WHITE SLAVE;

In giving to the public this Second Edition of the "White Slave," the author cannot help adverting with satisfaction to the change which has taken place in the public opinion of the country, as expressed by its organs, with regard to the condition of the Russian Empire and the nature of its Government.

A cunningly devised net work of invisible influences has, until a recent period, so completely succeeded in mystifying the question, and in entangling in its meshes all who could have exposed the character and effects of a system, perhaps, more extensively cruel and demoralizing than any which has ever existed, that hidden under the mask of civilized institutions, the Social Condition of the Russian Empire was as little known as that of China a few years since.

It was in fact less known, because the popular ignorance, with regard to China, was the restless ignorance of doubt; whilst that which prevailed respecting the condition of the Russian Empire was based contentedly upon the false impressions imbibed alike from the misrepresentations of men seeking to deceive, and from the silence of those who could have told the truth.

Two years ago, amongst the press, apologists of the Government of Nicholas were still forthcoming, but since sufficient light has converged upon it from various quarters, at least, dimly to shadow out its character and effects in their monstrous reality, they have one by one abandoned it to the fate, now rapidly overtaking it. I mean the common execration of all civilized humanity.

Is it to be supposed that in the present age any artificial system, however craftily combined, or terrifically supported, will not eventually crumble before the mighty breath of public opinion in the west, whose mere sympathy with suffering when unanimously expressed, will set more millions of hearts palpitating within the pale of the Russian Empire, than all the bayonets of Nicholas can quell?

To add what lay in his power to the light, now steadfastly, though yet insufficiently beaming into that once dark arena, where corruption and oppression in the most revolting forms are still daily running riot, battening on the sufferings of millions, and the brutalizing abasement of whole races, was a task which the author proposed to himself in taking up the subject, and in which he has been assiduously progressing.

In publishing the "White Slave," his object was to popularize important truths connected with it, through the intermedium of fiction, amongst that vast class of readers whose attention is most readily secured by amusing it. It appeared also to the author, that the form of fiction was better calculated than one more serious to convey vivid impressions of the spirit of society in the despotism he was depicting. A serious work even if containing nothing but literal facts and rigidly rational inferences, resembles a Daguerreotype portrait, whilst a fiction in which the same elements are entertainingly embodied, and brought into effective contrast may rather be compared to those sketching likenesses in which the characteristic lines, slightly exaggerated, still constitute a portraiture which forcibly recalls the original and conveys an idea more complete of the personage it represents, than could be derived from the Daguerreotype reflection which art has reduced to inalterable fixity.

As the tale was the mere vehicle by which he sought to communicate certain impressions to the reader, its merit was only matter of secondary consideration, and though, in one sense, the writer may have reason to be flattered by the manner in which it has been noticed by the press, he cannot but observe with some concern, that many, whilst recording favourable opinions of the fiction, seem in their appreciation of it, as a literary production, to have somewhat lost sight of its moral object. He is hence induced to draw the attention of the reader, more especially to the fact, that in the volumes before him, he has used no improbable incidents, situations or characters to give point and interest to the tale he was constructing; on the contrary, he repeats the assurance that he has not embodied in its plot, nor introduced in the episodes, into which he has diverged, one character, nor occurrence, without having the originals of both in his mind's eye.

Unhappily the reality furnished him with stores from which he might have gathered any amount of such materials as he used. A writer more able and experienced might have drawn from the same source facts far more impressive, and colours more startling to weave into his narrative without trespassing beyond the circle of actuality.

THE AUTHOR.

november 20, 1845.

It was between the acts of a favourite opera, the attention of a little knot of exquisites, distinguishable amongst the vulgar Parisian audience of the pit, was obviously directed towards a box, which seemed singularly to attract their notice and curiosity. This box contained one solitary inmate, a lady in all the luxuriant bloom of beauty; but a cane, an opera-glass, and a Spanish cloak upon a chair, seemed to indicate that a cavalier had just left her.

It was not the first time during the evening, that the eyes and opera-glasses then turned towards her, after travelling eagerly round the house, had settled dubiously and inquiringly upon that very box; but its two occupants up to that moment had been so concealed by its curtain, that they could see without being seen. But now, the curtain being withdrawn, suddenly revealed to the full gaze of those who an instant before were struggling to obtain a transient glimpse, the object of this anxious scrutiny.

The lady whose appearance acted so magnetically on all these eyes was not unworthy of attracting them; she was beautiful, and of that stamp and degree of beauty which no variety or singularity of taste can cavil at or deny. Why attempt to describe that expression—the soul and spirit of beauty—which is to loveliness of countenance what the odour is to the flower—which it is obvious that words can never paint, any more than the pencil can depict the perfume of the rose; or at least let us leave the description to the enthusiastic lips of a lover? But it may be observed that her beauty was in that rich maturity, which some women never reach, and which others only attain in exchange for youthful freshness. Girlhood and womanhood in her seemed mingling their attractions, reminding one of those rare days in spring when a midsummer's sky shines forth in all its radiance upon the ground still fresh with rain, and fragrant with young vegetation and early blossoms. Though rather dark than fair, her aspect and complexion were purely English. It was of that darkness, which not owing its origin either to any Hebrew or to any southern admixture, but to the blood of Celt and Norman, is almost exclusively found in England; dense raven locks and eyebrows contrasting with deep blue eyes. It was peculiarly the style which foreigners most appreciate and admire, because to them so unusual and exotic. The pensive expression of her countenance, the soft languishing glances of those eyes fringed with long black lashes, appeared to indicate that romance of disposition, which was required to realize their ideal of a fair islander.

The tasteful splendour of the lady's attire, so well according with the gorgeous nature of her beauty, was considered to add to it in the estimation of her admirers. Their enthusiasm was farther excited by the eager curiosity with which she gazed upon the brilliant scene around her, as she drank in, in one intoxicating draught, the universal admiration she evidently excited; for all eyes at first directed towards her by the notice of the group before alluded to were rivetted there by her own uncommon attractions.

But if she accepted this homage with an undisguised and almost undignified delight, her joy sprang from no direct or selfish vanity; for that night, radiant with love long thwarted and now unexpectedly crowned, she gathered the universal approbation, which no feminine simplicity could mistake, with no other sentiment than that of pride, at its rendering her more worthy of the one being in whose smile all the golden opinions of the world for her were concentrated.

But the little knot of spectators who had first patronized her with their admiration, judged otherwise. Whilst their glasses still guided their inquiring glances round the amphitheatre, they had been able perfectly to distinguish two figures in the box, though they could not discover whether she were one of them, or not.

When she drew aside the curtain, and appeared alone, it was not very unnatural to conclude that she had not dared to do so whilst her companion was beside her. At all events, they evidently considered her as an unhappy belle held in odious privacy by some tyrannical protector.

"Who is she? What is she?"

"She is ravissante!" said one.

"Quelle mise!" observed another.

"She is an Englishwoman—a Miss Mortimer—a wealthy heiress."

Whilst a third, by remarking: "Did you ever see a beautiful bird more anxious to fly from its cage?" even more obviously spoke out the common opinion.

Very prominent in this group were three individuals, with whom the young lady's appearance seemed the subject of a wager.

"I knew," said Hippolite de L—, "that I was right. I told you she would be here to-night. Trust to my information in such matters!"

Hippolite de L—, the speaker, was a Parisian "élégant," of the period of the Royal Guard, before the progress of Anglomania had driven the élite of male fashionables to imitate the costume and manners of the gentlemen of England—that England where traditions of taste and good breeding, of the chivalry of the Sydneys, and the polish of the Chesterfields, have been perpetuated undisturbed by revolutions.

In France the storm which swept away all the frivolity accumulated during the reigns of the last Louises, had scattered the French nobility in abject exile; its next generation, reared in penury, were deprived not only of rank and fortune, but even of their great names, eclipsed by all the brilliant deeds of the children of their fathers' serfs and lacqueys, which threw far into the shade the exploits of their Turennes, their Condés, and their Saxes. They returned, by the grace of foreign bayonets—not like the triumphant cavaliers at our own restoration, who had been driven from England, village by village—but to assume their borrowed consequence from the light of a royalty so soon and suddenly about to be again extinguished. Then were to be seen great names associated with plebeian manners, and with tempers soured into the braggadocio swagger of the Empire, by the consciousness of the national dislike and contempt.

Hippolite de L— was one of those endeavouring to mix the hectoring of the "grande armée" with the "papillonnage" of the monarchy, but having of the "Grand Seigneur" nothing but the name, and the blood which flowed in his veins. He did not therefore contrast advantageously with either the Count Z——— or the Prince Ivan.

The former, brought up at Oxford, was, like Hippolite, in himself a living argument against the theory which bestows too readily on races qualities inherent in them. Hippolite, whose ancestors had enjoyed through the reigns of the Montespans and the Pompadours the high privileges of the "tabouret," showing in his person in one generation the loss of that high breeding which a French lord was once supposed to imbibe with his mother's milk; and Z———, the Muscovite, converted by early education into a thorough Englishman—a fact more startling than the subjugation of the first tiger by Van Amburgh.

But Z———, though an Englishman in aspect, in manner, and in feeling, was a Russian magnate by position; like an Athenian in old Greek history, with his eloquence, his love of arts and of liberty, yoked to the chariot of a Scythian. He has since been distinguished for his unfortunate duels, and for the recklessness with which he scattered an enormous fortune to the winds. His features were open and noble, and he was distinguished by a head of curled hair of unusual length and density, which gave him an eccentric and a somewhat lion-like appearance.

The Prince Ivan, his countryman and compeer, was in everything a Russian. In person he was not uncomely; tall, and well proportioned, his features were tolerably regular, notwithstanding the sallowness of his thick, sclavonic skin; deriving its tint partly from the hot-house temperature in which Russian children ripen into precocity, but more from habitual excesses. His face had too the defect of nearly all Muscovite countenances—that of showing too much the nostrils; and it bore the characteristic almost as common, of the cat-like or Mongolian position of the eyes, slanting downwards towards each other.

Those eyes were in themselves the most repulsive of his features, from their astute expression; at least as taken in conjunction with his other features. They were dead and opaque, and of that pale leaden hue, which alarms and startles more than even all the pitiless ferocity which is disclosed by the transparent organs of vision of the feline tribes. Thus the filmy orbs of the blind, when rolled in the expression of passion, are more menacing than if flashing with the utmost brightness of hatred, because the known is less dreaded than the unknown danger, and we are accustomed to look into the eye, as a sort of mirror, which must at some instant paint upon its disk the inmost thought; it contracts for a moment, even previously to the most sudden pounce of the cat or tiger; and with the certainty of that instant of warning, one may look into it with defiance. But the dull, dead eye, reflecting nothing—the window of a mind into which it can never give the faintest insight, though we know it by the play of the features to be cunning and malevolent, inspires us with the same nameless dread and horror as the aspect of those cold-blooded, loathsome things, from which, harmless as they may be to man, we dread the contact of some hidden venom.

Indications of weariness and disgust—the results of dissipation or a sickly constitution—were mingled with a sort of jubilating cynicism, into which the former had perhaps degenerated; they were permanently imprinted in every line of those muscles which give to the human countenance its chief character. They were conveyed, too, by the intonation of his voice, when not by his words.

There was in Prince Ivan's whole demeanour a certain sort of insolence, before which men and women quailed, and which seemed to realize the crapulous impertinence with which we hear some of the nobles of the monarchy stigmatized in the memoirs of the day; but to the seignorial complexion of which plebeian vulgarity could never attain. One would have been tempted to imagine that one of these characters had been perpetuated, and transmitted through two generations to the prince, by some ancestor whose barbarism was forced, by the rude hand of Peter the Great, to take the impress of a roué of the regency, just as the impression of all civilization has been taken in Russia, superficially minute in every external. It owed its origin more probably to the habit of seeing others wince beneath the triumphant sarcasms of one himself unassailable, because callous to most that others dreaded—one regardless where he tramped, reckless what animosities he roused.

Nature had given the Prince wit; and a Russian education, teaching him to weigh his words, had preserved him from the loquacity in which a Frenchman would have diluted it. Habit had made him equally skilful in wounding with the tongue, or steel, or lead; the instinct of an envious disposition taught him unerringly to use the first, and wine supplied him with factitious nerve to wield the latter. In his own country there were a thousand terrors to cause him to bridle this unhappy humour; but abroad he was only subject to the political espionnage which, all Russians of his rank continue to endure; and there was no cause why he should restrain its indulgence. Just now too he gave, as well as his two companions, most ample evidence of being flushed with wine; and although he bore it well, by increasing his personal recklessness, it disposed him to give the full rein to his temper.

This somewhat lengthened explication was necessary to elucidate the scene about to follow.

Hippolite de L—, whom we left speaking, continued:

"Well, you will, at least, allow that I have won this wager. Is she not worth more pains-taking than an opera queen?"

"Fame," said Z———, taking a long look through his glass, "has not belied her. Now she has vouchsafed to shine out, like the sun, from a cloud, she certainly outshines."

"And like the sun," observed the Prince Ivan, whose leaden eye was resting upon her, "you say that she is unapproachable? I don't believe it. That woman is to be won in half an hour."

"What!" said Hippolite, "when I have watched her, or had her watched, by day and by night, these three weeks, without catching sight of her till now!"

"You must have shown either want of skill or timidity; so I will suppose you were too timid."

"Timid!"

"Oh! not afraid of the Blue Beard who keeps the lady in thrall; but timid, perhaps, in addressing her."

" 'Sdeath! Prince—you who sit and look on at the chase, why don't you try yourself? At least, a woman must be seen, or spoken to, or written to, before she can be won. Now Z——— knows that yesterday, in the midst of my breakfast, I heard that she had driven out. I was on her trace in an instant; and, behold! the blinds of her carriage were drawn down. This was the chance afforded by a whole week's espionnage."

"So you sentimentally alighted, and kissed the track of her carriage-wheels. You will make way thus."

"I was so timid, that as a last resource, I drove against her; you should have heard the crash! I lost a wheel, I smashed a panel of a new cab; but at least I brought her to the window, and won my wager, that I would show her to Z———; though he disputes it."

"You do not," said Z———, "explain that she put her head out of the window veiled."

"Well," replied Hippolite, laughing, "so it was; but what is to be done with a fille si bien gardée. Just as I sprang to my feet and was commencing an apology, Blue Beard, who had recovered from his shake, regardless of her sympathies, made her draw down the blind, and called out to drive on, leaving us in the midst of the wreck!"

"I think the attempt was bold and well considered," sneered the Prince, "if the cab had been your friend's, and you had been sleeping partner to a coach-maker. But I still hold, that the lady being clearly under some restraint, and not by her looks unwilling, there must be a way to get at her. You have been on her trace for weeks, and you have never exchanged words with her. All you know of her is so contradictory as to amount to nothing. You know she is English, you know she is beautiful, and that she is reported to be rich; at all events, that he or she must be so. You know that he exercises a tyrannical influence over her; you know that she is either a sister, a cousin, a niece, a daughter, a wife, or a mistress. You know, it is true, nothing of his station in life; but you have ascertained that he is certainly an Englishman, unless he be a Swede, or a Swiss, or an American, or a Dane, or a Dutchman."

"No;" said Z———, "his success has not been brilliant."

"If I had been as much interested in the matter," observed the Prince, "I would have been as far advanced as he is in an hour."

"A gasconade:—try it."

"My dear fellow, I have tried it; it is only five minutes since I caught sight of her, and I appeal to Z——— whether I have not made as much progress in this adventure as you have—which is none at all."

"I am afraid you want enterprise, young man," said Z———.

"I so much want enterprise," replied Hippolite de L—, "that who will wager me I do not go straight to her box and obtain a signal mark of her favour?"

"What do you call a signal mark of her favour? Something as intangible and invisible as the glances with which she has distinguished you?"

"No; I will obtain that rose-bud nestling in her bosom, or I will kiss her lips before the whole audience."

"Oh!" exclaimed Z———, "any ruffian might rush into a lady's box, and snatch a rose, or ravish a kiss!"

"Yes;" observed the Prince. "I'll answer for it there are plenty of fellows about the pit-door, who would attempt it for a handful of louis, with the certainty of kicking and incarceration for their pains."

At this moment he turned suddenly round, and the lady in the box waved her hand, and then hastily recovered herself. It was obvious that some resemblance had deceived her for an instant. The sudden pause in the very midst of the little sign of recognition, and her perceptible embarrassment, rendered this evident. But Prince Ivan unhesitatingly kissed his hand.

"Now by the modesty of the eleven thousand virgins," exclaimed he, "if I am not the fortunate individual whom the lady most distinguished by her notice! Listen, gentlemen:—to improve on Hippolite's proposition, hold me a bet upon the matter, and I go into her box; with her own white hands she shall detach that rose-bud and give it to me, and then I will close the curtain, and you must take the kiss for granted. Mark me, I do not mean to go in to her as Hippolite proposed—to raise an uproar, and be turned ignominiously out. It shall all be with her own free will: as a test of which, I will sit and converse with her for ten minutes after."

"This is too much presumption," said Hippolite. "I hold that wager."

"Well, anything from a supper to a thousand louis."

"I hold it for a hundred louis. Such a gasconade should not be taxed at less."

"I have none of the blood of Gascony in me," sneered the Prince; "but you will observe, my dear Hippolite, that the success of my wager will not depend on the mere audacity of a highwayman snatching at a purse. I am going not to outrage, but to conquer. Will you, Z———, be umpire to the bet?"

"Oh willingly. The lady is to give you that rose, and you are to remain ten minutes next her without being turned out; otherwise the wager is lost."

"Exactly."

"You are going to lose a hundred louis, and I to win them," said Hippolite; "but curse it, if for a hundred louis I would frighten the pretty bird, or make its jealous owner shut it up altogether."

"Oh!" replied the Prince, "you should have thought of that before."

"What if I pay forfeit?"

"I will not take the whole sum as forfeit, as I mean to give it to my valet."

"What if Blue Beard returns?" said Z———.

"Then I must play Selim," replied the Prince. "But it is very unlikely. Did you not observe that she kept the curtain close so long as any one was with her. Depend upon it, she would have closed it again already, had he been yet expected back."

"Don't call upon me for help if I see her footman thrust you down the lobby," said Z———.

"Better pay forfeit and give up," said Hippolite.

"Gentlemen, adieu! I will give you each a rose-leaf," replied the Prince, as he disappeared through the pit-door.

Blanche Mortimer still sat alone. It was true that the last words of Mattheus as he left her had been: "Dearest, do not let yourself be seen, or we shall be again annoyed and followed." Blanche smiled a promise; but she belonged to the same sex as Eve, Pandora, and the wife of Lot. She was a thorough woman; that is to say, a compound of those latent qualities which make men heroes, mixed up with habitual weaknesses and waywardness, which prevent us from respecting, to incline us perhaps the more to love their possessor.

The door of her box opened, and a stranger stood before her; for an instant she mistook him for Mattheus. He was the same she had just before mistaken for him in the pit. But the resemblance was one of those general likenesses, of build or figure, which vanishes into the strongest antithesis on detailed examination. The leaden eye, the sardonic smile, the decayed teeth of Prince Ivan, could not be, for longer than the subdivision of a second, mistaken for the blue eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, the open countenance, and the pearly teeth of Mattheus.

"Sir!" she said hastily, but in a very sweet voice, "this is a private box."

"Not very private. Madam, considering that the eyes of the whole house are upon us."

"Sir, you are in error," said Blanche.

"Believe me not. Madam," replied the Prince, and he sat down. "You see beside you an unhappy wight, bewildered, intoxicated, maddened by your charms."

Blanche rose in terror, and was about to call for assistance; but the Prince snatched hold of her wrist, and kept her down upon her chair.

"Your servant is removed; so also is the box keeper. Hear me for one instant, or you will occasion a scene before the whole house. One instant's patience, and I leave you!"

"Mattheus! dear Mattheus!" involuntarily murmured Blanche, who sank into a chair, almost fainting with alarm at his violence and the energy of his language.

"Queen of Beauty!" said the Prince, "your dear Mattheus has left you alone, like Ariadne, and so will I in an instant if you continue to require it. But first hear me! I am a desperate man. I have vowed either to commit suicide, or to bear away that rose whose hue and sweetness are shamed so near those lips."

"Oh, Sir! what have I done that you should thus insult me? Unhand me, or I will call out to the company!"

"Madam, I am desperate! I will kiss those lips before all the audience if you do. Give me only that flower, and I depart."

"Unhand me. Sir! You crush my wrist in your grasp!"

The Prince let go.

"Oh, heavens! I, who would die to save you a moment's pain! But remember my determination! Give me that flower to worship as a relic in the solitary hours of my despair!"

"Oh! whoever you are, let me entreat you to leave me! Mattheus will be here directly, and there will be murder!"

"Then do you prevent it. You are an angel; be an angel of peace! Give me that flower, and I depart!"

Blanche looked hurriedly round her. She detached the rose-bud, and said almost imploringly: "Will you go?"

"Yes, on my honour! To be plain with you, it is a wager."

"Here, then!" said Blanche, in an anguish of terror at the scene her imagination conjured up, "if Mattheus should suddenly return;" and she handed him the solitary rose-bud.

"Now, go! go! go!" Prince Ivan bowed low, and twirled the rose-bud aloft, to show it to his backers in the pit; for by this time those around Hippolite de L— and Z——— were betting on the results of his enterprise. Then he kissed it, put it in his bosom, and sat down beside the lady.

There was a movement of approbation amongst those who were to win by his success—of some disappointment amongst those who were to lose.

"Ah!" said one, "what folly! Now I recognise her—she is his old mistress."

"No more," said Hippolite, "than she ever was yours."

"Harkye!" said another, whose chivalry was stimulated by the prospect of loss. "I call it disgraceful. If the lady has no cavalier to take it up—I will."

"No, that is my right!" quoth Hippolite.

"Well!" said Z———, "we should call that in England a bet cleverly hedged, where a man is safe to lose his life, or his friend, or his money. I don't think it will be his money; look, he is sitting down quietly beside her; she listens to his pathetic pleading; and I don't think it will be his life, if Hippolite goes out with him."

Meanwhile, the Prince having received the flower, had not offered to move. He remained for a minute in mute admiration of Blanche's beauty, which at first he had scarcely thought of observing.

"Oh, Sir!" said Blanche, "you promised if I gave you that flower, you would go!"

"Did I?"

"On your honour!"

"Yes, so upon my honour I will; but not yet."

"Oh, this is infamous!" said Blanche. "I will call out if you do not leave me;" and her terror at this pertinacious persecution caused her voice to belie the menace of her words, as she sank back into her chair.

"You know the penalty," observed the Prince; "but, in fact, my wager is to sit ten minutes beside you, after I have obtained the flower."

"Oh, mercy! he will be here!"

"In eight minutes I go, although unwillingly. Take patience till then, since I must then take patience to leave you."

"Oh! this is cowardly, unmerited! Go, Sir! or he will be here."

"What, do you fear him then?"

"What! fear Mattheus?" exclaimed Blanche, bewildered by the stranger's conduct. "Go, Sir! leave me! I command you!" and again her voice sank with her courage. "Go—I implore you, go!"

"Hear me, Madam!" said the Prince. "I came to win a foolish wager—a paltry hundred louis. I have remained—my senses ravished by a beauty I had never dreamed of. I have learned to feel that the greatest sacrifice on earth must be to quit your presence. Forgive my audacity. Let me have the happiness of meeting you—wherever—whenever you may name, and I leave you this moment. I forfeit my hundred louis, and I yield up six whole minutes, which spent near you are of inestimable price."

A bright flush of crimson succeeded to the pallor of Blanche's cheek. "How dare you, Sir, insult me thus!" She rose so resolutely that his hand, which again clasped her wrist, was powerless to detain her on her seat. But all her energy seemed so wasted by the strength she had put forth in this effort, that the cry for help she attempted to utter died upon her lips.

"Ha! Madam," said the Prince, as with one hand he still held her, whilst with the other he rapidly drew the curtain, to mask her resistance till he could again pacify her. "Sit down! sit down! or I will kiss that very scornful mouth!" He passed the other arm around her waist.

"Oh, help! help! help!" screamed Blanche in an agony of terror.

Help came. The door opened, and Mattheus stood before them.

There was that resemblance between Mattheus and Prince Ivan, that they might possibly have passed for brothers, but at the same time all the widest difference that health and sickliness could make, betwixt a frame enfeebled by long excesses, and one Herculean in its youthful vigour.

The blood still flowed freely through the minutest vessels, to tinge the skin of Mattheus with the flush of passion; the angry veins, obedient to the throbbings of the heart, still swelled into protuberance upon his forehead, and his eyes still flashed the light through the clear lymph of their living orbs, as he stood for an instant in amazement, confronting the intruder.

The Prince Ivan was scarcely for an instant disconcerted. He instantly assumed the position of a man resolved to answer for his deeds. Nothing could exceed the reckless, insolent defiance of his looks.

The first movement of Blanche, forgetful of herself and of her outraged dignity, was to rush between them. She knew, or thought she knew Mattheus, and she dreaded from him the angry leap of the tiger upon its prey; but by a strange, yet natural feeling, all the warm blood rushed back to her heart when she saw him stand transfixed before the arrogant aggressor, his lips quivering with irresolution.

She who would have hung upon his arms to avert the fatal blow which might recoil upon himself—she who would have rushed to meet the stroke intended for him—now stood mute with unspeakable anguish, when she heard him parley, in a tone, common-place and cold, with the ruffian whom he had seen with his arm around her waist.

"What do you here?"

"What do I here?" replied the Prince, ironically; "your words are rough—speak civilly."

"Begone!" said Mattheus, "leave this box!"

To Blanche in that moment seemed withered the illusions of years; then the thought flashed across her, that the man, whom in the imagination of her first love, she had exalted into a hero, was perhaps a coward—one who dared not protect her against a creature she had dreaded to see crushed like a snail beneath his indignant heel.

Mattheus grew deadly pale; it was plain that his fear must be very intense, to quell the suffocating anger which almost choked his utterance.

"What do you here?"

"What do I here? I came to ask this lady for a rose-bud: here it is," said the Prince, who drew it forth and insolently pressed it to his lips.

"Go!" exclaimed Mattheus, his voice tremulous with passion. "Go! quit this box!"

"Not yet," replied the Prince, coolly. "I have wagered not to cross the threshold of that door for ten minutes."

"Begone!" said Mattheus, his voice still involuntarily rising, "or be the consequences on your own head!"

"Perhaps," answered the Prince, "the world may think fit to consider them on yours."

"Once more," exclaimed Mattheus, "go!"

"What, and lose my wager?"

"Hear me—then!" said Mattheus, who threw back his arms, as if to ascertain with what facility his costume would allow of his using them. "You shall quit this box, and yet not cross that threshold."

"You are witty, fellow," said the Prince, "how so?"

"Thus!"—thundered Mattheus, and then followed the pounce of the tiger, as he sprang upon him.

The pit had been looking anxiously on; the interest of the scene had extended beyond the little circle originally cognisant of what was passing. They saw the lady attempt to rise, and then the curtain had been closed upon them, to their visible disappointment. One minute elapsed, and then another. The voices of the disputants had been too low to reach the pit, excepting in an indistinct murmur.

At length the exclamation of Mattheus burst upon the house in a stentorian roar—the curtain was rent aside—the Prince appeared struggling in his arms for one moment, and then was hurled headlong into the orchestra.

There was a sonorous crash of lamps, of fiddles and bass-viols, two musicians were stunned under him, and the Prince Ivan, to the universal horror, lay stretched above them pale and lifeless, the blood gushing from his mouth in a red polluting torrent. Mattheus, with starting eyes, and the attitude of a gladiator, still vindictively shook his clenched fist at his fallen enemy.

But so general was the sympathy with his provocation, that a voice in the pit—it was Z———'s—cried bravo! and that bravo, bravo, bravo! was repeated by many scores of voices.

CHAPTER II.

Even Blanche, strange as it may seem, was still as ignorant as the reader of the station, parentage, or country of Mattheus, although he was her favoured suitor—although she had resolved to exchange her name for his.

The reader will naturally conclude that either the lady was romantically and outrageously confiding, or that some unusual circumstances must have marked her acquaintance with him.

Something of both had led to the singularity of their relative position. Two years before, Blanche Mortimer, then an orphan under her uncle's care, had met Mattheus travelling in Italy. Some of the chances, or mischances, of their wanderings, had first brought them together, under those trying circumstances which enforce temporary companionship, and often lead to intimacies which, from their incongruity, could never otherwise have been formed.

Experienced English travellers, like all travelling foreigners, know exactly when to avail themselves of pleasant road-side acquaintance—where gracefully to drop it. Ralph Mortimer, her uncle, was one of these. In addition to a perfect knowledge of the world, he was too heedless of it, and too selfish either to care for the character of his society, so long as it proved agreeable, or to dread the least restraining delicacy or difficulty in getting rid of it whenever, at any stage of mutual intimacy, it should cease to be desirable. As he happened to be a man of refinement and of extensive reading, travel, and information, his tastes preserved him from derogatory association; but provided these tastes were not outraged, he would sooner have made a companion of an amusing pickpocket, than of a prosy Doctor of Divinity. When, therefore, he learned to relish the society and conversation of his new acquaintance, he made no effort, after the first repulse, to penetrate the palpable mystery of his country and position; a forbearance which seemed duly estimated by the object of it.

Mattheus was designated as a subject of the United States, in the passport which on the continent attempts to carry its arbitrary scrutiny so impertinently into a traveller's privacy; but he always readily, and almost anxiously, explained that he had only assumed that character for the convenience of its protection. Regarding his real country, his answers were always playfully but pertinaciously evasive. Although he spoke English faultlessly, it was plain, from certain peculiarities, rather of intonation than of accent, that he was no Englishman. But this negative information was all that could be gathered from the most attentive study of his conversation or manners. All the principal European languages—the French, the Italian, and the German—he spoke so as to deceive even the practised ear of Mr. Mortimer.

Mattheus admitted his knowledge of the Russian and Polish: tongues, of a common root, but differing so widely from all others not of Sclavonic parentage, as rarely to be mastered by a foreigner; and here there seemed a clue to the question of his nationality. But then, on the other hand, it appeared that, with the facility of those who have acquired proficiency in several idioms, he had made himself acquainted with various dialects, as hard to learn and as useless to possess as the Russian or Polish to a Frenchman or German.

On everything that could indicate his social position, he was equally silent; but this could hardly remain a matter of mystery as absolute as his country. His conversation at once induced the conviction which prolonged intercourse confirmed beyond a doubt, that he belonged to, or had chiefly mingled in, the society of those classes which we conventionally call the higher.

Many more solid accomplishments, beyond his familiarity with languages, attested the sedulous cultivation of his intellect. He possessed them, as Mr. Mortimer regarded and expressed it, notwithstanding his skill in many tongues, which he argued, perhaps not unjustly, to be always acquired at the expense of higher knowledge.

"Words," he said, "are but the symbols of ideas—in most men the ideas are wanting; and not unfrequently when they do possess them, the paucity of words wherein to clothe them, reduces them to inutility. If a man, instead of gathering ideas, of which he can never have too many, or mastering the words of his own language to array them in, will learn nine foreign tongues, besides his own, he only knows at last ten ways of expressing what he could have expressed as well before; and nine tenths of the labour which might have stored his mind with facts and fruitful deductions, has been wasted to garner up barren sounds."

But Mattheus had apparently availed himself of this faculty of communing with men of different nations, by its most useful application: that is, by striving to acquire through it a knowledge of their habits, feelings, and spirit, and of the literary treasures of their respective languages. He had seen all that was worth seeing in every country; he had lived in almost every capital of Europe; and he was constantly betraying his acquaintance with the most remarkable society, political, scientific, or literary, which they contained.

Mr. Mortimer, whose early years had been spent in diplomacy, found in his new companion a man versed in the scandal and secrets of cabinets; called secrets, because confined to a coterie, which alone possesses a key to render them intelligible, in its knowledge of the characters, motives, and antecedents of those to whom they relate. He found Mattheus not only an enthusiast for the fine arts, but one of the most intelligent cognoscenti he had met with, and a successful collector of all those objects of virtu, which Mr. Mortimer still admired, but in which the expense of more sensual gratifications no longer allowed him to indulge.

The acquirements of his new and pleasant acquaintance were so varied, that his conversation and companionship were equally agreeable to Mr. Mortimer in discussing a theme of speculative science, the beauties of a picture, or the merits of his cook. Mr. Mortimer, indeed, at first felt, if not piqued, at least astonished, to think that his experience and sagacity should be so much at fault as not to enable him positively to discover even the country, rank, or standing of Mattheus; but he soon discarded all solicitude or thought upon the subject, contented with his first conjecture, that he was probably a Pole or Russian, and certainly the scion of some noble house, whose illegitimacy caused him to be unacknowledged, or whose political opinions had driven him to seek concealment. Poland, Russia, and Italy, were just then full of secret associations, some of the threads of whose entangling meshes were often discovered by the vigilance of the governments against which they were plotting.

It sufficed for him, that he had never met an individual whose society—for Ralph Mortimer neither believed in nor would have coveted friendship—was more agreeable to him. If he had often found more brilliancy, he could never hope to fall upon the same yielding deference with which Mattheus submitted to his opinions, his caprices, and his humours.

Although it is true that the pleasure of being near Blanche Mortimer, who was just then budding into womanhood, would alone have sufficed to repay Mattheus for these little sacrifices to the egotism of his host, they were as much occasioned by the gentle submissiveness, which occasionally giving way to fits of exultation, was habitual to the nature of Mattheus. He became a constant visitor; if he had any occupations or profession, he neglected or abandoned them, to follow from town to town the Mortimers, after having each time taken a formal and final leave.

Ralph Mortimer was the last male descendant of an ancient family, decayed, but not like an old tree, whose branches wither, through the gradual impoverishment of its degenerate sap. The last members of his fallen house had still continued to exhibit the intellect, the courage, and the virtues which had led to its original distinction, but largely mingled with the vices, the follies, the extravagance, and insanity, which predominating, had blasted its prosperity, reducing its blood to that which flowed in the veins of Ralph and his brother's daughter, and its once vast possessions to Ralph's personal wealth. This, his present fortune, was sufficient to allow him on the continent the gratification of every sensual enjoyment, without the attendant state which, in England, is usually connected with a certain luxuriousness of living, but which abroad may be dispensed with.

Ralph Mortimer had always been thoroughly selfish. He had not the reputation of being so because his ability taught him, in the very interest of his egotism, to conceal it; he had even passed for generous in the early part of his life, when he squandered half his fortune. Habitual amenity of manner still caused him to be thought benevolent.

It is unfortunately true that the very pantheism of self-idolatry is compatible alike with the most powerful as with the meanest mental capacity. The brightest intellect is frequently allied to unalloyed and exclusive selfishness; just as, descending a step beneath the lowest scale of humanity, we see even in the most gross and grovelling animals a temporary abstraction of self-instinct in favour of their young. It is born in the heart: the head has nothing to do with its existence, though its weakness may be careless in displaying, its wisdom solicitous to conceal it. Its wisdom feels that all that men most inwardly revere and venerate, must take its origin in some abstraction of this love of self—an abstraction which folly only doubts, or obtuseness dares entirely to disavow. It feels that there is no possible independence in the social state, in which a man can venture without danger, or at least without inconvenience, to forfeit all the sympathies of his kind by such a disavowal.

The egotism of Ralph Mortimer was absolute and complete; but as he was no fool, he was not boastful of it. His strong reflective powers, and his acute perception, left him indeed, in feeling, still below the level of the brute, because he would have been incapable of transferring his self-affection beyond the narrow limits of his own heart, even to his immediate offspring; but he wished to appear as if it was overflowing towards all mankind.

Though always fond of money, Ralph Mortimer had never been avaricious. He never confounded the representative sign with the enjoyments it represented. He laughed at the miser, calculating minutely every day's interest of his wealth, and ever mindful of his securities, yet not only forgetting all the while that death hourly threatened the deprivation of all his store, but that every year he kept it hoarded, according to all insurance tables, a tenth, a twentieth, a thirtieth of life's brief span was inevitably escaping, with its opportunities of enjoyment; thus reducing in equal ratio its value.

In his youth, Mortimer had used his talents assiduously, and lavished his wealth fearlessly, in the pursuits of ambition and of love, or what he called so. But these were then untried gratifications. He tried and he exhausted them. Love soon wearied him with its incessant calls for reciprocation. Ambition to him, who possessed already the means of all sensual pleasures, had nothing to offer, excepting the opinion of his fellow-men, which he despised; and thus, with all the opportunities of greater if not better things, he sank into a mere epicurean.

He had calculated justly, that by the time one half his fortune was spent over the green baize, on the turf, and behind the scenes, his diminished appetites would be amply supplied by the remainder. As he had foreseen, it did suffice to enable him, as he changed from one delicious clime or scene to another his place of sojourn, to roll along in the softest and most convenient of travelling carriages, attended by the most thoughtful and obsequious of valets, and preceded by the most skilful of cooks.

When Mortimer had led for years the joyous life of Sybaris, the conscientious satisfaction of the pious, just, and easy-minded man depicted on his cloudless countenance, he began to find that with all his wisdom he had made one great mistake. He remembered that money, which he once deemed could purchase every thing but life, or health, or appetite, could not buy affection. He had once imagined that the simulation of it—the most marketable of all commodities—would do just as well.

But manhood, though it walks in spirit as in frame erect and independent, seeks for some staff to lean upon, when changing into age; like those dissolving views, where the luxuriant scenes of summer first begin to fade into winter's cheerlessness. It seeks, as its blood chills, to sun itself in those warm beams which only importuned the brow of manhood when they fell athwart it. Thus, in the first days of Ralph's autumn, he began to feel that when old age, and age's childish imbecility should have stolen far upon him, the indifferent glances of paid menials, or their purchased interest, would bring but cold and sorry consolation to the discomforts of declining years. Thence grew, if not the want or wish of loving, the longing to be loved by something. He felt a void and hollow in the heart. The time had come when self no more sufficed to self. A new desire had sprung up in him—one which he was indeed surprised to feel, but which, instead of combating, he hastened to gratify before it was too late.

Ralph Mortimer's only brother, with whom he had, years since, quarrelled, had died, some time previously, a sudden and violent death, leaving unprovided for, an orphan daughter in the most interesting age of childhood. Ralph sent for, and virtually adopted his niece. This adoption of the last of the name and family was only what the world expected, but it discerned the generous warmth of benevolence, when a man so long surrendered to his ease, took at once to himself the lonely child, just as a bereaved and doting father would an only daughter, instead of leaving it to complete an education, so difficult for an indolent and inexperienced single man to superintend.

Blanche was winning as a child, as she afterwards proved fascinating as a woman. Her enthusiastic nature clung eagerly, like a creeping plant, to the nearest object. Never could frigidity and selfishness have fallen on a more easily excited affection, to soothe and warm it with its grateful attachment. She would have loved any one who seemed to take an interest in her—even through much unkindness. Ralph was the only person who appeared to do so, and he was never unkind. Indeed, his sole object being to be loved, he spoiled her more than the fondest parent would have done. It was his principle never to contradict her; and he was too indolent to persuade, or even to advise her. Her governess soon sank into a mere toady, and was early dispensed with.

The acquirements and accomplishments of Blanche were all those to which her unbiassed tastes and inclinations led her; her opinions, such as chance brought before her, and her own feelings led her to adopt. The society in which her uncle mixed, and into which the child, with a favourite's privilege, was always admitted, gave to her conversation and her manners the ease, and grace, and dignity, which a woman may indeed sometimes attain in after-life, but which are commonly acquired, like her mother tongue, insensibly—as men must always have acquired when they possess them.

The temperament of Blanche Mortimer was romantic and poetical; that is, she was born with an acute sense and perception of the morally and the physically beautiful, and with an imagination which, if it did not go the unsound length of picturing it by an hopeless inversion where it obviously is not, still fancies it wherever uncertainty leaves the possibility of its being. Without being ever ecstatic over the common-place, she could not have looked upon a vapour clothed valley without painting to herself some scene of beauty or of splendour hidden by the mist; and just so did she view the human heart and mind, with its clouded motives and inspirations; too prone to dream and imagine all that would have charmed her own.

Just as Blanche was growing into womanhood, her uncle lost, with his declining health his relish for society; consoled, for selfishly withholding her from it, by the reflection that, at least, it would not wean her affection from him. For he had grown very jealous of this affection, which he had reared so artificially like a hot-house seed; not, as he knew, in the natural warmth of corresponding feeling. The penetration which would have modified, on closer acquaintance with life, the notions formed in the poesy of a girl's imagination, was thus never called into activity in this retirement, which was first broken by the visits, and then by the intimacy of Mattheus. When her uncle admitted this exception, he failed to take into account the risk to the exclusive attachment which he had fostered; though if he had, he would scarcely have foregone the gratification he derived from his growing relish for the stranger's society.

Now it happened, just as in the nursery tales, where tyrannic fathers and jealous bashaws keep beautiful princesses carefully locked up, and undeviatingly veiled,—that when this precaution is for one instant neglected, they are sure to love at the first glimpse and to be loved by, the hero of the tale; so this one exception to their solitude proved fatal to the wish of the uncle, and a source of sweet disquietude to the heart of the niece.

Blanche, with her warm and tender disposition, was exactly at the age when woman is most inclined to love. The fondness lavished on her doll, or on her greyhound, had long since given way to her attachment for her uncle, and this, which would at best scarcely have sufficed to fill her bosom even in the absence of any more natural affection, was rendered, by the utter want of sympathy between them, less than she would have felt towards any other being. Her ardent and expansive feeling recoiled instinctively before his cold and selfish cynicism. She who was in spirit so often with her ancestral Mortimers, bearding the Stuarts in their wanton prosperity, or charging beneath the desperate banner of the Cavaliers; arrayed against the tyranny of James, or gathering to the Pretender's pibroch—ruined by graceful profusion, or dying in some lady's quarrel—men always reckless of their lives and fortunes;—she was hourly shocked by the mean and petty egotism of Ralph, so perceptible, however well concealed, because pervading the minutest actions of his life. She could not help reflecting how wide the difference between Ralph and all these illustrations of their house—Ralph, who, not content with differing from, was wont to pull them rudely from their pedestals in her imagination, by proving too provokingly the knavery and folly of which, notwithstanding his unanswerable proofs, she would have considered the conviction little short of impiety.

At this juncture, when yearning for sympathy, the eagerness to love pent up to overflowing in her enthusiastic bosom, like the overcharged electricity in a thunder-cloud, ready to flash into life, she found at once in Mattheus, enthusiasm and sympathy, and an object to love. She loved him. Seen, even without the prism of her youthful illusions, she might have done so; but viewed through it, he became the impersonator of all the heroes of her romantic dreams. He had the golden hair, and the blue eye, and the athletic figure of the north. He was still young, though far enough beyond his boyhood to have derived from the stirring scenes and ardent passions of life, the meditative seriousness imprinted on his brow and clouding its natural serenity—the proud, yet sorrowful aspect, the gentle gravity of his demeanour, inspiring interest whilst imparting a dignity in advantageous contrast to the vivacious frivolity of the southern men.

Mattheus was loud in his admiration, keen in his appreciation, of all that Blanche appreciated and admired. Versed in her favourite poets, he could follow her through them, and point out their beauties, where Ralph's invidious sagacity could only find out faults and flaws. Not only was the poesy, but alike the music of every nation, familiar to him; he felt and understood it; and added to this feeling and knowledge another natural gift, a deep harmonious voice. He could translate and sing to their wild accompaniments, the ballads gathered amongst the Highland palicares of Greece, or amongst the mariners of the bright isles of its blue seas, or the plaintive wail of the Moorish women of the coast of Barbary, or the songs of Russ or Polish serfs, melodiously monotonous. His glowing words could eloquently paint the scenes of all these sounds.

But Mattheus' life was a sealed book full of romantic mystery. Nor even her persuasion could make him throw entirely open one of its closed pages. Indeed he had early extracted a promise, that she would forbear to question him regarding a painful past; but then he told her much disjointedly, which put together, turned into glowing certainties her uncle's suppositions, and with the clue which they had furnished, she always thought that she could read the outlines of his story.

Firstly, Blanche could not help observing, that calmly as Mattheus regarded everything in life, more as a benevolent spectator than an actor in its scenes, there was one startling exception. On the subject of oppression in all its shapes, his gentle nature kindled into fire, enthusiasm lighting up his eye, the warm blood starting to his cheek. This theme sufficed to call galvanically into life all the emotions, which his philosophical tranquillity seemed long since to have deadened. His premature indifference here gave way to the ardour of youth, reckless of reason, and urged only by its fiery impulses, disdaining to persuade by argument, but carrying conviction by its own conviction and its eloquent invective.

This subject always at once aroused Mattheus from his habitual supineness, into the expression of a restless and almost a ferocious thirst for action. When he threw back the hair that usually shaded his forehead, there appeared the traces of a cut which had left an indentation deep enough for the finger to have been inserted. This he had once admitted to have been his first blood shed in defence of the oppressed.

It was then with resistance to some public oppression that his early life was connected?

There was also a singular mixture of caution with this enthusiasm into which he lashed himself so easily, alike on reading the negro horrors of a newspaper paragraph, on witnessing the daily petty tyrannies of the Austrian incubus in Italy, or even in contemplating the statues of the slave breaking his chain, or of the dying gladiator. Never did he venture upon one animadversion on any established authority—even that of a Turkish pasha—without glancing first suspiciously around, to assure himself that there were no eaves-droppers. It was thence plain that he had been long accustomed to be watched.

But when assured of being only in the presence of Ralph's indifference and of Blanche's eager interest, he dwelt with feeling on the wrongs of races, of nations, and of parties, and alluded with delight to all the daily symptoms of the storm then brewing up against the Holy Alliance, the Charybdis against which European progress had wrecked, in dread of the Scylla of half a century of anarchy and rapine from which it was escaping.

From this war of opinion, which Canning had prognosticated, and which was then on the eve of its partial fulfilment in Western Europe, Mattheus always insensibly reverted to the condition of Poland and Russia, and to the narration of certain episodes connected with the vast conspiracy by which the nobility of these countries fruitlessly sought to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of their Tsars during the last years of Alexander's reign. These episodes he depicted in such vivid detail and with such feeling and regret, that it was difficult to doubt that he had witnessed, suffered, and acted in them.

Besides the indications afforded of his station, by the lofty reserve of his manners, and the nature of the social reminiscences to which he was constantly recurring, indications rather strengthened than weakened by his advocacy of human equality, strenuous but so utterly divested of all personal envy or bitterness, an accidental circumstance had confirmed beyond a doubt the presumption of his elevated birth. On some occasion he had taken out and opened his watch. The quick eye of feminine curiosity, which delicacy and good breeding taught Blanche to conceal, but which was perhaps only whetted by this concealment, had rapidly discerned a ducal or a princely coronet, with the inscription in French: "To my beloved child, Mattheus. Warsaw, 1824."

Ralph Mortimer, who had long dismissed the subject from his mind, only observed on this discovery, that as he had originally conjectured, he was evidently some Prince from Poland or the Russo-polish provinces, where princes are plenty as blackberries, in political exile which imperatively required concealment of his name. But for Blanche, who had revelled early and unrestrained, in Shakespeare and in Walter Scott, in Byron and in Moore, till almost morbidly imbued with their romance, Mattheus, in his person, not only realised, but united, the attractions of the heroes she had dreamed when musing over her favourite volumes. She had been doubtful in her preference of the chivalrous knights of the middle ages, or the piratic and mysterious Conrads and Laras, or the romantic orientals who figure through liquid stanzas monotonously glittering with the brightness of gems and redolent of the perfume of flowers.

Mattheus combined for Blanche Mortimer the gentle gallantry of Feramorz, with the patriotism of a Kosciusko and the chivalry of a Sobieski. Forgetful of the flight of time, her imagination involuntarily reverted back to that brilliant passage of the Polish history, where its celebrated king, heading the fiery nobles of the turbulent republic, saved in its death throes from the Ottoman grasp, that pretentious Empire which affects to wear the hereditary mantle of the Roman Cæsars. She could almost bring herself to believe that he was one of those magnificoes, blending the western chivalry and oriental splendour, whose gorgeous aspect and astounding valour had suddenly blazed before the citizens of Vienna in their almost hopeless need—dazzling as the flash, and blasting as the stroke of lightning to the triumphant Crescent—one of that famous host, bright with the steel, and gold, and jewels shining on its velvet and its costly furs, which charged beside the Danube to the rescue of Imperial Christendom, and seemed—the eagle pinions flapping in lieu of plume from helms and saddles—like winged horsemen upon flying steeds, to pounce on the astonished Osmanlis.

It was not surprising that Blanche, confiding and inexperienced, beset by the incessant homage of the man whom she had exalted into a demi-God, should love him with all the ardour of a passionate heart and of a vivid imagination.

Mattheus shared or seemed to share this feeling. He looked, and sighed, and almost spoke his love; it was eloquent in his voice, in his eyes, and in his actions, but never directly in his words. Some saddening reflection seemed ever to arrest him on the point of speech, and suddenly to chill his passionate admiration into mournful apathy.

The dread of Blanche was that the pride of rank might view in some exaggerated light the inferiority of blood of an untitled English Commoner; but as often her fear gave way to the pride with which she had taught herself to regard her ancestral name.

Ralph Mortimer was not slow in perceiving this attachment, he was annoyed to see the affections of his niece drawn into an all-engrossing channel, but as he was not without remedies for the evil, he did not discourage the amusing visits of his guest. He simply, at last, moved on, as he had all along intended, to another city.

Mattheus took a gloomy leave, and Blanche felt like one awakening from a pleasing dream, the dream of first love, to a dreary reality. When the travellers had been, however, a few days installed in their new place of abode, Ralph began to miss the society of Mattheus, and none the less vividly from his niece's melancholy.

In this state of things Mattheus arrived; he was cordially welcomed; from Naples to Rome, from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Nice; he still took a final leave, he still followed, and he was still welcomed.

Ralph Mortimer, at last, gave up the remedy of migration for his niece's malady; but his knowledge of life assured him that he possessed one radical and certain means of cure, the withdrawal of the suitor, which he felt he could accomplish at any time; and then, he knew that though the patient might still linger in pain, the root of the disease was cut effectually.

The Mortimers had rambled on, still followed, though now by agreement, to the town of Ax: a little earthly paradise, imbedded like a gem in the hill-side, in the flank of the rugged Pyrenees. Ax, then the most charming of all watering-places, possessed (in the estimation of Mr. Mortimer) the advantage of being yet undiscovered and unhackneyed by English tourists. It is mortifying to reflect that Mr. Mortimer should only share this opinion in common with all British travellers of experience and refinement, to whom the absence of their countrymen from any given locality, proves always a high recommendation to it; and one might thence deduce, that if decidedly the greatest and most remarkable, we are assuredly not the most amiable people in the world.

Ax lies on the track of one of the few rare passes which, through the higher Pyrenees, forms over snow in June a chief thoroughfare into Catalonia through the territories of the worshipful republic of Andorra, the oldest commonwealth existing, and one of the smallest on record; its exiguity and poverty, perhaps, accounting for its age, dating its independence since the days of Charlemagne, and yet so long unknown to the rest of Europe.

Since Mr. Mortimer's visit it has been described in a "Summer's Ramble in the Pyrenees," by the Honourable Mr. Murray, the same who was recently killed by a grape shot, fighting against an overwhelming force of Borneo pirates.

The late Mr. Murray in his book, has doubtless described the watering-place of Ax, and therefore it probably no longer remains a spot sacred from the invasion of adventurous Smiths, and Browns, and Thompsons.

Then in its placid security, let the reader imagine a picturesque village, placed at the very point where the terrific sublimity of mountain scenery verges into the wildly beautiful. On one side are gloomy gorges, and high peaks covered with eternal snows; roads winding staircase-like amidst rocks precipitous, and frothy torrents thundering amongst them, or leaping angrily beneath the yoke of overspanning arches. On the other, blue hills heath-covered and wooded with patches of cultivation reaching to their summits, and vales between them with arrowy rivers winding amidst vineyards and maize-fields studded with villages and caserias.

Two rival hostelries, beside the wells, sufficed to harbour about a thousand summer visitors, consisting of the choicest society in France. Sleeping beneath one roof, and dining at one table, and spending their evenings in common, these visitors had tacitly agreed to waive all etiquette, and to consider themselves as one vast family party. In the morning there were rides in the romantic environs, there were rambles in search of mountain flowers and of the wild strawberry; whilst the breeze, cooled by the snows and scented by the balmy vegetation of the hills, was more deliciously refreshing.

There were the chase of the chamois for the adventurous, and the pursuit of the black cock, of the bartavelle, of the ptarmigan, of the quail, and of the red and gray partridge. In the evening there were gaming for the old and covetous, and dancing, and moonlight walks for the amorous and young.

Ralph Mortimer, whose health and appetite had recently improved, found here materials for his cook to work upon in viands the most delicious—fish, and flesh, and fowl. Here was the peculiar trout caught only in the mountain streamlets, whose waters are born of the winter's snow and summer's sun; the unequalled venison of the chamois, fatted with browsing on the wild thyme, and on the aromatic Alpine vegetation; and the luxurious ortolan, melting like a fig over-ripe to the touch of tongue and palate.

So keen was Ralph's enjoyment of the scene and of the fare, that he felt again disposed to mingle in the society around him; and, under these circumstances, no longer needing the companionship of Mattheus, he decided on using his grand remedy to get rid of him. One evening late, he sent to request some private conversation with him on the ensuing morning.

There was something startling to Mattheus in the unusual hour which Mr. Mortimer had fixed; it appeared evident that that gentleman had either some communication of importance to impart, or some explanation to demand, which he both guessed and dreaded to offer. He was deadly pale, notwithstanding all his self-command, when ushered into the room, where Ralph received him with his usual quiet urbanity.

Their conversation, whatever might be the subject of it, lasted for two long hours, during which Mr. Mortimer's valet was occasionally called; it even seemed as if, but for the interruption of breakfast, it would have been still further prolonged. Whatever passed during this interview, Mattheus re-appeared, not only relieved from his anxiety, but his countenance beaming with satisfaction.

"Blanche," said her uncle at breakfast, "Mr. Mattheus is kind enough to proceed immediately for me to Paris, to settle some urgent business; the carriage will be ready in an hour; I am sure he deserves our best prayers for his happy journey."

"I shall only pray for a speedy return," observed Mattheus.

"And when do you return to us?" hazarded Blanche.

"Not before a fortnight," said Ralph.

"Nor one day later," rejoined Mattheus.

The post-carriage drove up, one portmanteau had been packed, and his passport regulated by the Italian valet, and an iron deed box of Mr. Mortimer's was put under the seat. Mattheus looked in vain for the opportunity of one moment's à parte with Blanche; he was hurried in by her uncle, who, saying that he would not detain him, pressed his hand cordially, God- blessed him, and signed to the impassible valet, who shouted to the postillion to drive on.

"This day fortnight!" exclaimed Mattheus, speaking to Blanche, and away rolled the vehicle.

"Yes! this day fortnight, if ever, you will be back to us," said Ralph; but there was a sneer on his lip, and an emphasis on the words "if ever," which struck Blanche then, and caused her many cruel suspicions afterwards. She did not venture more than to express her wonder at all this. Her uncle was the impersonation of what is called an impracticable man, and she knew the inutility of all questions.

One fortnight passed, but at the expiration of it Mattheus did not return; and then another, and another, and another elapsed, still bringing no tidings of him. Ralph betrayed neither surprise nor uneasiness, and it will readily be understood how, the more this inexplicable absence occupied her thoughts, the less she dared trust herself with any allusions to it in his presence.

There was, however, one circumstance which always left Blanche full of hope of his return, or rather which rendered the expectation of it reasonable; for how should anything but certainty or time destroy the hope of a first love? She was aware that he had left behind him his baggage, his books and his curiosities.

When Mr. Mortimer, with his fluency in French, his wit, his courtly manners, his lovely niece, and his reported wealth, once chose to mingle with the visitors of Ax, his company was anxiously sought after. He was overwhelmed with politeness, and his niece besieged by admirers. But cold, disdainful, and indifferent, all their efforts failed to divert her thoughts from one painful and incessant channel. Her eyes still turned anxiously towards the road to Paris, and her heart still bounded at every cracking of the postillion's whips, which announced the arrival of a traveller.

If anything could have made her for an hour forget Mattheus, it would have been the flattering and enthusiastic admiration of one of the visitors, who might well have effaced the exclusive impression of her lover from a remembrance less faithfully tender than her own.

Count Horace de Montressan bore in a becoming manner one of the great historic names of France. The delicate cast of his youthful beauty was redeemed from effeminacy by the resolute expression of a short and finely moulded lip, by the flashing of an impatient eye, and by the highest aspect of animal breeding. The breadth of his chest, set off against his slight and waspish waist, gave promise that his somewhat slender figure would ripen into vigour with maturer age.

The manners of Count Horace were as graceful as his person and his movements. His accomplishments, were all those one would have looked for in him. In character, impetuous and impressionable, he was hasty and incautious in forming, and obstinate in maintaining, his prepossessions or dislikes. He was possessed of all the valor and generosity which had seldom been belied in his race, together with a love of adventure, and a certain roistering recklessness of temper and of air, which was softened by the courtesy of good breeding and by natural kindliness.

Altogether, Count Horace was a brilliant cavalier. When to this it is added that fortune had not denied him the rare appendage to a foreign title—wealth sufficient to support its lustre—it may readily be imagined that his undisguised admiration of Blanche Mortimer excited no little envy.

Count Horace was the only visitor who was a successful hunter of the chamois in a place where every one talked about it, but where few had the nerve or endurance to follow sufficiently far, the few native hunters, those marked men, who are often so possessed of the monomania of this occupation, that no earthly temptation could withhold them from its fearful fascination. There is a haggard dreaminess about them, induced by the solitary regions they frequent, by the high and rarefied atmosphere they are accustomed to breathe, which makes the air of the nether world seem sleepy and heavy to them; and perhaps by the consciousness of their inevitable doom—sure sooner or later to overtake them, and which has in most cases already decimated the families of those who entertain the fatal passion for this chase.

But it was in vain that Count Horace laid at Blanche's feet the trophies of his prowess earned in such company; in vain that he brought her bouquets of the frail alpine flowers which bloom in the mossy interstices of the granitic masses, swept bare by the winds, high above the region of eternal snows. It was in vain that he artfully fashioned into personal homage, the violent Anglo-mania, brought back during a recent visit to England, and induced by circumstances we will in a future chapter examine. He still found that, although his efforts were appreciated, that he could neither gain one step towards dissipating the lady's melancholy, nor towards dethroning his supposed predecessor, with whose existence he was not long left unacquainted by the public rumour.

Count Horace was not the man to follow long an adventure so unpromising, so he sighed, raised the siege, and returned to Paris.

Count Horace took with him, to Blanche's great satisfaction, an old servant of her uncle's, who had become useful to him, and to whom we will venture hereafter to devote a chapter, as he may play no insignificant part in the denouement of our story.

At length, Count Horace was gone. One by one the visitors were all departing, and yet there were no tidings of Mattheus. The anxiety of Blanche began so visibly to prey upon her health and spirits that even Ralph was forced at last to notice it.

"Blanche," he said one evening, "we hear no tidings of Mattheus." Blanche's lip quivered—her heart was too full for utterance. "He was a great admirer of yours, my child," continued Ralph. "He was what is called 'in love' with you; indeed with a little encouragement he would have asked me for your hand. Now though Mattheus might have considered himself agreeable to both of us, though his rank was possibly elevated, though he was not without fortune, and full of the romance and mystery calculated to work upon youthful enthusiasm, I, as an old man, knowing life generally, and foreigners in particular, could not help suspecting that my reputed wealth might influence his affection quite as much as my Blanche's merit or her beauty. Now, my dear girl, I never told you before, because how should you understand these things? It is years ago since my diminished fortune has ceased to supply even those mere necessities to which you know that I confine myself. I was obliged to sink all my property to produce an adequate income; and consequently this income dies with me. You know, dear Blanche, that whilst I have it I will share it with you, and I hope to live long, that you may long continue to do so." Here the voice of Mr. Mortimer grew a little tremulous with emotion, though there lurked a waggish sparkle in his half-closed eye. "Now if I had told Mattheus the state of the case, shame or vanity might have prevented him from retracting an offer he would afterwards have regretted, and have made you regret, your whole life through. If, on the other hand, he became acquainted with the fact at a distance, and with due time for reflection, I, who know the true value of men's disinterestedness, felt satisfied that we should get rid of his suitorship. I begged him, therefore, to transact some business for me, with my agent in Paris, during the course of which, he could not fail to learn the true state of the case. Mr. Mattheus, or whoever really he may be, (for I felt too sure of the result of the trial to have taken the trouble of inquiring), was to have returned in a fortnight. There is not a boarding school girl in existence who would not have staked her Christmas holidays on the event. But you see, my dear Blanche, that all the gilding of a girl's imagination does not alter the common-place of a reality, when we approach it. Mr. Mattheus, with all his romance and all his fervour, like most other men, has not the courage deliberately to face portionless beauty."

Blanche's colour came and went during this long explanation. At the close of every day, when that day's hope was closing, she had framed a thousand excuses for him: sickness, or dangers, or difficulties; and sometimes even the cruel thought had beset her, that pride of birth had conquered his affection, or that another had estranged it; but never had she dreamed of being abandoned on a plea so unworthy. She felt as if the tears that should have started to her eyes were gathering in her heart; and when Ralph ceased speaking she had fallen insensible.

"Ah!" said the old man impatiently, "scenes are inevitable wherever there are women."

He rang the bell violently, and then took out his toothpick and looked quietly on. But nobody answered his summons, and Blanche fell heavily from the sofa to the ground. Ralph now rang again more angrily, and stooped down to raise her up in his arms. He felt the blood fly to his head as he did so, and an instant giddiness and sickness came over him. His appetite had been good that day, and his dinner better. Still no one answered; the servants were standing at the door, around a muleteer, in noisy discussion on some rumour of the banditti of the neutral ground. At length a kitchen-maid came out to them.

"Has any one answered the Englishman's bell? He has been ringing ready to pull the house down these ten minutes."

"Ah!" said Mr. Mortimer's valet, "you idle rascals! Is that the way you do the service of the house? I will run myself, though I think, wench, you are dreaming; for Monsieur Mor-ti-mere is not the man to be so silent if he had rang ten minutes back."

But the valet was mistaken; the uncle and the niece were both silent, because both insensible. Mr. Mortimer's arms were thrown convulsively around her; the fingers of his right hand still clutched his toothpick.

Blanche was soon restored to animation; but they with difficulty extricated her from his grasp; for Ralph Mortimer was dead!

* * * *

Let the reader now imagine many months to have passed by, and Blanche to be at Versailles, in her worn-out mourning; without health, without fortune, without prospects, and without friends; for the charitable widow and her ugly daughter who had taken her as their companion, if friends, were very cruel friends; for hour by hour, and word by word, the moral torture they inflicted on her was like the sticking pins into a human heart at a witches' meeting. They hurt her feelings, they humbled her pride, they revenged by an arrogant assumption of insulting pity, the superiority which nature had given her over them. In a word, they made her eat the bitter bread of feminine dependence.

Blanche had almost ceased to hope. Of the only beings she had ever loved, the one had ceased to live, the other to live for her.

One day a gentleman called. His card told his name, but his name told nothing. He inquired for Miss Mortimer.

"Are you Miss Mortimer?"

"Oh dear no," said Miss Acidula Vinegar. "You mean the young person under our protection?"

"Precisely," replied the stranger. "The young lady who has found a home beneath your roof."

"The young person to whom we have been very kind," returned Miss Acidula.

"I should wish to see her."

"Sir!" said Miss Acidula. "I have not the pleasure of knowing you. We do not know much of the young person, and I doubt whether the rules of propriety—"

"Oh! Madam, my business is no secret. I am a junior partner in the banking house of —. We have long had a very important communication to make to Miss Mortimer, and singularly enough, have just received another from a totally different quarter, which appears even more urgent. I have been designated personally to wait upon her. I am charged to pay into her hands a sum due to the estate of her late uncle. I am also charged to give her two important letters, and to convey to her the intelligence that she has acquired, by the death of some remote connections, the claim to considerable property. I have no personal knowledge of Miss Mortimer: this is my mission."

Miss Acidula alarmed Blanche when, without preparation, she threw her arms around her neck, and embraced her with all the warmth of sisterly affection—for she had always looked more likely to bite than to caress any one. The maid who was standing by, was satisfied that she had taken a malignant fever, and wished to spread it. Blanche heard the confused account of her good fortune, with as much magnanimity as she had endured these congratulations.

"I have so much to communicate to you, Miss Mortimer," said the banker, "that you must allow me to look to my notes. Firstly, then, I am charged to pay into your hands the sum of a thousand pounds, due to your late uncle, on receipt of your discharge for that amount."

"And who could owe my uncle that sum?" said Blanche.

"One of these two letters will inform you."

She looked at the superscription:—it was from Mattheus!—Then, all the dignity with which she had resolved to bear her prosperity was forgotten; she tore open the letter and devoured its contents.

Mattheus still loved her. His forced and sudden departure for a distant land, whence he had hoped daily to return, and the sudden death of her uncle, had caused him to lose all trace of her. He had been indefatigable in recovering it; and now, if he had neither name, nor home, nor station, he could offer her at least his hand, his fortune, and his eternal devotion. In a postscript he mentioned that he had paid to her order the sum above-stated, the amount to which he was indebted to her uncle; but Blanche knew very well that Ralph had often boasted that he never lent or borrowed.

She had scarcely patience to read through the other letter, which announced her claims to an extensive property, together with the offer of a large immediate sum for the abandonment of her rights upon it.

Blanche did not think of comparing the date of her connection's death with the date of her lover's letter. But as she did not doubt, she would have derived no additional satisfaction from this proof of his disinterestedness. Just as she had once judged him, he was willing to take her portionless, dependent, and an orphan; and she, the orphan, having proved his love, could accept him without scruple as the independent heiress.

It was six weeks after the above-named events, and within one week of the proposed marriage, that the scene recorded in the last chapter took place, in a crowded opera-house.

CHAPTER III.

We left Prince Ivan, in a previous chapter, prostrate amongst the broken lamps and stunned musicians of the orchestra. Let us now return to him just as he had been lifted up, not dead, but senseless; the blood still pouring through his mouth, and his limbs hanging powerless and loose, as if all broken and disjointed. He was laid at full length on his back, on one of the front benches, and the crowd pressed densely about those immediately surrounding him; his private friends, and the medical men who happened to be present amongst the audience.

But there were two individuals who forced their way through the throng with an energy before which the most eager curiosity gave way.

The one was a venerable, grey-headed man, the other, middle-aged, distinguished in appearance, and remarkable by a green shade covering his eyes.

The elder of these individuals seemed in the deepest distress; he raised the Prince's head upon his knees, and clasping his trembling hands together, asked, with tears in his voice, if not in his eyes:

"Oh, is he—is he dead?"

It was a touching picture, as he encompassed the pallid face of Ivan with his arms, to see that old man's sorrow, as he raised his eyes imploringly to Heaven; and his companion with the green shade looked on, just as a connoisseur surveys an interesting picture.

"Gentlemen," said the famous Doctor B—, "unless it be the bones of the trunk, which is indeed, but too probable, there is nothing broken; the skull is intact, the limbs are all sound; we must move him instantly, for we cannot exactly strip him here."

"That," said the Commissary of Police, "would be an attentat aux mœurs, at least in the pit or boxes; nudity is not quite permitted, even upon the stage."

"Then let us move him at once, bench and all, without waiting for a stretcher," said the Doctor.

"One moment, Sir," observed the Commissary; "can you assure me that this man is neither dead nor very soon about to die; because if either were the case, it would be my duty to note down the exact position of the body, and to secure the broken lamps and fiddles, to bring in evidence to secure the murderer's conviction, which you will admit, gentlemen, to be more important to justice than whether one man lives or dies."

But they did move him into the lobby, and there they bled him.

"See, see!" said the good old man, "his eyes move—he opens them!"

"I'll bet a hundred lou—lou—louis," uttered the Prince Ivan, half choked with the blood as he spit it out, and then he closed his eyes again.

"We won't be premature," said the doctor, "but still I think—hand me the cold water—that our patient will shortly be very much better, unless he should become decidedly worse."

"Ah!" exclaimed the Prince, opening his eyes this time full wide. "Where am I?"

The doctor held the glass to his lips. He drank, and the blood was dexterously and quickly removed from his face.

"Ah, Hippolite!" said the patient; he paused for a moment in pain, and then continued: "What a cursed fall, my friends! The front of my head is beaten in, I think."

It was evident that he was entirely restored to his senses.

"Now Heaven in its mercy be praised!" exclaimed the good old man.

"Ah, ah! Grippe, is that you?" said Ivan.

"Heaven be praised he is saved! and so I leave him," said the old man, and he shuffled away, like a sorrowful and angry father turning from an unworthy son, whose danger had for a moment disarmed his just severity.

"What! afraid of blood, old bloodsucker?" shouted Ivan, feebly, but jeeringly. "Are you off, old cent per cent?"

"Heaven be praised for his recovery!" muttered the old man, "when one thinks that I hold in this pocket-book his engagements for three hundred thousand francs."

"Oh! it is Grippe, the money-lender," said a bye-stander.

"You see, my friends," observed the Prince, with a sickly smile, "that if this mishap proves fatal, you may put without scruple 'sincerely regretted' on my tomb; only don't add 'by all his creditors;' that will be understood."

"I must enforce rigid silence," said the doctor. "I must enjoin you not to speak a word; though I really don't think that blood is from the chest."

Let us now follow the man with the green shade to the box, where Blanche Mortimer lay insensible for the second time in her life, although already for the second in these chapters. Mattheus, whose furious passion had subsided into the reaction of depression, was by this time in the custody of two municipal guards.

"I arrest you!" said the commissary, with all the dignity of a Roman Consul, but not till he saw the prisoner's arms secured. "I arrest you, miscreant, in the name of the law! Who are you? what are you? what led you to the perpetration of such a deed?"

There were several strangers who had forced their way into the box.

"It was justly done, if not mercifully," said one. "I will bear testimony to the provocation he received."

"I am Sir Thomas Blunt," said another. "Byegones are byegones, and whether right or wrong, we can't recall them; but I will bear witness to the provocation too."

"Who are you?" repeated the Commissary.

"Don't answer him!" exclaimed Sir Thomas, "you must not criminate yourself; a rascal like this has no more ideas of fair play or justice than a pole-cat; he'd make you twist the rope to hang you by; but I am sure the man is not dead after all."

"Not dead!" said Mattheus. "Thank God!"

"That is right," quoth Sir Thomas; "don't bear malice, if you do break bones."

"Ho! there," said the Commissary, holding the door of the box, "no one must come in."

But the gentleman with the green shade had got in already.

"Who are you, prisoner, for the third time?" inquired the police functionary.

"Mattvei!" said the man with the green shade, in a language which no one else understood, but at which Mattheus started and turned deadly pale. "So it is you! What has possessed you?"

"The devil!"—replied Mattheus gloomily.

"Sir," said the Commissary, "you are speaking a language to the prisoner which I do not understand."

"Pardon me," answered the gentleman with the shade, "but conversant as a man of your externals must be with every European tongue, I forgot that you might not understand this one. It is American; my friend is American; he can speak no other language."

"I am neither fluent in the Chinese nor American," observed the Commissary, "but perhaps you will ask him in his own jargon, what he says for himself."

"Do you know whom you have killed?" continued the stranger, in the strange tongue.

"A Russian," replied Mattheus, "I know it."

"And do you know, wretch, who he is?"

"Not I—I only knew him for a Russian, by the oath he swore, as I flung him from me."

"Oh! Mattvei, Mattvei! you had better have been at the bottom of the mines of Nertchinsk, than at this night's work."

"Is he dead?" said Mattheus.

"Worse than dead!"

"Worse!" echoed Mattheus.

"You did not know him?"

"No, on my soul—who is he?"

"Not only a Russian, but a magnate. What would you give to hush up this fearful business?"

"Here it is impossible," said Mattheus despondingly.

"Impossible if he were dead; but he is not dead; I have just seen him; he is not perhaps much injured."

"Oh, if it were possible!"

"It is so; you are not more in my power than he is."

"What does he say with all this?" inquired the impatient Commissary.

"My friend says simply, that the thing was accidental, or that the poor sufferer must have thrown himself over."

"Bah! we know better," said the Commissary. "Your friend prevaricates in American, Sir."

"He says the patient will corroborate his statement; and now I remember, I think his first words were to that effect, when he recovered from his swoon."

"We shall see; I don't believe it."

"Now," resumed the stranger in Russ, "what will you give me to make your victim speak the only words that can exonerate you, and prevent exposure?"

"Any thing."

"No, name a figure."

"Ten thousand roubles."

"Good bye," said the stranger, "I am off to bed."

"Twenty thousand!" said Mattheus.

"Good night."

"Twenty-five!"

"A pleasant evening to you."

"Ah!" said Mattheus, "you are another devil tempting me. What is your price?"

"Say thirty!"

"Thirty," said Mattheus, and the stranger vanished.

When he penetrated again to where Prince Ivan was, the latter was perfectly self-possessed, though talking very fast, with the loss of blood and the excitement.

"I think," said the surgeon, gravely, "that I may congratulate you on one of the most marvellous escapes it has ever been my fortune to witness in thirty years' practise. There is nothing broken—nothing—but the bridge of the nose."

The Prince bit his lip through, as he heard the titter of his friends at this announcement; but he was determined they should laugh with him, as well as at him.

"You, doctor, could have, afforded it better; but when, like myself, a man has not much nose, it is disagreeable to have it further flattened and effaced."

"Sir," said the Commissary of Police, "since you seem thus far recovered, I should like to hear some statement of the facts that led to this atrocious attempt."

"Ah!" said the Prince, almost savagely, "what can we do to him?"

"Why," replied the Commissary, "if it should unfortunately happen that you live and recover, I am afraid that there is not much to be done, excepting fine and long incarceration."

"You would not surely take the law of him, when you have brought his violence upon yourself?" said Z———. "I see only two courses, worthy of a man of honour, open to you."

"Which?"

"The one is to forgive."

"The other?"

"To revenge it personally."

"Come," he continued, "Mr. Commissary; I am desirous of prosecuting this ruffianly assassin as far as the law will allow me, and you will please to spare no expense in collecting all the necessary evidence."

"It is a very grievous case," said the Commissary.

"Have you got writing implements about you, to note down my statement."

"Dear Prince!" said an insinuating voice, at the sound of which Ivan started, as if he had been bitten by an adder; it was that of the man with the green shade.

"One word with you."

And the stranger stretching out his long neck, hissed into Prince Ivan's ear, for the space of several minutes. When he had ceased, the Prince turned again to the Commissary and repeated:

"Are your writing implements ready? Then write down."

"I listen," said the Commissary.

"That Prince Ivan Ivanovitch, a Russian subject—"

"On the third day of January, anno 1827, between the hours of ten and eleven, post meridian," suggested the Commissary.

"Exactly," continued the Prince; "being in the Opera House, in the city of Paris, in the department of the Seine."

"In the department of the Seine," repeated the scribe.

"Being in the box No. 19, was moved by the caprice of the moment to sit upon the ledge, when according to the laws of gravitation—"

"According to the laws of gravitation? We do not recognise that code in France," interrupted the Commissary.

"Never mind," said the Prince; "write on. Having lost his balance, he tumbled over. That is all he has to depose."

The Commissary looked aghast and blank.

"Excepting that he was much indebted to the politeness of a stranger, who kindly exerted himself to prevent the possibility of his throwing himself down—a service which Prince Ivan Ivanovitch proposes to acknowledge in a fitting manner, in proper time and season."

"That is as it ought to be," said Z———.

"It is well done," said Hippolite.

"Since this is the case," observed the disappointed Commissary, "I do not see how we are to detain the prisoner; in fact there is only one event in which we should have the happiness to see the law vindicated, for I find you are determined to screen him."

"Which is that?"

"If your bruises and contusions should take a turn, and terminate fatally."

"Thank you," said Ivan.

"But now I bethink me," observed the Commissary, "if it was accidental, you are liable for all the damage done to the broken glass and fiddles. I must go and see; I don't know how the musicians may choose to view it; if they consider it in the light of an assault, to wit, that you made use of your own person as a missile weapon, it may become a question of Correctional Police; for a man has no right to throw his own body, any more than any other missile instrument, at the head of any one."

"Oh!" said the Prince to his friends, "on reflection, we cannot leave the punishment of the most ruffianly brutality, to the quibbles of the law and its myrmidons; at least, whilst we can chastise it with our own right hands."

CHAPTER IV.

In Mr. Mortimer's establishment, though fitted with such luxurious economy to his personal comforts, there had still lingered one supernumerary, in the person of an English groom. He was one of those characters who consider it derogatory to their dignity to appear satisfied under any possible circumstances, and he happened just now to imagine that he had much real cause of dissatisfaction. Bob Bridle was a little, spare, hard-featured man, sinewy and wiry as those Scotch terriers that you may suspend by one leg in the air without their yelping or wincing. You could no more have looked upon him, even if you had disguised him in a judge's wig, or in full canonicals, than you could upon a saddle, without mentally associating him with the idea of a horse.

But though he was only half the size of an average man. Bob Bridle considered that his bulk had been the chief bar to his advancement in life. He came of a stock—the Bridles on the one side, and the Horseflys on the other—who appeared for generations to have been bred for the stable, and to a studied undergrowth. Now Bob had been considered as a great, overgrown, weedy exception, who did no credit to his breed. His relatives disowned him—he weighed a stone and a half too much.

Brought up in the monastic severity of a Newmarket training stable, he was punctual as clock-work, and secret as the grave, particularly in every thing that regarded horses; no one but his master could ever have extorted from him the admission that the one he was riding was positively a mare or a gelding, a chestnut or a grey. He was a faithful, if not an accommodating servant. Though he never professed attachment to his employers, his great moral maxim of "doing justice to the nags" led him insensibly to do his duty by their masters.

Nothing could more forcibly indicate bodily agility than his frame, or insensibility to pain, danger, or persuasion, than his countenance. He looked as if it were impossible either to hurt his body, to frighten or impress his mind, or to unlock his tongue.

The costume of Bob, in cut and fashion, was strictly professional. His sandy whiskers were close shaven, his hair clipped short; his white cravat, his shorts, his top-boots, or gaiters, were always the pink of neatness.

Bob's opinions were peculiar and decided. It could not be said that there was any thing in the world but a thorough-bred horse which he admired. There was much about which he had not made up his mind; but there were three things for which he had an utter contempt—soldiers, foreigners, and trousers. Although he was in his own person a remarkable example of the sacrifices sometimes entailed upon poor humanity by dire necessity—necessity, the "mother of the world," as the metaphysical Shelley calls it—nothing had ever induced him to wear a garment he so much despised.

Though in the early aspirations of his ambition in the training stable. Bob had often looked with contempt on the meaner branches of his profession, his evil stars had made him outgrow the hereditary leanness. He became too heavy, and he was obliged to descend to where he had looked down. At length he went abroad with Mr. Mortimer as groom, in charge of two thorough-bred hacks. But he was doomed to fall still lower in his self-esteem, when Mr. Mortimer sold his horses.

From that time forward. Bob looked and felt as lost, and as much out of his element, as those unhappy ducks kept in the height of summer, dusty and disconsolate, afar from genial horsepond and from running stream. He was now reduced to the charge of the English travelling carriage. With what pride and pleasure he grew at length to wash and furbish it, and breathe upon the varnish of its panels, as he wiped it with his clean dry leather, and hissed to keep it quiet! With what jealous vigilance, when upon the road, he regarded every officious blacksmith approach it at the post stations! As Bob boasted, he was "up to them;" he had even suffered a month's imprisonment for chastising on the spot a burly son of Vulcan, who was over anxious to make work for his own smithy.

But at length Mr. Mortimer sold even his travelling carriage, and there remained only the English corkscrew, the cutlery, and his own tops and leathers, on which he could possibly occupy himself, without a moral derogation to which he would not descend. He obstinately refused any other branch of employment, or to meddle with any article of foreign construction or invention, in any manner, from packing a carriage to polishing a silver spoon.

Mr. Mortimer at length took courage to dismiss Bob; but it was agreed that he was to continue in his service until their arrival in Paris would enable him to obtain a situation in some English family.

Now Count Horace, during a recent visit to the government stud at Tarbes, had purchased an English thorough-bred horse, about to be sold by the stud-master on account of its peculiar and ungovernable temper. It was a powerful, fiery, grey steed, with the size and bone of the English breed, and the gazelle eye, the distended nostril, the curving neck, and the tail of an Arabian. The temper of this beautiful animal was certainly capricious, and had been teased into vice by mishandling. All idea of riding the horse had been long abandoned as chimerical, and even the attempt to curry him had been long given over. He had not inaptly been named Lucifer; for he looked quite as proud and almost as wicked as the fallen angel, when he tossed back his mighty crest and neighed defiance.

The Count having been in England, knew that it hardly amounted to a proof of vice in an English horse, that he should have been found unmanageable in a foreign stable. He caused Lucifer to be brought to Ax; but by the time he had gathered vigour from a day's repose, he succeeded in puzzling all the ingenuity of his owner.

Bob Bridle had seen the horse: his eyes, which had rested so long contemptuously on the foreign specimens of horseflesh, were at once fascinated. Not only did he discern at a glance his blood and breed, but found that he was full of "points." When he saw him seize with his teeth, and kneel upon the man who attempted to rub him down, he declared "that he was playful as a kitten." That night he actually dreamed of the grey: he dreamed that the noble horse was in a nice "loose box," and that he, Bob Bridle, was littering him down. This was the greatest flight, either sleeping or waking, ever made in Bob's imagination, when he pictured in his dream a little paradise, and let his fancy people it.

The next day, Bob took up his position at the door of the inn, from whence he could command a view of the barn-like stable in which the Count's horse was quartered. Bob's long-waisted coat of prince's mixture, his red and white striped waistcoat, his well cleaned leathers by Hammond, and his tops by Thomas, all looked better than new—as they should with every careful groom—because they had taken the set of his figure. Truth to say, there was a little plot in his mind, of which the previsions were realized. When the Count ordered his English horse to be led out of the stable, his eye fell naturally upon the English groom.

"Oh!" said the Count, "you are an Englishman I see; and Mr. Mortimer's servant, I suppose."

"I am so," replied Bob, politely pulling his forelock.

"Then," proceeded the Count, "you are the very man I want to tell me something about this horse of mine."

Lucifer was led forth; but he had so damaged his reputation as a pacific animal, that he was brought out like an unmanageable bull, by four men, two and two, pulling at him by a rope from the headstall.

The grey horse screamed rather than neighed, as he tossed back his silvery mane, in indignant contempt of the terror he excited, and tore up the ground with the angry pawing of his hoof.

"He is a fine fellow, is he not?" said the Count, "at least, to look at; for we can neither curry him nor ride him. It is a pity, for he is young, vigorous, of the noblest blood, and without a blemish—a perfect horse."

"He has points," replied Bob; "but we don't just tally in our ideas of a perfect horse with yours."

"How so?" inquired the Count.

"Why, Sir, as far as I see, foreign gentlemen buys horses for the faults they have not got; we buys 'em for the good qualities they have."

"Upon my word I don't know that you are wrong."

Bob proceeded, as if it was his wish to be instructive as well as agreeable.

"They are like those folks who won't have a hanimal at all, unless he is examined and warranted sound by a great veterinary; they don't know, Lord help them! that there are not five horses quite sound in a hundred, and that those five are sure to be amongst the worst score of the lot."

"Well, what do you say to him?"

"Is he thorough-bred?" inquired Bob, critically.

"Can't you tell by his appearance?"

"No, Sir; nor any other man breathing. He may judge that a horse is thorough-bred or almost; but the difference between quite and makes the cocktail. Now a three-parts bred cocktail may often look more thorough-bred than a thorough-bred his-self."

"What, do you mean to say that no judge can tell?"

"It is not on the cards, Sir, no more than he could swear by looking at a neatly-mounted whip, whether there was a cane or a whalebone inside of it."

"Well but, my good friend," said the Count, a little puzzled, "if a horse not quite thorough-bred looks so like a thorough-bred, what does it signify whether he is so or not?"

"Because he only looks so," replied the groom. "Like a whip, whether there's a whalebone or a bamboo inside of it, when you know the stuff it's made of you know what to expect from it. Now, Sir, if that grey horse is a cocktail he'll only train to last for one mile; if a thorough-bred for four. If he is a cocktail, his bones are bones, and all the training in the world will only sweat off his muscle, and leave his fat; but if he is a thorough-bred, his bones are ivory, and his fat will all train down into muscle as hard as a crow-bar."

"Well, then," said the Count, "I can tell you that he is thorough-bred."

"How?" said Bob.

"Out of two of the most famous horses in England; I've got their names somewhere."

"I'd try and remember them," said Bob. "It don't look 'andsome to forget one's horse's pedigree when he's got one. I am sorry to say, Sir, they imposes dreadful in England respecting horses on ignorant people, 'specially foreigners. They sell 'em a horse, and gives him a pedigree by Mousetrap out of Blacking-bottle, or some such names as never was in the stud-book any more than in the Bible."

"Well," said the Count, good-humouredly, "I think I can find it in my pocket-book; seeing is believing."

"Now," continued Bob, who thought that in a quiet way he was reading a great moral lesson—"now, when a humble individual like myself sees gentlemen so uncommon particular about their own pedigrees—which always may run crooked, no blame to them for it either—I can't help thinking why they shouldn't be more particular about those honest creatures, horses. A slip in his own breed don't much signify to a man, barring if his skin's iron-grey, or his head woolly; it won't make any difference in his training, as ever I see; but a wrong cross in the blood of a horse prevents his being ever trained at all, to speak of."

"Why not?" said the Count, highly amused.

"Because, when you begin to give them their gallops to get their fat off, they refuse their food in a few days, and you must leave off training. But what I mean to say, Sir, is this here: what more business have horses with names that ain't in the stud-book, than human beings with names they are not christened by?"

"Come," smiled the Count, still searching in his pocket-book, "you forget the Jews and Mussulmans, who are never christened."

"Well, they have no business with Christian names either. If a squire or a farmer will call his horse something when he runs it for the hunter's stakes, why don't he call him Clod or Dobbin; but he oughtn't to be let to give them fine thorough-bred names—classical, as I once heared a schoolmaster say—like Endymion, or All-round-my-hat, or Wide-awake—and 'specially not to sell them to ignorant people, who knows no better, as if they was in the stud-book."

"Well, our grey horse's sire is at all events; here is all about it, page and volume, stud-book and racing calendar: the name of his sire was Swap."

"And a thundering good horse, too," said Bob; "now for the mare."

"Dam by Leda—whalebone blood—"

"Ah!" said Bob, whose mind seemed relieved from a great weight, and who now turned to examine attentively the horse on whom he had feared to waste too much sympathy. "Is he quiet?"

"What a question," said the Count, "don't you see?"

The horse snuffed up the air through his black, distended nostrils, which glowed inside like a piece of red hot iron, and his shrill neigh was sonorous as the blast of a trumpet, as he bounded at the end of his cord, like a wild beast struggling with his chain. Bob Bridle went boldly up to him: the horse seized him by the shoulder, and tore out a piece of his coat and shirt in his teeth; but Bob dexterously avoided the blow of his fore-legs, and having got his hand about the halter, alternately he struck him with his doubled fist, and soothed and patted him.

"Ah, what! ah, would you! Now then!" The long-accustomed sounds of an English voice, and the handling of the groom, soon reduced the fury of Lucifer to playful ebullitions of snapping with his teeth, and giving cow's-kicks with his hind-legs.

"He is a real beauty," said Bob, as he felt his legs down, "and as sound as a roach."

"Is a roach particularly sound"? said the Count.

"You take one up like a hard and sharp," said Bob; "but did you, Sir, ever see a roach that was spavined, sprung on the fore-legs, broken-winded, ring-boned, or even wind-galled?"

"Never," laughed the Count, "in the whole course of my experience. It is a pity he is such a temper."

"I don't know nothing about his temper."

"Don't you?" said the Count. "Look at your coat."

"Oh, that is nothing," said Bob; "I dare say the horse knowed I ought to have took it off. Besides, Sir, consider what your own feelings would be if you was held by the halter like a wild beast by four jabbering foreigners. Why Job his-self would have turned rusty on his friends."

"I wish we could curry him," said the Count.

"I'll curry him, Sir, if you like, when I've taken my coat off."

"You'll be a devilish good fellow, if you will."

"Couldn't you put a saddle on him?" suggested Bob.

"I don't know," said the Count; "but I am sure we can get nobody into the saddle, unless you will mount him."

"I'll try," said Bob, "when I have dressed him; but perhaps you'll excuse my riding in my sleeves; my tops and leathers is my own, and so are my bones, and so is my time just now, by Mr. Mortimer's kind leave; but my coat is his'n, and I shouldn't like to get it further damaged."

