Читать книгу The Secret Dispatch; or, The Adventures of Captain Balgonie - James Grant - Страница 8

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Corporal Podatchkine was an admirable specimen of his own type of Russian,—one who was more afraid of neglecting Lent than of murdering his fellow-being, especially if that fellow-being was a foreigner; "for," saith M. L'Abbé Chappe at this time, "they do not reckon foreigners among the number of their brethren."

His thick black scrubby hair was cut straight across the forehead in a line with the eyebrows, and at each side it hung perpendicularly down below the ears, in the old Russian and Mediæval fashion, and was, moreover, cut square across the neck behind, just as the English wore theirs in the days of Richard III.; and he kept alternately scratching and smoothing his rugged front, nervously and assiduously, when he removed his fur Cossack cap; and, full of affected concern, even to exhibiting tears in his small cunning eyes, presented himself, through the bribed auspices of the dvornick, to Natalie Mierowna next morning, and besought her to have him "conducted to the chamber of his brave, his beloved Captain, his comrade and brother, who was, he now learned, seriously ill, helpless, and delirious,"—and, in fact, just as the cunning Corporal wished him to be.

There he found Balgonie, certainly too ill and weak either to recognise him or understand what he was about; so the faithful Cossack made a rapid and skilful investigation of all the officer's pockets, and especially his sabretasche, for the dispatch.

Not a vestige of it was to be found.

"What the devil can he have done with it?" muttered the bewildered Corporal, as he thought of his 200 silver roubles; "can he have lost it in the river, or swallowed it?"

The truth is, that Natalie Mierowna had her doubts about the fidelity of Podatchkine, and even of some of her own domestics, and aware of the risk run by the stranger if he lost a dispatch of the Empress, she had, prior to the introduction of the Corporal, secured the document, and at that moment it was hidden in her own fair bosom until she could secure it in a safer place.

In her bosom! Poor Natalie! Alas, she little knew its contents, and the horrors they were yet to produce!

Baffled thus in his attempt to secure it, there was no resource for the faithful warrior of the steppes now but to take up his quarters, which he was nothing loth to do, at the Castle of the Louga, and there quietly and comfortably to smoke his pipe by the kitchen stove; await the recovery or the death, he cared not which, of Balgonie; and to concert further measures with the huge gipsy, Nicholas Paulovitch, whom he saw daily.

It was no feverish dream of Balgonie that Natalie Mierowna had been hovering about his bedside; for she and her cousin Mariolizza had been his especial nurses.

In less than three days the feverish delirium subsided, sense completely returned, and the young Captain appeared to be labouring only under a species of influenza. A cold, as we understand that homely but troublesome kind of ailment in foggy Britain, is almost unknown in the latitude of St. Petersburg. "It is," says Dr. Granville, "indigenous to England, and, above all, to London;" yet we fear Balgonie had a most unromantic and unmistakable cold, consequent on his immersion in the icy Louga, together with an aguish shivering, which rendered the quitting of his couch, and betaking himself to the saddle, as yet quite impossible.

Balgonie had an insatiable thirst: he had visions of iced champagne; but in lieu, got only tea-punch, if we may so call it, being tea in the fashion still taken by the Russians (who hold that milk spoils it), with a slice of lemon or preserved fruit; and as he got stronger, Katinki, a strapping Polish damsel with fine black eyes, who was Natalie's own particular follower, added thereto a dash of rum and then tsvetochay, or flowery tea, with cakes, which the Captain seemed to relish all the more when he understood them to be made by the white hands of Natalie: an appreciation which showed a decided improvement in that young officer's health. But—

"My dispatch," he frequently said aloud,—"I must be gone with my dispatch!"

"Might it not be entrusted to the Corporal Podatchkine?" asked Natalie one morning, as she personally gave him his warm and soothing drink with her own hand, Katinka standing demurely by with a silver salver.

"Impossible, Hosphoza, for so I may call you: an officer alone can carry a dispatch of the Empress. Its contents are most urgent: this delay, over which I have no control, may be visited by royal disfavour, even punishment; and I fear that the air of Tobolsk or Irkutsk would ill suit a Scotsman's lungs, Natalie Mierowna."

