Chapter XI: Olga, the Gipsy

Balgonie had scarcely thrown himself at length on the soft, but not very odorous, pile of skins which formed his couch, when a face appeared at the little window, which was pulled open, and a voice called to him in a low and earnest whisper:

"Hospodeen--Carl Ivanovitch! Hospodeen, attend to me; but oh, be silent, as you value your life!"

He started up, softly approached the window, and saw, by the dim starlight, a fair female face with very dark eyes, white and regular teeth, and long, glittering ear-rings.

"I have seen this face before," thought he; "but when, and where?"

Balgonie, in truth, was too much of a lover to have more than one female face ever before his eyes--that of Natalie Mierowna.

"I am Olga, the gipsy," said the girl, humbly.

"Olga! Olga! whom I saw at the house of Count Mierowitz this evening?"

"The same, Hospodeen!" (Balgonie expressed an exclamation of astonishment to find her, as he thought, so far from that place.) "You gave me a silver kopec once upon a time, at Krejko, when passing through that town with Michail Podatchkine; and, this evening you saved me from the whip of the dvornick, when for the third time I had ventured near the Count's mansion, in a vain search for you, or the Hospoza Mierowna."

"In search of us--and for what purpose, girl?"

"To warn you, that for nearly a month past, a plot has been formed to deprive you of a valuable paper, and even of your life."

"My life--when?"

"On the first opportunity."

"By whom--and where, girl--where?"

"Here in this solitary hut--even now your assassins are in consultation--listen."

He placed his ear to the trap-door, and heard the murmur of hoarse whispers below.

"Hush," said Podatchkine, as already related, "take care!" Then followed the question of the subtle and ferocious Stepniak, as to why he had not given Balgonie a "prod" with his lance in the forest; and the whole conversation in all its horrible details, up to the moment when the wretched Corporal with death and terror mingling in his soul, fell from his seat in a stupor.

"Father in heaven!" exclaimed Balgonie, full of despair and horror, as he mechanically felt for his fatal dispatch, to ascertain that it was yet safe, "I have drunk of this drugged stuff, and am also lost!"

"Nay," said the gipsy, hurriedly, "nay----"

"I drank the accursed wine from a cup----"

"True; but not from the cup which was intended for you."

"How?--speak!--speak!"

"The wine and the cups too were all stolen by Podatchkine, with many other things, at different times, from the household of Count Mierowitz. This night you were duly expected here, and thus a plan was laid to destroy both you and your treacherous guide. Two cups were fully and deeply drugged by my brother Nicholas: one was richly mounted with silver; and knowing well that it was to be set before you, I abstracted it barely an hour ago, substituting another of the same kind, and now I have it here. Oh, Hospodeen, a narrow escape you have had!"

Balgonie began to breathe more freely; but, assured that never had he run so narrow a risk of death, he felt, though enraged and furious, his blood run cold, when contemplating the fate intended for him. Peeping through a chink of the hatch or trap-door, he saw that the ladder of access had been removed, and that the door of the squalid cottage was open now, for the loutchin flared more than ever in the night wind. It was then extinguished; but still he could see, and hear them dragging forth the passive form of Corporal Podatchkine, whom he supposed to be dead.

Personally, Balgonie felt that he was no match for either of the powerful giants below--men whose bodily strength was quite equal to their ferocity, and whose daggers and hatchets might make mince-meat of him. Moreover, they had now deprived Podatchkine of his sabre and loaded pistols, and were thus more completely armed. Charlie had his hand on his sword--a handsome Turkish sabre; but relinquishing the ideas either of attack or defence, while the glow of rage rose in his breast and cheek, he thought only of immediate flight.

"If you would save your life and the dispatch of the Empress, follow me this instant, and get your horse before they return: you have not a moment to lose."

It was the gipsy girl who spoke again, in her low earnest whisper, and with perfect decision.

"Then I owe my escape--my safety----"

"To my gratitude. Pass through the window and descend by the wall."

"Women," says a certain philosopher, "are not at all inferior to men in coolness and courage, and perhaps much less in resolution than is commonly imagined; the reason they appear so is, because women affect to be more afraid than they really are, and men pretend to be less."