"Ride him in any way you like," said the Count, "if you think he can be ridden; and if you do, get on him at once; we can see about his dressing afterwards."

"As you like. Sir," answered Bob; "but not just here; we must get him off the stones. I speak more for the horse than for myself; he'd likely hurt his-self, since he is so fresh; and even for a Christian's bones a grass field is softer to fall upon."

"I should have imagined," observed Horace, "that to get on the back of that devil, you must have been one of those riders whom nothing could unseat."

"I'll tell you what. Sir," said Bob, "I've often heeard people say as how they never see the horse as could throw 'em. Perhaps if they was to say they never got on to one as could, they'd tell the truth. Now, Sir, I never see the horse I wouldn't ride myself, barring he was a lame un or a screw; but it is my opinion that if I was a gentleman I would never keep a horse that couldn't throw me if he set about it."

"You mean by a screw, an unsound, damaged horse, I believe," said the Count; "why do you call him so?"

"Well, Sir," answered Bob, "if you come to that, what do you call a horse a horse for? But them as knows the walley of nags, knows the walley of words as well as most people. Isn't a screw, Sir, a proper name for a sort of beast as dealers is so fond of sticking into people, and of worming into the stables of them as don't know no better?"

"Ah, very true; but tell me, after all, what are you to do," said Horace, "with a brute that gets you off?"

"Git on him again. Sir," said Bob, quietly.

With the co-operation of an ostler, a postillion, two gensdarmes, and a veterinary blacksmith, who offered their assistance, and certainly did afford a great deal of advice, which was given in chorus, a saddle was got on to the back of Lucifer, and whilst Bob held his head, the girths were tightened.

The grey was led safely enough into a field surrounded by a high stone wall, where he pawed up the turf with a shrill neigh of astonishment, as Bob Bridle buckled on his spurs and prepared to get upon his back.

But here, with much vociferation, the veterinary proved that the stirrup leathers were buckled up too short, and the gensdarmes expostulated on the folly of riding him without a curb. In fact, so clamorous and extensive was the counsel afforded by the bye-standers, that Bob appeared somewhat in the light of a pupil receiving the instructions of many masters.

"Pray, Sir, am I to ride him?" inquired Bob.

"Of course," said the Count.

"Then," proceeded Bob, making a profound bow to the veterinary, and politely offering him the stirrup iron, "Mountey s'il voo plate."

Now it must not be imagined from this mispronunciation that Bob had failed to pick up a decent smattering of French; but being a great believer in the inherent tendencies of certain breeds, he had of late taken in his idle hours to literary pursuits, observing that the Bridles had always had an unfortunate propensity to books, the same as the Horseflys to dog's-nose—to the proneness of the maternal branch for which liquid he attributed his own unlucky overweight.

Now with some shrewdness Bob had directed his intellectual labours to spelling through a French and English vocabulary; but this branch of his studies had the untoward effect of making him sturdily mispronounce, by his rigid adherence to the sounds of the English alphabet, every word or sentence he had once seen in print.

In vain the Italian valet told him the true pronunciation.

"If these foreigners will call p l a i t, play, more shame for 'em!" he said. "I won't."

But as Bob's object, on the present occasion, was rather to be understood than to persuade by the graces or purity of his rhetoric, his end was obviously answered; for the veterinary replied to his very insinuating invitation to mount by a vehement negative.

"Voulez-voo?" said Bob, turning with sarcastic civility to one of his moustachioed advisers; but at this moment Lucifer growing impatient gave a snort and an indignant bound, which almost lifted the groom off his legs, whilst the gendarme started back two paces, with an oath, and a face three inches elongated at the bare suggestion.

"Then," said Bob, "p'raps you will let me go to work in my own fashion. And now, Sir," addressing Horace, "perhaps you'll keep an eye that they don't get in the way of his heels; for sogers, and pigs, and old women, is always in the way of horses; no wonder the sight on 'em makes 'em restive."

Almost instantaneously as his foot was raised to the stirrup, Lucifer gave a wild, terrific scream, and a bound of prodigious power; but this time he bounded under the weight of Bob Bridle, who was firmly seated on his back.

As the group around him cleared out of his way, there followed a moment of anxious expectation, which was disappointed; for the horse seemed lost in wonderment at the indignity offered him, and remained for a few seconds in the exact position into which he had fallen, uttering a low and almost dog-like whine. But then all his indignation seemed to break forth in one concentrated burst of fury; he reared, he plunged, he screamed, he snorted, and then he broke away, bound after bound, leaping like a stag, with all his four feet from the ground at once.

Then he made a desperate effort to seize the rider with his teeth, and reared so high that he was on the point of falling backwards, till he was urged on, and again leaped forward bound after bound, bound after bound, and then again he reared, and plunged, and kicked, and screamed, and snorted. And thus the horse and rider struggled, till the only question seemed whether the wild untiring vigor of the animal, or the skill and obstinacy of the man, would triumph.

At length, covered with foam, and tossing the white froth from his mouth, the steed paused for a moment near the spectators, with panting sides and starting eyes, and red distended nostrils.

When Sinbad found the old man of the mountains inextricably fastened on his shoulders, he could not have spoken words of more plaintive expression than did the piteous neigh of the grey horse.

And yet, there sat the little wiry iron-framed groom, as if upon a chair: cool, calm, unruffled, and collected. He disengaged his right hand from the reins one instant, just to smooth down his handkerchief, and tuck in a truant end.

The Count was about to speak, when away burst Lucifer again, with all the fury and the malice he had gathered in the interval of his repose. He reared, and swerved, and plunged, his mane all literally bristling up; and then he tried to lie down with his rider; but this time the blood spurted from his spur, and the horse sprang into the air with a prodigious bound, instead of rolling on the earth; and then, after another pause, he rushed to the extremity of the field, and tried to crush the horseman's thigh against the wall; but again the spur made him swerve.

The idea, however, tickled his equinine fancy, for he came back twice and thrice, to renew the attempt, with furious and malignant resolution. But the fourth time. Bob Bridle holding his head so as to prevent his swerving right or left, tightened his armed heels like an iron vice, and brought him straight up to the five foot wall, at a speed so furious that it seemed inevitable that he must either be dashed to pieces or leap over it, which he did in gallant style, clearing it by many inches; and then away he galloped up the hill side, from field to field, flying over enclosure wall, after enclosure wall, till from the walled-in fields he was speeding over the heath, and amongst the gigantic masses of granite, and up the steep and rugged slippery rock, on which it seemed that his hoofs could scarcely have held their footing.

And now a new source of anxiety opened to the spectators, for the fate of the noble horse and his daring rider; for at the summit of the hill a deep and dangerous chasm intervened abruptly. The wild and furious steed speeding onwards on the dangerous crags and the yawning precipice before him, formed an appalling picture. But here the danger ceased most unexpectedly; for the horse stopped short; he was clearly alarmed as he looked down on the abyss, and the excitement of his anger vanished with the terror of his situation.

And here the rider triumphed. He patted, and encouraged, and spoke to him, and dismounting and re-mounting alternately, he guided back the trembling beast, through all the difficulties of his timid downward course, over the dangerous ground he had dashed up so proudly! It was evident that the horse was now driven to rely on the rider, and found encouragement from his judicious handling and his voice. And then leaping him again over the enclosure walls, and galloping him round every field, his course being only now interrupted by an occasional burst of temper when the horse found himself again on terra firma. Bob, after an hour's exertion, brought the grey triumphantly up to his master.

"What do you say to that?" said the Count.

"Ah!" observed the veterinary, "no man could ever ride such an incarnate devil."

"Why, where are your eyes?"

"Oh! that is not riding—that is fastening one'self on to a horse's back like a monkey, or like a tick to the fleece of a sheep; a man must be three parts a monkey to do so."

"And," added a gendarme, "it must utterly spoil his riding, according to all the principles of the art."

Lucifer had next to be curried. It was evident that the groom had obtained, by his first victory, a wonderful ascendancy over his stubborn temper, but it was not quite subdued; for he offered precisely that degree of resistance to the operation, which rendered it just executable; but that was all, though Bob declared, that

"Barring he was a little fresh, he was as quiet a horse as one could wish to see."

"But he has a very ugly trick," said Horace, "which I never saw in a horse before, of kicking forwards with his hind legs, like a cow."

"Oh, Sir," replied the groom, "horses has their pertikilarities as well as men; my own grandfather on my mother's side, old Samuel Horsefly, and all on 'em before and after him, had a way like of taking snuff with the thumb and little finger of their left hands, by which a gentleman might have knowed 'em anywhere. Now, Sir, by the pertikilarity of that horse's cow-kick, there's a many would have sworn he was a Swap. I've seen a dozen of Swap's get, or more, and half of 'em was given to it. In my opinion, Sir, it stamps his breed and adds to his value; besides, Lord love you, Sir, them cow-kicks cannot hurt one."

But as Bob was speaking, Lucifer, whose sides were tickled by the comb, made a violent snatch at the groom, and though he was holding him with the left hand by the head, the energy of the horse's action carried him a little backwards, and with a dexterous malice, by the very kick which Bob had been discussing, as if in practical refutation of his theory, he struck him in the stomach, and stretched him almost senseless.

The veterinary bled him, to which Bob offered no objection, partly on account of the style in which it was done, and partly because he was speechless with pain. He was carried to bed, and Count Horace hastened himself to bring the most famous doctor of the district. After a search of near an hour, he might be said in two senses, to have found him out, for he both discovered his domicile and received the intelligence that he was absent from it. Having dispatched a messenger for him, he returned to the patient.

The doctor found him very pale, and evidently in great pain. Mr. Mortimer's valet was by his bed side; there were a couple of tin boxes open beside him, which seemed to be filled, the one with little oblong bits of tallow-like rushlight-ends, the other with a green salve; and there was a seal skin pocket-book, containing lancets, prickers, and a few veterinary instruments. In his right hand, Bob was holding an old and well-thumbed pocket bible.

"How is he now?" said Horace, eagerly. "The doctor will be here in an hour; but what shall we do in the meantime?"

"Oh! Monsieur le Comte," replied the valet, "Mistare Bridelle will see no doctor—he never has—he never will."

"How do you feel, my poor fellow, now?" said Horace, taking his hand.

"A little rum like, Sir," answered Bob, "but better. It is only a poke in the bread-basket; one of them off-hand hurts that will be all right one way or t'other by this time to-morrow; but," he added, "as it may perwent my arguing the pint, perhaps you will oblige me and keep the foreign doctors out of the way, at least till I either go over the wrong side of the post, or recover."

"God bless me!" exclaimed the Count, "you must be examined, man. I trust in Heaven there is no serious injury done; but all that art can do, shall be done to speed your recovery."

"I hope not, Sir," said Bob; "I've nothing to say to doctors. 'Cepting some veterinaries, I never see one that knowed even how to physic a dog or a horse, let alone a Christian, and I dislike foreign uns especially. As for heart, Sir, I never see that any of 'em, French or English, had partikerlarly much; and I've took already more than all the doctors in France has got to give me—the half of one of these here English horse-balls, as I always uses, made up at Newmarket and genu-wine, I know. I've put a James' blister on the part, with the help of that ere 'talian walley, (pointing to Mr. Mortimer's valet), and so it is my opinion on the whole, that if I am to live I shall live, and if I am to die, no one can say I've done it a-purpose, and I've got a bit of comfort here as a Papist wouldn't bring me."

Here Bob pointed to his Bible.

At length the doctor came, but nothing could exceed the sullen ill-will of the sick groom towards him. Being a man of sense, whilst he expressed his astonishment at the extraordinary remedies applied, he admitted that for the present he could do nothing; the internal medicine he thought might increase the inflammation, but the mischief was done, and the blister could only act as a counter-irritant, and might neutralise its effects, so he would not remove it. He was of the opinion of the patient, that a few hours would render him much better or much worse, and he took his departure, promising to return within a given time.

"And now, Sir," said Bob, who seemed again in pain, "I hope they haven't give the grey his fill of cold water."

"Oh! curse the horse," exclaimed the Count, "I'll have him shot to-morrow!"

"Shot!" shouted Bob, starting up in his bed in spite of his blister, as if he had been shot himself. "Sixteen hands high, thorough-bred, fast-up to any weight, and sound as a bell, and talk of shooting him!"

"Never," said the Count, "will I again put the life and limbs of a human being in competition with the gratification of keeping an animal like that, after what he has done to-day."

"Shoot him!" re-echoed Bob, "I never heard of such a sin; why, Sir, unless you change your mind, I should neither live quiet if I am to live, nor go off the course comfortable if I am to die. Consider, Sir, what a many horses them as rides 'em spoils, for one unlucky horse as spoils a rider. Consider, Sir, that this here book instructs us to do good to them as hurts us, even when they are reasoning Christians as knows the hurt they've done us, much less to forgive a poor dumb animal that has been worrited by foreigners and sogers. Why, Sir, it would be a wickedness, if he was a cocktail and a screw."

"Well, well," said Horace, "we will see then; at all events you have the true feeling of a Christian."

"I don't know," said Bob; "we are all apt to neglect this book, till we require the horse-balls; but of late I've thought more often of it; and, Sir, if anything should go amiss, perhaps you'll not forget to give it to our sweet young lady to forward to my mother. My father give it me five year ago, with this here box of balls. 'Bobby,' says he, 'you are going to foreign parts; but now mind, my lad—never neglect your horses, fear God, and keep your bowels open.' "

The next morning Horace went early with the doctor to visit the invalid. The nurse left to watch him was fast asleep, and the patient's bed was tenantless. He was at length traced to the stable, whither he had crawled, and was rubbing down the grey. A few days after, Bob Bridle, on excellent terms with Lucifer, was leading him along the road to Toulouse.

And this is the history of how he came to enter the service of Count Horace.

CHAPTER V.

"I have ventured to call, Miss Mortimer," said the bluff Sir Thomas, "to hear from your own lips how you feel after the agitation of that terrible evening. I hope you are quite restored to health."

"I thank you," answered Blanche. "I am quite recovered now, and am very grateful. Indeed, this kind visit has given me fresh cause for being so."

"At least, it's kindly meant," thought Sir Thomas Blunt, "however you may consider it;" but he observed aloud:

"The deep interest which I could not fail to take in any woman placed in so painful a situation, would not have allowed me to act otherwise—to say nothing of finding in her a countrywoman—a countywoman and almost a kinswoman. For although the excitement of the moment may have driven it entirely from your recollection, I remember perfectly that you told me you were the daughter of Edward Mortimer, of —— Hall. I knew all about him, poor fellow! and I knew all his brothers, though I have lost sight of them since they left the county. In fact, the family was somehow distantly connected with my own."

"Oh!" said Blanche, "I remember well your saying so: and I must therefore shake hands with you as an old friend of my uncle's, after thanking you for the disinterested kindness you showed to me as a stranger."

"And what has become of George?"

"He died in India."

"By heavens, it is a pity!" exclaimed Sir Thomas. "Poor George! he was a pretty rider. He would have lived to the age of Methusalem, if sitting a horse had any thing to do with living. But then, why do men go to India? To gratify the ambition of the country, to run it to eventual expense, to lose their livers, and to jeopardize their souls! And William?"

"Dead!"

"Dead too! and Ralph?"

"Ralph died in my arms," said Blanche. "I am not quite out of mourning for him yet."

"God bless me!" observed the Baronet, after a brief pause; "what ravages death has made. Why it is only eight, or ten, or twelve—no, let me see—it is twenty years ago since we were all together! And have they left large families?"

"Only myself," answered Blanche, with a melancholy smile, as the loneliness of her position, of which she never otherwise thought, was thus recalled to her.

"What, only you!" and then he reflected, that it was perhaps just as well, since from his recollection of them, they were not people to have left behind them many broad acres for the use of a numerous posterity. "Perhaps then, Miss Mortimer, the isolated position in which you are left, perhaps the distant connection I may claim with you, and, above all, my good intentions, may prove my apology for the delicate subject on which I am about to enter."

Blanche coloured, and nodded slightly for him to proceed, for she had an instinctive suspicion of the nature of his communication.

"Then allow me to premise that I am aware I have undertaken a very disagreeable and thankless office; though it is a duty I should almost have felt called upon to perform towards any countrywoman, though she had been a thorough stranger."

"Pray, Sir, go on," said Blanche.

"I trust, therefore, that you will not view my interference, however abrupt it may appear, and however little warranted by our very short acquaintance—I trust, in a word, Miss Mortimer, that even if I give you pain, you will duly appreciate my motives—"

"Pray, Sir, proceed," said Blanche, whose anxious embarrassment was increased by the unwillingness of the Baronet to enter at once upon his communication.

"Ah!" thought the Baronet, "that is the rub;" for though he was a bold, he was a kind-hearted man, and he was fully conscious that he was about to wound. But at length he continued:

"When I accidentally became acquainted with you at the Opera House, and had the good fortune to be at hand to render you what little service was in my power, you were not alone. Miss Mortimer. You were escorted by a Mr. Mattheus."

Blanche looked for a moment embarrassed; and then thinking to place their relative connection beyond all doubt, said with some dignity:

"Yes, Sir; and allow me to thank you in his name for the assistance you so nobly rendered him."

"For that," said Sir Thomas, "no thanks are due to me, either from you or him, since my conduct was so naturally dictated by my sympathy as an Englishman with the spirit which chastised, on the spot, a bully in the act of insulting a woman. I should have served the intruder so myself, only that, perhaps, I should have kept him in the box to punish him, instead of throwing him out of it. Besides," continued the Baronet, "Mr. Mattheus has been personally profuse of his gratitude."

"You have seen him then since?"

"Daily," replied Sir Thomas.

"Indeed!"

"In fact, I have only just left him. But, excuse me, Miss Mortimer—excuse the liberty I am about to take, and which I only venture upon when I come to consider your youth, your unprotected, lonely condition, your natural inexperience, our half relationship, and the fact that I am a contemporary of your uncle's, and old enough to be your father; but I was about to ask you, do you know who Mr. Mattheus is?"

Know Mattheus! what a question! thought Blanche. Oh, yes! how long, how well, how intimately she had known him! how his image was bound up with almost every pleasurable sensation through girlhood! how he had been tried in her bitter adversity, and proved disinterested, and generous, and good! but then it was a mightily difficult question to answer satisfactorily to a stranger.

"May I," at length said Blanche, "without doubting the friendliness of your purpose, first inquire the motive of your curiosity regarding him?"

"Assuredly," replied the Baronet. "It has arisen from hearing that you are betrothed to him. Believe me, that I should not thus rudely have intruded upon you without previously making all due inquiries; indeed, I have it from his own lips. Are you really going to marry him?"

"Sir!" said Blanche, colouring, "I am my own mistress."

"Yes; more is the pity!" muttered Sir Thomas, half audibly.

"And, after all," she continued, as her blue eyes flashed, and the flush which had overspread her neck and countenance came out into a deep open blush, like a suddenly expanding rose, "after all, why should I hesitate to admit to you, what I shall soon be proud to acknowledge before the whole world? Yes, Sir! I am about to become his wife!"

"By heavens!" said Sir Thomas; "that is spoken fairly and frankly out, like George Mortimer's daughter; and now, my noble girl, listen to Tom Blunt; who will be quite as open with you. I, who know foreigners intimately, am not astonished at your predilection for this Mr. Mattheus: he is a good-looking fellow, well-bred, possessed of much more information, and many more accomplishments, than most gentlemen boast, and I have never met with a more prepossessing foreigner—for of course I need not tell you that he is neither an Englishman nor an American."

Blanche nodded assent.

"But now—believe, that I am actuated only by the most heartfelt interest when I ask you emphatically and seriously if you know well who and what he is?"

"Well! Sir Thomas!" answered Blanche. "I take your solicitude for me kindly, as I am sure you mean it; but, on the other hand, you must excuse, because it would be painful, my wholly answering your question; but will it not suffice to reassure you, when I tell you that Mr. Mattheus was an old friend of my uncle Ralph's; that I have known him since my girlhood; that he is positively the oldest acquaintance I remember; and that I have had occasion to prove in a singular manner his disinterestedness and attachment."

"Not quite," replied the Baronet, "if that were to cause the last surviving relative of a good old friend and neighbour to throw herself away upon a——but let me first tell you what I know; only, allow me, Miss Mortimer, five minutes of your patience; thus far I must almost venture to insist that you should hear me, and then I drop the subject at once and for ever, if you require it."

"Proceed," said Blanche, endeavouring to master her emotion.

"Then excuse my first relating to you an anecdote illustrative of my meaning. I knew a young lady, accomplished, wealthy, beautiful, and highly born as yourself. She was on the point of marrying a foreigner, of whom I knew previously nothing, either of good or evil. Perhaps all that she had seen in him was calculated justly to prepossess her in his favour. Well, I happened to be present on the occasion of his grossly, though perhaps unavoidably, insulting a man at least his equal in rank; it was one of those marked and terrible insults which, in the foolish code of male honour, can only be washed out in blood. I am no duellist, Miss Mortimer. I do not see the beauty of a law by which the injured should be forced to expose himself to still further injury. But still, like many another foolish law, the law of honour is acknowledged, and the man who sets either at defiance is to be dreaded in the one case and despised in the other. Now imagine my hearing that the betrothed was about to be challenged by the man he had chastised; and knowing that he was friendless in the place where it occurred, offering myself as his friend; I knew that it was perhaps hopeless to prevent a hostile meeting, but I thought that I might probably divest it of the sanguinary character which foreign duels are apt to assume.

"I found the challenge, couched as it was in terms the most outrageous which a gentleman could be brought to repeat, and backed by threats of personal violence, accepted with reluctance. No apology, said the second, would his principal admit, unless the challenged passed under his uplifted horsewhip. Now you, Miss Mortimer, are a gentlewoman; and I am a bluff and peaceable elderly gentleman; but could you have wished a fond brother, or could I have wished an only son, to submit to the infamy of such a degradation? No! I see you would not.

"Now imagine that on the morning fixed for the encounter I found the intended bridegroom in a terrible state of agitation:—that I pardon:—if a man is afraid of quitting life, he cannot help it, poor devil, though it's bad taste to show it. But imagine a strong and full-grown man weeping like a woman, and falling on his knees, and swearing, that a fate the most terrible and mysterious hangs over him, and renders it impossible for him to keep his appointment! It was in vain I scouted the idea of having palmed on me the excuses of 'mysterious destinies' and 'terrible secrets'—as if I was a novel-reading, love-sick, and romantic girl. In vain I showed him that nothing more awful could in his situation possibly hang over him than the infamy and exposure he would bring upon himself, and the stain that even having ever listened to his proposals of alliance would bring upon the indignant gentlewoman to whom he was betrothed.

"But it was in vain; I left him rolling in an agony of terror or despair upon the hearth rug. The appointed hour of meeting was passing then, and it passed without his finding courage.

"But stop—as I was hurrying from him in disgust, I opened a wrong door, and passed through an inner room, where I beheld an individual whom I at once recognised, seated luxuriantly, smoking, on his ottoman, and evidently quite at home.

"This man, whom I had not spoken to for years, I instantly knew again, because twenty years ago I had picked him up on the continent, shirtless, shoeless and starving, and taken him into my service.

"I believe his history to have been that he was servant to an officer, whom he robbed after the battle of Leipsic; at all events he robbed me. He had even, I believe, been branded in the galleys; but of that I took little heed, for I knew how many of those who sit in judgment have merited little better. At length, he became marker to a billiard table. He then persuaded some good easy people, that he was the natural son of a Swedish nobleman, parading his ignoble scars, as honourable wounds. In fact throughout, wherever I have since chanced to hear of him, his career has been infamous. Now, let me ask you, after what had passed betwixt me and the betrothed, when I had seen him the craven, to find him the intimate companion of the thieving discarded valet, the croupier and the swindler, was I not in duty bound, as an honest-hearted man, to let the intended bride know all I knew?"

"Unquestionably," said Blanche, "but—"

Sir Thomas made an impatient gesture with his hand, and then proceeded;

"Now, Miss Mortimer, though bluff and rough, even I, such as you see me, and antidote-like as I must look now to the passion—even I loved once, and I am not even yet divested of sympathy, in my rude way, for what men of my stamp are apt to laugh to scorn. But I know too that love, blind love as they call it, is indeed like an old hunter, following the music of the hounds; and matrimony is at best but like a blind hedge; we may land well and go on pleasantly, or we may come into a gravel-pit—it is neck or nothing. Therefore, and because my tough old heart has tender points, I brought myself to break this painful intelligence to the young lady, offering to prove to her my assertions—and what do you think she did?"

"Poor thing!" said Blanche, with a sigh, "what could she do? she found her love had been a dream, and she discarded him;" and then she continued with a smile of sweet assurance: "But what suspicious parallel could you possibly draw between the conduct of so miserable a creature, and that of Mr. Mattheus? or what prudent moral could be reasonably deduced from things so utterly dissimilar?"

"Hark!" said the Baronet. "I have been named second to Mr. Mattheus."

"Good God!" exclaimed Blanche, starting up, "he has challenged the Russian Prince—I know he has—what is to be done to prevent it? Oh, tell me—tell me—tell me! that terrible man will kill him!"

"Oh no," said Sir Thomas. "It is the Russian Prince who has challenged Mattheus! and as I left Mattheus rolling on the rug when the hour struck that we should have been at the Bois de Boulogne, the Prince will not kill him, he will only post him up, and horsewhip him when he meets him."

"Oh! merciful Providence!" exclaimed Blanche, covering her eyes with her hands. At this moment the door of the adjacent room opened, and Mattheus, in a Spanish travelling cloak, entered and stood before them.

He was evidently equipped for a journey. His countenance was flushed, his manner was full of exaltation. He placed his hat behind one of the fauteuils, and then, having unfastened his cloak and laid it carefully on an ottoman, advanced a few paces.

Now one moment previously, the sober, anxious earnestness of the revelation made to Blanche by Sir Thomas Blunt, whose open, honest frankness was stamped in unmistakeable lines upon his features, and characterised in the very tone of his voice and the manner of his speech, had carried to her a sudden sickening, benumbing dread, almost amounting to a vague conviction of a truth which was so fearful to her. But the sight of Mattheus instantly dispelled it, and her first impulse, even in face of the severe and contemptuous aspect with which he was greeted by the Baronet, was a feeling of regret and shame at having for an instant doubted her betrothed.

"Oh, Mattheus!" she exclaimed, rushing to meet him. "In Heaven's name explain this cruel misunderstanding—this is Sir Thomas Blunt, an old friend of my family."

"I know him," replied Mattheus, with assumed coolness; "I have overheard his last words, and I can guess the remainder."

"Oh no," said Blanche, "I am sure you cannot guess them; but you shall hear, that you may show him how false have been his conclusions, how mistaken and unfounded his words."

"No," said Mattheus, calmly and confidently, "his words are literally true. I have refused to fight that duel. I am in the power of a man whom I detest and abhor, I am dishonoured in the eyes of the world, I am unworthy to be the husband of Blanche Mortimer."

"Oh! merciful Providence!" ejaculated Blanche, whilst the bold, open features of the Baronet relapsed from their contemptuous sternness into a sort of loathing pity.

"But," continued Mattheus, "this man of the world, in the ignorance of his fancied wisdom, is wrong—utterly wrong, and a thousand times wrong in the conclusions to which he has hastened so uncharitably, dear Blanche! I swear it to you by all the happiness I am about to forfeit. Through my whole past life, up to this hour, my conscience only reproaches me with loving you; and that, if it be sin or crime, is one for which there can be no pardon; for it is one of which there will never be cessation or repentance!"

"Now hark you, fellow!" interrupted Sir Thomas, in a voice which, like the sudden bellow of a bull, made the very panes of glass vibrate, and which caused Blanche hastily to lay her hand upon his arm.

"One moment," replied Mattheus, in an accent so imploringly earnest, and in a tone so unmoved by the Baronet's anger, as to command attention. "One moment's patience:—this day, Blanche, we probably part for ever—perhaps indeed within one minute we may be for ever and irremissibly separated. But if I can bear the terrible fate of quitting you, I cannot bear to leave you with the curl of contempt upon that beautiful lip, which has smiled on me so lovingly. When this man says—what all the world is saying, perhaps now—that I am a craven—it is false! false! false! as I will give you instant and unquestionable proof."

Then approaching the table he wrote a single line, in a bold, unwavering hand, and having sanded it, he rose and handed the sheet of paper to the Baronet, and then proceeded hurriedly:

"You see that arm-chair on which I have placed my hat, and you see at the opposite end of the room my cloak, thrown on the ottoman. Now, dear Blanche, lift up either the hat or the cloak, and you will come to the instant conviction that Sir Thomas there lies, when he insinuates that I fear to die."

Sir Thomas opened very wide his eyes when he read upon the paper given him, "Whichever Blanche chooses, I use the other;" and the thought flashed across him that the man was mad or delirious, or affecting madness; but Blanche stepped hastily up to the arm-chair, according to the directions she had received, and looked into the hat.

"Good Heavens!" she exclaimed, "what is this, Mattheus, a pistol?"

But as she turned round Mattheus had taken the fellow-pistol from under the cloak upon the divan, cocked it, and pointed the barrel to his forehead.

"Blanche!" he exclaimed, "lost life is nothing; but remember, not to lose your love I am forfeiting my soul—for this is suicide."

Sir Thomas rushed forward; but his foot caught in the rug—he fell, and Mattheus pulled the trigger!

There followed the smart crack of a copper cap, and then throwing down the pistol, Mattheus, whose hand had not wavered, whose brow had seemed rather elated than depressed when he wrote the sentence and when he drew the trigger, sank on a chair, and crossing himself, turned deadly pale for a moment; but he rose again before the Baronet could get on his legs, and seizing the other pistol, he hastily cocked and fired it against the wall. This time, the charge of a loaded barrel ignited and thundered through the house, the room being filled with sulphurous smoke, and the looking-glass smashed to shivers by the ball, whilst Blanche shrieked, and Mattheus, at the same moment, was deprived of his now innocuous weapon, and knocked down into a chair behind him by the powerful arm of Sir Thomas, who pinned him in it with the grip of a giant—a useless restraint, for he made no resistance.

"Why," said Sir Thomas, "the man is a raving maniac!"

"Not so," said Mattheus, very quietly; "but now that Providence has visibly protected me, and has stayed my arm from committing so great a crime as self-murder, do you think that I, who have just taken my chance between two pistols, the one loaded and the other not, do you believe that I had any personal fear of meeting the aggressor?"

"Why, zounds!" said the Baronet, "courage as ill applied, is, for aught I know, worse than poltroonery: it results in running the risk of one's skin, and incurring the infamy into the bargain."

But Blanche, who at first had not understood this singular scene, when she learned what her lover had done, in the agitation of her terror at a danger which was past, allowed her tenderness to get the better of her reserve, and threw her arms round his neck.

"Oh!" said Sir Thomas, half gloomily, and half sarcastically, "I have nothing further to do here," and he seized his hat. "Can I see you, Sir, alone?"

"Assuredly."

"When?"

"In an hour—or two hours."

"Say two hours. Where?"

"In my own apartment," said Mattheus.

"Be it so."

But Blanche, recalled to herself by the first words of the Baronet, followed him to the door, and taking his unwilling hand, she said eagerly:

"My kind friend, I thank you for your courageous frankness; but he, to whom in the eyes of Heaven I am already promised, he is not you see the craven you thought him. I knew him too truly; and too well! And so believe me you will find him, notwithstanding appearances, worthy in everything of esteem, and only to be pitied, not blamed, for the imperative mystery which binds his tongue, and circumscribes his very actions."

"I'll tell you what, my poor girl," said Sir Thomas, "I am afraid you will find at the bottom of this imperative mystery, an escape from the straight-jacket, and the mad-house. But whether he be a mad-man, or an adventurer, or a fool, I will find out more about him before I am many hours older. So God bless you; for willy nilly, I must keep an eye upon you, and protect you."

"And now, dear Blanche!" said Mattheus, "let me bless you for the noble confidence you have shown in me; let me bless you once more before I leave you."

"Leave me!" exclaimed Blanche.

"Leave you. Why what remains to me but to leave you, Blanche? Am I not at this hour dishonoured in the eyes of the world? and will not the ruffian, with whom I should never have interfered in any quarrel of my own, take care and trumpet forth my shame to the whole city. Oh no, Blanche! I go with the consolation of knowing that I am not what men will judge me, and, at the same time, that you are not involved in their reprobation of what they think I am."

"What, dear Mattheus!" said Blanche, enthusiastically, "what! because the world, so cruel to the unfortunate, persecutes you with its contempt, shall I, knowing the unjust persecution you suffer, knowing the wickedness and falsity of its calumny, shall I, instead of being a stay and consolation to you, place the world's opinion in competition with the pleasing duty of the heart's devotion?"

But here the servants, and several of the tenants of the hotel, were knocking at the door of the ante-room for admission, alarmed by the report of fire-arms. Mattheus easily quieted their fears, by assuring them that it was occasioned by the accidental discharge of a pistol; but, profiting by the opportunity, he did not return to Blanche, who thus, after the agitating scene, was left alone, in anxiety and suspense.

Now, at a very early hour on the same morning, Prince Ivan Ivanovitch awakened Hippolyte, who slept under his roof, as he was to be his second in the expected encounter with Mattheus. They had breakfasted, or, at least, the second had heartily broken his morning fast.

On an adjacent sofa were several pairs of pistols; there were the slender, inlaid barrels of the old Christoph Kuchenreuter, and the bell-hammered pistols of the unapproachable Joe Manton, and the flashy-looking, ebony-stocked, silver-mounted Le Page's, beside a plain pair by old Wogdon, and another by the modern Kuchenreuters of Ravensburg.

Now the Prince Ivan took up one after the other, and looked with the eye of an amateur along the barrel, as he aimed at the top of a Perigord pie on the breakfast table.

"My dear fellow," said Hippolyte, "the pistols will do, and your skill will do; if you can only use it with one fourth of your usual coolness, you may shave off the tip of his nose."

"Oh, it does not quite depend even upon one's own coolness; for instance, suppose I were to attempt it, if his want of nerve make him swerve half-an-inch, he runs even chances of escaping altogether, and therefore I shall not try it; but I will bet to hit him first shot in the heart or brain, and I leave to your option which."

At this moment, Baron Bamberg was announced.

"Oh, you can see no one, of course," said the second.

"Pardon me; we have an hour and a half yet," and Prince Ivanovitch stepped into another room to receive Baron Bamberg.

The reader has been already personally introduced to Baron Bamberg, as the man with the green shade in the scene at the Opera, and he has learned from the lips of Sir Thomas Blunt something of his history; for he was the individual whom he was so much surprised to see in one of the apartments of Mattheus. This personage had been now, and for some years past, employed by the secret police of St. Petersburg, and he had eminently distinguished himself in this capacity. He obtained his first employment in that department by turning to very good account a box of papers which he had taken from one of the fugitive conspirators of 1825. These papers, a portion of which he gave up at once to the secret office, sufficed to insure the punishment of half-a-score of individuals, and to place him high in its good graces; the remainder enabled him to hold the rod over about as many more, whom he now and then denounced, when his services had not been sufficiently successful or brilliant to keep up his credit; and with several of whom he used the possession of this secret as he did many others of which his profession rendered him master.

It thus happened that Mattheus, having been long abroad, had been for several years watched by him; and the indefatigable employé had noted down the liberal opinions, which had come to his ear, as expressed by Mattheus; and, in short, he held strangely enough both him and the Prince in his power, the former in a manner which it would be anticipating the development of the present story to explain; the latter, by the fact of holding several of his letters found in the box above alluded to.

Now Baron Bamberg, as he called himself, having got scent of the intended duel, determined to play the peace-maker, as he had done before; and that very morning he had menaced Mattheus with all the terrors of his authority if he repaired to the place of meeting. But then in his turn, startled at the sight of Sir Thomas, whom he had some cause to remember, and fearful that his influence might finally prevail, he drove straight to the dwelling of the other combatant, and was ushered in to the Prince.

After a long discussion on the subject, he resolutely left the Prince no choice between denunciation and remaining away from the place of meeting. In vain the Prince made him offers the most brilliant; he was a ruined spendthrift for the present, and the Baron saw no practical means of binding him by any future promises.

"But have you reflected how I am driven into a corner," said the Prince, whose face turned to a livid lead colour on finding his vengeance so provokingly baffled. "I am equally lost if I do not now go out."

"Not quite," said the Baron, "I will show you how to manage it; let us send for my little doctor."

Fifteen minutes after, Hippolyte, who was getting rather impatient, was shown into the Prince's bed-room, and told that he had just met with an accident; he had tripped and fallen down stairs as he was showing out his valued friend the Baron. And there his valued friend the Baron stood, and having caused the Prince to be copiously bled, he was then suggesting the application of fresh leeches, and the doctor seemed to defer to all his suggestions, notwithstanding the extreme disinclination of the patient.

However carried out, the pacific intentions of the Baron were in themselves highly laudable, even though he was solely interested in the safety of Mattheus; a sympathy which, as Mattheus was throughout the really aggrieved party, was the more creditable, and with which of course the draught for thirty thousand roubles, which the Baron held of his, and which, in the event of his death, might be called in question, had nothing to do.

But to the infinite mortification of the Prince, Hippolyte's suspicions were evidently awakened; and being as thoroughly disgusted as Sir Thomas, like him he had abandoned his principal; and thus both principals, whilst neither had been to the ground, were maddened by the imaginary triumph of their rivals.

As for Sir Thomas Blunt, when, at the expiration of two hours, he repaired to the lodgings of Mattheus, he was referred to the hotel in which Blanche had taken up her abode. Meanwhile he fancied that he had chalked out a course which he was determined energetically to pursue, and which must have the effect of preventing an imprudent girl from throwing herself recklessly away; at least, until Mattheus was exposed, or until his character was cleared up. And there is no reason to doubt but that his plan would have succeeded, only that when he reached Miss Mortimer's, he found her maids in the midst of packing, and he was informed that Miss Mortimer had driven away to quit Paris twenty minutes ago.

"Quit Paris! and where is she going?"

"To Scotland, Sir!"

"To Scotland! Alone?"

"Oh no, Sir, with Mr. Mattheus!"

"Then," muttered the Baronet, "she must go to the devil her own way, as all women will."

CHAPTER VI.

Brought up in his extreme youth by an English grandmother, Count Horace had learned to speak that language with fluency; but naturally given to prejudice, he had been distinguished, on attaining man's estate, by his singular antipathy to everything English. He had been partly imbued in the Faubourg St. Germain with the leaven of old monarchical hostility to that Protestant England, after whose example every noble had dreaded to see his feudal rights abolished, and against whose sturdy parliaments every courtier of absolutism had taken his cue to rail—a feeling mixed with hereditary rivality, and with the memory of Crécy and Agincourt, and Blenheim, Malplaquet, and Oudenarde, and the loss of India and Canada, set off, but never balanced by such fields as Fontenoi. He had been brought up to hear the incessant malignity of a portion of the restored nobility who could not forgive being brought back by British triumphs to the position they had abandoned without a blow, and who turning against their benefactors were only too anxious to pander to the honest hatred of the rest of the nation.

In addition to this, some of his family having served the empire, Count Horace had much connection with a party accustomed to view everything English, through the distorting medium of most deadly enmity. Chance threw him across a good-natured Englishman, who had the means of removing many of his prejudices, and took the trouble to do so.

After an angry discussion on this subject, during which Count Horace flattered himself that he had spoken with "frankness," his antagonist called upon him and reminded him of his offensive expressions. Horace fired up, and offered ready satisfaction for his words.

"Oh! no, my dear fellow," said his visitor with a smile, "it would neither be satisfactory to me to be sent out of this world, leaving you unconvinced, nor to send you out of it unpersuaded. The satisfaction I have come to demand, and which, in fact, I insist on, is the following: you are going to England to purchase horses; now I require that you should go and stay with my brother—a deuced good fellow, although he is an elder brother. He will both advise you in your purchases of horse-flesh; and, I think, show you England in rather brighter colours than you saw it during ten days in Leicester Square in a November fog."

"Shake hands upon it," replied the Count. "I accept your offer as frankly as it is made, on condition that your brother will let no one else show him Paris."

"Then just listen to my letter, and correct me if I have not noted down with sufficient accuracy your opinions, as you last night expressed them.

"Dear Brother,

"The bearer of this, &c. &c. &c. Now, my dear Tom, he is withal a fine young fellow; but I wish you to remove some queer notions he has imbibed concerning us. If you can't, who know life so well both abroad and at home, nobody can; but I have a shrewd suspicion that you will. In the first place, I must tell you that our friend, Horace, calls us a nation of shopkeepers—worshippers of the golden calf; our nobility, modern parvenus; our people, coarse and brutalized in its lower orders, and abject sycophants to royalty among the higher; our country a dull and sunless waste, or a foggy marsh where neither flower will bloom nor fruit ripen, protected only by its ditch, but doomed to be the prey of the first who can stride across it; our inns are mere pot-houses, even in London; our sports are ridiculous; our shooting, the massacre of hares and pheasants, tame and counted as sheep and barn-door fowls; our hunting, without skill or science, is the mad pursuit of a fox or a caged deer, with hounds that have scarcely any nose; our very riding is like that of monkeys. Our army, no army, but the most fortunate of blunderers; our nobility the sons and grandsons of pettifoggers and cheesemongers, only exceeded in the ridicule of their arrogance towards the nobles of France, Germany, and Belgium, by the assumption of equality of beardless ensigns, with epaulettes, purchased like the lace of our lacqueys' hatbands. Contrast, he says, with this mushroom nobility the illustrious houses of the continent; contrast the chivalry of the French private or artisan, defending his honour at his sword's point, or his grotesque gallantry towards the fair sex, with the boxing, cockfighting, lower orders of England; contrast the fulsome expressions of loyalty, the kneeling and kissing of hands, with the sullen, but manly independence of modern France; compare its champaign plains, its vineyards, and its vast forests to our own territory; compare the Sablonière or the London Vereys with the hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, or with Vefours and Vereys and Frères Provençaux; contrast our tame shooting to the active exercise of wild shooting in France—our hunting to its scientific venery—when the wolf, the stag, and the boar, are followed by hounds with the scent of the blood-hound and discovered by hunters, who require the sagacity of the wild Indian to mark their track on the snowless ground, and tell the age, and weight, and sex, of every beast by its foot-prints.

"Contrast, he says, our riding—the bended leg—the constant use of both hands—the rising in the saddle—with the erect and graceful posture of the French manége, where the fingers of the bridle hand alone seemed to play, and the horse to move by the volition of the rider."

"I think, Monsieur le Comte, that you spoke pretty nearly to this effect?"

"Well, perhaps I spoke too freely; but those were certainly my words last night, and are my sentiments now; but their frankness will hardly tell very advantageously in a letter of recommendation."

"Oh, nonsense! the truth is the truth; at all events it will be my brother's business to show you English urbanity and hospitality, as well as everything else, in its brightest colours."

* * * *

Count Horace was accosted as he landed by Sir Thomas, who would take no denial; but, at the same time, apologised for not receiving his guest at his mansion, which was undergoing thorough repair. They drove to his lodgings. They were ushered up carpeted stairs into a room gorgeously furnished; he was conducted to his bed-room, and shortly after summoned to dinner. The dinner was served off gorgeous vermeil plate; it consisted of a succession of dishes worthy of the best French artistes, amongst which, here and there, some substantial article of English fare was allowed to intrude, as if to show, in its unadorned simplicity, the exquisite quality of the material; for the first time he observed nature, as it were, contending with art for gastronomic laurels. There was every kind of wine, according to every taste, and in every stage of perfection. There were gigantic and highly flavoured fruits grown in this fruitless land, which seemed gathered from the gardens of Aladdin, to say nothing of the pine-apples, and the muscat grapes, of which every one was the size of a French plum; there were grown in the open air apricots as large as French peaches, and peaches, and nectarines, and plums and figs, such as he had thought never to have ripened but in the imagination of painters. Gloved waiters, silk-stockinged, and in clerical black, judged intuitively the wants, and attended rapidly and noiselessly to the necessities of the guests. They appeared to have concentrated all the intelligence of sharp men in their service, watching even a look, whilst their countenances indicated utter vacuity as to the conversation of those they were serving.

Count Horace retired to bed. His own valet was still sick; he was better valeted. He found his bath, he found all the apparatus of his toilet without unpacking his own, and he sank to sleep upon a bed too soft. The next morning his host apologised for receiving him at an hotel; but his servants, his horses, his carriages, were all in the country.

"An hotel!" said the Count. "Am I in an hotel? I thought the Sablonière the best in London."

"I don't know," said Sir Thomas, "I was never there."

"Well, I should not have believed such comfort and magnificence; but, after all, barring the comfort, it is only the combination under one roof of what may be found under several in Paris."

It was the beginning of August.

"I know you are a sportsman," said the host, "so to-morrow, if you have no objection, I will chaperone you to the moors: I hear that birds are plentiful."

They rolled along in a post-carriage drawn by horses which he could scarce believe to be hired ones, over the ceaseless hill and dale of merry England, with its dense hedges, its luxuriant foliage, its rich fields, its magnificent parks, and country-seats, and trim cottages. Count Horace was enchanted; but he ended by judging it too tame, and too much like a garden.

"Now you, like most Frenchmen, are a military man," said Sir Thomas; "how do you think a foreign army could manœuvre amongst the two hundred miles of country, with its hedges and ditches, which you have seen as we have come along?"

"Why, their artillery and cavalry could not act at all. It is worse than La Vendée. It would be impracticable if you had any force to defend it, which you have not. It is beautiful, but very tame."

They rattled on till night, and awoke next morning amidst the moors of Westmoreland.

"My dear fellow," said Sir Thomas, "what is the use of your carrying that tasty work-bag, and all those rattletraps. You should be equipped as light as possible for the moors."

"This is my game bag," replied the Count.

"Oh, we use a pony, or half-a-dozen lads to carry that, unless you have the strength of a pack-horse. I expect to kill forty brace to my own gun."

"It must be a barn-door massacre, then," said the Count.

"Not quite. I warn you, it wants good legs and an enduring shoulder."

They were now upon a wild heath, without the trace of any human habitation for miles and miles. A leash of thorough-bred pointers were breasting gallantly through the "ling."

"Look at your dogs," quoth the Count; "they are galloping away like devils; they are very beautiful—but just as we find them—good for nothing."

"The dogs are quartering all right," replied Sir Thomas; "but now I remember, you use heavy animals in France, with stumpy tails, which are never allowed to beat a stone's throw from you." As he spoke, one pointed, and the others backed.

"What a pity," said the Count; "they will never stand till we get up to them."

"Never fear." The sportsmen came up—the dogs were steady—the birds rose—they were fired at, and then the pointers lay down with their noses in the heather, till the guns were reloaded.

"It is wonderful training," said the Count, "but useless."

When they had advanced ten paces, the dogs stood again,—and whir, whir, whir, rose and fell three more grouse.

"You see," said Sir Thomas, "if the dogs had been allowed to run in, to pick up the dead birds before we had loaded, we should have lost this leash."

"Well, this is wonderful, your devils of dogs are unparalleled; they have beaten in half an hour more than ours would in a day. But who can follow them?"

"If I kill forty brace, I shall tire out two sets!"

At three o'clock they sat down to lunch. Count Horace had found that he could not do the same execution with the small bored Le Page as with a Purday;—"And yet," he said, "on trial, we find the small bores carry the shot more sharply and closer than the large."

"That is because you do not put English charges in them."

But the full charge of an English fowling-piece, after forty or fifty shots, so jarred the Count's shoulder, and set his head so aching—the rapid tramping through wet moss and wiry heather was so fatiguing—that Sir Thomas left him dead beat, and fast asleep.

In three or four hours he awoke, just as the sun was setting. At some distance he descried Sir Thomas, with his keeper, toiling up to him.

"The three-and-fortieth brace!" shouted the triumphant Baronet; "though the birds are so wild. Now as I suppose you are tired as well as myself, I have ordered beds and dinner at a little public-house, which is only four miles west of us; it would be seven miles home, and our ground to-morrow lies on t'other side."

"Ah!" quoth the Count, as they walked onwards, "shall we ever get to our place of rest?"

"There it is," said the Baronet.

"What! that little hovel in the midst of this wilderness?"

"I thought you found our scenery too tame?"

"Why we are in a desert; but we shall be eaten up with vermin, and scarcely find black bread in such a hovel."

"Never fear," answered stout Sir Thomas.

The Chequers, "licensed to deal in wines, spirits, beer, pepper, and tobacco," was a little road-side alehouse, chiefly frequented by the miners; but there was a snug parlour, a blazing turf fire, walls ornamented with stuffed birds, and a smiling hostess. There was port and sherry, and bottled ale and stout, and cognac, and excellent tea—indigenous to the Chequers, besides the Baronet's claret and champagne. In addition to their own game, there was a joint of meat, as delicate and as gigantic as those the Count had considered such a phenomenon at the —— Hotel, with fowls as large as Campine capons.

They retired to rest in snow-white sheets—in curtained beds—in rooms comfortably carpeted—the Count found even slippers and Windsor soap supplied, as a matter of course, by the hostess. After a second and third summons he was awakened by Sir Thomas in person.

"Breakfast is waiting, and so are the birds."

"Why, God bless me, you are not going out this morning?"

"Of course; strike whilst the iron is hot; the birds will be wild enough in a week."

"Then, I cry mercy; I am out of walking—I am knocked up."

"So then you don't consider it a barn-door massacre?

"Oh, I beg your pardon; I had no conception of it."

"Well, it always struck me," said the Baronet, "that to cut a figure in grouse shooting—and all shooting is tame sport at best—it required better dogs, and better legs, and a stouter shoulder, and more lasting skill, and altogether a better man, than any continental shooting I know of."

"You are right," sighed the convicted Count.

"And, by the way, have you suffered from the vermin, and the black bread in this hovel?"

"God bless you, no;—it is a little oasis in the desert—a marvel in such a remote part."

"No," replied Sir Thomas, "only an alehouse like every other, from the Land's End to John of Groats' house. Our comforts and our wealth are not all centralised in the capital, or the large cities, or along the main roads—they do sneak somehow into byeways."

A few weeks after, they repaired to the park of Lord Tinsel, to witness a meeting of the ——shire Yeomanry, of which he was colonel.

"You see," observed Sir Thomas, "that they go through their evolutions in one rank, to prevent confusion worse confounded. I can't say that they manœuvre very brilliantly."

"No," smiled the Count; "although their shakos and scabbards seem their most formidable enemies at present. I see they are a very indifferent sort of national guard on horseback."

"Only," replied the Baronet, "resembling your national guards in number; for there are regiments of them in every county."

"Well, I dare say it is a pleasant pastime; but what an illusion for these people to fancy that they are or ever could be made cavalry! But perhaps it is just as well, for what would be the use of them in such a hedge and ditch-divided country?"

"My dear Count," said the Baronet,—"look! do you see those two young yeomen, rolling about in their saddles, and so mightily puzzled, as you say, by their scabbards and shakos—see how they will take that rattling fence.—Look! they are going across country, to strike into the high road,—topping all the gates."

"Ah! bravo," said the Count.

"You see, they can ride. Now be pleased to consider that this very regiment of yeomanry consists chiefly of men accustomed to the dangers of the chase, and mounted as no other cavalry in the world can be mounted. You don't see them to advantage to-day,—it is not the first day of meeting, and their Colonel has so strongly expressed himself, that he would rather see them on plough-horses, taken out of a straw-yard, that would keep the ranks, than on the restless and unmanaged hunters and bits of blood which they first brought out of their stables, that many have taken the hint. But you see the men are the best riders, and the most daring men in the country, their horses the best in the world. Now, I ask you candidly, whether it would take long to make good cavalry out of such materials? As to its use in the enclosures of English fields, why, you are right enough in supposing that no regular cavalry could tell; but remember that this very yeomanry alone, of any body of horse in the world, could go across country, because accustomed individually to traverse it like birds. You were struck with astonishment at the gigantic horses and men of our life guards. I believe that they are the best heavy cavalry in the world; but I should like to see what figure they would cut if charged, after making their way through two or three fences, by this very yeomanry, awkward and in the state of raw material as it is.

"To-morrow you will see a specimen of our militia:—its discipline in war time has always been brought up to that of the line. It may appear paradoxical, but this trim park and garden-looking country of England presents, in a military point of view, greater difficulties of ground than any similar extent of territory in Europe; and these yeomen, without being conscious of the fact, constitute, to defend it, the most formidable indigenous guerrilla of horsemen in the world."

"But in your civil wars?" said the Count.

"In our civil wars—at least, in the only one which interested all classes—in the time of the Commonwealth, it was defended, village by village. But the yeomanry, the militia, the breed of horses, the avocations of the men, and the present disposition of the country's surface, have all been created since then. You see, that so far from its being a mere question of stepping across the herring pond to take possession, there is no tract of country better defended by its nature, and the aptitude of its inhabitants."

"And yet, abroad it is a common prejudice with the best informed. But how is it that your own officers are never heard to allude to these natural advantages?"

"Nine out of ten of them never give the matter a thought; the tenth, with the caution of military pedantry, trusts to the experience of others,—or if he does a little to his own, it has been acquired, like theirs, abroad. All his ideas of the natural difficulties an army may have to contend with, are associated with mountains and defiles, jungles and deserts, marshes and rivers, and fevers; he has never met out of England with any resembling the peculiar obstacles it would offer, and he has never reflected how embarrassed he would be to act at the head of a force invading it."

Before they dismounted to dine with Lord Tinsel, who entertained at his table that day the whole regiment of yeomanry, Count Horace had agreed to canter on with Sir Thomas to Morton Lodge to leave a message respecting some county business with its occupant, a relative of his own.

The lodge was situated in a small, but well timbered park. It was an old, dusky, and ungainly building; its walls of split flints stuccoed with oyster-shells, and partly over-run with ivy.

Mr. Morton was indisposed in bed, but the Baronet was requested to step up to him. The Count was shown into a little oak-wainscoted parlour, where a cheerful fire was blazing. His notice was attracted by a genealogical tree suspended above the chimney-piece, much darkened by the smoke, and apparently long appreciated by the flies. Being curious in these matters, he retraced on it with some interest the ancestry of the Mortons, for eight centuries back, to a baron figuring in the Doomsday-book of the northman conqueror. A Morton, he perceived, had stood a siege against a detachment of Prince Rupert's army in that very building.

Count Horace was seated in Lord Tinsel's hall with his Lordship, the officers of the regiment, and the notabilities of the county, at a semi-circular table, prolonged at each extremity into two interminable boards, at each of which a couple of hundred yeomen were accommodated. Toasts were uproariously passing, and speeches uttered so anxious to gain vent that they seemed treading on each others heels; there was always some compliment to Lord Tinsel contained in them, and a great many common places about devotion to Church and Throne.

"So a large portion of the guests are Lord Tinsel's tenants; and who is Lord Tinsel?"

"A peer of the realm, with vast landed possessions, and great influence and popularity in the county."

"Of an old family?"

"Dear me, no! His father was an army contractor, and his grandfather a carpenter. Strangely enough, he made the very cider press at my cousin Morton's."

"So much," said the Count, "for your money-loving England. This man, because he has wealth, is toasted and looked up to, and flattered, and placed in every man's estimation higher than your cousin Morton, with all the illustrious blood of nearly a thousand years in his veins!" "My dear fellow," replied Sir Thomas, "you foreigners don't understand us. You are right enough when you contend that the families of the English nobility are generally modern in comparison with those of your continental nobles; but you are utterly in error when you imagine your foreign families to be more ancient or illustrious than those of British gentry. Setting aside the genealogies derived from the lineage-manufactories of the Heralds-office, where Mr. Higgins can always purchase a descent from William Rufus, there are a great number of families, chiefly of Commoners, who retrace their ancestry, like my cousin Morton, as clearly as ancestry can be traced, back to the Saxon Thanes and Norman conquerors, who by the way only took your French names with your French lands. Now tell me, are there many of your proudest houses which can look back as far into the dark ages?

"Well," replied the Count; "but by your own admission. Lord Tinsel has nothing in common with these."

"I grant you so," said the Baronet; "but you must needs grant me, that all over the world, the estimation of family illustration and antiquity is based upon respect to past power. Don't let us deceive ourselves, and say that it is to past virtue, because who would not sooner claim his descent from the Emperor Nero, than from the faithful slave who staunched his wound? Now in England, being an essentially practical people, whilst we have a superstitious veneration for power which is become matter of history, we have a vast deal more for that which is living and present. Lord Tinsel is a vast landed proprietor, a stirring politician, a man of great tact, if not of any other talent; I won't quarrel about words, but I think that is a very great one. He commands two seats in the Commons, and he votes in the Lords."

"Our own peers vote in the Chambers," observed the Count.

"Yes, my dear fellow; but in the first place a peer has no influence in the Deputies, in the next he has ex-officio but the minutest share in the government of thirty-five millions. Lord Tinsel in his capacity of peer alone, to say nothing of his influence in the Commons, has a very much louder voice, in an empire of one hundred and fifty millions of subjects. Men in Lord Tinsel's position, when they have talent and exert it, if their party comes uppermost to-morrow, may be called to fill the highest offices under the crown, as a matter of right and conquest, not of Court favour—perhaps to a Governor-Generalship of India, with its hundred and twenty millions of subjects. When you meet with the plebeian Mr. Mellowfat, the East India director, or Ensign Smith, or Captain Jackson, asserting their equality with Colonel-Counts, inscribed on the great book of imperial nobility, they take their confidence from the consciousness of present power. Captain Jackson may be called to govern a tract of country as extensive and wealthy as a continental kingdom; and Mr. Mellowfat, though only one of four and twenty, is at least as powerful as one of the Venetian "Council of Ten!"

"You place the matter in a new light for me," said the Count. "But is it not a singular anomaly to see such a man as Lord Tinsel, if his party comes uppermost to-morrow, seizing for himself or for his lady some Court office of your powerless royalty, as eagerly as if he were a courtier of Louis XV?"

"Possibly; but in a very different spirit. When his party has succeeded to the power, emoluments, and honour of place, in the division of the spoil he may be obliged to put up with a barren honour for his share; but still he assumes it rather as a matter of right and conquest, a sort of trophy, than as a mark of royal favour. On that account there is a world of difference in the estimation in which we hold such offices about the Court as are really held in virtue of a parliamentary majority, and those derived from the personal good-will and patronage of a sovereign."

"The former are opened to those who have thundered at the door; the road to the latter is too apt to be by crawling on bended knees up the back stairs."

"Still," said the Count, "notwithstanding your democratic spirit you seem with a singular complacency to crouch to royalty. Look at the fulsome protestations of loyalty on every occasion in the mouths of Whig, Radical, and Tory. Look at the royal name and the royal arms intruded everywhere. Look at your gentry crowding to kneel and kiss the hand, or bringing their wives and daughters to be saluted by some old and hoary sinner."

"This," said the Baronet, "is a matter of national taste; and you know de gustibus, &c. But pray do not forget that John Bull's loyalty is derived from utterly opposite causes to the loyalty of subjects of the despotic monarchs. Theirs arises from their keenly feeling that they are the sovereign's property—John Bull's from intense conviction that the sovereigns of England are his. There is Mr. Cavil, the attorney, and Mr. Oxley, the fat grazier—if they were possessed of five thousand a year to-morrow, each of them would start a portly coachman in a powdered wig—a taxable article with us—and maintain the most pompous, idle rascal he could find, in spotless stockings, and scarlet plush shorts; he would like everybody to regard his coachman and his footman with all the respect the hair powder, and the scarlet shorts were in his opinion calculated to inspire.

"On the whole, the last thing John Bull has grumbled at, has been the expence of royalty, since the sovereigns of Great Britain have become servants of the nation instead of being its masters. His wife and daughters are also interested in the Court, immediately or in expectancy, as the place where they may show off their jewels, lace, and feathers, and see the fact of their appearance recorded, and the items of their dress chronicled for the gratification of the country, and the information of posterity, in the Court Journal or Morning Post."

"But still you will allow some inheritent servility, in the greater distance which the Englishman has voluntarily placed, between himself and royalty, than is admitted by other constitutionally governed people."

"You are mistaken in the fact. Through the past, no nation has ever behaved more unceremoniously to its Kings. During centuries it made, unmade, imprisoned, and laid ruthless hands upon them. It is true it had kings who paid the people back in kind. But at the present day, England is the only country where the gentry (a class to which wealth and talent find such easy access) still representing the old feudal chiefs, who chose one of their peers rather as leader than as sovereign, maintains the principle of chivalrous equality. In England only, the sovereigns and their children are socially but the first gentlemen, and subject to all the laws of chivalry as they have been modified to suit the days of broad-cloth and felt hats, which have succeeded to an age of barred helmets and steel hauberks. In England only we have seen one royal Prince turned off the turf by the Jockey Club, and another forced to fight a private gentleman."

* * * *

They were in Sir Thomas's library.

"If I wished," said the Baronet, "to give you the most favourable impression of our national greatness, I should direct your attention to that shelf. You would find there the most complete accounts of our character, constitution, power, and resources."

"You surprise me," said Count Horace. "I see many French authors amongst them. I should hardly have thought that you would find much praise in our writers."

"If I might say so without offence," observed Sir Thomas, "the generality of French writers, like the generality of unlettered Frenchmen, are rather superficial, and unusually prejudiced."

"Thank you," said the Count, "that is as candid as my letter."

"But—the scientific men of France are distinguished for their profundity, and their utter freedom from prejudice—more, perhaps, than any in the world. You see here is Voltaire, as famous for warping facts to fit his own conclusions, as keen in detecting, and witty in exposing, the same defect in others. But who more thoroughly appreciated, more boldly pointed out the superiority of Locke and Newton? There is Delolme on the British Constitution, and Count Pambour on the steam engine. There is Charles Dupin, who has so accurately measured and detailed our power, resources, navy, commerce, down to our very military system. There is Gustave de Beaumont's bitter book on Ireland, more full of research and knowledge of the spirit of our institutions, than all the Raumers, Rankes, and Puckler Muskaus put together. Writing against us, what a tribute he pays to our sagacious love of liberty!

"Talk of our army,—there is Froissart, and good old Phillip de Commines to tell what superior metal it was made of in days of yore. Here you have Rogniat, Jomini, Colonel Carion Nisas, and half a score more of your scientific modern military writers, and we must add Dupin to them. They admit that our infantry manœuvres are the most rapid of any in the world; they admit our system, after the long experience of the last desolating wars, to be the most perfect, regretting only that it is perhaps only applicable to English soldiers. Now if you like to dip into these volumes for a couple of hours, to convince yourself, say the word."

"Oh no," laughed Count Horace. "Not I—I had sooner take my boxing lesson; I am learning to parry your blows better than your arguments."

"Come along, then," said Sir Thomas.

* * * *

The Count, along with his host, was invited to dine at the Lord Lieutenant's of the county. The Baronet appeared in a uniform covered with stars, medals, and orders.

"Sir Thomas!" exclaimed the Count, "what is this? A fancy dress? Are these things matters of fancy with you? Have you any right to wear all these decorations?"

"As far as hard service gives a man right to them," smiled Sir Thomas; "earned at the rate of a battle or two a-piece in the Peninsula."

"God bless me! to think that I should have known you four months, and never have even heard that you had served. You! who must have served with so much distinction. Abroad we should wear the ribbons of those orders in the very button-holes of our robes-de-chambre!"

"It is not our English fashion—perhaps wisely. These gewgaws prove nothing, because every soldier knows that a man may have deserved without obtaining, and have obtained without deserving them."

* * * *

When Count Horace commenced his career as a fox-hunter, he was accompanied by his Mentor to his maiden field. The Count was what was called a "joli cavalier"—he was the pride of the foreign riding school. Who could take a horse more gracefully through the coquetteries of volte and demi-volte, curvettes, and prancings? Who sit more erect in leaping him through the bar of the manège? He had been a promising pupil of Franconi's; he could jump and stand erect on his saddle, and light a cigar in that posture, whilst his horse went at full gallop round the circus.

Let the reader now imagine him habited in approved scarlet, tops, and leathers—and mounted on a powerful sixteen-hands-high thorough-bred hunter, by Sir Hercules, out of Biondetta.

He who had thought himself an accomplished rider, felt like a solitary rower, trying to scull a frigate in a gale of wind. Away! like Mazeppa, he was carried after the hounds. He was borne almost unconsciously over his first fence, and his second, and his third,—but the jolt was tremendous. His breath was gone. At the fourth he grasped the rein with nervous energy, and checking his horse in its leap, brought it down with him into the ditch.

"Why, youngster," said a passing farmer, "you pulled that pretty bit of blood over upon you. Give the oss his head; if you can't lift him when he wants it, don't baulk him."

This was all the consolation he got. He made a vain appeal to a costermonger creeping through a gap in the hedge on his donkey, to see "summat of the run;" but finding that he was neither killed, nor hurt, nor pitied, he got on again, and tried his luck a little farther.

He came up with the sportsmen by a cover side.

"Your famous horse fell down with me, Sir Thomas!"

"No—you threw him down," said the farmer.

"My dear fellow," said the Baronet, "now do just try 'riding like a monkey,' as you call it. Buckle up five holes—tie the curb-rein in a knot—don't meddle with it—ride with the snaffle. Keep the horse together, and give him his head at the fences. He is a perfect hunter, or I would not have put you on him—and he will take you over where you ought to go, much better, I suspect, than you can guide him."

"Your unmanaged horses are like a steel spring under one!" said Count Horace; "abroad—"

"Abroad you don't ride horses. No one can ride horses that are horses, with stirrups as long as you do."

"But I assure you in the manège——"

"In the manège your horses require as much tutoring as the men. If they are vigorous, or spirited, or fit to carry a man across country, either they can never be taught at all or they are spoiled and crippled in the teaching."

"But did you ever see them ride at Franconi's?"

"My dear fellow, the riding of Astley's and Franconi's people is as much like what we call riding as dancing a minuet is like jumping, or running, or boxing. They play all kinds of tricks with their easy rocking horses, and jump over lighted lamps, spiked boards, and all that sort of thing; but put them upon horses that can go across country, and they are all adrift. I've seen it tried."

The next time Count Horace did buckle up. He had fallen far astern in a sharp run, but he came up at a check.

"How wonderful is the speed of your hounds."

"It is that speed enables us to hunt the fox."

"But they have very little nose."

"Find us in the world any dogs with as much nose and with their indispensable speed."

"We hunt the wolf on the continent."

"Yes, but with relays of dogs."

"Still there is no science in this fox-hunting."

"Pardon me," said Sir Thomas. "You are on one of the best horses in the kingdom. Sound, fast, thorough-bred, and master of two stone more than he carries; now look at young Smith the farmer, mounted on a forty pounder; he kept up with us; you could not. It is not that you want the boldness to take a fence, but you have not yet acquired the requisite endurance and skill. After a few miles' gallop, just when your horse wants lifting and holding together your strength is gone. You are only a dead weight in the saddle. Now in a desperate run it is plain, that mounted on exactly similar nags, Smith might be in at the death, whilst without his skill and riding, you must be left behind. It therefore requires judgment, and coolness, and courage, and endurance to follow fox-hounds. Your foreign hunts require comparatively none of the three last named qualities."

"I grant it to you," replied the Count; "but still this sort of chase demands no science or intelligence in those who hunt the dogs, as in ours."

"Let us see, our present speed is requisite to hunt the fox without being followed by carts-full of earthstoppers with trenching tools. We require the dogs to unite sufficient sense of smell to an extraordinary rapidity. But the utmost they are found to possess proves insufficient without the judgment of the huntsman to lift them, and without his instinctive sagacity in making a cast. The fox reaches a square cover. There are four sides to it, with these fast hounds the scent will be cold in the right direction when you come to it, if you have lost your time in searching on two of the wrong sides. Now this faculty of guessing, where reynard is most likely to have skulked away, is heaven-born. The result of great practise on an instinctive and natural aptitude. L'homme devient cuisinier et naît rôtisseur: so he does huntsman. Now recollect that to this qualification he must add the judgment, and boldness, and skill in riding, to be always up with his hounds. Fox-hunting," continued the enthusiastic Baronet, "thus requires inborn qualities, and acquired excellence in the huntsman, a remarkable combination of speed and nose in the dogs, unflinching boldness in those who follow them, together with coolness in danger, without which there can be no judgment; and the utmost speed, courage and endurance in their horses.

"Of the master of hounds, I will say nothing; the eloquence of Cicero, the patience of Job, the liberality of Solomon, are only a few of his requisites. In two words, he ought to be a sort of angel in top boots. In its spirit it is essentially emulative; open for every man to follow; the sweep may ride before the duke after his own hounds if he can; so that he don't ride over them. Now your foreign hunting may be followed by men of the most indifferent courage or skill, on any sort of horses and with almost any dogs. The skill of your huntsmen and prickers is indeed the result of great experience; but it is what the dullest man cannot fail to learn in time, just as every man, by dint of practise, may learn to hunt harriers. Besides this, it is with you, exclusive, and generative of an envious instead of a cordial feeling between high and low. In France and Belgium, every proprietor will prosecute you with the utmost malignity for riding over his fallows or his stubble. And in the length of an English drawing-room you may cross the patches of a dozen owners."

Count Horace was returning with the Baronet from an election scene. As their object had been to see the fun, they were suitably arrayed. Their costume was of that sort which may appertain either to a gentleman or to a blackguard, but has nothing of the vulgarity of the snob. It united the beauties of drab capes and belcher handkerchiefs, and wide-awake hats, and could not be called nondescript, because accurately defined in the phraseology of the vulgar by the word "varmint."

The weather was tempestuous, and the rain began to pour down in such torrents, that they sought in eager haste the inviting shelter of a pot-house. They called for brandy and cigars. The public-house, though at some distance from the field of action, chanced to be a buff-house, and was at that moment filled by an uproarious detachment of the defeated buff rabblement. All eyes were turned on the new comers, who were unluckily still wearing their blue ribbons.

Whilst the crowd were still in the silence of amazement at the assurance which had dared to sport the odious colours in the very centre of a buff den, the Count thought proper to inquire, in very audible French, what was the matter.

"Mounseer Jack Frog!" said a bill-sticker, whose political convictions had been shocked at the ribbon itself, but whose inmost patriotism was outraged to see it on the person of a Frenchman, "what business have you with that thingumbob? Don't you know that this is a land of liberty?" In practical illustration of which sentiment, he unceremoniously tore off the party sign.

The Count's good humour vanished. "How do you dare?" he said indignantly.

"Punch his head," roared one of the buffs.

"Knock him into the middle of next week," suggested another.

"I'll knock your head off, bully, if you do," said the Baronet, who saw they were in for it.

"Bully yourself," retorted the bill-sticker; "wouldn't you like to hit a man half your size?"

"Come away," whispered the Count. "I wish I could have caught that fellow away from his gang; but here they would murder us."

"Not at all: if you think you can lick him," replied the Baronet; "and, upon my soul, I think you can."

"Pitch into the monkey Frenchman, Jim! why don't you?"

"Down with the big bully, if he interferes," cried a score of voices.

"Oh," said Sir Thomas, "my friend is ready enough to fight."

"Is he? Well, that ain't bad for a Frenchman!"

"Out in the shed! make a ring."

Count Horace's blood was up: he took off his coat, and went to work. He was too much excited to be cool; but he possessed a great deal of agility, and some science,—his adversary none. Unluckily, at the very outset, his foot slipped on the wet ground, and he fell.

"How dare you? What! would you? Would you strike a man when he is down?" cried the bill-sticker's partisans.

To the surprise of Count Horace, he was assisted to rise, and asked if he was ready to go on.

"Go it, Jim; hit him between wind and water! Now then, Jim! go in and win!" shouted the buff backers.

But notwithstanding the popular encouragement, "Jim," who was three parts fuddled, who swung his arms about like the sails of a windmill, and never at best possessed much skill or courage,—soon gave way before the well-directed shower of blows aimed by the impetuous Count Horace.

"Holloa! well done, Jack Frog! Pay him back, Jim! He is a Blue and a Frenchman!"

"No," said the bill-sticker. "I give in,— that'll do."

"Hurrah! hurrah! Brayvo, Jack Frog!"

Sir Thomas stopped his pupil's arm, in the midst of the shouts; and Count Horace, thus restrained, understood that his foe was vanquished; but with his victory his consciousness returned, and he remembered that he was in the midst of a gang. He was about to suggest the urgency of an attempt at flight, when he was brought to understand their congratulations.

"That'll do for one day," said the Baronet; "but give back the bow you snatched away, if you have had a belly-full."

"Oh yes! that's fair, if he won't fight,—give it back! Cursed cur, that Jim! no more pluck than a pigeon,—but let them go! Three cheers for the Frenchman! he has done what no other two ever did before, licked an Englishman—three cheers for Mounseer, and six groans for his blue ribbon."

"As for that," said the Baronet, "my lads! here is my friend's ribbon and mine too,—do what you like with them."

"Hurrah!" shouted the buffs,—"what does Mounseer say?"

"He says," replied Sir Thomas, "that he won't wear it, because the blue is almost as dirty as the buff."

"Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah." At this piece of independence he was cheered three times louder. "Brayvo! He is game to the back bone. His mother must have fed him on roast beef when frogs was ris!"

And amid the buff plaudits, the Count made his exit, arm-in-arm with his friend.

"You have just seen a specimen of the lower orders, in the full excitement of liquor and electioneering. Does there exist in any other people the same sense of fair play? Where but in England would an angry mob allow a pot companion to be thrashed by a stranger, a foreigner, and an enemy, and allow the victor to escape scot free? Where not allow him to be struck when down, or off his guard, or when he had surrendered?"

"I confess," replied the Count, "that anywhere else in Europe, they would all have fallen upon us."

"This," observed Sir Thomas, "is the chivalry of the vulgar; if not originating in pugilism, it is at least perpetuated by what is called 'the brutalizing pastime of the ring.' It is like cockfighting, which your square-toed people have long since classed with cock-shying and bull-baiting, as mere unredeemed cruelty. But I say, that the contemplation of the utmost animal heroism which two game cocks display, is apt to excite some emulation in the spectator; and that it has not been unobserved by the vulgar is evident, since with them 'game' has become the synonyme for courage and endurance. For my own part, I do not think it quite so cruel as cooking some hundred shrimps, which are boiled alive for the breakfast of some worthy soul who writes, or of some gentle reader who reads the touching paragraphs in which the sport is stigmatised.

"Here comes the stage; let us get up; but there is only room behind."

It was a short-stage coach; on the same side with them was a female with a bundle, she complained of being a little sick; opposite to them were two journeymen and a smug tradesman.

"Will you move, ma'am?" said one of the journeymen, "perhaps it's your back to the horses."

"Oh no," observed the tradesman, "that is always a mere fancy."

"Thank you," replied the lady, "I do feel a sort of come-over-ishness."

"Change places, Sam," said the journeyman to his companion.

"Here, ma'am," exclaimed Sam; "but come," he continued to the tradesman, who had shown no inclination to accommodate her, "you had better move; here is a lady as ain't well, —you wouldn't have her sit outside, would you?"

"Oh certainly," said the surly tradesman; and he gave the woman up the central place.

"Now," observed Sir Thomas, "is it not a calumny to say that the lower orders of English want gallantry, in their rough way?"

It must not be imagined that Count Horace took everything for granted, or without due inquiry,—that being, as we have seen, of an excitable temperament he was carried by the reaction of conviction a little beyond the line of truth, within the limits of exaggeration. Even Sir Thomas soon became tired of the very enthusiasm he had worked up in his Telemachus, and of the task of cicerone. So probably is the reader by this time, and so undoubtedly is the author, and therefore we will cease to follow him.

"My good Sir Thomas!" said the Count, on the eve of his embarkation, with English horses, dogs, top coats, and double guns, in a high state of Anglo-mania, "my good Sir Thomas, with a few exceptions, I could almost be of your opinion in thinking yours the land of perfection."

"My opinion!" repeated Sir Thomas; "pray don't say my opinion. There is not a thing in the infernal country—from beginning to end—that I would not alter and remodel;—the cant—the hypocrisy—the waste—the meanness—the ostentation—the roguery—the oppression! Don't say my opinion. There is not one thing I would not change radically, if I could; but—not on the model of the continent, my boy!"

CHAPTER VII.

Count Horace awoke one morning in St. Petersburg, his temples throbbed, his blood felt feverish and drowsy, and he would again have yielded to the influence of sleep still weighing heavily on his eyelids, had he not been startled by the strangeness of the bed. He did not recognise its counterpane and hangings of rich brocaded silk, or its cambric-covered pillows with their trimmings of Mechlin lace. Where was he? As he rubbed his eyes and with them rubbed up his recollections, it occurred to him that he had been supping the night before with Prince Isaakoff, the son of the late millionnaire, just returned to claim his inheritance.

The last thing Horace could recall to memory was an attempt to quaff, for the second time, an enormous crystal goblet, a sort of cup of Hercules sparkling with champagne punch; and he thence concluded that, in the same manner as many of the Prince's guests before him, he had succumbed to the mighty potation.

Prince John Isaakoff had always been "one of the best fellows in the world," and now he was one of the richest. Horace had known him in Paris, in Italy, and on the Rhine; and though there was no striking similarity in their ideas or predilections, they had gone through together some of the most stirring scenes of Horace's gayest years, and they had always been on terms of unusual intimacy. Concluding, therefore, that he must have been put to sleep in an apartment of the Isaakoff palace, he jumped out of bed, and looked around him.

The room in which he was united the taste of Paris with the comfort peculiar to English dwellings, in its furniture and decorations. On each side of the English bed, from which he had just risen, were doors of richly carved walnut wood, impanelled, as well as the wall above them, with paintings in the style of Lemoine and Blanchard.

A scene of bathing-nymphs, or Diana and Actæon, the toilet of Venus, or mermaids arranging their dripping hair, served to indicate respectively the entrance to the baths or dressing rooms. The chimney-piece was of finely sculptured Carrara marble, and reflected in the glass above it, the massive clock with the gilded group supporting it, and two costly vases of Malachite found in the possessions of their owner. These vases were empty, though always filled in the winter with flowers, when flowers, now in full season and abundance, were rare and worth their weight in gold.

Within this chimney-piece was an English grate with all its appurtenances, and to tempt one to loll in beside it when blazing with sea-coal luxurious spring chairs around the hearth-rug.

He drew aside the window-curtain, the spring blind rolled up to the touch, and the massive sheet of plate glass glided noiselessly on one side in its mahogany frames. The broad rapid Neva flowed before him, the sky was clear and sunny as on the shores of the Mediterranean, and showed the transparent purity of the cold and arrowy waters in which its cloudless blue was mirrored.

The gilded spire of the fortress opposite glittered in the sun, beyond it the domes of many Byzantine churches, green, and starred, and tipped with gold, in the suburb of the Peterbourskoi Storonè; for the northern bank of the Neva and all the islands of its delta on which the city was originally founded, and which Peter the Great intended should sustain another Amsterdam, the holy city of his dreams, has continued with the exception of one—the Vasili Ostroff—still marsh or wood, converted into market-gardens or promenades sprinkled with villas. Such part of the city as has gathered around that which he first erected, has sunk into a mere suburb where wooden houses, and the bearded population, and the Muscovite churches, with their melon-shaped domes and minarets, have taken refuge.

The palaces, the magnificence, the inappropriate classic architecture, with its colonnades and peristyles, has crept over the mainland of the southern shore. The very statue of the grim old Peter is raised there; but he is pointing with his outstretched hand towards the island, as if the sculptor had imbued the bronze with the mind and tongue of the original, and that turning his back on all the Greek and Latin palaces, he was saying, "There is where I meant to found my city."

As the river here swells to embrace in many arms its islands, it is very wide. Being above the bridge, no craft ascend but the frigate brigs and yachts which lie opposite the windows of the winter palace, on a line with which rose the mansion of Prince John Isaakoff.

There only floated therefore on its surface, the unwieldy and gigantic rafts or barques drifted down, to end here, perhaps a three years' voyage having come some thousand miles from the vicinity of the Caspian, or from the interior of the Empire, laden with its produce. In singular contrast to these, hundreds of gondolas, gaily painted, with awnings and with high galley-shaped poops, glided backwards and forwards, to carry on the communication between the opposite banks of the river.

As Horace turned to seek the bell, a Russian servant stood before him, and with a low salaam threw open a vast wardrobe, where he found an assortment of dressing gowns and slippers; and at the same moment he was hailed by the voice of the Prince through the open doors of the adjacent apartment. But when he entered the room it seemed empty, till the servant drew aside a screen, and his host was discovered lying on a sofa in his robe-de-chambre. The sheets, the pillows, and the satin coverlet showed that he had slept there.

"How have you slept, my dear Horace? We were not in a condition to move far from the scene of action. The next is the room where we supped. So I had you carried to my own bed."

"A very touching act of friendship," replied Horace, "but which I should more have appreciated had I not seen that you Russians never seem to sleep on beds."

"Not very often, it is true, for though there are forty beds I suppose in this house, they might go six months without being slept in. There are many weighty reasons for preferring a couch; in the first place—Dimitri, are you there?" No Dimitri answered, and then the Prince gave utterance to his jest; "My groom of the chambers has the same idea of sleeping in a bed that the Grand Duke Constantine has of campaigning with an army."

"What is that?"

"He says it spoils the bed; and the Grand Duke says that fighting spoils the soldiers' uniforms. But the fact is, my dear fellow, you do not know the luxury of it."

"I can conceive that one may soon learn to consider it as but slight hardship; but I do not understand its becoming exactly a luxury," replied Horace.

"Ah, you have not experienced the delightful ease of putting on your schlafrock and slippers before you go to supper; you sit down to it, you get very drunk perhaps, and are quietly wheeled to where you mean to sleep, or masked by a screen as I was last night; and here you may be, as I am, ready to drink your tea, or to receive without having stirred from your couch. It is an Orientalism you will learn to appreciate in time. But I hope, my dear Horace, that you have not forgotten on your feather bed the promise you made last night?"

"What promise?"

"To go with me to my estates, and to remain here till we depart."

"Did I so promise?"

"Did you not vow so?"

"Well, Isaakoff, if I did, the vow is not quite so rash as that of Iphigenia's sire."

"You don't know that; you do not know what our Russian country seats are like," replied the Prince; "but anyhow I keep you to your promise. Will you take tea now?"

"Directly I am washed."

"Then make haste, for I have a world of business to go through to-day. Just imagine one of those days so happily gone by, when my doors were besieged with creditors, and I was plunged in schemes to raise the wind, or bolster up my battered credit; imagine, a day just as busy before one, with looking through the inventory of one's houses, lands, mines, and peasants, besieged by one's obsequious vassals."

When Horace had completed a hasty toilet, he found the door of the room in which he left his host shut too: the lock was one of those new patents, so exceedingly clever in contrivance, as to puzzle all ordinary comprehension to shut it when open, or to open it when shut. They were double doors; so instead of knocking Horace adventurously resolved to find his way round by the staircase.

It was a noble staircase of white marble, the chisel of the sculptor had wreathed the balustrade with carvings delicately frail, of the leaves, and fruit, and branches of the vine.

Two servants in a somewhat tawdry livery threw open a door; he traversed one dimly lighted apartment, and then stood within another of very large dimensions, in the midst of a vast crowd of bearded Russian plebeians, and of bearded and unbearded servants in and out of livery.

His progress was arrested by those around him falling prostrate on the inlaid floor, and kissing the hem of his dressing gown. He had some difficulty in disengaging himself and in proceeding onward; though as he did so it was obvious that he had been mistaken for the Prince, until the valet Dimitri led him back to where Isaakoff was still upon his sofa. The sheets and pillows had been removed; the Prince was no longer lying but reclining, his legs still underneath the coverlet, and a long Turkish pipe in his mouth.

He laughed heartily at his guest's adventure.

"Those are my domestic servants, a hundred and fifty of them I think I hear there are, and a few of my serfs, all anxious to get a glimpse of the rising sun. Do you take tea, Horace?"

"Oh I take tea ever since I have been in England."

The Prince clapped his hands; it is an Oriental fashion in which the Russians still indulge, and is more convenient than ringing a bell which you have to lift from a table beside you.

"You never drank tea in England, the English have no more conception of good tea than you have in France of good coffee."

"You are pleased to be paradoxical."

"No, I am matter of fact; they neither drink good tea, nor coffee, nor chocolate in England, good tea never; for the reason that you cannot make coffee in France,—they have nothing but a coarse leaf, and in France you never have the finest Mocha berry."

"And yet I had considered them as staple productions of their respective kitchens."

"Nothing can be more erroneous; it is plain that the preparation of any such beverage must depend on the quality of the material, as much as on the skill in brewing it. Now the material for tea is wanting in England; the finest imported is coarse flavoured, and they draw it so long and make it so strong that the infusion becomes too astringent and bitter, to be drinkable without cream or milk; now cream or milk added to our high flavoured teas would be like adding beer to Burgundy."

"As for coffee, the finest Mocha berry is nearly unknown; and when they have it they do not understand the art of drawing out its flavour and aroma—just as with chocolate, which ought to be the pure cacao nut deprived by roasting of all its volatile oil, and a fitting food for the most delicate stomach. By mixing it with milk in England, and with cream and eggs in France, they convert it into a beverage cloying and offensive.

"In France with the coffee, as with the tea in England, excellence is impossible, because the best Mocha is nowhere used. They may draw out all that is in the berry, but make always a beverage flavourless, acid, and heating, with which the habitués of your coffee houses are satisfied, and which travelling Englishmen admire."

"We will try," said Horace, "how far your own bears out your criticism."

"But what do you smoke?" And on a signal, an attendant, who might be called the slave of the pipe, brought forth a case containing cigars of every age, and hue and description, together with a lighted taper. "Or will you try the Turkish nargileh, or the Indian hookah, or the simple Turkish pipe, so great a favourite in Russia, with the red clay bowl and cherry stick, and amber mouth-piece, or some of the German meerschaum or staghorn pipes; I have plenty in my collection, though we consider them low and vulgar, and only fit for Calbashniks."

"What are Calbashniks?"

"Oh, it is the popular name for Germans; it means sausage-makers; they are called more politely Niemetz or dummies, a name singularly inappropriate, particularly when applied to their students."

"What are you smoking?"

"The Jukoff tobacco, a Russian preparation; an acquired taste, and one which you will probably not like."

The tea, a very weak infusion, was poured out from several minute teapots, into tumblers, and served with sugar and slices of lemon, and soukarees, or Russian rusks.

"What without cream? said Horace; "this would hardly suit an English palate."

"Don't talk of comparing English tea to the Russian, you might as well liken the coarsest gin to the finest vintage of Johannisberg."

"I will send to my Tartar coachman for some of the tea his people use, pressed into a brick and looking like a cake of greaves; they cut it with an axe, boil it in milk for hours, and that you will find more like your English tea. Try this, it is the finest green, it is worth forty shillings a pound; here are several sorts of the yellow tea, costing about the double: what do you say to them?"

"The green is certainly magnificent; its perfume is delicious. The others are very fragrant also, but then they do not taste like tea at all; I still like cream or milk, and cups."

"Ah, if you were a connoisseur, you would know that a drop of milk spoils so delicate a flavour, and then you would appreciate the luxury of seeing it sparkle in a tumbler in the true Muscovite fashion."

"Now let us try your pipe," said Count Horace, and as his notice was attracted by a boat passing on the river, he kneeled on the Prince's sofa and attempted to lean over it; but his knee rested on something that moved under him like a creeping mass of flesh, although it was beyond the Prince's feet, and a hoarse cry seemed to proceed from under the satin coverlet.

As the Count started back in terror, a gigantic head, with grizzled hair and bushy eyebrows scowled out upon him from beneath it, and then snapped its teeth like an angry dog, and continued muttering at him. Whilst Isaakoff was still convulsed with laughter, the body pertaining to the enormous head, which scarcely exceeded it in volume disengaged itself slowly from its covering, and a dwarf of the minutest proportions descended carefully from the canopy, still chattering and grinning like a furious ape.

"Do you know what he says?" laughed the Prince, "that you may well look afraid, though you are so big. Come! Archib, that will do, go to your place."

"Well I confess, that I was startled; but as I would not purposely have hurt the little creature, pray tell him so."

"Oh that is needless, he is very old and half idiotic, he does not know even me, he mistakes me for my father, who was singularly kind to all his slaves, particularly to this poor Archib, who has taken his death so much to heart that it has still further deranged his senses. My father used him for the last twenty years as a foot-warmer, and having found his way in here this morning, he proceeded at once to his old place. It was on this very sofa that the old gentleman died; was it not Dietrich?"

These words were addressed to a man habited in black, who had just entered, smooth, oily, and subservient in his aspect, with a head like a pimple, on his rotund little body.

"High, well-born Prince!" returned Dietrich, with a bow in which was concentrated as much abject submissiveness as in the prostration of all the domestics who had kissed the ground before Horace put together, "High well-born Prince! on this very sofa it was that the spirit of your late lamented father passed away, in the arms of your faithful humble servant. It must be a melancholy satisfaction to you, my high and well-born master, to know that he was visited in his last moments by his Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Constantine Paulovitch. Two hours he had lain groaning incessantly, clasping the doctor's hand so tight in his that he could not disengage it, when I saw from the window his Imperial Highness descend from his carriage. On this announcement, your father started up—'Dietrich,' he said, 'Dietrich, my excellent, my worthy steward! make haste, my regulation coat, my senator's uniform, are all my orders on it Dietrich? my St. Vladimir, my St. Stanislas, my St. George, and my St. Anne?'

