Chapter XXII: Over Their Wine

Heavy and sad was the heart of Charlie Balgonie when, on the evening of the 16th September, that which was subsequent to the episode at Schlusselburg, he saw the domes and towers of St. Petersburg glittering in gold and bronze, in green and fiery or fantastic colours, amid the rich glow of a ruddy sunset; and where rising from the haze of the vast city, the polished cupola of St. Isaac's Cathedral, and the slender spire of the Admiralty, like a needle of flame, seemed to float in mid air.

As he entered the first guarded barrier, he met a party of Lancers riding at a trot, their tall fur caps having scarlet kalpecs and large plumes, their lances, each with a long bannerole of the same colour, waving in the wind. They escorted a covered kabitka, or waggon, and were led by the Count de Balmain, a Scottish officer, who, in after years, stormed Kaffa, in the Crimea.

"Whither go you, Count?" he asked.

"For Schlusselburg--the place of sorrow."

"With a prisoner, of course?"

"Yes, I regret to say, with the niece of Count Mierowitz, with Mademoiselle Mariolizza. She is to be confined under a warrant from the Grand Chancellor--poor girl!"

Sadder and heavier grew the honest heart of Balgonie, as the escort and its hearse-like carriage passed on; and, as he looked after it, the fair merry face, the full and voluptuous figure, the gay manner, and remarkable _finesse d'esprit_ of the betrothed of poor Basil, as he had last seen her at Louga, came back vividly to memory now.

Balgonie was at St. Petersburg when Mierowitz was executed, and when other horrors followed. Moreover, he was closely and repeatedly interrogated by the Grand Chancellor, the Privy Councillor, Count Panim, by Count Orloff (the present lover of the Empress), and by General Weymarn, as to all he knew and had seen of the conspirators--so closely, that nothing surprised him so much as to find that no suspicion was attached to himself. But being a soldier of fortune, who possessed nothing in the world but his sword and his epaulettes, he was not worth suspecting by the Imperial Government.

Ere long, the name of Natalie came before the Secret Chancery, as a prisoner in Schlusselburg; and, like the rest, she was tried and condemned in absence, undefended and unheard; and sentenced, too, amid the solitude of her prison.

To Balgonie the charm of life seemed to have passed away; and, during the week or two that followed his return to St. Petersburg, dreary, weary, and unmeaning, indeed, seemed the routine of his duties as aide-de-camp at the vast parades, the brilliant receptions, the courts-martial, and other public affairs to which he followed his _chef_, General Weymarn, at the palaces of Tsarsky Selo or Oranienbaum, and elsewhere, while ignorant of the fate of Natalie--while the very life of her he loved hung in the balance.

When compared with their fate, how happy seemed those lovers, who, though separated for a period, could look confidently forward through the long succession of hours, of days and nights, of weeks, and months, or even years, and reckon with certainty on the time of reunion! With him and Natalie, time stretched into a length that seemed interminable: their future had no background; their separation was one without hope.

Charlie, in his desperation, applied to the Marquis de Bausset and to Sir George Macartney, then the Ambassadors from France and Britain; and both received his verbal prayers--he dared not write on such a subject--for mercy to the Count's family: but they were unheeded; and the Ministers replied only by bows, grimaces, and shrugs of their diplomatic shoulders. Their interference was impossible--quite; and, unfortunately, his old patron, Admiral Thomas Mackenzie, was with the fleet in the Black Sea.

The suspicions excited against his Regiment and the Grenadiers of Valikolutz, might procure the banishment of both; he feared it in the form of service in Siberia, or at the Crimean lines of Perecop. In either case, unless Weymarn stood his friend, how could he hope to succour Natalie!

At every tea-house, hotel, and café, his uniform of the Smolensko Infantry, and the knowledge that he was the staff officer who had been in Schlusselburg, and who brought the first tidings of the late affair, made him an object of special interest; but the subject was alike a perilous and painful one. Walls have many ears in Russia; so he was compelled to be silent, or discreet, even to rudeness, though the following declaration, which was issued by the Empress, might have allayed his fears:--

"We, Catharine the Second, by the Grace of God, Empress and Sovereign of all the Russias, &c., &c., make known to our Regiment of Smolensko Infantry that, according to the equity which we exert towards our faithful subjects, we cannot represent to ourselves, without profound grief, how much that regiment must be afflicted, for having among its officers a wretch in the person of Mierowitz: nevertheless, as the crime of one man cannot affect those who had no part in it, and that, besides, we know the bravery with which the regiment has distinguished itself upon all occasions, its attachment to strict discipline, and its exactness in the military duty of our empire; therefore we grant it, through our imperial good-will, the same assurances of protection which it has in all times deserved. In consequence, we forbid all and every one, to reproach or upbraid the said regiment concerning the treason of Mierowitz, under pain of incurring our indignation, and drawing on themselves the effects of our just resentment.

(_Signed_) "CATHARINE."

Hope seemed to revive a little after the issue of this conciliatory oukaz; but it was speedily dashed, when Balgonie, on returning from Cronstadt, whither he had been sent by General Weymarn, suddenly met Captain Vlasfief face to face, near the palace of the favourite Lanskoi.

