isles, and "the first gentleman in Europe" was a sinless infant on his mother's knee.

After Peter was laid in his grave, and Catharine was firmly seated on his throne, her conduct was cautious and judicious, and, as even her enemies admitted, at times magnanimous; yet frightful atrocities were committed during her reign when she degenerated into ferocity and debauchery.

The captivity of the young and innocent Ivan in Schlusselburg, in charge of the unscrupulous Bernikoff, Captain Vlasfief, and a Lieutenant named Tschekin—three officers in whom Catharine had implicit reliance—seemed more hopeless now than ever when the sceptre was in her firm grasp.

Now that Peter was disposed of, her only dread consisted in the chance of Ivan's escape; so his guards were doubled, and her orders to Bernikoff concerning him were to ensure his detention even by death if necessary: and it was concerning this very dread that Captain Charles Balgonie was proceeding with a dispatch from Novgorod, where Catharine, with some of her favourites and courtiers, was residing for a time in the ancient palace of the Czars.

CHAPTER VI.
THE PALATINE.

Corporal Podatchkine was an admirable specimen of his own type of Russian,—one who was more afraid of neglecting Lent than of murdering his fellow-being, especially if that fellow-being was a foreigner; "for," saith M. L'Abbé Chappe at this time, "they do not reckon foreigners among the number of their brethren."

His thick black scrubby hair was cut straight across the forehead in a line with the eyebrows, and at each side it hung perpendicularly down below the ears, in the old Russian and Mediæval fashion, and was, moreover, cut square across the neck behind, just as the English wore theirs in the days of Richard III.; and he kept alternately scratching and smoothing his rugged front, nervously and assiduously, when he removed his fur Cossack cap; and, full of affected concern, even to exhibiting tears in his small cunning eyes, presented himself, through the bribed auspices of the dvornick, to Natalie Mierowna next morning, and besought her to have him "conducted to the chamber of his brave, his beloved Captain, his comrade and brother, who was, he now learned, seriously ill, helpless, and delirious,"—and, in fact, just as the cunning Corporal wished him to be.

There he found Balgonie, certainly too ill and weak either to recognise him or understand what he was about; so the faithful Cossack made a rapid and skilful investigation of all the officer's pockets, and especially his sabretasche, for the dispatch.

Not a vestige of it was to be found.

"What the devil can he have done with it?" muttered the bewildered Corporal, as he thought of his 200 silver roubles; "can he have lost it in the river, or swallowed it?"

The truth is, that Natalie Mierowna had her doubts about the fidelity of Podatchkine, and even of some of her own domestics, and aware of the risk run by the stranger if he lost a dispatch of the Empress, she had, prior to the introduction of the Corporal, secured the document, and at that moment it was hidden in her own fair bosom until she could secure it in a safer place.

In her bosom! Poor Natalie! Alas, she little knew its contents, and the horrors they were yet to produce!

Baffled thus in his attempt to secure it, there was no resource for the faithful warrior of the steppes now but to take up his quarters, which he was nothing loth to do, at the Castle of the Louga, and there quietly and comfortably to smoke his pipe by the kitchen stove; await the recovery or the death, he cared not which, of Balgonie; and to concert further measures with the huge gipsy, Nicholas Paulovitch, whom he saw daily.

It was no feverish dream of Balgonie that Natalie Mierowna had been hovering about his bedside; for she and her cousin Mariolizza had been his especial nurses.

In less than three days the feverish delirium subsided, sense completely returned, and the young Captain appeared to be labouring only under a species of influenza. A cold, as we understand that homely but troublesome kind of ailment in foggy Britain, is almost unknown in the latitude of St. Petersburg. "It is," says Dr. Granville, "indigenous to England, and, above all, to London;" yet we fear Balgonie had a most unromantic and unmistakable cold, consequent on his immersion in the icy Louga, together with an aguish shivering, which rendered the quitting of his couch, and betaking himself to the saddle, as yet quite impossible.

