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--"

"In Natalie's bosom!" said Mariolizza, laughing.

"Certainly the last place, where, for her own sake, I would place a dispatch of the widow of Peter III.," responded the other, haughtily; but Balgonie felt his heart beat quicker as she spoke. Her voice was sweet and low, and had a wonderful chord in it.

The day was mild and beautiful, and truly an April one. The last of the ice had disappeared from the river; not a flake of snow was visible among the woods or on the distant hills; and the bright sun of noon shone clearly and brilliantly from a deep-blue sky flecked by floating masses of white cloud, and cast across the bosom of the Louga the shadows of the great fir trees that spread like a sea of solemn cones for miles along its banks; and amid that woody sea, the most striking feature was a white-walled monastery with its "golden-headed church" and all its metal cupolas glittering in the sunshine.

As they promenaded on the gravelled terrace that lay before the Count's residence, Balgonie could see the domains of Mierowitz that lay for miles around: the patrimonial village of the Count, nestling among the coppice, containing a dozen or so of stone houses, and double that number of quaint tumble-down edifices of wood, and a church with a little gilt cupola, where his serfs said their prayers, and thanked God and him for permission to live and breathe, and to hoard their roubles in secret--for wealth in a serf was a sure source of misery, extortion, and perhaps of torture, if discovered.

In the immediate foreground were wharves, where the wood for masts and spars from his forests were launched, and formed into great rafts for conveyance to the Gulf of Finland. The din of axes and the crash of falling timber, with the cheerful voices of the woodmen and labourers, were heard rising from the echoing woods, as they lopped and trimmed the giant pines for conveyance to the Baltic coast; for his forest trees were one of the chief sources of revenue to Count Mierowitz.

"Your father's mansion is indeed a noble one!" said Balgonie, who after surveying the landscape from the terrace, ran his eyes over the façade of the castle, as it was named, though by no means so well fortified as his patrimonial tower in Strathearn, which dated from the days of the Sixth James.

"So noble that the first Count of our name who built it, when Ivan Basilovitch--Ivan the Terrible--was Czar, put out the eyes of the architect, who was, of course, one of his serfs," said Natalie.

"For what reason?" asked Balgonie, starting.

"Lest he should repeat the work for another," replied Natalie; "but then the Count was a fierce soldier, who had served under Yermack in the conquest of Siberia. I fear you think us very barbarous, Captain Balgonie; but I can assure you, that even in the remote forests of Yakoutsk, on the banks of the Lena, there is more regard for human life and divine laws now, than existed when my father was a boy. He has, indeed, seen terrible things!"

Balgonie did not see much of the Count, who was generally occupied among his people, to whom he was alternately a source of reverence and of terror.

Though infinitely more civilised than the old Russian noble as described by Clarke, "unwashed, unshaven, eating raw turnip and drinking quass" (for according to the Doctor, in 1799, "raw turnips were handed about in slices in the first houses, on a silver salver, with brandy as a whet before dinner"), he was a fair average specimen of a fine old Muscovite gentleman "all of the olden time," who had a cat-o'-nine-tails always at hand; who generally unbuttoned his vest when the gold cup was brought, in which he drank his pink champagne or rare Hungarian wine, which he always had in equal plenty with his fiery vodka and bitter quass; who reckoned his silver roubles by sacksful, and his Sclavonian souls by thousands; and who, though by no means a bad fellow, as his imperious and outrageous class go in Russia, had still the somewhat czarish notion, that true nobility "means the privilege of being treated like a human being of intelligence and feeling, and of treating others as if they were nothing of the kind."

Scandal said that in his wild youth he had flogged his serfs to fight with his favourite bear, and flogged them again if they maltreated or bit Bruin too much: Balgonie certainly saw two or three old serfs who had lost an ear in these combats. And when the Count took his afternoon nap, if a cock crowed in the village, a dog barked, or a cat mewed, the whole community were wont to tremble, when the stout dvornick, or house-porter, was seen to issue forth with his cat-o'-nine-tails in search of the proprietor.

A rich sash usually girt the waist of his old-fashioned tunic, which was of fine cloth, and trimmed with fur, broad or narrow according to the season; a square cap of crimson velvet, tasselled with gold and edged with ermine as white as his beard, was placed diagonally on his head, when he went abroad; and then he carried a long gold-headed cane, with the exact weight of which most of the shoulders in the neighbourhood were perfectly familiar. On holy festivals the breast of his best velvet coat was always covered by orders of the empire; a dozen of servants usually hovered about him when he dined; and he always went to church and confession in a clumsy old coach drawn by six white horses, three abreast, in honour of the Holy Trinity.

He was proud of being one of the old hereditary nobles, who are distinguished from the personal nobility by their right to possess serfs, and to whose earthly tyranny there was no limit, save the tomb. All the wretched serf possessed, even his wife, was the property of his lord. Fear of secret murder alone protected the latter species of property; hence no wonder is it that the land is without a middle class. Even in the present century, Heber, in his Journal, mentions an instance of a Russian noble who, in his profane cruelty and lust of power, nailed a servant on a cross, for which he was only imprisoned in a monastery.

But in the character of Count Mierowitz, there was something of the rough and hardy country gentleman. He it was who caught with his own hands, and in his own forests by the Louga, the famous team of brown bears which, in the marriage procession of the late Empress Elizabeth's jester, drew that jocular personage and his bride, when the newly-wedded couple proceeded to the wonderful palace of ice (which was built on the frozen Neva), all the ornaments of which were icicles, and the appurtenances of which were also ice, even to the cannon which were fired, and did not burst.