"Yet tarry here you must," said she, with a smile, the beauty of which proved very bewildering: "the Louga is coated with ice this morning, but not so thick, however, that it might not be broken by throwing a five-kopec piece from here; but to travel yet would only kill you, Carl Ivanovitch, and cannot be thought of just now."

Then as she glided away, with her beaming smile, her white hands and taper arms, her rustling dress of scarlet silk trimmed with snowy miniver, and all the sense of perfume that pervaded her, Balgonie sighed wearily yet pleasantly, and half thought that beautiful figure a dream, as he turned on his soft and luxurious pillow, and marvelled whether his past or his present existence was the real one.

A captain in the ducal Regiment of Smolensko and not yet twenty-five! Same ten years ago, his future seemed to point to a very different course of life.

Far from Russian steppes and icy streams, their forests and barbarity, his mind had been wandering home to Britain's happier shore; and he might have said with the Bard who sang the "Course of Time,"—

"Nor do I of that Isle remember aught,

Of prospect more sublime and beautiful,

Than Scotia's northern battlement of hills,

Which first I from my father's house beheld,

At dawn of life; beloved in memory still,

And standard yet of rural imagery."

His story is a brief one, and not very startling, save for its rapid career of injustice.

Charles Balgonie, son of John Balgonie of that Ilk in Strathearn, had come into the world during that which was perhaps the most stupid, lifeless, and impoverished era of Scottish existence, the middle of the reign of George II.; when the country was without trade, energy, or enterprise, and when nothing flourished save that which prospers there more than ever even under the rule of her present Majesty, and will do so apparently unto the end of time,—gloomy fanaticism and canting hypocrisy: more among the laity certainly, who make a trade and cloak of outward religion, than among the clergy, who dare not be liberal, even if so disposed; for without a public and noisy exhibition of sanctity, few have ever had much chance of place or profit north of the Tweed.

Moreover, Charlie was born at a time when to be a Scotsman or an Irishman was almost a political crime in the eyes of their somewhat illiberal fellow-subjects, and when for either to attain eminence in the service of their native country was nearly an impossibility; and hence the Scots crowded to the armies and fleets of Russia and Holland, and the Irish to those of France and Spain.

By the early death of his parents, Charlie had been cast, in his extreme boyhood, upon the tender mercies of a bachelor uncle, Mr. Gamaliel Balgonie, a hard-hearted, grasping and avaricious merchant in Dundee—one who was a noisy exhibitor of religion, a fervent expounder of crooked texts, and, of course, an Elder of the Kirk; a great quoter of Scripture upon unnecessary occasions; one who always wore garments of sad-coloured broad cloth, with a spotless white cravat, and whose quavering voice and meek but cunning eyes were frequently uplifted against the enormities, the wickedness, and "the temptawtions and tribulawtions of this weary world;" and who was, moreover, a vehement despiser of that which he stigmatized as "its wretched dross," but which he left no means, fair or foul, untried to acquire.

In the lovely vale of Strathearn—one of the most exquisite tracts of verdant scenery in Scotland—stood the home of Charlie Balgonie. In his delirium, the present had fled, and the past returned. He had been a boy again at his father's knee—a child with his curly head nestling on his smiling mother's breast; again, in fancy, had her kisses rested on his cheek, and her soft voice lingered lovingly in his ear; again had he felt all that happiness, perfect trust, and security which the boy feels by his father's hearth, and the man, in after life, never more!

He heard not the hoarse Louga crashing down its ice-blocks to the Baltic Sea; but the gentle murmur of the Earn, flowing from the wooded hills of Comrie towards the broad blue bosom of the Tay—the Earn, where many a time and oft he had lured the brown trout and the speckled salmon from the deep, dark pools, near the old battle-cross of Dupplin and the Birks of Invermay. Again he had heard the leaves rustle pleasantly in the summer woods, where he had nutted and birdnested when a boy; and he had seen, in a vivid dream, his glorious native valley where it narrows at Dunira; and far beyond, the blue ridges of the mighty Grampians, lifting their summits, alp on alp, to the clouds, eternal and unchanged as when the foiled legions of Julius Agricola fled along their slopes in rout and disorder.