"Would you believe it, my high, well-born master, that the Grand Duke was upon us before we could fasten the last hook and eye of the collar? It was the only thing for which my poor master rebuked me when he was dying; but on the back of his neck he had an open blister, and I was obliged to handle him tenderly. I saw the Grand Duke's eye rest on the unfastened collar; but his merciful Highness made no remark.

"Eight hours after, my noble master expired; and his last words were; 'Dietrich, it was not po formè, it was not according to regulation; I know how a button undone angers all that family, and leads too often to a man's undoing; I hope the Grand Duke may not remember it when he comes across my son. Oh Dietrich! Dietrich, it was not po formè,' and so, my Lord; he closed his blessed eyes."

"Idiotic gossip," muttered the Prince, and then he continued, "so, Dietrich, I hear that my lamented father remained to the last as he had always been, too good and easy for his knavish people."

"My high and well-born master, who is a saint in heaven now," replied Dietrich looking up as if to catch a glimpse of the deceased in his mind's eye. "My high and well-born master was a real angel upon earth, I always thought so, but never more than when he got too fat to walk, and that his slaves carried him from one room to another on his chair or sofa."

"Dietrich," he used to say, "I should like to go into the picture gallery; but I do not like to give those lads the trouble. When a man is too obese to move he should lie still."

"I know he was always too easy to his slaves," said the Prince sternly; "but I have some reason to suspect that he was mighty easy with his agents also; I am not so, master Dietrich, we will look closely into accounts."

"Oh! my Lord," said Dietrich, "those will be happy moments. How many years past have I longed for some occasion which might bring my probity to light. These fourteen winters past I have been keeping your lamented father's books; there are forty thousand souls upon the property, and I might almost make bold to say that scarcely a cow has eaten a pound of hay or a hen laid an egg which I have not accounted for; but your lamented father, my high well-born master, though on New Years' day I always placed all the last year's account as it were under his eye to court his leisure, would never look into them."

"Never mind, we will," said the Prince, "figure by figure."

Here Dietrich threw open the door of an adjacent cabinet, which had something the appearance of a stationer's warehouse: shelves all round the walls groaned under the weight of bundles of paper, and account-books, and solid piles of manuscript ascended to the ceiling in columns and half columns.

"What! are these all the accounts of the fourteen years of your stewardship arrayed in battle to alarm me?"

"Oh! no," said Dietrich mildly, "these are only the documents which relate to the receipts and profits of the estate for the two quarters commencing last January and terminating at midsummer."

"Oh! indeed!"

"Would you like, my high and well-born master, to go into them directly?"

"No, I think I will breakfast before I go through them," said the Prince.

"Whenever my high and well-born master pleases; but he may judge how anxious I am that he should leave nothing unexamined. Let me put it to you, my Lord, is it not natural, when one has watched for years, when one has shaved and pared to see that not a single kopek should be misapplied or wasted, saying always: Dietrich, is it because thy master hath forty thousand slaves and a million and a half of roubles revenue, is it because thy master dreads the sight of figures, that thou shouldst allow one copper to be wasted? No, Dietrich. And then when one has kept so sharp a watch for fourteen years, that not a rat has gnawed at a cheese-paring without its skin being converted into money, is it to be wondered that one should long for a gracious master to look through one's accounts and books, and say: Harkye mine honest humble-minded Dietrich, though those who envy thee say that thou plunderest and thievest, God save the mark! I have cast up one and one, and two and two, and find that thou art true as gold thrice proven in the furnace."

"Dietrich," said the Prince, "thou art become a thorough Russian in one thing."

"My Lord, I am flattered."

"Dietrich, thou smellest like a Russian."

"If my Lord says so, I lament it," said Dietrich cringingly.

"Go away now, send Dimitri with pastilles, I'll call thee when I want thee."

"Body and soul," said Dietrich bowing low, "I am always at the disposal of my high and well-born master."

"I'll dispense with the body just now," said the Prince.

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Dietrich as he bowed himself out, "excellent! very excellent! witty, witty, very—very—very witty!"

"What is that fellow?" said Horace.

"A knave," replied the Prince, "a very transparent one."

"But is he a Russian?"

"A Russian subject, but a German, born in our German provinces; we frequently use these people as overseers, because we cannot trust our own."

"But knave for knave, why not employ Russians?"

"I mean to try it," replied the Prince; "but there is this advantage in a German, that he is a reasonable knave, who can let an apple ripen on the bough without plucking it eagerly off whilst green. He looks to keep his place, and therefore moderates his avidity. He will not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, or take more than the fleece from the sheep's back, but our Russians are in a constant fever, their fingers itch till they have potted all the goose-grease, and stripped off all the sheep's skin with its fleece, though they know that there will never be any wool to gather afterwards. A Russian in Dietrich's place could hardly refrain from purloining two lumps of sugar from that basin if our eyes were averted, though risking a situation in which he pilfers more than the amount of Count Nesselrode's salary. But then he has more in his character of the traits which Cicero paints in Catiline when he calls him covetous of that of others, lavish of his own. The Russian, at Easter, would purchase half a dozen sleighs of frozen meat to distribute in charity, magnificent diamonds for his wife, and make a rich offering to his saint; now all the charity and devotion of such a fellow as Dietrich would be concentrated on his own spherical little person. There is another advantage too with a Russian, if he be your own serf and that you keep him so, (one that I really regret when I look upon Dietrich,) as your Shakespeare says of the courtier, he is like a sponge.

You do but squeeze him and he is dry again."

"Do you know," said Count Horace, "that admirable as your Russian tea may be and crisp and brown as are your soukarees, they do not come up to my ideas of a breakfast, though they may do to break a fast."

"Oh! do not indulge the belief that this is breakfast, you shall breakfast presently, as luxuriously as a French artiste and a Russian pover can prepare a repast so important."

At this moment Dimitri announced a visitor in the person of Gospodine Jakof.

"Ah! Mr. Jakof. See, Horace, how the bees flock round the sugar, even when their own honey bags are full. Last time I was in Petersburg, this very fellow, who was richer than I am, affected to keep out of my way, lest I should borrow money from him."

Mr. Jakof was a young man with a prominent nose, and a countenance indicative of uncommon obtuseness. The exceeding floridity of his complexion, and the vulgar coarseness of his features, gave him somewhat of the appearance of a butcher boy; if one could imagine a butcher boy in tortoise-shell spectacles, which he wore. He was habited in a cut-a-way coat of outrageous fashion, adorned with gigantic buttons; around his neck was a handkerchief tied in an enormous bow, and the hat he carried in his hand was of that shape which facetious London hatters display in their windows with the superscription of tippy-bobby. He had a piece of cotton stuffed in each ear, lavender coloured Parisian ladies' boots upon his feet, a Malacca hunting whip in his hand, and three bull terriers following his heels.

"Ah, my dear Savè," said the Prince, embracing him, "how long since we have met. But first let me make known to you my friend Horace de Montressan—my friend, my inseparable, my more than brother; in fact, with your luxuriant imagination, conceive us to be two bodies animated by a common soul."

"Ah!" said Jakof, who notwithstanding the insinuation of the Prince, did not exactly look an imaginative being, "I do conceive a Pilate and Orestes—I am honoured."

"Exactly," returned Isaakoff, "we are even more closely united in the bonds of friendship than Pontius Pilate and Orestes were. Now, Count Horace, let me make known to you my intimate—Savè Jakof—a fellow Anglomane." (The Prince slily thrust his tongue into his cheek as he said this). "If he lives he will inherit one of the largest fortunes in Russia; if he dies to-morrow, the moral portion of his Imperial Majesty's subjects will get rid, with him, of one of their greatest eye-sores."

"You are too modest," said Jakof, who gloried in the reputation of "rouérie," which his meanness had alone prevented him from deserving. "Here are you returned from Paris—a fitting subject truly to rail at those, whom an Imperial will keeps by their humble chimney corner."

Jakof was hardly seated, when Dimitri announced fresh visitors.

"Flies! flies! flies!" said Isaakoff, "attracted by the lump of sugar."

"Of course," said Jakof, "all the town knows that you have come into a million and a half of roubles a year. Do as I do, never play high, never lend, never buy of your friends—I never do. I dine at Dulong's, and give everybody plenty of champagne; but beyond that, your humble servant."

"Ah!" observed the Prince, "it would be more economical to omit the champagne."

"I've tried it," said Jakof; "they won't stay; they go off to play elsewhere."

"I should feel flattered by such society;" said Isaakoff; but as he spoke the Count Lochadoff, Monsieur Lesseps, and Sergius Durakoff were introduced.

"Count Horace," said the Prince, "allow me to present to you Monsieur Lesseps, your talented countryman—with these gentlemen I see you are acquainted."

"Are we to congratulate you?" said Count Lochadoff, throwing off a light grey cloak, and showing the undress uniform of the guards.

"Why, my friends," returned Isaakoff, "you are all aware that I have come into a fortune by the death of a parent, with whom I had long since ceased to be on terms the most amicable—a fortune too which I should have soon become past the age of enjoying. Without being very stony hearted, I do not exactly see the justice of attaching peculiar stringency to any natural ties of relationship, when unaccompanied by other bonds. My late father was an excellent man in his way; but then he lavished all his affection on his slaves, and had none left for his son; it is their place to weep for him. On the whole, if I could recall the old gentleman to life to share my fortune with me, I would do it; but as I can't, considering that death is the common lot, that all regret is useless, and that there are several circumstances to qualify the bitterness of mine, I have resolved not to make my house a house of mourning. Why, in any case, should we seek to cloud the spirits of our friends with our own domestic sorrows, when no sympathy can recall the dead?"

"I am glad to see you take it so philosophically," said Lochadoff.

"Take what?—his million and half per annum philosophically," interrupted Jakof.

"Though," continued Lochadoff, "who would not have excused some want of stoicism on the death of a father?"

"Ah!" said Jakof, "Lochadoff! we all know that the funeral elegance of marble and of speech—the poetry and sentiment of sorrow is understood in your family. He is the man, Isaakoff, to teach you what is proper on such occasions—he has mourned over four fathers."

"You see," interrupted Monsieur Lesseps, who appeared one of those men who wrapped up in the triple armour of their conceit, their ignorance, and want of sensibility, are always running foul of the delicacies and decencies of refined society, which they never understand, even when born it; but which when raised to it fortuitously in after life, they trample down as unconsciously as an ox does the flowers in a tulip bed. "You see, Count," he said, addressing himself familiarly to Horace, "the jest is the most charming in the world; for our friend Lochadoff has really had four fathers; his lady mother has really buried four husbands. She is said to have married for the sake of peopling a little Père la Chaise, which she has established in her English garden, adorned with tasty monuments and a Gothic chapel, with the fret work of cast iron painted stone colour, for which her architect charged her twenty thousand louis. It is a pet spot, which she takes all her friends to see. She has always kept a portfolio full of elegant designs of tombs and cenotaphs; and she has always had some models got ready with each wedding trousseau."

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Jakof. "How do they say she got rid of them? Tell him that."

"Why that," continued Lesseps, "was very simple. She chose them, after consulting her doctor, according to their prospects of a speedy dissolution. Just with the hair-trigger set, as one might say, quite ready to go off—at least so it is reported."

The Count Lochadoff coloured slightly, and coughed to conceal his embarrassment and annoyance.

"Ah!" continued Lesseps, "our lieutenant coughs—a hollow cough—I hope it is consumptive, for his lady mother's sake. When the Russians learned her sepulchral taste, she seduced a foreigner into matrimony; but now unhappily the Greek church interferes, and will not allow a fifth husband, though all the continent of Europe is open to her choice."

"Perhaps I might suggest," observed Lochadoff, "that you would have shown quite as much delicacy in choosing another object for your scandal."

"Oh! no offence, young gentleman," returned Lesseps. "I neither intended any, nor care if I gave it. You must take me as you find me. I learned to speak out what I think loudly and roughly enough when I was a drummer; for I began life, gentlemen, by rattling on calf-skin; and when I became maître d'armes, I acquired the art, which I have not forgotten, of answering with a yard of steel for all that I have roughly spoken."

"Come," said Isaakoff, "we all know that his tongue is licensed. But let us hear what is passing in the Chevalier guards. What makes you look so sleepy, Lochadoff?"

"I was at parade this morning at six, so I was awakened at two to get on my leather breeches, and could not afterwards get to sleep."

"I am afraid," said Horace, "that if you do not dress more speedily, you could not get very quickly to horse in case of an alarm."

"My good Sir," replied Lochadoff, "I see you do not know what an affair our buckskins are—to make them set properly we are obliged to put them on damp, and to let them dry upon the body."

"I'll tell you what," said Horace; "for my own part I would sooner go to parade in a pair of shorts as loose as a Dutch skipper's."

"Yes," observed Jakof, "and get a week's arrest for every crease. Oh no, I've tried that myself."

"By-the-bye," said Durakoff, "talking of arrests, I must tell you how nearly a soldier in our regiment baffled the Emperor."

"Oh that is old," interrupted Jakof.

"Not to those who have never heard it, dolt. I have heard nothing," said Isaakoff, "so go on."

"Give me another pipe, Dimitri, and I proceed. Know then, that Nicolas Paulovitch was driving down the Nevsky prospect on the last spring snow—I need not tell you how sharp an eye he has for detecting all military delinquencies—the week before last he sent my cousin to the Caucausus for wearing white kid gloves; and it is only three days since he condemned one of my brother officers to a month's arrest for being in full dress when undress was the order of the day for the hour at which he was detected."

"How is that?" exclaimed Horace.

"My dear fellow," said Isaakoff, "you have no idea of our service, particularly in the guards. Now in Lochadoff's regiment they have innumerable dresses for different occasions. The white cloth coat, black and gold cuirass, helmets, jack-boots, and buckskins for one dress; another without the boots or cuirass; an undress of two or three descriptions; a palace dress of scarlet with silk stockings, and so on ad infinitum. A man may have to wear alternately in one morning the cap, the helmet, or cocked hat, with the cocktail feathers. The Emperor or the Grand Duke regulates day by day arbitrarily the hours and occasions on which they shall respectively be worn; and woe to the wretch who transgresses. Now then, proceed."

"The Emperor," resumed Durakoff, "was thus proceeding down the Nevsky prospect, alive and watchful as he is when he catches sight of a uniform, when he espied a soldier of our regiment in the condition we call 'slavè bogu.' It means 'praise to the Lord;' and answers to your French expression of 'being in the Lord's vineyard.' In a word, he was very drunk. 'Come here,' said the Emperor, 'jump up behind my sledge, and I will give you a ride to your barracks, and order you five hundred lashes. Here, hold on by the sleeve of my cloak that I may feel that you have not rolled down in the snow like a beast, as you are. The soldier thanked him very fervently and humbly, as soldiers and peasants do with us when promised favours of that description. It deprecates wrath, they say. Now the Emperor held on at the cloak just as an angler feels the fish at the end of his line; and away they drove to the barracks. When they arrived the officer on duty was called out.

" 'Harkye,' said Nicolas, 'take that drunken hound, who is behind my sledge, and shut him up till he is sober, then give him five hundred lashes.'

" 'I hear and obey,' said the officer; 'but please your Imperial Majesty, I see only two soldiers in the street—two mounted Cossacks just turning the corner, whom I will instantly pursue. Which is it?'

" 'Ah! fool! whose mother I have defiled!' said the Emperor. 'I mean the man who is behind my sledge.'

"But as the Emperor turned mechanically round to look, there was no soldier there; but the sleeve of his cloak was cunningly fastened to the sash.

" 'Oh!' roared the Emperor, 'I have defiled thy mother! I have defiled thy mother! I have defiled thy mother! The rascal has got off; but I'll be even with him; he shall not escape. Drive on.'

"The next morning the regiment was drawn out in one rank, and the Emperor himself came to inspect it. He quietly desired that the delinquent would step forward; but the delinquent knew better. Then the Emperor's brow lowered, and he walked along the line, looking into every man's face, and making his teeth chatter. But you know he endeavours to sort the men so carefully, he causes the soldier's hair to be cropped so close, and their moustachios to be cut so exactly in the same trim and blackened so accurately to the same hue with tallow and lamp-black, that for once he was utterly at fault. The Emperor chafed; the Colonel was in despair, and in vain implored the offender to come forward and be flogged, for the credit of the regiment. At length a free pardon was promised; but yet no one came forward. Still Nicolai Paulovitch swore that he would find him out; and then he offered not only a free pardon, but a hundred roubles and a week's holiday. Now a hundred roubles, to a poor soldier who receives only about seven shillings a year and is fond of brandy, was too strong a temptation. He stepped forward and confessed. The Emperor looked at him, and sent him back into the ranks—his curiosity and his anger were gratified."

"His curiosity," said Horace, "but not his anger, for I suppose he kept his promise."

"Oh yes, as to the pardon, and so he did as to the hundred roubles; but then the soldier drank, and of course the colonel found that he was drunk. He was condemned to run the gauntlet through three hundred men, and when his sentence was sent to the Emperor for approbation, he wrote down approved, but to run the gauntlet twice through six hundred men. And serve the fool right, for he had it all his own way once."

"Not quite so certain that, with our Emperor," said Jakof; "I believe he would have flogged the whole regiment rather than have let that man escape—and what can escape, that he is determined to find out."

"He leads you all, gentlemen," said Lesseps, "à la baguette, and on my soul I think he is right. I have heard that the stick was made for the Russian, and the Russian for the stick. I do not find him a bad fellow on the whole, your Nicholas; he is a good companion in his way; only curse all his police spies and followers. If you meet him in the street, Count, cut him dead as I do; there are always dozens of them dodging his heels in some disguise or other; and as they have a law to punish whoever addresses the Emperor in the street, whenever it happens that he speaks to you they pounce upon you the instant that his back is turned, and lock you up till they ascertain the next day, whether you were spoken to, or the speaker. Good bye, Monsieur le Comte, I am glad to have met so charming a compatriot. Good bye, gentlemen all; your time's your own, but I must be off to my palette and easel."

"I follow you," said Jakof.

"A worthy couple of Bœotians," observed the host as the door closed; "Jakof is I suppose the greatest fool, and Lesseps the coarsest hound and the best painter in St. Petersburg; I see he has got on lately."

"Oh! nobody likes him," said Durakoff; "but then he has that about him which passeth all personal attraction—the perfume of imperial favour."

"Well, Dimitri, what now?" exclaimed Isaakoff to his servant, who having filled his pipe, remained silent and motionless before him with his head sunk on his breast, in that singular manner which seems the result of an anatomical peculiarity in the Muscovites, and which, according to Lesseps, arises from an additional vertebra in the neck, with which, by a merciful dispensation of Providence, this race, doomed so abjectly and incessantly to bow, has been endowed.

"My Lord," replied Dimitri, "Vasili Petrovitch, the fruiterer; the very humblest of your slaves, begs that he may be allowed to see you."

"Vasili Petrovitch, whose name I never heard before, is a modest scoundrel," said Isaakoff; "I have my intendants, my household servants to the number of seven score, and I suppose two or three hundred wealthy serfs besides established in this city, all anxious to see me; and your modest Vasili Petrovitch only wants an immediate interview, forsooth at a moment's warning! I won't see him, but I will note him down to raise his obrok; he must be a liberal fellow and well to do in the world. What did he give thee, Dimitri, to bring me such a message?"

Dimitri, in whose pocket a hundred rouble note had just been deposited, turned to the corner of the room, and not finding there the image, which is only excluded from the most fastidious apartments, he turned his eyes towards the ceiling, and beating his breast compunctiously, as if to say, "Oh Lord! bear witness to the truth of thy servant a miserable sinner," he confidently answered; "Vasili Petrovitch gave me nothing, but he promised me his blessing, and he mentioned that he had an offering to make."

"His offering will keep."

"He says not; it is for my Lord's breakfast."

"For breakfast, Dimitri? that changes the face of affairs; let your Vasili Petrovitch in; whether or no he be a man of sense, he has had the wit to guess the only proposition I would just now listen to."

The door opened and an old man stood before them; his hair was dense and grey, his beard patriarchal. He was dressed in a sordid and threadbare caftan, a sort of bed-gown-looking vestment of blue cloth, girded round by a faded red-brown sash, and reaching almost to his feet, which were cased in boots pulled over his trousers. He threw himself prostrate before the Prince.

"Oh John, the son of John! oh my father!" said the old man to the young one, kissing his slippers, "now that my late master is a saint in heaven, what a happiness to look upon his son."

"A live master is worth two dead saints," replied the Prince; "but tell me, Vasili Petrovitch, are you a wealthy first or second guild merchant?"

"Oh John, the son of John! I am indeed rated as a first guild merchant, and mine enemies say that I am rich, the Lord forgive them for their falsehood; but if I am rated as a first guild merchant, it is because, according to the capital we declare, is the amount of the tax we pay for our merchant's licence; and according to the tax we pay is the guild in which we are rated, and, in consequence, the credit we enjoy. For this credit's sake I have struggled hard to pay the first guild licence; but so help me, the holy Saint Sergius, who spoke out when he came an infant from his mother's womb, this next year I must sink into the second guild, even if that my poverty will allow me to keep beyond the third. Many of us are there, in these hard times, oh John, the son of John, who deceive our dread Lord Nicolas, the son of Paul, by paying first guild fees when we have not capital to qualify us for the third. The Lord forgive our sin!"

"I'll swear that Nicolai Paulovitch (Nicholas the son of Paul) would willingly see you all sin so; but what have you brought me?"

"My father," continued the old man, I rent a salmon fishery off the Krestovsky island, to my loss and sorrow; and this day lo! I believe my patron saint, St. Sergius, sent into the fisher's nets a sturgeon, the first that has been caught these two years in the Neva. He is plump and full of roe. I have caused him to be brought with me, that my Lord may eat what money will not purchase in this season, fresh ekra for his breakfast."

"Thank you, Vasili Petrovitch; but go away now; I will remember you," said the Prince; and then he added maliciously, "I am glad to learn you are so well to do in the world. Now, gentlemen," said he turning to his friends, "you have heard, and of course you breakfast with me."

"Fresh ekra and the company of Isaakoff are visitors not to be resisted," said Lochadoff.

"Particularly the ekra," observed the Prince.

"It is true," said Durakoff, "that Isaakoff's company will keep, and the ekra will not."

"That is true," returned Lochadoff; "I can form a shrewd conjecture that the inheritor of such a fortune will not readily get permission to spend it, where they say he has squandered so much by anticipation."

"Dimitri," said the Prince, "let that fish be brought up to the breakfast-room; and now, men, let us pay our respects to the ekra."

"And what after all is ekra?" inquired Horace.

"Ekra, my dear fellow, is supposed to be the ambrosium of the pagan gods. It is brought in winter some thousands of miles, by relays of post horses travelling day and night, to reach our tables fresh, which it only does with the kind assistance of the cold and salt. Ekra is what in the west you call caviar, when you get it dried, pressed, salted, tainted, and spoiled."

Count Horace had scarcely time to observe that everything on the breakfast table—the wedgwood ware, the glass, the cutlery, the very plate, were English; when the doors were thrown wide open, and eight domestics appeared bearing in a cloth and blanket, a heavy weight. It was Vasili's enormous sturgeon, still living, as appeared by the feeble lashing of its tail.

The fish was followed by the Russian cook, bearing a huge wooden bowl, and armed with a sharp knife, whilst another domestic carried an antique punch-bowl, and the dwarf Archib followed at his heels.

"Look what a magnificent fish! How much roe is there in him think you, cook?"

The cook patted the fish on the belly and looked at it with the eye of a connoisseur, "a poud and a quarter, or a poud and a half—say fifty-five pounds."

"Ay," said the dwarf, who seemed singularly alive to this proceeding, "only a poud and a half—I could eat that all myself with blinees."

At this sally there was a laugh.

"Blinees are the buckwheat pancakes we eat with caviar at Easter," said the Prince.

"Now, cook, work away," he continued; "and you, my dear Horace, you are going to assist at a feast that would make any man's mouth water in the Empire."

The cook having thus received the signal, proceeded dexterously to rip up the exhausted fish, which gave a last convulsive bound.

"Be quiet," said the eager dwarf, patting the fish, "the master has ordered it; it will be worse for you."

Then the operator began to take out the roe by handfuls, and to empty it into the wooden bowl. The roe consists of grains about the size and colour of hemp seed, but semi-transparent, and agglutinated together by a fluid resembling castor oil.

"This is the celebrated ekra," said the Prince.

The china bowl being half filled, and some salt scattered over it, Count Lochadoff at once took a spoonful on his plate and began eagerly tasting it; "It is perfection," said he. "You have no ekra in the West; it is almost enough to keep one in Russia."

"Come, Horace, you do not eat," said the Prince.

"Eat," echoed Horace.

"Yes, eat man, only taste it."

"Oh! for heaven's sake give me a glass of brandy," replied Horace; "the sight is enough for me."

"What not taste! Oh prejudice, prejudice! only look how fresh and tempting it looks," said the Prince, as with his fork he separated a few bloody veins, and a piece or two of film, and having peppered it, took his first mouthful just as the monster who had furnished the repast was borne out, showing that vitality was not quite extinct, by a faint lashing of his tail against the folding doors, as the dwarf eagerly thrust his little arm to scrape out a handful of the roe still adhering to the integuments.

"Why you look pale!" said the Russians laughing.

It was true; Horace, instead of brandy, had helped himself hastily to Doppel Kummel, a liquor from the Baltic province, a sort of corn brandy syrup, rankly flavoured with fennel—congenial to the stomachs which do not reject the ekra.

"Do you know," said Isaakoff, "that ten years hence you will almost feel inclined to return to us for the sole purpose of eating this delicious food. I never yet knew a foreigner who was not disgusted with the sight of it, or who did not end by becoming fonder of it than the Russians."

"Unless he never tasted it," observed Horace.

"If you prefer it salted and pressed, there is some of the dry caviar."

"Not any way," said Horace; "it reminds one of an African abomination. I have read that somewhere in Darfour or Kordofan there is a lake of which the waters, stagnating in the summer's sun, become literally thickened with maggots, which are drained, salted, dried, pressed into cheeses, and must bear no slight resemblance to your salted caviar."

"Well!" said Isaakoff, "it is well that we are not all so bigoted; you will find nearly all the other dishes from your own kitchen. Here, let me recommend to you a double snipe: it is a bird you have not, between the size of snipe and woodcock, but combining the juiceness and flavour of the snipe and quail; they are now fat and in full season; or here you have patties of the Neva salmon."

"Salmon patties! what are those grains in them looking like transparent amber-coloured rice?"

"Oh! that is the sinew of the sturgeon cut into small pieces; the rest are your own French dishes."

"Oh! no," said Lochadoff, "I see! this is our famous national soup in the summer; try it and tell me if you ever tasted anything more exquisite."

"What! cold soup! God bless me!" said Horace as he found bits of cold fish and lumps of ice floating about in a green liquid, which tasted like mint sauce deluged with water and filled with chopped parsley. "If I did not know how much tastes vary, I should say that this had been mixed in the wildest caprice of a drunken cook."

"It is our celebrated batvinia."

"Ah!" said Horace, "I once tasted what the Spaniards call a gaspacho, and thought it the most villainous thing of that description possible; but I beg their pardons—I had not tried your batvinia then. But where is your wine? I see the choicest vintage of Spain, and Portugal, and France, and Germany; but have you not got admirable Russian wines?"

"Have we?" said Durakoff, "I never tasted them, though I have seen them written up over low taverns and disreputable wine-cellars."

"My dear Horace," said Isaakoff, "I desire you to hold a better opinion of our native wines than you would if you tasted them. Some of the best are mixed with common cape or coarse Bordeaux to improve their flavour; our Russian wines, I am afraid, are like our Russian literature; no one tastes the one who can afford anything better, or relishes the other who can read a foreign tongue. I do not say that there are not untried districts of our boundless territory whose soil may not at some future period produce an excellent beverage, or brains full of thought and originality; but hitherto the productions of either have only been tolerated through a large infusion of foreign spirit, and in imitation of foreign excellence. Such fellows as Durakoff and Lochadoff are always utterly ignorant of both, unless, indeed, they happen to have estates and vineyards in the south, and then they sometimes manufacture champagne and Burgundy, by adding two thirds of the real wine to the trashy produce of their own vines."

"A profitable speculation, truly," said Count Horace.

"The most profitable vintage in the world at times," rejoined the Prince, "when employed as a delicate flattery to our Emperors. Supposing our Emperor to read in the journal published by Count Horace de Montressan: 'This day we tasted the champagne grown upon Prince Isaakoff's estate, a wine little, if anything inferior to our own, affording us fresh proof that this favoured soil is fitted for the most choice and varied produce.' Do you think Prince Isaakoff will have laid his account unprofitably. A bad speculation, forsooth! when instead of one's name being brought on the tapis by a snarling courtier, it comes uppermost as the man who has curbed the unyielding soil to the imperial will, when it has said, let there be Chambertin, let there be Sillery, and the rebellious vines have only grown our sour Donskoi. But, praise your stars, Isaakoff has no vineyards. So now, my dear Horace, don't hold back your glass; that which I gave you is the best imported."

"It is capital; the last arrival of Cliquot's, I suppose," said Lochadoff.

"Hear them!" exclaimed the Prince. "Such are your Russians when their ideas are unenlarged by travel—such when they have not chipped their eggshell. From Lochadoff down to a money-changer's boy, there is not one of them who will taste a bottle of Champagne unless he sees the name of Cliquot or of Jaquesson branded on the cork."

"I have always heard," said Horace, "that there is more champagne drank in Russia than is grown in France."

"On the contrary," replied the Prince, "there is no country to which the observation less applies, for the very reason I have mentioned: everything without one of these known marks they brand as imitation, and consequently, whilst these marks ensure its reality, they prevent its excellence, because they are notoriously sufficient to sell the wine. Thus Cliquot and Jaquesson mix up their Champagnes, good, bad, and indifferent, into one common mixture, three degrees below mediocrity, and sweetened for the Russian palate; and thus, whilst there is none utterly bad, as our people stick to their marks, there are not twenty tables in the Empire where you get it good."

"And yours is certainly one of them," said Horace. "The account you give reminds me of the Dutchmen with their claret; for you know Bordeaux is their staple drink, as Schiedam is their staple dram. If you give a Dutchman the finest Lafitte he tells you he prefers Lemoine-Ludon, or Madame-vous-regarde—names fabricated like the wines in Holland, but which he devoutly believes to be of foreign production. Most men are obstinate when bent on being deceived; but a Dutchman is the personification of obduracy, for if he were not, the honesty of wine dealers might undeceive him, who boldly stick up upon their sign, 'Manufactory of every sort of foreign wines.' "

"And now," said Durakoff, "I drink to the welcome of Isaakoff back to Petersburg."

"Drink rather," said Lochadoff, "to his speedy departure. I wish to God you were drinking to mine. Here's to your Paris, Monsieur le Comte. Oh Paris! Paris! Paris! city of the heart!"

"And here," said Isaakoff, "I drink a hearty welcome to Count Horace:—long may he stay amongst us, and never wish to leave us whilst he does."

"Ah! happy fellow!" rejoined Lochadoff, "he has only to wish it! But tell me, Count, how do you like our country?"

"Gentlemen," said Horace, who had quaffed more deeply of the champagne than, considering his last night's potations, he at first intended, and who had some indistinct recollections of English toasts and formal thanksgivings in set speeches floating in his mind, "Gentlemen, unless I were the most ungrateful of beings, received as I have been in it, I must be delighted with your country. But quite independently of this feeling of gratitude, there is much which has pleased, impressed, and struck me in Russia. I once remember being full of prejudice against every thing English; but visiting their country, I learned to admire almost everything I had condemned before I came to understand it, because it shocked my preconceived ideas. This I am sure will be the case with me in your own country. Already, turning from western Europe, where successful revolutions and the inroads of a democratic spirit reducing society to a monotonous uniformity, have rooted out so many hallowed institutions, I find it refreshing to see still flourishing and healthy the loyalty, the piety, the venerable associations, which with us are either passing away or are already things of the past. I long to see more of the half feudal, half paternal, rule of your barons, over happy and devoted serfs, softened down in all that was harsh and grating by the highest polish of your actual civilization. Already, though I have scarcely had time to put together my impressions, it seems as if I had around me all gathered into one confused and dazzling picture—the costume, manners, buildings, of the poetic Orient—the Tartar mosque—the Asiatic robe—the Oriental salutation—the middle ages mingling with the East—the feudal Lord—his serf—his dwarf—his castle—the deep devotion of the pilgrim, and that long since departed loyalty which gave its heart up to a lady-love, its life unto the sovereign, and its soul to God! All this it seems as if I saw around me, mixed with the martial splendour of our warlike empire, and tempered by the graces of the old regime—the brightest polish of the new."

Here Prince Isaakoff yawned, and Lochadoff asked for a toothpick, hints which Count Horace took very kindly, and so his speech and the séance ended together.

CHAPTER VIII.

A dusty carriage drove up to the post-house of Strelna. It was drawn by six lean horses, with long ragged manes, and shaggy fetlocks; all harnessed abreast, and driven by a bearded peasant, dressed in a brown caftan, and low crowned felt hat. Blanche and Mattheus alighted from it.

"We are now," said the latter, "only a few miles from St. Petersburg."

The aspect indeed of the road, and of the post-house at which they had stopped, was very different from any thing Blanche had yet seen. The road itself was straight as a line, of magnificent width, beautifully macadamised; and ever and anon there arose along it little pillars of dark polished marble, with gilt letters carved on them, and raised on the summit of little monuments of granite, as verst stones, to mark the distance from the city.

Hitherto all the post-houses they had stopped at had been built on one regular plan, in every respect resembling each other, and bearing in their uniformity and arrangement much of the character of caravanserais; but this being a place of resort for visitors from the capital, and for travellers to and from the imperial residence of Peterhoff, bore all the appearance of a spacious inn, being only distinguished as a post-house by the Black Imperial double Eagle painted on a board, and by a post with the diagonal stripe of black, white, and red, which marks all government property.

On the other side of the road were the grounds of the summer palace of one of the grand dukes, in which the foliage of different trees, as planted by an English landscape gardener, formed a pleasant relief to the hitherto unbroken monotony of pine and birch woods which had intervened as they came along.

The travellers were first received by a sort of ostler, clad in a home-spun robe of the coarsest grey woollen cloth; his head was covered by an old wolf-skin cap, almost bare of fur, and which, when he removed it, showed a head almost as bald of hair,—apparently the result of some recent and violent illness, which his pale and hollow cheeks betokened, for he was not past thirty.

They were conducted to a public apartment on the first floor, by another waiter, habited in a sort of coloured cotton shirt, worn over a pair of very wide black velveteen trousers, which were tucked into his boots below the knee.

His dense and greasy locks were parted in the middle, and kept down by a leather strap, which, encircling his head, served as a "féronnière." His whole appearance was cringing and unctuous.

The public room was spacious and uncarpeted, and a prominent object, as in all other Russian rooms, was the winter stove, or "pech"—a bulky stack of bricks, about the size of an ordinary table, but nearly as high as the ceiling, covered externally with white glazed tiles, and ornamented by the brass handles of the flue-regulators, and by the small figured door of cast-iron, which allowed the replenishment of a little oven, about the size of a bandbox, in the centre of the pile.

The furniture consisted of sofas, chairs, commodes, and tables of very darkly-stained mahogany, with a due sprinkling of spitting-boxes, and a bundle of pipe-sticks in every corner,—excepting one, which was graced by the image of the patron saint,—beneath the gaudy frame of which burned a wick, floating in olive oil, and suspended in a lamp of brass by a triple chain.

There is a something singularly barbaric about the gaudy finery of these universal Russian penates.

The various holy individuals from which one is invariably selected as the tutelary of every room, are always painted according to a standard of conventional hideousness, copied from old and popular images, the rudest efforts of untutored art, which are held by the Russian Church as sacred likenesses on account of their antiquity. The picture is besides covered and hidden by a sheet of embossed metal, plated or gilt, in which three holes are cut, so as just to display the face and hands portrayed upon the canvas beneath it; the gold and silver being intended to represent the vestment, and the halo of glory of the saint. The picture, with its metallic casing, is surrounded by a deep frame of alternate mahogany and gilding, and covered with a sheet of glass. The mingled gaudiness and monstrosity of the image, and the frequent adoration of all who come into the apartment, remind one strongly of Asiatic idols.

Blanche felt startled and shocked when she saw her husband devoutly bow before the image like the others, though a momentary reflection, bringing to her remembrance the incognito he was so desirous of maintaining, stayed the ejaculation of surprise upon her lips.

At the request of Mattheus they were shown into a private room, for it was not his intention to enter St. Petersburg till evening.

Since last introduced to the reader, a considerable change had taken place in the appearance of Mattheus. The lines of his harassed features had taken all those scarce perceptible curves which mark so visibly the pressure of deep and anxious thought upon the human countenance; and partly because reflecting his anxieties, partly because their nature had never been confided to her, the face of Blanche too was sad and clouded, and her eyes swam in tears as she looked upon him, when leaning his head on his arms, he sat down gloomily at the table.

At length her hand sought his, and clasped it with a gentle pressure.

"Oh, dearest," she said, "you know I have never murmured yet, I have never yet complained."

"Blanche!" interrupted the husband, starting up, and putting his finger to her lip, "do you forget—your solemn—solemn—promise?"

"Forget it!" said the wife,—"oh, no! by day and night its recollection haunts me; it has sealed my lips when my heart has been suffocating, and when my brain has reeled as it does now. Oh, Mattheus! dearest! unbind me from that terrible vow, and let me give unfettered utterance to my thoughts for one short hour, though you should bind my tongue in silence ever after!"

"Speak!" replied Mattheus, after a moment's silence.

"Oh! if I speak," said Blanche, "you must not think that the impatient curiosity of the woman speaks in me; intense as it may be within my bosom, regarding the being I love so fondly, yet, of whom I only know that, like an angel-vision, he has appeared—enrapturing and delighting, and teaching this poor heart to admire—to love, to idolize—whilst, of whence he comes, of whither he is going—of his plans, and hopes, and fears—I know no more than if he were the unreal visitant of a vision! I do not speak, Mattheus, because in my sleep, when my dreams reproduce the terrible presentiments of my waking hours, I sometimes fancy that you have vanished for ever from my side—like a shade that leaves no trace in the air it came through, or track after it has departed, on the earth it has left; and not because I wake from such a dream, to find thy bosom heaving in a slumber, troubled by anxieties which I cannot share, but a slumber so restless and disturbed that after I have wept over it I awaken thee with my kisses. Oh! no! all this would not have made me speak, when I know so well that speaking pains the husband of my bosom, though it is a pain I cannot comprehend. But I speak because a nameless dread comes over me, that as we are approaching St. Petersburg we are hastening towards some eventful yet uncertain crisis of our destiny—uncertain, because I see sometimes a ray of hope light up thy countenance; but oh! how much more frequently it is pervaded by the gloom and the disquietude which increases as we hurry towards the fatal city."

"Dear Blanche," said Mattheus taking her hand and looking full into her blue eyes, "do you remember when, on the eve of our wedding night, I came to you in my travelling dress—insensate that I was!—to take a last fond look, and then for ever quit you;—insensate, to have faced again the temptation I had vanquished by a superhuman effort! Do you remember, Blanche, how resolute my love had grown, never to interweave your fate with the dark and tangled web of mine? Did I not warn you that my past must be like things whose irrecoverable trace is lost for ever in the night of time? Did I not warn you that my future was dreary, clouded, and uncertain; that my name, my family, my country, must all be, for whoever I should marry, as if they had no existence? And then do you remember, Blanche, how, intoxicating my reason, you drove me into crime—the crime of mixing up your destiny with mine—by passionately declaring that even if I had been like the magician, whose beloved was consumed to cinders in his arms, you would still fly into mine if they were open to you, and gladly perish there? Do you remember how, regarding my home, my name, my history, or my country, you said you were indifferent, so you only knew I loved you?"

"I remember it," said Blanche, "as one remembers the strongest terror, the most vivid joy of one's existence, the prospect of despair, and the glimpse of heaven crowded into a short half hour. And never—never—never for an instant have I regretted my resolution; though indeed my time has since been filled with many inward sorrows, shapeless, and vague, and indistinct, as mirrored, dear Mattheus, in my heart from thine. But oh! if I speak now, I speak because I feel that there is danger for thee in the Russian capital, a danger which may not be inevitable, which may, perhaps be yet avoided. Dearest Mattheus, let us turn away from it—there is yet time."

"Blanche, dear Blanche, there is nothing to dread," said the husband.

"Oh do not think to deceive me! Is not the terrible foreboding of some unknown evil sufficiently confirmed to me by thy anxieties, by the fears which thou canst not conceal, and which agitate so profoundly the good, the brave, the talented, the gentle? Oh! Mattheus, let us fly from the hidden evil, and I will never seek to penetrate its mystery. Perish thy name, thy family, thy fortune, all that can tempt thee to adventure the peril which I feel is menacing thee! what are they all to me when weighed against thy safety? My humble fortune has hitherto satisfied all our wants, thy love has made my happiness, and thou hast always said that I was everything to thee. Come, Mattheus, I implore thee hearken to my foreboding; let us turn away from this fearful city. Thou canst not tell in what gloomy colours recur to my memory the fate of the conspirators of whom thou hast formerly spoken so much; the secret and silent horrors of the terrible despotism which I feel that thou hast offended, and to whose mercies I am sure thou art now about to trust. Oh! has not thy Blanche loved thee enough without a name, a home, a family! Would she not love thee if thou hadst been born in the humblest rank of life, and thus without one. Oh! come, I implore thee, let us turn back on our westward road, and, abandoning thy dangerous dream, resign ourselves to love, to peace, and to contentment."

"And lead you back the wife of a nameless, fortuneless adventurer; for I have told you that my fortune depends upon this journey."

"Oh! Mattheus, do not let my love hurt thy pride, when it only speaks out in the excess of its devotion. It is thee that I worship, as thou art, in soul, in body, and mind; and when I say that I should not have valued thee less if thou hadst been born a peasant, I speak in all the conscious pride of belonging to a race for centuries illustrious, and with the instinct that in thee it has not been mis-allied. Dost thou think that my sympathy does not trace it in that indescribable nobility of expression, in all the peculiarities which stamp thy words, thy actions, and thy manner, in the very prominence of the deep blue veins through thy tender skin, and the rapidity with which thy lordly blood flows in its impetuous pulsations, in the feminine smallness of thy hand, and in the bold, wild freedom of thine eye? Oh! it is because I doubt so little of thy illustrious lineage, that I may well be careless of knowing farther respecting it. As to thy fortune—oh! let mine suffice. Come, dearest, let us fly, and be as we have been, all in all to each other."

"But who says, dear Blanche, that there is any danger?"

"Can I not read thine eyes, thy voice, thy countenance, thy lip, which quivers even now?"

Here Mattheus buried his face in his hands; and then after an interval, he said:

"And can you think only of danger? Have you never thought that it might be remorse at having yielded to the sweet temptation, and linked my fate, unhappy Blanche, with thine? Oh! Blanche, pity me, pity me! And yet perhaps an hour hence you will give me, unasked, that scornful pity which I dread."

"Mattheus, dear Mattheus, this is madness."

"It is worse than madness. Imagine if you can one of the damned, who wandering far from the profoundest depth, the deepest slough of his eternal prison house, has seized with all the recklessness of an immortal misery, upon the hand which an angel has proffered in its unsuspecting purity and innocence. Imagine what the wretched child of perdition feels as the hour approaches, when the angelic being must turn from him with its smile of love, changed into loathing, and contempt, and horror, as starting back with its prismatic wings, scorched by the burning blast, it sees by its infernal light the loathsome, hideous feature of the lost—lost child of sin."

"And how," said Blanche, with beaming and enthusiastic eyes, "should I imagine what could never happen? Love, real love, would not perceive the change, however hideous, in the being loved. Love, real love, even in an angel's breast, would moth-like, court the flame; and love too would forgive what Heaven itself had not forgiven!"

"How strange," mused the husband, as clasping his hands he gazed with an intensity of admiration into his wife's face, as if to sun himself in the last looks of her affections; "how strange, that I should still regard my transgression with such rapture, whilst its consciousness weighs me down to the earth. You smile now and you forgive in the abstract; but if you knew all, Blanche!"

"What need I," said Blanche, throwing her arms around his neck, "when with the poet

I know not, I care not, if guilt's in that heart;
But I know that I love thee, whatever thou art."

"Oh!" exclaimed the husband, "not exactly guilt, except it be the guilt of having entangled my Blanche in a fate, over which I never had control, for good or evil. As for the danger, calm all apprehensions; to-morrow you shall know all; it would pain me now too much to tell; but trust me, that in three short weeks, with a moderate fortune, if still without a name or rank, or station, we will repass this road upon our westward course; and believe me I shall find the inspiration in thy tried enduring love, to work out, in the wide world which lies before us, a name my Blanche may yet be proud to bear."

"You would not deceive me?" said Blanche, dubiously; "for remember, dearest, if danger be there and unavoidable, then dread no sighs or tears from me; the very terror which my tenderness inspires will give me courage. Besides, the race I come of never knew fear, when the men belonging to it hated, or when its women loved. My blood will not shame thine, however noble. But if the danger may be yet averted, why not fly? And if there be no danger, why that clouded, anxious brow?"

"It is clouded, Blanche, because to-morrow thy love, if not extinguished, may perhaps be cooled; and that I dread to think on."

"Never," interrupted Blanche.

"Oh," continued Mattheus, "love is like health—how can we say it will last? And then there is cause for anxiety; because our fate hangs on the single will of an individual. He is indeed one of the best, most generous, and noblest of mankind, all powerful by a single word to stamp our destiny. I hold his solemn promise here, and never did he break his mighty word, in the most trivial thing; but still he is a weak and erring mortal like myself."

Here, as if to stop all further conversation on the subject, Mattheus pressed his white lips to his wife's pale brow, and went out into the public room.

When Blanche was alone, as she looked round the apartment, her attention was arrested by an engraved and coloured portrait of the Emperor, which adorned the walls.

Although her eyes an hour before had wandered over it indifferently, she now traced with intense curiosity every lineament of those features, which, after all, perhaps the artist's flattery or caprice or want of skill had altered in a thousand ways from the original. But it was because the temper which they indicated had acquired a terrible interest for her now, an interest which, until that moment, as an Englishwoman, she had never understood.

Oh! thought Blanche almost audibly; although a little harsh and stern in its expression, it is a noble face; and at least if he will not err upon the side of mercy, he will be just; and what can the gentle, good, and generous Mattheus want but justice? But then how do men agree in their ideas of justice?

And as she mused, she remained in contemplation before the picture, and insensibly had joined her hands in supplication.

If one could have seen through the walls which divided the apartments, it would have been strange to observe within a few feet, an old Russian, with his face towards her, in a precisely similar attitude. He was a greasy merchant who, having slept off his last night's copious supper on one of the sofas, wrapped up his feet in a couple of rags, drawn on his boots, and paid his bill, being about to awaken his companion, was first offering up an earnest prayer to the image of St. Sergius, to protect him by not allowing the other to discover, by the sober light of morning's reason, that he had been cheated in a sale of hides on the preceding night; and as a consideration the petitioner humbly offered to the saint to burn for fourteen days the purest oil of the olive in his lamp—and he was really quite incapable of cheating his patron in its quality.

The reader might also have recognised in this person, our friend Vasili Petrovitch, who had furnished the sturgeon for Prince Isaakoff's breakfast.

The habitual reserve of Mattheus, at certain times, and on certain subjects, had taught Blanche to respect the moody silence into which he relapsed on returning to her; though some times, as if the brighter side of his position turned uppermost as he revolved it in his mind, he made frequent and successful efforts to rally, though studiously avoiding all allusion to their previous conversation. They had breakfasted and dined, and watching the passing vehicles, were sitting at the open window, awaiting the hour at which he had proposed that they should pursue their journey.

"You see," observed Mattheus, who to conceal the excitement under which he laboured, was ever recurring to the most indifferent topics, "that our Russia is not quite a land of eternal snows; it is seldom hotter on the shores of the Mediterranean than it is to-day. You see we have fruits too of our own; this melon from Tambof, these transparent apples from the Crimea, and these enormous raspberries—our northern regions are the land of the raspberry—which you have never eaten in the same perfection in a more temperate climate."

While speaking, their joint attention was attracted by a shabby droshky which entered the yard. There alighted from it a hatchet-faced individual, one of those employed in some department of the Civil Service, and known under the general appellation of Chinovniks, or men of rank. He was accoutred in the pale grey cloak worn alike by every commissioned officer in the Imperial Service, from the field-marshal down to the lowest clerk. When he removed it he displayed, instead of a military uniform, a sort of dress coat of rifle green, with gilt buttons stamped with the imperial arms, and a collar of light-coloured velvet; his head was surmounted by an ordinary black silk hat, a little rusty in the nap, and very much battered at the edges.

"Ah," said he as the pale ostler in the wolf-skin cap stepped forward, "so thou art here."

"The Lord have mercy on us," muttered the peasant, prostrating himself at his full length to kiss the stranger's feet, whilst the fat waiter only bowed, although profoundly, and bringing out, as ordered, a glass of spirits and a lighted pipe, looked as if expecting payment on delivery.

"What dost thou here?" said the Chinovnik to the still prostrate ostler.

"Oh, my father, I am at service."

"So when I thought thou wert in the hospital thou art here, rogue! earning good wages! Where is thy obrok? Thou owest me three months of it—five and forty roubles."

"Oh! my father, I have indeed been very ill. It is true I have been in this place six weeks; but hitherto I only serve here for my keep. Look at my arms," said the slave, as he pulled up the sleeves of his caftan, and showed the thin skeleton-like limbs, to the bones of which the skin seemed adhering, "who will give me any wages to work with these?"

"Come," said the Chinovnik, who seemed a little mollified, "I will take five and twenty roubles, and give thee a month for the remainder."

"Oh my father! by the Almighty! I have not, as I hope for salvation, five-and-twenty kopeks. It is a hard struggle, very hard, to pay a monthly tax of fifteen roubles, even when one can work and get work; but when a violent illness overtakes one, as it has overtaken me, I must beseech of your merciful nobility to wait."

"What, rogue! robber! dog! whose mother I have defiled; am I to keep a set of rascals who bring me always excuses, when I want money?"

And here the Chinovnik commenced beating him about the head and shoulders with the cherry-stick tube of his troubka or long-pipe. At the fourth or fifth blow it flew out of his hand.

"Fetch it!" roared the master, and the miserable slave crawled to pick it up, and then crouched again like a dog, as his master had said he was; and then the blows redoubled till the cherry-stick flew in shivers; upon which the Chinovnik first kicked him on the face with his heavy boots, and then placing his foot upon his neck, trampled his head down in the dust with all his might.

"Oh my father!" exclaimed the slave, raising himself up and spitting the blood and sand from his mouth.

"What," said the Chinovnik panting for breath, but with some concern in his countenance and in his voice, "I have not surely put out thine eye or knocked thy teeth out? Spit, dog; let us see."

How truthful is the pithy argument of the anti-abolitionists—those practical advocates of the positive rights of property against the vague and abstract rights of humanity—when they ask who can be more interested in the welfare of the slave than his owner! And it was here beautifully illustrated. What did the postmaster or the bystanders heed, whether the slave's eye was blinded or his teeth knocked out or not? But the Chinovnik did, whose property he was, and he examined him anxiously, making him open first one eye, and then the other, and then looking into his mouth through his swelling lips, till, giving him a last vigorous, but careful blow on the side of the head where he could not disfigure him, he bid him take off his caftan.

It was well that Blanche, in horror and disgust, had hidden her face in her husband's bosom, for under the serf's caftan there was not a stitch of clothing; and the naked, gaunt, and meagre figure, standing with shrunken legs in its wide boots, held up as ordered, the threadbare garment to the light, till the Chinovnik was satisfied that every place of concealment had been visited. He then commanded him to give his knife, and take off his boots.

The slave hesitated for an instant, and then he gave one to his master, who was evidently a practised searcher; he threw it down after a moment's examination; but in the other he speedily discovered a scapulary, a little paper of tobacco, and at last the treasure.

It consisted of two silver grivniks or four penny pieces, and a five rouble bank note of tattered coarse blue paper, stitched together with white thread across, and representing a currency of about four and sixpence English.

"Good!" exclaimed the Chinovnik, appropriating the spoil. "Now this day month, thou shalt bring me five-and-twenty on account; and before thou comest to me with it, thou shalt go to the police-station of my quarter, and say I sent thee, for attempting to rob thy Baron, to receive there fifty strokes, which thou shalt also pay for from thine own money; and look that they be well scored on thy back, lest when thou comest to me I make thee return to learn obedience where thou hast been to take a lesson of diligence and honesty."

"I hear, and obey! and humbly thank you, my father, for all these favours."

The Chinovnik drove away, and the poor ostler retired to mend the boot which his master had maliciously slit open.

"Oh what a sight," said Blanche; "it makes my very soul sicken. Who is that monster?"

"A civil officer," replied Mattheus; "I see by the colour of his velvet coat collar that he is employed in the office of the minister of justice."

"Good heavens! of justice! And how dares he trample thus brutally upon that man?"

"Because it is not a man, but a slave."

The face of Mattheus grew pale, and his voice sounded strange and stifled with his suppressed emotion.

"And are there no laws to restrain him, dear Mattheus?" said the wife after a pause.

"Oh, volumes and volumes full!"

"And how does it happen thus?"

"Because men break laws even where laws can punish, much less where they cannot reach them—because all the laws which should protect the slave are neutralised—because the slave can never accuse his master, and it is no one else's business; because, if the master injure the slave so that he dies after three days, he goes scot free; and even if he kill him on the spot, as no person above the fourteenth class can be submitted to any corporal punishment without being first degraded, which is only done for offences against the sovereign or the government, the cruel master can only be imprisoned in a monastery. And even this he need not risk, because for a few pence the police will do his bidding, and take all hazard off his hands. This is a fellow who, probably by long service, has reached beyond the fourteenth class, and acquired the privilege of buying serfs; by the sale of justice he has scraped together a few hundred pounds in bribes of silver pieces, and invested them in four or five unhappy fellow-creatures. A great proprietor is content to take a tribute or obrok of twenty or of forty roubles in the year; but a fellow like this watches them like a cat, and squeezes from them every farthing the poor hacks can earn, thus drawing from them a hundred or two hundred roubles."

"How very horrible! At least thank God that we are not slaves," said Blanche; and then she added: "Oh! for some one to teach them the gentle doctrines of Christianity!"

"Or!" exclaimed Mattheus, whose brow was now flushed, whose eyeballs glared, and who nervously clenched his fist, and set his teeth with the same expression of ferocious menace as when some months before he flung the intruder on his affianced's privacy from the boxes into the pit—"Or, oh for a Spartacus!"

Blanche, in her alarm as she looked at her husband, and remembered that they were in Russia, forgot for the moment the sufferings of the slave; but as she was stepping into the carriage, the serf was there, with his swollen and yet pallid features still smeared with the traces of his master's brutality; and Blanche putting five gold pieces into his hand, he looked into her beautiful face with vacant and incredulous astonishment. At this moment Mattheus called him to fetch his cloak, and being then beyond the eye of his benefactress, he asked her husband for a na chai, or tea money, and greedily secured the silver piece Mattheus offered him. Perhaps the slave remembered that that day month it was exactly the fee he would be called upon to pay at the police station for his own flogging.

Such is the effect of slavery, and in some respects of all oppression; it brutalizes and debases, and then gives rise to the beautiful theory that nothing but the system which has produced it can practically suit such brutality and debasement!

CHAPTER IX.

Count Horace joined in the drawing-room of the Countess de Baval, a group of personages who appeared deep in literary discussion.

The Countess de Baval, a Russian lady married to a Frenchman, had once been masculine looking; but as her flesh had wasted with her vigour, or perhaps her vigour with her flesh, the brown and withered skin on which her diamonds sparkled, the bending figure and the deep set eyes, had rendered her appearance hag-like more than masculine.

Next to her was seated Madame Obrasoff. She was fair; her features were so little marked that one might have compared her face to a portrait of which the colours were partly effaced, or which was viewed through a mist, or through a glass which you had breathed upon, so little had they of beauty, or deformity, or character, until she smiled or spoke, and then her voice was winning, her colourless eyes were full of softness, and all the graces of expression came to illumine those before unmeaning features.

This lady was not past four and thirty, and yet beside her were two grown up daughters of fifteen and sixteen, Anna and Feodora. The sisters were both tall, and very youthful in their aspect; there was a suppleness about their lithe and slender figures which reminded the beholder, when they moved, of the graceful waving of an ostrich plume, or of some frail and feathery kind of fern when agitated by a passing breeze. They bore all the impress of that precocity, and of its accompanying sickliness, into which Russian children are apt to ripen, where the stove supplies the place of sun, and leads to a factitious, as early as a torrid clime to a natural, maturity. But though wanting the hue of health, or even purity of complexion, their raven hair, in banbeaus, and their large dark eyes, contrasted strikingly and advantageously with their pallid countenances. Their mouths were small and delicately formed, and their teeth of that small and fragile pearly and transparent description which seldom lasts beyond the early freshness of youth. Their eyes, rendered soft by their long lashes, were slightly obliqued, as is always the case with those Russians who derive their darkness from a Tartar ancestry.

But though the sisters were so strikingly alike in feature and in figure, nothing could be more different than the dispositions which their manner and expression indicated. The eldest seemed a joyous child, full of mingled mirth and sensibility, who had suddenly wakened into womanhood, retaining all the wayward spirit of the girl; the youngest was grave, and thoughtful, and gentle, like her mother.

Next to them sat the Russo-German beauty, Madame Rudiger: tall, fair, and deep-bosomed, whose Juno-like attractions threw those of the sisters into relief.

"Come, Sir," said Madame de Baval, "we are discussing the merits of French authors; come and help me to defend Châteaubriand."

Horace had taken up a Venetian poignard with a silver handle exquisitely chased, which served as paper-knife, and still balancing it in his hand, he replied:

"Madame, you are fond of antiquities."

"Your answer is two-edged," said Madame Rudiger.

"Oh! I mean literary as well as otherwise," replied Horace, "for Châteaubriand's works have reached a premature antiquation; in fact it is a subject on which you can hardly expect to find a Frenchman fluent, because they cannot be said to belong to either the classic or romantic schools which are now with us the sole theme of discussion."

"And of slashing discussion," observed, with an inward chuckle, a heavy-looking personage, the senator Dimitri Danskoi; for a Russian can never avoid even the semblance of a pun.

"I shall be overwhelmed if I do not lay down this Benvenuto Cellini," said Horace.

"What! lay down your arms, when you are called on to defend us!" said Madame de Baval.

"I am supporting my literary antiquities against still more remote obsoletions. Here is a partisan who will hear of nothing less antiquated than Voltaire."

"Voltaire will never be antiquated," said the senator.

"No; I am for something more modern; and if our sentiments forbid our going into all the impious extravagances of your recent authors, believe that we do not all wish our literature to be, like our furniture, in the taste of the eighteenth century. Give me the heart and imagination, and the religious inspiration, and the harmony of Châteaubriand; or the romances of the Vicomte d'Arlincourt—"

"Or of Walter Scott," said Madame Rudiger.

"Or Lamartine's poetic meditations," said Madame Obrasoff, of which Horace thought, by a strange conceit, that she looked the impersonation, as the words flowed like music from her mouth, and a gentle respiration heaved her bosom, almost terminating in a sigh.

"If you are for the sentimental," observed the senator, "I can meet you with the authors of my epoch, as well as in the profound, the witty, and the classic. What can be more pathetically beautiful, than Paul and Virginia?"

"Romeo and Juliet!" said Anna Obrasoff, with a triumphant flash of her bright eyes.

"Ah!" exclaimed Horace. "Well said: we are in the regions now of pathos and of passion. Paul and Virginia is like one of David's pictures:—soft, chaste, and classic; but it is neither life, nor reality. It reads like love ably written of by an old man:—but Romeo and Juliet is love—speaking, and breathing."

"As if written by a lover," observed Anna.

"And how do you know?" said Madame de Baval, with prudish severity.

"I guess it," replied Anna, with unconscious simplicity.

"Oh! I beg you to believe," said the mother, "that Anna speaks from intuition, not experience."

"And you, Mademoiselle," said Horace, addressing the youngest, "you have not given us your voice."

"Oh!" said Feodora, softly, "like mamma, I love Lamartine and Xavier le Maistre.

"Oh! his lonely leper of Alost," said Madame Obrasoff.

"You see," said Horace, to the senator, "that the public voice is against you. You will never seduce these ladies to your Télémaque, or to your stately authors in powdered wigs, knee buckles, and three cornered hats,—with all their stiffness, and with all their wit. When we come to understand each other, we are all agreed—we are all of the romantic school:—we had rather feel with Shakespeare, and Byron, and Victor Hugo, and Sue, and Soulié, and Casimir de la Vigne, than admire Racine, or Voltaire, or Corneille, their polished verse, and their inviolate unities."

"Oh, Sir!" said the hostess, "I cry you mercy!—heaven forbid, that we should relish all your modem impieties—social, moral, and religious. I had hoped that you were too much one of us—too staunch and loyal a legitimatist to have entertained such opinions!"

"Here, Sir," said the senator, "allow me to observe, that you will find the poison poured out to stimulate the depraved tastes of anarchists and atheists, in very little favour. We too have our antagonistic predilections for the classic and romantic schools. We stretch liberality even beyond the bounds of decorum; and in favour of their wit, may even tolerate a Voltaire, or a Diderot, or a Bayle; but we do not countenance the length your revolutionary countrymen go, in outraging all propriety and decency; we do not countenance them by reading them; we abhor too much their tendency."

"Well," replied Horace, "I also am a staunch legitimatist, true to the motto of my house—'for God, and for my king;' but I could never square my literary tastes by my political opinions. It appears to me, that though wit may be pointed, or genius tend in an unhappy direction, it is wit and genius still."

"Besides," said Madame Rudiger, "it is better to be sometimes shocked, than always bored and wearied—"

"Oh, yes!" said Anna, "let me read something that makes the heart bound without being told that I should admire."

* * * *

"And then if we turn to Soulié, we find an imagination whose fertility and originality beggar even Victor Hugo's—Soulié, who crowds into one, the plots and action of twenty melodrames and novels—Soulié, who almost disdains, like the old tragedians, the accessories of costume and scenery, and paints a character so vividly in a few laconic sentences."

"It is true," said Madame Rudiger; "in his Memoirs of the Devil, he leads you through eight volumes, as if they were a single chapter; he breaks off incessantly in the middle of a marvellously interesting story, to introduce you to fresh actors, and another plot; and yet, notwithstanding all your disappointment, in two pages more you are so absorbed in the new, as to forget the old, till he brings it again before you by a fresh inversion."

"And then his Devil!" continued Horace, "what poor devils are all ever painted when compared with his: from Byron's baffled fiend, and Milton's proud, magniloquent Lucifer, down to the stupid devils of Le Sage or Goëthe. What bitter irony and what infernal malice almost personify the Prince of Evil in his pages! And yet he introduces this weird and terrible fiend not surrounded by dusty crucibles, or mountains of the Hartz; not amidst sublimities of Alps, or space, or the abyss, or amidst the wreck of worlds—but amidst the common scenes of actual life—in Paris or the provinces; only a year or two ago, and always taking the costumes of every day, and working out his terrible designs by natural agencies. And then there is Sue's 'Latréaumont,' one of the first historic novels ever written—"*

[*Translated and published since the above was written under the title of the "Court Conspirator."]

"Sir," said the senator, "you are talking to me now of novels, a literary monstrosity which I despise."

"And very unjustly," returned Horace, "for the novel has now become the vehicle of publicity for the poet, the dramatist, and even for the politician. The stage was the readiest channel to the public ear in Shakespeare's time; but if Shakespeare had lived in the days of Homer his dramas must have been crowded into an epic poem, and his epic rendered popular in piece-meal song. If he had lived in our own day he must have written a novel. The poet is no longer listened to in verse or on the stage, and the politician not often in the tribune, on the subject on which he may wish to speak; and yet publicity is the vital air of both. They must be heard, and what are they to do if the public will only hear them through the medium of a novel? Thus in England, Bulwer's 'Rienzi' and D'Israeli's 'Wondrous Tale of Alroy,' were poem novels. Even Miss Martineau wrapped up a dry subject in a novel, as a nurse mixes physic in conserve of roses. Thus Gustave de Beaumont preached on slavery in the United States." And Horace might now have added "that thus the poet who had sought an auditory for his poem in one novel, seeks, as the senator, to disseminate his political opinions in another when he publishes his Coningsby."

"But to return to Latréaumont. What can exceed its close adherence to the minutest details of history, the ceaseless interest of its story, and the graphic manner in which every character is realised to the imagination of the reader and imprinted on it afterwards—from Van den Enden the enthusiastic philosopher, and his daughter—from the great Spinosa, down to the ruffianly Latréaumont, and the vacillating Duke de Rohan."

"Ah yes," interrupted Madame Obrasoff, "it is very beautiful. How well I remember the devoted tenderness of Madmoiselle d'O——."

"Or," said her daughter Anna, "that fond father whose son, the youthful chevalier, is led into the conspiracy by his uncle—"

Here Anna met the eye of Madame de Baval; the young girl coloured, and was silent. There was a moment's unbroken pause. At length Horace resumed:

"Oh yes, and then that beautiful picture of the young widow to whom the chevalier is either affianced or married—who shares in all the conscious dangers into which his promise leads him—who is tortured with him, and dies with him on the scaffold."

Madame Obrasoff made some trivial observation, which she followed by a laugh peculiarly vibrating, silvery, and clear; but the tender liquidity of the glance into which her soft and chameleon-like eyes awakened, showed that it was an effort to laugh off the effect which the recollection of that harrowing scene might produce upon her nervous sensibility.

"Or," continued Horace, "the traitor who denounces Van den Enden—almost his relative."

"Ah," said the senator with some irritation, "was he not conspiring?"

"And you remember," still continued Horace—"for you all seem to have read it—those last touching prison scenes where the author takes the reader by the hand, and leads him into the cells of the condemned, to witness their preparation for eternity. I have never known any one who was not deeply affected by them. Indeed I see that you are all still more or less impressed with the recollection. Now is it not a triumph of art to stir up these emotions?"

"Sir," said the senator, petulantly, "I can find emotions at command in a galvanic battery. Your Latréaumont is a book immoral in its tendency."

"How so," asked Horace, "when it comes within the verge of English prudery."

"In England," replied the senator, who piqued himself on being at times Voltarian, "I know that they tolerate no printed improprieties out of their bibles; but your Latréaumont has a pernicious tendency; it trails in the dust a great and august monarch."

"I grant it to you," said Horace; "but what is more just than that historic truth should pull down Louis XIV. from the pedestal on which the flattery of the authors and poets he protected had raised him? What could they do but panegyrise, when he rewarded so munificently? In the succeeding reign of Louis XV. such men as Voltaire still extolled him, as an implied satire on his feeble successor. Voltaire seizing only on the points of contrast of his reign, was no more anxious to display his littleness of heart and mind than, when praising your Empress Catherine, to speak of her murdered husband."

Here the senator started on his chair; but the Count unheeding continued: "If the flattery of court painters represented Louis as a man of majestic stature, because the inordinate height of his wig, and of his high heeled shoes, showed that he wished to be considered tall, are posterity to believe it after they measured him in his coffin?

"Are we, when we consider that Louis might have forgiven, and had often forgiven when there was danger in striking—are we to blame the author for the effect of merciless harshness, which he has only faithfully described, or for the indignation with which the reader views the bloody and pitiful termination which assuaged his malignant jealousy and his vindictive spirit?"

But as Count Horace ceased speaking, and as the senator was opening his mouth very wide as if to bring out an enormous exclamation of dissent, a stranger who had joined the group, seized hold of the Count's hand, to his utter amazement, and wrung it violently.

"You are right, Sir," he said with enthusiasm, "there is still ever sitting in the hearts of nations that famous Court of ancient Egypt, which judged the dead king and the departed beggar!"

"Oh! Count Horace de Montressan, let me present to you the spoiled child of the Muses, our Russian Byron," said Madame Rudiger; and then she added, lying very sweetly, "we were just reciting a charming stanza from your Rouslan and Armilda."

"Oh! Madam," replied the poet, "any verses would flow charmingly from lips like yours; but your compliments are overstrained, as there will never be but one—there will never be any but an English Byron."

"Ah!" said the hostess, aside to Madame Obrasoff, "what terrible people these Frenchmen are! one is never safe with them, they are capable of compromising twenty families, for the sake of hearing themselves talk. I pity you, my dear; you have asked him to dine to-morrow at Peterhoff. We should both have waited till he was received," and then, she continued aloud "what time did the Emperor arrive to-day?"

"Is the Emperor in town?" inquired the poet.

The senator shrugged his shoulders as if in pity of such ignorance or affectation.

"Of course," replied Madame de Baval; "and he must have arrived before two, for at that hour the imperial standard was flying above the winter palace, and the telegraph working."

"Do you know," observed Madame de Rudiger to Horace, "that he works the telegraph with his own august hands. When you see its black ladders moving, the Emperor is personally transmitting orders to his fleet in the Black sea, or the gulf of Finland, or to his representative in Warsaw, or to his lieutenant in the interior of the Empire. You have not yet seen our Emperor."

"Pardon me," said Horace, "I have both seen and conversed with him."

"Conversed with him!" echoed the bystanders with one accord, for they had all been narrowly watching for his presentation. "Pray tell me where and when?" exclaimed Madame Rudiger, half in astonishment, and half in disbelief.

"This morning," answered Horace, "under singular circumstances."

"Oh, tell us all about it," said Madame Obrasoff, in a tone gently insinuating.

"Most willingly; you must know that I was this morning wandering through the imperial picture gallery of the Hermitage, and I was tempted to visit the atelier of a certain talented countryman of mine, who, making a ladder of his artistic merit, has stepped into the drawing-room from the guard-house; though his manners still savour a little of its coarseness."

"Ah! Lesseps," exclaimed Madame de Baval, but she added, in a tone of profound respect; "the Emperor takes great notice of him."

"Oh, he is a charming painter," chimed in the senator; "there is something very winning in his soldier-like frankness."

"Well!" continued Horace. "You are probably aware, that the imperial munificence has set aside a room in the Hermitage for the foreign artists."

"We know, and are proud of it," said the senator again.

"In this atelier, then, I was inspecting one of the painter's pictures—a battle scene, full of spirit, in spite of all its Dutch minuteness. But Lesseps himself seemed in ecstasies, over the very insignificant figure of a drummer in the back ground. 'I believe,' he observed to me, with immense satisfaction, 'that no man but myself could have shown so distinctly what that fellow is doing.' I remarked that the action of the drummer was unmistakeable, but that I certainly did not conceive the peculiar merit of its representation. 'Ah!' said the artist with one of his terrific oaths; 'he is beating the drum—any body can show a drummer striking the parchment—but what is he beating?'

"I suggested that he should have marked the tune with notes and bars upon the drum.

" 'So much for fame!' said Lesseps, throwing down his palette with a comic air of desperation; 'paint for a public which thus appreciates your talent! Now Sir,' he continued, 'this is the most striking part of the picture. No drum-major in the world could look upon the position of that drummer's wrists, and not perceive that he was beating the retreat. Just look upon this figure, he said, and then on me,' and he seized a drum and drum-sticks, and began tattooing, for the atelier was like an arsenal, with instruments musical and warlike. First he beat the 'Diane,' and then the march, and then the retreat; awakening all the echoes of the endless apartments of the galleries. 'Now,' he repeated 'look first on me, and then upon my figure;' but as he paused, we heard to our utter astonishment, behind another easel, the sudden rolling of another drum; and an officer in uniform, a man of colossal stature and imposing aspect, who had entered unperceived, and snatched up another instrument, appeared before us."

"Ah! the Emperor," exclaimed Madame Rudiger.

"Exactly. Lesseps acknowledged his presence by a similar rolling; and for more than twenty minutes I was deafened by their rattling in emulation of each other on the sonorous parchment.

" 'Ah! ah! Lesseps; you did not expect to be rivalled thus,' at length said the Emperor.

" 'Mille bombes!' replied the artist, 'I did not think there was another man in the empire, out of a drummer's uniform, who could have sustained that vigorous male and faultless roll! A foot soldier, Sire, has been made in six weeks. Condé became a general in six months, and in our revolutionary war, we made commanders as quickly as we baked a batch of biscuits. In a word, there have been heaven-born soldiers, and heaven-born generals; and to make an Emperor, a man has only to be born in the purple, as a chicken is hatched in a hen's egg; but who ever saw a heaven-born drummer?'

" 'You are right Lesseps,' replied the Emperor, 'we both know that no man on earth could learn to roll with that perfection under a twelvemonth of assiduous practise.' And then his Majesty took up a musket, and went rapidly through the exercise.

" 'Bravo, Sire!' said Lesseps; 'if fortune had placed you in the ranks like me, you might have chosen your career between drill-sergeant or drum-major. You have the advantage of me in inches: but then, I can not only play the drum, but reproduce the very action of it on the canvas afterwards.'

At this the Emperor laughed good-humouredly.

" 'But,' he said, after minutely examining the picture, 'I see a fault, a glaring fault.'

" 'I am aware,' replied the painter, 'that that column in the distance is too much softened down. I have passed the blaireau over it too often; it does not stand out in sufficiently bold relief. I was going to pumice it out.'

" 'Not that,' said the Emperor, 'but do you see the dead trooper in the foreground?—the number of his regiment is marked on every button, with the accuracy which renders your pictures so valuable;—but there should be only nine buttons.'

" 'Pardon me, Sire,' replied Lesseps, 'but there is the lay figure with the very uniform upon it, as it is worn now in that regiment; and it has not been changed since then."

" 'Oh, I am never wrong in these matters,' said his Majesty; 'the cut and colour of the coat was the same then as now; but the number of buttons has changed since the reign of my father, and the chako is worn an inch and three-eighths higher.' "

Here the senator interrupted Horace with the remark,—"Did you not think of his illustrious ancestor, Peter the Great?—of the comprehensive mind grasping the gigantic whole, and descending, like the all-seeing eye of Providence, into the minutest details?"

"I was struck," replied Horace, "with the colossal figure, the majestic port, the magnificent type of the soldier, with the minuteness of his knowledge of the duty of the sergeant and the drummer, and with the playful good humour with which the absolute sovereign of sixty millions bore with the artist's coarseness."

"And you were saying," observed the hostess, "that you had a conversation with the Emperor?"

"His Imperial Majesty was pleased to notice me; he knew, on hearing my name, exactly how long I had been in St. Petersburg; he examined with me the pictures; we conversed on his gallery of the Hermitage; he desired that I should see his palaces of Zarskoezelo, and of Peterhoff;—and then his Majesty left me, in admiration of his affability, if not of his artistic judgment."

"How very charming!" said Madame Rudiger; "how like the Emperor!"

"I am sure," continued Horace, "that with such urbanity he must be as popular as his father Paul was odious. Is he better liked than his brother Alexander?"

But the listeners all looked as blank as if a shell had fallen, and was about to burst amongst them.

"Sir," said the senator Danskoi, at length, "you are new to St. Petersburg, or you would know that these are subjects on which we do not dwell. We venerated our beloved Emperor Paul; we were full of love and loyalty towards Alexander; but our humble worship of our present gracious sovereign is a theme too sacred for discussion."

"It is a subject," said Madame de Baval, "on which delicacy alone would prevent our dwelling, considering that we are all the objects of his bounty."

"All!" repeated, with an accent of deep feelings a grey-headed old gentleman, with a care-worn countenance, who had been hitherto only a listener; "all! the expression of our gratitude would lead to an importunity of praise."

"All!" chimed in the soft voice of Madame Obrasoff, like a fair devotee's making a response in a Catholic litany.

"Besides, who are we," said the old man, humbly, "that we should venture to praise?"

"Is not the praise of subjects the noblest meed of princes?" asked Horace.

"To praise, almost implies the right to blame," said the senator, "and, thank heaven, our duty teaches us, that our gracious sovereign is not amenable either to our praise or censure."

"Well," thought Horace, "I had better be silent. I was considered an outrageous royalist in France;—here, I shall pass, it seems, for a republican. The Emperor is a frank, good-natured, and good-hearted fellow enough; he cannot help the sycophancy of these people, who will regard him as man ought only to regard his Maker."

"You will not forget us at Peterhoff to-morrow," said Madame Obrasoff, as she rose to depart.

"Come," said Anna, in the purest English, and in a voice that seemed so ingenuously conscious of persuading, by this monosyllable of half-entreaty, half-command, that Horace yielded at once, still doubting whether it had been prompted by the most finished coquetry, or the most innocent simplicity.

When Count Horace stepped out on to the quay, though not an hour past midnight, he stood in the broad light of day. There is something very strange to the unaccustomed eye in its bright yet frigid glare, when all the noises of the bustling busy day are hushed in silence and in sleep, leaving the stillness of the deepest night amidst the daylight. There is something still more strange in the lifeless and deserted streets, which make a living city appear a city of the dead. The very rattling of a distant car is startling, and no less so the few occasional notes of an awakened bird which sink again into silence, for it will be readily understood that where the night lasts only an hour, the birds cannot watch and sing till its shadows close, nor begin their song with the first blush of morning.

Amidst other carriages, the Count's droshky was waiting for him at the door. It would be superfluous to describe a vehicle so well known as the national droshky; a sort of narrow cushion-covered bench, supported on four wheels and springs, on one end of which the rider sits astride, his back supported by a slight elevation and his feet resting on a sort of step on each side of the vehicle, protected from the mud by a semi-circular splashing board of leather; the coachman, with his back to his master, driving from the opposite extremity. It would be almost superfluous to describe the old national droshky, if the caprice of fashion were not fast rendering it obsolete and consigning it to the stands where the Isvostchicks ply for hire. It is giving way to a car-shaped vehicle, in the construction of which picturesqueness has been sacrificed to convenience, and which might pass, in London streets, for one of the numerous hybrids, which coach-builders with less taste than fancy are daily calling into existence to be drawn by ponies "under duty size."

But the Prince's was still the old national droshky, looking half horse, half vehicle, driven by a coachman with a bushy beard as black as jet, dressed in an ample caftan of the palest sky-blue, trimmed with silver, and fastened with a sash of deep lilac silk, interwoven with a silver net, and with the low crowned beaver hat, which, in summer, supersedes the quadrangular winter cap of velvet.

Two sleek and glossy-coated horses were harnessed to it: the one, a heavy black trotter of the Orloff breed, in the shafts, which were kept apart by the famous bow of birch wood, to which the bearing rein is fastened; the other a light well-bred hack, of the same colour, with very long tail and mane, from the stud of Kourakin. He was attached "pristascha" or on the near side, with traces to a bar, his neck strapped down as low as it would bend.

The Count was no sooner seated than, on the given signal "stupai! drive on," his coachman started, holding a rein in each hand, and bearing on the snaffle with which alone the Russian coachmen drive. The Orloff trotter dashed along at a trot of inconceivable speed; the pristascha, with its neck cruelly borne down and its long mane almost trailing the ground, galloping with all its speed to keep up with it. Though all the marvellous stories of the speed and endurance of Russian horses on the road have been an imposition on ignorance, it must be admitted that there are no street vehicles in the world which go or can go at the speed of sledge or droshky, drawn by an Orloff trotter, whose pace is wonderful for a short distance.

"Praveya! praveya!" shouted the coachman as a warning when a solitary talega or cart, laden with vegetables, came across them, and away dashed the horses; at every corner a police watchman leaning on his axe peeping out from his tricolor striped watch-box, in hopes that the rattling pace which disturbed the decorum of the streets, was that of runaway horses, in which case, if he could secure them, the horses are confiscated, the coachman flogged, and made a soldier, and himself munificently rewarded by the police-major of his quarter—perhaps even with an eighty kopek piece, equivalent to nearly eight-pence.

But as he turned the corner of the Winter Palace, he came up with another droshky, drawn by two little dun-coloured horses of Kazan, wiry and shaggy-maned, and almost camel-like in their ungraceful angularity of outline. The poet and the young lieutenant Alexius were just alighting from the vehicle. The former made a sign to Count Horace to stop, who thereupon called out to his coachman to that effect; for he had seen enough this evening to understand that the favoured child of the Muses was in other respects a privileged individual.

"So!" said the poet, "do we meet again so soon? Come with us; we are going to wander about the islands, and to breakfast at the ferry on the Krestofsky island."

"I was going to bed," replied Horace; "but the beauty of the early daylight wooes me—the thought of a refreshing ramble tempts me, and the prospect of such company renders your proposition irresistible."

"That is right—rest if you will with the declining sun; but it is hardly in the rosy arms of morning that you should seek repose. This is the long day of Nature—she sleeps the other half the year. So now we will watch her wide awake, whilst man is sleeping—her whose sleep man's busy hum disturbs so often, when, during her long night of winter, she seems just roused by his restless importunity, to open her drowsy eyes for a few hours."

"I am told," said Horace, "that your winter is full of grandeur, and I see that your summer is full of beauty:—you must find inspiration in both."

"We need not seek inspiration in our solemn winter, when our pine forests frown in dark relief on the shroud of snow, when the Heavens seem to borrow their light from the earth as the inky sky refracts its cold whiteness; or where it overspreads our treeless steppes so boundless, so monotonous, so drear, as to image more vividly than even your boasted ever-changing ocean, time, space, and eternity. We need not seek it in our summer, which you see indeed with all its graces; but still without the charm which five months' sullen winter give it in our Russian eyes. There are other deeper, more soul-stirring sources, from which we might drink it in incessantly. I mean the only fertile source of true poetic inspiration, a bruised and wounded spirit, whether in nations or in individuals; that which in the lays of Petrarch and the poesy of Byron charms so magically; that which gave its touching sweetness to the Psalmist's verse, and, breathing through the plaintive wail of captive Israel, strikes a responsive fibre in every heart that feels and suffers—and who is there that feels, who does not suffer?"

"But is it," said Horace, "quite true, that sorrow is the only or indeed the deepest source of poetic inspiration? What do you say to Homer, and to Dante, and to Milton, and to Shakespeare?"

"These," returned the poet, "are not poets, but famous dramatists. They terrify, astonish, paint, and please according to their mighty art, whose object is to shake or soothe, or by heroic emulation rouse the human heart to action; but not detaching it from things of every day to raise it in indefinite aspirations, but not to probe its inmost depth and wring its utmost sensibilities with its searching pathos. This is a mission left to music and to poetry."

"At least," returned Horace, "I hope that you find no such inspiration nationally, as a Muscovite, a leaf as it were of the only independent branch of the Sclavonic tree, one thriving and triumphant in its vigour and overshadowing races. I trust that the successful author, his sovereign's and his country's pride, has found none as a man."

"None as a man," repeated the poet sardonically, and looking over the parapet of the bridge of boats into the river, he lapsed into a moody silence.

"At least do not think," said the Lieutenant Alexius, "that our friend has sung to an ungrateful country. The laurel and the myrtle have wreathed his brows alike, and I for one can hardly conceive what can be wanting to the felicity of the happy lover and of the appreciated genius, whose lays like those of Orpheus, have even charmed the sternness of authority into leaving him tongue-free, where all around him are tongue-tied."

"And is not this forbearance humiliating?" observed the poet bitterly, "when we consider how the human arbiter of our fate regards it. 'I will have,' he says, 'caged animals in my menagerie of Peterhoff; I will have specimens of the wolf, the lynx, and the bear, although I set a price upon the heads of their wild, free brethren; I will let them howl and gnash their teeth harmlessly through their prison bars. I will keep an untamed poet, only one, the censorship shall restrain and cramp his pen, as the gratings do the animals, and then scorning the dangers of an individual's tongue, he may talk freely. What, when I have Circassian guards, I should allow them to wear their characteristic shirts of mail and yataghans; and when I have a poet he should not be in character? No, let him talk freely, if he dares say much who will dare listen to much, and who will not admire the magnanimity of the lion, who does not crush the pismire? So let the poet talk, though I will have but one.' Oh, gentlemen! the prison of the great Torquato was preferable to this contemptuous and false forbearance, which, drawing from the wing of thought the pinion feathers which should have borne it far and wide, says to the maimed bird, 'Go! now crawl and flutter in the dust!' Torquato Tasso's dungeon bars showed to the world that he was dreaded; and, whilst his body withered in his chains, his spirit soared abroad and free:—but can you not conceive a converse fate more terrible? The body and the tongue left in contemptuous liberty, whilst the spirit pines without the hope of ever finding outlet. Think what it is to have speech free, when those around you dare not listen, or if they heard dared even less repeat. Think what it is to feel, when full of burning thoughts and glowing words, and daring, that might brave the martyrdom of persecution for one draught of immortality, to feel that one cannot give them the birth of publicity, even if contented that they should recoil and crush their author. No, there the censor sits inexorable as fate, and strangles them in child-birth."

"It must be difficult," thought Horace aside, "for any government to please these poetasters."

"But you," observed Alexius, "have had at least your share of glorious persecution."

"That," replied the poet, "was formerly, before I was a chosen specimen of my class. The very wolf now fed in the menagerie would have been knocked on the head and skinned, when not required to complete a collection. But let us change the theme. Like the plague-stricken, if I am not afraid of taking the plague, I may still impart it. I have digressed when I meant simply to say, in answer to your observation, that we need not seek our inspirations in our clime or scenery; though we have deserts where the wrecks of nations roam; mountains, and mighty rivers, and regions where the white bear gnaws the frozen flesh of the antediluvian mammoth, still embedded in its everlasting ice."

"I believe," interrupted Horace, "that your history, if it does not chronicle a very distant period, still records those inspiring glories on which nations love to dwell. Your freedom conquered from the ruthless Tartar, the wondrous changes under your great Reformer, of which this capital around us—raised like Aladdin's palace—is itself a monument; and then these great events must be full of episodes, pregnant with matter for the dramatist and poet."

"You talk," replied the bard, "of the great events of our history, and of the monuments which mark them. What were the glories of Assuerus, Semiramis, or Sesostris, to the slaves who fought and fell to achieve their victories? What are the massive Pyramids, but landmarks which perpetuate the slavery of those who reared their giant piles? As for dramatic episodes and tragic matter, we have had, we have them now. Why should we dive into the past to seek them? Unless we hold, with the classic and anti-Shakespearian unitarians, who never lay aside the rigid mask, that Time covers and hides the common-place and the prosaic, and that the prosaic and the common place are fatal to their art. None think, they say, beneath the dignity of toga or of corslet or remote costume, of Cæsar wanting a pocket-handkerchief, of heroes of the iron age whose only shirts were shirts of mail, or of the stern Elizabeth and amorous Mary, breaking their morning fast with rounds of beef and beakers full of potent ale.

"But then your audience expected from actors in such solemn stately guise tragic deeds and sonorous speeches, which, when forthcoming, only wearied them, although they would have gathered with breathless interest round the ladder from which a bricklayer's labourer had fallen with his hod. In real life the tragic startles and strikes, just from its contrast with that common-place which people avoid.

"If we turn to a scene of your revolution, the scaffold with its hungry knife gapes for a fair dishevelled victim, and the sight is awful; but how much is not its terror heightened, when the coarse jest of the besotted headsman is uttered, as, stained with blood and wine, he greases the expectant steel with a candle-end, stolen as he boasts from his wine shop; and, when passing his red fingers through the lady's hair, he says with brutal pleasantry, 'Think, citizen, that they are roses.' The victim shrieks, and all whom wine or long oppression have not brutalized feel their blood curdle.

"But when the weary guillotine has played so many weeks, that the children have become accustomed to see the gutters run with blood, death, from being an incessant theme, becomes common-place. Then timid, aged gentlewomen who were wont to faint and call for smelling salts, mount the scaffold with unfaltering step, and not unfrequently turn round before they die to utter their last witticism. The harrowing contrast of the common place and the terrible, we have more strongly in the most recent dramas, and these are working out wherever there are men, in all society; and not the less in ours because the despot and the favourite, and the lord-slave and his bondsman, hustle each other. Believe me, strange plots are weaving and eventful tragedies proceeding hourly before our eyes. In plain prosaic life, we gaze unconsciously upon the scenes, we mingle with the actors of living, actual, and terrific dramas."

"At least," said Horace smiling, "they are hourly passing before poetic eyes, which easily fill up the meagre and unyielding outline of events."

"You think so," replied the poet, "you shall judge; our acquaintance—I am almost disposed to say our friendship—dates only from a few brief hours, yet let us just recapitulate what scenes, what characters, with the events they both recall, have been thrown before us as plot and matter for a drama if cunningly interwoven by the playwright's art.

