DELUDED.
A lover has occasionally been likened to a fool, as being a man
possessed by one idea, his mistress. This was certainly somewhat of
poor Charlie Balgonie's state of mind. He saw only the dark eyes,
the half drooped lids, and the farewell glance of Natalie; so full of
hidden and tender meaning; and while thinking of her and of her last
words and promises, their mutual hopes of the future, based almost
entirely on Basil, he fell an easy prey to the plans and schemes of
the wily Corporal Podatchkine, who saw only his anticipated two
hundred silver roubles; and who, knowing the country as well as if it
had been every acre, rood, and verst his own property, led him on and
on he knew not where; but, at all events, two hours after they should
have met the caravan, they found themselves, to all appearance, lost
in a dense forest of dark pine trees.
Failing the caravan, having now proceeded, as he believed, some
twenty miles or so, Balgonie had thoughts of passing the night at the
house of a friend of Count Mierowitz, a _duornin_, of whom he had
been told by Mariolizza, who laughingly assured him, that this
personage was "a fine Russian gentleman of the old school, who beat
his wife regularly every Thursday and Saturday with a whip of
thongs," and was seldom sober.
Those duornins were country gentlemen, who held their lands by
knights' service, and were bound to attend the Czar on horseback in
time of war. Formerly it was sufficient to send a man well armed and
mounted; but Peter the Great first compelled them or their sons to
serve in person, if they could not pay for a substitute.
In short, though he knew it not, Balgonie had been for the last two
hours riding merely in a wide circle, and, by the careful guidance of
Podatchkine, was now not many miles from the hut of the gipsy
woodman, Nicholas Paulovitch; and, consequently, he was much nearer
the Castle of Louga than he had the least idea of.
On this night there was a glorious Aurora in the north, and full of
his love, his own tender thoughts, and inspired by the beauty of the
scene, it seemed to the somewhat provoked Podatchkine, that the
dreaming Captain was quite disposed to pass the night where he was.
When the dense wood of stupendous pines opened into long vistas, the
whole northern quarter of the sky could be seen, illuminated from the
horizon to the zenith. Gloriously bright as the most brilliant
phosphorus, masses of fire arose in the form of columns that waved,
towered, and shot into the air, with streaks of fainter light
between. Anon they all blended and merged into each other with
renewed grandeur, aslant, or radiating from a centre, like the sticks
of a mighty fan. All that portion of the heavens seemed a mass of
shining gold, rubies, and sapphires, with a wondrous light streaming
over them, broadening, brightening, and deepening, then fading away,
to flash forth again in greater beauty and glory, while, as if to
enhance the magnificence of this illumination, many falling stars
shot across it, leaving in their train sparkles of light, more
brilliant even than the glory that blazed beyond. In black outline
between, and in the immediate foreground, towered the dark and solemn
pines, in solitude and silence.
Not a sound was heard but the occasional snort of their horses, or
the cry of a distant wolf.
Balgonie was surmising whether Natalie would be surveying the
beautiful natural illumination from her window, or from the terrace:
he forgot that it was nothing new to her. Certainly it proved of
little interest to Michail Podatchkine, who, under his thick beard,
growled at the officer for loitering.
The Scottish islesmen call the streamers of the Aurora "the merry
dancers;" but the Siberians name them "the raging host:" and Balgonie
was reflecting what a relief their brilliance must prove to the
lonely hunters, who at that very time were pursuing the white bear
and the blue fox, far beyond the Lena, and along the shores of the
Icy Sea, when his attendant disturbed his reverie.
"Well, Michail," said he, in reply to some remark in which the
Corporal, who saw nothing wonderful in the matter, urged that they
should proceed, "we have missed the sugar caravan, and cannot
discover the residence of the duornin I spoke of, so I am rather
provoked with you."
"Oh, Excellency, who can withstand God or the Great Novgorod?" whined
the fellow, using an old Russian proverb.
Jean Paul Richter says, "the more weakness, the more lying; force
goes straight, but any cannon-ball with cavities in it goes crooked."
Some such thought as this occurred to Balgonie, as he checked his
horse, and half turning round, with a stern expression in his face,
which the light in the north made sufficiently plain, he said:--
"Rascal! I fear you are deceiving me again!"