Balgonie had an insatiable thirst: he had visions of iced champagne; but in lieu, got only tea-punch, if we may so call it, being tea in the fashion still taken by the Russians (who hold that milk spoils it), with a slice of lemon or preserved fruit; and as he got stronger, Katinki, a strapping Polish damsel with fine black eyes, who was Natalie's own particular follower, added thereto a dash of rum and then tsvetochay, or flowery tea, with cakes, which the Captain seemed to relish all the more when he understood them to be made by the white hands of Natalie: an appreciation which showed a decided improvement in that young officer's health. But—

"My dispatch," he frequently said aloud,—"I must be gone with my dispatch!"

"Might it not be entrusted to the Corporal Podatchkine?" asked Natalie one morning, as she personally gave him his warm and soothing drink with her own hand, Katinka standing demurely by with a silver salver.

"Impossible, Hosphoza, for so I may call you: an officer alone can carry a dispatch of the Empress. Its contents are most urgent: this delay, over which I have no control, may be visited by royal disfavour, even punishment; and I fear that the air of Tobolsk or Irkutsk would ill suit a Scotsman's lungs, Natalie Mierowna."

"Yet tarry here you must," said she, with a smile, the beauty of which proved very bewildering: "the Louga is coated with ice this morning, but not so thick, however, that it might not be broken by throwing a five-kopec piece from here; but to travel yet would only kill you, Carl Ivanovitch, and cannot be thought of just now."

Then as she glided away, with her beaming smile, her white hands and taper arms, her rustling dress of scarlet silk trimmed with snowy miniver, and all the sense of perfume that pervaded her, Balgonie sighed wearily yet pleasantly, and half thought that beautiful figure a dream, as he turned on his soft and luxurious pillow, and marvelled whether his past or his present existence was the real one.

A captain in the ducal Regiment of Smolensko and not yet twenty-five! Same ten years ago, his future seemed to point to a very different course of life.

Far from Russian steppes and icy streams, their forests and barbarity, his mind had been wandering home to Britain's happier shore; and he might have said with the Bard who sang the "Course of Time,"—

"Nor do I of that Isle remember aught,
Of prospect more sublime and beautiful,
Than Scotia's northern battlement of hills,
Which first I from my father's house beheld,
At dawn of life; beloved in memory still,
And standard yet of rural imagery."

His story is a brief one, and not very startling, save for its rapid career of injustice.

Charles Balgonie, son of John Balgonie of that Ilk in Strathearn, had come into the world during that which was perhaps the most stupid, lifeless, and impoverished era of Scottish existence, the middle of the reign of George II.; when the country was without trade, energy, or enterprise, and when nothing flourished save that which prospers there more than ever even under the rule of her present Majesty, and will do so apparently unto the end of time,—gloomy fanaticism and canting hypocrisy: more among the laity certainly, who make a trade and cloak of outward religion, than among the clergy, who dare not be liberal, even if so disposed; for without a public and noisy exhibition of sanctity, few have ever had much chance of place or profit north of the Tweed.

Moreover, Charlie was born at a time when to be a Scotsman or an Irishman was almost a political crime in the eyes of their somewhat illiberal fellow-subjects, and when for either to attain eminence in the service of their native country was nearly an impossibility; and hence the Scots crowded to the armies and fleets of Russia and Holland, and the Irish to those of France and Spain.

By the early death of his parents, Charlie had been cast, in his extreme boyhood, upon the tender mercies of a bachelor uncle, Mr. Gamaliel Balgonie, a hard-hearted, grasping and avaricious merchant in Dundee—one who was a noisy exhibitor of religion, a fervent expounder of crooked texts, and, of course, an Elder of the Kirk; a great quoter of Scripture upon unnecessary occasions; one who always wore garments of sad-coloured broad cloth, with a spotless white cravat, and whose quavering voice and meek but cunning eyes were frequently uplifted against the enormities, the wickedness, and "the temptawtions and tribulawtions of this weary world;" and who was, moreover, a vehement despiser of that which he stigmatized as "its wretched dross," but which he left no means, fair or foul, untried to acquire.

In the lovely vale of Strathearn—one of the most exquisite tracts of verdant scenery in Scotland—stood the home of Charlie Balgonie. In his delirium, the present had fled, and the past returned. He had been a boy again at his father's knee—a child with his curly head nestling on his smiling mother's breast; again, in fancy, had her kisses rested on his cheek, and her soft voice lingered lovingly in his ear; again had he felt all that happiness, perfect trust, and security which the boy feels by his father's hearth, and the man, in after life, never more!