"One hour ago, for instance, we stood together in the drawing-room of Madame de Baval's mansion. You were talking boldly, so boldly that none would have dared listen to you except perhaps myself, who have the dwarf's or jester's privilege, had your conversation not been sanctioned by the presence and the willing ear of beauty, in the person of Madame Rudiger."

"And does the presence of beauty then confer freedom of speech?"

"Not always, or directly; but Madame Rudiger is the favourite of Count Benkendorf, the grand master of the secret police. Let me see—immediately conversing with you was your hostess, and then a member of the Imperial senate, a youthful mother with two charming daughters, and then a very venerable grey old man, fervent and warm in his devotion to his sovereign. They are no doubt all good and common-place people, from whose faces even Shakespeare could hardly have distilled one scene or one soliloquy; but, if quiet, they are loyal, very loyal, all people who have favours for which to be grateful. Your hostess, to begin with, was a Russian heiress; she married when your revolution scattered your great names abroad, an emigrant, really a barber or a barber's boy, but who assumed the title of Count de Baval Montmorency. The restoration came and brought with its changes a real Montmorency to Saint Petersburg. The first baron of Christendom was angered to see the name and arms of his family borne by an impostor, and he complained, loudly and bitterly. But in this dilemma, autocratic power—secured in its good-will through some influential channel,—came to the assistance of the heiress and her husband. It is the privilege of all sovereigns to make nobles; but if they happen to be despotic, they can in addition both unmake and make them, without consulting either a ministry or the public opinion. Profiting by this privilege, which allowed him to give any name, or arms, or title, an emperor conferred upon the husband precisely those which he had assumed. Now, there are not wanting men, who venture to assert that, though a Russian Tsar might have a right to give to any individual any name or coat of arms resulting from any possible combination of the alphabet or of the signs of heraldry, still it was necessary to reserve those already chosen and rendered illustrious by the deeds of a long line, who had borne them gallantly through ages: but this only serves to show you that there are creatures to be found, who would make reservations even in the power of our autocrats. She thus became a Baval-Montmorency, made by an emperor instead of by a king.

"If we now turn to the sentimental mother, she has been called into the circle of court intimacy in the very commencement of the present reign, or rather I should say within the circle of Imperial notice and favour.

"That grave old man received from the Emperor a munificent donation to comfort him in a domestic calamity,—the sum of fifty thousand roubles!

"The senator, Demetrius or Dimitri-Danskoi was once admitted when he asked it, straight to his sovereign's presence, in an hour of bustle and of confusion; he then received, or he was promised, some of those orders and crosses which mark his worth and services. There we have four individuals who should all feel deep devotion and unceasing gratitude towards their gracious monarch."

"And in truth, they do seem to feel it," observed Horace.

"They do," said the poet, "undoubtedly they do; but let us proceed. We left Madame de Baval's an hour ago, and then where did we go? Let me see—we were leaning over the parapet of the second bridge; the clear broad Neva flowed rapidly beneath us, and behind us, and before us, reflecting in its waters the Winter Palace, with its many windows, and reflecting too the light that glares redly in the face of day, from the corner windows of the second story fronting the Admiralty and the river. There sleeps, or perchance watches, the mighty master. We crossed the bridge, we turned the fortress, the fortress in which the Russian Emperors lie interred, in which their gold is coined, and where in dungeons below the water-mark linger at this moment many prisoners, state-prisoners, no doubt great criminals.

"We are now standing on the green turf of the glacis. It is not long ago—on the 26th of July 1826—upon this very spot which we are treading, rose five tall gallows trees, and from the cells of those very dungeons I saw five young men led out to die."

"To die!" said Horace, "of what had they been guilty?"

"Of worse than infidelity towards the Emperor, which our catechism calls the worst of sins and the most horrible of crimes—for it was of actual rebellion. You have heard no doubt of the secret societies, which for years were labouring to overturn our paternal form of government; you have heard no doubt of the revolt of the 12th of December, when, on the accession of the Emperor to the throne, some of the regiments of the guard, instigated by the conspirators, refused to take the oath of allegiance and proclaimed the Constitution and his brother Constantine, who had abdicated in his favour. You have heard perhaps that the Emperor remained many hours in his palace, letting the insurrection spread, before he had made up his mind to act, and that fortunately Prince Sergius Troubetskoi, the dictator, chosen by the conspirators, together with their other leaders, who had sworn to 'strike home' like Greek or Roman tyrant-slayers, all vanished in the hour of action and of danger, leaving their followers without guidance—young and fiery officers, performing prodigies of valour, and leading up the soldiers whom their conduct and enthusiasm had electrified, to wait the livelong day for craven chiefs, who never came, or who were in their terror then betraying them. You may have heard how, once the Emperor's tardy resolution taken, stern and unyielding, he refused all compromise.

"You have heard no doubt how the revolted troops waiting for orders were drawn up on the Isaak's place, with their backs to the Senate, on the other side of Peter's statue; how Miloradovitch, the favourite general of the army, came up to harangue the rebels, and how the Lieutenant Kahovski shot him down. Miloradovitch was a fine old soldier, a hundred battles had left his body scarless, but had so covered his breast with stars, and orders, and crosses, that the fatal bullet could not reach him without piercing some of them. He was the military governor of the city; but so much had he forgotten in his foreign wars our Russian customs, that he neglected all the perquisites and opportunities of such a tempting office, and, strange to say, took nothing but his pay!—his pay, a mere per-centage on his perquisites; and, as he gambled, he has often come home and asked for dinner. 'There is no dinner,' said his solitary servant. 'Then give me coffee.' 'There is no coffee.' 'Then let me have a pipe,' and he smoked his pipe and lay down on his couch, he, the military governor of St. Petersburg, for want of money! We had read these things in Roman history of Fabricius and Cincinnatus, but we ranked them with the tales of centaurs, until we saw an honest military governor.

"It was a pity that, having once, perhaps unwittingly, deceived the soldiers in a prior mutiny, he came again upon a mission of falsehood; but at all events he fell.

"And then the fray commenced. The faithful troops long refused to fire upon their brethren, and the revolters still retained their line; but Benkendorf had secured the artillery; and when the Emperor had retired behind the Admiralty, out of range of the arms of the insurgents, in case they should retaliate, then his artillery began to play, and then at length the fire of musketry commenced in earnest. Close and murderous rattled the case-shot and the grape, and the musket balls came pattering like hail, or struck into human bodies with the sound of rain drops on water. The rebels were mowed down, dispersed, and scattered—they fled along the English Quay, and down the Galernoi Oulitza; but the Emperor's wrath rose as they yielded. 'Go on,' he said, 'go on! go on! I have defiled their mothers!' and, although they had thrown down their arms, the grape still continued to ply them until utter darkness came. Every lamp along the quay and every water-spout along the narrow lane of the Galernoi, was riddled. The whole night long, they broke holes through the ice of the Neva, as they do when the Emperor blesses its waters, and they cast the bodies of twelve hundred of the rebels through into the current of the river. Of the faithful soldiers there were only several, because the insurgents had rather refused to obey than ever resisted.

"Some even entertained the sacrilegious thought that the Emperor, being no usurper, ought to have pardoned the fidelity of men, who thought to uphold the cause of the legitimate sovereign his brother, from whom he held his own legitimate right. But they were not forgiven, and then commenced the investigation and the trial of the wilful rebels, and in July the execution of their sentence. Seven months had thus elapsed you see between the outbreak and their final punishment. I need not tell you that nearly every noble family of the Empire was more or less compromised in some of its members. So there were punishments public and private: thirty were publicly doomed to Siberia for life, and five were doomed to die. Of course, they were the most guilty, but assuredly they were not the most cowardly or ignoble of the conspirators. They had all been friends of mine, though, as loyalty commands, I have since disowned them, and rooted out from my bosom the sympathy and the respect which sometimes struggles with my duty.

"The first of the condemned was Colonel Pestel, one of Plutarch's heroes; the soldier, the philosopher, the jurist, the man of science, the philanthropist—Pestel, who had planned the association, which, as he deemed, was to regenerate his country, who guided its growth for years, struggling with all the sagacity of the statesman against the jealousy of caste and the narrow views of egotism. Pure in his intentions, prudent in his measures, he bent alike the passions of the selfish, and restrained the rashness of the enthusiastic to his purpose.

"The recreations of his Herculean labour were a giant's task, the compilation of a code of Russian laws, more elaborate and complete than all the salaried Russian jurisconsults had during one whole century framed or put together.

"It happened that the jealousy of those who sought only their individual interest in the projected movement, had elected, to preside over the association in the north, another leader in his stead, the Prince Sergius Troubetskoi, the Brutus of private theatricals, the ignominious braggart who threw away his shield.

"Pestel was consequently absent from St. Petersburg when the Emperor Alexander died, and he was ill besides; but, had he been in the capital, hearty and hale, there are those who think that, at this hour, Russia might be the great federal Sclavonic Union, and Pestel the Russian Washington.

"He was ill, as I have said when taken, and when taken he knew at once his doom; his only care appeared to be that they would save and handle tenderly his famous Russian Code.

"The second was the Sub-lieutenant Bestoujeff-Roumin: do not confound him with the brothers Bestoujeff who behaved so gallantly in the revolt in St. Petersburg. Though he too was taken, sword in hand, his proper weapon was the pen. Fiery, enthusiastic, energetic, and gifted with the fatal gift of poesy, if he had written birthday odes or laudatory stanzas to a courtier's leman, he might have turned it to the sole account that our Russian atmosphere allows. The pen is a mighty instrument, when it speeds the sword and makes the sword winged; but with us it is still useless and ignoble, as the uncut feather in the goose's pinion.

"But Bestoujeff-Roumin had been drawn into the full vortex of crime—the crime of those who wished not alone to subvert our paternal government, not only to pull down our rulers to the level of humanity, but to raise up to it our very serfs. Yes, Sir! will you believe, there were enthusiasts who did not turn their cattle loose into the woods and steppes, and yet proposed to unyoke their serfs and make them free men. What but the halter or the mine could correct such men, when we consider that they themselves were slave possessors, and that with the possession of their slaves they forfeited their revenues, because with us the soil is valueless without the peasants on it, as the title-deeds would be of property overwhelmed by an invasion of the ocean.

"So far and so hopelessly had Roumin become perverted, that he even wrote his political catechism of impious celebrity; I mean politically impious. He had no excuse to plead of ignorance of his duty, for it was framed question for question, answer for answer, in awful parody, of the last most stringent book of religious instruction for youth, since everywhere adopted through the empire. You shall hear it, for although when I was young, we had not obedience inculcated by so beautiful a theory, I am too loyal a Muscovite not to have learned by heart what every Muscovite and Polish child is taught when it comes lisping from its mother's breast.

" 'What,' says the Imperial Catechism, 'are the duties religion teaches us towards the Emperor as his humble subjects?' Peter the Great forbade that his people should style themselves his slaves.

" 'We owe him,' replies the answer, 'devotion,'—obedience, fidelity, taxes, service, love and prayers, all comprised in the words fidelity and devotion.

Q.—" 'In what should this devotion consist?'

A.—" 'In the most absolute respect, in words, in motions, conduct, thought, and actions.'

Q.—" 'What obedience do we owe the Emperor?'

A.—" 'Entire, passive, and in every respect unlimited obedience.'

Q.—" 'In what consists the fidelity we owe the Emperor?'

A.—" 'In the vigorous execution, without examination of all his orders, and in the act of doing all that he exacts without a murmur.'

Q.—" 'How are want of respect and infidelity towards the Emperor to be considered in a religious point of view?'

A.—" 'As the most detestable sin and the most horrible crime.'

Q.—" 'What books prescribe these duties?'

A.—" 'The Holy Scriptures, particularly the psalms, the gospels, and the epistles.'

Q.—" 'What examples confirm these?'

A.—" 'That of Jesus Christ himself, who lived and died the subject of the Emperor of Rome, and submitted himself respectfully to the sentence which condemned him.' "

"What!" exclaimed Horace, "is such a catechism taught to your Russian children? You have surely substituted the name of the Emperor for that of God?"

"So Bestoujeff-Roumin thought," replied the poet; "and there are those who, blaspheming like him, call the Imperial catechism blasphemous. I will not rank you amongst them, nor will I repeat the catechism Roumin substituted for it; suffice it to say that he attempted to prove in it from Holy Writ the equality of all mankind in their Creator's eyes, and to argue that even Christ, the God-man and the first of men, assumed no temporal authority; in short he filled it with similar impieties, though clothed in startling words and eloquently put together.

"After divine service and before the fight, Roumin read it to the revolted regiment; the soldiers simply asked for an increase of pay, and, when the fight went against them, they gave up the author with his eloquent catechism and his sword.

"The third was Colonel Sergius Mouravief Apostol: he was the right arm and the commander of the Southern Association, of which Roumin was the tongue. He was overtaken as he was marching on Kiew, the old capital of the Russian Grand Dukes, by an overwhelming force; he attacked them gallantly, his brother fell by his side; and he was given up by the treachery of his disheartened soldiers with Bestoujeff-Roumin.

"The fourth was the Lieutenant Kahovski: he was taken in St. Petersburg. Although his rank was not high amongst the conspirators, he was at his post and fought in the revolt of the 12th with the determined courage of one of the three hundred Spartans. He shot down Miloradovitch, and killed with his own hand Colonel Sturler.

"The fifth was a sub-lieutenant; a youthful husband, wealthy, enthusiastic, and ardent. His mansion was the place of rendezvous for the conspirators of the capital. There, on the night preceding the fatal outbreak, they held their last decisive conclave under the presidency of the Prince whom they had named Dictator. There speeches were made, in which the magniloquent common-places of declaimers, derived soul-stirring interest and significance from the proximity of the events that were to test the words of every speaker. There many hearts beat high with aspirations of the morrow, assembled as they were, not like the midnight assassins, who with the acquiescence of his sons, went to strangle Paul, to rid themselves of personal proscription and to remove their own immediate tyrant; but in the glorious hope that the next declining sun would see a mighty nation called into that existence, which it feels so joyously when from a thing, an object of possession, it becomes a being.

"None were more enthusiastic than the youthful husband, when they parted to meet the following evening as the triumphant liberators of their country, or, as they swore after the Spartan King, to sup with Charon. They all did meet again, here where we are standing, seven months afterwards, beneath the five tall gallows-trees.

"But the youthful husband had a wife, who loved him passionately, a wife neglected too because she had a rival. Her hope of winning back, by long untiring patience and unwearying tenderness his lost affection, was interrupted by her terrors at the dangerous career he was pursuing; with the quick ear and ready wit of woman's anxious love, she divined the object of the stealthy solemn conclave, and contrived to overhear the plans of the conspirators. When they were gone, she threw herself at her husband's feet, she implored him not to join the dangerous enterprise, she wearied him with her forebodings and her tears, till, kissing them away, he reminded her how his honour and his safety were hopelessly compromised, and finally rejected all her agonising supplications. If anything then could have added to the anguish of lost love, it must have been the thought that its absence from his heart rendered her eloquence powerless to persuade in an emergency so cruel. There was more heart than head about that gentle creature, or she might have known that her bosom's lord, even pausing there, had sinned already beyond all forgiveness and all hope. He had sinned in word, in thought, and intention, against Imperial Majesty, and though the intent of good shall not be taken into account, but go to pave the infernal regions, and though the intent of evil shall not be noted down by the recording angel when a virtuous resolution conquers it—what are we but the dust before the footstool of our Tsars, that we should dare expect their mercy on repentant traitors? Besides, we are in Russia, not in Heaven; but this she did not think of; she fancied she could save him if she could dissuade; but to dissuade, her art, her arguments, her prayers, her tears, had failed.

"At length, her part was taken—after a long and agonising conflict between the good and evil, the littleness and the heroism of a woman's nature, between her pride, and love, and jealousy, the angel in her disposition triumphed—the injured wife sought out the mistress.

"Day dawned gloomily on the morning of the 12th, to close after a few brief hours on scenes of bloodshed; the hour was come, the hour for which the husband had longed so ardently. The younger and more generous of the conspirators, having borne down all resistance by their personal prowess, performed successfully the part allotted to them in the bloody drama, and brought up their soldiers to the place of rendezvous.

"But then the boastful and cowardly Dictator, the Prince Troubetskoi, and their other leaders were missing: they were either crouching in corners in their abject terror, or denouncing their companions.

"And then associated with their infamy was the youthful husband, he too was missing. After the wife had failed, the mistress had prevailed. Her arms around his knees were chains which he had not the courage to break, and when the thunders or the crash of musketry and cannon rang through the frosty air, or boomed amid the palaces of St. Isaac's place announcing that the fate of sixty millions was deciding, he rose, as often convulsively to sink again, still captive to her passionate entreaties. Perhaps he remembered then that a Mark Anthony had thus lost a world before him.

"Although he took no active part in the revolt, he had offended beyond remission a master, stern, implacable, and unforgiving; and seven months afterwards he was one of those led out to die.

"During these weary months, which passed between the outbreak and the execution of the conqueror's justice, he personally saw, examined, threatened, all the prisoners and many of the witnesses. He saw their wives and parents, relatives and intimates, not to listen to their appeals to mercy, but to cross-question and interrogate them. It is said that few could endure unmoved the majestic flash of his Imperial eye, terrible with the consciousness of power.

"The Dictator, Prince Troubetskoi, clasped his knees, and begged for life in agonising accents.

" 'Live,' said the judge, 'and he lives on, having once prayed for life, to pray often and often for the relief of death.'

"The calm and philosophic Pestel was frequently confronted with the Emperor; nothing could shake his iron soul, or bend it or heat it to intemperate invective.

" 'Had you no remorse when conspiring against my brother and myself?'

" 'Less,' replied the conspirator, 'than your brother and yourself, when awaiting the result of the conspiracy against your father.'

"His answers to the many interrogations, were apostrophes to his sovereign to take warning by the dangers he had escaped, and to avoid the conduct of his predecessors. They were attempts to show him that his empire was an Augean stable, and arguments to induce him to examine and adopt his code of Russian jurisprudence, appropriating it like the spoil of a vanquished enemy.

"Pestel knew well that good intentions count for nothing, and he was anxious to leave some legacy to his country, thus certain that his life had not been wasted.

"These were the five great criminals, on whom the Emperor's justice was dealt, one summer morning on this very sod. A hedge of soldiers, or rather an army, kept back the crowd, amongst which, foremost appeared the relatives, the friends, and the acquaintance, whose names had flitted through the evidence on the lengthy trials of the men condemned, and who now came forth to disavow entirely by their presence a participation, which the government found too universal to punish.

"First there were led out from the fortress gate, thirty of the conspirators condemned for life to Siberia, with the Dictator foremost. Their swords were broken, their orders and their epaulettes, and their insignia, thrown upon a pile and burnt, their civil death decreed; their heads were shaven, their limbs were ironed, and their doom was read, not only to living death, but to the living burial of a Siberian mine.

"All this was at the gallows' foot, and here all the conspirators met again, for next were led out the five destined for execution, dressed in long grey cloaks and hoods, at first covering their faces, like those of the victims in the Spanish auto-da-fés.

"Their faces, particularly Pestel's, were wan, pallid, and meagre, for it is said that even torture had not been spared them. But one and all of the doomed five showed, by the firmness of their step and the enthusiastic sparkle of their eye, not only that they saw in death a refuge from the Imperial mercy, but the proud consciousness they entertained, that they, out of the millions of Muscovites who had perished by famine, by flood, and field, on deserts, or on seas, or beneath the executioner's knife or lash, to do the bidding or to glut the vengeance of tyrants, or of tyrants' myrmidons, that they were the first five who had died for their country.

"If they spoke, it must have been like Marino Faliero to time and to eternity, for the rolling drum rendered all speech inaudible, and they were launched into the air.

"But even in this solemn moment, the vulgar and the common-place are inextricably interwoven with the tragic. The executioner, whose business it was to find the ropes, an adept at the merciless knout, but not in the art of hanging, misjudged the strength required to sustain a human body, and purchased old instead of new, spending the difference in a dram. As the drop fell, a thrill of horror spread through all the crowd: three of the cords broke—and from their high gibbets, bursting through the flooring of the scaffold by their inert weight, down fell three of the victims.

"The drum had ceased rolling; those who presided at the execution had thought that all was over, or that the strangulating rope would have hushed all speech and indiscretion. But the undaunted Pestel exclaimed aloud:

" 'Wretched country, in which they know not even how to hang a man!'

"He added something more, but the dead silence of the crowd was broken by an itinerant vender of cold tea, who took advantage of it to vend his wares, and the last words of the dying patriot and legislator were lost in the cry of,

" 'Tea, tea, tea, excellent tea!'

"They died, and with them died the hopes of all who dreamed of the regeneration of their country."

Here the poet looked around him, and then stooped down and kissed the sod hurriedly.

"Come, come, come!" said the Lieutenant Alexius, who looked as pale and agitated as if they were all then conspiring.

"It is a terrible story," said Count Horace.

"It is not done," replied the poet. "The Emperor after the execution, caused the best part of Pestel's code to be adopted in the compilation of laws, which is intended to immortalize his reign, and which may do so whenever a reign shall come in which the laws are followed as well as established. But, as he had refused the prayer of Pestel's father, who begged in vain the life of his heroic son, he made him a donation of fifty thousand roubles."

"What a gratuitous piece of brutality!" exclaimed Horace.

"Old Pestel did not think so. He accepted them, and was grateful; he is grateful now, at least he told you so two hours ago."

"Told me!" said Horace.

"Told you," repeated the narrator, "that old gentleman who spoke so warmly in his sovereign's praise was Pestel, the Russian hero's father. You were unlucky too in talking of Rohan's conspiracy to the mother-in-law of an arch-conspirator, the mother of the Dictator's wife."

"What, Madame de Baval!"

"Precisely," returned the poet, "Madame de Baval. She is very loyal now, but she is said not always to have been so; perhaps some might consider the method taken to convert her to her present sentiments, a rude one and inapplicable to a noblewoman, or to a female so far past life's golden meridian. She was sent for one day to the office of the secret police, where the grand master, Count Benkendorf, the same who brought up the artillery so opportunely on the 12th of December; a very gentlemanlike and urbane old man, caused a dose of corporeal castigation to be inflicted in private on the lady, which has since rendered her both discreet and loyal. The Count has not been always so ungallant, for he notoriously favours Madame Rudiger, her guest last night. Her husband has been sent abroad on a diplomatic mission."

"Surely," said Horace, "you are giving the rein to your poetic imagination, and trying the extent of my credulity."

"Only with bitter truths," replied the poet, "and I shall have to try it farther. There was a nephew amongst the conspirators, a nephew who had been often caressed and was still dearly loved by a fond uncle, at least the nephew, Prince Alexander Odoievski thought so. He was one of the conspirators who had escaped the massacre and the pursuit, and, in the keen frost of a winter's night, he lay concealed between the boats, which serve as arches to the floating bridge; he lay for hours trying to warm his frozen limbs by burying them in the cold uncomforting snow; at least he deemed it so, for he had not yet tried the frigidity of an uncle's bosom. He saw the ice broken and the dead, load after load, thrust through the holes and consigned to the living stream beneath it.

"At length, horror and cold rendered his post no longer tenable, he braved the danger of discovery, and gained his uncle's mansion—he was saved; he found him and he craved an hour's repose, and warmth, and funds wherewith to fly.

"But the uncle was sorely tempted: on the one hand he saw a pressing danger, on the other an opportunity of proving his loyalty; no doubt he thought upon the sacrifice of Abraham.

" 'But come,' he said at length, 'fly with me, there is not an instant to lose,' and away he drove with his shivering nephew, not to a place of concealment, but to the Winter Palace.

"The victim had no longer power to fly or to resist; and the fond uncle led him straight into the Emperor's presence, for the Emperor saw every one connected with the conspiracy.

"The Prince Alexander now curses his uncle from the profoundest depth of a Siberian mine, and the uncle, sporting the badges of distinction with which his sovereign has honoured him, talks of his loyalty and his devotion, as his antecedents authorize him in talking, and as you heard him talk this evening, for he is the senator Demetrius or Dimitri-Danskoi."

"Wretch!" said Horace, "but tell me what became of the poor wife of the conspirator who was hanged."

"The wealthy sub-lieutenant's mistress," returned the poet, answering beside the question, "denied all knowledge of and all participation in his crime, and the criminal himself strenuously bore out her assertions to the last. But the day his condemnation was pronounced, she was invited to join the Imperial circle. The master's eye fell on her with a searching scrutiny; but the lady was not pale, she was well rouged, and laughed with a merry laugh, as clear as the tinkling of a silver bell at an Imperial pun. The master was satisfied."

"Good heavens!" said Horace, "but the wife?"

"The wife laughed too on the day of her husband's execution; after the Imperial justice had refused her prayers, she burst into a long hysteric frightful fit of laughter. She was then, she has since remained—a maniac!"

"A maniac!" repeated Horace, "and did the senses of the wretched mistress survive her horrible hypocrisy?"

"I do not know," replied the poet, "but you should judge that best, or at least you will be able to judge it well to-morrow, for she is the sentimental mother with the two fair daughters, with whom I heard you promise to dine to-morrow at Peterhoff."

CHAPTER II.

The Prince Isaakoff was reclining as usual on his sofa, with the long Russian pipe in his mouth, when Horace joined him. In front of him was standing the venerable and imposing figure of a tall and stately individual, long past the prime of life, with features full of gravity, indicative of florid health, and indeed a little replete in their robustness. But his dense beard, descending to his middle, was of silver grey, and his thick hair, of the same colour, flowed downwards over his shoulders still lower. He wore a cap of black velvet on his head, and was habited in a long robe of dark cloth, with very wide sleeves, and marked on the breast, like the tunic of a crusader, with a long white cross. His aspect was patriarchally majestic; and, when he spoke, his voice sounded sonorously clear, like the bass notes of a cathedral organ.

"My dear fellow!" said the Prince earnestly, "what a terrible wild Englishman you have brought with you as groom!"

"What my Bob Bridle, the quietest and most steady servant breathing?"

"Well, he may be quiet enough for England; but if he goes on so, I can only tell you that you will find him rather expensive here."

"He is a devil! my high and well born master," chimed in the steward Dietrich.

"But what has he been doing?" inquired the Count.

"Only been guilty of assault, rebellion, and sacrilege, which I think is pretty well by twelve o'clock in the day."

The Count looked dubiously in the Prince's face, but he was evidently serious, and so he exclaimed, "It is impossible. What do you mean?"

"Only that you must make up your mind, either to abandon him to his fate, or to give ample and immediate pecuniary satisfaction."

"Give him up, the tidiest groom and the boldest rider in Christendom? Oh, no, he must be got out of the scrape at any cost. But what in the name of good fortune has he done?"

"Why, in the first place, he has beaten your coachman, which don't signify, because he is my slave; but then he has used the oil of the sacred lamp for ignoble purposes; he has smashed the image of a saint, and pulled one of our Greek priests, the Father Bazilius, whom you see, by the beard; and, to crown the whole business, he has assaulted and shut up a police officer and soldier."

"I can't believe it," said Horace. "I should like to hear his own story. Let us have him up."

"He is waiting outside:—call him, Dietrich."

The redoubted Bob Bridle walked very quietly in. He was clad in his red and white striped cotton jacket, his leathers were spotless, his neckerchief delicately white, and his top boots mirror-like. No words could have thrown such doubt on the veracity of the accusations which charged him with desperate and outrageous conduct, as did his formal, cool and self-possessed demeanour. As he would himself have expressed it, "he had not turned a hair." Bob Bridle pulled his forelock respectfully to his master, and scraping his right foot along the ground, gave a scarcely perceptible kick backwards, which was intended to add to the graces of his salutation.

The Count addressed him, for Bob Bridle never spoke till he was spoken to.

"What is the matter?" said the Count, speaking as if nothing had happened. "What have you got to say to me?"

"This here, Sir," answered Bob, "fust, Lucifer took his bran mash last night, and next I took your note to the embassy, as directed, and was told that my Lady, the Ambassadress, is going on as well as can be expected."

"So far, so good," replied Horace. "But have you nothing of more importance to say; do you know any thing of this man?" pointing to the priest.

"Not much," said Bob, shaking his head, "and still less to his credit."

"Well now, what has happened between you?"

"A row," said Bob, "I am free to confess; but I was a-going to tell you, Sir, all about it in regular row-tation."

"Pray, let us hear your story, for here are terrible complaints against you."

"It ain't a short un," said Bob, "if I must 'splain it all."

"Never mind," replied his master, "out with it all, take time to it, and tell it your own way."

"Then, Sir," said the groom, "you've given the charge of the Rooshian horses to the Rooshian coachman, as understands 'em, but you've give me the charge of the oats and hay for the whole stable, which was as wise a thing as any gentleman ever did."

After this exordium, Bob paused for a moment, and then went on.

"Now, Sir, I must tell you, that when first we come to this here city, an English groom comes up to the stable-door, uncommon friendly like, though I never see him before. Now between you and I, and the post, Sir, he smelled very strong of spirits, and looked as dirty as a Rooshian life-guardsman in them dung-coloured bed-gowns they wears, when not buckramed up, and which I suppose they calls great-coats. 'I am out of place,' says he. 'But that is no reason,' says I, 'why them buttons of yours need be so,' for he had got two brass veskit buttons sewed on to one gaiter, and the t'other fastened by a bit of string in the top hole, which looked scandalous. 'Well,' says he, 'a man looses his spirits when he looses his 'ployment.' 'I wish he'd lose the smell on 'em,' says I, 'and he'd be like to get it all the sooner.' But as he was an Englishman, Sir, in this here strange country, and knowed all its ways, as well as a horse knows his stable, I've come somehow to know him, though he is neither quite so tidy nor so 'spectable as I could wish. Now the day you bought them Rooshian horses, and engaged the Rooshian coachman, Billy—"

"Vasili," suggested Horace.

"It does mean, William," observed the Prince with a smile.

"Ay," said Bob, "I knowed the English, for it must be Billy, to say nothing of the beard as fits the name. 'Well Sir,' Jack What's-his-name says to me, 'you are surely not a going to sit down with a moujik? It won't do here. An Englishman can no more demean himself by sitting down with them Rooshians, than he would with pigs.' But I didn't attend to him, for when first I see the natives, thinks I to myself they have as many good pints as any foreigners I ever come across. They seem fond of their horses, they drives 'em with a snaffle, and they takes their comfortable tea, or goes into the cellar to drink London porter, which is all more creditable than the macaroni of the Italians, or the red vinegar of the Frenchmen. And then, as for their not being civilized, I never see more civility anywhere, for two piemen in the streets, or two of your worships (Iswostchicks) as they calls the Rooshian jarveys, bows to each other, like dancing masters, when they meets. So I didn't take Jack's advice, partly because pride is sinful, and partly because I didn't know the Rooshians was so unpleasant. Says Jack, 'If you sits down with him, I must cut your company;' says I, 'you may cut your stick, for I'm Christian enough to know that Billy is a creature of flesh and blood like ourselves, and a man is a man after all;' and so he is, Sir; but some on 'em is rather dirty and uncommon dishonest, and that there Rooshian Billy is just one of that sort.

"Now, Sir, by having lived in a foreign embassy, he speaks a little French, and so do I; so I made myself companionable with him, and gave him the run of everything, except the corn-bin. The first thing I see very queer about him, was one day when I catched him cribbing some lard and lampblack and brown sugar, I had mixed up in a tin to blacken Lucifer's hoofs with. I catched him, Sir, with a pot of baked buckwheat grits, as they calls 'kassia,' before him, actually putting the stuff to his porridge and eating it! 'You nasty devil,' says I, 'that was meant to grease my horses' hoofs, not your inside; here's butter if you want it;' and after that he did use the butter, but he took the grease too.

"Now, as nigh as I could make him out, Billy takes it into his head that the stable is haunted by what he calls a Domovoi, a sort of Robin Goodfellow or Brownie, which eats up the corn and turns the horses' coats; and yesterday he calls me into his stable, to show me the tails of his horses, which the Domovoi had plaited together in the night, but which in my opinion had got entangled by their whisking 'em about. Now Billy declares that sometimes the Domovoi takes a dislike to black horses, and sometimes to roan, and sometimes to grey, and that nothing would go right till he went and fetched the Pope to drive him out with holy water. So I told him by all means to do so, because I happened to know that the Pope was at Rome in Italy, where I see him with my own eyes. But what do ye think, Sir, last night in he brings this gentleman with the knob stick, (pointing to Father Basil) saying he was the Pope, which I knowed of course to be a flam, the Pope (though a papist) being a different character altogether, and a great deal more respectable. Well, in he goes to Billy's stable, and, after he had mountebanked enough, he says he has driven the Domovoi out and that he will never return again, which I expect was the only true part of the story. For, though I am rising five and thirty, I never see any spirits, excepting them as people keep in bottles. Then, Sir, he wants to go into Lucifer's box, but I said no, no; no tricks upon travellers there; the Domovoi won't plait his tail or meddle with him, I know, any more than any other foreigner that ever I saw. And when he found it wouldn't do, he asks for one of them blue five rouble notes for his trouble; Billy declaring that it was customary. 'Well,' says I, 'I'll ask my master to-morrow; and if he sees proper to encourage your tomfoolery, you shall have it, so come again and see. 'Then' says Billy, 'will you give him some brandy and he will give you his blessing.' 'Here's the brandy,' said I, for the bottle was on the top of my chest of drawers, and I couldn't do less; 'but he may keep the blessing for them as wants it.' So down he sat and made hisself jolly, and out he pulls a pack of cards and wants to play with us."

"What, that venerable-looking priest," said Horace, looking incredulously from Bob Bridle to the Prince Isaakoff, who merely shrugged up his shoulders, as much as to intimate that the story was highly probable.

"Yes," said Bob, "that very same old sinner there; and very dirty cards they was. Now, as the best game but one, I know on, is put, and the best of all, which I've been given to these many years is, not to play at all, I declined his offer, so that when the brandy was drunk, he grew very cosey and affectionate, and wanted more. Says I, 'When you come to-morrow.' Then, Sir, he asked me for my name, 'Bob,' says I. 'And your father's name?' said he. 'Bob,' again says I. Which when Billy had explained it to him, he calls me Bob, Bobovitch, upon the spot, which was neither civil of him to do, nor gratifying to my feelings to hear.

"Now this, Sir, was the state of the case last night. But this morning, Billy walks in with another Rooshian; he had asked me the day before, as I understood him, whether he should bring any one to take away the litter, and I told him, by all means. Now, Billy's friend had got a sack with him, which I thought a queer way of clearing a stable-yard. You must know, that it was the day on which I give him the three days' corn for his horses, which, I will say, he takes some care on, which is a redeeming pint in his character, though he does make'm as fat as if they was meant for Leadenhall market. But presently Rooshian Billy puts his horses' corn into his friend's sack, and his friend shakes hands with me, and pulls out a bottle of wodky, endeavouring to explain the thing they wanted to set afoot.

"Now, as soon as I was sure of what they was up to, I do confess that I gave them a clip or two a piece, and when they made off without waiting for their change, I shied the friend's brandy bottle after him.

"Well, Sir, when they was off, I began to clean the bits and stirrup irons, when what do I find, but that all the oil in the harness room is gone. Oh, oh! says I, that oil is gone after the contents of my grease-pot, to smoothen the inside of that Rooshian Billy's in-tess-tines. But I'll be even with him; and, just at that minite, I happen to see a little lamp a-hanging before a pictur, which he is so uncommon fond on that I suppose it his father's, who, howsoever was not by any means so andsome as the frame they've put him in. Now, thinks I, though he may be so very fond of the old gentleman that he likes to look at him by candle-light, he should have drank his own oil before he took mine. So down I hooks the lamp, and begins cleaning away with the oil that was inside of it."

Here Bob paused for an instant to take breath and then resumed,

"In the course of half an hour, Sir, back comes Billy. He first tries to persuade me that he had only been a-jesting; but when he saw that I wouldn't believe him, out he takes a little pictur, the size of a Jack-in-a-box, and, having spit upon the glass and wiped it with his sleeve, he kneels down before it, as I've often seen him do before, and seems to take it to witness, calling it Bogy (Boje), which considering its ugliness isn't by no means a bad name.

"When that wouldn't do, he lays flat down, and, imploring that I wouldn't tell you, begins kissing my feet and slobbering them all over, as if taking the polish off a man's boots was the way to come over him; and then, Sir, last of all he has the impudence to offer me a silver rouble to hold my tongue. So I thought it right to kick him out; but presently he raises a terrible outcry, and declares that his Bogy is broken, which was a fact, and at the same time he twigs his lamp. You would have thought, by the uproar he made, that his Bogy was as beautiful as paint, and that he was the most injured individual about his oil as ever walked upon two legs. So I packs the coachman, and the lamp, and the broken Bogy all out together.

"Next, Sir, who should walk in but that gentleman as calls himself the Pope, aggrawatin me in the first place, by calling me Bob Bobovitch again; he throws his arms around my neck, and, smelling as he did of salt herrings, brandy, and onions, he kisses me as if I was a young lady. So says I, 'You old goat!' and taking him by the beard I dragged him out after them.

"Then, Sir, they all come round the door gabbling like so many turkey-cocks, and even Mr. Dietrich there comes up to me, and joining his hands together, says, 'Mine Got, mine Got.' So says I, 'no, you hav'n't got yours yet. But you'll have it in the twinkling of a bed-post, if you don't look sharp.' For you see, Sir, I was very much aggrawated. But I wish to let you know exactly everything that passed. Now this one might have thought was enough for one day's plague, to a quiet, peaceable man, who only wants to do his duty honestly. But they was up to another game with me, for presently I see one of them police fellows, with a sword and cocked hat, which they calls nasty-rats (Nadziratels) and another soger with him. So thinks I, I can't wake my master at this hour, and they are getting too many for me, so I was under the necessity of shutting up the nasty-rat and his man, till such time as I thought you'd be up; and this is the whole story, Sir, in every pint from beginning to end."

"Well," said the Count, "you have behaved like a man from beginning to end, though you have been playing terribly at cross-purposes. But how the devil did you manage those police fellows?"

"Why, Sir, as I have heared Paddy often laughed at for doing, by surrounding them, with the help of Lucifer. When I sees 'em a coming I pops quietly into his loose-box. The nasty-rat beckoned to me to come out, and I beckoned to him to come in, so, seeing the horse licking my hand in an amiable manner, in he comes at last with his man. But no sooner did Lucifer see 'em, than he bristles up and flies at 'em. Now you know, Sir, that in his box there are a couple of iron basket-racks on each side of it, so as Lucifer had got between them and the door, up they climbs into 'em like lamp-lighters, the nasty-rat into one, and his follower into the other."

"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted the Count, "and what became of them?"

"Why, there they are, Sir, now, and there they have been these two hours, like two rogues in the pillory, for Lucifer won't let 'em come down, I'll warrant. He has torn off both the nasty-rats' uniform coat-tails, as was hanging over the rack; he has worried his cocked-hat like a young puppy-dog, though he has abstained from doing the same by his man, seeing that he turned his back to the wall."

"Well," said the Prince, "these English are the queerest people in the world. So far it appears that they have all fortunately imbibed the notion, that you are attached to your legation, which will wonderfully facilitate all arrangements with them, because they know that if they were to push your servant too hard he would eventually find effectual protection. A hundred roubles to the father, and a hundred roubles to the Naziratel, and a new image for Vasili, will I think repair the damage; you had better leave it entirely to Dietrich."

When the whole matter was explained to Bob, he expressed great contrition for the difficulties into which he had unintentionally drawn his master; but when he was assured that the priest, in calling him Bob Bobovitch, or Bob the son of Bob, was only using a courteous custom by which Russians distinguish every individual from the serf to the Emperor, he remained incredulous or dissatisfied.

"Let well alone," he said; "people never meddle with the name of Bob in England, and surely they could not mend it in Rooshia. As for whose son he was, that was no business of nobody's."

Dietrich first tried his powers of persuasion upon Father Basil. He began by offering him ten roubles in full compensation for all the indignities the church had suffered both in his person and out of it; and father Basil, after protesting his particular respect for Prince Isaakoff and Count Horace, and his christian forgiveness of Bob, declared that he should consider himself as a guilty creature towards his holy mother in accepting less than five hundred for such a complicated case of sacrilege.

"Why," said Dietrich, "in our villages the priest only taxes a moderate theft at two dozen eggs, and an open blasphemy at a couple of chickens or a full grown goose."

"Ay," replied the father shrewdly, "but there you get a fathom of firewood for half a paper rouble, and here you pay eight for it if you buy it from the wood barge."

At length, Dietrich rose to fifty roubles, and Father Basilius descended to two hundred; at this stage Dietrich thought fit, for certain private reasons of his own, to remove the progress of the negotiation from the hearing of his master, and the affair was at length happily arranged, with the stipulation on the side of the injured party of the addition of a couple of bottles of rum. Dietrich then proceeded with the aid of Bob to release the Naziratel and his man, and to compromise matters with him.

"But I hope," said the Count, as soon as he could recover a serious countenance, and before Bob went, "I hope you will remember that we are in a strange country, and endeavour in future to respect its laws and regulations, and the prejudices and superstitions of its people, however ridiculous either may be."

"I will," said Bob, very solemnly, for he was touched by the manner in which his master had paid the heavy tax imposed upon him by his servant's mishaps, without a murmur or allusion. "My mind is made up; I'll keep my hands in my pockets as long I'm in this here Rooshian country, and I'll handle every thing I don't understand as gingerly as if they was pots of balsam flowers three parts blown."

But Bob's temper was sorely tried when, crossing the yard, the Pope, who had pocketed eighty roubles, and who had got a couple of bottles of rum under his arm, and a pint of the same liquid in his inward man, patted him familiarly upon the back, and gave Bob his jovial benediction in spite of his teeth.

CHAPTER III.

Blanche and her husband were again upon the road. After a few versts the country-houses or datchas on either side indicated their near approach to the city.

The idea which the wealthy Russians entertain of the pleasures of country life is very peculiar and utterly distinct from that of all other European nations, particularly of the English.

The gregarious instinct appears in this particular as strongly developed amongst the higher orders as it does amongst the peasantry, when, dreading isolated farms and cottages, which are almost unknown, they crowd into villages and hamlets—when they congregate in atels or associations; and when, shaven and drilled, and led to the field of battle, it makes them so formidable an infantry, because even discomfiture or terror only causes them to huddle up together like a flock of sheep instead of flying.

So, retirement in the summer to their own estates is always a matter of business, of policy, or of economy, with the proprietors of them; but the residence of their choice is in these datchas, half villas and half cottages in the environs of large cities, of which the great attractions seem to be that they are crowded close to each other, and are often more overlooked than the winter residences which they have quitted in the towns.

Blanche observed that they were built in every variety of style, from the classic, with its Doric or Corinthian pillars, to the Saxon, or the Gothic. In magnitude and in fanciful absurdity of construction they resembled the cockney villas of a few years back; and the gay parties, sitting at their tea or their dessert, with open windows and within a few yards of the dusty road, strikingly resembled the scene witnessed on a fine Saturday summer evening, in the fanciful buildings which line the way to the great metropolis of England.

But, in the first place, there was this difference, that nearly all these Russian cottages and villas, and temples, were built of logs covered with a façade of painted planks, which gave them a scene-like and lumber-room appearance; and, in the next, that the people who were inhaling the freshness of the evening and the dust of the highway, were not citizens confined to a certain distance from the counter, but the owners of vast hereditary estates, of villages, and hamlets, and primeval forests, whose only avowed pursuit was that of pleasure and amusement.

At length, a triumphal archway rose before them, surmounted by a colossal figure of bronze guiding the many figures yoked abreast which drew its car. This was the city gate. But not alone the sentinels on duty—not alone the numerous picket, whose vigilance is exercised by the constant ringing of a little bell which calls the soldiers to present arms to every passing general officer—are judged sufficient guard at the entrance of the capital. Horses, regardless of imperial ukases, might possibly run away, and not attend to the sentry's challenge, and this has been provided against. A ponderous beam traverses and bars suspiciously, even at midday, every entrance to the city. It is painted with the imperial tricolor, and is balanced on a pivot by an enormous mass of wood which serves as counterpoise, and the sentry by a chain raises it up when satisfied.

There are no drivers or riders in the Russian dominions so foolhardy as to attempt to dash past the picket-house, so that this barrier can only be raised against the animal impudence of bolting horses; the horses may just pass under without the bows of their Russian harness, but they must leave the carriage or the rider behind them, as more than once has happened to the young merchants' clerks at the close of a holiday's ride.

The great beam rose and fell again; they were admitted. A tall gaunt sergeant of the picket, sallow and sternly stiff, demanded the names and passports of the travellers. Every one passing the gates of St. Petersburg, inwards or outwards, in any vehicle, must give his name. If indeed he be neither a traveller nor in uniform, by humbly saying that he is only a merchant going to his datcha, the grivnik or groat, the smallest silver coin, judiciously offered to the sergeant will exempt him from the formality of stepping out in the mud or rain to inscribe his name in the guard-house; but with the traveller or the unfortunate in uniform this cannot be; he must be inscribed upon the list, which is forwarded every night to the Emperor, who, when he is in town, peruses it with minute and puerile attention.

Now the Emperor, or else his brother, to whom the military list of departures and arrivals is also forwarded, may that very morning have met some officer whose regiment is quartered at Peterhoff, or Zarsko-Zelo, or Oranienbaum; and when the reports are brought to him at night by the military governor, the fancy may take him to see at what hour he entered or left the city; and, supposing his name not to have been recorded, an investigation would follow; the officer on duty at the gate would be degraded, and sent to the Caucasus, and the sergeant and sentinel be condemned to run the gauntlet.

No trifling bribe can tempt in the face of so imminent a danger. With a traveller, too, there is considerable risk, because he may always possibly be a person of mark and distinction, whose advent may attract notice to the fatal omission of his name upon the list.

The sergeant, therefore, insisted that Mattheus should descend from the vehicle; and as soon as he ascertained that he was neither a foreign diplomatist nor a military man, he put on that air of malignant severity which all officials in the Russian empire, from high to low, assume towards those over whom they hold any temporary power of annoyance; for it is worthy of remark that, if the employés of several other continental states, though far from equalling Russia, are exceedingly venal, still they either strive to extract the bribe by their good-humoured civility, or at least this civility is always tendered in return for the bribe. But in Russia all, from high to low, to whom the smallest fraction of authority is delegated or sub-delegated, go rather on the principle of bullying all who come within its range by their sternness and brutality, so that they may pay, and gladly pay, as much as possible to deprecate this gloomy severity.

But Mattheus knew exactly how to deal with the sergeant, who introduced him, and the writer who inscribed his name; and, having feed them both, he was dismissed very speedily with indifferent contempt, instead of being detained three quarters of an hour with insult and contumely.

They drove on within the limits of the city, but still only among market-gardens or blank spaces of ground, boarded in by high wooden palisades, between which buildings, most frequently of timber, were scattered at intervals, and then across the canal, and down one long street till they cut across the Nevsky Prospect, and passed under a stupendous archway surmounted by another group of allegorical figures and harnessed steeds of bronze; and then they emerged on the extreme end of a vast quadrangular space, and opposite to a prodigious, though unsightly pile, the Winter Palace, afterwards destined to be burned down, and rebuilt within a twelvemonth.

They passed the Winter Palace; which as they drove along, the quay seemed of interminable length, in consequence of its adjoining the famous Hermitage, with which an arched gallery, spanning the canal that runs into the river, connects it.

They proceeded past the line of private palaces which succeeded the Hermitage, till at length the carriage stopped before a princely edifice. The windows, looking on the Neva, were open, and several figures reclined over the balcony, whilst the sounds of music burst upon the ear. Droshkies and carriages waiting in the street showed still more clearly that there were guests within; the porter, arrayed in sober black, stood with the plate-glass door in his hand, decked in the scarf of a Swiss beadle, whilst the gaily liveried footmen behind him were evidently in holiday array.

"How very strange!" exclaimed Mattheus, "that just as his health is declining, he should have broken through the solitary habits of so many years;" and then he pressed Blanche's hand, and said with some agitation, "I am glad, dearest, to see you look so beautiful, for in another minute you will be in the presence of the best, the noblest, and the most kind of men, to whom your marriage with me, I trust, will be not only a surprise, but a rapturous surprise; and in whom you will really find a father!"

"Here?" said Blanche, with delighted astonishment at seeing the long perplexing mystery so unexpectedly and pleasingly cleared up; and then there succeeded a little of the anxious timidity which a young wife maybe excused in feeling when about to be ushered into the presence of a father-in-law, whose good opinion may so much depend upon a first and favourable impression.

The porter stepped aside with an expression of mingled deference and surprise.

"Hail to you, Mattvei Mattveitch" (Matthew the son of Matthew).

"Hail, brother!" replied Mattheus, to whom the porter's name did not immediately recur; "but how is Ivan Georgievitch" (John the son of George).

"Ivan Georgievitch! Do you jest, father? His body has been these six weeks with the worms, and his soul with the angels."

"What, dead!" shrieked the broad-shouldered and herculean Mattheus, in a voice expressing such a poignancy of agony, and with such an accent of despair, as nothing but a blow, acute and sudden, terrible and overwhelming, can wring from the bosom of a vigorous man. "Dead!" he repeated, "dead! dead! dead!"

Then raising his hands to his head, as if instinctively to compress the veins and arteries which seemed ready to burst with the dilating blood, he reeled and staggered, and fell down into a hall-chair, covering his eyes, and quite forgetful of his young, affrighted wife, who, understanding nothing of the scene, remained aghast amongst the many-liveried footmen in the hall.

"Ay, dead;" said the little dwarf Archib, starting up from the bench on which he was lying. "And he was very cold; but they put him in a coffin, a very narrow coffin, so narrow that Archib could not creep in to warm his master's feet."

"Ah, Mattvei Mattveitch!" said Dietrich, stepping forward, "you have come too late; my high and well-born master longed anxiously for you, in his last hours. Nay, truly, let our sorrow be decorous as it is sincere; suspend your grief awhile; come this way.

"Your letter reached ten days ago, not him for whom it was intended—but us. Bless me! Is that your lady-wife? Come this way."

The bustling and obsequious Dietrich led Mattheus and his wife, not up the marble staircase of the Isaakoff palace, which the reader has doubtless recognised already, but through several rooms on the ground-floor into an apartment that looked out on the yard.

An elderly Russian, bearded and habited in a threadbare caftan, and another whose Russian physiognomy could not be mistaken, though shaven and dressed in black, were sitting before a tea service.

"Dead, my father dead!" repeated Mattheus, whose thoughts seemed all concentrated in that one stunning, terrible reflection.

"Here is Mattvei Mattveitch, and the foreign wife we were just talking about," said Dietrich.

"Welcome Mattvei Mattveitch—a joy in the midst of our sorrow," said both the Russians starting up, and one after the other embracing Mattheus, who seemed still as one entranced.

"Ah! and is this your strange wife?" exclaimed the elder, whose manner had been rendered tender, whose eyes were humid, and whose breath was tainted by the contents of an empty rum bottle. "A lovely creature, a dove, by the Lord, welcome, my little soul!"

And a merchant slave of the same stamp as our old friend Vasili Petrovitch, who had vowed the pious vow to St. Sergius at the post-house of Strelna that very morning, wiping the beard about his lip, wet with the contents of his glass, on the sleeve of his caftan, caught hold of Blanche, and imprinted on her lips a couple of hearty kisses. The odour of his breath, and the coarse vulgarity and manner of the action, inspired her with a bewildering horror and disgust. As she struggled from his arms, she found herself in the embrace of Dimitri, the valet; there was on his face the presumptuous leer of the slave and varlet, who has engrafted on his low vulgarity the vices and the insolence of his superiors.

In vain Blanche looked, and called for Mattheus: she did not see him; where was he? Not rushing forward to avenge the disgusting impertinence from which his beloved wife was suffering, in his own palace or at least in the halls of his ancestors, as she imagined. No, his arms were clasped around her knees, and, frightful to behold, he was prostrate before her, like the Chenovnik's slave she had seen that morning, and with a frantic despair he dashed his forehead against the boards at her feet.

"Oh, Blanche, Blanche, Blanche! the terrible punishment of my crime has overtaken me; there is no hope, no remission for me! My father, my more than father, who could have saved everything, is dead."

"Never fear," said Blanche, whose eye was sparkling, and on whose brow the blood was proudly mantling. "Rise up, adored of my soul! rise, do not let any man say that he has seen my Mattheus in that position, even at his Blanche's feet. If a terrible misfortune has overtaken us, I feel the spirit of my race rise within me to face it. I am a heroine now, Mattheus; lift up thy noble brow, look at me, I am ready to ascend proudly with thee the steps of the scaffold, or to face the dungeon, or the torture, or the mine. If even thou wert guilty—a thousand times, guilty—thy guilt is mine; as Adam shared the guilt of Eve, so we are man and wife, and thine is mine!"

"Oh, Blanche, my injured Blanche! its consequences are on thy head already. I am the fiend, who have drawn an angel down into the infernal gulf!" and again he dashed his forehead against the ground; "oh, there is no crime like mine!"

"Come," exclaimed Blanche, with a wild exaltation, as she vainly endeavoured to raise him up, "for better or worse I took thee and thou me. Come, in my breast there is a spirit to cheer thee through every fate; come, dear Mattheus, there is a refuge on my bosom for any guilt, so it be thine."

At these words, Mattheus, rose up. "What!" he said, in a low, distinct, and bitter tone, which sounded unearthly by its contrast, "what! make the breast of Blanche Mortimer a sanctuary for the Slave?"

"The slave!" shrieked the wife, and then she sank down on the floor; and it was the frantic husband's turn to raise her up.

There is something inconceivably terrible in that peculiar crisis of grief, when an enthusiastic mind has resolutely bent itself to face the worst, and something worse even than the worst that its daring fancy had pictured has overtaken it. Death, and suffering, and separation, and pain, all had flashed across her brain in their most sombre colours. She had conjured up in her imagination, as she thought, all that was most fearful, and she had resolved to face it with the unwearying devotion of the wife and the firmness of the heroine; but when—thinking she had contemplated everything,—this sudden and astounding ignominy was added to the horrible, then like a bow, which has been distended to the utmost, and whose fibres snap when it receives a slight but sudden bend beyond its furthest distension, the spring, and force, and energy of her resolution were at once, and utterly and hopelessly destroyed.

"Mattvei Mattveitch," shouted Dietrich and his two fellow-slaves, "look, up, here comes the Lord."

Let us ascend one instant to the drawing-room of Prince Isaakoff. There lingered over their coffee about a dozen of the guests who had dined with him. The Prince was on the point of excusing himself to drive to the Yelagin Gardens, when Jakof was announced, and entered boisterously.

"So, you never told us of the beauty you were importing, by all that is enchanting, the most charming creature in St. Petersburg."

"What do you mean?" said the Prince.

"Only that I have seen her. Gentlemen, we should claim the right of hospitality: there is just arrived a travelling carriage, from which, under the private escort of one of our host's confidential slaves, has just descended into his hall a fair foreigner, not only beautiful, but distractingly beautiful."

"Oh, he was going to meet her then."

"Come, I propose," said Jakof, "that we toss up whether he shall present the lady to his chosen friends, or whether we let him off at once to enjoy her company alone."

"Your offer is very liberal," replied the Prince; "but I assure you, that my good fortune is unexpected." He addressed a question to one of his servants in a whisper.

"You know," said Jakof, "you cannot keep your light under a bushel in such a place as St. Petersburg."

"One may try," returned the Prince; "but who do you think she is, gentlemen? The foreign wife of one of those slaves whom my late father in his philanthropic mania educated and maintained abroad like noblemen, whilst I, his unfortunate son, was obliged to resort to every imaginable expedient to keep the bailiffs from the door. I am charmed, truly, to hear so favourable an account of her beauty."

"I'll bet you all I won of you last night," said Jakof, "that she is either an Italian, or a Spaniard, or a Swede, or an Englishwoman."

"An Englishwoman! who ever heard of an Englishwoman marrying a slave!"

"Come, gentlemen," said the Prince, "I am off to the Yelagin, so good night to those who will not stay for supper; but I will peep as I go at my fair vassal."

"And I have a double claim to follow," said Jakof, "firstly as having made the discovery, and secondly because we ride together."

"Let us all see her," said one of the guests.

"Gentlemen," replied the Prince, "you forget my duties as her husband's proprietor; and then if she be not worth seeing, why should I show her to you? If she be, I should feel sorry to scare her by the sight of so many strangers. Come, Jakof,—if I give him, gentlemen, an invidious preference, he has a claim which you have not in his personal appearance, for it is impossible to dread that he will win from me the smiles or approbation of the beautiful foreigner—if beautiful she be."

"Don't say the smiles," observed Lesseps, "if she can look at Jakof without roars of laughter she must be the Goddess of Gravity, and she must wait till she sees him next winter, with two little gauze bags covering his ears; that's all."

Jakof had retorted on the Prince, not by a word, but by a little movement, which, imperceptible to the rest, had stung him to the quick; but having taken his leave, he snatched his hat and strode out whip in hand, Jakof following at his heels.

"In Dietrich's room, do you say?" asked the Prince of the groom of the chambers. "Fall back, we will go out that way into the yard to seek our horses."

And thus it was that the Prince Isaakoff and his companion came to intrude on the privacy of the steward's apartment.

When Blanche raised her head, when the eyes of Mattheus turned upon the Prince Isaakoff, and when his glance met theirs, they all three remained for an instant transfixed—for he recognised them, and they recognised in him the Ivan Ivanovitch of the Opera House! It was just, too, as Jakof, who came stumbling after him, fearful that the sarcasm conveyed by his gesture should pass unnoticed, exclaimed: "You talk of personal appearance; you, the man with the flattened nose! ha, ha! ha, ha!"

The vivid recollection of the indignity which he had sustained, and the ineffaceable mark which stamped for ever the humiliation of that hour, were thus brought forcibly before the master on his first meeting with the slave.

Nothing in the whole course of that eventful life, into which he had crowded, and in which he had wearied and exhausted so many sensations, had ever taken so strong a hold of the Prince Ivan Isaakoff's mind, as that long unsatisfied revenge thus placed so suddenly within his reach. And now he felt like one who has gone to sleep a beggar, to dream of inexhaustible wealth, or to rouse to the waking dream of life in its possession. He was embarrassed where to begin with his enjoyment. His dead and lead-like eyes spoke nothing, because no passion could light up their opacity; and yet in his whole deportment there was that unmistakeable air of withering superiority and of imperious triumph, that Blanche, quickened in her perception of horrors,—as she looked upon him and then upon Mattheus, whose head sunk despondingly upon his breast, as his fatalism came to prostrate the last energies of his heart and brain—knew instinctively that the Prince Ivan Isaakoff was the awful slave-master—the arbiter of her husband's fate.

"We have met before," said the Prince, ironically, to Mattheus, "come hither! Do you remember this?" and he raised his hand to his nose. "Thus, mark for mark!" and with all the power of his arm he cut him across the face with his horsewhip.

Then Blanche felt nervously disposed to close her eyes, for she doubted not to see her slave-husband, with all the despair of Spartacus, seize the puny Prince in his muscular arms, and dash his skull to pieces against the wall; although her colour came and went, she would probably have found relief in some fearful catastrophe, which might have put an end to the hopeless, ignominious horror of her fate.

But though the blow left a deep red scar, which was rapidly changing into dolphin hues, across those features which her enthusiastic fancy had often compared to the mythologic deities, Mattheus only bowed his head, and letting it sink submissively upon his bosom, folded his arms, and stood in ignoble deprecation of his tyrant's wrath.

"Fear nothing, Madam," said the Prince to Blanche, "I do but chastise the insolence of my slave."

Blanche's blood boiled. Oh, how she longed that the cool Neva had flowed before that window! and, panting and bewildered, the only expression into which her features were visibly moulded, was that of an intensity of despair and of disgust.

"You will remember, Madam, that nothing but your presence saves him from further castigation; and that any mitigation of the punishment due to his insolence can only be obtained through your intercession for him."

"For him!" said Blanche, pointing to her husband with ineffable scorn. And then the wretched Mattheus indeed felt the iron entering into his soul; the cup of his misery, full before, ran over now.

Was it the supernatural endurance of one determined to make every human reparation possible, or was he awed into less than man by the instinctive terrors which become, by dint of transmission through so many generations, the debasing heritage of a line of slaves, when in the presence of their tyrants? Something of both the heroism of the martyr's winning patience and the bondsman's servile and desponding fear had been mingled in him, to make him play a part so gentle in a scene so harrowing.

"Madam," said the Prince, "those eyes recall to me that I have sunned myself before in their glances; you remember, perhaps, a certain passage respecting a rose-bud; by the by, let this bouquet pay you back a debt so sweet; as for this worthless slave, this pilfering merchant, and the thieving steward, I cannot leave you in their company. You will send that fellow to the stables and give his lady apartments; do you hear me, Dietrich."

"Hear me!" said Blanche, "if there be one of your accursed race more contemptible than another, I know not whether it is the brutal master or the crouching serf. But I am Blanche Mortimer, I, at least will fly far from the contamination and pollution into which my unpractised inexperience has led me." Here she threw down, and trampled on his nosegay. "Make way, let me pass, I charge you. I am not your slave!"

"Nay, there my indignant beauty," said the Prince, seizing her hand, "you are in error; by the Russian law, if a free woman marries my slave, she too becomes a slave, and you are mine."

"I!" said Blanche Mortimer, "good God!" and she sank upon the chair.

"Bravo," said Jakof, "she is very charming, but I knew directly I saw her, that she was an actress; ask her to let us see her foot."

CHAPTER IV.

Gentle reader, did you ever see a fawn in an old park, mirroring itself in the glassy water, which reflects alike its graceful form, and the steady gaze of its full, soft hazel eyes?

Or have you ever watched as I have in an Alpine solitude, a young chamois which has never yet been scared by the sight of a human form, standing on the brink of a blue mountain pool, and turning the liquid light of its orbs to mark its own image in the cold chaste wave, whose basin is the unthawed ice? If you have, you can the better imagine Nadeshta by the river's side, on a placid summer evening, thoughtfully scattering rose leaves on the shifting bosom of the stream, and harmonising so indescribably with the scene by the youth, and grace, and beauty, and timidity, which her figure and her attitude conveyed.

In their wild, happy freedom, there is a restless fearfulness which speaks in all the motions of the gentle deer tribe, who have only their vigilance, and their winged feet for their protection, and something of this too is in Nadeshta's glance and in her air. As she muses beside those deep, solitary waters, whose course, curving above and below where she is standing, seemed enclosed by bower-like wood and florid meadow, you might have fancied her Undine; but Undine with the inquietude of her earthly lover transfused into her own soft eyes. Is it love which gives those eyes that restless and mournful expression? For though it is the age of youthful mirth, it is the age too of love with her; and love draws tears like those which fall from them on the smooth sheet of the river's surface, where their circling ripples disturb the dimples of the eddy, amongst which the scattered fragments of the rose are floating leaf by leaf.

Oh! no—Nadeshta has never yet felt any love, but that for an absent brother—a brother, absent so long that this love is almost an ideal abstraction. But Nadeshta is a slave.

It is true that in yonder village, nay, along that very stream, throughout the happy summer, the merry song of other slave-girls resounds from morn to night, awakening the birds with early day, and disturbing them as they sink to rest at even-tide. They are born so, and heed no more their sad condition than do the butterflies the killing and inevitable winter, as they flit so gaily from flower to flower, along the river's banks.

But Nadeshta, alas! has drunk of the fatal cup of knowledge:—the light of education has beamed in, to show unto herself her desolate condition. The art of cunning men, which records immortally the stirring thoughts of others, together with the thoughts recorded, which paint, describe, instruct and move upon a page—made up from filthy rags, and charactered in signs of grease and ashes, the true type of those elements, whose gross corruption the human soul redeems—all these had given her glimpses of a vast and mighty world beyond, beautiful, and strange, and full of life. And this fatal knowledge had made it hers to love, abhor, and long and suffer, whilst her pitiless fate rooted her to the soil, like a tree to which these feelings might be given, whilst all power of action was hopelessly denied.

"Go!" thought Nadeshta, as the scattered rose leaves whirled slowly round in the eddy and then fleeted onwards. "Go! Float gently down the stream! That stream leads to a river, and the river, to a free, illimitable ocean. Go! the breeze that wafts you gently with the current, though it sweeps over the dark wood, and the sweltering marsh, and the dull monotonous village—still travelling on, in a few hours may roar amongst the life and change of stormy waters, or revel amidst golden lands, as it sighs through trellised vines and marble palaces, and fountained gardens, or it may sweep through the crowded streets of cities, where genius, beauty, virtue, wit, and learning, stamp a human being's value, and where the high deeds and thoughts, the blood and the eloquence, of the brave, and generous, and gifted, whilst hallowing the scene, have made all free, and given a hope to all ambition. The swallow that skims so gracefully the water's surface, the birds that sing so joyously upon the branches around me, may all flit onward to happier climes and sunnier skies—they do not, because they are free, where Nadeshta is a slave. The very mist, that rises up at even from the slough of the damp wood and of the spongy morass, hurries in on the sweeping clouds, for the breeze which leaves Nadeshta weeping here, will help that vapour onwards, far, far away, to descend where it may list, in showers. All things inanimate and animate seem to have a future and a hope—but I have none. And yet the nightingale, since foolish thing it stays, finds here a sojourn it loves as well as the orange groves of Spain or Italy. What matters it to the wind, whether it howl through a dark pine forest with the wolves, or ripple the blue Mediterranean? What cares the vapour whether it lie amongst the humid moss or sodden leaves of a Russian wood, or descend in dew on the opening roses of Stamboul? But I am not indifferent as the bird, or the wind, or the wave, or the vapour, for I have peeped into the world beyond the dull horizon which imprisons me. The artist's skill has shown me the imagery of Greek and Roman ruined temples—sun-lit and reflected in blue waters; and the gay and statued gardens of the Tuileries, and the woodbined cottages of England, and seas where white sails, more numerous than the sea-mews, speck the distance and bustling sea-ports, and the wild Alps, and the smiling plains of Lombardy, and the beautiful vales of Switzerland with the chalets which stud them, looking like our own log dwellings, but where all are free and happy within. And I have read of the high destiny of man, where men have been and are heroes and sages, and where it is woman's glorious mission to inspire them; where, as Grecian wife or Roman mother, the name of woman has won an immortality; where Chivalry in its romance has raised her on a pedestal and worshipped; or, where the burning odes and tender madrigals of poets and of lovers have been poured out to intoxicate her, like a bird's impassioned song.

"Alas! why do I know that such things are? that such scenes should invite and glow, and such men people them, for others, not for me? Ah, why was I made to know all this? Why? Oh, cruel benefactor! whose memory my reason curses and my affection holds so dear, why take Nadeshta like a cage-bred bird, and show her the wild woods and the free meadows, and the glorious skies, and then forget to untie the string which binds her fluttering to her cage for ever, hopeless and alone?

"Alone!—alone!—alone!—For, oh! Mattvei, my brother!—the brother of whom thy Nadeshta is so proud—the brother for whose coming she hath longed, as the withering flowers long for rain!—can I wish thee, now, to come from the happy lands where thou art roaming free? to come within the limits, where the law fetters thee with chains, which have never been unbound, which a master's caprice may rivet, and in which thy noble heart would burst!

"Alone! alone and hopeless! it is Nadeshta's doom to live.

"Go! tears! the free-born of the slave-girl's weeping eyes! Her body is registered with the lands, the serfs, and the cattle of her Lord. Her heart is with Mattvei, and her thoughts and soul she will upraise to the Virgin Mother! So—go, my tears, and float free with the wild wave!

"For I know that there are men who acknowledge no master but their God, and, owning their own bodies as we do our thoughts and souls, struggle for honourable wealth and fame, cheered by the smiles of those they love, and attaining them by the noble road of good done to their fellow-men; not as with us, by cringing to the agent's agent of a Lord, who in his turn trembles at his Tsar's name, like the grey hare in the wood when startled by the rustling leaves. I know there are such men, and nightly do I dream of them, full of high beauty, with open noble brows and fearless eyes, which have never learned to quail since they were opened to the light; valiant, and chivalrous, and feeling, and full of all that soft devoted tenderness and gentle delicacy, which must be to love like the gay powder on the wings of the bright butterfly, without which it sinks into the dust and dies.

"I dream of them, in some lilac walk, or next the fountain of a citron grove, upon their bended knees as lovers; and then the dream vanishes and I awake in my dull village. There is the sordid steward and his family, and there pass by my fellow slave-girls singing thoughtlessly, destined to become the wives of coarse and brutal men, to tremble beneath the lash of husbands drunk with vodka on the Sunday, when unyoked from their weekly toil, and trembling on the Monday in their turn beneath the Oupravitel's lash—all counted and regarded like the master's cattle; and as without a hope, so almost without a wish for aught, save to eat, and drink, and sleep, and to escape from blows."

It was many years ago that Nadeshta, with her orphan brother, wandering along that very river in search of mushrooms, had first attracted the notice of Prince Isaakoff.

The Prince was of a disposition so notoriously benevolent, that when his wealth, and the absolute power of a Russian landed proprietor over his serfs is considered, it is difficult to believe that his forty thousand peasants were not as happy as ever falls to the lot of humanity; but unluckily, boundless authority and unlimited benevolence do not suffice, unless united to firmness and activity, to ensure the well-being of fellow-men committed to a single individual's charge. Whilst his life was spent in philanthropic plans, his agents, who humoured his fancy, still managed somewhat to oppress his people, because he had, like the Emperor Alexander, the amiable but unfortunate weakness, of wishing, at any cost, to see nothing around him but happy faces.

Now it was equally difficult both for the Emperor and for the land-holder to bring smiles into the faces of favourites and land-stewards whom they saw daily, excepting at the price of tears, drawn from the eyes of those remote from their notice. But at least all of his serfs and dependents, who by any chance came under the Prince Isaakoff's notice, were cared for with the solicitude of one whose large heart, redeeming his little mind, had learned to seek its whole happiness in the happiness of others.

He was struck with the beauty of these two little slave children, whom he had never seen before; and when, in a sudden shower, they took refuge under his cloak and related to him, with artless simplicity, their forlorn and orphan condition, he determined to be to them rather the natural protector they had lost than the master whom his birth had made him.

They were taken into his house, and served together with his dwarf and his Newfoundland-dog to amuse his hours of melancholy leisure. Their infantine graces gradually won still further upon his affections, and the more readily from the contrast between their dispositions and that of his only son, a sickly youth, whose malignant temper might have given any father uneasiness, but was a source of ceaseless unhappiness to the Prince Isaakoff, who seemed to have united in his own bosom the kindliness of two individuals, and his wayward child—unredeemed by one good quality—to have combined more than the malevolence of any two ordinary characters.

The young Ivan, who was named after his father, but according to the universal Russian custom, with his father's name appended to his own, which made it Ivan Ivanovitch, (or John the son of John,) was one day lashing with his tiny whip a little peasant whom he had hunted into a corner, when the boy Mattvei, bold in the Prince's favouritism, stayed his hand. And then, with all his childish passions of jealousy and hatred roused, the young heir, seizing a heavy hatchet, had fractured Mattvei's skull.

From that time the Prince became more and more estranged from his own offspring, and looked on his protection towards Mattheus as a duty. He had already educated many of his serfs, maintained them at universities, and brought them up as doctors, architects, or artists, furnishing them afterwards with a capital to start in life. He had, by his protection and assistance, raised many others to the condition of thriving shopkeepers or wealthy merchants. But for Mattvei he determined to do something more. Not only was he sent early to the university of Dorpat, where his name—for the slave had no name but his Christian name of Matthew or Mattvei—was latinized—according to the custom of northern pedantry, into Mattheus, which passed well enough for a patronymic.

From Dorpat his affectionate protector sent him to travel abroad; for the Emperor Nicholas had not yet issued the ukase which, under pain of confiscation of property and still severer penalties, forbids any Russian subject, not a nobleman, to remain more than one year out of the empire, or the nobleman more than three—that is to say, in the few instances in which foreign passports are not altogether denied.

The instructions of Mattheus were simply to travel, to collect objects of art and virtu for the Prince, and to cultivate those literary or artistic tastes which he might feel inclined to indulge. The allowance which the benevolent Lord made to his favourite serf was such as would have done credit to the liberality of a sovereign; and, when Mattheus returned to him the surplus, he laid it aside and allowed it to accumulate into a fund which would secure him a handsome independence, and to which his generosity was constantly adding.

But there was one point on which the conduct of the good slave-master was strangely contradictory, for, whilst it was the dearest wish of his heart to secure the happiness of such of his slaves as had attracted his particular notice, and whilst he was perfectly sensible of the inestimable value of freedom, which he had never dreamed of eventually withholding, he could never readily bring himself to part with the control which his position gave him over them, even after his arguments had ceased to persuade himself that he could exercise it as a means of salutary and restrictive parental control. Then, when he had settled in his own mind the fitness of their immediate enfranchisement, he would put off the necessary steps for a month or two, or reserve the gift for a sudden and pleasant surprise to those on whom he intended to bestow it.

Hence with Mattheus, who knew the feeling of his master, it became a matter of delicacy not to press on his indulgence, though he knew that he could always so far count upon it as to insure receiving whenever he should ask it, his manumission at his hands.

Meanwhile the Prince Isaakoff did not neglect Nadeshta. She was sent as a relative of the family to a fashionable French school at Moscow, where she was instructed in every branch of female accomplishment, and of course became a proficient in the French, the language of every Russian drawing-room.

But an absence of several years, without diminishing the benevolence of the Prince's intentions towards her, had partially weaned his affection, and enabled him to perceive her growth into womanhood, and the injurious rumours to which her residence with an unmarried protector might give rise. He therefore established her in the family of the resident land-steward of his estate, until such time as her brother should return and take her under his own roof, whilst her manumission he had always put off until that of Mattheus should take place. It thus happened that, between grateful delicacy on the one side, and procrastination on the other, death had overtaken the Prince in the midst of good intentions unfulfilled.

CHAPTER V.

When Xerxes, with his hosts as numerous as the sand of the sea-shore had signally failed in subduing a handful of freemen, and when one name was indissolubly bound up in glorious connection with this great failure, the rankling recollection of which the tyrant strove to drown in the bubbling wine-cup—the monarch, pursuing in his sleep the all-absorbing thought of his waking hours, is said to have exclaimed, "I hold him! I hold Themistocles the Athenian!"

And so the Prince Ivan Isaakoff awoke from a feverish dream, crying aloud, as he leapt energetically on his feet from his sofa, "I hold him! I hold him!"

Themistocles did not occupy the thoughts of the Persian King more incessantly than the stranger of the opera-house had recurred to the indignant recollection of the Prince. And the Athenian was less in the Persian monarch's power than the slave Mattheus in that of his malignant master. Xerxes, too, was ambitious, and restricted by considerations of his king-like fame, whilst at best his great supplicant had made him arbiter of his present and of his future, for he had no power over his glorious past—that past into whose memory everything resolves itself—which the folly of pseudo proverb-making sapience despises, but which true wisdom esteems as the only certain and unchangeable good, which no caprice of fortune can alter or take from us.

But the Prince Ivan had no ambition to usurp the place of vengeance in his mind, where no considerations arose to restrain its exercise, whilst Mattheus, whose life had hitherto been rather a hope of the future on which he was entering, than an enjoyment of any present which made a satisfying past, was thus placed with his whole existence in his power. For every human destiny the thread of which is not untimely broken, or which does not close in that barrenness which all men unconsciously struggle to avoid, will be found to consist of a period of action and of one of passiveness; the latter filled up by hope when it precedes, and by grateful remembrance when it follows, the life of fruition. But then the positive past resembles the golden fruits of autumn; there is no keen wind which can now prevent that maturity which is reached; but when the early portion of existence is spent in hopes, the cutting blast sweeps them all for ever from the tree, and when they fall there is nothing to garner up and satisfy and fill the soul.

Is not this the reason of that moral phenomenon, which makes the wretch to whom life has been a step-mother still cling to it with desperate energy, whilst those who have lived in the enjoyment of pleasure or prosperity, or gratified ambition, are seen to relinquish it with comparative indifference?

Now Mattheus, year after year, had looked forward to the period of his promised manumission, which he considered as his real entrance into life. He had studied, he had treasured up knowledge, he had embued himself with the learning, the ideas, and the sentiments of the great and good—not as things with which the slave had anything to do—but to be used in this new life of freedom on which he was about to enter. And this entrance it was in the power of the Prince Ivan utterly and for ever to bar; thus making the past a blank, a chaos of blasted hopes and ruined aspirations, whilst he remained beside the supreme and cruel arbiter of his present fate and future destiny.

For many years past, the Prince had felt a feverish and intense desire for that sensation of excitement, which he could so rarely find to stimulate his palled appetite and torpid feelings. It had come at length in the form of hatred. But as, in those nervous diseases, where the patient longs for change to some definite sensation, though it be even to suffering—and thirst comes—though thirst be change, it is only change of pain, till the deep draught is upraised to allay its cravings. The draught was there. But, as it had come so unexpectedly, he determined to waste no portion of that for which he had longed so ardently by his impatience or imprudence; and, therefore, whilst he looked in the cheval glass at his broken nose, he bethought himself that both Mattheus and his wife, like all other travellers, must have given their names at the gate on entering the capital, and that they would therefore be obliged to present themselves within three days at the office of the secret police, where all persons newly arrived from abroad, whether strangers or Russians, must undergo a strict examination.

He therefore judged it expedient to let this interview pass before he took any step which might render either the slave or his wife so desperate as to appeal to the grand-master of the high or secret police.

Not that they would have met with any eventual assistance, although it happens to be the avowed object of this institution to give redress in those cases which the laws do not profess to reach. But then such a complaint would afford this Russian Holy-Office a delightful opportunity for nibbling at his property; for, if it would not prevent his "doing as he liked with his own," yet, in consideration of his million of yearly revenue, it would make him pay handsomely for this luxury. He therefore summoned Dietrich, who was told to release Mattheus from the stable in which he was confined, and to intimate to him that his master's vengeance was satisfied, and that he would be allowed to negotiate for his freedom.

"And, in fact," added the Prince, "suppose that this morning I were to sign the freedom of Vasili Petrovitch—he offers me five and twenty thousand roubles, and, though one might get more out of him—you have rated him, I see, at forty—the fellow is apoplectic, he might slip his wind, and do me altogether. You can hold that out to Mattheus as a bait. Let us see who is the next upon the list. Oh! one of my father's protégés, a bachelor of arts of the University of Heidelberg, brought up to the medical profession, offers a beggarly ten thousand roubles. It will not do: I'll keep him for a house-doctor. And then there is Rouguenieff, who humbly offers seven thousand roubles. The rascal! Is that the wealthy fishmonger?"

"Oh, no! my high well-born master," answered the obsequious Dietrich. "Rouguenieff would not offer so much to be free; he has made money lately, but he turns round, and refuses to pay his debts."

"Ah, I understand!" exclaimed the Prince; "since a slave is not liable for more than a debt of five shillings, he would prefer not to be free just now. Send him to me to-morrow, and tell him I will give him his liberty, unless he can show me a substantial argument to the contrary. I dare say it is provoking to thee, Dietrich; but thou seest I know the exact value of my flock, from which to take the fleece, and from which the milk, and from which the hide!"

Dietrich had not obeyed the orders of his master to the letter; instead of confining Mattheus in a stable, he shut him in a room formerly belonging to the stallmeister, or director of the stable, to the late Prince, who of late years had left the office unfilled in his establishment. For, in the first place, Dietrich had always been perfectly aware of the old Prince's affection for his slave, and he never entertained a doubt either of his manumission whenever he should return, or of his being able to obtain, if he desired it, so entire an influence over his weak benefactor as to assume the entire management of his affairs, and to be able to command as a freeman to any extent the resources of his immense fortune. He had, therefore, considered it politic to ingratiate himself as much as possible with Mattheus by offers of service and protestations of friendship, which he increased when the conduct and letters of the absentee showed that, with the education of a gentleman, he had imbibed or affected an indolent indifference to his pecuniary interests.

"My dear child," wrote the old Prince to him a week before he died, "the child of my affections, if not of my blood. At length I must call thee back; long, very long, I have struggled between the desire of having thee with me and the advantage to thee of thy foreign sojourn, of which I am fully conscious. But I have been now long suffering—not that I believe my malady dangerous—and I am growing an old man; my spirits are low, very low, and I cannot resist the selfish temptation of recalling my dear son to cheer me with his presence; for, though I have many children whom I consider as such, and though I have one who bears my name and will occupy my station, and who has my forgiveness and good wishes, thou knowest well, dear Mattheus, that thou art still the first-born of my heart. I am still kindly tended by the good, honest Dietrich. I do not think that he understands affairs, but he joins in all my little plans of philanthropy, and he loves me well, and so he does thee, my boy. He writes to thee respectfully himself, enclosing the letter from thy dear sister, Nadeshta, who is still with the family of Dietrich's brother, at the Bialoe Darevnia, and from whence thou shalt fetch her as soon as thou arrivest."

Now, though it was true that the Prince's death and the animosity of this present heir against Mattheus had utterly changed this state of things, yet Dietrich had been on such terms with the latter as rendered it difficult for him to disavow all sympathy with his misfortune. And then Dietrich had been made the confidant of the marriage of Mattheus with a beautiful and wealthy foreigner; and although he knew that the large sum which the late Prince had laid aside as the portion of his virtually adopted slave had been quietly confiscated by his successor, with many other sums intended for similar purposes, still, in right of his wife, he was possessed of other resources, of which Dietrich might reasonably hope that his position would allow him to take advantage.

The frame and constitution of Mattheus were of that enduring organization which nature, fitting the back to the burden, seems to have bestowed upon all human races long enslaved; just as, in the animal kingdom, it has protected the camel's knees by callosities and the hide of the patient ass by insensibility. But his strong and vigorous body, though unimpaired, showed all the traces of having struggled with a mind intensely sensitive, wrought up to madness, but to which insensibility had not given relief, his bodily strength having held his mind, as it were, at the stake, to prevent its escape into unconsciousness from the agony of one single pang.

His eyes were red and protruding; and, if his hair had not grown grey in that single night, which he had spent in pacing up and down, his features had taken an expression of which some of the lines were so indelibly stamped, that they could never be effaced by any smiles—if for him the uncertain future had any smiles in store.

When education had thrown open to the enthusiastic mind of Mattheus the past history and the contemporary position of his fellow-men, he had felt, like his sister Nadeshta, a deep and humiliating sense of his degradation; and his subsequent years of study and of travel, his contemplation of antiquity, his examination of the struggles of men for freedom and enlightenment through every age, and his visits to the very spots hallowed as the cradles of philosophy and liberty with their attendant arts and sciences, or, distinguished as the battle-fields on which they had struggled in their adolescence, or dignified by the triumphant reign of their still inexperienced manhood—all this had imbued him with an admiration of what was most extreme in the wildest and most impracticable theories of those, whose noble error dreamed an impossible liberty and equality. And, at the same time, whilst this appreciation taught him the double and complicated ignominy of his position as the bondsman of a man who himself was not free, it is scarcely to be wondered at that his hatred of all oppression grew intemperate and intense.

The time arrived when Mattheus identified himself in feeling and in wishes only with those who, by bold and bloody acts, had struck down tyrants in the zenith of their power; and the dream of his ambition had been, not for power, or wealth, or fame, but only for one successful hour of the lives of Thrasybulus, of Brutus, or of William Tell; and who, that in England talked twenty years ago of Church and King, and an inalterable Constitution, knows in what morbid thirst of vengeance his energies might have centered, if consciously placed in a position lower than that of the negro slave, as Mattheus was, being, like every Russian serf, the slave of an enslaved master?

Now his acquaintance with Blanche and the love with which she inspired him, whilst it left his convictions unaltered and his predilections unenfeebled, giving a new aim and object to his ambition, taught him to forget his wild democratic longings, in the hope of enjoying individual independence and personal happiness with her.

If, on their journey to St. Petersburg, Mattheus had laboured under presentiments which happened to be afterwards unfortunately realized, there had been, notwithstanding this instinctive misgiving, no reasonable cause to doubt the success of all his plans. They had been overturned by two of those rare and consecutive accidents, against the occurrence and combination of which no human foresight can ever provide, and the complicated fatality of which might, in almost any situation of life, have deranged the most cautiously concerted project. It required the singular and successive ill fortune of losing his generous patron, when six weeks more of life would have sufficed to crown his wishes, and of meeting with a master in the very man he had chastised.

When, therefore, these strange mischances did occur, Mattheus, notwithstanding the vague preparation of his forebodings, did not the less feel all his energies prostrated by the unexpected death of the old Prince, his benefactor, and by finding himself so utterly in the power of a man whom he had mortally offended.

So sudden and so terrible were these successive blows, that all the pride of the enthusiast, all the magnificent resolutions of years, and all the temper which he thought his character had taken from his long contemplation and his vivid sense of man's natural right and the slave's individual wrongs, gave way together. Instead of the edge, and elasticity, and hardness of the tempered steel, which struggles against, or breaks, unyielding in the grasp, or wounds the hand that tries to bend it; before this unexpected fate he felt himself bowed like a springless bar of softened unresisting iron. And then at the same time there flashed across his mind one of those terrible doubts, which had occasionally and at intervals assailed it, a doubt which more frequently and more fatally crosses the mind of the bondsman than he cares to avow everywhere.

"Are there not, perhaps," he thought, "certain races which nature has doomed to servitude, to which in vain the noblest aspirations may be given, since they are always destined at the eleventh and decisive hour to find their will and courage fail?"

Thus, after so many years' absence, during which he had learned to look with loathing and contempt alike upon the submission of the serfs and the tyranny of their servile tyrants, when he found himself suddenly placed in a position, in which he would formerly have laid down so many plans of desperate action, he felt himself as much overawed and overwhelmed as the Cimbrian slave when he quailed in the presence of Marius.

From this sickening despondency he was awakened, not by the lash of the Prince's horsewhip across his cheek, but by the haughty contempt spoken at once from eyes and lips which he had never heard or seen before expressing aught but words and looks of admiration, love, and tenderness.

This indeed aroused him to the full vivacity of his mental energy, as suddenly and agonisingly as the searing iron applied to the torpid nerves awakes them from their lethargic stupor; and in this frame of mind he had been confined by Dietrich in the apartment in which he had spent the night.

His first impulse was a harrowing regret that the past hour was not again before him, a delirious longing for the next opportunity which would bring him face to face again with the Prince Isaakoff. In imagination, he had seized the sickly tyrant and strangled him by twisting the embroidered cravat about his neck; he had grasped him in his Herculean arms, and, notwithstanding the interference of Dietrich and of the foolish Jakof, for he was fully conscious of his own extraordinary power of muscle, he would have thrown the crushed and bruised carcase, whose ribs would have collapsed and broken as in the embraces of a bear, all lifeless and disjointed at the feet of Blanche. Would she then have given him that look of disdain? And, after all, he could only have died; and did he now deliberately dream of living?

But then again he thought what would be her fate—would she not become the property of some distant and unknown inheritor of Isaakoff's fortune? Her too he had dragged into an abyss, from which there was no honourable escape but death; it was true that her deep blue eyes, the eyes which seemed to him to reflect the hues of Heaven, he had seen enthusiastically kindle, when she had heard or read of lovers dying together; and he could fancy how, if he had snatched down one of the Asiatic scimetars or yatagans, which lined the walls and stabbed her to the heart, instead of that withering look of contempt, her face would have worn the expression of the dying daughter of Virginius, where the marble struggles with death and with affectionate pride, as the father holds up the reeking knife to Heaven, which he has just plunged into his daughter's bosom. For that one act—however degradingly, a master's heel might before have trampled him in the dust—that one act would have raised him from infamy to the sublimity of heroism; and that act he was now in his exaltation eager to accomplish. But, alas! how keenly he felt that, just as it is not merely the brilliancy of the thought or the language in which the idea is arrayed, which constitutes eloquence, without the à-propos of its delivery, so the want of à-propos in resolution and in action had changed the only good which fortune had left him—her love and admiration—into loathing and contempt, whilst, alike for both, in either case, there was nothing—but to die!

And then he gnashed his teeth to think that, by the irresolution of that hour, he had perhaps lost even the power of saving her by death from a fate too horrible to think on.

The past, however, was irretrievable; and, as he looked towards the future, he was determined, at the first opportunity which should bring him into the presence of his tyrant, be it in an hour, or in a day, or in a week, to take a terrible revenge for the indignities he had suffered—for the life whose happiness was blasted—and to perish, dealing death and terror round him.

Then Blanche could only pity, or at worst hate, but not despise him: the fury of the overloaded camel, the venom of the trampled reptile, are full of terror; and the lowliest slave, when desperation guides his reeking knife, rises at once from the contemptible to the fearful, even in his master's estimation.

It is true that, by a common effect of long and utter servitude upon a race not naturally excitable, even when the prospects which life held forth were so intolerable that he dreamed no longer of living, still the irresistible awe which he felt of the oppression, to which he and his fathers had been born, would have caused him rather to steal out of life, rather to have terminated his existence in some obscure and sulky corner, with all the hatred of his despair fierce in the last palpitations of his heart, than to break openly and boldly away from life and its unendurable bonds, involving, like the dying Sampson, his enemies in a common ruin.