Hustled up on his saddle, rather than in it, with his knees on his
holsters and his lance slung behind him, Podatchkine made many signs
of the cross, and called on St. Sergius and all the other
_moshtschi_, or saints of Russia, to bear witness that he was as
innocent as a young bear of any such foul idea; but only begged that
his Excellency would proceed, and assured him that the track they
were on must assuredly bring them, ere long, to some woodman's
dwelling.
At this time, such is the slavish influence of superstition, that
Podatchkine, for mere fellowship, kept close to the very man against
whom he had formed the most fiendish schemes; for stories of the Wood
Fairies,--of the _Leechie_, or Forest-demon, whose fangs tore the
benighted asunder,--of the _Domovoi_, or mischievous Russian
Brownie,--of the _Vodianoi_, or smiling River-spirit, who lured
travellers to a watery doom,--of wolves and bears in ravening herds,
came fast upon his memory; for the forest was growing denser, and the
darkness deepened painfully after the Aurora faded away, and a few
solitary stars alone glinted through the openings between the broad,
flat, pendant branches of the intertwisted pines.
The silence of the night was now broken only by the whistling croak
of the _valdchnep_, or great woodcock, as he darted from amid the
black gloom of a pine tree, or the lighter shadow of the graceful,
but, as yet, leafless birch; and the craven and clamorous anxiety
that had been giving real pangs, and even qualms of conscience, to
the superstitious Podatchkine began to subside, when the wood opened
a little, a red light appeared, and they approached the cottage of
Nicholas Paulovitch, the half-bred.
It was, as already stated, built of logs, squared by the hatchet
outside and inside, and whitened by chalk: before it yawned a deep
draw-well, with a bucket, handle, and winch.
"'Tis the cottage of a man I know. Here, Excellency, we can pass the
night," said Podatchkine, leaping from his horse and dutifully taking
Balgonie's bridle, as if to anticipate any proposition of proceeding
further. "There is a shed behind where I shall stable our horses:
Nicholas, I know, will make us welcome to his lodge."
In a few minutes more, Balgonie found himself seated in the cottage,
the aspect of which struck him as being peculiarly comfortless,
dingy, and squalid, as he viewed it by the light of a _loutchin_, or
species of pine torch, which stood in a rusty iron holder on the
rough deal table, whereon lay a pack of frayed and dog-eared cards.
On the walls were some rude images, stuck over with crumbs of black
bread, which attracted the flies in summer and the dirt at all times.
In a place of honour was a holy effigy, with some train oil flaring
before it in a tin sconce, as a species of votive lamp; for the
proprietor affected religion quite as much as Mr. Gamaliel Balgonie
did in a more civilised part of the world.
The furniture consisted of a few plain stools, and some very dirty
bearskins spread on the floor in the corners, as beds; and on the
table was a pitcher of foaming and seething quass, with wooden bowls
to drink it by.
Balgonie took in all these details at a glance.
How great would have been his surprise, if he had known that after
riding so many miles, he was only a short distance from _her_, from
Natalie, who was now weeping bitterly and sleeplessly on the bosom of
her cousin for him, and for the fate she dreaded, and yet had not the
power to avert, or from which to save him.
In addition to Podatchkine and the host, Nicholas Paulovitch, who
stood respectfully at a little distance from Balgonie, and was
appraising the exact value of his costume, arms, and ornaments, even
to Natalie's diamond ring, there was present another ill-visaged
fellow, with a powerful figure, square shoulders, and giant beard,
like every Russian of the lower order; eyes that were small and
piercing, like those of a mouse; a long, fierce nose and jagged
teeth, hair shorn off close above the eyebrows and brushed all down
straight from the crown of his head, which in form resembled a cone
or a pine-apple.
This barbarian, who was dressed chiefly in a shoubah of sheepskin,
and had a small, but sharp, hatchet and dagger in his girdle, was a
Stepniak, from a district where nothing like a town was ever seen or
known, but whose aid and strength Paulovitch thought might be useful
and necessary in the work he and Podatchkine had cut out for
themselves in the night.