UNDERGROUND.
The Empress's court of Secret Chancery soon decided on the fate of
Basil Mierowitz; the Count, his father, and his cousin Mariolizza,
who had been passive, though suspected in the matter, had their cases
taken into future consideration, so they were kept close prisoners
while their properties and possessions were given up to pillage and
military execution. Basil was condemned to be broken alive upon the
wheel; but the Empress, who had a particular tenderness for handsome
men, "mitigated his punishment to the less severe one of being
beheaded."
A brief paragraph in the _London Gazette_ of the 23rd October records
this brave fellow's death, just fourteen days after his rash affair
at Schlusselburg:
"M. Mierowitz, in pursuance of his sentence, was publicly beheaded on
Wednesday last; he behaved at his execution, as he had done
throughout the whole transaction, with the greatest resignation. Six
of the soldiers and under-officers who were engaged with him ran the
gantelope the same day; they were so severely whipped that it is said
three of them are since dead. Many more are to be punished. One,
Usakoff, a Lieutenant in the Regiment of Welikolutz (_sic_) who was
privy to the design, was accidentally drowned."
Notwithstanding his rank and years, old Count Mierowitz was retained
in a dungeon among a number of miserable Russian rogues and Polish
prisoners, clad in filthy sheepskin shoubahs, many of them being
afflicted with the terrible disease known as _plica polonica_, or
matted hair, which hung over their necks in clotted lumps, every tube
being swollen and dilated with globules of blood.
The lower vaults of Schlusselburg were those built by Ivan the
Terrible, for the reception of a few of the revolters of Novgorod,
after he had put twenty-five thousand of her citizens to the sword.
They were such prisons as--let us hope--are no longer in use, even in
Russia, although the London press has asserted that, until lately,
exactly such _oubliettes_ or dungeons were in active operation, and
never without tenants, under the royal rule of the deposed Francis
II., and prior to the remodelling of Italy by Victor Emmanuel.
They were like the frightful cells of the Bastile, which Victor Hugo
has described in "Notre Dame;" those of the Inquisition at Goa or
Madrid, or of old castles of the middle ages; but apart from the
happily departed horrors of such places, even English jails have been
little better than living graves within the memory of many now alive;
for one of the greatest glories of modern civilisation, in all
countries, has been the amelioration of prisons and their government,
and the substitution of mercy and protection in their general economy
for that irresponsible despotism and wanton cruelty which have formed
such ample materials for the romancer and novelist to excite
compassion and even dismay.
Yet it is exactly such a place--a prison of the middle ages--a rival
to that Chillon to which Byron's genius has given a greater name than
ever its terrors won it--we are now about to describe: one of the
lower vaults of Schlusselburg, a den, the floor of which was below
the rocks whereon the seals of Ladoga basked in the sunshine, and
which was consequently liable to be flooded during those inundations
that at certain seasons, overflow all the country for a great way
north, so that no crops will grow save upon the eminences.
Vaulted with stone, it was nearly square, and measured twelve feet
each way, with a floor that sloped down at one end, having been
unevenly hewn out when the rock was pierced; and from a portion of
this rock sprang the solid arch of granite blocks which formed the
roof. A narrow slit, six inches broad by twelve high, and having
even in that small space a thick iron bar, admitted to the interior a
feeble ray of light. This slit was partly built of stone, but its
sill was the living rock of Schlusselburg. It opened towards the
lake, but gave no prospect save the clouds, for it was high up in the
wall; yet the melancholy cries of the waterfowl and of the seabirds,
which often came up the Neva from the Baltic, were heard through it
at times.
The prisoner, when seated on the stone bench which formed a bed or
seat alternately, could only see the changing hues of the sky and
patches of cloud, and know by the darkness which gradually obscured
this mere shot-hole that day was passing away, and that another
night, chill, dark, dreary, and hopeless, was at hand.
As the floor sloped down some twelve inches or more, the lower end
was always full of water, into which the slime that gathered on the
vault of the arch fell at intervals with a regular plash that, to the
silent and apparently forgotten prisoner, became maddening in its
monotony of sound, by day and night, by morning and evening, by dawn
and sunset. Then, as the tides rose and fell, or as the waters of
the vast inland lake of Ladoga are affected by the Baltic stopping
the downward flow of the Neva, or by rains flooding the many
tributaries that join them, so did this dark pool in the dungeon rise
and fall, when the current oozed through secret and unknown channels
or crannies in the granite rocks.
It was in this vault, or one of those adjoining--such a den as that
in which Dante placed his Demon--that the betrayed wife of Count
Orloff, the beautiful daughter of the Empress Elizabeth, was drowned,
ten years after the date of this history, when the waters of the Neva
rose ten feet; and, as they subsided, bore her body to the Gulf of
Finland.
No one could live very long in such a place--low, damp, cold, and
horrible. And well did Bernikoff know this, when, in the blind
transports of rage and agony resulting from his double wounds, he
barbarously consigned Natalie Mierowna to such a place--ay, even
Natalie, the soft and delicate, the highly-bred and tenderly-nurtured
daughter of Count Mierowitz; and she had now been in the underground
vault for three days and nights,--seventy-two hours,--which to her
had resembled a horrible and protracted nightmare.
She was ignorant as yet of her brother's execution, a week before.
Betrayed by one of their most trusted adherents as the price of his
own liberty, she and Katinka had been taken. Of the fate of the
latter she knew nothing: a mere Polish waiting-maid, a pretty
soubrette, she had too probably become the lawful prey of the
Cossacks, whom Natalie had last seen in the forest, with terrible
significance rattling their dice on a kettle-drum head.