This personage he would have avoided like a toad or a leper; but from him only might he learn something of her he loved in Schlusselburg, that hateful place to which the Captain was returning; so, overcoming, or rather concealing, his repugnance, he adjourned with him to a café, and ordered wine.

"I dare say you have heard," said Vlasfief, with a strange leer in his eyes, as he tossed his hat and sabre on one sofa and deposited his jack-booted limbs on another, "how the estates of the Count and those of Usakoff have been sold or gifted away; pillaged and ravaged by Lanskoi with a party of Tchernemoski Cossacks; and that the plunder has been stored up in Schlusselburg?"

"Something of all this I have heard," replied Balgonie, when the waiter had filled their glasses and withdrawn, "and--and--but you have there two ladies of the Count's family?"

"True--Mademoiselle Mariolizza, who was engaged to Mierowitz, and the Count's daughter: one beautifully fair, the other black-haired like a Pole. Poor girls!" he continued, while leisurely filling the large china bowl of a tasselled pipe, which suspiciously resembled one Charlie had often seen the old Count smoking, "I remember them both in happier and brighter times; but those who play with fire will, you know, be burned. The sentences on all have been found, recorded, and, in two instances, executed; and they are truly terrible!"

"Executed--the sentence!" repeated Balgonie, in a faint voice.

"Yes; you have been four days at Cronstadt: well, in those four days many things have been done--a light; thank you. The Count is now travelling towards Tobolsk under an escort of Balmain's Lancers. There he will have to hunt the ermine, cultivate asafœtida, or dig in the mines, with a collar at his neck, for the remainder of his days; but for the ladies of his family, a more severe punishment was reserved: ah! he is a stern fellow, old Panim!"

"How--what? Vlasfief, you jest?"

"'Tis no jest: we don't jest on such matters in Russia," replied Vlasfief, who was too thorough a _roué_--too "used up," in fact--to care for what any woman might suffer or undergo; for every human emotion and sympathy were dead in this man now.

"What new horrors am I to hear?" exclaimed Balgonie, with passionate vehemence, as he dashed his heavy Turkish sabre on the table.

Vlasfief smiled sourly, and his cunning eyes twinkled.

"You are a Scot, like Balmain," said he disdainfully; "and as the Turks--those accursed unbelievers--say, but truly, 'Those who have never seen the world think it is all like their father's house.' Pass the bottle--'tis Cracow wine this, and not worth four ducats the flask. In short, the--the two ladies of the Count's family, in the wildness of their grief,--Mariolizza especially,--on hearing of the death of Mierowitz, permitted their tongues to run riot, and to say such things of Her Imperial Majesty and some of her favourites, such as Count Orloff, Lanskoi, the Grenadier, and so forth, as no woman would pardon, you understand; so they are to be given in succession to _le maître d'entre les épaules_--the master of the shoulders," added Vlasfief, with a species of laugh at the strange expression which he saw gathering in Balgonie's face.

"Explain, I implore you, explain!" asked the latter, with quivering lips, as he set down a crystal goblet of Hungarian wine untasted on the table.

"Mademoiselle Mariolizza--but you don't drink fairly, Ivanovitch--has received six blows of the knout. The torturer is a new man, and mangled her cruelly. She has had her tongue cut out, and her forehead branded with the executioner's mark;* and she goes to Siberia as soon as she recovers: but she will never reach it alive, even if she escapes the fever that has now seized her; for as the whole family has been degraded,--declared infamous and without protection,--being tongueless, she will become the prey of the Cossacks en route. Once beyond the Volga, we never know what happens. The Count's daughter will undergo exactly similar punishment; and, if she survives it, they will be mercifully permitted to travel together: and there ends the House of Mierowitz, which boasts of its descent from Ruric of Kiev--Ruric the Varagian of Old Ladoga!"

* The latter punishment is abolished now.

With wonderful coolness of manner, over his wine and pipe, almost with an occasional jest, the cruel and snakelike Vlasfief--who, as a parvenu of the foundling hospital (the son of a goat), hated the hereditary aristocracy--detailed these matters; and Balgonie felt as if a black cloud enveloped him. He heard the Captain talking; but his mind and thoughts were far, far away; and, after a time, he found himself alone.

Vlasfief had mounted and ridden off; and mechanically, like an automaton, Balgonie had bidden him adieu at the portico of the café, and returned to finish his wine, as one in a waking dream: nor was it until the bell of St. Isaac's tolled midnight, when the lights were burned low, the fire in the peitchka had died away, the decanters were empty, and he saw a drowsy waiter hovering near him, that he rose to depart; for to him, now, all places seemed alike.

In the street a shower of tears revived him; and he wept unseen, like a great boy, while grinding his teeth and twisting his mustaches like a furious and desperate man. Russia, her laws, her rulers, her very air, he loathed and detested. But what was he to do?--which way was he to turn?--was he to permit these horrors, and live?

