Chapter IX: 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.