Balgonie found that the courageous girl to whose guidance he now trusted himself, had been enabled to reach the window by standing on the roof of the outhouse, or shed, in which Podatchkine had stabled their horses. The whole edifice being built of squared logs, was not very high, and it afforded easy means of ascent and descent, by the interstices consequent to its rude construction by the hatchet. He soon leaped to the ground, and softly assisted her to descend.

"Here is your horse: you see, Hospodeen, that your kindness to the poor gipsy girl was not thrown away."

Balgonie looked rapidly to his bit and girth, adjusted himself in his saddle, hooked up the hilt of his sabre, and shortened his rein, almost unaware of the black tragedy being so coolly and deliberately acted on the other side of the cottage.

"Ten versts farther from this will bring you to the monastery of the Troitza, which you will know by its three domes. You have but to ride straight westward by the forest path; God keep you, and may you and the beautiful Hospoza be happy in your loves!"

"Tell me, gipsy girl----"

"Ah, I can foretell nothing, save that in love mere merit is of little matter."

"What is of most importance--beauty?"

"No."

"What then?"

"Success, Hospodeen."

He almost laughed, as he slipped into her hand two xervonitz (the largest coins he had), and in a moment more was galloping over the soft grass of the forest path she had indicated.

"By Jove," thought he, as he spurred on, "I shall not be sorry when this infernal dispatch is safe in the hands of old Bernikoff; and to think of that wretch of a Podatchkine! I always expected the fellow to be a rogue, but not of so deep a dye!"

The unfortunate Corporal, now, as he deserved, hanging head foremost downward in the draw-well, stark and stiff and cold, had been to all appearance a good Russian, Balgonie reflected: he neither confessed, fasted, nor did penance (too much bother all that would have been for the Corporal of Cossacks); but he kept Lent regularly to all appearance; made a sign of the cross fussily before and after every meal; always went to church when in camp or quarters; and never omitted his prayers and genuflexions at night, if in haunted places or when passing a wayside cross, especially if any one was by. All this was no doubt studiously hypocritical; and Charlie remembered that his worthy Uncle Gram kept Fast-days and "Sabbaths" with stern and gloomy rigour; that he said a long and sonorous prayer before meals--a longer prayer after them; that he went thrice daily to kirk at the ordained periods, and had nightly a noisy expounding and out-pouring of the spirit that would have put the great John of Geneva himself to the blush.

"Ah," thought poor Charlie, as he trotted on his lonely way through the darkened forest, "decidedly there are Podatchkines in Scotland as well as elsewhere, and in Russia."

The light was beginning to dawn, for it was the morning of one of the first days of May, so long had he been detained by illness--shall we say by love?--at the castle by the Louga, that Muscovite Eden, as now it seemed to him. The birds were chirping merrily in the woods; and in some places he saw the brown rocks shaded by a species of graceful silver birch and dark rowan tree, similar to those that grew in his native strath at home.

By midsummer he knew that the birchen glades he traversed would be in full foliage, and that the rowan berries would hang in ripe red clusters among the thick green leaves; and that there, too, would be grey lichens on the granite cliffs, and in their clefts soft emerald moss, the wild strawberries, and the drooping bells of the purple foxglove, just as he had seen them where the Earn "gurgling kissed her pebbled shore" as it flowed towards the Tay.

They seemed like old friends in that strange place, and with a sigh of gratitude for his escape from a perilous and deadly snare was mingled one of hope--a wish--a bootless wish, that one day he might sit by the banks of the lovely Earn with Natalie by his side, amid all the security his native land afforded, and under the white blooming hawthorns that cast their sweet fragrance to the soft winds of the Perthshire valley.

Beloved Natalie--so fair and delicate, so dark haired and so bright-eyed! Her diamond ring, and still more her lock of soft and silky hair, brought all the charm and sense of her presence vividly before him. He counted the brief hours since they had parted, and sighed to think how many hours and days and weeks must inevitably elapse before they met again.

In memory and imagination, he conned over and over again each tender speech and glance, each mute caress and passionate kiss, with every circumstance and minutiæ of their occurrence and bestowal; and what lover has not done so since time began, and apples grew, and roses bloomed in Eden! Even his recent narrow escape and the gipsy's gratitude were forgotten in the ardour of his thoughts.

And he sighed again, when thinking how wild and insane were the dreams in which he was indulging, as he touched his horse with the spurs, on seeing the three shining domes of the Troitza, or monastery of the Holy Trinity, rise before him amid the green woodlands.