He had been present when the Regiment of Smolensko guarded the punishment of Madame Lapouchin, one of the most beautiful women of the Imperial Court, where she shone like a planet, was loved, admired, and more than once was fought for. An alleged conspiracy brought her to the knout in all her nude loveliness, in the light of open day; and Charlie remembered that sickening scene, before the eyes of assembled thousands, and how, as the Abbé d'Anterroche records, "in a few moments all the skin of her tender back was cut away in small slips, most of which remained hanging on her shift. Her tongue was cut out immediately after; and she was banished into Siberia."

"Oh Natalie, Natalie!" he could but repeat, while he wrung his hands; and thus the dawn of day found him.

After mature consideration of his position, his powerlessness, and the difficulties that beset him, with the horrors impending over Natalie, poor Charlie Balgonie felt maddened, crushed, and heart-broken. Could he see her perish without a struggle, an effort, however reckless, fruitless, and futile, on her behalf, even if he pistoled the executioner? Could he know that she too, probably, would die, in agony and mutilation, a horrible and ignominious death,--she, so gentle, delicate, and pure,--and would he survive it?

"Hearts will break in this life," says a recent writer; "it is the nature of them; but if God wills it, and it were possible, it is honester, braver, and nobler to live than to die." Most true; but to live is to hope. Balgonie vaguely, but sternly, resolved that he would do something, or--like the hero of a melodrama--"die in the attempt;" but being a poor, bewildered, loving young fellow, he could in no way practically see what that something might be.

Let not the reader flatter himself or herself that their own beloved country was entirely free from legal barbarism at this time; for in the very year of Ivan's murder,--the fourth year of the reign of His Majesty George III.,--a woman was burned at the stake in Ilchester for poisoning her husband. During the reign of his son, more than one head was chopped off for treason; and women were flogged by tap of drum, for petty theft, at the Market Cross of Edinburgh. Neither need the superstitions of the poor Muscovites excite surprise, when we find, in 1867, Highlanders in Scotland putting clay figures into running streams to bring consumption and wasting upon their enemies; burying a living cock (as the Pagan sacrificed to Hermes) to cure epilepsy; and a woman in Somersetshire* cooking toads in a pan, exactly as the "black and midnight hags" did in the days of Macbeth, for the amiable purpose of bewitching her neighbours. So truly does the world reproduce itself, in spite of its boasted civilisation.

* Western Gazette, September, 1867.

The next day was not far advanced when Balgonie was summoned by General Weymarn, whose staff he had been resolving to quit; but for what purpose, or whither to go, he knew not. With something of a shudder, he beheld the Stepniak--the comrade and confederate of the late Nicholas Paulovitch--leaving the General's quarters.

Save that he wore the scarlet livery of his new trade,--torture and death,--he was unchanged, and was the same hideous and ill-visaged giant--with square shoulders, enormous beard, mouse-like eyes, hair shorn off straight across the beetlebrows, and the pine-apple shaped head--whom Balgonie had seen in the hut where the wretched Podatchkine perished. He was now public executioner of St. Petersburg: under his felon hands had poor Mierowitz and Mariolizza been, and erelong would Natalie be!

Weymarn was a grave and stern, yet not unkind, old soldier; and, on perceiving that his young aide-de-camp looked pale, he spoke to him with unusual kindness, and added:--

"I am sorry to say, that I have a new duty of importance for you to perform."

"Thanks, General; any excitement is better than--than idleness."

"True. You will have to ride to Schlusselburg with an escort, composed of six Cossacks of the Imperial Guard, and bring hither in a kabitka the sum of eighty thousand roubles, which are there in canvas bags, _sealed_. They have been levied on the estates of the Count Mierowitz. You will receive them from the officer commanding there: give a signed receipt, and deliver them into the Imperial Treasury."

Balgonie bowed in silence.

The General, who, of course, knew well the corrupt venality of the Russian service, added:--

"If the sum is brought entire to the Treasury, Carl Ivanovitch, a reasonable gratuity will, of course, be paid you."

"Excellency, I require none for doing my duty, either in this or any other matter," replied Balgonie coldly, even haughtily.

"As you please, sir,--as you please. Some among us might be less particular," said the old General, tugging his grisly mustaches. "And stay; by-the-bye, there is a prisoner in Schlusselburg, whose sentence is to be executed to-morrow, in presence of the assembled troops and people here----"

Balgonie thought of but _one_ prisoner there; and an icy chill came over him, as Weymarn said--

"With the escort and the kabitka, Captain, you will, at the same time, bring the culprit here."

"And--and this pris--on--oner, Excellency?" faltered the poor fellow.

"Is Jagouski, the Cossack, who so severely wounded Colonel Bernikoff when in the execution of his duty."

Charlie breathed more freely.

"An order will be necessary for you--a special order: since the affair of that wretched young fellow Mierowitz, we cannot be too particular, so take this:--

"'_To the officer commanding in Schlusselburg._

"'You are hereby directed to deliver to Captain Carl Ivanovitch Balgonie, of the Smolensko Regiment, the prisoner who is to be executed to-morrow.

"'WEYMARN, _Lieutenant-General._'

"For the delivery of the money, here is a separate order from the Treasurer--adieu."