For herself, the poor girl only knew that she was placed there to
await the pleasure of the Empress and the Grand Chancellor.
Hope was dead completely in her heart; and though the desire to live
was strong, her former life seemed all a dream, or something that had
happened long, long ago!
Crouching on a damp pallet that lay on the couch of stone, her hair
dishevelled, her dress more than ever torn, discoloured, and
disordered, her snowy arms and hands stripped of every ornament and
ring, her tender feet well-nigh shoeless, her eyes half closed and
surrounded by dark inflamed circles, her cheeks sunk and haggard,--it
would be difficult to recognise in her the once beautiful and
brilliant Natalie, whose coquetry had excited the ready jealousy of
Catharine in that fatal Mazurka; the Natalie of the imperial _salons_
at Moscow, at Oranienbaum, or the palace of Tsarsky Selo; or the
Natalie of that princely old château near the Louga--the proud,
bright-eyed, and beautiful girl whom Charlie Balgonie had loved, and
worshipped as a goddess.
As she crouched in a species of stupor beside a wooden bowl of stale
water and a mouldy loaf of black bread, there seemed to be no breath
in her tender nostrils, no sound in those little ears over which the
black hair rolled in unheeded masses--no sound save the monotonous
plash of the dropping slime. She was pale as white marble,--cold as
death,--a prey to utter confusion rather than profound grief. There
were times when she felt and thought and knew of nothing: but there
were others when all the past--the memory of her ruined house, her
shattered love, her slaughtered friends, their fatal project, and her
lost position in society--brought a cruel and keen pang to her heart,
and made her writhe and start and wring her hands, but not weep; for
she had not a tear left; and her hard dry eyeballs were the only warm
part of her shuddering frame.
Seventy-two hours had she been there, yet the time seemed so long
already, that she knew not whether it were seventy-two days or the
same number of weeks.
When she did rouse herself to steady reflection and the realities of
her position, thought well-nigh drove her mad.
Her old father--his sturdy figure, his venerable beard and white
eyebrows, his silver hair queued by a simple ribbon, his quaint
old-fashioned costume of the first Peter's time, rose vividly before
her; and with a gush of memory came all his peculiarities of
disposition, his warmth of heart and temper, his kindness and
irritability, his pride of race and family. Where were all these now?
Her lover too--his voice, and eyes, and gentle manner came next, to
add to her pangs; for him too must she relinquish for ever: no
shelter was there now for her save the cold grave, which was perhaps
to receive them all! Basil, Usakoff, and Mariolizza--alas! terrible
though her own sufferings, she little knew those to which the fairer
beauty and more unwary tongue of Mariolizza had subjected that
unhappy girl.
The excellent taste, the polished education, and high accomplishments
of Natalie, which were so far superior to those of most ladies of her
own rank and country then, gave a greater poignancy to the horrors of
reality and imagination; yet imagination could supply no horror but
what was real and sternly so.
Their princely old dwelling amid the pine forests--never more would
she see its dome of polished copper shining in the sun, or the wooded
domain that stretched for uncounted versts around it; or her father's
patrimonial village, nestling by the Louga, which bore his rafts of
timber to the sea, and by night reflected the glare of those furnaces
which were another source of his vast wealth, and the means of
procuring a thousand luxuries.
Better would it have been, had she and they and all succumbed to
Catharine's iron rule, than sought the freedom of Ivan IV; but it was
too late--too late, now!
Was it all a dream from, which she must awaken? Strange it was, that
as weariness, sleep, or a stupor stole over her, scraps of songs,
frivolous ones especially, airs from operas, and so forth, occurred
to her drowsy ear, as if her brain was turning; and to these the
filtering plash and the sound of the rising waves and wind without
seemed to mark a cadence.
Suddenly a scream escaped her: she was in total darkness. Amid her
sleep or stupor, a fourth night had come on--a night of storm too;
for she heard the roar of the autumn rain, as it descended like a
vast sheet upon the lake without.
Cold and slimy things had often crossed her slender ankles, making
her shrink and shudder: but now she became sensible that her feet
were completely immersed in water; that the wind was bellowing
without and rolling the waves against the rocks; and that the current
of the lake was flooding the floor of her vault, and rising fast
within it.
It rose with appalling rapidity: and now the terror of a dreadful
death made Natalie utter a succession of piercing shrieks, mingled
with prayers to heaven. But her cries were unheard; for the same
cold, icy tide that flooded her cell, filled all the corridors by
which it and others on the same floor were approached.
Rapidly it rose, this dark, silent, and terrible tide--rapidly and
without a sound.
She sprang upon her stone couch, but already the pallet was floated
away. Up yet rose the invading water, and it was soon nearly to her
waist; and gasping and shuddering cries were mingled with her
prayers. A little more, and the narrow slit through which she could
hear the bellowing wind and see the black clouds careering past one
red and fiery northern star--the last gleam of life and of the outer
world--would vanish from her eyes, as she perished in that miserable
tomb: even as the Princess Orloff and many others have done, helpless
and unheeded in their dying agony--drowned miserably, like the prison
rats that swam around them.
In the last energies of her despair, she made her way to the
enormously thick door which closed this trap of stone, and, applying
her lips to the joints, shrieked loudly again and again for succour,
and beat wildly and fruitlessly with her tender hands upon its
massive planks and iron bolts.
Her brain seemed bursting, for she was suffocating as the air
lessened. She thought she saw a red light shining through the
crannies of the doorway; but whether this were fancy or reality, it
was impossible to say, as a faintness came over her, and she sank
down choking and drowning in the dark flood that rose within the
walls and against the door of the prison.