But then the remembrance of the contemptuous look and words of Blanche, lashed on his resolution, like the scorpion scourge of the avenging Furies, into that degree of terrible fixity, which betrays itself not by heat and fury, but by its cool and stony immobility, like the lava, which, boiling and molten, may waste or scatter itself abroad or change its course; but which, once cold and hardened, retains eternally its bent and form.

In this humour, hour passed after hour and found Mattheus. His arms were proudly crossed upon his breast, his head was raised in a loftier attitude, as he paced up and down the solitary apartment, of which Dietrich had taken the key, and it was evident that, as his thoughts recurred to the examples of antiquity which he was about to follow, he had risen in his self-estimation, like a slave, who had cast aside the habit of his servitude, to drape himself in the tunic or the toga of a stern republican of ancient Rome.

But, as he paced up and down the place of his confinement, his eye, (which had rested for the hundredth time on a little picture, the deep, gilt, gaudy frame of which glittered in the light of the lamp suspended before it,) suddenly conveyed to the mind the meaning of the object towards which his glance had been so often mechanically directed.

It was an image of the Virgin and her God-born child, set forth, not by the genius of art, by a Raphael, a Guido, or a Carlo Dolce, but in the hideously orthodox portraiture of the barbarous artists of a barbaric people. The faces soiled by time and encased by tawdry splendour, were in themselves grotesque; but, in the mind, or, perhaps it should be said, in the heart of Mattheus, the sight awakened a long dormant train of ideas and feelings. It was before a similar image that he last remembered kneeling with his mother—a good pious peasant woman—with his infant sister Nadeshta in her arms! And thus it recalled that beloved sister, who so many years had been looking forward to their meeting, and who had regarded him as her living hope of being extricated from a position like his own, in which he alone could console her, and whom he must now leave unprotected. It recalled his thoughts from the stern Pagan virtues to the duties of love, as a beautiful image of that most universal abstraction of all selfish feeling—the love of the mother for her child! It recalled the sublime and distinctive doctrines of Christianity, with its utter self-sacrifice; and thus by degrees the absorbing ideas of his outraged dignity as a man, and of the gratification of his revenge, which appeared so noble beside the submission of the crouching slave, in its turn gave place in his mind to a sense of the sublimity of self-denial and of suffering for those we love.

Then first, really forgetting self, he began to turn over in his mind whether any possible plan, whether the endurance of any possible degree of human degradation or suffering, could save her whom he had drawn into this fearful situation from the fate that awaited her; and, when he had turned it over in his mind, a hope and light broke in upon him, and he resolved—to live!

His first duty, his first and fondest wish, was to save the generous, confiding, and enthusiastic wife, who had been so fearless of uniting her fate to poverty or misfortune, but who had found misfortune and ignominy.

Having still the resource of Blanche's fortune, he was not without hope that, by a sacrifice of a portion of it, he might still be able to contrive her escape from the country. And to accomplish this he determined to submit to any humiliation, suffering, or contumely, which the wrath or malice of the Prince Isaakoff might heap upon him. He resolved to endure it, whether or not his injured wife should appreciate the depth of his expiatory sacrifice. For, perhaps, she might only look upon it, after all, as resulting from the pitiful spirit of the hereditary bondsman!

The dread of this interpretation was perhaps the bitterest part of his anticipated trial; for it seemed to him then that there was nothing which he should not find strength to undergo, did he but know that Blanche was aware of all he was now suffering to repair the unintentional injury which he had done her.

Now the projects he had formed, and which he resolved to modify according to circumstances, required indispensably two things: in the first place, that he should contrive to see Blanche speedily, and persuade her, as the only means of enabling him to carry out his views of saving her, to affect a serious illness. When, therefore, Dietrich, with many expressions of condolence and of sympathy, came to relieve him from his durance, and to assure him both that the Prince's wrath was appeased, and that by his (Dietrich's) management, the manumission of his friend would probably be obtained for a reasonable price, although Mattheus was not deceived as to the intentions of his master regarding him, at all events he saw in his present leniency the means of taking the first steps towards fulfilling his designs. As to his wife, Dietrich assured him that there was no objection to his seeing her forthwith, and that she had been so well taken care of that, even at that moment, the house-doctor was with her, and in fact, by a singular fatality, the illness which Mattheus intended to persuade her to feign, had overtaken her, and it was of a very serious nature. When he rejoined her, she was, as she had been for many hours, delirious.

After spending uninterruptedly two hours by her side, during which, in her incoherent ravings, she gave no signs of recognition, he was at last reminded by Dietrich that he was expected by the Prince that morning to present himself at the office of the secret police, taking with him a doctor's certificate of his wife's inability to attend.

Now the first steps of Mattheus were not to the office of the police, but up the crowded Nevsky Prospect, the principal street of the metropolis, along which he continued for a couple of miles, until, reaching the part where its glories and magnificence begin to fade, and the brilliant aspect of the European capital to merge into the Oriental city, he stopped before the vast bazaar called the Gostinoi Dvor.

The Gostinoi Dvor is a large square building, presenting the external aspect of a double covered gallery, one story surmounting the other, and showing, through its long range of small arches, a row of cells on each floor. These cells are the shops and warehouses of some thousands of bearded shop-keepers, who have not their dwellings but merely their places of business here. Some are now glass-windowed, and have assumed the appearance of other European shops; but most of them are still quite open, and have nothing to secure them from the inclemency of the air but the heavy iron plated doors and shutters, which are barred up at night, when the tenants of these cells retire.

Mattheus passed onward, pressing through the motley crowd, which, circulating beneath the piazza, relieved by its bustle the gloomy, massive, and prison-like appearance of the building; and, resisting all the seductions of the itinerant venders of cold tea, caviar, and pickled lampreys, established under the protection of the arches of the ground-floor, and the solicitations of the shopkeepers or their assistants, as pressing as those of the old clothesmen, who about certain lanes and alleys of London, formerly seized the passenger by the skirt of his coat, as if they could secure his custom by impeding the progress of his person, at length he paused before the shop or store of Vasili Petrovitch. It was an open shop, and lengths of cloth and stuffs, hanging from the ceiling, indicated that it was dedicated to the trade in drapery. Within it was a red-haired youth, with a slight nascent beard, his hair parted in the middle, and clad in a caftan, which, being lined with the inferior reddish refuse of the fox-skin, was left open, displaying a very coarse and dirty shirt, under a greasy sky-blue satin stock, besprinkled with rose-buds, and ornamented with a mosaic gold pin; the two last mentioned articles being an engraftment of foreign elegance on his Muscovite costume.

At his feet was a samovar, the national bright brass tea urn, with its central chimney and little charcoal furnace beneath it, to ignite which it is placed in the draught of the open air.

The attention of the youth seemed divided between watching the progress of the urn and the progress of a repast in the inner shop, at which seven or eight men were seated, all the while not forgetting at intervals to recommend in a loud voice to the passengers the wares which he was placed there to watch, until relieved and allowed to take his turn at the banquet table.

When Mattheus, marking the number, decidedly paused before the door, the shopman, making a low bow and placing the supposed customer between himself and the shop, so that he could hardly escape until he had time to try all his powers of persuasion upon him, exclaimed in the most insinuating tones, "Hail to you, my Lord, what is your pleasure?"

"Tell me, brother," replied Mattheus, "is Vasili Petrovitch within?"

"That is he," said the lad pointing to one of the group at the table, and Mattheus at once entered the shop.

Here, with five other bearded men, Vasili Petrovitch had patriarchally taken his seat. One wore a new sheepskin coat looking like a robe of the inside of a soiled white kid glove, and another a garment of the same kind which had grown black and greasy with time, and which, perhaps, as well as his under-clothing, had never been removed excepting when he took his weekly bath, since eighteen months ago, when he first donned it in its virgin purity of hue. The others, like Vasili Petrovitch, were clad in dark green cloth caftans, which were naturally cooler than the fur-lined garments, and showed to the practised eye of Mattheus a distinction of rank, being assumed by the peasant; whereas the trader, or even the traders' assistant, may be considered to have entered the burgher class.

The strong smell of cabbage indicated that, as usual, in the form of soup, or of pirogi (pies), it had formed the staple article of their repast; but, at that moment, having disposed of the coarse elements which were intended to satisfy the grosser cravings of appetite, they were discussing that portion of their meal, which, evidently, by the intense relish with which they swallowed it, was gratifying to the Epicurean tastes of their nature.

The master and his men, each armed with a wooden spoon, were supping up a dark liquid from a wooden bowl, alternately with these instruments and by dipping in it a crust of bread. A foreigner would have thought it to be treacle, or some kind of posset; but Mattheus at once knew it to be the refuse or unclarified hemp-seed oil, of the strong taste of which the rancid smell emitted by it gave evidence. The master dipped in his spoon gravely, and his messmates waited deferentially till he had done so; and then amongst themselves there seemed to ensue a scramble as to who should first plunge in his spoon, or soak up with his bread the largest quantity of the rapidly diminishing dainty.

With a last hasty gulp, on hearing himself named, Vasili Petrovitch started up, and with a servile bow surveyed the new comer, and finding that he did not know him he exclaimed:

"Sto vam ugodne—what is your pleasure, my Lord?"

"What, Vasili Petrovitch, do you not remember me? Do you not recall Mattvei Mattveitch?"

"Mattvei Mattveitch! whom I have danced upon my knee? Mattvei Mattveitch who arrived last night? Hail and welcome, and thank God, my son, that I once more embrace you."

And Vasili Petrovitch, whose moustaches and beard were reeking with the oil, embraced him by throwing his arms around his neck and kissing him upon the cheeks, and lips, and eyes. And then he wiped from them all the grease which they had not discharged on the new comer's face, partly with his fingers and partly upon his sleeve, and invited him to sit down to his meal.

The habits of the drawing-room for twenty years, and of ten years of travel, had so far civilized the stomach of the educated slave that he unhesitatingly declined this invitation, and, the repast being at length concluded, Vasili Petrovitch dismissed his shopmen and servants from the inner-room, and began loudly to condole with his guest on his disgrace, with which he was already acquainted.

"Ah! Mattvei Mattveitch! so much for foreign learning and foreign ways. Thou wert brought up, Mattvei, to enter upon manhood with a tailed coat like a real blagorodie (nobleman), besides I know not what fine learning and a shaven chin! Ah! Mattvei Mattveitch! what has it advanced thee? For truly it seemeth to me that the wisdom departeth with the beard.

"I have thriven, and our forefathers have thriven, and my gossips thrive, with our old Muscovite maxims and our long Muscovite beards; but this will not suit the young. In this very Dvor there are scores of merchants' sons and youthful merchants who ape the foreigners in their dress and language, and do they prosper? No: one by one they are bankrupts, and so it has been with thee, my poor Mattvei Mattveitch. But tell me—our old Lord, who is in Heaven, loved thee as dearly as a son, and the sixty thousand silver roubles which he destined thee might as well be in the hands of a tribunal of justice for any chance thou ever hast of getting that; but surely he has laid by elsewhere many and many a round sum where Ivan Ivanovitch cannot get at it." And old Vasili, who ever since the allusion he had made unto beards was still complacently stroking down his own, peered cunningly into the face of his guest.

"No alas!" said Mattheus, "he was so like a father to me, Vasili Petrovitch, that I trusted everything to him."

"Ay," said Vasili, "just so. There is the folly of youth departing from the wisdom of its forefathers. If thou hast wheaten rusks and salmon pies, and thou wishest to continue to have wheaten rusks and salmon pies to eat, then before thy Lord thou shalt eat black bread and salt as long as thou art his serf, and when thou hast purchased thyself free of his servitude then every rusk and every pie of which thou wishest not the Emperor's chenovniks to devour the half, thou shalt still eat between four friendly walls. To be sure our late master—may his soul repose in peace!—was the kindest and the best of Lords. 'Vasili Petrovitch, Vasili Petrovitch,' he was wont to say, 'why hidest thou thy wealth from me, the wealth which I should be so pleased to hear of, and from which thou knowest that I would not take the value of one kopek?' But still I always answered him: 'My father, I am poor, my good Lord, men belie me. I trade largely, but I am very poor.' Trust to the goodness of thy patron saint, and to the security of the hiding-place where the money is hidden—but not to God or man, or to the Emperor. God is too high, and the Emperor is too far off, and man is too changeable and too mortal. This old wisdom of our unlettered fathers I have followed, thou hast not; now mark the sequel. All the kind wishes of the earthly patron on which thou hast relied—his good intentions and his love—they are in Heaven with him, and thou, my poor Mattvei, art left here. But I—I have done very differently. I cannot read, 'tis true; but, by seeming poor, and by wearing my patched caftan, and by depending not even on the best of masters, I have managed to obtain my freedom and secure my fortune, for to-morrow I shall be free, Mattvei Mattveitch! free! free! free!"

"Indeed!" said Mattheus, "is it sure?"

"Ay, free as the birds of the air, and so sure that—you see this little packet; well, in it are five hundred roubles done up to give the Quartalne (police chief of the quarter), for, of course, when one is free and has wandered from the shelter of a rich master's wing, the police expect more for their protection."

"Ah," said Mattheus bitterly, "I see; if he were not reasonably propitiated he would heap all sorts of annoyances on thee; send for thee daily to his office, and send thee away unheard; keep thee a week waiting for thy passport, when thou wishest to go twenty miles; and perhaps find a pretext to flog thee and to make thee sweep the street, unless thou wouldst, at double the expense, bribe those above him."

"Ay! God only knows," said Vasili, "what he might not do; but who that has money ever tries?"

"And this," mused Mattheus, "is what is called here freedom, and even such freedom do I now look forward to with envy! Well, I congratulate thee, Vasili Petrovitch; and then wilt thou still have a heart for those that were thy fellow-slaves?"

"The heart does not change with the condition; my brethren will still be my brethren. But, tell me, is there anything in which I can serve thee? Art thou quite poor as well as so unfortunate as to have incurred the wrath of Ivan Ivanovitch?"

And on this Mattheus explained to him his position. With somewhat of that very instinct of his race in which Vasili Petrovitch seemed to think him so deficient, he had converted the entire fortune of his wife into money, and had long carried it about him. It is true it was in English bank-notes, all Russian money whether in paper or in specie being forbidden to be exported on pain of confiscation, on its reintroduction, which of course renders it unattainable in any foreign country. Now the first object of Mattheus was to obtain a place of asylum for his wife during her illness; his second, was to deposit his money in a place of security, ignorant as he was of what fate his master might have reserved for him; and his third, to endeavour to provide the means of her escape upon her convalescence.

"Mattvei Mattveitch," said Vasili, "you have chosen an unfortunate moment to crave my assistance; for now, being a freeman, I am about openly to extend the speculations I have carried on, and therefore I shall not only have much more to engage my attention; but, I need not tell you, when a man is reputed rich, what risks he runs in interfering between the master and the slave."

"Risk! Vasili Petrovitch, hast thou forgotten the risk my father ran for thee? And did not he, as the poor man, hazard as much as thou canst hazard?"

"Not quite, Mattvei Mattveitch, the poor man can only jeopardize his skin, but the rich man risks his skin and his money too. But still, my son, think not that I am ungrateful or unfriendly to one of the same village. As to your money that I will take charge of; and as to giving harbour to your sick wife, truth to say, I am just married myself, and between you and I, as I could afford a pretty wife, I have chosen a helpmate as beautiful as a dove; but her temper is violent and jealous, when I keep her within doors, and there are so many gay young Lords who cast a longing eye upon her that I dare not let her go out. Now I am afraid that, besides her giving a sorry reception to your drooping bird, it would never prove a place of concealment for her. Nevertheless, Mattvei Mattveitch, if I procure an asylum for her, will it not do as well? So come along, come with me at once, and we will go to my brother Ivan's. He is a harsh, gloomy, and austere man, one of the "starè verè," (of the old faith) but, being under the same obligation to your father as myself, I know he will undertake it. And you know these men of the old faith; though they have never an image by which to swear, their words, when they promise, are as unchangeable as if they were of cast iron."

"Come along," said Mattheus; "but," he proceeded as they walked onwards, "you may judge how uncertain is my fate; I may ensure another day's freedom to-morrow by pretending that my examination was put off in the High Police Office, and then, who knows? I may be transferred for life to the Lord's iron mines in Perm or Viatka. Now, Vasili Petrovitch, will you swear to me, by the beard of your father, by your hopes of salvation, and on the relics of your patron saint, that, when I am hopelessly disposed of, you will endeavour to contrive my wife's escape?"

"Why, mercy on us! no, Mattvei Mattveitch, I can promise nothing so unreasonable; money, judiciously given, will always deprecate the wrath of any Lord: Ivan Ivanovitch is rich now I grant you, but God bless you! he will soon want money as well as the rest of them. The gold and the thousand rouble notes were piled last night upon the gaming-table, as I heard from Dimitri, in a manner that made one's mouth water. As for contriving your wife's escape, I can understand that, when your wife is in your own possession, you should bolt and double bar her in; but, if you yourself are hopelessly removed, what does it signify what becomes of her? Oh, no! it is really unreasonable to suppose that one should risk utter ruin for the sake—not of a friend, but a friend's strange wife! for you know it would be utter ruin to a rich man to be concerned in effecting the escape even of his own son from the country. Oh no, I will not defile my fingers with that pitch at any price. You must find some German trader who has connections at Cronstadt, and if you tempt him with a sufficient sum, he will seek you out some mad English captain of a collier, who will carry her off out of pure bravado."

Mattheus made no reply. He had hoped to arrange this through some other channel, but, with a foreboding of the fate which awaited him, fearful of failing, he had been anxious of providing for her in several different quarters the means of flight.

They had now reached the Tolkoutshoy Rynok, a sort of permanent fair for every imaginable species of commodities. It was divided into distinct departments of rows of shops and wooden booths, and markets held in the open air. Here were alleys occupied exclusively by dealers in new or second-hand furniture, or china, or clothes, or fruit, or poultry, or fish, or broken up carriages, or old iron, or second-hand rubbish of every denomination.

Here also are the general receptacles for all stolen goods. The value of the perquisites of these dingy stalls to the police authorities within whose jurisdiction they fall may be imagined from the fact, that the boutoushnik, or common police watchman, receiving some eighteen shillings of annual pay, gives a present of twenty thousand paper roubles (£900) every Easter to his chief.

It is true that the receivers of stolen goods are obliged to give two thirds of their profits to purchase the connivance of the various grades of these myrmidons of justice; and this, they have been heard to argue, shows the superiority of the system over that of other countries, where the receiver most frequently keeps the whole of the proceeds.

As for the boutoushnik, or soldier of police, who watches these transactions, to retain so coveted an employment, he really gives up to his chiefs three fourths of the amount of his extortions; and then, when he has hoarded up the remainder for a few years, one of his superiors will generally squeeze it out of him by an ingenuity of menace and torture, against which even the obstinacy to which he trusts is not proof.

At length, they paused in an alley dedicated to the sale of old rusty iron, and here, at his shop-door, they found Ivan Petrovitch. His costume was sordid, his long ragged beard was reddened by the rust of his wares, but there was a sedateness and gravity about his demeanour which inspired respect.

He greeted both his brother and Mattheus distantly and coldly even when informed who the latter was, and, signing to him to proceed, he heard the whole of his story and of his petition through. Then he replied bitterly, but without any additional warmth in his tone, "So, Mattvei Mattveitch, at length the hand of the Lord is heavy upon thee! Ay! no sooner was thy father, the stanch old believer, laid in his grave than thy mother abandoned the true faith, to take up with the general heresy, and the doctrines of idolatry, and the worship of Antichrist; and so God's curse has fallen upon thy mother's son. Nevertheless, thy father was a good and true man, and thus, my bowels yearning with compassion towards thee, I am led to incur the defilement which I should shun. Bring to me thy Midianite wife, I will give her harbour in her sickness, notwithstanding the pollution to my roof."

"Oh, Ivan Petrovitch, if the thanks of the son of your valued friend...." exclaimed Mattheus.

"Thank not me," said the old man, "for that which the Lord may perhaps yet call me to account for."

"But I will thank thee, brother, and embrace thee too," said Vasili.

"Not so!" said the stern sectarian, "my spirit is vexed and troubled. Anger me not now. Call me not brother, apostate! but depart in peace."

"Well then, peace be with thee, good Ivan! I depart since thou offerest us not even a pipe to smoke."

"To smoke! thou hast surely forgotten—askest thou for a pipe to smoke from me, when it is written, that it is not that which goeth into the mouth, but that which cometh out which defileth?"

"Oh friend of my departed father!" said Mattheus, to whom the old man refused his hand, kissing the hem of his caftan, "if we should not meet again, I entrust to thee all that I have on earth most precious. Swear to me by the Bible, that thou wilt consider her a sacred charge?"

"What, swear?" said the old man sorrowfully. "Is then our communion with heretics and idolaters to be one series of profanations and of blasphemies? If thou wert walking still in those paths of righteousness in which thy father moved so undeviatingly, thou wouldst know that it is written, Swear not at all. I have said it—go—the hour of prayer is come!"

"Good Ivan Petrovitch, perhaps we never meet again."

"I do not wish we should," said the sectarian, and, turning his back upon them both, he moved into his inner shop.

"Come!" said the brother, "let us go!" and then he added musingly, as if in some doubt of the result of his own apostacy, "But surely so many Emperors, and so many priests, and so many wise men, and so many rich men, could not have gone astray. Could they, my holy patron, St. Sergius?—Now, Mattvei Mattveitch, to-morrow I expect thee; to-day has been the day of fast and labour; to-day I am still the slave, but to-morrow is the prasnik, the holiday, and to-morrow we will make merry."

"Merry!" echoed Mattheus, as he pressed his hand, and proceeded on his solitary way.

CHAPTER VI.

"Well!" said the Prince Isaakoff to Horace, "how did you come off last night?"

"Middling," replied Horace; "but you must have lost prodigiously."

"More than ever I lost in twenty sittings before. But when a bold player encounters cowards, he is like the skilful Andalusian matadores—a good thorough-bred fierce bull, which is game to the back-bone, they can conquer, because they know exactly how and where he will strike home—but your ill-bred craven toro, whose courage only comes out by fits and starts, who backs as often as he attacks, occasions all the accidents of the bull-ring. If I had held the bank another hour, you would have seen another story; but you broke up—you played unhandsomely."

"Not I!" said Lochadoff.

"Oh, no! you, and Durakoff, and Horace, were among the losers. When you were gone, I tried my fortune with Dimitri, and I had a run of luck which would have shown a very different result."

"How fortunate that Jakof always is!"

"Yes; bearing out the adage of fools' fortune. Still Jakof will play sometimes."

"That is the only good point about him," said Durakoff.

"Well, considering his ample means, I am free to confess," replied the Prince, "that this qualification gives him more claims to my friendship than any other he could humanly possess. You see I bear people no ill-will for earning off my money."

"So they will only give you the opportunity of winning it back," observed Horace.

"Precisely—with some of their own."

"Well, I was a greater loser than you," observed Durakoff.

"The devil you were!"

"Will you bet?"

"Any thing in creation. You are dreaming!"

"Well, then, I will bet you my reversion to a house worth thirty thousand roubles against my choice of one of your slaves."

"My dear Durakoff! have you been making a Champagne breakfast this morning?"

"Will you not bet?"

"Something reasonable—if you will lay such an unreasonable wager—"

"It is perfectly reasonable. I have nothing to risk just now, so I can only stake what I am going to have."

"Well, then, let it be a bet," said Isaakoff. "No one can say I am robbing you; for who the devil will remember such a claim till your uncle dies?"

"It is done then?"

Isaakoff nodded. "I suppose you have considered how tough the old gentleman is, and wish to know exactly what I have lost?"

"Oh, no! we can decide the wager without knowing its amount. Have you lost every thing?"

"No," said Isaakoff.

"I have." said Durakoff.

"Ay!" observed Isaakoff; "then it is a thorough case of destitution, for I remember you lost even your temper."

"Yes," continued Durakoff, "every tangible kopek; for yesterday I took my last furs, plate, and jewels to the Lombard—and every prospective kopek for the next three months."

"You would have met many of our last night's friends there to-day," observed Lochadoff.

"Their to-morrow will be my to-day then," replied Durakoff; "but I submit that my wager is won."

"Not in the least; this is cavilling upon words," said the Prince.

"I appeal to those gentlemen!" said Durakoff.

"Well!" replied Horace, "it is one of those stupid wagers of which the terms were not properly defined, and which must therefore be drawn."

"I contend that it is won."

"Did you ever hear of a wager won by a jeu de mot?" said Isaakoff, a little contemptuously.

"Well, then, will you toss up for it?"

"What; for the choice of one of my slaves against a property which may come to me in the year 1900, if I win it?"

"Well, will you sell?" said Lochadoff; "for Durakoff is only blundering about it."

"Now you are nearer the mark," said the Prince. "My ready money is gone, and I am obliged to sell, so that, having once begun it, I would sell any thing, coin my grandfather, if he were a bar of gold, and weigh him out by the pound if he were a marketable commodity."

"In fact," said Lochadoff, "we want to buy one of your best slaves between us."

"I thought Durakoff had lost all his money."

"Yes, but we are in partnership. Lochadoff finds the money and I the wit."

"Am I right in supposing that Dimitri is your chief confidant now; for I do not see your French Legros?"

"Oh!" replied the Prince, "Legros is invaluable in his way, but I just happen to have sent him on a diplomatic mission."

"A mission?"

"Yes, to Paris; and as the story, to make a good one, wants publicity, and I can trust to your discretion in a piece of mischief, you must know that Jakof was in the Morskoi at the milliner's, and that the Esmeralda became enamoured—"

"Of Jakof?"

"Oh! nothing so miraculous; only of a dress he had purchased, it was the only one in St. Petersburg. The milliner's correspondent had written that the pattern was rare, and therefore no more were forwarded. Of course, the Lady, when it was not to be had, conceived an outrageous longing for it, and Jakof proposes to present it to her on her birth-day. Now there were two and twenty days till then, so within twenty minutes of the time that Jakof confided it to me, I dispatched Legros to Paris. He is to go to the fountain head; to the manufacturer, and to bring me back as fast as post-horses will carry him, a dozen similar, which I am going to present to a dozen of the dames who are to meet at the Esmeralda's, making each believe that hers is the celebrated dress."

"Oh! the scene will be admirable!" observed Durakoff.

"But I was about to observe," said Lochadoff, "that your Dimitri is a slave of mine. You wanted to buy him last time you came from abroad."

"Always providing that he did not know it."

"He suits you then?"

"As a hired servant. The rascal has picked up all the languages and vices of England, France, Germany and Italy, and engrafted them upon the parent stock; but I grant you that he suits me well."

"How strange that, with so many serfs of your own, you should hire a Russian valet!" observed Horace.

"My dear fellow," replied Isaakoff, "experience teaches us that it is the only way to get well served. If Lochadoff wanted a valet, and I discharged him, he would not employ his own serf in that capacity, but hire a slave of some one else."

"Of course," said Lochadoff; "I hire a Russian as it is. But now, Isaakoff, I am willing to pay any difference, but the serf of yours I wish to have is an old merchant, a certain Vasili Petrovitch, of whom I dare say you have never heard."

"Why, that is the man who brought me the sturgeon the last time we breakfasted together. Now what in Heaven's name do you want with old Vasili Petrovitch?"

"Well, then, the truth is this, the old sinner has married the little singer, Katinka; he shuts her up like a marmot in a Savoyard's box, and Durakoff and I are determined to get at her if we were to revolutionize the State for it."

"Hush! hush!" said Isaakoff, "that is an ugly jest."

"We have determined to club his money and my wit together for that purpose," said Durakoff; "we can toss up for her afterwards."

"There is only one objection, gentlemen," said Isaakoff.

"You will find us strongly indisposed to admit any," observed Lochadoff.

"Which is as follows," continued the Prince; "that some one has been beforehand with you. He is sold."

"Who was your customer? He must re-sell, we will give him a handsome profit."

"It is hardly probable that he will."

"Is he not mercenary?"

"Oh very."

"Oh then, I answer for success, if Lochadoff comes down liberally, which he must; only tell me to whom you have sold him."

"To himself," replied Isaakoff with a malicious smile.

"Now, what on earth could be more provoking?"

"I admit," continued Isaakoff, "that I was not aware that the old sinner had married such a pretty wife; but I am quite out of luck. I have another slave here in the house, whose spouse was the most beautiful woman in St. Petersburg; she is seized with some malignant fever."

"So the old Vasili Petrovitch, Katinka's husband, is a freeman!" observed the confederate couple with profound disappointment.

"But, never mind, I swear by his beard and by Jakof's spectacles," added Durakoff, "that I will get at Katinka notwithstanding."

"Ay," said Lochadoff, "if he had purchased the throne of the Grand Padisha a bargain, and shut her up in his seraglio—"

"I thought," said Horace, "that by the new law no serf could be sold without the estate to which he belonged."

"What signify laws," replied Isaakoff, "when they may be evaded? I have got estates in Perm, where I should be happy to sell twenty acres for a penny, or for any piece of money that could be coined; well, if Vasili had been still mine to sell, I could easily have attached him to a few desetines of such barren uninhabited territory, and have sold them together to Lochadoff, and so the sale would be quite legal."

"Your serfs are well treated?" said Horace doubtingly.

"Too well, the rascals!" answered Durakoff, "I am going round now without a kopek in my pocket, to try and bully some of my uncle's serfs established in the city out of a few hundred roubles."

"You must press very hard," observed Lochadoff, "to squeeze much out after your uncle."

"Yes, I am afraid their teats are rather dry, I only wish they were good milch cows, like those Isaakoff's father left him."

"There will not be cream on the milk nor any superabundant milk in the udders long, will there, Isaakoff?" said Lochadoff prophetically.

"Not I suppose if I should happen to want it," replied Isaakoff; "but now, my dear Horace, I promised you that Dimitri should accompany your groom down to Peterhoff, since he is to conduct my own horses thither. I have done with him and am going to start him now."

Let us shift the scene to the door of Bob Bridle's stable.

Lucifer is saddled and tied up by the halter; the light summer cloths are carefully packed on the saddle-bow, and he is all ready excepting his bridle.

Bob, with his coat off and his sleeves tucked up, is still rubbing down the horse's sleek, glossy, satin-looking skin, which here and there seems like a kid glove tightly drawn over lengths of packthread, so distinctly visible and prominent are the veins beneath it.

The water-brush, which Lucifer has some how got hold of, is lying at his feet bitten to pieces, and, as if to apologise for this misbehaviour, he rubs his head affectionately against Bob Bridle's shoulder.

"Now," said Bob, "there isn't a loose hair or grain of dust in your coat, and if any body says to the contrairy, I should like to see 'em pint it out; ah! it is of no use coaxing Lucy, you hadn't ought to have pulled that brush to pieces. It's of no use whinnying, not one bit of sugar, not the stump of a carrot, shall you have this blessed morning. Not if you was to go down on them knees of your'n, which by my leave howsomedever you should not do if you was so inclined without your knee-caps on, to perwent your rubbing off the hair. Not if you was to go down upon them knees and kiss the book, and swear in plain English that you'd never do it again."

Here Lucifer whinnied and raised up one hoof as he had been taught to do.

"Well," said Bob relentingly, "worse sins has been forgiven in this here world, to say nothing of that there one as, nilly willy, we must all go to. You want to shake hands upon it, do you, and make it up? Well, it warn't andsome of you, but forgive and forget is my maxum, so give us your paw; no that is the left hand, never forget your manners, specially to them as sifts your oats and rubs you down: always give the right foot first and keep the other in your pocket till it's asked for."

The sagacious animal, finding that this one was not accepted, gave up his other foot.

"That is right," said Bob, taking hold of it, "here is your sugar, and a pretty hoof it is, we'd have a lavender-coloured kid glove or a black satin boot, like them Miss Blanche used to wear on her dear little feet, made for it before you could say Jack Robinson, only that it would be a pity to hide it."

But at this moment Bob perceived Dietrich and Dimitri beside him.

Bob had been of late cultivating an assiduous acquaintance with Dimitri, the only Russian he knew who spoke English, who could teach him a little Russ, and who could explain to him every thing he wished to know, and Dimitri, for some private reasons of his own, had been equally friendly.

"The steward says," observed Dimitri, "that your horse looks as if he could speak."

"He looks," said Bob with honest pride, "as if he would say more sensible things than a many Christians, if he did—"

"But Boje moi, what is the matter with your arm?" asked Dimitri.

"Oh!" said Bob, the inner part of whose arms appeared like the tattooed skin of a South Sea Islander, "that is a frolic when I was a boy: it's the pedigree of a famous horse, as the other lads in the stable pricked in with vermilion and gunpowder, and all that is fancy-work round about it. It was just no use, unless there had been room for the whole stud-book."

Dimitri, with a little Tartar groom, was about to take down two of the Prince's horses, and Bob had been two hours awaiting him.

Just past the Barrier, Dimitri dismounted at the first traktirchik's, and called for Madeira and porter, and further on he stopped to smoke and drink again, to which, as Bob Bridle was not tied to any particular hour, he made no particular objection; but he was not by any means so tractable, when the valet, inspired by the exhilarating liquids imbibed, seemed determined to gallop the horses along the hard Macadamised road.

At length, about midway, they stopped to bait and repose for a couple of hours, and here Dimitri insisted on treating Bob to champagne, which, considering the nature of his predilection for him, he could well afford to do.

For Dimitri's friendship arose from the fact of his settling all the bills. It was true that Bob looked with a hawk's eye to see exactly the number of roubles charged and the amount given out, and flattered himself that he was not cheated of a single kopek, which, it may be as well to inform the reader is a fictitious value, representing the hundredth part of ten pence halfpenny, into which, for the purpose of decimal computation, Russian money is divided.

But, like those individuals whom the wisdom of our adage-making ancestors has stigmatized as penny-wise and pound-foolish, Bob, though not cheated in the kopeks, was desperately so in the roubles; for Dimitri had at once perceived that Bob had not distinguished between the paper rouble and the silver rouble, which is three times and a half its value—a mistake which Dimitri had artfully encouraged, and which enabled him to raise a commission of two hundred and fifty per cent on these little transactions.

At length, elevated with champagne, Dimitri insisted on proceeding and galloping on to their journey's end, and the matter terminated by Bob's obstinately remaining behind, to allow Lucifer his two hours' repose, and then walk him gently onwards. Now, after Dimitri's departure, Bob noticed a poor dusty soldier, sweating under the heat of his coarse brown great coat, stop and drink eagerly out of the horse-trough. Although he was a soldier, Bob's compassion for him was aroused.

"Won't you have something better?" said Bob, "that is enough to give you a bowel complaint," and, to render his words more intelligible, he took out his case-bottle, and poured a liberal supply into the cup, which the soldier tossed off with a profusion of thanks, though with a little suspicion lurking in his eye at this disinterested kindness.

Let us shift the scene to Strelna, to enable the reader to understand what is about to follow. Every one trembled. The Grand Duke Constantine Pablovitch, (the son of Paul,) the elder brother of the Emperor Nicholas, in whose favour he had resigned the throne, had got up, as the nursery-maids express it, "with the wrong foot foremost."

Already those keen observers to whom his humour had become so terrible a study, had bruited abroad that his brow looked lowering; and the intelligence ran from mouth to mouth, as men speak of signs fearful and portentous.

That wrath, which in private life would have been ridiculed, power rendered momentously awful, and it was compared to the lightning, of which none knew how it was kindled, or on whom it would alight.

It is true that he was not in his Vice-royalty of Poland, and that consequently those exposed to his uncertain temper formed here but a portion of the troops, the inspection of which he had undertaken.

But amongst those unlucky wights whom it concerned, from the general aide-de-camp down to the private, this untoward predisposition occasioned an uneasiness which was distinctly visible on their countenances; for, under these circumstances, they all well knew how the Grand Duke would quarrel with the setting on of a soldier's chako, or the position of a button on his uniform, and doom him to the severest punishment, and his officer to degradation, for it. There was no averting the ill effects of his anger by the minutest attention to their duties and appearance, for his wrath would wreak itself on some one; and they were therefore in the position of those village school-boys, who are hurried into school by the tyrannical master, who lies in wait to strike the last unfortunate. They were sure that some one must suffer, and therefore were only anxious personally to avoid his displeasure, which, from their very trepidation, they frequently incurred.

On the subject of the minutiæ and rigour of military costume, and discipline, and drill, the whole of the Romanoff family have long suffered under what the French, with all their love of the pomp and circumstance of war, have designated the "mania of corporalism." Alexander was about as deeply imbued with it as any specimen of the martinet to be met with in Western Europe; but in him it was scarcely perceptible in comparison with his father Paul, and his brothers Nicholas and Michael; whilst in Constantine it assumed the form of one of those insanities which call for the straight waistcoat.

The scene was the riding-school of his palace of Strelna. The Grand Duke Constantine—unlike his brothers and father, and indeed unlike all Russians, excepting the Cossacks—a very bold horseman, was about to inspect the riding of some of the cadets and privates.

Now it happened that, a few weeks before, on turning a corner, he had come across an officer who was wearing his cocked hat with the point forward instead of broad-wise, according to the regulation; he degraded him from his lieutenancy, and made him a common soldier on the spot; but, his temper being ruffled by this incident, he searched the pockets of the next half-dozen cadets whom he met, in quest of kid gloves; and, making them open their coats, he at length pitched upon an unlucky youth, who had perpetrated the offence of venturing to wear a shirt many degrees finer than the regulations allowed. The Duke caused him to strip it off in the open street, and also doomed him to the ranks; but, as the two delinquents were smart and soldier-like in their appearance, bore an unblemished character, and were considered as good riders in their regiments, he determined to transfer them as privates to a model regiment at Warsaw, as both happened to be from the Polish frontier; and on this account they were amongst the officers and cadets who were to display their horsemanship before him.

Let the reader imagine the riding-school echoing to the stentorian roar of the Grand Duke's angry voice, and his dependents all trembling, because the unfavourable augury of his countenance that morning had been terribly verified, and he had not only been scattering his punishments with savage profusion, but there was little reason to believe the distribution of them over, the most difficult portion of their exhibition being yet before them.

Several of the riders were looking anxiously at the leaping-bar, and counting the number of holes at which it was placed, with trepidation, when the Grand Duke, to their utter discomfiture, caused it to be raised several pegs higher.

"Now," said the Grand Duke to one of his aides-de-camp, "I think that will do—go and try it."

"Monseigneur!" replied the colonel aide-de-camp, in an accent of involuntary supplication. "It is rather high!"

"What! dog, whose mother I have defiled!" roared Constantine—and the aide-de-camp dreading more the wrath of the Prince than the barrier, at once spurred his horse at it; but, in the first place, it was too high for his horse to rise to, and, in the next, he was too nervous to lift him, so that the animal turned short round. The Grand Duke jumped in an instant on his charger, which a soldier held beside him, and, leaping backwards and forwards over the bar, he came up to the Colonel, and spat full in his face.

"There," he roared, "is it too high? Go to the barracks, hound—a month's arrest!"

"I have erred," repeated the Colonel with humility; and, watching till the Grand Duke's head was turned, to wipe the spittle from his face, he sneaked off to the place of arrest.

Constantine now ordered another of the riders to take the barrier, who, although he was tossed about on the saddle, gained such desperate energy from the terrors of the Grand Duke behind him, that he forced his horse to clear it.

"Put up the bar a peg higher!"

And, on a signal made, another unfortunate officer advanced to attempt the leap; but his hand conveyed a tremulous motion to the rein—once, twice, thrice, his horse refused it.

"Dash up against it; spur him at it!" thundered the Grand Duke.

The terrified rider spurred his horse, and the animal stopped suddenly short, flinging him over its head.

"Oh, the fool!" said the Grand Duke; "a month's arrest. Now, get on again."

But he could not hold the bridle; his left arm was broken.

"Take him away, I am glad of it; I wish it was his neck! Put up the bar a peg higher. Now you, sir, get upon that horse and take him over." And thus half-a-dozen horsemen were forced successively to attempt the leap, till they were thrown, or their horses thrown down, or the men injured against the barrier.

At length it came to the turn of the two degraded men. The Duke had caused the bar to be so constantly raised that there seemed no chance of their horses being able to leap it. But if the barrier was before, the thunder of Constantine's voice was behind them. The ex-cadet first attempted, or feigned an attempt, of the futility of which he was beforehand persuaded, for his horse refused the leap. By this time the Grand Duke was furious. "Take him up to it with more life, hound; use the spur! Dash him to atoms against it!—break all his cursed bones and your own too, or I will have them broken for you!"

But the rider, smarting under his degradation to the ranks, had turned dogged, and persisted in bringing his charger at a safe pace up to the leap.

"Get off, devil's head! (Chortova golova)" roared the Grand Duke. "Begone to the guard-house; I award you five hundred lashes! Now you," he continued to the ex-lieutenant: "and if you don't take it, I have defiled your mother!—I will have both man and horse pricked over with lances!"

Thus admonished, the degraded officer, who was a good rider and well mounted, lifted his horse so energetically that he carried him to the other side of the barrier, though not indeed without grazing it with his feet.

"He touched—he touched!" said the Grand Duke, "bring him back."

He leaped back.

"Now, again," said Constantine.

This time the horse fell headlong with his rider.

"Put him to it again!" roared the Grand Duke.

But all the desperate efforts of the ex-lieutenant, from whose nose and mouth the blood was streaming the while, seemed unable to determine the affrighted and perhaps injured animal to rise again. At length the rider let the bridle-reins drop in utter discouragement on the horse's neck.

"Let me crave ten minutes' rest, your Imperial Highness."

"Did my horse touch when I leaped it?" asked the Grand Duke.

"In the first place, the bar has since been raised many pegs, in the next your Highness is better mounted," said the Lithuanian, growing reckless.

"Oh! he reasons with me, he argues. Off your horse: to the barracks. Five hundred lashes with the other!"

* * * * *

Now Constantine had left this scene, still half stifled with rage, like a thunder-cloud over-charged with electricity and ready to spend itself upon the first object. He was galloping along the high-road at a furious pace, accompanied by two of his officers and half a dozen Cossacks, when he caught sight of the unfortunate soldier to whom Bob Bridle had given a draught from his case-bottle.

Now almost as far as the soldier could distinguish the uniforms of the riders, he recognised the terrible Grand Duke.

A private, as well as a cadet, is strictly forbidden to ride in any vehicle; and the soldier had ventured on this long walk to take home a pair of shoes he had been making, in the full confidence of being back in time for his duties, by getting a lift in some peasant's talega along the road back to his quarters, and this—to say nothing of his heavy, dusty great-coat being unbuttoned, and his leathern stock loosened—of course he dared not avow to a superior to whom he might naturally appear to be at an unwarrantable distance from his barracks.

So just exclaiming "Constantine Pablovitch!" he jumped up, and bolted right through the traktirchik's into the garden, intending to make for the woods at the back; but here he found no issue, excepting through a wicket which led into the yard where Bob was tending Lucifer, who was tied up in the shade with a feed before him.

But here too there was no visible outlet unless to the high road, and the terrified soldier made an ineffectual effort to climb the high palisade which divided him from the fields.

"Ah," said Bob, as he slipped down, "so you have made a false start of it; but you look a poor, hunted, frightened devil, you do, so whoever is after you shall have a distance ahead and a fair run across country." And Bob very dexterously made a step of one arm by holding the paling, signing to the soldier to place his foot on it, and then he did the same thing with the other arm, and so alternately till the wiry muscular little groom raised up the tall thin guardsman above his own head, which thus enabled him to gain the top and slip down on the other side.

"That is right," said Bob, "now, if there is any need to run at all, don't wait for your change."

Without understanding the pith of the advice given him, the Russian put it at once in practise, by scampering as fast as his legs would carry him.

At this moment the Grand Duke came up at a furious gallop, and reined in at the traktirchik's door.

His quick eye had recognised a soldier, as far as the soldier had recognised him, and his attention was immediately attracted, and his angry suspicions aroused, by the obvious solicitude of the soldier to avoid him.

"Where is that soldier who just stepped in here?"

The traktirchik, or tavern-keeper, who, attracted by the noise of the hoofs of horses, had come to his door, bowing almost to the ground, professed his ignorance of the fugitive's whereabouts, and called to all his waiters. But in vain they ran through the premises; in vain the Cossacks dismounted and searched, the soldier was no where to be found.

"Rogue! Scoundrel! Thief! thou hast favoured his escape," howled the Grand Duke.

The traktirchik throwing himself on the ground, before the Prince's horse, protested his innocence.

"Rascal and robber!" continued Constantine, endeavouring to force his horse over the tractirchik's prostrate body, whilst the animal, less cruel or more reasonable than his master, obstinately refused to trample the victim beneath his hoof.

Suddenly, however, the Grand Duke desisted from his attempt.

"Get up!" he said, "so thou keepest wines and spirits, and vodka, and dainties to seduce the Emperor's officers and soldiers into expense as they pass by; thou harbourest them in their disobedience, and connivest at their extravagance? Bring me out here all the contents of thy cellar, wines, and spirits, and everything else."

And the Grand Duke, bounding to his feet from the back of his horse, drew his sabre so fiercely, that the tavern-keeper fell upon his knees.

"Get up, cursed hound! I have defiled thy mother! Bring hither the whole contents of thy cellar. You! don't sit stuck upon your horse like a statue," said Constantine to General ——, his aide-de-camp; "but draw, and come and help me."

The General dismounted obsequiously from his horse, and drew his sabre, uncertain what bloody work he was about to be called on to perform. The other officers of his suite, epauletted, and aguilletted, and plumed, and bedizened with orders as they were, hurried down to the cellars accompanied by some of the Cossacks, to assist the traktirchik and his waiters in bringing up their miscellaneous contents.

"Now," said the Grand Duke, as soon as there was a pile of bottles before him, "now, I will ruin you, you rascal! Now, I will teach you to connive at the disobedience of soldiers!" and he began fiercely slashing away with his sword at the bottles, the General, on a sign given, following his example with a ridiculous emulation.

"There, I will teach you!" roared Constantine.

"There, we will teach you!" chimed in the General, a note or two lower.

And beneath their joint efforts, the champagne, and the soda-water, and the bottled porter, bubbled out in a frothing stream, and mixed with the red current of costly clarets, and the amber flow of the most expensive Rhenish.

Every blow went to the soul of the traktirchik; he would rather have endured them all on his own person.

"There goes my expensive claret!" he thought, "there goes my Cliquot which stands me in seven roubles a bottle, and my Johannisberg at four salkovies (silver roubles)."

"Here's a game to be sure!" said Bob Bridle, who had come to the door of the yard. "You cut your lucky just in time, my friend in the buckram."

"Fresh bottles!" thundered the Grand Duke, whose sword, hacked like a hand-saw, was dripping with the blood of the grape.

"Boje moi! Boje moi! (Oh Lord! Oh Lord!)" exclaimed the traktirchik, as he hurried past Bob Bridle with as many bottles as his arms and the ends of his uplifted caftan could embrace or contain.

"Oh, you call him a Bogie! Well," observed Bob, "the painted one as Rooshian Billy, the coachman, carries under his petticoat, though he ain't 'ansome, is better than that ere wiolent live one."

And now the Grand Duke and the General, after three quarters of an hour's hard work, came to a pause, and the latter wiped the perspiration from his forehead. Like Alexander the Great when he wept for more worlds to conquer, Constantine was stopped short in his career—there were no more bottles to break.

It is true the Cossacks found here and there an open flask or bottle or two upon the shelves of the bar, and a few medicine phials, and then they brought down all the oil and vinegar cruets, which were remorselessly put to the sword.

"It's just what I remember doing once myself among the blacking-bottles with a poker," mused Bob, "when I was a little ragamuffin, before I was breeched."

"Bring out every thing that can be broken!" roared the Grand Duke, who was still like an angry lioness deprived of her whelps.

"Ay! there goes the crockery," observed Bob; "I thought it would come next."

When every thing destructible was broken, the Imperial Prince sheathed his sword.

"Now you will see, some of you, that this fellow's licence is taken away from him! There, that will teach you to connive at the disobedience of the Emperor's soldiers!"

The traktirchik bowed low, and humbly thanked him for his mercies.

Now Bob had quietly slipped on Lucifer's bridle. The loud sonorous neighing of the noble stallion and the critically quiet attitude of Bob Bridle had two or three times attracted the Grand Duke's attention, but it had always been diverted by the fresh supply of bottles or of crockery, given to his ruthless sabre, though it could no longer be said to his sabre's edge.

Now it was an unusual and an alarming sight for the Duke's suite to see any one stand as unmoved and as perfectly self-possessed, as the manner of Bob Bridle showed him to be, when the tempest of wrath which they so much dreaded was raging—it was alarming, because they considered it a spectacle calculated to increase its violence. So that one of his staff, who spoke English, and instantly recognised Bob Bridle as an Englishman, gradually edged up to him, and asked in a voice intended to impart somewhat of the awe which filled his own breast:

"Do you know who that is?"

Bob shook his head.

"That is his Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Constantine!"

"Well!" replied Bob, "I don't think much of he. Does he belong to a Temperance Society, or has he got any friends in the rag and bottle line as he wants to make a job for?"

"His Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke!" repeated the officer, thinking that Bob had not heard.

"The Grand Duke!" thought Bob to himself; "now what do they mean by a 'grand duke?' He is as smart as a parish beadle, and makes as much noise as a town-crier, but I can't see how he is to interfere with me."

"Good Heavens! get out of the way you idiot!"

"Well!" replied Bob, "it ain't very sensible to look on at such tom-foolery," and, stepping lightly into the saddle, he was proceeding onwards.

"Madman!" whispered the officer.

"Who is that fellow! how does he dare to pass me so upon the road? Stop!" said the Grand Duke.

"So I will when I get to my journey's end," said Bob to himself.

"Stop! stop! stop!" echoed half-a-dozen voices.

"Bring him back!" thundered Constantine to the Cossacks, who, calling to him to stop, spurred after him.

"Ay! if you gentlemen with the long poles catch me, you may serve me like that ere ginger pop and bottled stout."

"Spur after him! stop him! spear him through!" vociferated the Grand Duke, as he saw Lucifer break away from his pursuers like a greyhound from a set of heavy mastiffs, and his rider turning his head to look contemptuously back, as he said in answer to their wild hurrah:

"One would think it was Bedlam broke loose, with these fellows without rims to their hats!"

The light weight the grey was carrying, and the length of his stride as he bounded lightly on, would evidently soon have enabled him, as Bob expressed it, "to get away from them like a bird, without turning a hair," so easily he seemed, without an effort, to shoot ahead, when suddenly a detached body of horse-artillery changing its quarters appeared upon the road before him, and Bob was obliged to pull up. But he had no thoughts of surrendering to the Philistines. He was only deliberating whether he should ride suddenly straight through the Cossacks, for Bob's contempt for the firmness of a military seat unjustly enough extended even to them; but in another instant he made up his mind, and, spurring off the high road, he took across a field right up to a wooden paling. The ragged pieces of split pine wood stuck into the earth diagonally, which compose the fences in Russia, form a formidable chevaux-de-frise; a horse stumbling must inevitably be staked; but Bob, who knew the vigour of his mighty stallion, and how, from never having been hunted, he was in the habit of rising much higher than was necessary to his fences, unlike a seasoned old hunter who measures the height so accurately by the eye, and puts forth no unnecessary strength to waste it—Bob Bridle rode Lucifer at the paling, and Lucifer cleared it like a flying Pegasus.

An exclamation of admiration burst from the Cossacks as they came up one by one, and found how impracticable was the leap for their own horses; but the wild blood of the sons of the Steppe was up, and they galloped round it shouting and shaking their pennonless spears.

"Give me a lance!" said the Grand Duke, who, furious at seeing his people baffled by the fugitive, had just galloped up.

He was better mounted than any of his accompaniment, being a Prince, and able to afford any kind of horse, and a bold rider, not afraid to back a good one.

He put his horse at the fence, and, though the animal could not leap it with his heavy weight, the rotten wood gave way, and thus he forced a passage, and, with an oath which merged into a savage yell, and with a lowering brow, he rode away far ahead of all his Cossacks.

Now Bob, had reached the crest of one of those undulations of ground called mountains in Russia, and in England hillocks. He looked round in triumphant security, and Lucifer, as he shook his mane to the wind, neighed a blast of defiance. Neither were yet aware that the ground, covered with green grass and low bushes before them was so treacherous, till the Grand Duke being within distance, they attempted to proceed, and went floundering into moss-pit after moss-pit, and quagmire after quagmire, till their pursuer was close upon them.

"Now Lucifer, now then," soliloquised Bob, "who ho! hold up—don't let us be beaten by a soldier. Oh for five minutes of the two-mile course of Newmarket! This is only fit for a frog or a tadpole, not for a well-bred English horse with a Christian rider on his back;" and at this moment the grey floundered up to his shoulders. Bob heard a horse blowing behind him; he turned his head—there was the Grand Duke five paces off, riding at him so fiercely with his lance that it was only with the utmost dexterity that Bob, by moving sideways on his saddle, avoided the thrust which, as it was, grazed his jacket, though with great presence of mind he caught and held fast the shaft.

"D—n your broomstick, don't poke it at me," said Bob, forgetful of his bible, and lifting his horse out of the slough, whilst, he still grasping one end of the spear, and the Grand Duke holding the other, it became obvious that one of the two must become unseated. But Bob held to his saddle like an iron vice, and when the Grand Duke found that his balance was nearly lost he let go and drew his sabre. "Ah!" said the groom, "if I only knew which was the right end of it I'd poke you back again," and then he threw the lance contemptuously down. But the nature of the ground did not permit him to get a fair start; again Lucifer was swamped in a moss-pit, and the infuriated Constantine, who through good luck, or skill, or knowledge of the surface of the country, had been more successful in keeping his horse's footing, at length got at him, and began raining the blows of his sabre about Lucifer's quarters, and Bob Bridle's head and shoulders. Happily the sword had been thoroughly blunted by its previous usage.

Nevertheless, by one tremendous plunge, the horse gained a smooth piece of level turf; but after a short space there was again a palpable marsh before them. Bob turned to see how far the Duke was behind, and as he turned he saw a gash on Lucifer's quarters from which the blood was streaming. Bob's patience was gone; the bog was before him, the cause of his indignation close on his horse's heels. He turned round, and to the Grand Duke's surprise spurred right upon him. Constantine was very skilful in equestrian combat, but he was accustomed to encounter riders upon managed horses; Lucifer came upon him like a thunder-bolt, with a stride of sixteen or eighteen feet at a bound, and the velocity of a missile. The steady unflinching hand, the quick energetic heel, of the Englishman enabled him to guide the very last of these projections of his horse's weight, multiplied as its power was by its speed, so as to catch the Grand Duke's charger sideways, and down came man and horse before the charge of Bob and Lucifer, as if shattered by a cannonball. Luckily it was on the spongy moss turf, which was like a spring mattress.

"Now," said Bob, "what have you got to say for yourself that I don't trample the life out of you?"

The Grand Duke was stunned for a moment; his face had been buried in the mud, and he had not sufficiently recovered his breath to answer.

"Highness! they call you," continued the exasperated Bob, "your ways is the lowest that ever I hear of, to go and injure a poor dumb animal with that ere pruning hook of yourn. What had we done to you, that you should ride after me and stir me up with a long pole, as if I was a bear in the theological gardens? What business had you to slash me about the head? Did you take my head for a piece of crockery, or my neck for the neck of one of them ere bottles? I've a mind to try your'n, I have!"

But in the midst of Bob's triumph, the Cossacks had taken advantage of the swampy ground; they were surrounding the marsh, and six or eight were close upon him with upraised lances.

"No, no, no, no!" shouted the Grand Duke, with a terrible oath raising himself upon one hand. "Not a hair of his head shall be hurt!"

The Cossacks seized Lucifer's bridle.

"What a man!" continued Constantine, rising up, "though there is so little of him."

The sunshine which succeeds an April shower offers not a contrast more remarkable than the good-humoured, hearty admiration of Constantine's countenance with its previous savage and malignant expression.

"There is a horse and rider for you! why you all—I have defiled your mothers—I can beat you at anything; and this little devil, armed only by a pair of gloves, has baffled me, with lance and sabre. Who is he? What is he?"

"An English groom," said the aide-de-camp, who had first spoken to Bob.

"A groom! if he will take service, I will give him a squadron before a twelvemonth is out; if he were only three or four times as big I would make a Colonel of him."

The aide-de-camp interpreted for Constantine, whose English was not very fluent.

"His Imperial Highness, in admiration of your skill, affords you his full pardon."

"For what," said Bob, "for running his spear through my jacket, or for cutting me about the head with his hanger, or for maiming that ere pretty bit of horse-flesh?"

"His Highness will make you every reparation; he judges you worthy to carry a sword instead of a currycomb."

"I wish I had the currying of his'n, I'd have kept it out of a sight of mischief to-day."

"His Royal Highness offers you to quit your menial situation; he will make a soldier and a gentleman of you."

"What! make me a soldier!"—said Bob, "why that would be adding insult to injury."

"What can I do for him?" said the Grand Duke at length.

"Do for me?" said Bob, to whom it had been at length explained, that this was the Emperor's brother. "Do for me? Why be so good as let me go quietly along the King's highway, when we next meets, without saying nothing to nobody;" and here he pulled his forelock with a sort of constrained civility.

CHAPTER VII.

Mattheus, under the pretext of having again to attend at the Police office on the following day, left his wife, who had not recovered her senses, to seek out again Vasili Petrovitch, and make with him the final arrangements, which the next day it might be too late for him to effect.

According to appointment, he went not to any of the trader's multifarious places of business, but to his snug wooden house in the suburbs, for it was not only a prasnik or holiday, but moreover a day of rejoicing and merrimaking as the first of his freedom.

The place of residence of Vasili Petrovitch was situated in one of those unpaved streets, which the snow in winter and the mud in summer would render almost impassable, were it not for a sort of wooden platform or pavement raised about three feet above the soil, on which the pedestrian, who chooses to exchange the disagreeables of the common road for the chances of falling through the rotten boards, may generally contrive to walk dry-footed.

As soon as the door was opened, the steam of many dishes mingled their strongly savoury odours with the air, although, this being one of the last hot days of the season, few of the windows were closed.

He was at once shown into a low-roofed parlour, adorned with heavy pieces of furniture of a very dark mahogany relieved by very bright brass handles, the room being further ornamented by a couple of richly framed pictures, each representing a coarse landscape, and in each of which a real clock was inserted in the twin church steeples; and of course there was the gaudily framed image of the saint in the corner, before which burned the purest of oil, in a silver lamp.

Indeed, to the assiduity with which he had cultivated the good graces of this celestial personage, the host in his own mind chiefly attributed his prosperity.

Vasili Petrovitch himself was seated at a table, no longer in his sordid caftan, or resembling the thrifty trader, who sipped the oil out of the same dish, or munched the coarse black bread, with his servants and apprentices; but now revelling in all the most costly luxuries which his imagination could suggest.

At first sight, he seemed to have on his head a green turban, and his new dark blue robe was covered by a napkin, which was placed like a shawl round his neck; but, on closer inspection it proved to be an enormous water-melon, into which a hole the size of his head had been scooped, and which, to enjoy the genial coolness it imparted, he had donned like a bonnet, whilst its juice streamed down his face and trickled gratefully from his beard, like the ointment poured upon the head of an old Judean patriarch.

Another water-melon was cut and lay upon a plate before him, whilst several of the same fruit, which are all brought from a distance of at least five or six hundred miles from St. Petersburg, were beside him, and he had in his mouth the troubke, and in his hand a tumbler full of cold tea.

Mattheus was greeted with a hearty welcome, and, having unluckily admitted that he was hot, it was with considerable difficulty that he could decline his host's pressing solicitations, as he endeavoured to persuade him to assume a water-melon head-dress like his own; and, even when he had positively refused, one of his pricaschiks or clerks, who officiated as head butler and waiter, received a signal to scoop out a hole in one of the finest fruits, for the size of which orifice he measured the head of the guest by the eye, after the fashion of a hatter's prentice.

This was in the genuine spirit of the old Muscovite hospitality, to make the stranger feel that no empty compliment had dictated the offer.

Although Mattheus was naturally anxious to enter at once on the deeply interesting business which he had in hand, Vasili Petrovitch, perhaps with somewhat of sympathy for the obvious distress of mind, which his coarse nature judged that a taste of his festivity would relieve, resolutely determined that his guest should first drink to his health and prosperity on this auspicious occasion, and give him his opinion of his wife, his horse, his cat, and his nightingale.

The cat indeed was a magnificent animal of the Angora breed, which on a signal jumped on the table and purred, as it rubbed its head against its master.

"Is he not a fat one, brother?" said the owner admiringly.

And in fact the rotundity arising from little exercise and good living, and the length and thickness of its coat, gave it an aspect quite aldermanic.

"I have refused two hundred roubles for it."

Mattheus, who felt too great a depression of spirits to contest the point, and on the other hand was aware that the readiest way to obtain his end was to humour his host, allowed himself first to be led to see the nightingale, considered the second in the city and for which six hundred roubles (£25) had been paid, and then to the stable, from which an Orloff trotter enormously fat, according to the taste of the genuine Russian merchant, was led out.

It was not without pride, that his owner boasted that he had cost him twelve thousand roubles.

"And now, best of all, you shall see my wife, she is not very fat yet; but I can see by her make that in a dozen years she will be as round and as plump as a ball, for her bones are small and her flesh has inclination to dimple already. She is a Niemetz, a foreigner, as well as your wife, Mattvei Mattveitch," continued he, unheeding the painful expression that crossed his guest's countenance. "At least her mother was, not that I find but what these foreigners have quite as much tongue as our Russian women."

Here Vasili chuckled at his own wit, to render which intelligible to the reader, it must be observed that the lower order of Russians give the name of Niemetz, which signifies "dummies," to all foreigners whose idiom is utterly foreign to their own, and therefore to all who do not belong to the Sclavonic family, though this appellation is now beginning to be confined to the Germans.

"I rejoice, brother," said Mattheus, "that the Lord has prospered you so well."

"Yes, thanks be to the Lord for it! But let us have in something to eat and drink, and let Katinka come in: now my friend you will see a real pigeon! a soul! a little soul! I picked her up at the wife-market in the Summer Gardens. I had said to myself, Vasili Petrovitch thou art getting stricken in years, thou art rich, take to thyself a wife, and when I saw her pass amongst the show of women, says I, that woman shall be mine, and do you know I nearly lost her, for thought I, though I can afford her—for why should not an old man gratify his whim?—and though I will have her at any price, still I will get her as cheap as possible; so I said to the old woman, the broker, pointing to her, I might be induced to take that girl; find out for me all about her.

"Says she, when she had made inquiry, 'Vasili Petrovitch, if you want to wive, I have a fine show of marriageable women on my list; but that woman will never suit you; she is not the quiet daughter of a trader, she is half a Niemetz, she is a free woman, and she has been trained as a chorus-singer.' "

"And you married so out of the habits of your people?"

"Ay that did I; I am not an ascetic of the old faith like my brother, and, since I left it for the new, because the new was the more comfortable creed, dy'e think I will not take elbow-room in it? What cares my holy patron, St. Sergius, so that his lamp be kept clean and the oil be pure and never-failing? Well, I nearly lost her because the baggage had got many suitors; ay, there were noblemen hunting on the same scent, and the old hag who acted as broker was betraying me for the promise of an embroidered katzaveika above the commission that I offered her, and then the old devil told me, that she had done it for my soul's good. But nevertheless I secured Katinka, she could not resist the furs and the jewels, and the money, of old Vasili Petrovitch; and I was made happy and shall be happier still when she grows fatter."

"You are a lucky fellow," said Mattheus, endeavouring to force a smile.

"No," said the old man with a chuckle, "not lucky but wise. According to the wisdom of my fathers, I lived frugally, and kept my light under a bushel. So I was enabled to acquire wealth and to keep it, and to choose the prettiest wife in the city, and to heap upon her jewels and furs to her heart's content, and dost thou think that I have paraded her about, or mean to do so now that I am a freeman, no, no! The young noblemen and the officers, with their plumed hats and spurred heels, who were on the scent, have all lost it, and I will keep her away from them, I warrant me."

At this moment his people had finished spreading the table with a collation, which was to be replenished during the whole day for the benefit of such visitors as should drop in to congratulate the host.

The board groaned beneath the promiscuous profusion of smoked salmon and pickled lampreys, the costly sterlet and smoked goose, Hambro' beef and dried reindeer tongues, sausages and water-melons, foreign cheeses and sardines, anchovies and peaches, dried caviar and pine-apples, salt herrings and Batvinia (cold fish-soup, seasoned with floating lumps of ice), potted meats and preserved ginger, limes and pickled cucumbers, olives and large black radishes, and many other eatables too tedious to record; but all mixed up higgledy-piggledy in glorious confusion with flasks of kirsch, noyau, curaçao, and kümmel; and bottles of English sauces, soy, ketchup, anchovy, shrimp and Harvey; for, without understanding their respective and peculiar merits, it suffices for this class of Russians that these condiments are dear, foreign, and neatly corked up in strange-looking bottles.

There is this to be said, that, if a trader from the interior, unaccustomed to the oil and Italian business, as sometimes does occur, happens to pour out either soy or shrimp sauce as a liqueur, to settle the fatness of his meal, he with impunity, after sipping at it, swallows the glassful and then refills with noyau, gravely observing that he prefers the latter as a beverage.

And then besides, there were bottles of Johannisberg, and Malaga, and Tokay, and Port, and Sherry, and the simultaneous popping of the corks of several bottles of Champagne and London porter showed the wasteful profusion of the owner's hospitality.

A barrel of the large coarse oysters imported into St. Petersburg was opened, and occupied a position in the feast, the more respectable since they were then at sixteen shillings per dozen, Some, indeed, opened their shells like a wide gaping mouth, as if to show that they contained only the cold remains of the departed—not always even of the recently departed: yet these Vasili seemed to pick out with relish. And then, as if in dread that this would not be sufficient to take off the edge of their appetites, hot blinis, or pancakes, both of buckwheat and ground rice, were served at intervals, with an imitation of the Italian ravioli and lastly the blooming, blushing Katinka herself, in a sky-blue satin katzaveika, made her appearance, presiding over a huge salmon-pie, which the ambition of the cook had made beyond the compass of any mortal dish, and which was carved upon a board covered by a napkin.

Katinka, or Catherine, herself, was decidedly a beauty, having derived her attractions from her German mother. But, though a natural and arch coquette, there was a cold, calculating, passionless sensuality about the expression of the lower part of her face, which almost explained her past and present history—both the very questionable antecedents of one, who looked on men chiefly as purveyors of jewellery and Cashmere shawls, and her sudden retirement from her numerous admirers to become the wife of the greasy old serf. She had indeed without difficulty adopted the costume of a trader's wife, because, in the first place, she considered that it became her, and in the next, that Vasili was easily led in this form to lavish his wealth in a magnificence congenial to his taste.

It has been said that Katinka made her appearance blushing and blooming, but both the bloom and the blush were of a lasting kind, because artificially imparted to a very clear and transparent skin. Though it was so warm, she could not help displaying a cloak of pale amber-tinted satin, lined with the richest sable, and with a collar of the fur of the black fox. Her pale blue satin katzaveika, too—for the Russian women, particularly the wives and daughters of traders, revel in the most delicate and perishable shades of this material—was donned over a dark and richly brocaded petticoat of silk, and her feet were encased in shoes of white satin. She wore upon her person, besides, in the form of ear-rings, necklaces and brooches, a great quantity of brilliants in very old-fashioned settings; and, as if the fur cloak would not have been sufficient to guard her against any very improbable and sudden change of temperature, she had also on her arm a very costly Cashmere. Altogether, his wife's dress as she gracefully cut a slice from the salmon-pie, and as Vasili's eyes surveyed both her and her ornaments, with the conscious satisfaction of being the lord of all they rested upon, must have cost the old man near two thousand pounds sterling.

Katinka seemed disposed to lavish her fascinations on Mattheus as soon as she saw, to her evident surprise, in her husband's guest a shaven and fashionably attired young man, instead of one of his bearded and caftaned brethren; but, finding her glances thrown away upon his mournful impassibility, she transferred them to her husband, in the hopes of coaxing him into allowing her to exhibit somewhat of her finery that evening in the Summer-Gardens; but in vain, for Vasili Petrovitch was in some things a sullen old Turk; there were points on which he could no more be coaxed into compliance than a piece of granite molten by the sunbeams—and, as for trying foul means, it was equally dangerous, because he was constantly reminding his gossips, when they assailed him with their domestic complaints, of their marital rights, and advising them to send their wives to be flogged at the police-office—which it is still the privilege of every Russian husband to do, even without assigning any reason, since the law no longer recognises his right to do justice to himself.

In fact, Katinka had not been aware of the utter bondage to which she was selling herself; but, being a woman of a reflective turn of mind, she bore her lot with contentment, and even with cheerful resignation, whenever she passed a church-yard and thought of Vasili's age.

At length, when Mattheus thought he had fulfilled the requisite courtesies, pleading his want of time, he insisted on an immediate interview in private with the host. With a last effort to press him to more food and drink, as they rose together, Vasili gave the order to open three more bottles of Champagne and three score of oysters, to show his guest that, if he did not eat and drink, both would be wasted.

Such was the hospitality of Vasili Petrovitch, a true type of his class, who did not possess two shirts in the world, nor boast a pair of stockings—such his boundless extravagance when he did make an occasional departure from his habitual frugality, and intending, as he did, to resume on the morrow his old caftan and his seat at the wooden bowl with his dependents—where he spent about eighteen-pence per week for his living, and held, from motives of economy, a piece of sugar as large as a pea between his teeth whilst he poured two or three tumblers of unsweetened tea down his throat.

"Now, Vasili Petrovitch," said Mattheus, "two hours hence I must be with the grand-master of the secret police, and after that—God knows! I have read Ivan Ivanovitch's eye as he passed me this morning, and there is little hope for me except in Heaven! Look! I have brought to confide it to you all my wife's fortune. Here, in the presence of your patron saint, I trust it to you as a sacred deposit!"

"These are foreign notes," said Vasili, eyeing them curiously. "I do not know their value, but as you give them into my hands, so you shall receive them back."

"No; it is not exactly thus I mean it. They are worth about fifty thousand silver roubles; now change one or all with some of the foreign merchants, according as my wife's necessities may require, or as she may desire it; and remember that, at any time she asks it, I wish you to give any portion or the whole into her hands, as you would into mine. And as you are faithful to this trust, so may God prosper you, Vasili Petrovitch!"

"Amen!" said Vasili Petrovitch, fervently; "but have you considered how mad it is to trust money in the hands of women? Better let me return it only into your own."

"I may be sent back to the village—perhaps to the mines on the Lord's estates in Perm, and we may never meet on this side the grave!"

"Brother! brother! verily thy wisdom hath departed with thy beard! Does a Lord treat his slave thus, when the slave has got fifty thousand roubles well hidden and secured, and the slave manages wisely?"

"Ah, if you knew how his anger was aroused!"

"Anger passes, and the love of gold endures!" replied the old man.

"And furthermore," said Mattheus, "that money is not mine; it is hers, and to her restore it. Not one kopek of her fortune should now go to save my very life, since I have already robbed her of health, and happiness, and peace of mind, and linked her noble name to the name of a slave—for what am I but a poor degraded trampled slave!"

"Ay, if you had let your beard grow and stuck to the habits of your fathers," said Vasili, "perhaps by this time like me......"

"At least, if I had lived unconsciously in my ignorance, and my filth, and superstition," added Mattheus, with excitement, "I should not feel my soul weighed down in my misery by the ruin of an angel—for what better idea have you of such a woman than of the Almighty's angels!"

"She is very well!" said the old man; "but she will never get as fat as Katinka."

Mattheus remained for a moment thoughtful. Although with no other witnesses, in Vasili's imagination, than the image of the patron saint whom they invoked, he trusted to him his wife's fortune with little hesitation; for, although Vasili was in his usual dealings, like most of his class, a notorious rogue, these people, Mattheus knew to be true and faithful to each other. Vasili himself had formerly belonged to an atel, or company of his fellows, which rendered itself responsible for the honesty of each of its members, and thus each member recommended by it, and who could not otherwise be trusted with an article of the most trifling value, is commonly employed, especially by the foreign bankers and merchants, as a money-carrier, and is never known to be guilty of a violation of trust, for which his brother atelchiks would suffer.

On the whole, there is perhaps no such general honesty and good faith ever to be met with amongst men who are bound by equal moral obligations towards the whole world as in those classes, whose opinions or tenets allow them, with the one exception of their own race, tribe, or caste, to look upon the whole human family in a spirit of hostility, which at least excuses any treachery. The Jews, in those parts of the continent where oppression has divided them from the Gentiles, the gipsies, and the Russian Moujiks, afford a few out of many exemplifications of this singular strengthening of social good faith by the restriction and limitation of its sphere.

A large portion of the internal commerce of the empire and nearly all its export trade are carried on upon a system based on this rough probity, which, under certain circumstances, is almost always to be met with from men, who, in their ordinary dealings with their fellow subjects, and invariably with strangers and those appertaining to strange classes, exhibit a dishonesty which seems sometimes morbidly irresistible.

The merchants of London, by advancing capital, in fact, set the export trade in motion. From their commission houses in St. Petersburg, Riga and Odessa, through innumerable agencies, advances of money are made to irresponsible men, who can neither read nor write, in remote parts of the empire, and who are true to their engagements, delivering their goods for eventual transport to that England, of which they have scarcely ever heard, with sufficient punctuality for the purposes of trade.

Mattheus therefore felt little anxiety as to the safety of his deposit, but he was more doubtful as to whether the brother of Vasili Petrovitch would still consent to take charge of Blanche till her convalescence, if she were destined to recover, for her medical attendant had just decided that it was a malignant fever; and it was probable that the Prince would that day order her removal from his palace to the hospital, by which opportunity, melancholy as it was, her husband hoped to profit to instal her in a place of refuge.

"Did not Ivan Petrovitch say he would receive her?"

"He said so," replied Mattheus.

"Then, if Ivan Petrovitch said so—if death itself came to his threshold, he would still say, come in! But you have been near her and she has a malignant fever," said the old man, crossing himself; "bring me some scents, and burn vinegar, and let the Pope be sent for to sprinkle the rooms with holy water."

"Well," said Mattheus, "I leave you! What, not my hand? Well, God bless you! and as you are true to your trust, may He spurn or receive you when you appear before His judgment seat!"

CHAPTER VIII.

Count Horace had just done writing. A number of those fur-lined garments, which the Russians call shubes, were lying about the room, from which he designed to make choice for the approaching winter. A servant announced that his English groom was there.

"Good morning to you, Sir."

"Good morning, Bob."

"Well, how is Lucifer?"

"All right and tight, Sir."

"Sit down, Bob," said the Count good-humouredly, for he looked forward to considerable entertainment from all these interviews.

"No, thankee Sir," said Bob, looking round him, a little uneasily, his eyes during their circuit resting mechanically on the fur pelisses piled upon the sofa.

"Now, how would one of those fur shubes serve you for the cold weather?"

"It wouldn't serve me no how, Sir, no more than I wouldn't serve a Rooshian gentleman," replied Bob, with rising acrimony, for he was very sensitive on the subject of any projected innovation of costume, and looked with a suspicious eye on all that might be held to indicate it.

"Well," said the Count, "don't be afraid; no one will force you to wear one, but I cannot exactly see why you should show such marked disinclination to serve a Russian master. Whatever may be the peculiar qualities of the Russians, they are generous enough and affable enough to their servants."

"I know it," answered Bob, "and that is just it; they not only talks friendly and familiar like to their French cooks and walleys, but even makes hail fellow-well-met with their English grooms and coachmen, shakes hands with 'em and asks 'em to sit down, when they so far forgets their selves as to submit to it. Now it don't make a groom a bit more 'spectable for sitting hob and nob with his master, but it does to be serving a master as every body respects, which that ain't the way to get 'em to do, and it is agrawating to a man as don't wish to step out of his place, but takes credit in serving a gentleman as keeps in his'n."

"Oh," thought Horace, "I see the rebuke. You are rather a philosopher, Bob."

"Well, Sir," said Bob, "that pint ain't clearly agreed upon, for my late master, Mr. Mortimer, often said, I was no philosopher."

"Do you know the meaning of philosopher?"

"His meaning, and he was the knowingest gentleman as ever I come across, was a man as could make foreign cutlery bright and sharp, as could polish boots and shoes with French blacking, and as would undertake to keep a lumbering German carriage in order, which never was in order, from the day it was made."

"Well, that is a very singular definition; but, on the whole, Bob, never you take being called a philosopher amiss, because it is the most creditable appellation imaginable."

"As Mr. Mortimer understood it," replied Bob, "a philosopher was entitled to some credit, since he must have succeeded in doing what no man ever did before him, which no man ever made foreign knives clean, blacking shine, or wehicles roll smooth or look tidy, and no man never will."

"You must look at it in a more enlarged point of view, Bob, the word 'philosophy' is derived, you see, from two old Greek words, which mean the love of wisdom, or, according to the Cartesian definition, the love of the thing demonstrated."

"I have been told that too," said Bob, "but what is the use of arguing with a gentleman of your 'cuteness on the truth of any words as ever came out of the mouth of any Greeks, thimble-riggers, horse-chaunters or Yorkshire dealers, old or young. Otherways I could show that philosophy was exactly the precise reverse, and contrairy to the love of wisdom, or at least to the practise of it."

"Let us hear," said the Count, "by all means."

"Well, sir, just to go to the case in pint; since Mr. Mortimer found out, when he tried it, that French knives wouldn't cut, that foreign blacking wouldn't shine, nor German coaches roll easy when they moved, nor look respectable when they stood still, I think that what he called philosophy (which was thinking that they would) wasn't exactly wisdom."

Bob proceeded, being encouraged to do so by an approbatory sign from Horace.

"Now, Sir, I once too, knowed a man as called himself a regular philosopher, and lived in a back attic overlooking a mews. He was in the habit of watering his porter, and always poured it out from the pewter into a chinay mug without a handle, that wasn't wisdom. Then, Sir, there was a schoolmaster, as lived near Newmarket, who, when he buried his scolding wife, came and run up a score at the tap of the Rutland Arms, sung jolly songs and courted another wife directly. Now that wasn't wisdom, especially as, if the first wife used her tongue free-like, the other used the poker quite as freely.

"Then, Sir, there was the parson, as made a Christian of me, when I was only rising six weeks old; he drove his wife from the parsonage to the church with the same horse and gig for eleven years; at length the wenerable gentleman goes to London, and at the Addled-egg Gallery he sees a new patent chain safety rein, partikelarly recommended to invalids and elderly timid and nervous people, which tickled his reverend fancy so much, that he bought it.

" 'Bob,' says he, 'don't you consider this a valuable acquisition, which pervents the possibility of a horse running away.'

" 'Sir,' says I, 'seeing that your'n is broken-winded and lame on three legs, I wouldn't try to perwent it.'

" 'Never mind,' says he, 'it is sound philosophy to guard against the possibility of an accident.' So, Sir, he did try it, and pulled the horse and gig, and his wife and all, over into the ditch on the following Sunday. Now he wouldn't let well alone, and he called that philosophy."

"Well, and how do you like the country by this time, Bob?"

"I can't say much for the country."

"What is your objection to it?"

"Well, Sir, I have not seen a bit of ground yet over which a horse can gallop, and a man who has been all over it tells me there is none for the next five hundred miles to his knowledge."

"Nonsense, I see plenty of open spaces and meadows."

"Yes, but they are all boggy or swampy, or hard, there isn't half a mile you could train a horse upon."

"And what do you think of the people?"

"Not much, though I have thought much about them."

"Well, and what conclusion have you come to?"

"Why! on the whole," said Bob, "it's my opinion, Sir, that these Rooshians is not unlike the Jews in some partikilars, and uncommon like 'em in their looks; I knowed an old clothes-man once, his name was Mordecai Isaacs; like most of 'em he would have cheated anybody he could, and he could have cheated any born creature he would but a Rooshian or a Yorkshireman. But, at least amongst his own people, he was very charitable, which was the main pint of difference betwixt him and many Christian traders, who cheat every body they can, and never deal with any body they cannot cheat, and besides is never charitable to nobody.

"Now the principal difference, as I can make out, between a Rooshian and an old clothes-man is that the Rooshian washes his-self once a week, and never changes his clothes till they drop off him. Now the Jew is always changing his clothes (which it is his business to do) and he only washes his-self as often as the Rooshian gets a new rig out. Then as for the likeness, the Jew calls any thing he is going to eat kosha, and the Rooshian calls it kooshat. And then they neither of 'em knows the walley of a roast sirloin of beef. The Rooshian cuts it up in bits and boils it into sour cabbage soup, which he calls stchee, and the Jew calls it trifa, and won't eat the joint at all. For people who do read their bible, which some says the Jews wrote it, I have always wondered at their standing so much in their own light as to prefer a brisket to a sirloin which they do. Was you ever in Houndsditch or Duke's Place, Sir?"

"Never, Bob."

"Well," said Bob, complacently conscious of enlightening ignorance, "whenever you do go, Sir, you'll find them to be the famous places which they breeds in. Well, there, Sir, you may see 'em eating just the same salt cucumbers, the same salt raw Dutch herrings, and frying their fish just as brown and crisp in oil as the Rooshians do. Then the Jews never eats hares nor eels, nor the Rooshians neither, though they have plenty of hares, not on their heads and chins only, but running about the woods, brown, white and grey, like fancy rabbits, which I wouldn't have believed, barring I'd seen it, which I have. And they have eels as thick as a man's wrist, which seems really to have got so old and fat as to be unpleasant to their selves, like very stout old gentlemen, through the cruel ignorance and prejudice of them as wont eat 'em.

"Again your Jew, except upon the sly, will never eat lobsters nor crabs, nor periwinkles, nor shrimps, nor hot cockles.

"No more don't the Rooshians, which is a rule they never breaks through, seeing that there is none in the whole country as I hear tell."

"Well, Bob, and what is your theory. Do you think they are related?"

"The Rooshians is too sharp for that, Sir, they can give 'em weight and beat 'em by a distance in any mortal deal a gentleman could name or think of."

"Have they taken you in?"

"Only once, Sir."

"Well, you can't complain of that."

"No more I don't, Sir, because it perwented me from ever giving 'em another opportunity."

"And how did they do you?"

"In a pair of shoes, Sir."

"What were they too dear, or were they not good?"

"The soles were fastened on with glue, and when I walked out in the rain last night, I only brought back one of them, and that was in the crown of my hat to keep as a curiosity."

"Well, Bob, now to proceed to business, what do you say to those two bay horses the Prince has for sale. They are rather light for the saddle and would hardly carry me?"

"One may call them both light and heavy," replied Bob, "their limbs are too slight and the carcases upon them too bulky; as to their ever carrying you, Sir, I don't think that they can even carry their own weight with comfort to theirselves, and I am sure they can't just now, that they are in regular Rooshian training—which is just like oxen fatted for a cattle show."

"I did not much like them."

"No, Sir, they'd be no credit to no stable."

"Not but what I believe these country horses to be generally better than they look."

"Not them two, at any rate; a horse may have all the pints about him, and yet not go after all; but if he hasn't the pints requisite, he never can go. Now the nags we are a talking of, want depth of chest and power about the hind quarters."

"Well, but supposing them perfect in every other part."

"Still, Sir, they'd only be bunches of dogs-meat, as I could 'splain to you in two minutes."

"Let us hear."

"In the first place, the power of the hind quarters and the vigour of your horses' thighs is half the battle; they push him along the same as they does the grasshopper, he can't go without vigour there, no more than could a greyhound, or a cricket, or a flea. Then, when his hind limbs are of the right sort to carry him over the ground, look to the depth of his chest, that holds the wind-bags, and will make him last the pace, when his hind legs will push him up to the pace. And when you find that right, it is time to look to his forelegs to see what stuff they are made of, and whether they are strong enough to bear his own weight and you'rn on the top of it (not forgetting the saddle) without going to pieces with the racket, when he does go the pace and keep the pace.

"It's quite true that a horse may have all these essential pints about him and be a bad one—like a watch, which may be brimful of works, and yet may never go 'cept when its carried. But, if he wants any of these pints, you may be sure that he never can turn out a clipper no more than a watch without any works inside of it can ever tell the clock at all.

"Foreigners, indeed, looks to the breadth of chest, which may be found uncommon fine in a broken-winded dray-horse, or they looks for a white stocking, or a white spot, or a grey hair in a horse's tail, to find fault with, by which the breeders and dealers always knows at once where to find the green spot in their eyes, and looks upon 'em direct as safe to be done."

Here, a visitor being announced, the groom took his departure.

Being in want of information as to where he could find an English saddler, Bob Bridle was under the necessity of repairing to the address given him by the English groom, whose acquaintance he did not much relish, on account of his being in his estimation not very creditable to the respectability of his cloth.

It was at an English public house or tavern, kept in a back street, and frequented by the English domestics brought over by Russian noblemen, and usually, in a short time, like all English servants on the continent, utterly spoiled and corrupted.

The high though uncertain wages, the occasional familiarity of their masters, who are accustomed in their hearts to consider as their equals any free inhabitants of Western Europe, and the example of their employers, all tend to lead them into habits of irregularity, intemperance, dissoluteness, and blackguardism; whilst the superiority which all Russian servants unhesitatingly admit—never pretending to sit at the same table as English domestics—together with the utter contempt which these entertain not only for their fellows but for their masters, frees them from all that salutary control, which in England restrains their irregularities.

Bob was ushered into a low parlour, where ale, and porter, and soda-water were announced in gold letters on little framed boards suspended from the walls after the fashion of English public-houses.

The aspect of the room, and the appearance, costume, and manner of the guests recalled some low English tap-room near a horse-fair, filled with customers of a questionable description; with this difference, however, that its inmates mixed up with their slang and familiar nicknames an assumption of dignity of rank, which was taken quite gravely, and the style of gentlemen, and gentlemanly was adopted by them as a matter of serious right.

Bob looked to the walls, and above the chimney-piece he read this golden statute, "Any gentleman found cheating at play will be fined five shillings and given to the poor Thomas Webster," which local act of legislation, from its lofty disregard of punctuation, Bob for a moment interpreted as a threat of delivering the delinquent into the bondage of the worthy publican.

This notice had its counterpart on the opposite side of the apartment in the following announcement, which had been prompted not alone by the host's love of justice, but obviously by his friendship for an individual whose name was modestly concealed, whilst his acquirements were respectfully set forth. "A gentleman, a friend of mine, kills rats, mice, bugs, and every other sort of varmint."

The lad of whom Bob was in quest was seated drinking at a table, and, on seeing him enter, he nudged his companions, and said, "That's the sanctified chap as keeps a bible in one of his top boots; now you'll see a game."

"How are you?" said Bob.

"Well, now I've been in a way, like, since last we met; do you know that I begin to think that I am rayther a sinful creatur."

"It's not unlikely," said Bob drily.

"No, I ain't a-chaffing; do you know that I am beginning to think on my lonely condition in the world; my mammy's dead, and my daddy's gone, and my friends is all under ground."

"So I should have thought," replied Bob drily, "for I have only passed this street twice, and I have seed you twice going into that ere beer cellar."

Hereupon there was a general laugh at the expense of the other.

"That's too varmint a badger for you to draw," said one of his companions; for altogether, the dry, quiet manner, and self-possession of Bob, together with the neatness and correctness of his professional costume, had produced a highly favourable impression on the whole assemblage, and had inspired them with about as much respect as they were capable of feeling for anything human.

"Perhaps, however," insinuated the taverner, "this gentleman would allow me to draw something for him."

"No, my friend," replied Bob. "I'm not to be drawed of the walley of a pint of beer just now. Thank you, all the same."

"Sir," said the individual, who had flatteringly compared him to a badger, "you mistake the matter, there's nobody here as wants to draw nobody of nothing; but I and these here gentlemen feels disposed to do the polite, and to stand treat, to welcome a strange gentleman who comes amongst us to anything he may choose to name, for the sake of cultivating his acquaintance."

"You are very good," said Bob; "but, in the first place, I hav'n't time; and in the next, it's my opinion, that a man, like a horse, should always take his drink sparingly when he has anything to do, and as abundantly as he pleases when he's out of service, or turned out to grass, but yet always at regular hours."

"And yet," said the taverner, "a glass of somethin' hot is always wholesome and refreshin' if you only take a snack with it; let me tempt you with a slice of broiled bacon or a bit of toasted cheese."

"Thank you," replied Bob, "I'd rather not make a mouse-trap of my inside at this time of day."

"Sir," said Bob's patron, "I honour your sentiments; but allow me to say that you are not up to the customs of this here city. As for having anything to do, that is all round my hat. Time was made for slaves and Rooshians; and we should demean ourselves into vulgar ignorant Rooshians by attending to it, should we not, gentlemen?"