He heard not the hoarse Louga crashing down its ice-blocks to the Baltic Sea; but the gentle murmur of the Earn, flowing from the wooded hills of Comrie towards the broad blue bosom of the Tay—the Earn, where many a time and oft he had lured the brown trout and the speckled salmon from the deep, dark pools, near the old battle-cross of Dupplin and the Birks of Invermay. Again he had heard the leaves rustle pleasantly in the summer woods, where he had nutted and birdnested when a boy; and he had seen, in a vivid dream, his glorious native valley where it narrows at Dunira; and far beyond, the blue ridges of the mighty Grampians, lifting their summits, alp on alp, to the clouds, eternal and unchanged as when the foiled legions of Julius Agricola fled along their slopes in rout and disorder.

On the death of his parents his small paternal estate of a few hundreds per annum would have become, as all might have supposed, his inheritance; but the relation before mentioned—the paternal uncle, Gamaliel, a man of the strictest probity, and of that which was equally valued in Scotland, extreme sanctimony; one who, on the funeral day, had shed abundance of tears at the uncertainty of life, and had excelled even the minister in prayer and "in warsling wi' the diel" (i.e., wrestling with Satan)—suddenly produced a will, by which, to the profound astonishment of all, the entire estate was left to him as a return for certain loans and sums advanced to the deceased, of which, however, no proof could be found; but it was a veritable death-bed will, written accurately by a notary, and duly signetted with the autograph of "John Balgonie of yt Ilk."

Though tremulous and shaky,—strangely so,—and rather unlike the usual signature of the deceased laird, three men there were, accounted good, worthy, and religious men, who solemnly deposed to having seen "the hand of the dead man pen those four words."

It was a case which made some noise in those days, because thirty-six hours after the alleged signature was given John Balgonie died.

The law of Scotland requires that, after framing and signing such a deed, the testator must have been able to go once at least to church or market. How it came to pass we know not now, but the dispute, though without a basis, was brought before the Supreme Court by some friends of the orphan, for there were not a few persons in Strathearn who alleged that John Balgonie's hand had certainly traced the signature which was sworn to so solemnly as his,—but had done so after death: the pen being placed in the fingers of the corpse, which were guided by those of the pious and worthy merchant of Dundee, who wanted his nephew's little patrimony in aid of certain speculations of his own.

Pending a decision, the bereaved boy was removed to the busy town on Tay side, and was left to solace his sorrows at school, prior, as he supposed, to becoming a drudge in his affectionate uncle's counting-house, when the last of his slender inheritance had been frittered away in the fangs of the law.

One day—poor Charlie never forgot it—his worthy Uncle Gam returned from Edinburgh by the packet. The case had been decided against him, and the Court was about to name trustees to look after the estate of the orphan boy: so that boy learned long after. Mr. Gamaliel Balgonie was unusually grave, stern, and abstracted; but he deliberately seated himself at his desk, and while humming, as was his wont, a verse of a psalm, he penned a letter addressed to the captain of a vessel then lying in the harbour, and gave it to his nephew for immediate delivery, desiring him to wait for the answer.

Charlie remarked that Uncle Gam did not, according to his usual careful custom, keep any copy of this letter, and that it was written in a hand so unlike his usual penmanship as to be completely disguised.

The boy, then in his fifteenth year, started on his errand with alacrity. It was better to be out amid the bustle of the sunlighted quays, than drudging with a quill in the sombre merchant's office in a narrow gloomy alley of Dundee. He soon found the ship, which was moored at some distance from the shore, with her fore-topsails loose, and blue-peter flying at the fore, to indicate that she was ready for sea; yet Charlie had no suspicion of the trap into which he was running, or the cruel fate that awaited him.

The skipper, a rough, surly, and brutal-looking man, eyed the boy keenly, while tearing the letter into minute fragments, after he had perused it, with a grim smile of satisfaction. He then went to a locker, where he poured out a glass of something that seemed to be port-wine.

