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.