A burst of approbation indicated the acquiescence of the bystanders in the maxim set forth by the speaker, and he continued:

"Perhaps, however, you prefers to stand treat yourself, in which case, we shall take the liberty of voting you into the chair;" and, adding to the insinuation of his words the eloquence of action, the orator rose and gracefully dragged forward an arm-chair.

"You are very kind," replied Bob; "but in three quarters of an hour I must be in the saddle; and I have some business to transact twixt this and then, which is just to get a new buckle sewed on to the girths of it."

"Really we can't excuse you; besides these here gentlemen would feel aggrawated if you refused them, it being the custom among gentlemen in St. Petersburg, which of course before you was told you would not be aware on."

"When I sets up for a gentleman," said Bob, "I'll take a leaf out of your book—so good morning, gentlemen."

"What! you refuse the chair?"

"I am afraid of it, and that's the truth. Tom Spavin, who kept the 'Running Horse,' was so fond of taking the chair, that he died in the bench. But don't let the reflection spoil your conviviality," replied Bob Bridle, who, having beckoned aside his acquaintance, and learned the saddler's address, wished them all good morning, saying to himself: "Let them put that in their pipes and smoke it; and by the bye, now I think of it, I'll take a whiff myself as I go along." Drawing from an inner recess, he filled and lighted a short, blackened clay pipe, which his father had dispatched to him many years before—on his first going abroad with Mr. Mortimer—through a gentleman's servant travelling to the part of the continent which Bob, with his master, was then inhabiting. The anxious father had learned with some horror from his son's letter, that the part of the world which they had reached was so "outlandish that there was not even such a thing as a clay pipe, or a pewter-pot, or a draught of porter to put into it, in the whole country, the foreigners giving their barley to the horses instead of making it into malt."

Now judging that such things indicated an utter inversion of all social order and could only be at the Antipodes (whom old Bridle judged to be a fierce people of that name, armed with tomahawks and habitually standing on their heads), he made application first to the Captain of a South Sea whaler, and then to the steward of a West Indiaman, to induce them to take charge of a parcel, hearing that they were going across sea, "which was exactly where his son was gone." Being, however, at last put in the right channel, it was eventually transmitted to Bob in safety, containing amongst other articles, this piece of consolation, which, truth to say, reached him indeed in several pieces.

Nevertheless, the stump adhering to the bowl had been prevented from farther multiplying by Bob's exceeding care; for he usually kept it with his pocket-Bible in his right top boot, when not carrying it about his person.

"Oh! you are going to smoke in the street, are you?" said his pseudo-friend with a grin from ear to ear.

"You don't see no objection, do you?"

"Oh no!"

"Considering that I have not set up for a gentleman yet."

And, shaking hands with as much sincerity as their betters might have done, they separated—Bob considering the whole party as an irredeemable set of vagabonds, from whom, as he was determined to get into no further scrapes, he had better keep away; and they judging him to be "a mean-spirited, pitiful fellow."

Bob was proceeding quietly along; he had nearly reached the saddler's, when a boutoushnik, one of the police watchmen, stepped up to him axe in hand, and unceremoniously seized him by the collar. Bob felt for a moment inclined to knock him down or trip him up; but, seeing that there was help at hand for his assailant, he restrained himself.

Bob was evidently in custody. The boutoushnik and a couple of assistant police soldiers, who had emerged from the watch-house or boudtke, displayed vociferous and savage indignation—intended to impose upon their prisoner—to whom, when they found that he could not understand them, they made signs that he was to be marched away between two of them.

When Bob had thus proceeded a few paces, the boutoushnik called them back, and made unequivocal signs that he would be set at liberty on paying for it.

"Oh!" said Bob, "tricks upon travellers; I understand. Lead the way, if you dare; for I am not going to submit to such highway robbery!"

And the boutoushnik, judging from his manner that there was nothing to be extorted from his obstinate determination, with a malicious grin, directed them to proceed.

Bob raised his pipe to his mouth; but it was rudely snatched from him. At length, they reached the police station, with its high wooden turret, whence a look-out is kept for fires, and the signal made by elevating one or more globular Chinese lanthorns, according to the number of the Chast or division of the city in which it has broken out.

Bob Bridle was led by his captors through two or three dusky rooms filled with traders and moujiks, purposely habited in their dingiest attire, when obliged to repair to these dens of extortion.

He was kept standing by the police soldiers, who would not even allow him to sit for near three hours, until his case was inquired into by a man, whom from his close-fitting uniform and cocked hat, the groom recognised as a naziratel, or, as he termed it, nasty-rat—the police lieutenant. He very soon, however, seemed to give up all concern in it; and after another hour of anxious expectation, he was brought before the police-major in person. The police soldiers gave their evidence with great volubility, and apparently with a vivid sense of the enormity which the delinquent had committed, tempered only by their awe of the personage in whose presence they were delivering it. All this was written down in a book, and then the pipe was brought forward, examined, and evidently described with minuteness by the recording scribes. The major looked at the pipe and then at Bob, and scowled awfully.

"One would think," said Bob to himself, "that I had committed murder with that pipe, or that I had used it as Sampson did the jaw-bone of a jackass."

Here Bob was interrogated, and, as he understood not a word, he only shook his head.

All this was duly taken down.

"Well," thought Bob, "you seems to like the fun of writing down your own questions."

At length, with a wave of the hand, he was dismissed by the major; but not till his pockets had been rifled. Then he was taken down into a pestilential dungeon, where he was thrust in with a score of loathsome objects, covered with rags and vermin; and here, placing his back to the wall, because he dared not lie or sit down, he was obliged to make use of his fists to prevent being stripped by them at the outset.

Here, bewildered with this strange treatment he remained till nightfall. Then the dungeon doors opened and a dozen more individuals were let in: they had chains or cords about their legs and brooms in their hands: they were those forced during the day by the police to sweep the streets.

One of these individuals, more mud-bespattered than the rest, sank on a bench in sudden and overwhelming abstraction; he took off his cap, his head was close shaven. At length he seemed to gather something of the conversation of those around him, and turned suddenly about to Bob Bridle, who was apparently the object of the remarks.

"You are an Englishman?" he inquired, to the utter surprise of the groom, in perfect English.

"Ay!" said Bob, "and I wish I had to do with Englishmen now, even if they was the worst of their sort as ever was whelped."

"Do you know what you are here for?"

"Lord love you, how should I?"

"Relate to me how and when you were arrested," and Bob, in his own peculiar manner, narrated all that had happened to him.

"Oh, it is quite plain," said the man with the shaven head, whom Bob could not help comparing to Joseph interpreting his fellow-prisoner's dream. "You were smoking in the street; now smoking is forbidden in any city in which there may be an imperial palace, under a penalty of one thousand paper roubles (£45). When the boutoushnik arrested you, if you had given him a silver rouble, he would have let you go; as it is, he gets nothing by your capture."

"That's a satisfaction," said Bob.

"When the naziratel interrogated you, a hundred roubles would still have got you free, and when you came before the major, perhaps half the amount of the fine would still have satisfied him, for, although he will pocket the whole of it, it will be at the risk of having to disgorge it to one of his superiors."

"And what is to be done now?"

"Firstly, you must manage to communicate with your master, and in the next place, either you or he will have to pay the full fine."

"Two years' wages!" sighed Bob.

"You must give one of these police soldiers a silver piece, to take a scrap of paper for you to the house of your master."

"They have taken my money," replied Bob. "Do they mean to keep it?"

"As long as money is the circulating medium; but in that case you must bribe him with your coat or waistcoat."

Two hours afterwards, the fine was paid and Bob relieved.

"Well," said Bob, shaking hands with the stranger, "many thanks to you; but hang it I'm sorry to leave you here with such an English tongue in your head too. You will soon be out of trouble, I hope."

"Not in this world," said the other mournfully.

"Is there anything I can do to thank you."

"Nothing. Good bye! It is a happiness for me to have served an Englishman," and, as he pressed Bob's hand, a tear glistened in his eye.

When the fine was paid, Bob also managed to get back his pipe on bribing the major with five shillings, and then, in a terrible state of mind, he hastened to his stable, for Lucifer had been locked up since the morning, and Bob had the key; a reflection which had rendered his captivity almost distracting. But, when Bob had duly attended to Lucifer, as he retired to rest, the visage of his strange companion in misfortune recurred to him incessantly: he could not help thinking that both the voice and features were familiar to him. Alas! how in his rags and misery should he have recognised his late master's friend Mattheus?

Just as a Russian father or husband is forbidden, if within a definite distance of a police office, to chastise his wife or children, so is the master forbidden to chastise his slave. But just as the husband or father can send the wife or children to the police to be punished without inquiry, so the master can and daily does by his slave. He dispatches the slave to the station with an order for his corporeal punishment, and for making him sweep the public streets for a given number of days.

The Prince Isaakoff had availed himself of this privilege. Mattheus, who had made all the necessary arrangements for the safety of his wife, had bowed with resignation, and was supported in his sufferings by the consciousness of an expiatory martyrdom.

CHAPTER IX.

When the Wednesday came, although Count Horace had previously determined to send an excuse to Madame Obrasoff, he felt himself impelled by an irresistible curiosity to study her character more narrowly, after the strange history which he had heard from the poet.

Somehow, her face was like those once seen in our sleep, which, dreamily indistinct, are constantly afterwards recurring to us, and so, to him that face had recurred, as he endeavoured to sink to rest on the preceding night, sometimes upon the lithe and graceful figure of her daughter Anna, and then the countenance and all had changed into Anna's, with her ingenuous smile, and the joyous sparkle of her quick bright eyes. And when he awoke, his thoughts had still been provokingly haunted by the mother and her sister-like daughter.

It was evident even to himself that they exercised a sort of magnetic fascination over him, derived perhaps from the very contrast offered between the mother's heartlessness and her exquisite sensibility of expression, and between the guileless frankness of Anna's manner and the consummate coquetry which he no longer doubted in the daughter of such a woman.

He endeavoured to recall dimly remembered stories, illustrative of the feeling, which finds a singular attraction in the very horrors which should have acted repulsively, such as leads men of some temperaments, by an irresistible impulse, to lean dangerously over a dizzy precipice, and which may have given rise to the tales of birds fluttering into the jaws of the serpent, and of mariners eagerly curious to catch the voices of the destroying syrens. At least, both mother and daughter had inspired in him a vivid interest, and, forewarned, he thought to amuse himself by playing off deceit against deceit, where any perfidy was excusable. Or, was it all perhaps a mere rhapsody of the poet's luxuriant imagination?

"You know Madame Obrasoff; pray can you tell me whether the Lieutenant R—, who was hanged after the revolt of 1825, was ever an enthusiastic admirer of hers?"

"He was," said Prince Ivan, "to answer your question. But who in Heaven's name has been talking to you about R—?"

"My informant was the poet."

"Ah!" replied Ivan, "he is allowed to speak, and he uses his tongue as a child in a crowd would a sharp sword. But don't you imitate him, my good fellow, and pray let all conspirators rest in their quiet graves, or in the full security of their mines, or chains, or dungeons. It is a very ungrateful theme, and though you, as a foreigner, may not fear to talk, you will very soon find every one as disinclined to listen as I am. Who was with you besides?"

"The Lieutenant Alexius only."

"Ah! a foolish, weak, poetic youth, the poet's follower and disciple, who will waste some ingenuity to accomplish the easiest thing in the world—getting sent to the Caucasus."

"Do you go to the imperial fête at Peterhoff to-night?"

"Do you?" returned the Prince. "You have an option. I have none. I cannot venture to stay away."

Peterhoff is situated upwards of twenty miles from St. Petersburg, on a slight elevation, which overlooks the gulf of Finland. It is the Versailles of Russia. Here, round the palace, with its extensive parks, and gardens, and waterworks, a little town has gathered, chiefly consisting of the boxes of the nobility and courtiers of both descriptions, who have so crowded together in their anxiety to get near the Imperial sun as to raise the value of ground to an enormous price by the competition.

These Russian courtiers may be designated as of two descriptions, because there are those who—as all other courtiers do—gather around majesty to secure, like jackals, the leavings and the offal of the lion's share; and then there is another, the more numerous class, peculiarly Russian, consisting of some of the wealthiest nobles, whose fortune allows them to scorn not only the pitiful pay, but the rich perquisites, of any office in the empire. These attend the court, not for the positive gain of what they can get, but to secure, by attaining office, the negative advantage of protection to themselves and their families from the severity with which people of their rank are apt otherwise to be treated not only by the sovereign, but through all the grades to which his authority sub-descends.

It thus happens that, within a few cannon-shot of woods which have never been cleared, and of land of mere nominal value, the most extravagant prices of any in the world are paid for building-ground; and on this account the villas and cottages are comparatively small and contracted, and are often reared of perishable boards of deal, imitating the gothic sculptured stone, at an expense which stone would not elsewhere have occasioned.

From his palace at Peterhoff, which stands midway, the Emperor has one eye on his capital and the other on the island and town of Cronstadt,—the Portsmouth of his empire, and the chief port of his fleet. On the other hand, he is within only a few miles of the summer camp of Krasnoe-Zelo, where all his guards assemble.

Just out of the little town itself, in fact divided from it by the width of the road, is the camp of the cadet schools. Some thousand boys, the sons of officers or of the nobility of the empire, forced into this service by a thousand complicated and vexatious regulations—dressed in stiff uniforms and armed with tiny muskets—manœuvre under the Emperor's eye, are exercised in firing Lilliputian cannon, and sleep under pigmy tents, whilst just off the shore is a little fleet entirely manned by the naval cadets, all youths of corresponding age.

A gateway and of course a guard-house bar the high road to Oranienbaum, which passes within the precincts of the Imperial town; and, this entrance once past, beware! You are within the outer porch of the temple—approaching the holy of holies—and you must neither smoke, nor run, nor laugh merrily, nor talk loudly, even in the lanes and along the hedges and dead walls, where etiquette reigns triumphant. The roads and streets are swept more clean than even in those fabulously tidy towns of Holland, where I have seen an old woman come out and pick up a cigar end and four leaves and throw them into the canal.

The villa of the Obrasoffs consisted of a sort of Gothic tower, with an adjoining wing, built up of brick and stucco; but there was a vast green-house adjoining, and the large windows of plate and stained glass opened upon a little bowling green and English garden, intersected with neat gravel-walks, and surrounded by a richly figured railing of cast iron, whilst the foot pavement that ran along-side the enclosure consisted of slabs of the same metal, cast in an equally elaborate pattern.

The early hour of two had been fixed for dinner, in consequence of the fête at the palace in the evening. Horace was received by Madame Obrasoff and her youngest daughter.

The room opened upon the lawn, and as the morning was a little chilly, some fragrant faggots of cedar-wood and a piece of English kennel coal, had been lighted in the grate which filled a sculptured chimney-piece of marble inlaid with cameo-like medallions of Sèvres bisque, the whiteness of whose graceful classic figures was relieved on a ground of pale blue.

The hangings were also of light blue damask silk, overrun with wreathing white convolvuluses and roses, and matched the colour of the tesselated pavement, which was left visible within a yard of the white marble wainscoting, by a velvet-like carpet in which deep blue predominated.

Here and there, on the chimney-piece and the console tables, and on little consoles of antique bisque, were exquisite figures of gilt bronze to imitate a sort of bronze of gold, because the radiant metal seen piercing through its purple oxide, gave it a kind of bloom, which harmonised with the surrounding hues, and seemed reflected from them.

Scattered about were instruments of music, books, and engravings, and those costly sketches, whose hasty boldness speaks rather of the artist's fame than conveys any distinct evidence of his merit.

It will be readily imagined that the ethereal hue which pervaded the apartment was not exactly favourable to the pale and fairy-like beauty of Madame Obrasoff; but then, either by chance or design, she had seated herself just where the light reflected through one of the coloured panes caught her distant figure in its faint and roseate halo.

Next to her sits an elderly gentleman in uniform. He looks rather like a high-bred German than a Russian; his figure is good, his carriage soldier-like; the baldness which his grey hair leaves as it recedes, gives to his forehead the appearance of being high and ample. There is a natural frankness and jollity about the expression of his countenance which habit or position has restrained, and there is that impertinent and suspicious inquisitiveness about his grey eyes, which men of very limited perception acquire in their aspect when long accustomed to peer into the motives of their fellow-men.

There is nothing to indicate superiority of intellect; but in his manner, as he signs to Madame Obrasoff not to introduce them, there obtrudes an imperious and involuntary hauteur derived from the consciousness of power. For this man is very powerful.

There is a carriage and four this moment passing along the road, containing within it a nobleman and his wife, of family more ancient than the Emperor's—starred, titled, and ribboned—whilst their fortune matches their rank. Well, if this elderly gentleman were to beckon the nobleman to step out of his vehicle, and to remain with his wife upon their knees on the high road till he relieved them, they would do it, and they must do it for—although not so powerful as he will afterwards become—they know well enough that he is Count Benkendorf, to whom the Emperor's whole power is delegated as grand master of the secret police; whose absolute authority every one in the Empire, the princes of the blood inclusive, must unhesitatingly obey; and who has no account to render to any one for the exercise of it but to his Imperial master.

It struck Horace that he had seen him before, although he could not remember where; and so he had, for, as chief of the secret police, he personally interrogates and converses with every stranger arriving in the capital, only leaving this business to his lieutenant, the General Duppelt, when unavoidable duties prevent him.

There was an affectionate cordiality in Madame Obrasoff's welcome; and as she gently pressed his hand there was a beseeching expression in her speaking eye, which glancing in the direction of the grand master, seemed to say that there was something to explain, and to make the most winning apology before her words expressed it. They were to dine at five instead of at two, "because a very charming person, whose acquaintance would compensate him for any number of hours of ennui, had proposed to join them."

Feodora Obrasoff received him with reserved but easy gravity, answering only in monosyllables to his attempts at conversation, though sometimes looking up from her book of engravings to survey him very minutely and intently, as she might have done by one who had been the subject of much conversation for either good or evil.

"But where is Anna?" said the mother.

"Anna is in her boudoir," replied Feodora. "I have sent to her three times:—she will not come."

"But does she know that the Comte de Montressan is here?" said the mother.

And, in a few minutes, Anna came bounding joyously into the room, and, after having welcomed him with frank cordiality, she turned with a distant respect almost amounting to dislike towards the grand master, although his salutation was good-humouredly courteous.

"Ah!" quoth he, aloud. "Youth! youth! youth!—how disdainfully it turns from our sixty summers towards congenial youth!"

Horace's lip curled insensibly, and he thought "this is a badly got up and well-acted comedy of La fille à marier; but each one to his part."

The sun was beginning to shine out temptingly, and a ramble in the imperial gardens was proposed; but first Anna insisted on showing Horace through the green-house, and into the boudoir of herself and sister.

The green-house was very properly, less a botanical collection, or the collection of a market gardener in which the classification and economy of space had been borne in view for scientific or commercial purposes, than a vast and tastefully arranged exotic bower, adorned with statues and with fountains.

It led through a screen of verdure, and through doors of painted glass, into a sort of circular Moorish court; it was paved with white marble, whilst the arches were moulded into beautiful arabesques, modelled after the walls of the Alhambra, and the glass between them, kept in a heat which compensated the palm tree for the hot sun of Africa, whilst its broad leaf partially shaded the glare of light.

The passion-flower and the vine too, intruding their stems through narrow apertures from the green-house, helped to exclude the sun's rays from the delightful retreat which they invaded. There was a basin in the middle filled to the brim with crystal water, and an exquisitely sculptured water goddess seemed to hold up delightedly a water lily with leaves and buds of gold; but the lily was represented by the fountain itself, which issued out of the hollow stem, and formed with the pellucid fluid exactly the cup of the flower. The boudoir might almost be said to form part of the court, for it was entirely without windows—open on one side—and consisting of a sort of alcove receding behind several of the arches.

This recess was hung with green and white striped silk, wherever it was not hidden by spacious glasses, and a broad luxurious divan surrounded the walls, its cushions covered with the same material. The deep soft velvet-like plush of the Aubusson carpet, which trenched upon the white marble pavement of the court, was of a deep grass green, and in its pattern were woven irregular groups of the early crocus of the spring, and of the short stemmed tulip. There was a small round table, a slab of malachite supported by cupids of or-moulu, whose wings seemed outspread to assist their dimpled childish arms to bear aloft their burden. But most remarkable was a very large folding screen: on the reverse its black ground was adorned with flowers and birds, to whose gorgeous wings the brilliancy of inlaid mother of pearl had given more than the refulgence of their real plumage; on the other side it was covered with beautiful sketches of figures or engravings admirably coloured. This was evidently a great object of Anna's pride, for many of these paintings were the production of her own or of her sister's pencil.

The productions of the two sisters differed as they did themselves in temper—those of Feodora being minute copies, Anna's exceeding anything he had ever seen from the hands of an amateur.

But what amused him most was the naiveté with which the Peri of this fairy bower, pointed out and dwelt on the merits of her own works. Those of her sister were mere careful copies perhaps retouched by a master's hand, whilst her own were full of life and spirit, and genius— and all this she unhesitatingly pointed out, and then inquired which of their styles he preferred, in a tone of grave earnestness, as if she took the deepest interest in his decision.

"Ah!" said Horace, "this is a face I have seen somewhere."

"This is my performance!" answered Anna with delight, "it is a sketch of Madame L— from recollection."

"I remember now, I saw her pass my window one evening in your carriage."

"Perhaps," said Anna, "my memory is the worst in the world; but I will tell you where you have met her. One Thursday night on the 9th of last month, after dinner at Madame ——'s."

"And how do you remember that so minutely with the worst memory in the world?"

"Oh!" said Anna with simplicity, looking him full in the face, "though you were only presented to us the next night, it was there I first saw you."

"Do not imagine that I forget," answered Horace; "but you may conceive how agreeably I am flattered, to find that you should recollect the circumstance."

"Oh, I ought to remember it. Look, here is your face, as I sketched it from memory on the following morning."

And, to his utter surprise, she opened a drawing book, and pointed out a finished sketch of himself, full of all that general and spirited resemblance which portraits from recollection bear, when possessed of any likeness.

"Ah!" said Horace, "how could I be ignorant of the happiness of attracting so much of your attention?"

"It was to please my mother," added Anna; "she entreated me to endeavour to recall your features upon paper the ensuing morning."

"Your Lady mother and yourself have flattered me beyond expression," said Horace; but he thought too much sweetness will even clog the wings of the butterfly.

"She said not," replied Anna, "and therefore I have kept the sketch myself. Is it not very like him?" she continued, addressing Feodora, who had just entered to summon them.

"Rather so," replied Feodora, "but there are several faces in that book which could have been altered into quite as good a likeness."

"Ah," thought Horace, "there is a family sting as well as honey."

"Feodora seeks only careful imitation in her sketches," said Anna. "I strive after the beautiful. I think it a Vandalism of art to reproduce anything on paper or on canvas which is not so in nature. Look at these two faces."

"Here then," said Horace, "you have attained it,—as well as if you had portrayed your own."

"My own!" said Anna, turning round and looking attentively in the glass. "My Tartar features, my Asiatic eyes and colourless complexion! Is that all the compliment you have to pay to the beauty of these two faces? Consider that they are both real living portraitures, though my ideal of beauty."

"Is it possible," thought Horace, "that the vanity of the woman can be merged in the vanity of the artist?"

The figures he was invited to inspect were those of two females, utterly differing, it would appear, in station, and both youthful and lovely: the one was dressed in robes of state and wore on her head a tiara of jewels; the other was in the simple costume of a Polish peasant girl.

The face and figure of the peasant girl were both beautiful; but, as he dwelt on the other painting he was more and more struck with the fascinating sweetness of its expression, which whether faithfully reproduced from the original or whether added by the imagination of the painter, did her equal credit; and when he had laid it down, he felt impelled to take it up again to give another long glance of admiration, which he now earnestly expressed for the performance.

"And you say that these are both real portraits? You have, I am sure, transformed with your magic pencil, women into angels."

"One of these portraits is not flattered," answered Anna, "of the other you shall judge yourself; for you will meet the person at dinner."

But here Anna hastened to put on her shawl and bonnet; and the whole party were soon rambling in the gardens.

If the inhabitants of Peterhoff are cramped for space,—generally so valueless in Russia,—everything, grounds, park, and gardens, connected with the Imperial establishment, luxuriates in a superfluity of room, which seems to typify the narrow limits of individual privilege and liberty, as contrasted with the boundlessness of sovereign power.

In these gardens they passed by English cottages, copied minutely from pictures. There were the deep thatch, the latticed window, the climbing woodbine and roses; though, on approaching them, Horace discovered that the thatch was of sheet iron painted to imitate straw.

They had wandered on for some time when it happened that they somehow became separated from Madame Obrasoff and the grand master.

"Come!" said Anna, "one does not often get one's liberty. Now for a long ramble."

"But mamma will look for us," said Feodora.

"She must look in vain then. At all events I will go; and what can you both do but follow?"

"What could I wish to do but follow?" said Horace.

"You hear," said Anna to her sister, "Count Horace will accompany me; so, whether you come or not, I shall go on."

But when Anna had led them from one shady spot to another for nearly half an hour, they were suddenly met by an officer in uniform, who approached them with considerable trepidation.

"My children!" he said, with a hasty bow of recognition, "I do not know how you have got past the line of huntsmen, but you will come directly face to face with the Emperor. He is out shooting to-day."

"See what you have done, Anna!" said Feodora, reproachfully.

"What must we do, General?" said Anna.

"What you must do?" replied the General in some perplexity, "why we must contrive to hide you somewhere. He will not be out another hour."

"And if we do meet him," said Horace, "his Majesty, I am sure, will not hurt us."

"But if he do meet you, it may hurt me. Sir; the fellows who have let you pass shall smart for it."

"Oh yes," said Anna, "it is better not to meet him."

The General made a signal, and immediately half a score of jagers or huntsmen, appeared on different sides as if by magic, like the Highlanders in the Lady of the Lake at the summons of Roderick Dhu.

"Now," said the General, stepping into the copse where there was a party of these militarily attired foresters, "you must remain here till the Imperial party passes; for when once the Emperor descends thus far, he will not at this hour turn back again."

To the surprise of Horace, he found that these foresters were holding, one of them a pheasant, another a hare, another a fox.

"What are these, Sir," said Horace to the General, who,—the cause of his agitation, once removed,—became very polite and courteous.

"These," replied the General, "are to be let loose from the brushwood should the Emperor pass this way; a little farther on, in that copse to the left, there are foresters with two deer and a wolf; and just look! floating on that rivulet, do you see six or eight wild ducks? Well, they are tied down to little posts in the water, and there are two men cleverly concealed in the rushes, who hold a string, which pulls a sort of trigger, to let them off at the opportune moment, which will be if his Majesty should approach within shot of them. I flatter myself that it is skilfully managed."

"But," said Horace, "is there no wild game?"

"Dear me," replied the General, "do you suppose that game is with us as in the West of Europe? We have plenty of it, because we have an immense extent of territory; but it is thinly scattered through dense woods and morasses, the most impenetrable in the world, where its pursuit becomes a real labour instead of a pastime; and then it would be immensely difficult and expensive to preserve it; and as the Emperor rarely shoots we thus insure him good sport."

At this moment some shots were fired at a short distance from them; and then the Emperor, with two of his officers, emerging from a path which led into a shrubbery, walked right up to the stream.

"Now!" whispered the General, who evidently took all the interest of a manager of a theatre in some point of scenic interest. "Now—ah! those fools—ah! that is right;" and up flew some of the ducks, whilst others dived.

The Emperor fired and missed; and then one of his companions fired after him, and missed also; but the third brought down one bird and struck a handful of feathers with the discharge of his second barrel from another.

"Ah! he is the most skilful," said Horace.

"Which?" said the General, sharply, and with an accent of contempt which he instantly checked.

"I am sure," said Anna, in English, "that the most skilful of the two courtiers was not the one who hit."

But the attendants having furnished them with fresh guns, the Imperial party proceeded, and a deer running slowly out before the Emperor, he fired, and struck it down; and then approaching in high good humour, he beckoned to some one, which made the party think that they were discovered.

"Hush!" said the General, "do you not see it is the Empress?" and the tall, somewhat slight figure of the Empress was seen approaching with the wife of General Friedrich, the companion of her youth.

The Empress herself frequently shoots; but that day she had declined it.

She rallied the Emperor a little upon his want of skill; and then she proposed to fire a few shots with pistols, which the grand veneur caused speedily to be procured; and in a few instants a post was stuck up, to the top of which was attached a live pigeon.

The Emperor fired; and then it surprised Horace to see the Empress, with her peculiarly feminine aspect and her frail wrist, raise the pistol and fire, and then again; and at the second shot she hit the bird. A second pigeon was stuck up, and after several ineffectual attempts, the Empress again hit it; and then the Imperial party moved forward, the Empress still jesting with her husband on her superiority of skill.

The General was evidently delighted. "All has passed off well, thank God," he said.

"But tell me," said Horace, "does the Emperor know that all these birds and beasts are let free for him to fire at when he passes?"

"God bless you, no; that would destroy all the illusion."

"But it strikes me that with a gun in my hand, I should not be long in finding it out. A sportsman would readily perceive that game of such varied descriptions does not come across his path to be fired at thus."

"That," said the General, "is because you have been accustomed to see differently; but if you never had? And then would you have the Emperor keep whole battalions of foresters and huntsmen and a vast establishment, and not be able to enjoy his sport without more trouble than it would cost a peasant?"

The Imperial party being sufficiently distant, a signal was made, and the foresters were seen gathering in scores from the places where they had lain so skilfully concealed. Horace just thought it possible that a good deal of the same scenic representation might be got up throughout the Empire to keep its master in good humour.

"What sort of woman is the Empress?" said Horace, as soon as he was alone with the two sisters. "Is she accounted kind-hearted, or severe, or indifferent?"

But even Anna looked about as embarrassed and shocked, as a young girl might do in England before whom some opinion startlingly blasphemous had been propounded; and then she said hurriedly as if to dismiss the subject:

"No one speaks of the Emperor's wife!"

"But does she do good or evil?"

"She laughs and dances," replied Anna, and then took up abruptly another subject.

It was just dinner-time when they returned. Anna and Feodora flew to complete their toilet, and Horace was ushered into the receiving room.

He looked with some curiosity amongst the three lady guests for the original of the beautiful portrait of the boudoir; but there was only one amongst them who was young or beautiful. Now, though she was singularly handsome, her loveliness was of a kind utterly distinct from that which he had seen reproduced by Anna's pencil, and which dwelt on his recollections as a very few of the most exquisite works of the brush or chisel are apt to linger on the memory of those who have been intensely impressed with their perfections.

And yet—had it not been for the predetermined bent of his curiosity—the charms of the lady in question were such as might have gratified, instead of disappointing, the most fastidious anticipation.

Her complexion, features, and figure, were rather the type and ideal of the Polish than of the Teutonic stamp of beauty. Her "Asiatic eye" was quite Polish with its mingled softness and brilliancy, when

Through it stole a tender light
Like the first moonrise of midnight,
Large dark and swimming in the stream,
Which seemed to melt to its own beam.

Besides, a touch of suffering and of anxiety had chastened the bright expression of the woman's eyes into that of the angel's—the angel's, when liquid and thoughtful with its watchful sympathy.

Her dress was so simple as to contrast strangely with some jewels of inestimable value; the cost of a vast estate worn so carelessly denoting inordinate wealth.

The lady—for Horace had not caught her name—was treated with a deference which she endeavoured to repress, and she was just then in conversation with a tall, elderly military dandy.

The tightness of his uniform, or its padding, retained his figure in all the symmetry for which it had formerly been distinguished, and the most perfect of black wigs, the most natural of teeth, and the dye and curl of his moustachios, had baffled, if not the march of time, at least ten years of the trace of its triumphs. His very dark eyes—of the harsh Mongolian black—sparkled as brightly in their unquenched fire as the diamond stars which, together with ribbons, crosses, medals, and silver lace, relieved the invisible green of his uniform.

In his manner he still affected the graces for which he had been distinguished twenty years before; but for which he had grown too antiquated, notwithstanding all the arts of the toilet; for he was no other than the Count Tchor.... notorious at the Court of Napoleon for his wit, his elegance, and his successes.

But his conquests had not all been of the drawing-room or the boudoir; for the plan of Napoleon's projected invasion had been entrusted to female discretion, and female discretion had confided it to the sympathy or the carelessness of the handsome diplomate.

Now how much this trustful discretion was at fault, the sequel, which is matter of history, proved; for the diplomate suddenly vanished from Paris, the lover and the secret taking wing together.

Napoleon who, when too late, was made aware of it, caused him to be pursued—a pursuit which, if successful, would probably have deprived the object of it from showing the varied nature of his talents; for, after safely carrying his information to his master, he next appears upon the scene—not in his ball dress, or triumphing in deceits, red tape, and sealing wax, and other weapons of the grand anti-veracious trade of diplomacy; but in the character of the fiery partisan, leading a band of Cossacks by unheard of marches, amongst the boundless steppes and forests, and frozen marshes, to hover on the rear or intercept upon their passage, the conquered of the elements, the children of the grande armée, the men miraculously seduced in one generation from the propagandism of the wildest democracy to the support of utter despotism, by the bauble of military glory held before their eyes, and typified by a bit of red ribbon, suspending eighteen-penny worth of silver.

And then when the roar of armies which had gradually receded from the ears of France, like ebbing waters, had begun so fatally to flow in a tide of foreign invasion; when Leipsic had seen

The Saxon jackal leave the lion's side,
To turn the bear's, the wolf's, and fox's guide,

and the continental allied armies advanced so cautiously on the soil of France—the soil which bore those redoubtable Frenchmen who had visited every capital in Europe, and whom no one but the red islanders, since the death of old Suwarrow had ever matched in fair and equal fight—then, when three fourths of what was done so cautiously, was accomplished by Alexander's Russians, headed by German leaders or moved according to German counsels, then Count Tchor.... the ex-dandy, ex-diplomate, and ex-partisan leader, was again prominently brought into notice as commanding a division of the Russian army, which advanced with a successful boldness, of which none of his colleagues with immeasurably greater means had given evidence.

Since then the Count, now the Prince Tchor.... had risen to the dignity of minister of war, and of one of the favourites of the Emperor Nicholas.

He was then the only thorough Russian really possessed of power—the antagonist of the German Diebitsch and of all Germans, whose views he incessantly thwarted, being altogether the personification, it cannot be said of Muscovite interests, but of the feelings of all Muscovite employés, from the private soldier upwards.

Strikingly anti-teutonic, he was an apt and favourable specimen of the higher classes of the Muscovite race—not of the peaceful and fair-haired majority, with their inborn love of trade, descending from the mixture of the Sclavonians with the aboriginal Fins; but of the darker race arising from the conjunction of the Sclavonic or of the Sclavonic and Finnish with their Mongolian and Tartar conquerors.

With talents, which never amounted to genius, he had always striven rather to seem to know than to know; but his powers of perception and reflection, as far as they did extend, were rapid; and he was the man of moral courage and promptness, of intrigue and action.

Like all his class, in reality possessing an equal amount of ability to the Russo-Germans, to whom the Russian Empire has so long realized the land of promise—those Russo-Germans theorising even in their pettiest intrigues—he had moreover the advantage over them—which all his class possess—of qualities which enabled him to make the most of his talents, just as his countrymen have the art of spreading a very slender stock of knowledge, like a thin leaf from the gold-beater, over an immense superficial surface.

Thus, in a negotiation, or at the head of an army, the Russian would have seized the entangling thread, which the slower Russo-German genius would have discovered on the morrow, (a day too late to act upon it,) or, where it baffled them both, the German would pause to cogitate where the Russ would have cut the Gordian knot, by a determined resolution or with the sword of battle.

It might be imagined that these natural advantages would suffice to secure the preponderance of Russian candidates for office; but that would be to reckon without the smile of imperial favour, which is to the social world of these realms just what the sun is to the material,—without whose vivifying influence no seeds or roots, the most useful or noble, can pierce through the frozen superstratum of the soil to the life of active vegetation—and the sun of imperial favour is so mistrustful, or so far mistaken, as only to shine on those who have no root amongst the Muscovite population,—except at intervals, in a few rare instances,—and the Prince Tchor.... was one of the most remarkable of these.

Before the dinner, that very barbaric prelude to the meal was served which jars so singularly with the splendour and elegance of a fashionable Russian table, which the world has been ransacked with more than Roman avidity to supply, appropriating its most varied delicacies, its customs, and its gastronomic skill.

Let the reader imagine smoked goose and smoked salmon, hung beef, and Bologna sausages, anchovies, and salt herrings, sardines, and fresh and dried caviar, grated Parmesan, and Cheshire cheese, and in fact, everything for which the oil and Italian warehouseman can lay the animal kingdom under contribution to supply his trade, served up with liqueurs and sweet wines; and all to preface a repast which is always tediously copious, the French kitchen appearing to put forward its productions in a formidably numerous array, as if alarmed by the allied army of Russian, French, Italian, and English dishes, which find their place at the overloaded board besides.

The idea irresistibly arises—if these things be intended to whet the appetite as asserted—that they must be provided for those insatiable appetites, qui viennent en mangeant, or else to take off the edge of a gluttony, dangerous to itself in the first eagerness of its unblunted fervour.

But a Russian hastened to explain to Horace, that the custom so universally adopted was foreign in its origin, being imported from the north-eastern German provinces—the Russian bee, like the oriental bee in general, collecting a very questionable sort of honey, when it wanders abroad from flower to flower; which may fully account for the strong disinclination of the great majority of orientals to all innovation.

"With us," said the Russian, "it is imitation; with its German originators, greediness—the besetting sin of our worthy neighbours."

"I can only say," replied Horace, "that from Berlin to Königsberg, I could not find white bread even at the post-houses."

"Well, but it is no proof of frugality when people have not wherewithal; besides, one may show moderation over a foie gras and greediness over black bread. I have heard a doctor say, that, in the statistics of European ailments, the largest number of broken constitutions, arose with men in France from their devotion to the fair sex—though not from broken hearts—in England from their copious potations; and in Germany from the singular want of foresight, which Providence has exhibited in not fitting their stomachs to their appetites."

But he did not add that the French doctor had told him so on the occasion of his consulting him for an asthma, arising from a cold which he had caught by attending the ceremony of the blessing of the waters by the Emperor, and standing in twenty degrees of cold, bare-headed, and in a thin coat which was worn in compliment to his majesty; whereupon the doctor had added "that, in Russia, he was prepared to find the most general predisposing cause of illness to exist with one half in determination of blood to the head, and of injuries of the worn out spine with the other; from the incessant prostrations of the peasantry, and the perpetual bending of the back with their masters."

The dinner itself was like dinners all over the world, differing only in the fish, which being caught in rivers that run into inland seas, or to the brackish waters of the Baltic, were—except the salmon—peculiar, and inferior of their kind to those which in the salt ocean swarm on our western shores. And then the love of all that was costly had been,—as is so frequently the case elsewhere,—allowed to predominate over the general good taste which had presided over the arrangement of the banquet. There was, for instance, a tureen of soup of an unsightly size, and a dish of fish inordinate in magnitude; but then all present knew that it was soup made with the precious sterlet—and champagne. And the fish was a sterlet of unusual size and rarity.

It is not unlike, and little superior to brill in flavour; but then, perhaps, that fish had cost a thousand roubles. And of course there was every kind of wine excepting Russian; not forgetting the most expensive Tokay, made from the over-ripe grape, when, by the mere pressure of its own weight, the richness of its juice drips into vessels placed to receive it, and sold at a price somewhat exceeding its weight in silver. There are many districts of Spain, where wine of a similar quality is made and sold for a few halfpence, and drunk unwittingly by the population of the spot; but then, if ever discovered by the Russian gourmet, the baseness of its price will always be a bar to its competing with Tokay.

Now, as the attention of Horace was directed towards the beautiful and mournful face of the lady, who seemed the point of universal attraction and the object of general deference, he could not help thinking that he had seen her before; and then on a sudden, a light broke in upon his memory, to which, indeed, he would scarcely have trusted had it not been that he felt he could not easily be mistaken, when he only had to tax it back for a few hours.

He felt satisfied that hers was the face he had seen so admirably represented in the boudoir of the daughters of his hostess, though not the one by which he had been so much struck, and of which he had been so fully prepared to meet the original, but that of the Polish peasant girl in her national holiday costume. But the traces of a few years, and still more of deep anxieties, had so far changed her features that this, as much as the difference of attire and station, had prevented him from at once recognising the original. He was deliberating in his own mind, whether her portrait had been taken in a fancy suit, or whether the peasant girl had perhaps risen—as her beauty merited—to rank and wealth; when the minister of war à propos of a glass of water, related an anecdote which he appeared to think too good to be monopolised by a single pair of ears.

"After the allies," said Count Tchor.... "had crossed the Rhine, I happened to occupy the city of Liege in the Low Countries. I had not been in the place above a few hours, when a worthy citizen forced his way into my presence, panting for breath like a hunted hare, and threw himself at my feet, imploring my protection."

" 'Against what,' said I, 'do you wish me to protect you?'

" 'Please, your Excellency, against the fiercest and most unreasonable gentleman of a bearded Cossack, who is quartered upon me.'

" 'Let me hear what cause of complaint he has given you.'

" 'Allow me to take breath, your Excellency, and you shall hear.

" 'When he presented his billet, he began by flourishing his whip, and I assure you he was received with every mark of attention, politeness, and respect. The first thing he asked for was de l'eau. Well, your Excellency, I thought that if his manner was peremptory, his demands had been hitherto so moderate that I could not hasten too speedily to comply with them; and I presented to him a glass of the clearest, coldest, and purest spring water. Hereupon he drew out his sword, and with a horrible expression of countenance made sign for me to drink it. Though his request was strange, I drank it, affecting to smile pleasantly, and then he said again de l'eau. When I brought the second glass, he flourished his sword more angrily than before, and again made me swallow it, and then he asked for more water!

" 'Thinks I, perhaps he is afraid the water is poisoned, so wondering at my own stupidity, the next time I brought in the jug, and voluntarily tasting, I washed out the glass, and filling it to the brim, respectfully tendered it to him. But, nothing soothed, again he made me swallow it, and fill another bumper. I fell upon my knees; but glass after glass he made me gulp down, till I came to the ninth; and then your Excellency, as I only hold two chopines, feeling that the next would burst me, I frankly confess, that I took to my heels, and Providence, which brought me safe into your presence, I trust will interest your Excellency in my melancholy fate.'

"When he had concluded this pathetic appeal, I sent for the Cossack, and inquired the motives of his conduct; when it appeared that, having been told that eau-de-vie was the French for brandy, he had remembered only the word eau; and that, when the worthy citizen had brought him water, feeling aggrieved at the pertinacious jest which he imagined his host to be perpetrating, he had determined to try whether he could not bring him to reason, by making him swallow, as fast as he brought it, a beverage so very little to his own taste."

After dinner, the last of the guests left were the fair Pole and Count Horace, who was to repair with the Obrasoffs to the Imperial gardens.

Like a true Pole, she kindly expressed her sympathy with his countrymen; and then, looking to the hour, she rose. Madame Obrasoff called for the carriage of "the Duchess," and she departed; but with an "au revoir" and not with an "adieu," and as the hostess, with unusual deference, led her to her very carriage, Horace just caught the words as they left the room, "I should have been delighted to stay with you..." and then again, the last of the sentence—"him!".... probably audible from its emphasis.

"Ah!" thought Horace, when he recalled the anxiety and inquietude of that sweet face—"some victim to her own or to her family's ambition!"

"Who is that very interesting person?"

"That," said Anna, "is the Duchess of Lowicz."

"The Duchess!" repeated Horace, reflecting that he had never heard of Dukes or Marquises, or Viscounts in the Russian Empire.

"She seems very amiable; but her mind appears unceasingly disturbed by a painful disquietude."

"Yes," returned Anna, "how anxious she was to leave us!"

"And what is the object of her solicitude—a child?"

"No," replied Anna, "a husband."

At this moment the return of Madame Obrasoff interrupted the conversation; and, tea having been served, the ladies prepared to accompany Horace to the fête.

CHAPTER X.

It was one of those days on which the Emperor of all the Russias—that is to say, of great Russia, and of little Russia, of black Russia, of white Russia, and of red Russia—throws open his palaces and gardens to receive all his subjects, from the highest to the lowest.

But there is all the haughtiness of absolutism even in the apparent humility of this universal condescension.

The princes of the monarchies of Western Europe, in all the arrogance of their superiority, always tacitly acknowledged that there were individuals or classes approaching sufficiently near them to render it imperative upon Kings to treat them with respect. In England, for instance, a crowned head has been heard to repeat a sentiment, engrafted in the convictions of his nobility and gentry, that the King was only the first gentleman in his realm.

But an Emperor of Russia is raised too high above his subjects to take into consideration these differences of rank; like a giant gazing down upon a busy nest of pismires, the distinction between the lowliest and the proudest of his slaves is supposed to be imperceptible to eyes accustomed to scan the wide distance between the condition of the loftiest of those who crawl beneath him and his own. This is the implied moral, too, of these universal receptions, where the vermin of the slave and the brilliants of the noble are scattered alike, as they jostle together on the gravelly paths of the gardens of Peterhoff, in the rush of the crowd for whom a hundred thousand lamps have made an artificial daylight. It is a lesson not intended to upraise the humble portion of the people; but to show the aspiring the vanity of their pretensions. Talent, and birth, and wealth, and learning, may be distinctives among the common herd by inter-comparison; but, at the footsteps of the autocratic throne, they must all sink to the same undistinguishable level, before the august majesty of the Tsars.

Everywhere—even in England—pride may be seen occasionally draping itself in the mantle of condescension, and haughtiness in the garb of humility. If the reader will take the trouble to tax his recollection, he will doubtless recall many exemplifications of this fact, more remarkable than the one which immediately recurs to the author's memory.

He remembers a certain ducal family, who gave a grand entertainment to all the tradespeople of the market-town adjoining their princely residence, to the utter scandal of the gentry of the county. Now, as the ducal family professed an extreme liberality of opinion, it was perfectly consistent in waving those distinctions of caste, which are quite anomalous with certain political tenets, and which, in the estimation of some, may even be little consonant with their religious convictions; and consequently, thus far the indignation of the gentry was misplaced and reprehensible. But in the next place the same Amphytrions issue a general invitation to the gentry of the country; and then, when the supper succeeds the ball, those who had given it, retire, with the party staying in the house, to sup in another room.

Now, after this assumption of a superiority which neither really existed nor was recognised, was it condescension or pride which made these people admit into their drawing-rooms those whom the conventionalities of society had hitherto excluded from them?

It is in this spirit that the Imperial palaces are occasionally thrown open to all the Emperor's children.

In the present instance, thousands upon thousands were partaking of their Sovereign's hospitality to the roar of those innumerable fountains which have caused the gardens of Peterhoff to be designated "gardens of the many waters." All classes were represented in the motley assembly—the moujik, the trader, and the merchant, feeling secure from observation amongst the crowd of their fellows; and the noble, whose absence might be marked in some black list, being anxious to display his loyal attendance.

The Sovereign's invitation is universal, and unrestricted. Lazarus in his rags is not excluded from it; but then there are so many hundred police agents, avowed and disguised, who do not consider such a spectacle as fitting for an Emperor, that a selection is made; and neither the wan and hollow cheek nor the very sordid habiliment are admitted, should they present themselves. A good well-fed countenance and decent clothing, of however humble a class it may be distinctive, or whatever filth it may cover, are the real tickets of admission for the lower orders.

The Emperor's eyes must rest on none but happy-looking people; and, in truth, it would be difficult to see a more pleased or contented-looking crowd than greet the Imperial family with the thunder of their acclamations, when the signal is given—not before.

The fact itself is not to be denied, though how false the conclusions drawn by those who,—contrasting the condition of this people with a sullen assemblage of French or English operatives—would draw from this momentary appearance of contentment, any inferences in favour of the former.

Without inquiring how much of human happiness may arise from natural cheerfulness of temper, it is obvious to all who have seen much of men and things, that races are born with marked distinctions in the natural contentedness of their dispositions, just as individuals possess it in a greater or less degree in their respective races. The experience of the man who has never stirred beyond his village, may have shown him those, whom health, and wealth, and every prosperity have crowned, a prey to gloom and mental misery, whilst perhaps the unluckiest of cobblers sings over his scanty ill-paid work as merrily as the caged lark suspended from his stall.

The author has heard a hearty song from the tenants of the bagnios, and beheld happy faces, as their owners kept time to the clank of their irons; and he has seen a devotee—not of the ascetic school, but one in the very act of labours of love and charity—look as miserable as the personification of the ills which he considered it his gentle mission to relieve. Cheerfulness does not therefore depend upon virtue. He has seen one of the most healthy of Athletæ, wear a face as unchangeable in its mournful rigidity as the mask of a sculptured Melpomene; and he remembers once conversing with a merry, hungry beggar, who had just been turned out of an hospital, with an incurable cancer. "When you know life to be so short, why not pass through it gaily?" said he.

It is therefore neither wealth, nor health, nor virtue, nor competence, nor independence,—present or prospective,—which has anything to do with this tendency of the mind in individuals; and so it is with races, whilst both with races and individuals it is accidental as the colour of their hair and as little connected with the comfort or discomfort of their condition.

The Lazzaroni in their rags, and the negroes in the slave colonies on their holiday, present a picture of contented mirth, which you will never see breaking forth from the prosperity of other people; for instance the English. Without alluding to a crowd of artisans or of labourers, with their many causes of complaint—thrown into such relief by the luxury and opulence which insult and surround them;—take any assemblage of the prosperous and wealthy, look into the faces of the members of the House of Commons, can you read the same contented merriment there as on the countenance of the Neapolitan beggar or the captive black? And this felicitous contentedness of disposition, the lower orders of Muscovites possess to solace them beneath their many burdens; but never believe, dear reader, however speciously it be argued by those who confound the "because" with the "notwithstanding," that they would look a whit less happy if as secure from the lash of a master and the rapacity and tyranny of the omnipresent police as the white population of a state of the Union.

As a superficial spectacle, however, one of these princely entertainments is highly interesting, though subject to a drawback, to which all classes of Russians have been long accustomed; but to which a stranger can never become wholly habituated—the insupportable odour of the crowd, exceeding that of a million of rabbit-hutches—when the breeze mingles the perfume of sour bread, and semi-putrid cabbage, and rancid oil, with the abundant musk of the wealthier burghers, nobles, and employés, and wafts it across a space of many hundred feet—before you join the assembly whose proximity is so odoriferously heralded.

Horace had not been long in the garden before he descried his friend the poet, who was soon walking arm-in-arm with him. Of course he was followed by his chief admirer, the Lieutenant Alexius.

"Look," said the poet, "do you see that shooting star?"

"Nonsense! it is a rocket—one of the fire-works," said Horace.

"I tell you it was a shooting star—it was just above the paper-mills; there would be no rockets in that direction."

"Well, if it be a shooting star, it might suggest a poetical allusion, if it were seen flashing above a castle, or a ruin, or a dungeon, or even a palace; but a prosaic paper-mill!"

"A paper-mill may be prosaic; but even that very paper-mill might point a moral, if you knew its history; at least a Russian moral."

"How so?" said Horace. "Does any story attach to it?"

"Scarcely a story," replied the poet. "These mills were tenanted by an Anglo-German. The Emperor Alexander was determined to write on paper as fine as English made within his own dominions; and these paper-works were one of the great hobbies of his reign. He laid out—I am afraid to say how many million roubles on them, and their director, who was a relative, by the way, of Sir William C—'s, who has given his name to the rockets of his invention, stood high in his favour—so high, that, forgetting that man was mortal, he refused to allow a portion of the premises of the Imperial manufactory to be taken to enlarge and embellish the adjoining residence of the Grand Duke Nicholas. But Alexander died, and Nicholas became Emperor; the director had forgotten the offence he had given; but the Prince had not forgotten or forgiven it. The first act of his reign was to send a commission to inquire into the manufacturer's accounts; and, as there are no accounts in any public office or direction in the Empire, which will bear such determined scrutiny, he was declared a defaulter and expelled, ruined, and beggared.

"And the moral of all this?"

"Why the uncertain tenure of Imperial favour—a moral of which I should like to see those who now monopolise it more persuaded."

The poet here suddenly started, and his brow contracted for a moment, as two ladies, on the arm of an officer, appeared at the end of an alley; but it was only momentary; and, apologising to Horace, he went to join his wife, his brother-in-law, and his wife's sister; for such were the three personages.

"I," said the Lieutenant Alexius, "am most anxiously watching for the Obrasoffs. I trust they will be here."

"At least it was their intention an hour ago; for I dined with them."

"You dined with them? Tell me then," replied the Lieutenant eagerly, "was not the Duchess of Lowicz there?"

"The Duchess of Lowicz was there."

"Ah! how provoking," exclaimed the Lieutenant, "that I should not have seen them this morning!"

"And now tell me," said Horace, "who is this Duchess of Lowicz?"

But as the Lieutenant was about to reply, they perceived Madame Obrasoff and her daughters.

First of all, his companion entered into very earnest conversation with the former; and then he appeared to be referred by her to Anna. Almost immediately, Anna appeared to listen and reply to Alexius with such eager interest that Horace, a little piqued, devoted all his attention to the fair mother; and he rendered it none the less marked because he thought that he read in their eyes a sort of rivalry betwixt the mother and daughter. Considering the attractions of the former, her real insensibility of heart, and the pains she took to please, he could not help thinking that the spirit of intrigue and the vanity of the mother must often have led her to neutralise the matrimonial schemes which she had formed for her daughter.

Now it happened that, amidst the light, the crowd, and the bustle, the little party were separated at every turn, and therefore they fixed upon a place of rendezvous to which they constantly returned. At first the appointment was duly kept; but at length Madame Obrasoff waited in vain with her cavalier for them nearly half an hour.

"Who has carried off my daughter?" she said to a passer by.

"I have just met them; turn to the right and you will overtake them. They are with the Princess Lowicz."

"With the Duchess? Oh it is all right. We shall see nothing of them for an hour; and, in fact, if we take this direction, I know her favourite haunt; and, at least, we shall be out of the glare, and heat, and crowd."

After a short walk, Horace and Madame Obrasoff sat down together; and, falling into her own vein of sentimental German mysticism, that of the Krudener school, with which the Emperor Alexander became so imbued, he took a malicious pleasure—as he thought of the passage which the poet had related of her history—in leading her, step by step, to commit herself, by pretending all those delicate refinements of sensibility which are incomprehensible—say those who pretend to them—to the grossness of natures less susceptible than their own.

The Count piqued himself in not being outdone in eloquence or pathos, as they proceeded deep into these dreamy abstractions; but though he was so perfectly aware that he was listening to an actrice, and an actrice who, unlike one professional was endeavouring to practise upon him a real deceit, instead of avowedly conjuring up an illusion to extort his admiration for her skill; still,—cognisant of the heartlessness which dictated them—he could not help wondering at the involuntary effect of her words upon him.

And, as it not unfrequently happens, the visionary generalities which they discussed soon resulted in quite individual application. When on the subject of those magnetic, or sympathetic, or sympathetically magnetic influences, which involuntarily and at once attract the affections, and, sometimes with the rapidity of a single glance, determine through life, and, perhaps, through eternity, the fate of two beings; the lady—led on by the pretension which Horace significantly set forth "of being under the empire of one of those sudden, inexplicable, and overpowering fascinations of which he had often heard and doubted," and from somewhat of which it was perhaps true that only his knowledge of her secret preserved him—she avowed that she had felt singularly troubled ever since the first time that her eyes had met his, and that she had first heard the accents of his voice; because—although there was no resemblance of feature—so striking, startling, and painful was the likeness of expression to that of one long loved, unceasingly mourned, and unhappily departed, that she had hastened to her carriage and fainted there outright. In the full belief of that mysterious sympathy, of the existence of which she had always entertained an intuitive conviction, and which his assurance confirmed so strangely—she had ventured to confide to him that, which he would too readily understand to misconceive her motive or abuse her confidence. To him, who protested that he had felt the same involuntary simultaneous interest, she was led to entrust, on so brief an acquaintance, what an age of intimacy would never have induced her to lay open to a nature less congenial; for how could any other understand or respect the recollection of an affection, which was at once a happiness, a remorse, an agony, and a terror—an affection of whose enduring memory nothing could ever usurp the place? Whilst at the same time it must account for the deep thrilling interest, and the unfeminine eagerness with which she sought to look into his eyes whose glance, and to listen to his words whose tone recalled in a startling and miraculous manner to her faithful and sensitive recollection those looks and sounds—the remembrance of which was the only solace to one for whom hope and happiness were buried."

A deep blush of indignation rose to Horace's brow, and he was about to ask,

"In the grave, at the gallows' foot?" But he restrained the words upon his lips, and endeavouring to modulate his voice to the touching harmony of hers, he continued, as he seized the hand which trembled in the most natural manner in the world within his own,

"Oh, yes, I can fully understand the plenitude, the depth, the constancy, of such an affection! and how much indulgence there is in the hearts of men for love, even for that which they stigmatise as guilty love, when it is true to itself in death, and beyond death, like yours, gentle lady!—one may judge by the picture, which Dante, the orthodox Dante, has drawn in his Inferno of the daughter of Guido da Polenta, and the universal sympathy which the touching tale elicits—you remember it? Francesca de Rimini has been slain, with her lover, by the deformed and outraged husband, Malatesta; and, dying in their unrepented sin, they are doomed to the regions of the damned, where Dante sees them wandering, but together!—and where the soft Francesca's shade boasts of this happiness amidst her pain—

He, who from me shall never separate!

So redeeming has the depth of love's devotion been held in its guilt, and so hallowing in its innocence—as in yours!"

Madame Obrasoff only withdrew her trembling hand, and Horace continued: "In Dante's picture—Lanciotto Malatesta no longer pursues them; he has wreaked his mad anger upon earth. It is true, that the case must have been reversed—to have made the husband's the pursuing shade; and, perhaps, if it had been instead an injured woman, the poet might have represented her as an avenging fury—in the person of a wife, whom jealousy, or grief, or anger had maddened!"

"Maddened!" said the lady, scarcely audibly, and at that moment a cloud suddenly clearing away from before the moon, its light penetrated into the sombre solitude—which the general illumination had made so rare a place of refuge—beaming with all the cold brightness of a frozen sun ray through the leaves, full on her face; and Horace was startled for a moment as he saw her hands clasped, and her humid eyes turned up to heaven.

But they heard voices and footsteps approaching, and by the same transient light Horace distinguished the Duchess of Lowicz in deep conversation with Alexius, and a little behind them, the two daughters of Madame Obrasoff. As the moon became again clouded, the mother made him a signal to let them pass in silence, and when they had passed about a minute, she rose, and peremptorily insisting on following them, pursued the same path in silence, her arm in the Count's, and hurrying him on at a rapid pace. They were soon again in the glare and crowd of the illuminated walks.

As this artificial light shone upon her countenance, Horace saw that all traces of her no less artificial emotion had vanished, and its expression was of the same placid winning gentleness as usual, as the variegated lamps appeared reflected from those peculiar opal-like eyes, which seemed without a colour of their own.

Here, at the place of rendezvous,—whilst she was occupied in the interchange of friendly words and kindly congratulations with a party who were pre-occupying it for the same purpose—Horace took his leave. He had not rambled far, when, suddenly, the crowd, which he was seeking to avoid, ebbed away: the fireworks were beginning—a rocket or two had given the signal that the antagonistic element was now to be allowed to play in sheets, cascades, and streams, and all the innumerable devices of the artificer—as if in emulation of the water, whose reign had hitherto been triumphant, as thousands of fountains scattered it about in glittering dew.

At this moment, with a very hasty step, two persons hurried past him. A man in uniform,—for almost every one who, in England, wears anything but a smock-frock, appears in Russia in uniform, or in professional black—seemed dragging along a female figure; and in her Horace again recognised the Duchess of Lowicz. But she gave him no opportunity of bowing, as she looked resolutely straight before her, although her cavalier paused for an instant as he passed Horace, and, scowling at him under a pair of bushy eyebrows, gave a sort of growl like a bear; and then again, with a rude jerk, hurried on the Duchess.

Horace smiled. "No doubt the husband!"

"Poor husband! frown not on me," and then he added to himself, "What marvel! for who ever saw a better illustration of Beauty and the Beast."

But before this couple had proceeded five paces, the Duchess dropped a note upon the gravel-walk. There were other persons approaching, and so Horace—having dexterously placed his foot upon it—picked it up.

"Bravo!" said Horace, "talk of Venice the joyous in its carnival!—this is the place for intrigues."

The seal of the note was unbroken, but it was directed to Mme. de L., destroying the illusion, which for an instant had taken possession of his mind, that it might be addressed to himself.

"At least, Madam, you have fallen into discreet hands; and if I deliver it to any person but yourself, it shall be to the young Lieutenant, not to the bashaw-looking husband."

"It is very singular," he thought, "that, in a place so scandalous as Petersburg, I can hear nothing about this Duchess of Lowicz; but there is Isaakoff, he will not blink the question."

"My dear Isaakoff! you must solve a riddle for me; for I cannot get a straightforward answer from any one."

"I hope you are not going to ask me any more questions about conspirators or politics."

"Oh, no; it is on the subject of a lady—"

"Ah! a lady, indeed, on this head any truth may be told; or, indeed, any untruth repeated."

"Who, and what—I want to know—is the Duchess of Lowicz?"

"Now, in the name of common sense, was there ever such a mania for fishing in troubled waters!—The Duchess of Lowicz, is the Duchess of Lowicz."

"Thank you for your information; she is handsome and amiable, and I suppose wealthy; and she has a husband with an aspect stern enough for a door-knocker; but who was she?"

"Little more than a Polish peasant girl."

"And the rank and wealth of her husband bought her?"

"No, he paid a price besides—a crown."

"A crown-piece? You are jesting."

"No, the imperial Crown of all the Russias."

"What? Her husband is—"

"The Grand Duke Constantine, who, to marry Janna Grudzinska, sacrificed his claim to the autocratic throne. Now, let the subject drop;—but, curse your inquisitiveness! what, have you been meddling with the Princess Lowicz? Look! do you see that fellow coming up to us, I know him well, he is an agent of the secret police. God only grant that I do not get mixed up in it!"

Our old acquaintance, Baron Bamberg, here stepped up to them, and held out a hand, which the Prince shook with a fervour which was intended to conceal a momentary expression of disgust.

"Will you present me to your friend?"

"Oh yes," said the Prince, eagerly. "Count Horace de Montressan, Baron de Bamberg."

The Count drew himself up stiffly and contemptuously, and looked the new comer full in the face, whilst the Prince, retiring with indecent haste, said:

"Excuse my leaving you an instant together."

Horace turned on his heel. When the stranger seized him by the button-hole, he clinched his fist and was about to put in practise one of Sir Thomas Blunt's lessons, by knocking him down; but he was thus addressed:

"Pardon me, Sir, you have picked up a note belonging to me."

"To you?—It is false."

"False!" said the Baron, fiercely. "Do you know whom you are speaking to?"

"By profession if not by name," answered Horace.

"Well then," said the Baron, "as an employé of the Imperial High Police, since you know it, I demand that note which you picked up."

"I will not give it you," said Horace, resolutely.

"You refuse?"

"I refuse."

"Then follow me this instant to the Grand Master. You had better, or a sign will procure assistance."

"Let us go then."

They walked on side by side; but Horace perceived a third person following at their heels, probably to give aid in case of his attempting to escape or to pick up anything he might throw down.

The Grand Master, whom Horace had met that morning, was seated in an apartment of an adjacent pavilion. The Baron Bamberg went in first; and then Horace was introduced alone. There was an officer of the gendarmerie in his sky-blue and white uniform, who quitted the room on a signal from his chief; and before the grand master were pens, ink, sealing wax, paper, envelopes and a lighted taper, all hastily drawn from a portable apparatus.

"Ah!" said Count Benkendorf, blandly extending his hand, "do we meet again?"

"It appears so," said Horace; "but I—"

"Well, Count de Montressan, you bear an older head than I should have imagined on such young shoulders; and I compliment you on your discretion in not giving up a note dropped by a lady into any but proper hands. How could you know that it was a matter of the utmost indifference? But as it is, my discreet young friend, the Duchess—knowing how easily scandal attaches to one in her station—has requested me to ask you for it, to remit it direct to her husband, whom it principally concerns, as she saw at a first glance, which prevented her from reading further."

The manner of the Grand Master was so frank and urbane, that perhaps Horace might have been deceived, had not the powerful official betrayed himself by saying that the Duchess had opened the note, the seal of which, Horace knew to be unbroken; so after a moment's hesitation, he replied:

"You are pleased to rate my discretion perhaps more highly than it deserves; but at least it extends thus far, that if the Duchess had dropped a note and I had picked it up, I should never have dreamed of giving any but the most respectful interpretation to an incident so common-place; but I think that, before either praising or calling in question this quality in me, it would have been as well to ascertain whether I ever had picked up a note at all."

"You do not, Monsieur le Comte, meet me in an equable spirit of frankness," said the Grand Master, slightly knitting his brows. "The fact is ascertained though you dexterously put your foot upon the letter."

"Well," answered Horace, "if it be so,—and I never denied, I only called on you to substantiate it,—what then?"

"Simply," said the Grand Master, "that the Duchess desires me to ask you for her note."

"What?" replied Horace, "give up a note I had found to any but the person who dropped it? Though pray observe that I have never acknowledged picking up anything of the kind."

"You forget, perhaps, young man, the nature of my office. If the wife of a lavoshnik (shop-keeper) had dropped her gilt ear-ring, it is my duty to demand it; nay, furthermore, I should punish any finder who did not bring it to the police-office; and you pick up a written document, which, for aught you know, may be a precious one; for, as you have not read it, how can you be sure of its insignificance? And which you have seen dropped by an august personage. You dare tamper with me about it?"

"If I have such a paper, I am willing to deliver it into the hands of the person who dropped it."

"Perhaps you would wish for an autograph requisition to that effect from the Duchess?" said the Grand Master, ironically.

"No," said Horace coolly, "that would be of no use; for I do not know her handwriting."

"What!" thundered the Grand Master, "would you wish the wife of the Grand Duke to demand it of you in person?"

"If I had it, to none other would I give it up."

"Harkye," said Count Benkendorf, who was losing all patience, "do you know that I have the power, by raising my little finger, of causing you to be searched? Do you know that I have the power to strip your flesh of its very skin if requisite to seek beneath it? Do you know that I have the power of making you rot in a dungeon?"

"I am a subject of the King of France," said Horace.

"And do you forget," continued Count Benkendorf, "that France, like every other country, acknowledges our right to enforce our own laws; and that the detention you are practising is a felony?"

"I do not know," answered Horace, "what may or what may not be your power; but this I know, that, for me as a gentleman, there is a law of honour and of chivalry, which no authority, however despotic, will ever cause me willingly to violate; and, just on account of the threat you have held out, I must crave your indulgence for a step which will place the matter beyond dispute;" and Horace, taking the note from his pocket, lighted it at the burning taper.

Count Benkendorf called out aloud, at the same time endeavouring to snatch the burning paper from his hand; but Horace held it resolutely and successfully at the full length of his young and vigorous right arm, so resolutely that the flame scorched his fingers to the quick, and caused him to extinguish it by crushing the remnant in his hand; and then, as the officer of gendarmerie hastened to the Grand Master's assistance, with considerable presence of mind he swallowed the small darkened remaining fragment.

"Call for a stomach-pump!" said the Grand Master furiously; and then, as Horace looked very coolly and contemptuously at the sword which the officer of gendarmerie had drawn, his interrogator continued more calmly: "No, stay; the fragment was too small. Now, headstrong youth, you have sealed your ruin, unless you are willing to repair the mischief you have done."

"Now," said Horace, a little elated with his determination, as men are apt to be when they have made up their minds to brave the worst, and have acted up to the dictates of their enthusiasm, "now, that question settled, I am willing to do anything to oblige you."

"Not to oblige me, but to save yourself, young man," repeated Count Benkendorf, with a sinister expression of countenance. "Did you see that note given?"

"After what has passed between us," said Horace, "do you think that I, the Count of Montressan, am likely to play the part of a spy?"

The Grand Master reflected for an instant, and then whispering to the officer of gendarmerie, he said aloud:

"You must follow me into the presence of the Grand Duke."

CHAPTER XI.

Horace, together with Count Benkendorf and the officer of Gendarmerie stepped into a carriage, which, with six horses abreast, rattled rapidly along the high road, till it stopped at the palace of Strelna, just opposite to the post-house, where Blanche and Mattheus had paused three days before on their road to St. Petersburg.

It was evident that the Grand Master of the secret police was vexed at being thus baffled; for he made only this menacing observation:

"You are now going into the Grand Duke's presence; and on your own head be whatever happens."

The domestics of this palace were all grey-headed soldiers, prim, and buckled up to the last degree of military stiffness. They were led by an aide-de-camp, who moved stealthily and noiselessly as a cat through a long suite of apartments, the walls of which were as closely hung as a picture-gallery with paintings, but all small military paintings, chiefly representing the soldiers of different regiments in their most rigidly professional attitudes. At length they reached a room, in which Generals Rhoda and Le Gendre seemed to be keeping watch; the former was the chief of the staff, the latter was a cavalry general. Dismissed from the Russian army on account of his inordinate rapacity, which probably ruined him, by causing him to deny his superiors a share in his spoliations, he had taken refuge under the wing of the Grand Duke Constantine. There was nothing forbidding about his countenance, on which even appeared a substratum of good nature, had not the formation of his fleshy mouth and jaws indicated, in unequivocal lines, habitual sensuality and the predominance of all the animal appetites.

And his physiognomy did not belie his nature. Without a grain of malice in his composition, to lead him to do harm for harm's sake, whenever these appetites, or his insatiable love of play, instigated him; there was nothing to which he would not descend or to which he would not apply his natural cunning.

So—although formerly known for a mere jolly companion when the Grand Duke employed him in the secret police of the kingdom of Poland, of which he was viceroy—he had become one of the most unscrupulous and dreaded agents of an institution, which proved so terrible a curse to thousands, and which, in Poland, as in Russia, can only be compared for its power and cruelty to the old inquisition of Spain.

"Stop," whispered both these worthies in a breath to the Grand Master, pointing significantly to an inner room, one of the folding doors of which, was half open.

"What! can I not go in?" said Count Benkendorf.

"Not now; the fit is upon him."

"Indeed!" replied the Grand Master with an involuntary expression of awe; and, suddenly drawing himself up, he seemed to hesitate for a few minutes, during which no one interrupted the silence.

At length, a deep rough voice broke out upon it from the inner room, thundering out the question: "Who is there?"

It was the Grand Duke: his quick ears had caught the jingle of the spurs of the police-master, who, judging from this interrogation that the fit of insane animal ferocity, to which he knew that Constantine was subject, and under which he imagined him to be labouring, had given way, at least to some glimmering of reason, was now emboldened—by the mighty power of his office, which gave him full authority in the absence of the Emperor even over the Imperial family—to intrude upon him, when even his two favourites dared not approach. He entered the apartment. After an interval, they were heard in a conversation scarcely audible, except for a storm of guard-house oaths and expletives, which every now and then the Grand Duke thundered out.

"Thank God!" said Le Gendre, evidently much relieved, "the fit has passed away."

"Perhaps," replied Rhoda doubtfully, in the lowest of whispers.

At length the Grand Duke's voice was heard, as he concluded a burst of boisterous indignation by, "I have defiled his mother! I have defiled his mother!—bring him in."

The police director opened the folding door, and beckoned quietly with his finger to Horace, who endeavoured, by a firm step and an assured countenance, to conceal and perhaps repel the rising thoughts of Siberia, and dungeons, and perpetual imprisonment and mines. The doors closed after him, and he stood in the presence of the Grand Duke. But the fit was not over. Count Benkendorf put his finger to his lip, and, seizing Horace by the arm with his left hand, as if to prevent his moving another step, they both remained silent and motionless.

Constantine, who had torn open his uniform, was seated on a divan; his hair and garments were in utter disarray, and the upper part of his body seemed to double over the lower, as he rocked it to and fro with a see-saw motion. His eyes were red and bloodshot, and glared from under his shaggy eye-brows with all the ferocity of those of an infuriated animal; his lips quivered and worked, while the foam frothed over them; and there broke from him a low moan, which sometimes subsided into a plaintive intonation and then rose to a howl, which it was terrible to hear from a human being.

After a few minutes, this nervous agony or excitement seemed to subside; and, making a sign to them to remain, he swore an oath or two, and then followed another howl as he rocked to and fro; and then an oath until a full and uninterrupted volley showed his restoration to his habitual reason.

"This is the French Count," said the Grand Master, as if anxious to arrest his attention.

Hereupon Constantine rose; and Horace, who had scarcely noticed him in the gardens, had an opportunity of surveying his figure. His make and stature were tall and commanding; for incessant drill had modified its natural burliness; but there was a peculiar stoop and forward projection of his bull-neck, which gave him an appearance of deformity. His face was not ignoble, although his forehead was low; but it was knitted by a scowl, which was far from prepossessing; and his bloodshot eyes rolled just like those of an angry boar, as they twinkled through the overhanging grey and bushy eyebrows, which were bristled up and staring.

"Oh this is the Frenchman!" said the Grand Duke, clenching his fist and approaching with a step like that of an elephant.

"Now," whispered the Grand Master to Horace, "beware! answer frankly, promptly, and submissively."

"Your rank, name, and regiment?" asked the Grand Duke angrily and abruptly; and then, recalling his wandering thoughts, he added: "Oh! I remember! you are the man who have dared to refuse a note, which you picked up, when asked for it in my name? Speak!" thundered the Grand Duke; "how dared you?"

"In truth," replied Horace, "if your Imperial Highness had let it fall, I should have been the first to restore it."

"What? He answers me!—he argues with me!—he gives me reasons, forsooth! Where is that letter?"

"Burnt," said the Grand Master; "he destroyed it in my presence."

"He dared!" exclaimed Constantine.

"I would now suggest to your Imperial Highness that, the mischief being done, he should repair it as best he can. From the moment your Imperial Highness called my attention to the matter, he has been watched; those who saw him pick up the paper know that he never read it; but there is every reason to believe that he could give us the antecedent information we require as to who delivered it, though," added the Grand Master warily, to remove all his scruples, "it is as well to inform him you had perused its contents."

"I!" said the Grand Duke; "that is an outrageous lie. I never saw the outside of it, much less the contents."

The Count Benkendorf shrugged his shoulders.

"But, look you, things are come to such a pass, that there are people who, reckoning on feminine ignorance and sensibility, step at every turn betwixt me and the culprit, and stay the sword of military and civil justice—traitors seeking to relax the bonds of military discipline and civil order—to turn the guard-houses into bear-gardens, and my soldiers into slovenly logicians and philosophers. Whenever I am about to make an example, these busy-bodies set her to interfere: I shall soon not be able to punish a soldier, degrade a negligent officer, or send a disaffected dog to the mines, without a domestic scene; and of those meddlers themselves—I have defiled their mothers!—I will make a terrible example. Who are they, Benkendorf? I have defiled thy mother! Why dost thou not speak? It is thy business to know!"

"I have brought your Imperial Highness one who can speak," said the Grand Master, pointing to Horace.

"Yes," continued Constantine, "she has been tampered with. I degraded two of my people; and yesterday, forsooth, the one turned dogged and the other insolent. Why shouldn't they when so sure of an intercessor? Now, to-night, she spoke to me of them; and some one prompted her. Who was it, Benkendorf? or are you yourself in league with them? But all shall not avail, if you all band together. I had ordered them five hundred lashes apiece, and now they shall share five thousand between them, and begin the tale at sun-rise to-morrow. So much for interference—and now let me see if I cannot do something for those who set her on to speak. Who they are I will know."

Count Benkendorf, with a low bow, again pointed to Horace.

"You, Sir, speak out. What do you know? Who dropped that note? Where did you pick it up? Who gave it to her?"

As the angry observations made by Constantine had been in Russ, which, spoken with some vehemence and volubility was wholly unintelligible to Horace, he was still under the impression that all the wrath of his interrogator was caused by his doubts of his wife's fidelity. But whilst he mentally cursed all the intrigues of these Russian and Polish women, he turned over his position in his own mind, and resolved, whatever the fate in which a refusal would involve him, that his pride of family station and of nationality, to say nothing of the interest which she inspired, forbade his giving her up,—happen what might—so he replied:

"Is your Imperial Highness, whose rank I so profoundly respect, so ignorant of mine, as not to know that I, the Count de Montressan;—owing my allegiance to the King of France, and being responsible to my family and myself for maintaining its honour;—that I cannot, without disgracing myself, give any evidence in such a matter, if I had any to give; or, that it would be a worthy part to feed the jealousy of a husband, or to turn spy on an illustrious Lady? I pray your Highness to consider my respectful refusal—notwithstanding the painful situation in which I am placed, as final, absolute, and irrevocable."

"A jealous husband!" exclaimed Constantine in astonishment. "What does he mean? Speak, scoundrel!" And he twisted his hand furiously into Horace's neckcloth, whereat the latter losing all his self-possession, pushed the Grand Duke so suddenly and forcibly from him, that he staggered back one pace, whilst Horace, by receding another, augmented the distance between them.

"This," exclaimed Horace, doubling his fist, which smarted with the pain of the burn, "is infamous treatment! I have kept within the bounds of the respect I owe; but, be it at the peril of any man breathing to lay a hand upon me whilst my arms are free!" And, in his desperation, he so evidently looked around for some weapon, that the Grand Duke perceived it; and, just as the police-master was making a signal, he desired him by an impatient gesture to desist.

"You were looking for a sword!" exclaimed the Grand Duke, less in wrath than amazement. "In God's name what to do?"

"To pay back blow for blow, and blood for blood!" said Horace, who had grown quite reckless.

"And you refuse to answer me!"

"If the earth yawned at my feet."

"If so," said the Grand Duke, cooling suddenly, and speaking to himself aloud; "he is a sort of Tcherkess, there is no forcing such natures." And then, with all the fickleness of his father Paul, he began to survey him attentively and without anger, till his features gradually relaxed into a positively benevolent smile of approbation.

"Do you know, Benkendorf," he observed in Russ, "that a fellow like that is a true man after all!" And then he said to Horace in French, "What height are you?—Five feet eleven?"

"Your Highness is free to jest, so you do not touch me."

"Jest! gad's death, I am very serious; but what is the matter with your hand?"

"A just consequence of his obstinacy in holding the burning letter till it was consumed," said the grand master in Russ.

"Obstinacy! only hear, you call firmness obstinacy; you would (I have defiled your mothers) call that Roman—the man of the statue-makers, what was his name? Mutus Scævola—obstinate? Now, I say that it is very fine. A man who will do that, has got a heart in his body.

"Come," said the Grand Duke, with a cordiality so frank and natural, that even the deep irritation of Horace gave way. "I forgot what I owed both to you and to myself; I was too hasty. As to the disorder of your cravat, you are not in uniform, and look at my condition, it is more scandalously disarranged."

Still it was a little suspiciously that Horace allowed the Duke to press his hand.

"You don't bear malice, do you?"

"I am only glad, no longer innocently to offend your Highness."

"But that burn is an ugly one. Here Benkendorf let them call some of my doctors."

"No, I thank your Highness; I will wrap it in the cotton of my cloak wadding, and if permitted, will hasten back to Petersburg."

"Permitted! I will permit you in my own carriage, with my best horses; you shall be driven like the wind; as for the cotton, here, let us cut some out of the lining of Benkendorf's cloak." And the impetuosity of Constantine was only restrained by the want of some incisive instrument from making an immediate attack on the grand master's garment.

"Good bye!" said the Grand Duke, whose eyes, peering beneath his now upraised shaggy brows, had assumed an expression of sagacious kindliness, not unlike that of the water-spaniel or poodle; "remember, that you have a friend in Constantine."

Horace bowed profoundly and was retiring.

"Stop!" exclaimed the Grand Duke, recalling him, as the door closed; and observing to himself enthusiastically, "He is six feet! six feet, within the eighth of a veshok, I will wager, and has the carriage of a soldier!"

"Your Imperial Highness was pleased to recall me."

"You have no idea of taking service?"

"None whatever," said Horace.

"Oh, very well! we bear no malice to each other?"

"Nothing but respectful devotion."

"Good bye."

They had not closed the folding-doors, when Benkendorf and Rhoda were called.

Constantine gave his directions to Rhoda, and then he said to Benkendorf, "Mark me; I will not allow of any molestation whatever."

"Your Imperial Highness will allow me to observe, that his conduct was outrageously intemperate."

"That is my affair."

"And then to speak plainly, he is a Frenchman—who knows the colour and interpretation he may put on this affair, or what stigma he may affix upon an august name? The wife of Cæsar should not be suspected; and he may think.... In a word, he even ought to be at least frightened into discretion."

"I tell you, no! no! no!—there is more discretion in that youth than in all of you. I have defiled your mothers!—now, go—anything that is done to annoy him I shall consider done to myself."

In a few minutes, Benkendorf joined him: his aspect was stern, his tone of voice severe.

"Hark ye! Count de Montressan, you have seen and heard things to-day, which it were well for you entirely to forget; but if you should remember one tittle of them, at least, recall what I now tell you—I, to whom you owe, perhaps, your liberty—that it would be better for you to cut out your tongue than use it indiscreetly. Now, will you give me your word of honour, that nothing of this matter shall ever pass your lips?"

"Never, upon my honour! and I think I have given proof of my discretion."

"Then, go!" said the grand master, "the carriage of his gracious Highness waits to convey you to the city."

The next morning, when Horace awoke from a refreshing sleep, a small parcel was delivered to him.

It contained, detached from its chain, the emerald which he had seen on the arm of the Princess of Lowicz, and it was accompanied by these words,

"Sir, you have saved two lives! Do not forget that she, who is indebted to you for them, will not prove ungrateful, if ever it be in her power to serve you.

"J. L."

"An episode for a novel in three volumes, and a truly pleasant termination!" exclaimed the Count; "if it were not for my burnt fingers. I suppose she means her own life, and that of the Lieutenant. Poor Grand Duke! but what else was to be expected from such an ill-assorted union!"

But it is not fitting that the reader should remain, perchance, under the same impression as Horace respecting that illustrious lady, whose exalted station, and whose unhappy decease have made her virtues—interrupted only by the grave—matter of history, and, as matter of history, the property of the novelist, so that he approach with due respect those manes, and handle tenderly that gentle memory.

The Duchess of Lowicz loved, indeed, she loved with all the devotion of an undivided affection in a woman's bosom; she loved her husband, the Grand Duke Constantine, the capricious, sullen, cruel compound of the bear and boar, the moody sanguinary tyrant, whose name was a terror in the mouths of men, and whom, on account of the animal ferocity of his brutal instincts, even those who did not tremble in his dependence, approached at times with trepidation. Constantine, who was daily dooming men to exile, or to perish by the knout or lash, almost without a shadow of a cause; Constantine, who had immolated victims with his own hand, and who, in savage pastime had shot a female slave in his gardens; this man, or monster, was the only object of the beautiful and kind-hearted Duchess's love. Through life until his death, she seemed attached to him like a good angel to the path of a malevolent being, effacing or soothing by her beneficent influence the terrors and the traces of its fatal passage.

There is no praise too exalted for the good she did and the evil she prevented—as she watched with tender solicitude to save all the world from him, and to save from all the world her rude Constantine.

But how, it will be asked, could a creature so good, and amiable, and sensitive—even admitting all the attractive force of contrast—love a man so fearful?

This is one of those mysteries of the female heart, which, in life, daily present to our observation effects the causes of which remain perpetually insoluble to our comprehension. Was it not unspeakably flattering to a woman, to see this terrible and unimpressible nature, which resisted so obdurately all softening influences, so utterly subdued and conquered by his love for her—to see—like Una's lamb-like lion—the untameable and ravening beast crouch at her feet, and lick them—to see the eyes gleaming with their sombre and self-destroying fury, subside from these paroxysms into glances of affection, as their rough lids filled with tears, and the lips, foaming with the agony of his rage, mutter their blessing as he covered her fair hands with kisses!

And then, was it strange that she should make all the allowances for hereditary predisposition, which her indulgence might suggest, in favour of the man, who had twice given up the highest position upon earth for her; not the vain questionable honours of a constitutional throne, with their daily petty annoyances; but the absolute Imperial throne of Russia, with sixty millions, not of subjects, but of slaves?

When Constantine first became enamoured of Janna Grudzinska, the daughter of one of those petty Polish gentlemen, who never really rose above the condition of the smallest farmer, and whom the present Emperor has banished again to the ranks of plebeianism; Constantine, to obtain the consent of his brother Alexander to his marriage with her, agreed to sacrifice his birthright to the throne. It has been said that she was originally ambitious; but she was soon cured of that ambition. She saw how closely her Constantine resembled his father Paul. There was the same reckless generosity, the same occasional appreciation of what was noble, the same fitful benevolence; he was the true inheritor of Paul's eccentric virtues—Paul, who as all the world knows, arose one morning, and—judging that, since the quarrels of nations originated from the ambition or the machinations of princes and their ministers, it was unjust to shed their subjects' blood, or waste their treasure in the prosecution of their wars,—forthwith proposed to the hostile sovereigns of Europe, that they and their respective premiers should meet him and his minister in single combat; Paul, who, struck with the admiration for Napoleon's genius, changed his policy in a night, in the spirit of what Carlyle calls hero-worship; Paul, who, when he could be brought to see that he had punished, unadvisedly, acknowledged his error, with almost ostentatious humility, and endeavoured magnificently to repair the injury.

In short, all the noble qualities of Paul, which insanity often distorted into ridicule, were abundantly reproduced in Constantine, and in this he alone bore a characteristic likeness to him. For, if Alexander himself injured no one, he fled from the importunity of those whom he had allowed to be injured, and to whose suffering no mental obfuscation blinded him. Nicholas, in the cold, unrelenting, almost passionless cruelty of his persecution, seems to increase in obduracy as he continues it,—as if he paid back by augmenting hate the hatred which his treatment must inspire in those who suffer,—and who has never once acknowledged himself in error in all his multitudinous inflictions whether it be that, measuring as it has been just suggested, his hatred by that of his victims, he judges, that the more unjustly they have been punished, the more vividly this treasonable feeling must rise up in their inmost hearts; or, that he considers it more fitting that the guiltless should suffer, than that he should be convicted in men's estimation of having ever erred.

It is true that, like Paul, Constantine was a monster—not the cold, calculating, crafty monster of Louis XI's stamp, whose crimes, deliberate atrocities, were coldly and consciously committed; but of the school of outrageous tyrants of the Nero and Caligula stamp; men, whom in private, a British jury absolves from the last responsibility of their crimes, and locks up in the wards of Bedlam.

And was it not natural, that his wife's affection should refer all the hideous side of the Grand Duke's character to hereditary insanity, whilst she looked at the virtues which it obscured as all his own?

But as she endured the long protracted agony of seeing, one by one, all the violences which she could not prevent his committing,—besides being cognisant of those premeditated, which she dissuaded him from perpetrating,—she soon turned all her efforts to deter him from aspiring to the purple; in which she knew that the imperative law of self-preservation would soon lead his subjects to strangle him like his father Paul.

She felt that there was none but herself in the wide world to love, perhaps to save, him; and she dreaded that, if armed with the unlimited and destroying power of Imperial sovereignty,—where a single command the breath of passion may have such a terrible and extended action,—she should no longer be able to step in as a sweet mediatrix between the millions whom she pitied, and him whom she trembled for, and loved, and pitied.

For, although, Constantine had renounced his claims to the Empire, his sombre spirit, now questioning his brother's right to impose such a condition on his marriage, and now persuaded by his wife to doubt his fitness to reign, was in a state of dangerous fermentation, and as, before the sudden death of Alexander, the political atmosphere was rife with rumours of plots, conspiracies, and secret societies, which, in reality, had undermined society beneath the feet of Nicholas—that cautious Prince dreaded, that, if he accepted his elder brother's resignation of the crown and assumed it himself, a change in Constantine's capricious and uncertain mind might involve him and his family in utter ruin; and, therefore, the moment Alexander's death was known, he sent and hailed his brother, Cæsar!

The fretful spirit of Constantine, who, Esau-like, had been long brooding over his resignation, was sorely tempted; and then the Duchess of Lowicz put forth all her influence to induce him to renounce a second time the Imperial throne. After a long and terrible struggle with himself, he again sacrificed it to her—he sacrificed it not as a thing in perspective—not in the impatience of ungratified passion, but real, present, tangible, and only to the tears of his tender wife.

Now it happened that the two degraded officers who were the next morning to suffer, had found no means of appealing to the Duchess, until the Lieutenant Alexius, on the evening of the fête of Peterhoff had succeeded in securing her intercession; and he had commenced by giving her the case in writing, in the event of their being interrupted before he could explain the full particulars. This was the note which Horace had picked up.