"Drink that, my lad," said he, "while I write an answer to your uncle."

Charlie, half afraid to refuse, though the skipper's bearing began to inspire him with distrust, drained the glass; but scarcely had he done so when the cabin seemed to be whirling round him; he thought that he was becoming sea-sick, and was in the act of staggering towards the cabin stairs, when he was felled to the floor by a blow from the skipper's heavy hand—a blow dealt cruelly and unsparingly.

He recovered consciousness some time after, to find himself stiff, sore, and bloody from a wound in the temple, lying on deck in the moonlight, with some twenty-five other boys, several of whom were still in the same state of stupor or intoxication in which they had been brought on board. Others were loudly lamenting their parents and brothers or sisters they never more would see, and all were more or less covered with blows and bruises. To his horror and dismay, Charlie now found that the ship was at sea, and running between the dangerous reef known as the Bell Rock and the flat sandy shore of Barrie, and that, through the machinations of Uncle Gamaliel, he had been lured into the hands of one of the most notorious plantation-crimps that ever infested the Scottish coast, Captain Zachariah Coffin of New England, whose craft, a palatine ship, the Piscatona, was a letter of marque, carrying twelve six-pounders and fighting her own way.

Many miserable little fellows who had been lured to a certain den in Aberdeen, and there drugged, robbed, and manacled, were brought on board the palatine ship as she lay off Girdleness and burned three red lights, in the night, as a private and concerted signal with the crimps ashore: and some of these same crimps were discovered, in after years, to have actually been the magistrates of the city!

After this, the Piscatona was hauled up, in order to go north about by Cape Wrath, having on board nearly fifty boys, who were to be sold as slaves to the highest bidder in Virginia, for nowhere was the infamous crime of kidnapping carried to a greater excess, even during the early years of George the Third's reign, than in the neighbourhood of the Granite City, where, in some instances, whole families disappeared, and their horror-stricken and bewildered parents died broken-hearted and insane.

Among the little Palatines—a name given by Americans to individuals who were thus kidnapped—some there were who pined and wept for home; and some who built castles in the air, and looked to America as a land of promise. Others there were who schemed out vengeance, and were sullen. Among the latter was our hero, who hoped yet to repay his wrongs on Uncle Gam, but meanwhile was knocked about mercilessly by the sullen skipper, and was so repeatedly rope's-ended by him, that he was often a mass of blood and bruises; and then, like a poor little victim, as he certainly was, Charlie would creep away into a corner, or skulk between the lee-carronades, where the salt spray flew over him, and mingled with the tears he wept so unavailingly, for those once tender and affectionate parents who were lying side by side in their graves, in sunny Strathearn, far, far away.

Many times, after being beaten cruelly, he was deprived of food for hours and put in the bilboes, where the captain amused himself by hunting a savage dog upon him.

But his time of vengeance was coming!

Storms came on when the Piscatona entered the Pentland Firth; and four days after Dunnet Head with its flinty brow, four hundred feet in height, had vanished into the wrack and mist astern, a sudden cry of fire caused every heart to thrill on board the lawless vessel.

Whether an act of treachery or not, it was impossible to ascertain; but it had broken out near the ship's magazine, to which it communicated with frightful rapidity; for suddenly, while the crew were all running fore and aft with buckets, a dreadful explosion seemed to rend the Piscatona in two. Half of the main-deck was blown away with two of the boats. A whirlwind of fragments flew in every direction; and then the flames shot into the air in scorching volumes, which soon set the courses and topgallant sails on fire.

Discipline, or such a system of it as Zachariah Coffin maintained on board, was totally at an end. Some of the crew lowered the only remaining boat, and fought like wild beasts for possession of it, knocking each other into the water without mercy. Captain Coffin cocked his pistols at the gangway, shot one man dead, and swore with a dreadful oath that he would kill the next who dared to precede him; but he was struck from behind by an iron marline-spike, and falling together with his savage dog into the flaming gulf that yawned amidships, was seen no more.