"When Peter the Great came to the throne," said he, one day, "he found only two lawyers in all Russia; so, Captain Balgonie, he hung one as an example to the other. Ah, he was a truly great man, Peter! The English admire him solely because he tried to imitate them; but, for that very reason, we don't approve of many of his innovations. We look from the north and south sides of the same hedge."

It is not surprising that Charlie Balgonie preferred the society of two beautiful young girls to that of a testy old boyar. To enhance their natural attractions and winning manners, they were always dressed in the most fashionable French _mode_, and wore the rich stuffs which came from Moscow, and even from China.

They and he had many topics in common, on which they could converse, after old Count Mierowitz had dined and dozed off to sleep--such as the theatre erected some years before at Yaroslaff, by Volkoff, whose troupe were now performing the tragedies of Soumorokoff at St. Petersburg, where a government theatre had just been erected by a ukase; while another ennobled the manager, Volkoff, who had died last year, after appearing at Moscow in Zelmira. Their knowledge of French and German opened up the best literature of Europe to the two cousins, which was fortunate; for at the period of our narrative, Russia had almost none, save some barbarous national songs, fabulous ecclesiastical records, and ferocious traditions: nor is she now much advanced in letters, though certainly, two months after publication, Charles Dickens may be read at Tobolsk--that terrible Tobolsk--where, as we have all read in our youth, Elizabeth wept such grateful tears on the bosom of her Smoloff.

Exiled from court, and secluded amid these forests by the Louga, a Russian lady had few resources for amusement then; so the unexpected visit of Captain Balgonie, with whose name and courage they were quite familiar, proved a most welcome and fortunate circumstance to those two handsome girls, who were merely enduring life, or simply vegetating, in the great old mansion of Count Mierowitz.

But there was one topic in which our soldier of fortune could by no means agree with Natalie Mierowna--her bitter and most unwise hostility to the strongly-established power of the Empress, or, as she styled her, "the woman who now occupied the throne of Ivan;" a prince whom she viewed exactly as the Scottish Jacobites did "the Young Chevalier," and a few old Frenchmen do at the present hour, "Henry V.," the descendant of St. Louis. These sentiments, however, she had to utter in secret, or when none were by them; and when he gazed into her dark and beautiful eyes, so full of romantic enthusiasm and of dangerous light, he felt thankful that one so peerless and so perilous was not, at all events, his enemy.

She had accompanied the Empress on her celebrated pilgrimage to the ancient cathedral of Rostov, by the Lake of Nero, where the last of the Princes of Jaroslav was murdered in cold blood by Ivan the Terrible. Her expedition had taken place in the May of the preceding year. Catharine and her ladies walked ten versts afoot daily, and it was at the conclusion of this devotional journey that the final quarrel had taken place concerning the mazurka with the Aide-de-camp Vlasfief.

"That insult shall never be forgotten here!" said she, stamping a little foot, in a prettily-embroidered scarlet shoe, on the carpet of the drawing-room where, fortunately for herself, she was alone with Balgonie: "an insult to me--to us, who have the blood of Ruric the Varangian in our veins; and from her--this woman of Anhalt-Zerbst!"

Balgonie laughed; for the Ruric blood is to Russians what Captain John Smith's is to the Virginians, and the Norman element to the English.

"Yes," she continued, "'tis something novel, an insult to us, from this Catharine, misnamed the Great, who has enslaved all the Ukraine, and given men and women away by thousands, like herds of cattle, to her courtiers and her lovers!"

"Oh, be wary; I pray you, be wary, or speak in French!" said Balgonie imploringly, while laying his hand impressively--rather too impressively, we fear--upon hers, which was so delicately smooth and white, and was placed very temptingly within his reach, as they sat near each other for the purpose of conversing in low and confidential tones.

"The people are mere slaves under her rule," continued Natalie, lowering her voice but without withdrawing that coveted hand; perhaps she forgot it in her energy; but the omission made poor Charlie Balgonie's honest heart beat very fast indeed, and his colour came and went painfully while her dark and glorious eyes were bent on his: "in her I behold only a usurper, who wields a knout in lieu of a sceptre, and who seats herself on a throne of human skulls; but the time is coming when all these things shall be altered!"

"And this time, Natalie Microwna--what do you mean?" asked Balgonie, who had been long enough in Russia to feel a thrill of terror at words so wild and dangerous.

"When it comes you will learn; if the blow fails, woe unto those on whom it recoils! You may escape as a stranger; but I fear me, she will punish the whole Regiment of Smolensko--"

"My regiment--mine, say you?"

"Yes, yours, Hospodeen, even as Peter the Great did the Battalion of Strelitz, for adherence to his sister Sophia; and that we know to be one of the most sanguinary sacrifices on record, even in Russia."

"Heaven knows that is admitting a great deal; but you say either too much or too little to satisfy my curiosity: explain this coming peril--this mystery--to which you refer."

In her growing energy, Natalie's other hand was now clasped above his, and truly "the situation had its charm."

"Let us speak of it no more," said she, recollecting herself, and with a strange smile; "ere long you shall know all; but not now--not now. Alas! the best I can wish you, Ivanovitch Balgonie, is, that your chance visit here may not also compromise you with Catharine."

They pressed each other's hands: it was done, perhaps, merely in the energy of conversation; but, to be brief, Balgonie found himself now hopelessly and helplessly in love with Natalie Mierowna.

Though both cousins were remarkable for their beauty--one blonde, the other dark--he had never for a moment wavered between them; for he had been, from the first moment he beheld her, irresistibly attracted by the brilliant and black-eyed Natalie. Besides, he knew well that Mariolizza was betrothed, or, as the Russians might justly phrase it, assigned away, to his friend and brother-officer, Basil Mierowitz.