As the Duchess anticipated, the short space of time allowed, obliged her to interfere too suddenly, and without sufficient preparation to enable her to succeed. If the document in question had fallen into the hands of the Grand Duke, their doom would have been irremissibly sealed; as it was, the Duchess, who had overheard all that had passed between her husband and Count Horace, and was all the time in the adjoining room upon her knees in prayer, resolved, with desperate resolution, to profit by the returning sunshine of his temper; but alas! the only effect of her generous intercession appeared to be to evoke again the tempest, which was lulling into a calm.

"The fit" returned in all its fury: the window was thrown open; and the Grand Duke was left alone—with her.

After a time, according to her wont, she took his head upon her lap; for she only had the power somewhat to soothe him in these moments, when he was unapproachable to all the world but her; and thus the night passed; and after the night the first hours of morning.

* * * *

It will be asked, how was Constantine allowed, in Russia, away from his own government, to exercise such terrible and gratuitous severities?

Let the reader imagine it to be an hour past midnight. The Grand Master of the secret police has regained his dwelling, and a highly influential petitioner is waiting for his return. Count Benkendorf answers him:

"It is impossible! I have just left the Grand Duke. He is furious!"

"But he has ordered them five thousand lashes! It is a certain death—the most cruel death!"

"Death three times told; but what is to be done?"

"And all for nothing!"

"Most likely, when the Grand Duke orders the punishment."

"But is it not terrible? It is all very well to send such a King Stork to those turbulent Poles; but I cannot understand that he should be allowed to go on so here. What says the Emperor?"

"What would you have him say? His brother has given up enough not to be thwarted in his humour in such trifles."

"Well, there is then nothing to be done?"

"Nothing."

"Adieu then. I shall not go home. I have left five women inclusive of my own in tears in my wife's boudoir. I shall go and see if it is too late to sup at La Sapphira's."

"Ah! I would accompany you if I were not so sleepy. Good night."

* * * *

Just at the hour when Horace was half through his slumbers, and having got his head between two pillows, turned restlessly round as he dreamed himself at the dinner table of the Obrasoffs, where, bursting through the ceiling, the Lieutenant R.... with the rope still round his neck, and the cap drawn over his face, fell on his feet between Madame Obrasoff and Horace, and began to inquire superciliously of the latter, "how he dared to personate him by assuming so closely his face and manner." Just as Horace on turning relapsed into profound oblivion from this inconsistent and fantastic dream, the chill breeze of morning blew through the open window into an apartment of the Palace of Strelna, which presented a very different scene.

Constantine, long since exhausted, had fallen into a sweet sleep, his head reclining on the lap of the Duchess of Lowicz, who was still watching, pale, cold, and statue-like, but yet unwearying in her gentle vigil. At length his eyes opened slowly; he grasped her hand, it was cold as marble; and when she attempted to speak, her teeth chattered, so chilled was she with the night air; and she coughed a hollow cough. He addressed her affectionately:

"You are not well, my soul. You have not slept; you were watching me."

"I should not otherwise have slept, thinking of those poor men who are to suffer."

"You must do something."

"How can I think of myself when my fellow beings are about to endure such pain?"

"What can I do?" asked the Grand Duke gloomily.

A cloud passed over Constantine's brow; and then he said: "So be it!" and, impetuous in everything, he almost upset the exhausted Duchess as he rose and rushed to the door. "Here, Rhoda!"

Rhoda started from the sleep into which he had fallen,—booted and spurred as he was, and without having even ungirded his sword;—and hastily passing his hand down the front of his uniform to ascertain that every hook and button was in its place, as he answered, stood up in a precise military position, erect as an arrow, and letting his hands fall to his sides, against which he pressed the palms slightly, turning the thumbs outwards as the regulation prescribed.

"Rhoda! see to it. I suspend the sentence of those two men who were to run the gauntlet."

CHAPTER XII.

Johann Sauer was half-brother to Dietrich Susse. They had both of late years contrived to ingratiate themselves so completely with the late Prince Isaakoff, that Dietrich had become by degrees the factotum of his master's property in St. Petersburg and Moscow; and Johann had been entrusted with the stewardship of the estate of Bialoe Darevnia, with its ten thousand peasants, in the government of Kalouga.

In figure and features there was considerable resemblance between the two relatives; and both had succeeded in supplanting their predecessors.

But in the character they assumed and in their modus operandi they utterly differed. Dietrich, by an assumption of honest simplicity and unbounded philanthropy,—which was the result of so low a cunning that it was transparent to every one but the old Prince himself—had won his way to his master's unlimited confidence.

Johann Sauer, on the contrary, affected the genius and the man of science; and the Prince had died in the belief that he was patronising one of the great men of his century—a sort of compound between Newton, Leibnitz, and James Watt.

If, gentle reader, you have ever taken up your abode in any small town or village of northern or central Germany, you can no more fail to have met with such a character as the steward of the Bialoe Darevnia, than with a church and steeple.

Consult for a moment your scattered recollections, and they will surely remind you of some foolish pedant, with a little ill-digested reading and about enough mechanical knowledge to put together a Dutch clock, who modestly styles himself mechanicus and philosophus, and is evidently self-satisfied that he has monopolised all human knowledge, wisdom, and talent.

Johann Sauer was the type of that thoughtful and cloudy genus, so prevalent in Germany, where every man is said to think ten times more than an Englishman, and twenty times more than a Frenchman—a fact which there is no denying, though it be so slowly and in general to so very little purpose. A disposition of mind too, which is characterised by an obstinate conceit, naturally in the inverse ratio of the thinker's power and lucidity of intellect, which leads him to imagine, when he has slowly disentangled a complete idea from the oceans of words, in which the talent of his countrymen obscures and buries it, that its value is to be rated by the trouble which it has cost him to disinter and master it, in addition to which, he is almost sure either seriously to appropriate its originality, or at least to set forth arrogant pretensions thereunto.

Thus the philosophical systems of the Greeks, those intellectual demi-gods who seem nearly to have exhausted the wide range of metaphysical speculation, have been taken up by the philosophers of Germany, and diluted and obscured in such interminable volumes, that some perspicacity and unwearying perseverance are necessary to extract what need never have been thus concealed; but when any portion of the works of these interminable thinkers falls into the hands of one of these village sages, if after vast labour he can snatch out one rag of the fanciful mantle, which his author originally purloined from the Greeks, he swells in his own estimation, at least, to the level of his master.

In physical sciences, if he reads some commonplace absurdity, attributing the invention of the steam engine to Hiero, who observed the force of the vapour from the spout of a kettle of boiling water, and applied it to twirl round some revolving toy, it immediately strikes him that he has made the same observation; and, enamoured with the originality of his own unappreciated genius, perhaps he sets to work to study the steam-engine; and when he has slowly toiled so far as to understand its general principle, is at once satisfied that he could have invented and can improve it; and that the whole civilized world ought to raise statues to him.

Now Johann Sauer, though born in Russia, was a self-styled philosophus and mechanicus. It is true that he had never read more than thirteen or fourteen volumes of history, geography, philosophy, and literature, out of which, two were catalogues of pictures, one a spelling-book, and the rest odd volumes. But then, as he said, he had well and inwardly digested them. His claim to the title of mechanicus, on which he chiefly piqued himself, had been long deferentially admitted by many persons of note, whose countenance the patronage of Prince Isaakoff had procured for him, and rested chiefly on his being the hundred and ninety-fourth inventor (at least at the date of our story; for the same invention is renewed by different persons in Germany and Russia, and figures in the newspapers at least five-and-twenty times a year,) who, by means of an ingenious system of cog-wheels, proposed to supersede the power of steam.

Few of our readers, in these days of Encyclopedias and Penny Magazines, will assuredly be ignorant that all mechanical contrivances are only an application of power in different ways, With all the wheels, and pulleys, and cogs, and springs in the world, you cannot gain the power of a mite, though when you have derived it from animal force, or steam, or falling water, you may regulate it so as to give a more rapid motion with less force, or more force with less rapidity. On the contrary, you lose a little of the power you have by friction. This is the very first rule—the A. B. C. of mechanism, in the teeth of which these worthies proceed with their inventions, the ingenuity of which may be aptly illustrated by comparing it to that of the Irishman, who cut off the top of his sheet and sewed it to the bottom to make it longer.

Nevertheless, Johann acquired some celebrity, and, once brought into notice, found plenty of protectors, among whom were the minister of public instruction and two or three generals of engineers, who proved their faith in his genius by considerable advances of money. He constructed many little droschkies, which could be moved with very great labour by the person sitting on them, and a small vessel which was boasted to have come up the Gulf of Finland from Peterhoff in a terrible storm, a fact which seemed for the moment triumphantly to establish his success, until it was found that it would not move in a calm; and that, on the occasion in question, it had come up with the wind, and not against it—a circumstance about which every one had hitherto forgotten to inquire.

Gradually the pecuniary support of his patrons was withdrawn, though even then the contemptuous opinions of the English mechanics and engineers were attributed to jealousy, particularly when they opined "that the man was one part knave and three parts fool, and that those who encouraged him were wholly the latter."

Nevertheless, the Prince Isaakoff, looking upon him as a man in advance of his age, continued warmly to befriend him, and sent him to superintend his mines in the government of Perm.

Here he further distinguished himself by sending up to the national exhibition the first Russian locomotive engine made on the model of one of Stephenson's, and closely resembling it, at least externally; for it would not work, and the boiler would not even hold water.

The working of these mines the Prince was forced to abandon, because, flourishing as they were, he found that the slaves employed brought him in four times more revenue at the occupations from which he had withdrawn them; which, considering that in those desert and inhospitable regions, a truss of hay cost him sometimes three shillings was not to be wondered at. When this event took place, Johann was placed as assistant to the steward of the estate in the government of Kalouga, and in a short time contrived to step into his shoes.

Notwithstanding his philosophic mind and his mechanical genius, Johann had long since learned to look with as vigilant an eye to the "main chance" as his half-brother, the philanthropic Dietrich; and, as the scientific disappointments he had met with had soured his disposition, he did not, in his dealings with the serfs under his control, much temper with the suaviter in modo the fortiter in re.

He had evidently learned to consider himself as the worm of a sort of social press, and those under his authority, as intended by Providence to be screwed down to the last possible turn, and he had always acted according to this conviction, in as far, at least, as he had not been checked by the fear of shocking the benevolence of his master.

Johann was blessed with a wife, a daughter, and a son. The wife was fat, short, round, and fair, though by no means beautiful, the skin covering her heavy features being thin and of a lively pink, her very light flaxen hair, eye-lashes, and eye-brows, reminding one, as they relieved it, of the pale white bristles on the blushing skin of the back of a young sucking-pig.

In temper she was so imperious, that all the serfs on the estate considered her as a providential retribution on Johann, and in her habits she was so thrifty, that she stinted him even in the sugar of his afternoon's coffee.

Their daughter, Trautchen, took morally and physically after her parents, excepting that, as regarded her personal appearance, she seemed to have been drawn out from breadth into length, was deeply pitted with the small-pox, and had one eye the colour of her father's, the other a facsimile of the tint and shape of her mother's, not omitting those white spots which constitute the wall eye; whilst, furthermore, as if to convince themselves of this unusual peculiarity, the balls of these organs of vision were incessantly turning towards each other.

Hans, the son, was a heavy, stupid, clownish youth, without any very marked propensity, excepting sloth and gluttony, to either good or evil.

Now, when the old Prince, in the absence of Mattheus, treated his sister so like a daughter, she had been the object of the unceasing civility of this family, both as a means of paying their court to the old man, and because the father and mother indulged the then ambitious hope that a match might be patched up betwixt the hopeful Hans and a protégée for whom the Prince avowed his intention of providing so handsomely.

But it has been already shown, how, when the benevolent master of Nadeshta sent her to complete her education at Moscow, once weaned from the habit of her company, he, on her return, with a very unusual delicacy, judged it better for her future prospects that, as a young and beautiful girl, she should not live under his roof, and arranged that, until the return of her brother, she should reside with the family of the Sauers.

Now, Johann and his wife, during the first period of her sojourn with them, treated her quite like a spoiled child; notwithstanding her active and enthusiastic advocacy of the cause of the oppressed peasantry, her spirited denunciations of Johann's conduct, and her frequent letters to the Prince upon the subject; the Prince reading with delight these evidences of a fervent and poetic temperament, though without ever attaching the slightest weight to their contents.

It was true that Johann, with some Machiavelian ingenuity—aware of the danger of the Prince's once becoming thoroughly acquainted with the condition of his slaves during his occasional visits to this portion of his property,—had taken the precaution to assume in all his dealings with them exactly the same tone of maudlin kindness in his words, as was habitual to the Prince; so that, accustomed to hear it constantly associated with harshness and extortion, when the master really came, the graciousness of his inquiries had not the effect of thawing into communicativeness the sullen reserve of his slaves. But it was not with the children as with the parents, for Hans, having been incessantly reminded of their desire that he should make himself agreeable to Nadeshta, had for a long time, in a dogged spirit of obstinacy, preferred the more easy and natural task of rendering himself exactly the reverse: and, as for the daughter, Trautchen, her spite, ill-nature, and ill-will she had from the first been unable to conceal. She had, at least, however, the merit of consistency, for she was the only one of the family who saw no cause to change in their treatment of her; for, just as the father and mother were beginning to awaken Hans to a sense of his disobedience, they heard through the medium of Dietrich, both of the hopeless malady of the old Prince and his unwillingness to enfranchise or provide effectually either for her or her brother, until the recovery to which he vainly looked forward. The very different position in which Nadeshta was thus placed made a corresponding difference in their behaviour towards her, and then they found that the interest which it had been so difficult to excite in Hans, was quite as difficult to allay; for, as he said of himself, he was like the clay stuffing of a Russian stove, if he was slow to heat, he was slow to cool.

Nadeshta—whom we have seen, as if with a presentiment of what was to befall her, so painfully alive to her condition; Nadeshta, ever since she had left Moscow, had obstinately persisted in wearing the costume of a peasant girl, though finer in material and fitted with all the art of the milliner, and in this there was more pride than humility; or, it was rather, perhaps, the result of the ambition which had utterly absorbed all trace of vanity in her—ambition which aspires to be what vanity only strives to seem. Anxiously looking forward to the arrival of her brother, whose presence would determine the old Prince to emancipate them, whilst she longed so ardently to be freed, she was utterly careless of appearing what she was in the eyes all.

When her star was still supposed to be in the ascendant, Johann and his wife, after vainly endeavouring to induce her whom they coveted as their future daughter-in-law to renounce her sympathies and intercourse with the serfs of the estate, and to assume the costume of Western Europe, which is at once distinctive of another and higher caste, chose to remember that the Empress and the ladies of the court had recently adopted the national dress; but, as soon as the hopeless malady of the old Prince was known, the wife vented all her long dissembled malice,—Trautchen, that which she had so long been obliged to restrain—in heaping every humiliation on her. She was twitted with her condition; she was told that her peasant's dress was exactly fitting for a slave; she was refused the use of her own piano by the daughter, and told by the mother, who locked up her books, that it would be more fitting for her to attend to the kitchen, the dairy, or the cow-yard, to which, doubtless, she would have been driven, had it not been for the prudence of Johann, who observed that the old Prince was not yet dead.

"The human frame," quoth he, "is a machine after all."

"A machine!" echoed the wife; "look after your stewardship. I am sick of your machining: you have spoiled all the churns, and stopped every clock in the house; and the bakehouse chimney will not draw at all since you have improved it by boring it full of holes."

"And yet," said Dietrich, "it was on the same principle as the chimney I altered at the glass-house works."

"Yes, and the Prince's friend complains it will not draw at all since you have meddled with it."

"It did not draw much before," said Johann, in extenuation of his humiliating failure.

"Hold your tongue about machines: when did any of yours ever answer?"

"All scientific operations are proverbially uncertain. But, as I was saying, the human frame is a mere piece of mechanism; and precisely as, when I have had reason to suppose, after long meditation and labour in constructing a piece of machinery, that it would act, and that it has failed to do so, by the same rule of uncertainty, although medical science and experience may expect the Prince's internal mechanism to stop, it may you know just possibly disappoint them and continue to go on."

"Well," said the wife, "I should think there was something in that, if it came out of the mouth of anybody else; but do you, at any rate, lose no time in putting all the account of your stewardship in order."

"Yes," repeated Johann, elated with the unusual impression which he had made; "yes, the human frame is a machine; philosophy teaches us that: and the English philosopher, Bacon, made the same observation. His name, my dear, means salted pigs-flesh."

"Ah!" said the wife, "the only sensible thing I ever heard about philosophy; but now, I remember, there are nine sows expected to litter within this next week; have they been brought in?"

"No," said Johann; "you are right, my dear. The peasants will cheat us out of half the young pigs if they litter in their own sties." And the steward went off to give his orders before he forgot to do so.

At length the Lord had died; and still Nadeshta met the fresh humiliations showered upon her with the same cold, haughty, sarcastic, and unpropitiating patience; although, even now, the hatred and malice of the Sauers was partially diverted, and its full exercise postponed by the uncertainty of the respect which the young heir might show to his father's predilections, and of his continuing Johann in his situation.

Now Nadeshta, who by her brother's last letter had been made aware that he was on his way homewards, was intently watching for the arrival of Hans, who had been that day to the adjacent post-town; but the letters of which Hans was the bearer were taken from him by Johann's wife, who refused to allow her husband to peruse them because the coffee was getting cold. The coffee is a particularly important meal with the German settlers in Russia; and after the midday dinner follows the two hours' siesta which intervenes. It was served in the gold and purple Turkish china cups, as thin as an eggshell, mounted in their stands of filagree silver—a present from the late Prince to Nadeshta, who formerly had often been called on to preside at its distribution as the greatest compliment Johann's wife could pay her. But now, times were changed; she was not even offered any: and, when Hans saw this, he heaved a deep sigh of compassion, and turned thoughtful. As if purposely, she was rudely excluded whilst the letters were being read; but she could not help observing that the result of their perusal had been to throw Trautchen and her parents into a state of some confusion and consternation.

Whilst she was pondering over the cause of this change, which was occasioned by the announcement of Prince Isaakoff's proximate arrival, Hans stealthily approached her; his finger was on his lips, as if to bespeak discretion; there was a small bunch of hot-house grapes in his hand, and an awkward bashfulness in his demeanour.

"Nadeshta," said he, "don't tell my mother or Trautchen, because I do not want to give them any. I—I like you best, you know: these are fine hothouse muscatels. I bought three pounds of them; and very dear, but very nice they were."—Here he looked wistfully at them.—"I have finished all but this; but as they have given me the stomach-ache, I dare not eat any more. I had saved them for to-morrow."—Here Hans looked first at the grapes, and then at Nadeshta, and picked off several of the largest, which he swallowed.—"I had put them by till to-morrow; but as my mother gave you no coffee,"—here he picked off a few more—"I mean these for you;" and with a violent and sudden effort he put an end to his internal hesitation by handing them desperately to her.

"Thank you, Hans; but keep your grapes: you can do me a greater favour, which won't cost, you anything."

"Can I?" said Hans, eagerly, withdrawing them.

"Do you think there was any letter for me amongst those you brought?"

But at this moment Nadeshta was called into the kitchen; and the Frau Sauer handed to her an open letter, addressed by Nadeshta's brother to her; anticipating all comment by saying haughtily:

"I have opened this; and I should have burned it, but I cannot read it, for it is in French—what is it about?"

Nadeshta read—"Dearest sister: In the deepest affliction I am consoled to think that in a few days after this I shall be with you—"

Nadeshta's heart beat high! The writing was scrawled with a tremulous hand, the page spotted with tears; but still she was about to clasp him to her bosom!

"What does he say? It is not long!"

Nadeshta's eyes flashed fire; she crushed the letter in her hand, and cast it into the grate.

"Ask the flames!"

"Ha, ha, ha, ha!" shouted Hans.

Madame Sauer contracted her brows for a moment; and then appearing to reflect, she vented her anger, by giving Hans a blow upon the head with a rolling-pin.

Hans whimpered and sneaked off to his own room to solace himself with the rejected bunch of grapes; but there he cried outright; for he found, alas! when he drew them from his pocket, that he had sat down upon, and crushed them.

CHAPTER XIII.

The Prince Isaakoff was giving a farewell dinner to a small party of his intimates before he started for the country. There was Lochadoff, and Durakoff, and Jakof, and the poet, and the poet's brother-in-law, and Alexius, with whom the reader is already acquainted; and amongst those who have not been introduced to his notice a tall, hard-featured, grey-headed, elderly gentleman was seated next to Horace.

The dinner is over; the vast epergne, groaning beneath its picturesque load of fruit, and modelled in graceful combination from several of the Parisian fountains, scatters in tiny spray its four streams of odours—from the mouths of dolphins, or the amphora of nymphs, or the fluvial urns of river gods, of frosted silver—the rose-water and the liquids perfumed with the blossoms of the orange and the citron, and the scents of the violet, and the aromatic distillations from the borders of the Rhine—the fragrance of the most unfragrant of cities.

The Burgundy, in recumbent bottles, crusted without and within, rolls slowly round on a wheeled car, supported by the eager arms of exquisitely chiselled golden Bacchantes, who seem at once to implore and to command the guests to handle their precious burden gently, and by no rude motions to disturb or ruffle the serenity of temper of their god, whose spirit glows above them in ruby red, in the midst of the rich deposit which time has made along one side of the sea-green glass in which it has been so long reposing.

Horace was rather surprised to find that his neighbour was an English knight, or baronet, and, notwithstanding the little prepossession his physiognomy inspired, yielding to his predilections for all that was English, he addressed him in that language, and they were soon deep in animated conversation.

Sir James Crafty was a canny Scotsman, but of the Scotch character he had nothing but the thrift, the shrewdness, and the bravery. A residence of half a century in the country had made him in everything a Russian, and yet he delighted occasionally to hear his native tongue, and to affect for an evening, to those with whom he conversed in it, the liberality and freedom of opinion, together with the blunt, harsh, sarcastic frankness common to the Land of Cakes.

Horace soon learned from him that, since the reign of Catherine, he had been deep in the confidence of the imperial family, and, in truth, he had obtained, on the personal request of the late Emperor, as his physician, his baronetcy from George IV.

It was also true that he had presided over and very creditably organized the whole medical department of the Russian empire, though his own medical abilities were considered by the other foreign doctors as of the lowest order.

He had amassed a large fortune, and risen to high favour and dignity, and was universally considered as the depositary of many secrets, not only of the reigning, but of the principal families of the empire.

Even recently, he had exhibited in the Turkish war a cool and determined bravery which had put many an aide-de-camp to the blush. On the other hand, he was noted for the un-Scotch disfavour and jealousy with which he treated his countrymen, and for the parsimonious meanness of his own hospitality, though he was accounted a man whose company the prospect of a good dinner would any where secure.

"So I saw by the English papers," replied the Baronet, in answer to an observation Horace had made.

"Did you?" said Horace. "It appears a difficult thing to see any thing in them worth reading. I receive them with paragraphs daubed over with ink and whole columns cut out, whilst others are not allowed to enter at all."

"Ay, mon, all that is the censorship."

"So I hear. And then they have confiscated half my books. My Don Juan for instance."

"Oh that," said the Baronet, with an expressive shrug of the shoulders; "that is because it reflects on the virtue of the Empress Catherine."

"And Maryatt's Pacha of Many Tales."

"The censorship suspected it to contain some implied satire, or something disrespectful to constituted authorities."

"Well," said Horace, "and lastly, I had a sort of general history and geography, from which they have cut out the two or three lines which stated that Paul was the victim of a conspiracy and was strangled in 1801."

"God bless you!" laughed the Baronet; "Paul died of apoplexy in all our Russian histories. No Russian Emperor could be admitted to have died by the profane hands of his subjects."

"And I find," said Horace, "that I cannot even put an advertisement into the papers for a valet without the sanction of the censor's office."

"Nothing can be printed in the country, nothing in print admitted from abroad under the severest penalties; you may not even print a prospectus of tooth-powder, or introduce one of Day and Martin's blacking bottles, on account of its labels, without such authorisation."

"How very ridiculous!" observed the Count. "But do you mean to say that there is any doubt on the subject of Paul's death?"

"Fill your glass, mon!" replied the Baronet, with a merry twinkle in his eye. "There is every doubt in the world as to how he came exactly by his death, as I can testify, for the conspirators all told different stories, and his head was so beaten in, and his body so bruised, that it was difficult to say, professionally speaking, what had killed him, and whether it was the strangulation of the sash, or the beating in of his skull with a bootjack; though their agitation was excusable enough, for the killing of an Emperor must have been as nervous a matter as a young surgeon's maiden amputation. I ought to know as much about it as any one, you will say, because, as you know, it is the custom in Russia to lay the dead Emperors out in state, I was ordered to perform the task of patching up the body, so that by a dim light it might present no very visible marks of violence, and what with a little wax and paint, a very tidy job I made of it; so that I don't believe that he died of apoplexy. Hout tout, mon!" he continued, seeing an involuntary expression of horror cloud the countenance of his neighbour; "take a glass of wine upon it. Why what would you do in a dissecting room?"

Here the conversation became general.

"Scents!" said Jakof, "I hate all odours!"

"Of course!" said Durakoff, laughing, "you were asking for a story, and Jakof reminds me of one, of which he is the hero. I will tell it to you."

"Oh that stale stupid trick!" said Jakof. "You want my horses to-night, and you shan't have them if you bore us with that."

"My dear fellow, when I reflect that Isaakoff does not know it, I cannot resist the temptation of narrating the little episode. Besides, I am sure when he has heard it, that he will lend me his own if you refuse."

"I'll give you a pair of horses for a story about Jakof," said Isaakoff, "if it is a good one."

"We do not know what you offer; for at that rate you would get rid of the twenty thousand horses in the old Countess Orloff's stud," replied Durakoff, "because our friend there lends to good stories."

"I have lent to you," observed Jakof.

"So you have, especially on that very occasion."

"Yes; and a precious fool I was."

"The demonstration of which fact is the very point of my story. Know then, gentlemen, that our friend, Jakof, whose wit and wealth are notoriously in inverse ratio; and as he always pleads poverty to those who come to borrow of him, he can only take the axiom as a compliment. Our friend, Jakof, whose habitual liberality is not proverbial, will nevertheless stick at no reasonable or unreasonable sum, when the whim takes him, particularly for anything unique in its kind; he would give more for a mouse-trap, if it was the only one in the world, than for all Canova's statues. I do not mean to say that sometimes this taste has not its advantages; for instance, there is the cruel Esmeralda, who has treated Jakof's wealth and wit with as much coldness and disdain as so many other people's poverty and dulness, the Esmeralda is raving about a dress, a cap, or a bonnet—I forget which, but it is the only one in the city; and Jakof is the happy possessor of it." Here the speaker, Lochadoff, and the Prince, interchanged a malicious glance, whilst Jakof looked stolidly self-satisfied.

"A week ago she would not allow Jakof to cross her threshold; when she met him she made her coachman drive to the other side of the road; and now she dreams of him, they say. Of course you will readily understand, gentlemen, that Jakof has become the hero of her imagination, since he can give her what the Emperor cannot."

"The Emperor," suggested Lochadoff, "might it is true, give her Jakof himself, and the piece of millinery she covets too."

"How could you imagine," said Isaakoff, "that an Emperor would make so sorry a present?"

"Well," continued the narrator, "I was about to relate to you why the Esmeralda conceived such an antipathy for Jakof. You must know then, that the capricious beauty took it into her head to sport the costume of an Andalusian maja. I sent forthwith to our embassy at Madrid.

"One of the attachés was exactly my figure; and according to his own measure, he sent for to Seville, and dispatched to me by an extraordinary courier, the full and orthodox habit of a majo.

"Now I was that very day desirous of borrowing ten thousand roubles of Jakof, and Jakof was very little desirous of lending them, until he saw the majo's dress; and then he was so pressing that I at last gave it up to him. I assure you it was less the prospect of the loan, gentlemen, than the idea of seeing him in tight sky-blue satin inexpressibles, with silver lace on all the seams, which tempted me. Friendship triumphed over vanity. He fulfilled his agreement in sending me the money, which I propose to return to him when the paper and silver roubles are at par; and I more than fulfilled mine; for I not only sent him the Andalusian costume, but something more in it:—a couple of little silver paper bags, sewed into it, containing each a half an ounce of musk. He had no sooner presented himself and reaped the harvest of the Esmeralda's smiles, than people began to fly right and left,—no musk-rat, no musk-goat, no opposum, ever smelt half so intolerable—the Esmeralda changed her quarters, abandoned her furniture, and burned her clothes. They say that Jakof lay sixteen hours a day for the next three months up to his chin in a tan-pit, to get rid of the odour; and there is at least this foundation for it that he was never seen abroad, though some say that notwithstanding he actually smells of musk yet."

"Never mind," said Jakof, resolutely filling his glass, "the Esmeralda is all right now, and those who have the last laugh, gentlemen, laugh the merriest. I am not often taken in."

"Not often, but in a manner worthy of recording," said the Prince. "I shall call on the poet for a song, or a story, or a sonnet next; meanwhile here is mine. It is nine words long, and Jakof is again the hero of it, so fill and let us toast him, gentlemen. It flashes across my mind like a dimly remembered dream that Jakof, whilst still in the service, was in the habit of giving little private dinners to certain personages—gluttonous and influential. I forget whether he wanted leave of absence or promotion, but I know that, whatever he wanted, he judged that the road to the human heart was through the stomach. Always alive to his means of seduction, he tasted at my table—"

"Oh!" exclaimed Jakof, "those cursed mangoes! I have never yet paid you off for that."

"Well, he tasted and became enamoured of some of the West Indian pickled mangoes, and teased me for them. I was putting on, as he left me, one of the then newly invented clogs of caoutchouc, and a luminous thought struck me; I fished out the vegetable solid, and leaving only the thickened vinegar, cut up one of my india-rubber goloshes into delicate slices, sealed up the jar and sent it to his house. The gourmands, hearing of a novelty, were all impatience. Imagine an old gentleman with just seven teeth trying to cut a slice of India-rubber with his knife, and then, after an ineffectual effort, greedily lifting it to his mouth with a fork, and beginning to chew and chew away, whilst Jakof complacently asked him 'if it was not delicious?'

" 'It is very tough,' said the General, with his mouth full.

" 'Oh you have no teeth,' said his companion, taking up a piece impatiently with his fingers."

"Confound your jokes," said Jakof, who could not help smiling at the recollection of the scene, "that laugh cost me another obligatory twelve months in the service. The old fogies thought I was quizzing them."

"At all events it is paid for beforehand then," said Horace; "but I thought the poet was next to be called upon."

"What is the use of calling upon me," replied that personage, "I know of no merry conceits; my voice would only be like the tolling of funeral bells in the midst of a wedding or a merrimaking."

"So much the better," said the Prince, "it will offer the more lively contrast to our buffoonery. Bring more wine, and give every man a narguila."

"Since," said the poet turning towards Horace, "you have imposed upon me the task, I must call on you to give me a subject."

"A subject," said Horace, "if that is all you want I will soon find you a subject. If it is to be serious, there is for instance, jealousy, the most common, the most terrible, the most fatal of passions."

"Be it, then, jealousy, the most terrible and fatal of all human emotions," replied the poet, glancing for an instant inquiringly at Horace, and then allowing his eyes to travel with an instantaneous but sinister expression towards his brother-in-law, after which he continued:

"When we come to reflect on the intensity of this all-absorbing passion, it becomes only difficult, when well founded, to find any possible retribution which can inflict punishment approaching what poetical justice requires."

"I never was jealous but once," observed Jakof.

"And then," said Isaakoff, "as it was of the intelligence of your bull terrier, it is an instance we will not cite; so hold your tongue."

"I was observing," continued the poet, "that nothing is more difficult to conceive than a vengeance measured by the intensity of jealousy. Death, ruin, degradation, pain, what are they to the long enduring pangs of those on whom it preys? But still it does incite to terrible vengeances, and you shall hear one."

"A poetical example?" inquired Isaakoff.

"A real example," replied the poet.

"Poetically told?"

"Prosaically told, as you will hear. I can afford so to divest the narration of all poetic embellishment, that I can make it an affair of A, B, C, like a problem in Euclid, or a sum in proportions.

"You have only to suppose, gentlemen, that A is an old weather-beaten soldier; his hair is grizzled less with time than care. His life has been a life crowded with many accidents by field and flood, and the snows of age have descended on his honoured head, whilst his heart is still generous and ardent, and his blood still warm and wild. His arm is yet full of prowess, his eagle eye still speaks of the determination and the genius which have earned him the meed of heroism and of wisdom.

"B— is one of two fair sisters loving and loveable, and weak and vain. She was pleased and proud when she saw him, whose name was in all men's mouths, at her feet; and he, whose life had been the voyage of the tempest-tossed, longed to repose from all its wild waves and its bufferings within so sweet a haven as her arms.

"C— is an untutored boisterous youth, passionate, impetuous, without respect for anything human or divine, and with scarcely more hairs yet in his downy beard than there are scars on the breast of the veteran or leaves in the laurel-wreath encircling his brows."

"I see it all," interrupted the Prince, "as A was to B, so was B to C,—at least in the second act, the second chapter, or the second stanza, that is to say, the grizzled A was in love with B, whilst the fair B loved the inconsiderate and impetuous C."

"Well, since you sum up so briefly, imagine then that where the old man sought for rest and peace, and love, and happiness, he found disquietude and such anxieties as moved to agony a breast steeled, as he thought, to all adversities and sorrows. He had spent some months in all the horrors, not of jealousy only, but of doubt, when he removed with his wife far away from cities and from human society with their contaminations.

"They retired to an old habitation, with thick walls creviced by age, and long since loopholed for defence; it hung besides suspended on the edge of a bare steep rock, like the nest of a king-fisher over the subjacent waters of an angry torrent.

"One day, these overwhelming doubts and terrible suspicions were fearfully resolved; for his sudden return and noiseless step enabled him to surprise, in the chamber of the tower overhanging the rock and river, a visitor in close converse with his wife.

" 'And your dream, dearest?' said the visitor.

" 'Oh my dream! my terrible dream! It seemed to me as if we were both suspended by that fearful rope, and that the rope had broken, and that, still clasped in each other's arms, we were dashed against the rocks and drowning in the torrent!'

" 'At least,' said he, 'we should not then have been parted; they would have laid us in one grave.'

" 'In one grave!' echoed the wife; 'how very sweet, to think that nothing should ever part us more—that the winter's blast should howl, and the summer's sun shine over it, and that still we should lie there for ever and ever together.'

" 'But the sun is rising. I hear some one stirring; fare thee well;' and, with a hasty kiss, he vanished through the window.

" 'To-morrow, dearest!'

" 'To-morrow!'

" 'To-morrow!' echoed the husband, sheathing his sword; and he retired stealthily as he had come, to meditate for four and twenty hours a vengeance worthy of a man, who had found the hopes of a long and agitated life so wantonly and pitilessly wrecked.

"The day had passed—another night had come:—the cold pale moon was shining out—the lady watching. There arose a sound like the warbling of a thrush disturbed from the ivy of the old grey wall in some amorous dream; and the lips of the wife simulated the sweet response. She hastily threw down a long, long cord of many fathoms from the window, and bound the farther end round the marble pillar of the mantel-piece, tying the knot so carefully; and then making another signal, she held the rope besides in her fair hands, as if to add their frail and fond security to the precious burden which it was to bear aloft. At this moment the husband stepped forward noiselessly, and, with his uplifted sword in act to strike above her head, remained for some seconds motionless........"

"He was a fool!" said Jakof; "he should have used a whip. It was a stupid revenge enough to strike her thus; for I suppose he got tired of the uplifted sword, and struck at last."

"He struck—but not his wife."

"Well then, the lover; but he need not have reflected four and twenty hours for that."

"Not the lover."

"Himself?"

"No. He struck and half severed the rope behind her; and when his voice had thundered in her ear the terrible warning to hold fast for the dear life of him who hung suspended by it, he entirely severed its last yielding twists with his trenchant blade. Then sheathing it, he folded his arms and looked quietly on to enjoy his vengeance.

"If there be any human retribution excepting jealousy itself, which can measure out an equal meed of suffering for jealousy, it must have been in the wife's unspeakable protracted agony.

"The betrayed husband was there before her, fascinating her with his fiend-like gaze; and she was clutching the rope which held her lover over the precipice and flood, with all the desperate energy of love and terror, and with the horrible consciousness that her strength was fast deserting her.

"Could she call to her husband for assistance? Could she even call on Heaven? Imagine, gentlemen, the superhuman efforts of despair to hold on another second and another second, the terrible and hopeless effort as her frail wrists became numbed, and her bloodless hand grazed by the cord, to relinquish which was the murder of her lover.

"Even in this last extremity, when she would have implored even his pity and felt so piteous an eloquence of supplication arising from her soul as no human obduracy could have withstood, her freezing lips refused her utterance, and a hazy film, floating before her eyes, denied even to them the language of imploration...."

"There!" continued the poet fiercely, "was a vengeance worthy of an outraged husband—the contemplation of such a scene!"

"Horrible!" said Horace; "and how did it end?"

"Thus:—the savage ecstasy of the old man vanished like a dream dispelled, to leave him nothing but the memory of the past. The rope gave way at length:—there was a scream—the heavy sound of a falling body, as the mangled trunk bounded from rock to rock, leaving its clotted hair and the fragments of clothes on every briar, and then a sullen plunge, and all was over; but, after all, the lady did not kill her lover, for she died first; and it was only when her heart had burst that the cord slid away from the relaxing grasp of her inanimate hands!"

"Very good," said Isaakoff. "I suppose that, after that, the husband hardly laid them in the same grave, though they had well merited so trifling an indulgence."

"Pardon me, gentlemen, if I venture to speak after so great a poet," said the Lieutenant Alexius; "but, perhaps, you remember the story of the famous painter of Antwerp, who had designed the immortal horrors of the fallen angels, and whose pupil, Quentin Matsys, when all had declared that nothing could add to the picture, heightened its terrors by designing on the thigh of the arch-fiend, a bee, the emblem of remorse: so, in a like manner, I can humbly pretend, by setting forth the sequel, which the narrator has either never heard or forgotten, to impart one deeper shade to the story."

"Let us hear."

"Then, gentlemen, after the catastrophe, the veteran found amongst his wife's papers some reason to believe that the supposed lover was a natural brother of his wife; and, as he could never clear up whether this was truth or a tale, which they were getting up to deceive him, he lived on in the cruel doubt of having wreaked this diabolic vengeance on a tender, guiltless woman; and so it happened that, after all, whether lovers or brother and sister, in a moment of remorse they were laid to sleep in a common grave."

"Oh!" said the poet, burying his face for a moment in his hands, "yes that doubt must have been horrible! horrible! horrible! better all the pangs of jealousy than that;" and he spoke not another syllable the whole evening.

Sir James Crafty now rose, and, pleading an engagement, took his departure. As he was going he cordially shook hands with Horace.

"Did you ever taste a Welch rabbit?" said he.

"No."

"Then come and sup with me to-morrow."

"You are very kind," replied Horace; "but we start before break of day for the interior."

"Dear me, how provoking! Then we must defer it till your return."

"Oh we can put off our departure till the next day," said the Prince, making a sign to Horace.

"Really," said Horace, "I think it would be better to postpone the pleasure of supping with Sir James."

"I'll not hear of it," exclaimed Sir James. "I will not hear of disturbing your arrangements."

"Now I reflect," replied the Prince, "we shall hardly be able to start to-morrow."

"No, no, no," said Sir James, pressing Horace by the hand and darting off. "I withdraw my invitation. I will not be the means of detaining a whole party; but on your return do not forget the Welch rabbit;" and with these words, the worthy Doctor vanished.

"What an old fox!" laughed the Prince. "Why did you not accept at once?"

"I thought we were to start to-morrow."

"So we are; but do you think he would have asked you if he had not heard it?"

"Never mind, he was frightened," said Durakoff.

The wine passed round; and the party had retired to another room for coffee, when it was discovered that the poet and his brother-in-law had, as Jakof termed it, 'quietly evaporated.'

"How very odd," continued Jakof, "that he, being the only man allowed to speak freely, should commonly be so silent!"

"My dear Jakof," said Alexius, "I can answer you by a quotation from his own works, where, in a colloquy between a poet and the crowd—the crowd with whom you may identify yourself—says:

.... Fashion the minds of thy brethren!—we are astute and wicked, shameless and ungrateful—we feel our hearts to be of clay, our souls filled up with rottenness."

THE POET.

Away! what can a gentle poet do with ye?
go! petrify in your debasement! He cannot
give ye soul. Away! your breath to him is
like the tainted air of tombs. To restrain your
grovelling passions, ye have the lash, the dungeon,
and the axe. They must suffice for ye, vile slaves!*

[*Pushkin.]

"Hush! hush!" said Lochadoff, "your friend is a great poet and all that sort of thing; but don't let us repeat all that he writes. We have no licence; but imagine Count Horace giving him jealousy as a theme!"

"Where was the impropriety?" asked Horace.

"It was like talking of ropes to a man whose father has been hanged. His brother-in-law, who sat next to me, is a young Frenchman in our service. The poet took umbrage at the attention he paid to his wife, and challenged him. Your countryman protested that his attention was all addressed to the wife's sister."

" 'Then marry her,' said the poet. He did marry her; but nevertheless, he is even now tormented by jealous doubts, they say. How do they get on together now, Alexius?"

"Alas!" said Alexius, "it is a sort of mania with my gifted friend, and he still alternates betwixt affection and suspicion of his brother-in-law."

"In short," said Jakof, "everybody knows that he is always trying to make up his mind whether he shall cherish him or cut his throat."

CHAPTER XIV.

Let the reader now imagine several hours to have passed by,—the card-tables, with their green baize, have been drawn out—the baize itself is whitened with the intricacies of the score; for, according to the true Russian custom, before every player are placed, a piece of pointed chalk and a small brush, with which he marks upon the cloth the points of the game, and the number of games, and the money he owes, and the money owing to him.

The play is waxing high; piles of notes change hands; and the heaps of humbler gold are shovelled over, as scarcely valued dross. And then when the notes are exhausted, the losers have recourse to pencil and paper—the precursors of still deeper stakes; the iced champagne goes frothing round, and cools the fever of excitement. Horace has won considerably of the Prince; but the Prince's gains, even with this drawback, have been excessive; perhaps on this account he is not unwilling to interrupt the game; for, when Dimitri whispers, he rises up and says: "Gentlemen, the Tsigani—the gipsies!"

Jakof, staggering a little, swears that he cannot decipher his own score, though some one owes him a little fortune; so he quietly cuts out the piece of baize from the table and thrusts it into his pocket, saying, he will unravel it to-morrow; for he is too drunk and too much excited to perceive that the chalk marks will all be effaced by the time he gets home.

"The Tsigani! the Tsigani!" say the players, forgetting their losses and their gains, and the folding doors being thrown open, in troop the gipsies with their guitars and tambourines.

All over the world, the gipsies are still in their main characteristics the same. Still the same wild wandering race, belonging in feeling, tendencies, and feature, to one great family originally, a thieving caste of India, dispersed about the western world, but always retaining its identity, in a manner so distinct as would be wonderful, if it were not for the singularly exclusive nature of the sympathies of all this people. For the gipsy there is no fraternity but with the gipsy:—true to his brethren, his obligatory devotion to them he hardly counts a virtue; but against all the rest of the human race he nourishes an unquenchable hatred. Nothing can dispel this deeply-rooted malice. No benefits, no kindnesses, can move his soul to gratitude, or love, or pity; and he lives and dies with detestation in his heart of all the world, except his tribe, and with the one hope and ambition of injuring and deceiving the Busnè or Gentiles.

"We know not," observes a Polish author, "whence this people comes, nor whither it is going. The gipsy seems utterly to want the organ of religion, he assumes carelessly the faith of the country in which he is dwelling, to cast it aside when he has crossed its boundary. A gipsy recently put to a cruel death in one of the Austrian provinces, turned to the Greek and Catholic priests, who were exhorting him, and promised to embrace the faith of whichever would furnish him with a pipe. The gipsy when taken in early childhood, and brought up in colleges—after going through his studies with credit and when distinguishing himself by his capacity—some day, true to his instincts, escapes from the midst of his colleagues on a stolen horse, verifying the adage of his people, that the gipsy only remains amongst the Gentiles, like the wild goose amidst the tame, till the season of migration is arrived."

The community of this peculiar bent of mind, more than their nomade habits or their universal language, has caused the gipsies to retain in every country of Europe a striking similarity, although their condition naturally differs; since, everywhere studying to take advantage of the Gentiles, to the utmost that circumstances will allow, it varies according to the facilities which these circumstances afford.

There is no country in which they are, however, more prosperous than Russia:—not that the laws are there less stringent against them than elsewhere; but then the laws are so easily eluded by wealth, and wealth is here to the gipsy so easily attainable.

As they have taken in England to tinkering and fortune-telling, and in Spain to horse and mule dealing and stealing, so in Russia they resort to the song and dance.

The gipsy singers and dancers are as much in request with the higher order of Russians as the foreign dancers and singers with us; but there is this distinction that their taste for them is not forced, acquired, or affected, like our own; but a genuine, intense, absorbing passion.

As some of our nobility have sought their wives behind the scenes, the Russian magnates have sometimes shared their names and fortunes with these gipsy singers, and the gipsy bride has entered, in the spirit of Judith repairing to the tent of Holofernes, the palace of the magnate, to scatter his wealth abroad to her tribe.

This troop consists of men and women. Of the latter, those who are a little past the bloom of youth are growing hideous; but the two younger of the party have the same clear olive complexion, the same beautiful lips and pearly teeth, as some of their fortune-telling sisters of England; but their costume is semi-oriental: their deep dark eyes are rendered still more brilliant by the arts of eastern coquetry, which has dyed the interior of the lid.

Their profession, which is that of the Bayadere, has developed their natural grace, and given to their limbs the lightness and vigour of those of the antelope. Cinderella herself could not get on their slippers, whilst their figures display a snake-like, superhuman suppleness, in every movement.

The harmony of motion in their pantomimic dances, like the wild sweetness of their notes, is, or seems to be, utterly untutored; the plaintive wailing chant of the chorus, accompanied by the guitar, touched without any regard to the notes, is suddenly hushed, and one of the singers begins and pours out all the melody of a bird—a melody as spontaneous as impossible to record.

Then follow their lascivious dances—the writhings of the snake, and the bound of the deer, and the amorous notes of the singer translated into motion. Meanwhile, the wine bubbles freely round amongst the spectators; and when the gipsies pause at length exhausted, every one rewards them with heaps of notes and gold, and then besides their very rings and diamond studs and pins, resorting to the chimney-piece, they cast the gold and agate toys, the antique rosaries of Venetian gold, all into the apron of the sorceress.

Even Jakof cannot resist the temptation; he throws on the pile a bank note of large amount, and then suddenly repenting, he draws out half its value in change.

The gipsy flashes, from the depths of her dark eyes, an instantaneous but withering glance of hatred; but its effect is intercepted by his spectacles.

Then, having placed their treasures in safety, and glared over them with an avidity fearful to behold in eyes so beautiful, as if refreshed with the sight of gold, the gipsy girls began their dance again.

Again the music sounds; the guitars seem to vibrate almost into fierceness; the other gipsies stamp and accompany it in chorus with their wild notes, and the dancers are excited to fury, and from fury to the phrensy of Bacchantes—the Bacchantes when they tore to pieces Orpheus in their delirium. At length they sink utterly exhausted on the floor, all excepting the two younger ones, whose beauty is judged most likely to fascinate the spectators into the utmost liberality; they, according to their custom, leap at a bound into the laps of the spectators, whom, interlacing in their arms, they embrace.

One has given the Prince the kiss which concludes the entertainment, the other has jumped on to the knees of Jakof.

"Oh! oh! oh!" bellows out Jakof, like a bull.

"Jakof is too bashful!" exclaims the Prince.

"He is afraid of being devoured!" laughed Lochadoff.

"So I am," said Jakof; "the cursed she-wolf has bitten through my cheek!"

And true enough, whether the spontaneous vengeance of the gipsy, or whether she was acting on a well-paid hint from some wag present, her small, white teeth had left a circular bleeding mark, as deeply indented as with the sharp fangs of a viper.

"Hark," said the Prince; "who will come with me to Moscow, or as much farther as you like?—My cook has already preceded me. I am going to engage all the gipsies to accompany us in four carriages as far as that city: two Italian singers are already joining our caravan. We will make the journey a race from one feast to another; we shall arrive at stations where a banquet is all prepared for us, and revel, and gamble, and drink till daylight, and then sleep through the day as we rattle over the road!"

"Hurrah!" reply with one accord the guests, who that night are captivated with the prospect of an expedition, which half of them will decline in the morning.

The gipsies drive a hard bargain; their season is not very successful, and they are really about to return to Moscow; but this is a fact which they carefully conceal; and the reward lavished on them for that night's performance enables the guests, in estimating Isaakoff's magnificence, to judge of the fortune which it has cost him to secure them for the journey.

The gipsies retire, to sink—as soon as they are left alone—pell-mell upon the floor, utterly exhausted by the intensity of their exertions, into a serpent-like torpor. For the scene they have been this night enacting they have repeated, not only many times during the same day, but for many successive days and nights, in their eagerness to gather in an ample harvest; and yet this scene they have just engaged to act over and over—so galvanically does the prospect of gain seem to waken up their over-strung nerves from the death-like reaction into which they are ready to relapse to the most vivid animation.

Jakof is gone home, wiping his cheek with the green baize which he cut from the card-table, and now mistakes for his handkerchief, and cursing all dancing-girls, as he thinks on the black patch he will have to wear.

Isaakoff and Horace, and some of the guests, have retired to seek the refreshment of the bath and of the couch; the rest have driven homewards; and, at the noise of their vehicles as they drive out of the yard, the slave, Mattheus, is awakened, and starts up from the straw on which he has been sleeping in the kennel. Last night, wan, weary and enfeebled, he was brought back from the siege, and locked up there to await his master's pleasure in the morning.

Sleep, which sometimes flies from the restless eyelids of the pampered oppressor to comfort the oppressed, had stolen over him, and he was dreaming of the balmy South, and of Blanche, and of happiness; and was again transported back to the hour when she first confessed to him her love.

The noise of the carriage-wheels, and the shouts of the lacqueys as they roused the drowsy coachmen on their boxes, have disturbed this consoling vision. As he rises up, he strikes the pail from which he quenched his thirst last night, and the cold water, as he spills it over him, recalls him to the present.

A rat, which has been daintily nibbling at the black loaf beside him, rushes right into the very sleeve of the coarse brown caftan, which he has drawn over him like a blanket.

"Go," says Mattheus, disengaging the animal with sorrowful serenity; "I wish I could thus let free all the captives in the world."

CHAPTER XV.

The Prince Ivan and Horace stopped to dine a few stations beyond Moscow, whither, as usual, the cook had preceded them. But of all their numerous accompaniment there remained only one single attendant, whom they had brought with them in the rumble of the solitary carriage.

Tired out and wearied with their journey, which had been one long protracted orgie, mixed up with the fatigue of travelling six hundred miles, they had determined to spend the night at the post-house, so that, being thus refreshed, they might start early on the following morning, and get to the place of destination before nightfall.

Although the repast was as luxurious as usual, nothing could exceed the moderation with which they partook of it: Moselle, and Seltzer water appearing alone to possess attractions for the frugal tastes of our travellers.

"We shall enjoy this quiet night by contrast," said Horace, drawing from his pocket two or three letters, and looking carelessly at the superscriptions. "See, we have been so long on the road that these letters have overtaken us."

"You are not obliged to read them."

"My dear Prince," continued Horace, "now we are alone together I want to ask you a question about Madame Obrasoff and her daughter."

"Ask me a question about them!" replied the Prince. "Why, my good fellow, you are surely inverting the natural order of things, which would be for me to ask questions on such a subject, and for you to answer them. Have you not been, for the last two months, riding about the Summer Gardens, and the gardens of Peterhoff, and the island of the Krestoffsky with the daughters, and perpetually driving out with the mother?"

"Nevertheless," said Horace, "though I have learned, through my intimacy with them, how anxious both mother and daughter are to find husbands, I wonder why they selected me as a matrimonial victim, when they are evidently still considered rich by so many who are richer than I?"

"My dear Horace," replied the Prince, "do not, for a moment, imagine that your French fortune can be of the slightest object to the Obrasoffs: their own is indisputably too considerable."

"Are you sure?"

"Their estates adjoin my own. It is a matter of notoriety that they have not a peasant mortgaged."

"Then," said Horace, "why should they at once have laid a most transparent plan to draw so humble an individual as myself into their matrimonial snares?"

"You are as much in error there as in your previous supposition. Those women do not marry; they are arch-coquettes; it is in the family blood; the daughter takes it from the mother; they lead men on to propose, for the pleasure of laughing at them."

Horace mused for a moment.

"Madame Obrasoff, with her feminine softness," continued the Prince, "and Anna, with her invidious frankness, are two of the most artful women I know; it is impossible to fathom them; they never compromise themselves, and they raise a laugh at the expense of all their admirers—probably at yours just now, my dear Horace."

"If there be a laugh," said Horace, "at least it will not be at me, but with me."

The Prince shook his head incredulously, and Horace smiled.

"They had not to do with a novice. I grant you that mother and daughter may have both intended to deceive me, but I have deceived them both."

Isaakoff shook his head again.

"Then listen," said Horace. "This is from the daughter," and breaking the seal from one of his letters, he read:—

"So at length, dearest Horace, you are really going to Moscow, and going for three long weeks! You plead an engagement; oh! Horace, how many reasons I should have found not only to infringe such a hollow formality, but even to neglect, as in truth I am neglecting, serious and sacred duties, wherever they threatened to separate us! And yet I reproach you not, perhaps it is as well; you ought to possess a firmness which I neither covet nor desire, because, endowed with it, I should seem to love you somewhat less."

"Is that from Anna Obrasoff?" said the Prince, with astonishment.

"From Anna Obrasoff," and Horace proceeded.

"It is not alone your departure, but the company in which you are going, that I dread."

"She cannot mean the Tsiganes?"

"Oh! how I hate and fear that Prince Ivan, with his cold clammy hand and the frigid malignity of his death-like eye!

"What say you to that, Isaakoff?"

"Little dear!" observed the Prince.

"Oh! beware of him, Horace," continued the Count; "only yesterday I heard that he would ruin you."

"I wish the little minx spoke truth!" exclaimed the Prince. "Hitherto it has been the other way, I am sorry to say, Miss Anna!"

"Dear Horace, to-morrow, as you request, I shall see you, and still hope to prevail on you to stay; at all events, I shall hear from your own dear lips that you will not be an hour away beyond those long interminable one and twenty days. Even now that you are near me, my life is strangely compounded of disquietude and of delight. When I reflect that you love me, I feel an indescribable elation, and then I remember how I love in terrible rivality with my mother!—a mother, who has been at once a sister, and a kind and sympathising friend!

"I remember that to become your wife I may not only have to fly to a strange land—renounced by her—but I shall probably add to the disobedience of the child all those torments which I myself have felt, when at times I foolishly imagined that you loved my mother.

"You know, Horace, that I have often said to you—bewildered by my affection for you both—'Love her, and forget your Anna!' and then you have ever answered me that love depended not upon ourselves; and alas! I knew you spoke truly, for how could any effort have made me cease to love you?

"When you return, Horace, you will at least put an end to this: for, since you cannot love her, she is so anxious for the happiness of her children, that I am sure she will not offer the objections you anticipate and dread.

"I almost feared that I could not see you to-morrow, but I found that my mother had suddenly made up her mind to come to town, for the day after is her regular day. You know I have told you of her gloomy and mysterious days: one every week she spends in town; the next locked up,—whether here or in the country—in a boudoir with its treble oaken doors, beyond the outermost of which we have never penetrated. At my pressing solicitation she has agreed, against her usual habit, that I should accompany her; and as on these occasions she is the whole day absent, we can ride in the Summer Garden, and then you can come home to us, where there will be no one but the deaf old governess Mamselle Mimi.

"You tell me that the lock of hair I gave you was not long enough for what you wanted, so I enclose you another: may you only prize it, dearest, as I value yours, which I am kissing now."

"Look," said Horace, "here is the lock of hair in question."

"And has she signed it?" said the Prince.

"Here is the signature of the would-be Countess of Montressan," said Horace—at least the christian name and the initial, "Anna O."

"Very good!" said the Prince.

"And now," continued Horace exultingly, "you shall hear what the mother says: but stop, who is this letter from? O! from my English groom; I must read that first."

"Nonsense!" replied the Prince, "let us hear what Madame Obrasoff says:—begin with the most interesting."

"Then, frankly, to me the groom's letter is the most interesting."

"Ungrateful!"

"Now for the groom's letter; he always begins his sentences with small letters; and strenuously insists on doing so till you can show him some difference of pronunciation betwixt them and the capitals.

"What," he says, "is the use of troubling yourself to make capitals if you are to read them just like ordinary letters.

"Honored Sir, this is the 12th of August which the slow coaches of this country calls the 1st. I have reached this place, which I cannot tell you by name because I hav'n't yet contrived to spell it. The horse is doing well, and according to your desire I am training him along the road side. He was a little off his feed last night, and they have stole his bandages, but I have made some new uns by tearing up a shirt; they keeps the legs wonderful cool and comfortable; and though the strip of grass by the road side is the best ground ive seen to gallop on, still it is hard, with the dry weather.

"I'm afeard I shall have to part company with Dimitry, he will hurry on so, which if he would read his Bible he would know that the merciful man was merciful to his beast; besides which, honored sir, as I purceed with with his acquaintance, I find that he "runs cunning" and begin to be satisfied (which is no satisfaction to myself) that he is a rogue and wag-a-bone, and a real Rooshian, as I wish, honored sir, you would tell his master."

"What do you say to that?" laughed Horace.

"Your correspondence is very flattering to me," said the Prince; "but Bob's letter contains one indisputable truth, where he states Dimitri's knavery, and even one sentence of truth is not so common in epistolary eloquence."

"The more I look for his honesty," continued Horace, "the more it won't show itself."

"Is that mine or Dimitri's," said Isaakoff.

"The author's meaning is obscure."

"Though I don't think he can circumvent me, seeing that since I have been in foreign parts I have learned to keep a sharp look out after foreign counts, which, no offence, honoured sir to you, though you are a count yourself, for I do not mean you or the like of you, which is gentlemen as cut figures, but I mean the figures in the count-books, which you, sir, is so fond of cutting, leaving them all to me to settle as was brought up in a line altogether different.

"I have sent you two letters as was delivered to me, and I have something to tell you, honoured sir, as will surprise you, but which I bottle up till I see yourself, because I hear that letters are apt to be opened, as my father's was, though that don't signify, because if them as peeped into it could read his writing they could do more than Bob Bridle, and was welcome.

"I found it out because the governor puts wax and wafer, and they say it is the government, which can have no reason unless they wants to get at the receipt for cleaning boot-tops or something of that sort, which they might have by asking above board and civilly for.

"We hold in England that what one man writes to another, what I might write, honored sir, to you, should be strictly between you and I and the post, which I suppose is where the Rooshians mistakes it—for what ain't so pleasant—they likes to make it between you I and the post-office. With my respect and duty,

"I remain your humble servant,

"Bob Bridle.
(christened Robert.)

"P.S.—excuse my not sending any postscript which I know is manners, but I have nothing more to say."

"A very good notion of a letter," observed the Prince; "now for Madame Obrasoff's."

"Here it is," said Horace, "you see it looks almost like her; the paper is just tinted with a scarce perceptible shade, and the wax exactly matches it in colour; the ink is pale and indistinct, and on the seal is the impression of a chameleon."

"You write me, dear Horace, that you are going beyond Moscow, and I was not surprised; for I rose with a presentiment of evil; but at least to-morrow evening we will meet as you propose, at the same hour and on the same spot as before: my boat will remain out of the current, under the shade of the thickets of the Krestovsky, so that you will not perceive it till you come close in.

"On reading your letter through, I am startled to find that yesterday was one of your days on which we can hold no intercommunion of spirit: you are like one of those mortals, who at certain times can hear and understand the language of fairies, or the meaning of the song of birds, or the murmuring of the wind, but to whom the gift is utterly denied at others. Sometimes I am almost led to doubt those ethereal and magnetic sympathies on which is founded that mystical affection which attracts us so irresistibly, and which must be so incomprehensible to those who live beyond the sphere of these inexplicable influences."—

"What the devil does she mean?" said the Prince.

"I dare say she would like to know herself," replied Horace; "for it is fresh translated from the German."

"Sometimes," continues the lady, "after days of ecstasy the feeling which I reciprocate grows suddenly hideous to me, when I see it glowing into an earthly love, hideous because in that character it would be as unnatural as the communion of an embodied with a disembodied spirit, from which an instinctive terror protects the soul whilst still linked to its clay. So that the recollection of a passion—which is mine—responded to by the feeling which seems overpowering you—a passion warm in all its earthly vitality—would be as awful as when a living hand, with its hot, throbbing pulse, grasps the dead, cold, palm of an unreciprocating stiffened corpse! We know that matter does not perish, since from death, which is its great step to transition, life is perpetually springing; we know that our bodies laid in the earth to-day must in the course of time be vivified again, and that, whether their atoms ever, or never, meet again in their present unity, assuredly they will at some time be parcelled out amongst many animated beings. Is it not thus also with the spirit? In the course of its immortality, may it not pass through innumerable phases, and may it not scatter itself abroad like the vapour of a cloud or the waters of a stream, and unite with the congenial essence, whether fixed in its embodied or wandering in its disembodied state, just as the clay which it has abandoned incorporates itself at length with other bodies already living or which are to be vivified?

"It is thus that I dream, perhaps in madness,—and yet I will not believe I err—that something of that immortal principle breathes in you—at once fascinated and so fatally fascinating—that flash of the eye, that expression of the look, that voice, all immaterial, all motion, a mysterious agency on matter, all reproduced in you as they were long since living. If it were not so, why should you have felt that attractive sympathy, why should my daughter alas, have felt the same, we transmitting somewhat of our soul to our children? Poor Anna! when the unhallowed passion struggles with that mystic love, why can you not transfer it from me to her? You say that love, so far from yielding to our will coerces it—and perhaps it is as well—there would be no horror to me now, like not daring to recall that which I thought for ever lost to me, and how should I have dared, dear Horace, as my daughter's husband, to invoke the dead as I do by drinking in, in an intoxicating draught, the light of your eyes and the accents of your voice. Poor Anna! it is not your fault and it is not my fault that you do not love her—for you do not love her."

"Certainly not, Madam," said Horace, and then continued reading:

"Why, dear Horace, why do you go so far away, and above all, why do you go with that Isaakoff? From that man will come evil to you—I feel it. To me he is loathsome as a slimy snake. He is like a dead body, which a ghoul or evil spirit has possessed—with the eye still death-like and the heart gnawed away. To-morrow I will tell you a terrible history about him.

"This is complimentary to you," said Horace, laughing. "Your eye is certainly not bright; but the idea of the heart devoured and decayed is very flattering."

"Perhaps she means my liver," replied the Prince; "and if so I am afraid she is right; but on the whole, I think it more complimentary to have such things written of me by a woman like Madame Obrasoff than such a letter written to me. It does not say much for the estimation in which she holds your intellect."

Horace continued:

"As for the lock of hair, I enclose you another since you wish it. Have you lost the first? If so I have been more careful with yours."

"And did you keep the appointment?" inquired the Prince.

"How should I? The letters are dated, you see, Wednesday; and on Thursday morning, as you know, we started. Now, though I really do not understand their drift, these women are both under the impression that they are deceiving me."

"I could hardly have believed it, if I did not see and recognise the writing," replied the Prince. "They would never have dared thus to compromise themselves with a Russian; and I suspect that they have not mended matters by trusting to the discretion of a Frenchman. As far as Madame Obrasoff is concerned, it is clear that you have let her perceive that you know that story of her connection with the conspiracy; and her curiosity has been piqued to see if she can, notwithstanding, impose on your credulity."

"There is something so disgustingly heartless in the unblushing manner in which she seeks to take advantage of what should overwhelm her with remorse and shame, that I feel vexed at myself for laughing at an incident which is irresistibly ludicrous in this game of diamond cut diamond. Just imagine then, that those two locks of my hair, which the mother and daughter are respectfully treasuring, or which I have here their written acknowledgement that they are treasuring—which will answer my purpose equally well—are Jakof's."

"Jakof's! impossible!—He wears a wig."

"My dear Isaakoff, I tell you I saw them cut from his own head. I called in upon him as I was going last to Peterhoff. He was under the hands of his French hair-dresser; and as I was loth to waste one of my own curls, I picked up a mesh, which had fallen from the operator's scissors, and divided it between the mystic mother and the artless daughter."

"Oh!" said Isaakoff, laughing as no one had ever seen him laugh before, "this is too ridiculous! Know then, my dear Horace, that Jakof is bald. He does wear a wig; but it is one of his weaknesses to conceal it; he spends a little fortune with that French hair-dresser. He has thirty wigs of progressive lengths, and inimitably true to nature, from a short Brutus crop, which he puts on when he wishes it thought that he has been sheared, to the long flowing locks which he dons at the end of the month; and if you happen to look at his head suspiciously, it is ten to one if, the first time you go to see him, he does not have his hair snipped before you by the coiffeur, to convince you; and this is what happened on your visit to him."

"Oh! that is too rich!" said Horace. "The idea of Madame Obrasoff and the dainty Miss Anna, treasuring a lock of Jakof's wig."

"The story will run through the capital like wildfire," said the Prince. "How do you propose to open their eyes?"

"By answering these two letters and purposely mis-directing that of the mother to the daughter, and vice versâ," replied Horace. "I have here wherewith to seal it—a delightful little English seal, a fox seizing a pheasant, and seized by a terrier, with the motto of 'the biter bit.' "

"Oh but the letters, and the hair, and the story of the locks of Jakof's wig?" said the Prince.

"Well really," replied Horace, "I am too good-natured to make full use of the revenge which offers itself. After all, they are a couple of women; and it would be too bad, however they may deserve it."

"My worthy friend," said the Prince, "your generous men are always egotistical. You make no account of my feelings. The only enjoyments left me are the propagation of a good story, and the pleasure of revenging one's self. I am like the man who shot another for kicking him, and longed to be kicked again to taste the same gratification. Here you have shown me the ill-will of these people, and you put into my hands an instrument for punishing my enemies by treating my friends to a laugh, and unreasonably expect me not to use it.

"It is like giving one an appetite, putting a beccafico on the point of one's fork and then saying, hold! I shall neither return you these letters nor these locks of hair. The former shall be lithographed, and the latter transmitted to Jakof, to whom by rights they belong, as they were given in exchange for his own."

"Well, there is no resisting force," laughed Horace; "but be the remorse and the consequences on your own head."

"Now," said Isaakoff to their solitary attendant, "pull off my stockings, damp my feet, with eau de Cologne, and seek me out a pair of cooler slippers. And I would advise you, Horace, to undergo the same operation. Then put some more Moselle in ice, and get something which will serve as a fan, and come and fan us." The servitor obeyed. When he had fanned them for nearly half an hour, the Prince made a sign with his hand, and bade him depart.

"I do not like your new valet," said Horace, "though, from his countenance, I should judge him to possess all the honesty that Dimitri wants; and though he serves you with perfect, if with unpractised, intelligence."

"Why do you not like him then?" asked the Prince.

"I do not dislike him as a man, but as a servant," replied Horace. "There is at times an aspect of such hopelessly resigned and passive misery about him, as makes his service painful to one."

"I am sorry," said the Prince, "that his service should be painful to you, but I am delighted that it should feel so to him, for he is a slave of mine long spoiled by my father, and to whom I am anxious to give a lesson. Imagine, my dear Horace, when I was put to every imaginable shift on account of the wealth my father squandered on these fellows; imagine my meeting him and suffering from his insolence and pride, without a hope or prospect of satisfaction or redress, and then suddenly finding that he was the serf and that I the master."

"The deserved retribution," replied Horace, "is strange and dramatic; there is nothing exceeds the insolence of the lacquey, and nothing more amusing than when he unwittingly displays it against his master—but whatever he may be morally, he is a magnificent animal."

"And then," observed the Prince, "he has a sister in the village to which we are proceeding, who is singularly beautiful—so beautiful as to have attracted the enthusiastic attention of a celebrated artist in my father's time."

"What, is she—a peasant girl?"

"Not exactly: from what I can hear, for her beauty tempted my father to lavish on her many accomplishments—for instance, like her brother, she speaks French as well as you or I."

"I should be delighted to hear so," said Horace, "if I did not remember that you are only speaking from hearsay."

"Yes!" replied Isaakoff, "but such hearsay as may be relied upon. I will warrant you that she is a charming creature; and before I have seen her I will change her for your grey horse."

"What! change my horse Lucifer for any of the sex, known—much less unknown?" said the Count. "Is she like her brother?"

"Upon my word I do not know, they have not met for some years; but whether like him or not, they say that she is singularly handsome. She has been as well brought up as if she were my own relative."

"Do you know," said Horace, "that you make me long to step into the place of the brother."

"Nothing in the world," replied Isaakoff, "could be easier. If you have ever read the Memoirs of Madame Du Barri, you must remember the history which the Duke de Richelieu relates of his once disguising himself as one of his own servants, on a similar occasion:—supposing you were to do so now?"

"What!" said Horace, "I play the valet, and make your new valet play the gentleman? Upon my word, the idea is very original, and not unpromising: when it is to result in my being clasped in the arms, and smothered by the unsuspicious kisses of this phœnix of sisters!"

"Suppose you adopt it, my Don Juan."

"I should ask no better, were it not for two fatal objections. In the first place, the sister would discover, if only by my ignorance of the Russ, that I was not her brother: in the next the brother would not readily consent to my representing him."

"As to your first objection," said Isaakoff, "I learned by a letter which casually came under my eye, that my slave Mattvei always corresponds in French with his sister to elude the inquisitiveness of my land-steward, so that she may reasonably conclude, if you address her in that language that her brother chooses to speak no other to her: and as to the second, I beg you to believe that our Russian serfs have no will of their own, in opposition to their masters."

Outside the thin partition which divided the inner from the outer chamber of the post-house, the slave was watching: he was obliged to be within hearing when his master clapped his hands to summon him, and thus overheard the foregoing conversation; and as he heard, his head sank despondingly upon his ample breast.

The manor house of the Bialoe Darevnia had been hastily prepared to receive its owner.

It stood at the extremity of the village; but although the chief place of residence on an estate as large and populous as a German principality, it bore no resemblance, except in magnitude, either to the castles of Germany, or the châteaux of France, or the Italian villas, or the old mansion houses and modern country seats of Britain.

It was built up of logs and pine, whose interstices were caulked with moss; and though it might have been rendered picturesque in the Swiss cottage style, the taste of the architect had preferred building after a classic model, with a peristyle and columns, all of planed deal wood, painted, and to match which, the rough walls had been covered with planks—intended to simulate the smoothness and colour of a surface of stone—but which warping here and there, and stained by the rusty nails which fastened them, were guiltless of deceiving.

There was the desolate bleakness of a French château without its feudal grandeur, the homely meanness of Holland without its comfort and neatness.

No grounds or park surrounded the building, it stood aloof, in the centre of the widest part of the clearing in which the village was situated, and this in the estimation of whoever built it, had decided the eligibility of site.

The forest which had receded before the axe and plough, but which was still on every side in sight, formed a beautiful and natural park, a green lawn—here and there indeed a little marshy—being scattered over with clumps of oak, and birch, and pine. Yet as far as possible removed from this, the Lord's mansion had been raised by Russian taste in the midst of negligently cultivated fields, divided by rugged fences of rudely splintered fir.

The prevalence of the wild forest all over the northern and middle governments of Russia, may, however, account for this distaste of its inhabitants for trees, which leads them to prefer the open space, the most desolate, to the spot the most luxuriously timbered, since from similar causes it is said to be in some measure entertained throughout North America.

Several hundred of the villagers selected by the steward were and had been for the last two days lounging in the yard.

The women in their gayest attire carried aprons full of flowers, which were abundant if not very choice, because only such as the woods furnished, Johann having abandoned the care of the only ornamental garden to his son Hans, who had rooted up the rose trees to plant raspberry bushes, and dug up the flowers to sow cabbages. The steward himself was in holiday array, as well as his wife and family.

Trautchen, his daughter, incessantly occupied at the glass, was sporting all her finery, as if with some latent hope of captivating either the Lord or some of his noble guests—an imagination so preposterous with a glass before her as only to be accounted for by the supposition of some extraordinary treachery in her visual organs and which indeed would have been quite in accordance with their habitually deceitful character, since their glances always seemed directed on you when in reality peering into the face of your neighbour.

Her brother Hans was dressed in a very short tailed coat of silver grey, his broad face expanded grinningly into a wider breadth beneath his long dense crop of flaxen hair, as he surveyed the collation prepared for the expected guests; and the flaxen hair pyramidally surmounted by a little green cloth cap of truly teutonic fashion and exiguity, with which his silvery-mounted Sunday meerschaum correctly harmonised.

Indeed, perhaps Trautchen and Hans were of all the festive party the most joyous at heart, Trautchen in her very fallacious illusions, and Hans in the anticipation, which he had already partially realised of profiting by the expected confusion to increase his private store of dainties, for he had already succeeded in carrying off, under the lynx eyes of the Frau Sauer, a smoked goose, a handful of almonds, and a pot of custard.

Johann had prepared an exhibition of fireworks, manufactured under his own directions, and an illumination of glasses coloured with tinted paper, and which was to be of peculiar brilliancy on account of a method of preparing the wicks of his own invention.

Though Johann was chiefly influenced by the wish of receiving his master (at his master's own expense) with a warmth which might captivate his good-will, still in the midst of all his anxiety respecting the result of the Prince's visit on his fortunes, he was gratified at this opportunity of giving his blue-lights, rockets and ingenious lamps a fair trial, as he called it, for his wife's parsimony had never but once before allowed him to essay them during the last visit of the late Lord, and on this occasion the result had been marked but not satisfactory; for the wicks had spluttered and exploded, and the fireworks had gone off in an instantaneous flash, burning the fingers of the peasantry, an accident for which the benevolent Prince begged Johann to remember them, a recommendation which he obeyed to the letter, though not in the spirit in which it was given.

Johann had received some hint from the steward, Dietrich, as to the differences between the character of the present and the late Prince: but still he thought it prudent, in the event of his being misinformed, to collect the most prosperous looking of his slaves to receive him.

Most of the moujiks in their best summer grey caftans, with new red woollen sashes, in which were stuck their axes, looked sullen and suspicious, particularly the older men.

The Starost, the elder of the village, a grey bearded man of patriarchal aspect was leaning against the rail, surrounded by a group who were taking a sort of camp dinner, consisting of a prodigious hunk of the truffle-coloured alumny flavoured rye-bread, on which was scattered a thick layer of salt.

"Never," said the elder shaking his head, "does any good come of change: we do live now at least, and there is corn stacked up so that we can never want grain at seed time. We should always remember, if a hungry Lord comes as well as a hungry steward that we live where corn will fetch some price in the market, so that we may be rationed down to the last crust; and then if a crop fails, I know the misery, for I have seen it."

"Not here!" said several voices.

"No, not here; I was born in another village, in a rich corn country; but the Baron shaved every thing from the soil. A year of famine came—we fed on the bark of trees till starvation scattered us abroad over the face of the country. Some of us were brought back, some made soldiers and crown serfs, and others enticed by the Barons of prosperous estates, as I was here. The grandfather of Vasili there had just died; I was put on to his passport, and so, though he is older than I, he is my grandson, and as the old man died at seventy, and I am sixty now, and that it happened forty years ago, I am reckoned to be a hundred and ten years old."

At this moment a scout informed the steward that a carriage was discernible. The peasantry were hastily marshalled in order. Johann, who was determined that they should look contented and happy, had recourse to the infallible means on which he had all along counted, of distributing a dram; and where the dram failed in its effect, he used his cane lustily to awaken to alacrity and cheerfulness some stubbornly sullen moujik.

"Philosophy and religion should teach you alike, my dear children, to show yourselves grateful to your Lord, the son of your late benevolent master, whose heart yearned towards you, like my own."

The carriage drew up; but instead of being the Lord, it was the Lord's cook and his assistant, who very ruthlessly and contemptuously put the Frau Sauer's collation to the rout, Hans hovering round the retreating dishes like the Cossacks on the rear of the Grande Armée, after the burning of Moscow.

But as at least the hour of arrival was known with some precision, the joyous villagers were marshalled in the most appropriate order.

To the infinite delight of the exulting Trautchen, Nadeshta was placed amongst the comely peasant girls who were to scatter flowers before their expected master, for Johann had learned by Dietrich's last communication the profound disgrace into which Mattheus had fallen.

Nadeshta's spirit rebelled for a moment; and then, absorbed in the thought of at length seeing her brother, she yielded with a sigh. Alas! the group of village maidens amongst whom she took her place, on whom she had heaped so many kindnesses when comparatively high and happy, all regarded her degradation with undisguised and insolent satisfaction.

At length another cloud of dust came rolling on; and then there emerged dimly from it a team of post-horses, who seemed to knead it with their feet, adding this pleasant labour to that of dragging the Prince's carriage after them.

Johann remarked with some surprise that Isaakoff's valet was seated in the carriage beside him, whilst his friend occupied the rumble.

It was true that both he and his servant seemed a little elevated with wine, for when they alighted, and the steward, with a bow which brought him into an attitude thoroughly toad-like, offered at once his homage and duty, and presented his wife and daughter, they both—master and man—turned aside to ogle the four-and-twenty village maidens, heedless alike of the sweetly acid smile into which Frau Sauer had relaxed, and of the graces of her daughter. Their eyes were at once arrested by the sight of Nadeshta, who shone amidst the group like a bright gem in a heap of pebbles, or a rich pearl amongst incrusted shells, and whose tall and graceful figure rose, contrasting with the ignoble crowd, like a stately swan surrounded by a flock of wild fowl.

The lacquey, or at least he who wore the caped and laced livery cloak, started back in some astonishment; while the Prince, without deigning any answer to the address of his steward, asked him whether that was not the sister of Mattheus?

"Exactly, my most excellent and high-born master!"

"There then is your sister!" said the Prince.

The servitor staggered for an instant, and then Nadeshta—who at this joyful announcement had recognised her brother—opening her arms with a wild exclamation of delight, he threw aside his cloak and rushed into them.

But as he threw his cloak aside, Johann had noticed that he was dressed as fashionably as his master, and arguing from all he saw, that he had been induced into some fatal error respecting the disgrace into which Mattheus was said to have fallen, he was officious in leading the brother and sister into the mansion out of the gaze of the crowd.

"And here," said the Prince, "is my friend, the Count. No one assists him to alight! My dear Count, you look pale and faint, and if you grind your teeth together thus, you will spoil the enamel, or bring on a lock jaw perhaps," and so saying, he seized him vigorously by the arm, as if to support him.

"Look, my dear friend!" he continued, grinning in his face with infernal malice. "Look, and refresh yourself with the touching spectacle of the meeting of a long parted sister and brother!"

But as the Prince spoke, the individual whom he addressed had fixed his eyes intently on the delighted couple; the blood had fled from his white and compressed lips, and the nails seemed entering into the palms of his nervously contracting hands.

But when he saw Nadeshta just mounting the steps, pause, and, again twine her fair arms round her brother's neck, he made a sudden bound as if to dash forward; but the Prince holding up his finger, just said "Beware!" and then when he seemed magically to have controlled his victim's terrible emotion, he looked into his face and laughed a long, shrill, fiend-like laugh, which grated even on the ears of Johann. Need the reader be told that Count Horace, as he proposed, had changed places with Mattheus?

"Dearest Mattvei! my own, own brother!" said Nadeshta.

"I have forgotten my Russ!" stammered out Horace; for although flushed with wine and prepared for the adventure, his confidence was gone. He felt bewildered and doubtful of his senses; for in the slave girl he was struck to find the form, the features, and expression of that portrait in Anna's boudoir, which had so strangely impressed itself upon his recollection.

"Do I dream," thought he, "or am I intoxicated with the wine and heat?" But as he looked again, the more attentively and coolly he examined the peasant girl, the more remarkable appeared her likeness—in all but costume—to the lady in that singular painting.

"Dearest Mattvei," said Nadeshta, "do we then once more meet again? Oh! for years since I have dreamed of you! My only consolation has been the perusal of your letters, and the consciousness of your affection; and now do I at length behold you? Let me kiss those eyes; so like my mother's, and that brow which was so much fairer when we parted, and those lips which were then as smooth as mine are now! You are darker—very, very much darker altogether, my own brother—but let me look at you and admire you, and note how handsome you have grown; and oh! how one can see that your time has not been spent in a land of slaves. What a noble figure! what an air of haughty independence! How like those gallant men of the west you have become—the chivalrous, the brave, the wise, the good, the truthful! But, dear Mattvei, why do you repulse my kisses? Why, do you blush at a fond sister's praises? It is surely not your poor Nadeshta's slave dress shames you; for since you came on such terms with the Lord, you have, I trust, obtained your freedom?"

Never had Horace felt so utterly ashamed of himself as in the perfidious deceit which he was so wantonly practising; but his resolution was rapidly taken. He nodded assent, and pressing her hand, seemed speechless with emotion.

"Oh!" said Nadeshta clasping her hands and looking up her gratitude. "Heaven be praised! then he is free at last."

"Oh! my brother," she continued surveying him with an intense affection and pride, "so kind, and so brave, and so beautiful—and free!—And now you will obtain the freedom of your poor Nadeshta, and bear her with you away to foreign lands, far from the scenes of our ignominy, where you go to carve your fortune—far from this land of petty tyrants, and of cringing slaves, and of men false, hollow, and servile—away to the historic climes of song and chivalry, and liberty, and inspiration. Is it not so, my Mattvei?"

Again Horace nodded an assent—and again she clasped him in her arms; and never did the brow of a young girl burn with fevered blushes, like that of the gay and somewhat licentious Count, when thus placed in the very situation he had sought so eagerly.

"But come," said Nadeshta, leading him by the hand, "we shall be interrupted here—let us go. Is not your heart too full to speak, Mattvei, as mine has been so often with grief?—But it is not so now, for it is overflowing with its joy."

Yet nevertheless as she conducted him by the hand, some two hundred paces, a sad reflection stole across her countenance like a cloud over the mid-day sunlight.

They were approaching the place of many groves, and whilst Horace was gathering heart to speak out and explain the deception he had practised, she led him to a shady corner of the churchyard, where an old wooden cross rose up from the rank grass. There were withering on it some of the pale wood violets of autumn, emblematic of hope, and a chain of the stalks of the dandelion, such as children are fond of weaving, and which the slave girl had musingly put together, both sadly significative of her condition and her prospects.

On this spot, saying "It is here, Mattvei," she kneeled, her eyes filling with tears; and Horace felt intuitively that he was treading on the grave of a mother!

He too had a mother once—fondly loved and mouldering in the cold earth now; and for him there was no human association so sacred.

It acted on him with the suddenness of an exorcism;—he felt that it was sacrilege to stand upon that holy soil in his deceit: so falling on his knees he said,

"Nadeshta, forgive me! I have basely deceived you! I am a foreigner—a stranger—not your brother: but by the clay which is mouldering beneath our feet, and by the spirit which looks down upon us from above, I will be to you a brother."

"What, not my brother! not Mattvei!" exclaimed Nadeshta starting wildly up, and pushing back the hair from his forehead to look for the scar which should have marked his skull with its deep indentation; and then withdrawing her hand with a shriek of loathing and of horror.

"Hear me," said Horace.

"Oh how base! how infamous!" said Nadeshta—her eye flashing with indignation and her cheek burning with shame—"May plague spots grow from the contact of my lips!—May heaven and earth avenge this foul, unholy outrage! Oh! shame and infamy to insult the weak, the lonely, and the orphan!" and as she spoke, upraising her tall figure, and stretching out her hand in denunciation, she looked a magnificent image of the angry Pythoness: but this excitement only lasted for an instant, and was followed by quick re-action—the colour fled from her cheek, the power from her limbs—she clasped the cross upon her mother's grave, for her support, and fell in that attitude senseless, saying in a voice of poignant misery:

"But who—but who may not insult the Slave-Girl?"

CHAPTER II.

When a faint glimmering of reason dawned upon the mind of Blanche, in the midst of her fever and delirium, though she had no distinct recollection of anything, she felt a vague and oppressive sense of some undefined calamity. Where was Mattheus? She stretched out her hand and grasped the arm of an old, withered, toothless crone, who, muttering in a strange language, was lifting up a coarse stone pipkin, making sign for her to drink. The apartment—in which the patient was stretched on a mattress stuffed with the lime-bark matting—was only a few feet square. A small open window let in a current of air; and in the corner were piles of rusty old iron, old clothes, and other frippery.

Nothing could be more sordid than the aspect of the place. A door, which just then happened to be open, gave, through a long, dark, narrow passage, a distant vista of a small shop, piled up with chains and heaps of rusty nails, and bars, and rods of iron in sheaves and bundles.

She turned on her mattress; and lo! on the other side of her bed, there sat a stern-featured man, with long and grizzly beard, who looked into her face, and read aloud in a monotonous tone from a heavy old tome, printed in bold strange characters.

There was no sympathy either in his cold, hard eye, or in his voice; and if she could have understood the passages he was reading from the Scriptures, in the obsolete Sclavonic, she would have found little that was consolatory in his lugubrious selections.

The heart of the stern, old sectarian was long since dead and withered to all human feelings; and if his language had been intelligible to her, she would have been rather startled than soothed on her sick-bed by his quotation of those parts of Holy Writ, which referred only to approaching death, and which he used not so as to smooth the passage of the departing soul by familiarizing it with its aspect, but to add to its terrors by mingling with it all that seemed to imply a doubt of the salvation of those not pre-elected. Herein seeking his words in the eternal book, Ivan Petrovitch was giving utterance to his own gloomy thoughts and stern misgivings. But on the other hand, because he deemed it his duty—a duty of which he was even doubtful—he had taken to his miserable home, in the full delirium of a malignant fever, a Midianite woman, as he called her.

Ivan Petrovitch was miserably poor, because he despised all worldly wealth; and as one of the Starè Vertsi, was peculiarly subject to a persecution from which his poverty had chiefly shielded him; and yet, besides bringing the pestilence under his roof, he exposed himself voluntarily to the wrath of the police by infringing two distinct laws which it endeavours to enforce with the utmost vigour.

In the first place, as sane policy demands in all countries, he had no right to receive into his house, without giving notice to the due authorities, a sick person in a contagious fever in a populous quarter. And in the next, by a general police law of Russian stringency and severity, no individual has a right to harbour another, even for one single night, without presenting the passport of his inmate to the police-office to be inscribed; and the penalty is enforced upon the housekeeper. For every night that he neglects to lay this information, there is a distinct fine: the police generally allow these to accumulate before they pounce upon the delinquent; and, as a man so poor as the old fanatic, would have been unable to pay it, he would have been punished by corporal chastisement, and incarceration doubly prolonged, on account of his being noted as a dissenter in the black-book of the police-office of his quarter.

But Ivan Petrovitch braved this danger as he braved the contagion. He tended the patient with unremitting attention, if with a stony, solemn indifference; and as his religious duties added to the scanty business of his store, and the hours of indispensable sleep occupied some portion of his time, he had engaged the old hag, a fellow-sectarian, to relieve him, and to pay her the miserable pittance for this duty, three days in every week did the penury of Ivan Petrovitch oblige him to abstain even from his coarse, habitual food.

Now this was one of those days of abstinence on which, as he said, "he drank the waters of the brook to satisfy the cravings of his body, and ate of the bread of eternal life to satisfy his soul."

"She is delirious again," muttered the crone. "It will be over soon. They will lay her in the earth before next Sunday, young and dainty as she is!"

"Thinkest thou so?" said the old man, shutting up his book, and casting up his eyes in pious ecstasy. "And thou shouldst know who watchest so many departing!—who better? Oh, Lord! when will it please thee to call thy weary servitor? Here goeth a sinful daughter of the sons of men, thy mercy only knoweth whither! And I, who am of thy elect, still tarry; whilst Abraham's bosom is ready to receive one of thy chosen people!"

Though Blanche was in so dangerous a condition, yet her host was too determined a predestinarian to resort to medicine, so that her malady was left entirely to nature. But this first lucid interval was of very short duration; for, bewildered by the scene around her, and by the stern aspect of her strange nurses, her brain speedily began again to wander.

At length the ravings of the sick woman having awakened the attention, and aroused the suspicion of his neighbours, Ivan Petrovitch, who was scrupulously true to the trust he had undertaken, resolved to remove her to a place of greater security. Now, none but a very few of the old man's persuasion could have been induced to undertake such a charge; and if they had been willing to do so, those in the city could have found no means of concealment better than his own.—Beyond the walls of his dwelling, Ivan Petrovitch could only bethink him of one of his brethren, a brickmaker, quite as austere and fanatical as himself; but then the brickmaker had long since fallen away from the orthodox principles of the old faith, or at least was reputed to have done so, though, as it was to depart quite as widely from the hateful tenets of the dominant church, he was regarded rather as a schismatic than a heretic—rather as one of the elect who had strayed from the fold, than as one predestined to perdition. For his own part, the brickmaker still anxiously held out a hand to the uncompromising votaries of the faith from which he contended that he had not swerved, whilst they would neither listen to, nor discuss the obscure metaphysical abstractions in which his uncultivated mind had become entangled. But he was still anxious to conciliate them—persuaded that whenever he could prevail upon them to listen to him, he should convince—and he was just an enthusiast of their own stamp, who would set at defiance all inconvenience and danger in anything he undertook.