Some of the crew ultimately pushed off in the boat; others sprang overboard and held on to spars and booms; but these and nearly all the little Palatines perished miserably, after being half scorched. Some were crushed to death by the falling yards and masts. Many held on to the fore and main chains, till these became so unbearably hot, that they had to drop off, with screams of despair, when they sank, faint, weary, and helpless, to the bottom at last.

How it all happened Charlie Balgonie never knew, but hours after the whole affair was over, and the detested Piscatona had burned down to her water-line and sunk, leaving all the sea around her discoloured and covered with floating pieces of charred wood and the buoyant parts of her cargo, he found himself adrift in the wide and stormy Pentland Firth; but wedged with comparative safety in a large fragment of the fore-top, to which, the yard being still attached by the sling, a certain amount of steadiness was given; yet his heart leaped painfully, each time, when the fragment of wreck rose on the summit of a green glassy wave, or went surging down into the dark and watery trough between.

To add to the terrors of his lonely situation, the sun had sunk amid gloomy purple clouds, and a rainy night was drawing on. Half drowned perhaps, the poor boy soon became faint and exhausted, and would seem to have dropped into a species of stupor; for when roused by the sound of strange voices, he found himself close by a great and towering ship, which lay to, now right in the wind's eye with her main-yard aback, and her gunports and hammock nettings full of weatherbeaten faces, gazing at him with eagerness and curiosity in the twilight, while a boat was lowered from the davits and pulled steadily towards him by six sailors clad in dark green.

She proved to be a Russian 50-gun ship, the Anne Ivanowna, commanded by Thomas Mackenzie, one of the many Scottish admirals who have bravely carried the Russian flag in the Baltic and the Black Sea, the same officer who a few years after was to build the great harbour and forts of Sebastopol, at the little Tartar village then known as Actiare.

His youthful countryman became his protégé.

The worthy admiral sought to make a sailor of the rescued Palatine; but the latter had seen quite enough of the sea while on board the Piscatona, and while he was clinging like a limpet or barnacle to the piece of drifting wreck; so he became a soldier, and served under General Ochterlony, of Guynd, in the Regiment of Smolensko, where, as a cadet, his superior smartness, intelligence and education, not less than his courage, soon distinguished him among his thick-pated Russian comrades: thus, in less than ten years, he became, as we find him, Captain Carl Ivanovitch Balgonie, the most trusted aide-de-camp of Lieutenant-General Weymarn, Commander-in-Chief of the City and District of St. Petersburg.

CHAPTER VII.
THE SOLDIER OF THE CZARINA.

"You can never know, Ivanovitch Balgonie, how much I pitied you—"

"You, lady?" was the joyous response.

"That is, I and Mariolizza," said Natalie Mierowna, slightly blushing (the Russians always speak thus, putting the personal pronoun first), "when we found you sunk on a fever-bed, in a foreign land, so far from your country, your friends, your mother, perhaps; for you are young enough, I think, to miss her still, at such a time, although a soldier."

"Far indeed, in many ways!" replied Balgonie, with a bitter smile, as he thought of Uncle Gam and the Palatine ship, or perhaps it was illness that had weakened him. "I have a country to which more than probably I shall never return; but father, mother, or friends, I have none there: all who loved me once, have gone to the silent grave before me."

"All?"

"Yes, lady."

"But you are making many friends in Russia," said Mariolizza, cheerfully: "there are my cousin, Basil Mierowitz and my brother Apollo Usakoff, who both, I know, love you as a brother."

"True; and most grateful am I to them for their regard, for both are polished gentlemen. I have old General Weymarn, too, though I know not what he will think of this delay in delivering the Imperial dispatch."

"Alas, that most tiresome dispatch!" exclaimed Natalie; "but I forget," she added, with a curl of her short upper lip, "those who proceed on the errands of the Empress Catharine, would need seven-league boots, or the carpet of the prince in the fairy tale, which transported the owner at a wish."

"Hush, cousin," said Mariolizza, glancing timidly round: but no one was near save Corporal Podatchkine, who was stolidly smoking a huge pipe at a little distance on the terrace, when this conversation took place two days after Balgonie became convalescent, and fully a week since the night of peril on which he swam the Louga.

"I cannot describe to you, ladies, the relief that came to my mind on discovering that it had neither been lost nor stolen, but was safe—"