Chapter XII: St. Petersburg

After traversing a green valley some five or six miles in length, bordered on each side by forests of fir trees, dark, solemn and acutely conical, where the sunlight could scarcely ever penetrate to the thick rank grass and herbage that grew below, and where a merry gurgling brook rushed noisily along by the side of the narrow horseway, Charlie Balgonie drew his bridle at the gates of the Troitza monastery, when its white walls, its three great cupolas, shaped each like a gigantic onion inverted, covered with plates of burnished copper, and all painted and bestarred, were shining gaily in the morning sun.

There he was made welcome by the monks--quaint-looking men, in long black caftans, with high black caps, fashioned like our modern hats, but without brims, and having black veils floating behind over their long, straight hair. He deposited some money with the treasurer, declined the invitation of the sacristan to see the uncorrupted body of some saint with an unpronounceable name, reposing in its shrine like a silver bedstead, and its head begirt by a diadem with pearls as large as pistol bullets; for the saint had been a martyr, who, in the days of Ivan Basilovitch, the Tartars had rewarded for his attempts to convert them by knocking out his brains; and now he was a miserable mummified relic of humanity, before which, for many ages, thousands of devotees had knelt and wept and smote their breasts in paroxysms of prayer. Charlie waived the invitation; and after having a good breakfast in the refectory, and there telling his story to the monks, he was somewhat bewildered when informed by them, that after all his (certainly circuitous) journey with Podatchkine on the preceding evening and night, and after his riding since he had left the cottage of the gipsy, he was still barely twenty miles from the Louga!

Was a spell cast upon him? was his horse bewitched, that he was to continue travelling thus, and yet never make progress? It almost seemed so; but one of the monks, a more shrewd man than his brothers, explained the whole affair as being consequent to the cunning of Podatchkine, and his scheme for destroying the dispatch-bearer.

A large party of pilgrims on horse and foot were returning to St. Petersburg that afternoon. With them Balgonie travelled for the remainder of his journey; and, after traversing a wild and desert tract of country, on the evening of the next day he had the pleasure of beholding, in the distance before him, that new but vast and splendid capital,--

"Proud city! Sovereign mother thou
Of all Sclavonian cities now,"--

covering the once wild waste whereon, before the time of Peter the Great, the father of his country, a few wretched fishermen were wont to contend with the wolves and bears for a spot to erect their huts--where, as Count Segur says, winter reigned for eight months of the year, rye was an article of garden culture, and a bee-hive a curiosity.

Its bulbous-shaped Byzantine domes, and tall needle-like spires, and all its countless roofs, that rose beyond each other in ridgy succession like the waves of the sea, and are generally like the sea in colour, being of a brilliant green or an ashy hue, were now all tinted redly by the rays of the setting sun, which cast the shadows of its many bridges on the waters of the Neva and of the canals that glided silently and darkly beneath them.

As the sun sank beyond the Gulf of Finland, and the shadows deepened on every plated dome and granite rampart, the great gilt crosses of our Lady of Kazan (a fane which was ten years in building) and of many other noble churches glittered, or rather seemed to burn like stars, amid the deep blue of the cloudless sky beyond.

Balgonie's satisfaction, on finding himself so near the end of his journey, was somewhat clouded by a trivial circumstance.

After entering the city by a palisaded barrier, where stood a guard of the Regiment of Valikolutz, he checked his horse's pace, while the caravan of pilgrims, whom he now wished to quit, traversed a long street of small wooden houses that lay beyond. Here, close by the margin of the Neva, lay a man with his loose caftan wet and dripping, and a piece of sack or old canvas spread over his face. On his breast lay his fur cap, as if to receive alms for his burial; for none doubted that he was a poor drowned fellow just fished up from the Neva, and that money was required of the religious and charitable alike for his obsequies and masses for the repose of his soul. So all the pilgrims from the Troitza threw something into the fur cap, where denuscas, kopecs, even roubles and Polish ducats, jingled fast together, while the passers muttered prayers and made signs of the cross.

All the caravan had passed, so the clatter of Balgonie's charger, steel-scabbard, and accoutrements, seemed to create a different effect on the attentive ear of the seemingly drowned man; for the knave, who had only been acting, started up, and, with his spoil, fled like a hare down one of the little alleys that opened off the wooden street. He vanished in the twilight, yet not so quickly but that Balgonie was able to recognise in his face and form, the bulky and muscular half-bred, the gipsy, Nicholas Paulovitch.

What had brought him to St. Petersburg? Was he still dogging the luckless dispatch-bearer, or had he only fled thither that, among its thousands, he might elude the punishment with which Count Mierowitz would be sure to visit him, if the murder of the Corporal was discovered?

This episode made Balgonie feel uncomfortable, and suspicious that other and hidden dangers yet menaced him, as he rode steadily but watchfully through the densely crowded, but monotonously regular streets of houses, which are stuccoed, white-washed, and decorated with different colours, roofed with wood and iron, painted in most instances green, and nearly all pillared and piazzaed--each long vista, with its oil lamps, being terminated by domes and spires; and erelong he saw the lights shining in the lofty windows of that magnificent crescent, which, for a time, was the palace of Catharine's most cherished favourite, "the fair-faced Lanskoi," as Byron has it--

"A lover who had cost her many a tear,
And yet but made a middling Grenadier."

And now the melodious bells were ringing for vespers in the towers of our Lady of Kazan--a Greek cruciform fane, which was founded as a rival to St. Peter's at Rome, and named after the Tartar kingdom of Kazan. It is the greatest church in the city, and one of high sanctity.

Along the northern margin of the Neva, a river broad as the Thames at London Bridge, but (unlike the Thames) deep, blue, and transparent as crystal, lined with solid granite quays, and bordered by many stately palatial edifices, Balgonie pursued his way; but the stars were shining at midnight on the vast sheet of water called the Lake of Ladoga, before he, weary and worn with fatigue, dismounted beneath the formidable gates of the castellated prison of Schlusselburg, which had been strengthened and fortified anew by General Count Todleben, whose arrest and quarrel with the Empress had made so much noise three years before the time our story opens.