Chapter XXI: 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.