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.