Anxious to oblige Ivan Petrovitch, he did agree to undertake the charge; and then, drawing forth a well-thumbed volume, he tried whether gratitude would not induce Ivan to listen.

"Brother Ivan Petrovitch, just listen to this one comment."

The stern, impracticable, old sectarian rose up abruptly:

"That book wants no comment."

"But hear me just explain according to the belief of our fathers."

"Fare thee well!" said the dealer in old iron; "I have no ears to lend thee: if it be old and true, then I know it; and if it be new, then be the curse of folly and of perdition on thy words!"

"They have eyes and see not, they have ears and hear not!" said the brickmaker, as his visitor retired. But thus far these men knew each other, that, their word once passed, Ivan Petrovitch caused the wife of Mattheus to be committed to his charge, in the full confidence that she would nevertheless be received; and the other received her almost plague-stricken, as she might be said to be.

"The Lord has sent me the pestilence!" exclaimed the brickmaker; "and sent by him, I give it welcome."

When Blanche again awoke to consciousness, it was after a long period of utter insensibility from weakness; and even then, though restored to the possession of her intellectual faculties, such was her debility, that she had not strength even to uplift her arm, or to raise her voice so as to utter any articulate sound. She was stretched upon a couch: around her, on three sides, was perfect darkness; but the fourth showed her, through a door-like aperture, a dim, red, sullen glare, in the midst of which strange figures flitted to and fro. There broke upon her ear a low, monotonous chaunt, and at intervals the sounds of the scourge, accompanied by groans and stifled cries.

Some of the figures that hovered about in the red light, were those of gaunt, emaciated men, stripped to the middle; others seemed those of women, also naked to the waist—some having arms and busts in all the proportions of beauty, others in hideously distorted parody of the form of women, the pendent breasts being thrown back over the shoulders, but all alike supporting on the latter, heads black, shapeless, and demon-like in their aspect.

The terrific idea seized the imagination of Blanche that she was dead, and that these were the shades of the departed around her; and then, the light becoming gradually extinct, and all these voices—after joining in a low and mournful chorus—subsiding into unbroken silence, the thought flashed across her brain that she was perhaps doomed to eternal darkness and immobility; and under the influence of this awful imagination, it began to wander again. In vain she attempted to utter a prayer; in vain to call upon the name of Mattheus; and thus she relapsed into unconsciousness. But for this, she might have seen, a few minutes afterwards, the red flame blaze up again more brightly, and show by its increased light that these were all human beings assembled in a rude log cabin.

The men seemed, mostly by their long beards and the cut of their hair, to be peasants or traders, though one or two, by their shaven chins and such portions of their usual attire as they still wore, appeared to be of superior rank.

The women, who were barefooted, trod, like the men, over the sharp flints of the floor; and their faces were masked with hoods of black cloth, like those of some of the religious orders of the Romish church.

Nevertheless, it was easy to distinguish amongst them a similar difference of caste. The peasant women were mostly betrayed, either by the disgusting malformation so common among the Russian females of their class, or by the unconcern with which they trod over the shards and pebbles to which their horny feet were insensible; whilst the penitents of superior rank could only move in agony.

There was one in particular whose tender feet were cut and bleeding; she too, drew, like the others, at a given signal, a garment woven of coarse, prickly horse-hair, over her back and shoulders, torn and scarred by the scourge, but which had been left carefully intact wherever they were exposed, when she wore a low-bodied dress; for this fair ascetic frequented the court assemblies, and routs, and balls, it being one of the rules of this strange society, that its members should continue to follow all the usual habits of their walk of life.

Among this assemblage, the brickmaker was evidently regarded as the spiritual chief, the minister or prophet: and it is time to inform the reader that Blanche had been carried for security into the midst of the conventicle of one of those secret sects which of late years have been springing up like mushrooms in the Russian empire, and are daily discovered and silently suppressed by the Imperial government. Although a very small portion of those in existence are supposed to be found out—for naturally all the arts of the police in gathering information must fail with men who compare with every threat the eternal terrors with which indiscretion threatens them, and weigh contemptuously every bribe with the immortal reward which they anticipate—still, even those discovered have of late years augmented to an extent which would immediately alarm the government if they had any correspondence or connection with each other.

They appear, on the contrary, to be totally distinct, and to embrace not only in a few instances tenets of austere and gloomy piety, but in the majority of cases the most opposite and unheard-of extravagances of doctrine and of practise. All that the human mind can conceive of most outrageous and revoltingly horrible in the wildest aberrations of insanity, has been brought to light in some of these recently discovered sects in the Russian empire; and in fact, in any attempt to describe the most remarkable of these associations of fanatics, the pen of fiction would find itself stopped short on the blushing page at the very commencement of a narrative which should attempt to portray the whole truth, as well as to keep within its limits.

There are even well-informed Russians who look upon this recent and increasing tendency as threatening more proximate and great changes than any other existing influence, and who argue a more imminent, instead of a diminished danger from the disconnection of these sects, alleging reasons epitomized in the metaphor, which compares them to the fungi, poisonous, and rank, and slimy, though of different aspects, properties, and tribes, which, without identity of root or parent seed, all spring alike from the rottenness of the prostrate tree, from whose bark they take their parasitic growth. The profound demoralization of society, and the subservience of the national church, are supposed by some to give involuntary birth to these dissidences frequently so monstrous.

It may be said indeed, that of late years there has been no great, or at least no proportionate increase, in the universal corruption and venality; but then to this a lamentable truth is objected, that the improved organization and centralization of the present reign have enabled oppression to pervade the whole fabric of society, restricting even that faint liberty which the most ruthless tyranny, unless it possesses this knowledge, can never prevent betwixt the very intervals of upraising its remorseless hand to deal the blow.

In this respect Russia, not many years ago, more resembled Turkey, where the rapacity, the violence, and ferocity of rulers being untutored, did not allow them to do more than strike and desolate; and all over its provinces, rights, privileges, and liberties, only occasionally violated, have survived amidst its heterogeneous population. But of later years, extortion and oppression, without being greatly increased, have learned so much more minutely and intimately to penetrate into every social recess, that the yoke has become more benumbing and intolerable; and as men are wont, when their condition becomes hopelessly degraded, to seek their consolations at the foot of the altar, so has the Russian: but then, if he is at all of inquiring mind, and rise above the gross superstitions—which the tenets of the Greek church cannot be said to authorize, but into which its practise in Russia has degenerated—he sees the religion presiding at that altar, at whose foot he has taken refuge—so far from being able to afford him hope or protection—hand-bound, and suffering itself, whilst a booted soldier bestrides its neck, and guides with iron grasp the hand professing to hold the keys of Heaven.

The sectarians over whom the brickmaker was presiding in the lonely and abandoned hut—isolated in the midst of wood and morass—where they were holding their weekly meeting, would, if discovered, have been classed between the Bespopoftchina, on account of their neglect of all the ceremonial of religion, and the Doukobortsi, on account of their strange practises; the mysterious tenets of the latter causing the vulgar to attribute to them forms and doctrines the most contradictory, so that they be only wild and extravagant.

And thus it happens that, with some of these known—though vaguely known, persuasions—are incessantly confounded all those original and independent sects which fill up innumerable shades of difference betwixt a faith dictated by austere and gloomy self-denial, and others which—degenerating into a horrible consecration of infamy—appear to have been conceived by some morbid inversion of the human brain during the ravings of insanity.

The assemblage to which the reader has been introduced consisted of the votaries of a belief into whose dreamy tenets we will not enter, but which induced a form of worship and rites which were characterised by an almost Trappist severity.

After alternate intervals of silence and of prayer, a board was taken up in the centre of the apartment, and exhibited an oblong hole. The females of the congregation now came forward, two at a time, armed with spades, and dug away at it amidst the chanted prayers of the rest for several minutes, being then relieved by two more in succession till it was judged to be sufficiently deep.

Then the elder or prophet, or whatever they styled the old brickmaker, seated himself on the mound of earth thrown up, letting his feet fall into the grave—for it was a grave—and, thus seated, he gave way to the enthusiasm which his hearers accounted inspiration, and to the flow of which they listened with devout attention.

Here and there, from the wildest metaphysical conceits mixed up with quotations from Scripture and the early fathers—and all incoherently strung together, with a grotesque and yet startling eloquence—it might have been gathered that he regarded matter and spirit as in an incessant state of antagonism, and that it was only when the spirit should be entirely freed from the trammels of matter with its consequent individuality—that it should, at last, and perhaps after being linked to the flesh through many successive lives, succeed in disengaging itself for ever from material corruption, and soar upwards, like the air-bubbles disengaged from a fetid pool, to be absorbed into the one pure and finally indivisible element from which it had been violently separated. He looked on individuality as the root of sin, and as distinctive of matter—the great arch-fiend with which he called on them incessantly to battle.

Some terrible mortification or penance his flock were called on daily to undergo, in order to regain, by this retaliation on the body and the feelings, the victory from matter triumphing through sin.

One by one, the penitents came up, and kneeling, with their hands between his knees, confessed aloud their faults, and glorying in their self-inflicted mortifications.

It was strange to hear a slave's wife ransack her past life, to bring to light its coarsest features, and then to hear the court lady detailing to the rude brickmaker her catalogue of dazzling, hideous sins.

"Here," said the enthusiast, pointing to the grave, "here, to-morrow at midnight, we will meet over the body of our departed sister—this night our brethren are snatching it from the cemetery of the children of the benighted!—Hers was a happy fate—but as she died from the fever, they have buried her remains in lime—this must not be— too long, too long she suffered from the clay that clogged her spirit—the worm and slow corruption must avenge upon that body her so long imprisoned spirit—and we, my fellow-sufferers, must enjoy the spectacle of this our victory over the flesh."

"Lives yet the woman from whom she caught the malady?"

"She lives," said one of the sisters, approaching Blanche and putting her hand upon her heart.

"Whose turn is it now to nurse her?" said the Prophet.

"Mine," answered one of the hooded females.

"Fearest thou still the pestilence?" said the Prophet.

"No longer," replied the sister. "If the fever comes, I will open my arms to receive it as doth the bridegroom to the bride."

"Thou shalt not watch her. Fearest thou?" said he, turning to another.

And this—the fair and high-born lady, with the small bleeding feet, replied, "Not for myself, if I may remain and watch her till she dies. But oh! I tremble at the idea of going back, and carrying the disease with me to those I love."

"Then thou shalt nurse her, and go back unto those thou lovest."

"Oh! that is beyond my strength!" exclaimed the fair penitent in an agony.

"What!" replied the Prophet, "the greater and more intimate the terrors and mortification, the greater the victory! The imprisoned spirit becomes like the external body, callous and numb, till there is no point on which you can inflict pain; and then, as it were, a nerve is suddenly laid bare all sensitive and full of feeling, and you neglect this opportunity of trampling on the flesh! Kneel down and recite again aloud the sin for which thou hast fought so valiantly to be absolved, and think on that ethereal particle whose redemption thou wishest so to achieve."

The sister knelt at her confession, and then, an hour afterwards, when all the congregation had departed, she was sitting by the side of Blanche, with her wan hand in hers and tending her, not only to brave a danger in compensation of an equal amount of guilt in the stern spirit of her sect, but with all the pity and affection of a sister.

When Blanche again recovered her senses, nothing tended more to soothe and prevent them from wandering again than the soft face bending over her, and the gentle voice addressing her in a language she could understand. By degrees the whole of the scene, which had shaken her so terribly, recurred to her recollection, and she came again to understand how cruelly all her hopes had been wrecked in her husband,—the craven, and the slave, whom her own imagination had travestied into the hero,—and who, working upon her inexperience and devotion, had selfishly dragged her, Blanche Mortimer, the last noble scion of a house of ancestral glories—innocent and unsuspecting, and spotless in her purity, down into the most ignominious depths of degradation; and then, even her indignation gave way to involuntary anxiety, and her contempt was softening into pity, when on the bench beside her she recognised the handwriting of a note pinned to an old shabby cloak; for in the course of her removal from one place to another, her soft and costly shawls of Cashmere had been stolen, but the spoiler who was no other than Vasili,—with the superstitious respect of the lower order of Russians for all letters—had attached it to the garments he had substituted for her own.

Blanche asked, with all the energy which her feeble voice allowed, for the letter, which she could not reach, and which, when handed to her, she perused with eager excitement. It was as follows:

"If any conceivable degree of temptation could prove a palliation—if any conceivable magnitude of suffering could offer an atonement for a crime like mine towards you, then I might plead such a temptation, such a punishment; and I appeal to both in the solemn voice of one who will never see you more on this side of the grave. I invoke the distracting love which tempted me, and the maddening doom which parts me from you in extenuation of my guilt.

"The sons of light, when they took to their bosoms the daughters of men, were never tempted as I was tempted, and Cain, when he wandered forth alone with his remorse, had not in his heart the desolation gnawing mine! for Cain had not been driven out of such a paradise as I have been.

"But now that I go, in mercy hear me plead in the melancholy hope of pity and forgiveness, a hope which now will be my only solace. That I, slave as I was, should have loved you, was only what would happen again if the past were present. It was no more my fault when you were so loveable, than it is ours that the sun shines when it dazzles our eyes with its light and radiance; but where I was in fault was, in daring to link your fate to mine, in daring to deceive you—it is true that with the inspiring thought that you would share it—I had never doubted of carving out a name that even you need not have blushed to own. I should have done so first and have wooed you afterwards: but alas! my sanguine hopes too fatally persuaded—you smiled—and I was lost—I committed the crime of securing you before my fortunes.

"But time presses. Let me at least live on in the knowledge that you are not ignorant of the expiation.

"Blanche! dear Blanche! whose name, mixed with excruciating memories, my lips will hourly pronounce till death, but which from me will never meet your eye or ear again. Dear Blanche! I have found strength to live a life more painful than a thousand deaths—a life of unimaginable humiliations, to free you from the degradation to which I must bow.

"When you recover, as something whispers me you will, all is prepared for your escape.

"Vasili Petrovitch holds in sacred trust the whole of your fortune—as for the ignominious ties which still attach you to the slave, these Blanche, dear Blanche, will be soon dissevered.

"And then, when that last wrong has ceased with my life, when you have heard all that I endured whilst enduring for your safety—when you have heard all that I dared, to avert your contempt—then Blanche—for the last time, dear Blanche, perhaps your gentle heart, forgetful of all these injuries, may deign one tender recollection to the memory of

"Mattheus."

When Blanche had read the letter through, the fevered brightness of her eyes was dimmed by tears; and just then she experienced, as she moved, an indescribable sensation, which caused the blood to throb tumultuously towards her temples from her heart, as all the violence of her returning love therein expanding, seemed to chase it towards the brow—Blanche had just felt that

............She held within
A second principle of life,

which, if she should die now

Would close its little being without light.
And go down to the grave unborn, wherein
Blossom and bough lie withered in one blight.

Death struggled with life for many hours, and meanwhile the pale sister watched and prayed.

CHAPTER III.

"If my memory serves me rightly," said the Prince, "you are the man who formerly so much took my father's fancy with your inventions for converting silver roubles into old lumbering iron."

"They were intended, high-born Sir," replied the steward, "to convert old iron into silver roubles."

"Intended perhaps," replied the Prince; "but I am afraid that the intent and the effect of most of the projects which my father patronised, and which you presided over, were often at variance. I have vague memories of machines constructed to raise water, which only raised the wind, and that at the expense of my worthy progenitor, of all sorts of wheels and engines intended to draw the gold out of those unlucky mines, and which only ended in drawing it out of his pocket to sink it in them. Yes, I am afraid that what all that sort of thing is intended for is often at variance with what it accomplishes."

"You are right, my honoured Lord," said Johann; "philosophy teaches us the uncertainty of all things; and you speak with such critical knowledge of the subject, that I think you must have made mechanics your favourite study."

"You flatter," replied the Prince.

"Not I," continued the steward; "philosophy rejects all recourse to arts so futile; but allow me to observe, that if you should judge fit to continue the erection of the steam-mills which my late lamented lord commenced—"

"If I do," replied the Prince, "I promise you I will remember you."

"You make me proud and happy."

"I will remember, considering all your successes, most carefully to avoid your assistance."

Johann smiled faintly.

"But though I have not made either mechanism or philosophy my peculiar study, there is another branch of knowledge to which, besides great natural aptitude, I have devoted unremitting attention, I mean the science of arithmetic, of figures and accounts."

At this, the faint smile changed to a visible elongation of countenance.

"Your deeply lamented father," commenced the steward—

"Deeply lamented, I dare say," continued Ivan; "for I suppose you do deeply lament him."

Johann nodded assent, and then replied:

"Philosophy, my honoured Lord, has, however, partly consoled me for his loss; and the happiness of seeing such a successor has done the rest. Your deeply lamented father—then as I was saying, whose soul overflowed with kindness and philanthropy—your deeply lamented father, my high well-born Lord, sought only to have his estates benevolently administered."

"And so he chose you," said the Prince, "to whose natural disposition his own ideas were so congenial."

"I humbly hope so," replied Johann.

"But now look you," said Isaakoff, "every man to his taste; he was master then, and I am now. I am more of a satanic than of an angelic temper. I am a stern misanthropist, who want to have my peasants governed harshly, malevolently, diabolically. I want a steward who will squeeze them as dry as a grape-husk, and that I fear will not suit you."

"My Lord," said Johann, looking very hard in the Prince's impenetrable face, "my Lord, if such were the orders I received from an honoured master, I—I could look very sharp after them too."

Here Horace suddenly walked out into the verandah to conceal a burst of laughter.

"A useful man of all work," observed Isaakoff. "I have one word more to say, and then you may go for the present."

"I listen, my Lord."

"You will manage, if you please, that Nadeshta may live in the house for the present on the same terms as in my father's time. You will send to Moscow or take her thither, and see that she is supplied, regardless of cost, with all that is required for the toilet. I wish her to keep us company, and I do not wish her temper to be ruffled; for, if I judge aright, she has a will of her own."

"Indeed she has, my Lord; and what woman has not? But I need not tell you, who know as well as I do, that, though by dint of starvation, and the lash, and labour, we can keep our male slaves in tolerable order—the women sometimes incorrigibly resist all our efforts, setting punishment utterly at defiance."

"I am fully sensible of it; but you will also be pleased to let her understand that her brother's treatment will depend upon her own amiability; for the present, I have dismissed him from personal attendance on myself. When you go to Moscow to-morrow, you will repair to Madame A's, the milliner, where you are to pay the bills of that cursed Italian singer."

"Nadeshta is certainly very beautiful, if I dared observe thus much," said the steward, who thought cunningly to sound whether she were likely to rise in the Lord's favour; "and, though she be wilful, her accomplishments, her education, and her manners, as I have heard say, are quite those of a great lady."

"And now I remember," continued the Prince, indirectly answering the remark made by Johann, "when you see Madame A—, you will inquire whether she still pays as liberally as of old for pretty apprentices, either for sale or hire; and you ask what she will give for Nadeshta three months hence, with her beauty, manner, and accomplishments; and remind the good lady that my former dealings with her will enable me to judge pretty accurately what advantage she will derive from such a purchase."

"I understand you, my Lord," said Johann, with a sort of twinkle of the eye, which almost amounted to a wink.

"Is your right eye convulsively affected?" inquired the Prince.

"Oh dear me, no," said the steward, again looking gravely respectful.

"I have another observation to make. Pray let the female part of the service of the house be done by cleanly and good-looking wenches, if you can find any in my villages. I do not like to be meeting at every step with all imaginable varieties of female ugliness and distortion. You will send away from under this roof all that I have yet met beneath it. There is, for instance, that little fat woman, with a face like the back of a measly pig, and a sour expression animating it, like the sauces of your German kitchen—all lard and vinegar. Who is she?"

"That, my Lord," said Johann, "is my wife."

Isaakoff knew it.

"I pity you," said he.

Johann sighed.

"And then," continued the Prince, "there is a female, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow,—exceedingly like her—who behaves atrociously to me."

"To you, my Lord?"

"She squints at me hideously."

"Oh! that is my daughter," said Johann, naïvely.

"Your daughter, is it?—then as she is so nearly related to a person I esteem so profoundly, she must also remain. Perhaps you will, however, contrive that she shall either keep out of my way, unless she will wear a black patch over one eye; for it makes me nervous to see her open a cross-fire with them."

"If she has the misfortune to displease my honoured master—"

"That will do; now go, Johann."

In dispensing with the services of Mattheus, his master, too acute an observer not to see exactly where he wounded, had done so, because he felt that continuing his slave in the menial service to which he had degraded him, would be but a slight addition to an infliction to which, amidst so many other causes of uneasiness, he must be now becoming callous.

The Prince, who had always been addicted to high play, had, by an extraordinary run of ill-luck, lost so largely to his present guest, that Horace had considered that he could not discontinue playing as long as he was so considerably the winner. Night after night, they had therefore continued, Horace's luck only occasionally ebbing to return in a stronger and more determined tide.

At length, the extent of his winnings was so enormous, as to cause him uneasiness and restraint, which tended to make him feel that it was neither agreeable to remain, nor delicate for him to leave, though Isaakoff interpreted his embarrassment into a wish to that effect.

Aware both of the impression which Nadeshta had produced upon his guest, and of the mutual affection of the brother and sister, the slave-master looked upon her as a means of retaining Horace till his luck should take a turn; for his losses, seriously affecting his fortune, had added the excitement of deep interest in the struggle to that which the gratification of his revenge still afforded him; and, besides, he saw in her a precious instrument for subsequently torturing his victim.

CHAPTER IV.

The shades of evening are darkening. Nadeshta is again beside the grave of her mother, sitting on another humble mound.

Next to her is her brother, this time her real brother: with one hand he covers his face, whilst the other is pressed betwixt the hands of Nadeshta.

Opposite to them stands the old Starost, stroking down his beard thoughtfully, and watching them with a sympathy resembling the instinctive sagacity with which a dog regards the affliction of his human master.

"Alas!" said Nadeshta bitterly, "how little did I dream, my poor Mattheus, that when I looked forward, day after day, and year after year, to your arrival, how little did I dream that we should meet as we are meeting here without a hope!"

"Without a hope!" exclaimed Mattheus, "I have a misgiving that even she will not be saved."

"Speak not to me of her," said Nadeshta bitterly, "when all the illusions of my youth are for ever withered, when my poor brother is restored to my arms, his mind, his courage quelled, his spirit broken amidst the despair which, on every side surrounds us, when there is no refuge for us but beneath the sod on which we are now sitting."

"And not even there a refuge for me," replied Mattheus, "I should not even dare to die in the fear of leaving her exposed to the fate—"

"To the fate of your sister," interrupted Nadeshta.

"Oh!" said Mattheus, with a look of bewilderment, and pressing his palm against his forehead, "that is true; but then—"

"But then, you would say, she was not born like your slave sister to suffer. What, my poor Mattheus! influenced at last, even in those thoughts of whose freedom you were once so proud of boasting; born forsooth to servitude or liberty! if there were anything in the condition of the parent that should affect the destiny of the child, then in compensation, the children of the free and wealthy ought rather to be impoverished and enslaved, the offspring of the bondsman and the pauper, rich and independent."

"Oh, not that, Nadeshta; but there weighs on me the remorse of having dragged her down. Now you and I are in the position in which God caused us to be born."

"Accuse not God of the crimes of men; for our position is man's crime, no work of God's."

"Oh Nadeshta! that thought was once my own, but time and study and the fruit of sorrow's fatal tree have made me feel that on our race there rests a malediction more ancient and more bitter than the curse which stamps the Hebrew! Whose impious hand shall dare rebuild the fallen temple? What Sclavonian shall venture to rise from the prostration, in which the line of Sur, of which he is the unhappy scion, has been for tens of centuries trampled? Oh I have striven to banish the desolating thought—the terrible conviction—but when I contemplate our hopeless woe and their prosperity who make us suffer, then its reality returns, and then I learn to know that just as man is subject to disease and misery for sins committed when the world was young, so he is doomed to bend beneath a master."

"On earth man has no legitimate master," said Nadeshta—"even in those that govern him—for, if honest, they are his servitors, if unjust, his tyrants."

"Oh, my sister, your spirit is yet unbroken by grief. Good God! to think that they will break it—"

"Never!" said Nadeshta, "my heart, perhaps, but not my spirit."

"Alas! what know we of ourselves?"

"Oh that I could only instil my own into your bosom, my poor brother!"

"Nadeshta! sorrow has taught me to believe that, as there is a remedy for every disease, an antidote for every poison, so perhaps there is a virtue characteristic of every station,—placed in antagonism to every suffering,—which for the bondsman is resignation."

"Resignation!" said Nadeshta impatiently.

"Resignation," repeated her brother, "has not my own fate taught it me. What is there for me but to turn towards the example of the cross, with its nails, and crown of thorns? What but to emulate its gentle patience? Tell me, Nadeshta, when one reflects on my position what other virtue fits it? The eloquent and burning thoughts, the iron stoicism, the high resolves, on which I have dwelt so often, are all impossible for me; they would be guilt not virtue; they would heap fresh wrath upon the head already stricken through my fault, and therefore I submit to everything, my sister, since aught but absolute submissiveness would be to abandon her to the misery into which her love for me has led her."

"Love!" replied Nadeshta bitterly, "love, do you call it love? The love of the civilized, of the high-born and the gentle: the love which promises to endure, through danger, crime, and misery, and turns, at the first misfortune, towards the object of its fickle passion with scorn upon the lip! The love of these western dames is truly like the chivalrous gallantry of their men. Oh, no! give me rather the affection of our coarse village slaves, rude as themselves, but true and unpretending. No, no, my poor Mattvei, forget that heartless wife of thine, there is no one loves thee like thy poor Nadeshta."

"Oh! consider Nadeshta, how I have left her, helpless and degraded, and alone and sick."

"And thou, my brother?"

"Children," said the old Starost, who had been long looking wistfully at them, "children, though you speak in the language of the blagorodie (nobility)—in the tongue of the Niemetz—I can trace as much sorrow in your tone as if you spoke it out in good, plain, honest, Christian, Russ:—"

"Father," said Nadeshta, "though thy head is the clearest and boldest in all the villages of the estate, and though thou hast done more to shield our people than any in them, it is new to see thee pity any affliction."

"Pity," replied the rustic misanthropist, "no, why pity such things as men?" and here his eye seemed to wander involuntarily towards Mattheus, and he continued, "or women either, excepting one who stands before me,—the woman of the bold heart and of the iron will,—and with her it is not pity for the tears she sheds so rarely, it is hate of those who cause them to flow."

"Well," replied Nadeshta, "I seek no sympathy in grief, for that is selfishly to spread one's pain. I scorn all pity; but still, whatever moves thee, our fellow slaves trust only thee with all thy bitter words and cruel speeches."

"Daughter, the fools have learned to love my rude contempt, because contrasting it with my foresight for them and the Niemetz steward's honeyed language and his hungry soul."

"Why dost thou seek us now then, father?"

"For them, as I have sought thee out so oft before, I need not ask; I see already that our hopes, or their hopes, I would say, are blighted in the ear, like the fields of corn before a famine harvest. When thou hadst favour, thou wilt recollect how they remembered it; and I remembered it, and besought thy intercession in so many matters."

"Yes," said Nadeshta, "they remembered it when I had it."

"Only then, it is true," said the Starost, "I always told thee so—what then? They are slaves with us; they are our own people, against our baron and the foreigner. Well they have long been brooding in discontent and longing for a change, they have got it, like an oupravitel (steward), whom I once knew, who broke the slave's backs by making them carry clay and bricks. They rose and threw him into his own kiln: that would not satisfy him, and so the flames carried away his soul to the devil's furnace, where he is burning to this hour; and wishing for the kiln perhaps, ha! ha! Well, in their fresh trouble, then, daughter, they have watched narrowly the Lord's behaviour towards thee, they think thou art again rising, they pray thee to watch over them. I see the prayer is idle; thou canst do nothing, I rejoice in it.

"I rejoice in it," continued the Starost, as Nadeshta shook her head silently and mournfully, "I rejoice in it, because I, who have seen much,—who have learned to know that the rain is coming when I see the cloud, the frost when the east wind howls in autumn—I see the misery that is coming on them. The Lord's gold flows away night after night like the waters of the rivulet, the corn, the hay—the stock is selling. This day I have received orders to note down all the families exceeding a given number, and to pick out two hundred individuals, the weakest, the sickliest, the most useless—these the Lord is going to let to a Moscow manufacturer."

"Oh God!" said Nadeshta, "things are getting worse indeed; all this would have made the old Lord's hair stand on end."

"We class them into sorts," continued the Starost, "like hemp, tallow, and bristles; I am to note the barren women, and the youths and the girls who are weak-chested. The steward delights in this unchristian regularity, all these are to go.

"The Lord, who is long-headed says, 'that it is more profitable to breed slaves than pigs; that his steward cannot cheat him in human souls as he can of produce.' In a word, this place is becoming worse than Siberia, and yet till hunger grips these sheep by their very throats they will do nothing."

"What would you have them do?" said Nadeshta.

"What would I have them do? What sayest thou, Mattvei, man of the strong arm, who knowest the arts and hast the wisdom and the language of the foreigner—what?"

"Suffer in patience and embrace their cross."

"That is not my counsel: if there is no protection for the slave, if God be too high, the Emperor too far off, if God's servants strip him of his savings, and give him hand-bound to his Lord, if the Emperor's servants wring out what his Lord has overlooked, still the slave has his advantage—for the slave there is no punishment. Hark ye, both, all know that I was born in a distant government from which the slaves were starved out; but they do not know the vengeance that we took, they do not know what I tell you both, that, when we were maddened, when we tore our oppressors limb from limb, what happened? We got bread, they knouted and sent forty of us to Siberia, I was one of them—my back is marked with the knout now—I have seen Siberia. Neither were punishment to what we suffered; the knout, according as the executioner lays it on, may be death or it may be the mere cut of a whip—what is that to a slave whose flesh has been raw for months? And then the knout has its predilections: it cuts into the vitals of rebellious Poles, and priests, and nobles; they die from it, not we—for who cares whether a slave should be vigorously punished! When he is placed on the sleigh before execution and covered with a mat, the crowd throw on it copper pieces in their pity, and, if bribed by this, the executioner handles tenderly his terrible instrument, if no one bids him strike.

"As for Siberia, what of that? When convicts reach Siberia they inquire not whether a man is an assassin, or a fraudulent bankrupt. So he knows a trade, and be a hale strong man, he never goes to perish in the mines, unless he be a blagarodne (nobleman). They know the value of a man too well, and look at his craft and muscle, not his crime.

"Yes, I can foretell the rain when I see the cloud coming: this will be worse than Siberia soon; once worse, the worse the better, so that you and I may die then, Mattvei."

"Peace, peace!" said Mattvei, "disturb me not, old man, with such wild words. Here let us pray to rest, and to rest soon in the quiet grave, on whose turf we are now sitting. But I must go—where do we meet, Nadeshta?"

"Where, daughter?" said the Starost.

"You know my arbour by the river side, in the lone dry wood, amidst the grove of hazels beyond the marsh; do you remember it, brother, it was there we built our hut of moss, it was there we had our gardens. That recollection has endeared it to me ever since. I will go to-morrow and every day at noon."

"Before we part, daughter, let me deliver my message. You know the three and twenty chosen girls with whom the steward bade thee stand to scatter flowers? This morning, by the Prince's orders, five have been chosen for the service of the house, the rest are to be married next Monday."

"Well," said Nadeshta coldly, "several of them were betrothed, they waited his permission."

"They have got his order instead; but their betrothal serves them nothing; the steward has suggested, or the Lord imagined, some plan for marrying his young men to middle-aged women, his girls to grey-headed men to increase the population more rapidly; for, after all, as he observes, if he wants to sell or pawn his estate to the government, their value is estimated by the number of souls upon it, and a male child three days old reckons like a vigorous peasant.

"They are thus all to wed men between forty-eight and fifty-five; if I cannot find as many single in this village I am to go to the next.

"These women and their families and their betrothed have implored me to see if thou couldst do anything; one and all pray thee to help them; if thou art powerless now, they—these girls, and their grey-beard fathers—all suggest that if thou wouldst only smile, if thou wouldst only use the arts of a woman, thou wouldst not long be powerless; but, daughter, the words are not mine."

"No, father!" said Nadeshta indignantly, "better thy axe, thy brick-kiln, better Siberia and the knout; and yet," she added turning to her brother, as a deep blush came over her countenance, "yet for the Lord and his guest, so fallen and so helpless are we, I daily deck myself in choice attire, I daily sing, I warble with a breaking heart notes full of joyful melody, I smile and I despise myself. But oh! there is only one in the world, my lost, my spirit-broken brother! for whom that smile and its deceit are not a crime—only a baseness."

CHAPTER V.

It is an autumn day in an almost autumnless clime. The nights are already frosty, though the sun shines so hot and brightly till it sinks to rest, and though the leaves of the oak and birch—bitten by the night cold through the stem and killed—hang yet unwithered on the parent trees.

Horace, with gun and dogs has gone, he says, to shoot the double-snipe, an autumnal bird of passage.

He is met, as he crosses the high road by his host, who walks along beside him, not much, it would appear, to the satisfaction of the sportsman.

They pursue their way along the dry path through a wood, and reach the river.

It is evident that all cordiality has ceased betwixt these men, so recently united in the bonds of that intimate companionship, so often termed friendship; and yet quite as obvious that both have some deep interest in concealing the mutual dislike which now inspires them.

"Here, then, I leave you," said the Prince, "if you persist in beating over this marsh. I am not equipped for bog-trotting; but though the birds are in plenty here, you can never get at them."

"Half the pleasure of the sportsman's diversion is in following the direction his caprice points out," replied Horace. "Good bye!"

"Till dinner-time, then!" said Isaakoff. "But I am not so obtuse as you imagine. Though there may be double-snipes along the marsh, I am not ignorant that, if you cross it, you will come to certain thickets, where, in a solitary bower, a turtle-dove is wont to nestle. Never mind, I am not like the stingy owners of preserves in England, who give you leave to shoot and make a reservation of hen-pheasants and of hares. Good sport, my boy, till dinner-time!"

Along the right bank of the river there runs a belt of land, high and dry—covered with a short fine flowery grass and shrubs—which separates it from a wide grassy wood-girt plain, green and even as a savannah. But this is a treacherous moss, in the centre of which the crane, the wild swan, and the curlew may be often seen alighting, secure in its inaccessibility to human footsteps. Its very edges quake beneath the tread, and it is evident that only a superstratum of the tangled vegetation of the surface supports precariously any passing weight above the slough it covers.

From this prairie-looking expanse, the superabundant water—which the saturated moss cannot soak up—is discharged into the river through many little rivulets, which, at intervals of a few hundred paces, traverse the broad natural causeway that divides the marsh from the stream.

The trunk of a fallen tree, or a few pine-logs rudely thrown together, afforded passage over these interruptions to the path which Horace was pursuing. When, however, he had nearly reached the park-like terra-firma which stretched for miles along the river side, he found a pool before him, where the rotten wood of the rude bridge had given way. The water, clear—though darkly tinted by the mosses—and unfathomable to the eye, perhaps from its hue, or perhaps from the overspreading leaves of the lotus, had the startling aspect of all deep silent waters.

The rale, as it ran lightly over the broad leaves of the innumerable water-lilies, called up associations of solitude and of hidden vegetation, entangling—like the arms of a malevolent water-sprite—the limbs of the strong swimmer who trusted to its glassy surface, rendering it more formidable to face than the wild current of an angry stream.

Horace was hence induced to turn aside, and, a little higher up, he saw that the cut was so narrow—as it spread between banks of firm and solid-looking turf—that he was sure that he could leap across it.

But the green turf itself was treacherous; it quaked beneath his footsteps, and he sank through the surface. In vain he struggled, until, his knees being imbedded in the moss, he felt that every motion was plunging him deeper into it. He saved himself indeed from being immediately engulfed by holding his gun across, which for a time supported him. He turned his head in the hope that Ivan was still within sight, and, to his inconceivable delight, perceived him on the pathway which skirted the other side of the marsh, though on the point of entering the wood. Horace hailed him in the stentorian tones of a man whose life depends upon his being heard.

The Prince did hear him, for he could just be distinguished pausing as he turned back to listen. His ear was quick; so was his apprehension; he guessed directly what had happened, and the thought flashed across his mind that the green bog would wipe out all the ruinous score against him which had been accumulating on the green baize—and then Horace saw him turn into the wood.

"He saw me!" gasped Horace; "and he leaves me to be smothered—the assassin!"

The gun laid across had in so far assisted the sinking man, that, though he was still settling deeper and deeper into the quagmire, it was now by degrees imperceptible, excepting when he made the slightest motion.

His dogs stood on the edge of the bog and howled; when he called to them they would not venture upon it. Terrified and exhausted, he paused and endeavoured to think on what was best to be done. There was plenty of time for reflection. But what did reflection show him—that he was alone in a wild trackless solitude, where no human voice could hear his accents, though ever so loud, though ever so piteous; where even whilst he was reflecting, he was half an inch nearer his inevitable death; where life was measured by a few inches, like the wick of an almost exhausted taper diminishing to the eye. And then,—just as he had contemplated the utter inutility of so doing—in the terror of his fearful situation, he called out again with all the strength which despair could give to his youthful lungs.

This time he startled the wild-fowl from the middle of the marsh; the stilted crane flapped heavily into the air, and the curlew flew piping over his head in numerous gyrations before it settled. Then the whole scene resumed its silence; and he knew that, in a brief space, the green treacherous moss would have closed over his head, leaving no trace of his death-struggle.

There is something in the indifference of Nature peculiarly full of awe to the mind of a strong and healthy man, in the prospect of thus slowly and inevitably dying, surrounded by a peaceful solitary scene.

To perish amidst the roar of tempests when the wild waves seem to clamour for life; to fall amid the thunder of battle, or to die amidst the admiration, pity, hate, or even execration of a living crowd—all these may be appalling—but what is it to the consciousness of expiring in a lonely waste, amidst unsympathising objects, animate and inanimate, all reckless of the momentous and dreaded passage from life to death as of the falling of a dew-drop from the bough on which it has been gathering, to be absorbed into the earth, or lost amid the waters—to know that the cloud which is sweeping past will sail on across the sky—that the shadows of the trees thrown over the green turf will still slowly lengthen—that the sun will shine on benignantly—all no more heeding these last convulsive moments and these agonies, than if there had only sunk upon the marsh the fly born to live but till sunset—whose wings buzz in the ear of the death-devoted now as it flits past—and who will still hover over the spot with the same vibrating hum when the pitiless morass has engulfed the sufferer!

At length—just when all seemed most desperate—he heard a human voice behind him; he turned his head, and, to his inexpressible joy, there stood upon the bank a bearded moujik. No words can paint the delight which this apparition of the Starost—for it was he—imparted to the heart of Horace; for, in fact, that homely peasant was the harbinger of life in the midst of death—a death of which, he had been slowly tasting the full bitterness.

"Ah!" thought he, "friend! whoever you are, you come well for the punishment of your perfidious master and for your own reward, I will purchase your freedom and endow you with the richest farm on the domain, half the value of which, he has forfeited to me."

But as the peasant seemed hesitating on the brink, he mustered what Russ occurred to him, and called: "Brother! brother! speedily!"

"I hear and obey!" replied the Starost.

He took his axe from his girdle, and, detaching a pole and one of the beams from the broken bridge, he brought it to the edge of the moss. Here he first plunged the pole slowly into the bog, and seeing that it sunk down to its full length—more than a fathom—he looked around him at first, as if for help, and then having assured himself that there was no one within sight, he paused a moment irresolutely, whilst a singular expression stole over his countenance.

"Quick, brother! quick!" shouted Horace.

"Brother! brother!" ironically repeated the moujik, whose eyes were kindling malignantly.

"Yes, we are brothers, dog of a Niemetz (foreigner)! dog of a noble! we are brothers now, when I can save thee. Verily save thee! for what? That thou art a friend of my Baron's? That thou shouldst teach him to wring more wealth from the blood, and sweat, and thews, and sinews of his peasantry. Call upon thy fellow country-man, the Niemetz steward—he is thy brother—not I—not I. Thou remindest me of the late Lord's spaniel: he snarled and bit our heels, and we dared not kick out his entrails; but when I saw him drowning in the fish-pond, and there was no one there to say I saw him drown, dost think I fished him out? Not I—not I."

Horace, who could not understand the words of the peasant, but who was strangely alarmed at the menace of his manner, again appealed imploringly: "Brother! brother!"

"Brother!" replied the peasant contemptuously, "you and the like of you are pretty brothers! My mother, when she fell ill was sold to a mill, where they bought worn-out slaves!"

"Make haste, brother!"

"Brother! My first child died for want of milk when we all wandered abroad from starvation!"

"Quick! quick!"

"Ay, quick! Call not on me—call on your God, if indeed you Germans have any God but your bellies," said the peasant, who, nevertheless, inspired Horace with some hope; for he laid down the beam across the green surface, and walked out upon it.

The Starost looked around him. He took his axe from his girdle. Horace stretched forth his hand. He could just have reached it, when he saw it upraised to stun him with the blunt end.

"Thus," said the Starost ferociously: "thus I knocked the Lord's puppy on the head when he yelped on the water's edge."

Horace doubled his arm in an instinctive endeavour to protect his head, and the Starost leaned forward as far as he could keep his balance on the beam; but he could not reach his victim by a few inches. Nevertheless, owing to the involuntary movement which the Count had made, he had sunk still deeper, and was now up to his arm-pits.

"My curse light on you—fit slave of an infamous master!"

"Speak on in thy foreign tongue, I cannot reach thee; but what matters? In a few minutes more thou perishest. No man ever comes forth from the bosom of the moss, ha! ha! Yesterday thou wert drinking of the Lord's costly wine!—to-day of the cold peat water, and thou wilt have thy fill, ha! ha!"

The Starost stepped back to the dry land: he lifted up and cast down the beam.

"Brother!" shrieked Horace, despairingly.

"Brother!" repeated the peasant mockingly. "Ay, thou boldest out thy arms to me as thou heldest them out to the slave's sister, from whose lips thy lascivious lips stole the kisses meant for a brother! Fold thy arms on the cold moss!—press thy mouth to it now; for the cold moss has folded thee in its arms; it is rising fast to press thy hot lips; and that embrace will last till the day of judgment. Ha! ha! ha!"

The peasant was going. Horace watched his departing footsteps—he was left alone—alone with his despair. Why had he shunned the blow of the merciful axe? For he forgot that the Starost could not reach him.

One minute passed, and then another, and another, and another minute. Whether from the chill of the water, or from the horror of his situation, his teeth chattered, and he began to shiver as in a tertian ague; for, if he had never thought, to tremble thus when face to face with the grim king of terrors, he had never dreamed of meeting him in a shape so appalling.

He closed his eyes—he attempted to pray—he could not recall his scattered thoughts. Strange sounds were in his ears; there danced before his sight a singular and incongruous mixture of scenes and personages from the life he was departing, all indistinct, and dim, and vaguely blending together in form and feature, like the figures of a dissolving view. Isaakoff, the buffoon, and Madame Obrasoff—the Starost and the Duchess—Anna and the Prince—all dreamily mingled. He heard the cheer of an English mob—the roar of a torrent in the haunts of the chamois—and lastly he was in the boudoir of Peterhoff, before the portrait of Nadeshta; and then the portrait swelled like a reflection of the magic lantern to the size of life. It detached itself from the disc of light; it started into sudden animation; it breathed, it moved, it spoke, it called out to him! He opened his eyes, and Nadeshta stood upon the brink of the moss.

She was very pale with emotion. She had been calling out to Horace—now Horace answered her: "Save me!—save me!"

"Stretch out your arms to the utmost," said the slave girl, throwing out to him with presence of mind and dexterity the pole with which the Starost had fathomed the bog. "Try and get this under them!"

He succeeded in doing so.

"Now," said Nadeshta, "what shall I do? If I leave him to call for assistance, he will have sunk before any help can come. I have not strength to throw this beam so that he can reach it. I cannot with my unarmed hands detach more timber from the bridge!"

At length, she pushed the beam over the surface of the moss, farther than the peasant had pushed it, and stepping upon it, walked intrepidly out to the extremity. She there held out her hand to Horace, but could not quite reach him; and as she endeavoured to do so, almost lost her balance.

"Enough!" said Horace, "enough, noble girl! leave me; for you would only perish with me."

"That," said Nadeshta contemptuously, "I might do if I were a man, or at least a foreign wife—a noble lady—with old blood in my veins—love and romance upon my lips."

"Leave me!" said Horace, "leave me!" and as he spoke, her hand grasped his; but to reach it, she had stretched out so far, that, losing her equilibrium, she fell, and cleaving the surface of the bog by the force of her fall, sank at once nearly up to the middle.

"Merciful Heaven!" exclaimed Horace, as he made a desperate and mighty effort, which only imbedded him deeper in the fatal slough, for his acute sense of personal danger was now absorbed by his sympathy with hers.

"Rash! generous, unfortunate!—I cannot help you—cling to the beam—get back!"

"Get back!" echoed Nadeshta, calmly, though breathless with the sudden fall and the chillness of the water, "Can you get back?"

"Lay hold of the beam, I tell you!—struggle at once, and lustily, or you will sink as I have sunk—one energetic effort!"

"Which would plunge me deeper in."

"Good God!" exclaimed Horace, shocked at her making no attempt to move—"do you know what will happen to me where I am?—Do you know what will become of you if you cannot extricate yourself?"

"We shall perish!" answered Nadeshta, with a startling composure, derived from the very excitement of her nerves—"the moss will smother us."

"Oh!" said Horace, "this is too, too horrible! but hear me, noble and devoted woman! it is impossible that you can thus be left to die—I am hoarse with awakening this cursed solitude; but I will find a voice for you."

Horace gave a loud prolonged resounding shout, which rang through the distant forest for many seconds afterwards.

There followed an interval of silence—nothing was heard but the bubbling of the water of the bog as Nadeshta sank a little deeper.

Once more Horace called out, but this time his sonorous outcry terminated in a wild shrill piercing cadence. Again all was silence—then it was responded to by the hoarse croak of the raven.

"Hark!" said Nadeshta, "how the very raven mocks us: we might cry out here from the growing to the waning moon, and no living soul within hearing."

"Oh; you are mistaken," said Horace eagerly, "you are the third within this half hour, that is to say inclusive of the Prince, with whom I came—eternal maledictions on him!—he saw me fall in here, and turned away, and left me."

"What I, the third? Oh! the second then must have been the Starost. Alas! there is no chance:—the Prince came with you, the Starost had just quitted me—there may now pass no human creature here for days."

"How horrible," said Horace, "what a hideous fate, to think that you too must perish with me."

"To think," replied Nadeshta, "that the Count de Montressan should lie by the side of the slave-girl! to think that his noble clay should decompose in a common grave with hers! the man of great name and of heraldic glories, side by side—in the undistinguishing moss—with the base peasant: a slave, whose pride, whose feelings, whose existence—whilst both living—could not have weighed with one so gentle, against the caprice, the sport, the amusement of an hour.—Yes! the morass is a great leveller! the church-yard rears its marble vanities to lie in the face of its dumb truthful master—death; but not the morass—the honest morass. I may speak out now, without fear or hindrance, for we are both dying—inevitably dying."

"Dying," repeated Horace, mechanically, "dying! Oh! but can we not at least save you?"

"I have lived too long a life of illusion to indulge it now. It is impossible—you must face the stern reality, illustrious Count!"

"Oh! if I could but save you; so young, so beautiful, and to die thus!" said Horace.

"So high! so proud! so wealthy! and to die thus!" said Nadeshta.

"Why did you hazard yourself?"

"To be unlike the haughty, and the great; to be unlike the free and happy, whose chivalry, whose devotion, whose noble sentiments are falsehood all, though I believed them once—to profit by the privilege of the wretched—to show the generosity which misery teaches, and which, with such as you, lives only on the lips. I do not fear to die."

"Nor I," replied Horace, "if you were only safe upon the bank. How could I die more pleasantly than gazing on a face so beautiful! so that it looked not into mine so angrily and so disdainfully! Give me your other hand, and hear me—I shall sink first—I will sink first, and then support yourself upon my head and shoulders—that will sustain you longer, and Heaven will send you succour."

"Not on earth," said Nadeshta; "whether or not it be to turn the slave's thoughts toward itself, I know not, but the enslaved are heaven-abandoned, here." And then she asked abruptly, "and you, what led you hither?—You came to seek me out."

Horace signed affirmatively.

"It is well. Reflect now, Lord of an illustrious lineage, of an ancient line! How came we both to be where we are now? You seeking an interview to insult the slave—the slave to save her insulting enemy—and thus we perish face to face; you ignominiously, and I.... though it is a chilling thought to smother on the cold waste.. and I," continued Nadeshta, with exultation, after an involuntary shudder, "to triumph as I die."

"You wrong me, noble girl! you wrong me, by all that is sacred! If I intended to seek you out this day, it was to bring you hope and consolation."

"Hark," said Nadeshta, "you shall hear what hope and consolation you could have brought me. Why should I not after all speak out? I shall soon be silent enough, and long enough silent.—Why should I not pour out all that has filled my soul so long, into the last human ear that can listen—that must listen to me? Why not before I die? What if it be from the slave to the lord, from the insulted maid into the ear of the libertine! Death levels all distinctions; rank and sex, and maidenly modesty, and pride are all confounded now—so hear me.

"One like yourself, Count Horace—a lord of the creation—one kneaded as he thought from the porcelain clay of earth—one lying now as cold as you will be before evening—one for whom I have almost now the weakness to weep, took me—as he took my brother—from the penury and ignorance in which our fellows vegetate: he made us acquainted with the luxuries of wealth, of knowledge, and of intellect, and then he died, and left us in our degradation!

"I blush to remember him with affection, for he had indeed the affection of a father for me, because he could not lavish it upon his infamous son—your prince—my lord, from whose bondage I am fast escaping—but the greater his affection, the more his shame, the more his selfishness—when he clung to the unhallowed possession of his human property, till death overtook him in his maudlin false humanity and kindness. It is ever the same...."

"Hear me," said Horace.

"Hear me," replied Nadeshta imperiously. "It is ever the same. I was to have been the toy of the young man's passion—of yours—ceded by the politeness of the host—devoted to a life of shame, a death of misery, to divert the ennui of his noble guest. The old man had no companion to amuse, no dupe to conciliate. In his passionless breast there was only the longing "to pour out a vague affection upon some recipient object: so I was chosen as the toy on which his age could lavish it, unrepulsed by the chilling contempt, the unsympathising nature, of Ivan."

"Hark!" said Horace, "there is help at hand. What sound is that?"

"Croak! croak! croak! croak! cra, cra-a!" replied the raven which had before answered the cry of Horace, as, drawn by its carnivorous instinct, it wheeled slowly round, flapping its dark wings as if anxious to alight.

"Help!" said Nadeshta. "There is no help for us but in death! Hear you not? It is the raven would dispute our bodies with the hungry moss. It waves its sable plumes, most noble Count, and none besides will nod over so illustrious a funeral! But why should the black raven interrupt me? Why? I was telling you how one of your cruel fellow lords, retaining me in thrall, set free my thoughts by showing me a world beyond my bondage—how he developed in the light of knowledge the feelings and the instincts whose productive germ might have lain dormant in mine ignorance, like seeds deep sunken in the bog—in which you and I are sinking. And then—that very light was the treacherous sunlight, which at morn and even deceives, which gilds and lends its halo to a barren scene, making its distant desolation beautiful. The world, which was before my eyes, I saw and I despised. I loathed our Russian great. I knew the cankered heart beating corrupt and faint beneath the orders and the stars which brand its base submissiveness! I saw insolence without pride first trample, and then lick the foot that trampled it in turn! I saw the sordid meanness of their rank profusion! But, oh! that world beyond! I imagined it just as books had painted it. I saw it pictured with deceitful words. I gazed upon its expanse, lighted up by poetry, and eloquence, and art!—and for that world I panted. My dreams were of its gentle women and its generous and devoted men—those men whose feeling the chaste and classic virtues of republican antiquity had inspired, or who had drawn it from the glorious spirit of a softly daring chivalry—lavish of sighs for every tender thought, of blood and sympathising tears for every infortune!

"Such did I deem the inhabitants of those happy lands to be, as in the meditations of my childhood I have peopled the twinkling stars with beings bright and fabulous—and in this dream I was living still when first I met one of those chivalrous children of that envied West, whose voices rail against oppression, whose words are full of pity and protection towards the suffering and oppressed. And where and how met we? Say, Count! He having donned a menial habit, and snatching from an orphan sister's lips the kisses destined for a brother—defiling with impure deceit a mother's grave!—he coming with insult to the lowly—where, before my illusion was destroyed, before the spell was broken I could have worshipped, and have fluttered like an eager bird to meet the fascination of the snake. Oh, when I thought he was a brother, with what pride I looked upon his form, his beauty, and his noble mien! Never, no never, had my girlish dreams conjured up aught more winning than he seemed! It is you I mean, Count Horace! a maiden tells you so unblushingly, now that death has set his seal upon her forehead—that contempt has filled her heart with scorn!"

"Hear me, Nadeshta!" said Horace.

"And then," hastily continued Nadeshta, "your western women! your dames of noble lineage! My poor brother, whose soul and courage have been withered in that deceitful West—he married a woman—only think, a loving woman—proud of her birth and boastful of her passion! And what did she when misfortune lowered around her bosom's lord? She left him in his misery—as we are on this dreary waste—abandoned and alone."

"Hear me!" repeated Horace. "Since we must die, be it not, Nadeshta, with scorn in those eyes. God knows I am not faultless; and our meeting was a thoughtless cruelty. But I was not, as you deem me, quite ungenerous. I felt the pain I had given; I have striven to repair the injury I had done."

"I know what you would say. You found that I was not a mere illiterate peasant; and, when your friend—my master—acting on my brother's terror for his foreign and false-hearted wife, and on mine for him—when he made me earn each diminution of that unhappy brother's suffering by a smile—then you would say that, as you saw its mockery, you induced him not to constrain me to his odious presence—you were respectful and might have been rude. Along the very borders of this marsh, Count, I have chased in my girlhood many a butterfly; and oh! how softly and how gently—not to scare its timidity when it settled on a flower,—did I approach it with the very hand that swept the brightness from its ruined wings the moment it was closed upon my prize!"

"You wrong me, Nadeshta! you wrong me cruelly! Think you that, plunging thus into eternity, I would speak false? If I am where I am, I die because I was seeking you out. I sought you out to bring you hope and consolation. Two hours ago, I parted from your brother; he sent me in his place to meet you, because his tyrant would not let him come."

"My brother sent you?"

"Oh, Nadeshta! when you hear all it will be more terrible for you to die; although for me it will be very sweet to see less angry glances from those eyes, which trouble and disturb my soul—as, so help me Heaven! they do, Nadeshta. Already I had determined on freeing you and him, when, to-day I first heard the details of his story. Only conceive, your brother was once an envied rival of my own—for I once loved Blanche Mortimer. And when I offered him just now my hand in token that my interest, my wealth, my life, if need were, should be lavished to see him righted, I thought myself the most generous of rivals; but now I feel that it was because your image had superseded hers who once caused that rivalry, and because he was your brother."

"Or, perhaps," said Nadeshta, still with bitterness, "perhaps rather our misfortune was too ignoble in your eyes till hallowed by participation with my brother's haughty wife."

"No," said Horace; "now that the vanities of station and of fortune are nothing in the face of death—now that its near approach like fire, has purged away the dross of empty conventionalities, I will tell you, in the solemn truth of a man's dying words, what urged me—for, blinded partially before, I see it now—it was my love for you!"

"For me?" said Nadeshta.

"For you! How mad I must have been to weigh my rank or fortune when I thought of you, now that I would die a clown and beggar to feast my eyes by gazing on you for five minutes more—on you whose image Heaven has interwoven so strangely with my destiny; for some mysterious chance, before we ever met, had impressed my memory with the features of a portrait incredibly resembling yours. Oh! it must have been one of those incomprehensible presentiments; for when you called me from the bank, I opened my closed eyes, to look on the reality of a vision floating then before them."

"If you," said Nadeshta, "only realized in every thing the picture of my young imagination's love, as in what I see and know of you, oh! I could have loved you!"

"When you look thus upon me," said Horace, "thus, I feel it almost sweet to die. Or are you not perhaps—if I were superstitious, I might think so—are you—for all this is like a dream so very strange—are you perhaps a guardian spirit, winning me back before my final hour from all life's gaudy vanities to love and peace? If so, I am won and fascinated, and my soul will take a flight too happy in such company. Or am I really here, imbedded in a fatal moss, and are you the Nadeshta of my living, waking life?"

"I am she," said Nadeshta, "whom at the Cross's foot you undeceived."

"To whom I vowed a brother's love: but whom I love as never brother loved!"

"Then tell me," said Nadeshta, in whose eyes there gleamed a wild and feverish excitement, "if we were there, together, upon the bank a few yards off and saved, how would Count Horace act?"

"I would kneel at your feet," replied Horace, in a tone of similar exaltation. "I would say, Nadeshta! dear Nadeshta! your smile is Heaven to me!"

"Count Horace at the slave-girl's feet?"

"Oh Nadeshta! I would say, Fortune has bestowed on me rank and wealth; will you give them value in my eyes? I have an ancestral name respected long, and now indifferent to me. Love! will you teach me to regard it with affectionate pride by sharing in its honours?"

"So help you Heaven?"

"So help me Heaven!"

"Oh! how happily I could thus have lived!—Still I die happier than I had hoped to live."

"And, Nadeshta, what would you answer?"

"Horace!—dear Horace!"

"My love!"

"Oh, Horace! we are dying!—If it be sin, forgive me, Heaven! I only think of you."

"If I could only press you to my bosom—not as I once did in that unhallowed hour—but as my own, with God to witness my truth! If it were not that the motion might sink us, I would draw you towards me."

"Oh!" said Nadeshta, "we must die at last, and why not so?"

"Why not?—Come hide your blushes on my bosom—come, my Nadeshta!"

"So that I only reach you, love!—One prayer, my Horace, and I come."

For some time past, the slave-girl and the Count had joined their outstretched hands; and now he drew her towards him with all his might. As he had dreaded, they sank so rapidly that the wet moss rose to Nadeshta's chin. Horace made one desperate effort to reach her; and again the hovering raven was heard—croak! croak! croak! croak! and then the raven's mate took up the sinister note, her black wing almost sweeping the surface of the bog, as she answered—croak! croak! croak!

The raven is a bold bird: when an elk or a head of cattle sinks hopelessly in the marsh, it is said that, taught by its experience how speedily anything is sucked under the surface, as soon as it sees a living creature imbedded beyond all power of defence, it will pluck out the eyes as they roll in their last agony.

Horace and Nadeshta are in each other's arms; the astringent and deep amber-coloured water bubbles up from the moss, as from a well-soaked sponge; and in another moment it will reach their lips.

"Oh, Horace!—Horace!—Horace!" shrieked Nadeshta, as with the strong instinct of life she convulsively expelled the first bitter mouthful of the gurgling liquid; and then, raising herself a full inch, she exclaimed: "Oh, God!—Horace!—Horace! push forward your foot, I tread on something hard, and we may live!"

"Great God!" said Horace, "if you were only saved!"

"What!—I alone?—Oh, no!—I feel it!—I feel it!—but not the ground:—a tree—a tree, deep buried in the bog! If it lies towards the bank we are saved, Horace!"

It may be necessary to explain, for the benefit of those who have never enjoyed the intense gratification of sinking through the moss of a wet moor, and then suddenly alighting on a hard, gravelly bottom, or any other solid substance imbedded in it, that in this case the danger becomes a mere affair of labour; for, the footing once secured, the body may gradually be edged forward, by working to and fro—just as a man does when buried to his neck in a snow-drift—till the solid bank is reached.

And, having pointed out this means of safety, it would be of course superfluous to say that Nadeshta and Horace made their way at last to terra-firma; for the reader has doubtless never entertained any serious fears for their safety, persuaded that—whatever the license assumed by modern authors—it would have been too ridiculously inadmissible to have allowed a hero and heroine of the tale, at the very commencement of the third volume, to perish in a bog, like flies agglutinated in a pot of treacle.

There may be also some, who will hypercritically inquire why such a scene, containing the inevitable elements of the ludicrous, should ever have been presented by the author?—But hereunto, with all due deference, he makes reply, that the reader is apt to be oblivious how, in common with the public—of which he is a component and respected atom—he will have love-scenes in a novel, whilst at the same time the majority of that very public is accustomed to watch the behaviour of the heroes and heroines of an author—when it deigns to read him—with a solicitude as lynx-eyed to detect every departure from the rules of starched propriety, as ever maiden-aunt displays when chaperoning pretty nieces.

Now, if the reader can point out a situation, in which it was humanly possible to place a pair of lovers, better calculated to divest a tête-à-tête and declaration, of danger and of indecorum than a hopeless immersion to the neck in a cold moss, the author pledges himself to adopt the suggestion, should he ever reach a second edition.

CHAPTER VI.

Blanche is very pale, and very weak. Of her former beauty only those traces now remain which none of the ravages of sickness can obliterate, no convulsion of the human frame efface. Her smile is still sweetly mournful, and her sunken eye still beams softly bright; but, above all, an ardent hope, which no despondency can subdue, and a restless energy which her weakness cannot quell, blend with the profound anxiety which both express.

Blanche is a mother now.

And now, like the young tree—with leaves of everlasting green—upon whose boughs the fruit expands for the first time into rich maturity, succeeding the beauty and the fragrance of its withered blossoms, and yet, whereon these very blossoms bud and bloom again, beside these very golden proofs of its fecundity—so new feelings, impulses, and fears, have been generated in the young mother's bosom; and with their birth have been awakened the love and tenderness which filled it up before. The pride of station; the rooted prejudices of her childhood, the angry recollection of the injury inflicted on her have vanished:—she has no thought now, but of her child, and of the father of her child.

What a bright thing is love—maternal love! and how, like knowledge, it betrays its immortal essence, undiminishing at the fount by its expansion, and by that which it imparts—both comparable, if one durst compare the nobler with the ignobler object, to what the sun appears, when ever giving forth its light and warmth without sensible diminution of its radiance. Thus is the mother's heart, when filled to overflowing with one passionate affection, and which yet finds room for another without detriment to the first.

Blanche leans on the arm of the old sectarian, whose grim features relent into an involuntary complacence and pity against which he struggles.

They stand at the door of the house of his brother in the suburb. Vasili Petrovitch is outside, superintending the erection of a wooden paling which is intended to shut out all view from the windows, at which his wife, Katinka, is too fond of looking out on to the lane, which has suspiciously become the resort of grey cloaks and plumed hats. He receives them with some embarrassment—ushers them in, and begs them to be seated.

Blanche seats herself, and replies to his welcome;—for she has learned to speak a little Russ, and to understand more: her austere companion stands in silence, fixing his eyes irreverently and gloomily upon the image of St. Sergius, his brother's household god.

"I have come, Vasili," said Ivan, at length, "with this daughter of sorrow, to ask worldly counsel of thee, a worldly-minded man. Know then that this woman—whom Mattvei, the son of the good and just Mattvei Mattveitch, one of the Lord's departed saints, hath taken to his bosom—this woman who, Niemetz as she is, might, if brought up in the knowledge of the light, have been worthy to eat of the bread of eternal life, which thou hast not been chosen to partake of—this woman, I tell thee, Vasili, wishes to devote her foreign wealth to purchase the liberation of her husband from him who calls himself his Lord, to whom I myself have been given in bondage since my birth for the expiation of my sins, as thou wert until lately."

"I listen, brother," replied Vasili.

"As thou, Vasili, hast the art and knowledge of these worldly things, seek thou to effect this matter?"

"Brother," said Vasili, "the Prince Ivan Ivanovitch will be very difficult to deal with. He nourishes a deadly hate against our brother Mattvei."

"I know he does; but this much I know too, that, in the minds of the weak and wicked, the love of gold triumphs over hatred. Thou, at least, knowest how to deal with him."

"But," replied Vasili, "if for thy sake, Ivan, and for Mattvei's, I should attempt it, it will be no low figure that will induce your common Lord to yield him up his freedom."

"His wife weighs not his freedom against her gold. His freedom first she seeks at any price; nevertheless, be thou wary and sparing in thy offers, remembering always that it is the portion of the orphan." Here Ivan looked hard at his brother, because his knowledge of his character led him to suspect that in such a transaction his inveterate habits of dishonest thrift might urge him to pilfer, though he was utterly astounded when Vasili replied:

"First, I must know what the fortune of this dove of our brother Mattvei's amounts to."

"Know. Who should know better than thou who holdest it?"

"I?" said Vasili, innocently.

"Thou. Did not Mattvei into thy hands confide her fortune?"

"Into my hands her fortune!" said Vasili with well feigned surprise, and crossing himself: "you dream, brother."

"What, wretch?" said Ivan, "dost thou deny the sacred deposit?"

"The only deposit Mattvei left with me," replied Vasili, with sullen effrontery, "was his Niemetz wife, and her I have transferred to thy care, as was agreed."

"Here," said Blanche, producing the letter of Mattheus. "He has written it to me here."

It may appear strange that Vasili Petrovitch, instead of withholding, should have taken so much pains to preserve and place under Blanche's eye a document which he might almost have been sure would contain some mention of the sum entrusted to him. It must, therefore, be observed that, independently of the superstitious respect of the lower orders of Russians for all letters, Vasili's dishonesty had not been premeditated.

Judging him by other individuals of his class, whatever their usual dishonesty, there would have been no very gross imprudence in the confidence reposed in him by Mattheus under such circumstances, even if a choice of acting otherwise had been left him.

He had no intention of breaking through his trust at the time that he accepted it. It was only by degrees, as the amount of the property and the legal impunity with which he might appropriate it suggested itself to his mind, in a form irritatingly tempting to his cupidity, that he called to his aid that Byzantine casuistry, which the Muscovites seem to have inherited, with their alphabet and their architecture, from the Greeks of the Lower Empire.

"Mattvei has placed this sum in my hands," reasoned the covetous trader; "and, when he asks me for it, into his hands I will give it. What more am I bound to do? If he has told me to give it up to a strange woman, am I to do the foolish thing to my brother's detriment? If my brother Mattvei had said to me 'take thou this knife and stab me,' was I to choose rather to slay my brother than to disobey him? Is it not written that 'the mouth of a strange woman is a deep pit; he that is abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein;' " and then, having satisfied his conscience that he was justified in refusing to deliver up Blanche's fortune to any one but Mattheus when he should come to claim it, he slyly addressed an invocation to his patron, St. Sergius, praying that through his blessed intercession he would keep his brother Mattvei from ever returning personally to claim it.

To secure the intercession of the Saint, Vasili had first promised to set his image in a sheet of solid gold, weighing twelve zlotniks, and then, mingling a singular cunning with his superstition, he bethought him that, as he was only agreeing to reward his celestial protector, as soon as the service of warding off a threatened disagreeable should have been duly performed; it was obvious that he could never be called upon, at least, not till his own death or that of Mattheus, to fulfil his part of the bargain; and therefore, trusting to the remote necessity for payment, he liberally increased his bribe from twelve zlotniks to fifty.

Thus, in his self-estimation, Vasili Petrovitch had satisfied at once his sense of duty towards his neighbour, towards Heaven, and towards himself. He knew that the Pope, for a jolly glass and a pink note, would bear him out in his views; and he was congratulating himself on having turned to a creed so comfortably administered from the "stern, uncompromising, unreasonable, austerity of the Old Faith," when Ivan thundered in his ear:

"Brother! brother! beware! Mattvei, with his own lips, told me that he had confided that woman's portion to thee!"

"If I were to write upon a paper, I have entrusted wealth to Ivan Petrovitch—if I were to turn to the Niemetza, and say: 'Sister, I have entrusted wealth to Ivan Petrovitch,' would that make it true, and couldst thou, Ivan, help it?"

"Oh God!" said Blanche, "does he deny it?"

"Dost thou utterly deny the deposit?" said Ivan.

"I utterly deny all charge of any moneys; and I take to witness...." Here Vasili, crossing himself and mentally promising a candle to Saint Sergius turned towards his image.

"Swear not," said the sectarian with stern disgust. "Besides, is it not written: 'What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven it; the molten image, and a teacher of lies, that the maker of his work trusteth therein to make dumb idols?' "

And then turning to Blanche—who, forgetting in her agitation the scanty Russ she had mastered, had seized Vasili's arm, and was appealing to him by the mute supplication of look and action—said:

"Come, my daughter, let us go. The treacherous dealer hath dealt treacherously; yea, the treacherous dealer hath dealt very treacherously! Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh the flesh his arm! As for thee, Vasili Petrovitch—though one womb bare us—although we have grown two fruits on the same tree, whereof when the harvest came I have foreseen the rotten one would be cast aside—yet even here below, I now abjure thee. Thou shalt be to me henceforth as the gentile and the stranger, for thou hast made thy heart as an adamant stone lest thou shouldst hear the law. With lies thou hast made sad the heart of the righteous. I curse thee, son of my mother, son of my father."

"Oh Ivan, curse me not!" said the superstitious Vasili, turning very pale, and seizing the hem of the ironmonger's caftan to retain him; "what have I done?"

"The sin of Judah," replied the sectarian, "is written with a pen of iron. Thou hast 'oppressed the fatherless and the stranger.' Fear and the pit and the snare are upon thee, oh inhabitant of the earth! Thou shalt be numbered with those of whom the Lord saith, 'When they fast I will not hear their cry; when they offer burnt-offering and an oblation, I will not accept them. Thou shalt die a grievous death; thou shalt not be lamented, neither shalt thou be buried; but thou shalt be as dung upon the face of the earth!' "

"Brother," said Vasili, who, having been brought up in the same faith was fluent in the Scriptures, "is it not written, that 'whoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger of a judgment?' "

"But it is also written," said Ivan, stretching out his hand and hurrying Blanche away, "it is also written 'if thy right hand offend thee cut it off and cast it from thee, if thy right eye offend thee pluck it out and cast it from thee,' and thus I cast thee from me,—thou art an abomination in the sight of the Lord,—and thus I say to thee, Raca!"

And the old man, fevered with the enthusiasm of his denunciation, and the young mother leaning on his arm, and stunned by this new misfortune, stood once more in the open street.

Katinka, who was growing very weary of the jealous seclusion in which she was kept, was taking her last look from the window, and Vasili Petrovitch, though feeling a little uncomfortable at the malediction of his brother, consoled himself at the thought that the worst scene was over, and that he retained possession of the roubles.

"For, after all, what sort of a saint would be my patron, St. Sergius, if he could not protect me against such an unreasonable curse?" ejaculated the trader, with a shrewd notion of interesting the pride of that holy personage by the query.

Ivan, walking with hasty step, led Blanche along in silence so rapidly that, almost fainting with exhaustion, she implored him to stop.

They had paused opposite the Church of Kazan. A busy crowd was thronging the semi-circular area in front of it, and the deep solemn chant of the choir celebrating mass within was distinctly audible from where they stood.

The sectarian, as he walked along, after having thus renounced his brother, had been brooding over the change of faith to which he attributed his crying dishonesty—his thoughts had wandered back to the days of his early youth, when Vasili as well as himself kneeled with his father in the same austere worship—a worship from which Mammon, and the world, and the lies of the false prophets of the dominant church, had seduced him, and at this moment the sounds of its pomp burst insultingly upon his ear. His eye wandered with irritation over the heterodox architecture of the cathedral, with its semi-circular colonnade: it had been his intention to hurry past it, as past a pest-house, when Blanche, overcome with fatigue, suddenly stopped upon his arm, and at this moment one passer by observed to another, "It is the high mass of the Metropolitan."

Ivan Petrovitch knitted his brows: he beckoned to the driver of a vehicle plying for hire, seated Blanche in it, and told the Isvostchik whither he was to drive.

"But you will come with me?" said Blanche, "I must—I must consult with you."

"Go, daughter, go in peace," replied the fanatic, "I must do the Lord's bidding and not thine, I must testify against the Antichrist."

"But, good Ivan," exclaimed Blanche, "when shall I see you?"

"When the last trumpet sounds to rouse the quick and the dead," said Ivan, and, signing with his hand, the driver urged on his horses.

"Now, oh Lord!" exclaimed the old man, "I hear thy voice and I obey it, saying as of old, 'son of man, set thy face against Zidon and prophesy against it.' "

The Metropolitan of Novogorod and St. Petersburg, the most reverend, or (as he subscribes himself) the humble seraphin was celebrating Mass in the Church of our Lady of Kazan. The Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, as the primate of the national church of Russia, is still looked up to with great veneration by some fifty millions of its votaries, although the Imperial power has long since juggled every semblance not only of authority but of independence out of his hands.

He has become, in fact, only the first bishop, and, like all other bishops in Russia, he is classed according to military rank, and really owes his unrestricted nomination to the crown. A Russian bishop is not necessarily attached to any diocese, called eparchy in the Greek Church, but may hold the title as a sort of brevet. The whole church is governed by a holy synod of which the Emperor appoints the members. He is represented in it by the ober-procurator, lately an aide-de-camp of his own, with whom every proposition must originate, and practically, besides appointing the synod, the Emperor can at any moment dismiss any member belonging to it. Nevertheless, to throw dust in the eyes of the vulgar faithful, the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg is designated as the president of a council, which is entirely at the beck of the Emperor's delegate. And then the attendant wealth and pomp have been made commensurate with the ostensible importance of his station, and are displayed in gaudy magnificence, congenial to the oriental taste of an Eastern Church.

The humble Father Seraphin belongs—as all bishops must—to the black or monastic clergy, a body widely differing in learning and in practise from its corrupt, debauched, and ignorant brethren, the white or secular priesthood.

He is a mild and venerable prelate, pious it is said and erudite, and bearing in his demeanour the conscious impress of the hopeless insignificance of his high-sounding title; for, in truth, he appears before his flock like the famished actor of a country town, who plays the millionnaire upon the boards. The congregation of the Kazan Church bow nevertheless as low as if he were the Roman pontiff, and cross themselves with assiduity, and beat their breasts with fervour, as they admire the splendour of his array and the pomp of his attendance.

The Greek priests, the finest-looking men in the empire, allow their beards to grow unshaven, and their hair unshorn from their youth. The mass resembles that of the Roman Catholics, excepting that instrumental music is not tolerated, but then the magnificent bass voices of the choir are allowed in their deep imposing harmony to exceed even the sacred melody of Rome.

The church, like all other Russian churches, has all the richness and glitter of Flanders and of Italy, though unredeemed by a vestige of taste, because the fine arts have been judged, in the barbarian bigotry of the Muscovite hand-maidens too profane to be allowed the decoration of a Christian Church. And then there is this main distinction, that a vast screen, representing the veil of the temple, and called the Iconostas, or place of Images, shuts out from the nave of the church, in which the congregation kneel, the sanctuary in which mass is said; and the three gates which open from it, consisting of a groundwork of gilt arabesques, are not only kept closed, but a purple curtain is drawn to within, during the greater part of the service, to conceal what passes from the gaze of the people. This screen is covered, like a picture gallery, with the figures of saints and holy personages, painted in a style of conventional hideousness, and placed in frames, which are glaring sheets of gold and silver, set with jewels and illumined by rich lamps.

On the ambon, a sort of raised step, stands the deacon, and in a sonorous voice repeats the Ektenii, the Russian litanies, which are now half filled with the names of the members of the imperial families, and of all the departments of the government—whilst, at the termination of every verse, the choir, who represent the faithful flock, respond in chorus with the "Gospodee pomiloui nas!—Oh! Lord have mercy upon us."

The altar within the sanctuary is cubical instead of oblong as in the Romish churches, and, in the ceremony of the mass, the leavened instead of the unleavened bread is used—slight difference apparently—though the latter led the Byzantine Greeks rather to welcome the rule of Islamism than seek succour from the Latins.

The Metropolitan, surrounded by his priests and deacons, is dressed in the richly embroidered dalmatic of the Greek Emperors transferred to their patriarchs, and the gorgeous and pontifical omophora or sacred scarf, with its deep fringe, is round his neck—he has quitted the sanctuary—he mounts upon the elevation, called the ambon, to give his benediction to the people.

At this moment Ivan Petrovitch steps forward. His grey hair streams back—his wild eye dilates— he shakes his hand almost in the bishop's face, and thunders out in a stentorian voice as he points to his garments:

"And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls."

Right and left, hands were laid on the intruder by the bystanders, but, thrusting those who held him rudely aside, he mounted the ambon.

"There is a conspiracy in the midst thereof—like a roaring lion ravening the prey, they have devoured souls. Her priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy things.

"False prophet!—false shepherd! whither leadest thou astray the sheep of Israel? Verily I will testify against thee!"

Here Ivan was again seized by several of the attendants, whom he had for a moment shaken off.

"Yea, verily I will testify against thee—thou art an abomination in the sight of the Lord—wolf in sheep's clothing, Antichrist! thus I spit upon thee."

And, as Ivan spoke—pushing his body forward, in advance of his pinioned arms—he spat full in the face of the Primate of the Russian Church.

A murmur of indignation arose among the crowd at this sacrilegious outrage on the high priest in his very temple.

The most reverend seraphin received the indignity with apostolic humility of manner—he forbade them to injure him, and wiped the spittle calmly from his right eye. He made a sign to remove the fanatic, and continued his benediction.

"Woe to the idle shepherd, that leaveth the flock—the sword shall be upon his arm, and in his right eye—his arm shall be clean dried up, and his right eye darkened!" said Ivan, exulting in the grotesque aptitude of his citation, and struggling with his captors as they bore him off. "Woe! woe! woe! to the Antichrist—Woe! woe! to you, lost sheep of Israel."

CHAPTER VII.

Vasili Petrovitch is sitting at his tea. It is handed to him by the fair Katinka, who looks pouting and sullen, but her husband, as he complacently surveys her, only observes that she is getting fat. As for himself, he has all the satisfied air of a man well to do in the world. It is true that his brother, the sectarian, has rendered himself amenable to a terrible and irremissible punishment, but he has learned philosophically to regard this, as if death from illness or insanity had overtaken his relative.

Vasili's affairs are prospering—all that he touches seems to turn to gold; besides which, we have seen how apt is the gold which his fingers touch to stick to them. On the other hand, Vasili laughs in his beard when he thinks how he has baffled all the admirers of his gay young wife, and how completely he has isolated her from all possibility of temptation; for not only is the wooden paling finished which shuts out all external view, but whenever removed from his own eye, she is left under the active and incessant surveillance of a personage who acts as cook and dueña in his household, and who is not to be bribed or tampered with, either by the besiegers without, or the disaffected garrison within, because, in the first place, the beldame is Vasili's aunt, and, in the next, she hates his young wife much more than she loves anything that could be offered to gain her over. In addition to these causes of satisfaction, Vasili stands well with the Police Major of his district, and is on excellent terms with his patron Saint Sergius.

The wary trader had attained the summit of his ambition, that is to say, if there be any summit to ambition, which is more than doubtful, but at least he had reached the extreme point to which he had ever aspired before, though not exactly the degree of wealth to which he now looked forward. After all, there is not perhaps in St. Petersburg a man easier in his mind or conscience, or more self-satisfied; when lo! some altercation is heard without, and the old aunt bursts in, breathless, if not speechless with terror, ejaculating "Oh Lord! Oh Lord! O Lord! the Police."

The old trader winced a little, because such a visitation under any circumstances occasions some expense; but he reassured himself by the thought which he at once expressed, "that he stood well with the police."

"Oh worse, worse, worse, than all the civic police of the quarter—two of Count Benkendorf's chancery. Oh, woe is me! woe is me!"

At this intelligence Vasili looked very blank—he was accustomed to the civic police and its frequent extortions, and he knew how to deal with it—but the secret and inquisitorial police of the empire, which seldom interferes with men of his degree, inspired him with a mysterious awe. The unlimited power, the terrible reputation, of this institution, and his knowledge that its familiars, where once they intrude, do not loose their hold for any inconsiderable bribe—all tended to alarm him. What was to be done? He could think of nothing but crossing himself, and, whilst he was crossing himself, in stalked an officer of gendarmerie in his pale blue uniform, with silver lace and his cocked hat upon his head, and accompanied by another official.

The gendarmerie is the executive force, at the sole disposal of the Grand Master, and therefore the well known and widely dreaded garb of this one individual showed at once the character of his companion, although he was wrapped in the grey cloak, with the imperial buttons, worn in every department of the military and civil service.

"Which?" asked the gendarme officer imperiously, as he smoothed down his moustachio, "which is Vasili Petrovitch, merchant of the first guild, and a recently made freeman?"

"May it please your nobility," replied Vasili, with some trepidation, "I am he."

"You are Vasili Petrovitch!" said the officer, directing towards him a severe and scrutinising look, as if there had existed strong temptation for any one to personate the merchant under such circumstances.

"I am your humble slave, Vasili Petrovitch; though I know not—"

"Silence," said the officer: and then, turning to the other, he said with immense deference and some emphasis, "this is Vasili Petrovitch."

"Oh! this is he. Take thy hat, Vasili Petrovitch, and prepare to follow us. It is ordered so."

"Shall we seal up his papers," said the gendarme.

"Oh Lord! Lord! Oh holy Saint Sergius!" ejaculated Vasili. "Oh your excellencies, I swear to you by the Holy Trinity—"

"Hush!" said the cloaked official haughtily to the trader; and then he answered snappishly and abruptly to the suggestion of the officer of gendarmerie. "It is not ordered. Vasili Petrovitch, thou hast no children," he continued, referring to a note-book.

"None, none," repeated Vasili. "I am a weak, poor, miserable, lone, old man."

"But thou hast a wife; go fetch her."

"I obey, my Lord, my very merciful Lord," said Vasili Petrovitch, who hastened into the room where his wife, and the aunt, and their only servitor were cowering in a corner, like poultry frightened by a kite.

"Hark ye," said Vasili, "truly my heart has been in my mouth, and I knew not what I was doing; but things may yet be mended;" and, with a deep sigh, he drew from the profound depths of an inner pocket two bank notes.

"Oh my fanatical brother! my fanatical brother! this all comes of thee, because thou wilt not give to Cæsar what is Cæsar's. I must give to Cæsar what is Vasili Petrovitch's! and yet with Benkendorf's people, no trifling—big bits for great fishes," (here Vasili sighed again) "where they come it is like the spigot in the barrel—you are lucky if you can plug it with a lump of gold."

"Oh, Vasili Petrovitch!" said the aunt, "welcome be the first expense if it be the last."

"Oh yes," said Vasili, who had recovered his confidence, and who was drawing the bank note between his thumb and finger, as if loth to part with it, though aware of the expediency of so doing. "Oh yes, with this;—and then they ask to see my wife—they are young men both. What if they take her off?" This idea seemed at once to determine the astute old man, so, taking by the hand his beldame aunt, he said to her: "Hear me, thou must personate my wife."

"What?" said Katinka, to whom the idea was not so formidable. "What? trifle with the high police. What? play with Benkendorf's people?"

"It is no play," replied Vasili; "but very sad and serious earnest. You, child, stir not from hence!" and, locking the door, he insured obedience, whilst he led his old aunt upon his arm.

"One word aside with you, my very merciful Lord," said he to the man in the cloak, "I guess wherefore you have been sent to me. I know I have a foolish brother; but it is well known that we had nothing in common; and I have, in fact, the assurance from one of the civil police-masters that I shall not be confounded in this matter concerning it, or molested. You will, therefore, readily see that there must be some mistake, as you will find, if you will look to this memorandum, which I pray you keep."

Then Vasili turned to the gendarme.

"His Excellency agrees," he whispered, "that it must be a misapprehension. Let me pray you be seated." Here Vasili took the hand of the gendarme, and pressed into it a hundred rouble note—to the official in the cloak he had given a thousand.

"What is this?" said the gendarme, "money! do you think to bribe me?" But here the man in the cloak, whom he treated with great deference, turned round and gave him a significant look, which silenced him. The gendarme pocketed it, as well as his superior.

"Vasili Petrovitch, this is a worse business than you think for."

"Through your kindness, however," replied Vasili, "all may go well, I feel; but what can I offer to my noble guests? What will you take, gentlemen—champagne?"

"Where is your wife?" said the man in the cloak more sternly than before.

"My wife, merciful Lord—my wife—this is my poor old wife," replied Vasili, pointing to the old crone.

"That! your wife!" exclaimed the gendarme; but his companion authoritatively interrupted him, and said with a malicious smile:

"Nay, Vasili Petrovitch, thou hast inspired an interest in me as far as my orders will allow. Come thyself—we want thee; and as for thy wife, she shall remain. We will take the rest of thy household instead of her."

"Oh! I am undone! I am ruined!" said Vasili, who, besides finding the affair wear an aspect so serious, was caught in his own trap.

"But you had really, really better leave my household, and take my wife whom you here behold!"

"Oh! holy Trinity!" said the old woman in a paroxysm of terror, "he is deceiving your merciful nobility. I am not his wife. Only look at me—I knew him before he was born. I have danced him on my knee."

"What! are you his grandmother then?" said the gendarme laughing; and again the cloaked official interrupted his misplaced levity by wrathfully exclaiming: "What! I have defiled his mother! the hound has been playing me false then?"

"Viniebat! Viniebat! I confess—I confess my fault!" said Vasili, falling prostrate.

"Go bring his wife and all his people before me;" and the officer of gendarmerie walked out, led by the old aunt.

"Rise!" said the other, as soon as he was gone. "Rise and harken to me. Though thou hast deceived me, I wish thee well. It may be too that thou art guiltless."

"By the Lord, as I am an humble, honest trader, I am innocent of aught against the Emperor, or his servants, or their laws!"

"Very like, very like, that does not mend the matter; for, when the truth is sifted from you, if you prove guiltless, why then our office is a sorry customer for an humble, honest, trader to deal with; for, even if at length found innocent, it is apt to be judged more politic to keep so obscure an individual safe, than to turn him loose, where secrecy is for the good of the Imperial service."

"Oh, holy Saint Sergius!"

"Thou hast, however, strongly interested my sympathies by that little memorandum—that style of setting forth one's innocence is convincing; if I should contrive to bring you safe back from your trial, perhaps you will let me see the conclusion of it."

"I am poor," said Vasili Petrovitch; "but oh! I am grateful."

"I will take it out in champagne or millinery," whispered the familiar with a wink; "but now listen, our only chance is in keeping your affair very quiet. When you have been duly interrogated and confronted, I must contrive to keep the business as much as possible from the notice of our chiefs, and to let you slip away unperceived."

"Oh! the Lord grant it!" said Vasili.

"As you value your safety, let no rash application be made. You need not even let the police of your quarter know of our visit. I can almost take on me to leave some of your people, who need only say that you are for a few days absent; but if I do, will you forget the champagne?"

"May St. Sergius forget me at my last hour if I do!"

"Two cases remember; and, honest Vasili Petrovitch, it is understood of the right mark."

"It is understood, my Lord;" but, even at such a moment, Vasili reckoned that the precise mark was not stipulated. He could save sixpence a bottle by delivering the lower priced. Just as he was endeavouring to change the subject, lest Cliquot should be specified, a scuffle was heard in the passage; and, as the door flew open, the officer of gendarmerie was seen with his arm around Katinka's waist.

"Oh!" said Vasili Petrovitch, opening wide his mouth like a roaring lion, to emit a terrible exclamation, which as his fear quelled his jealousy, subsided into a slight ejaculation.

"What! how now?—what are you doing there?" said the familiar sternly.

"I was only feeling for treasonable papers concealed about her person."

"That is no duty of yours, Sir. Re-assure yourself, Madam. When you are searched, it shall be in private."

"Oh! oh! oh!" groaned Vasili.

"Is this the whole of your establishment?" continued the official, pointing to the old aunt and a clownish boy.

"All that live under my roof."

"I will not disturb them. Hark you, my friends, if any one inquires for Vasili Petrovitch, he is absent for a few days. Now, Vasili Petrovitch, follow me."

Vasili enjoined to his wife, his aunt, and the serving lad, the most religious silence concerning what had happened.

"To your wife we will recommend silence at the office, for she is going with us."

Vasili groaned, and, turning to his wife, said, "Katinka!"

"Don't talk to me!" sobbed Katinka, "to think that I should have married an old wretch who has got into trouble with Count Benkendorf's office!"

"As for you two, you are warned," resumed the official, and then, turning to the gendarme, "You, sir, take this man in your custody, you know whither. You, madame, follow me."

"Did you say I was to take charge of the lady?"

"No, Sir, I said of this man; though first, before we leave her, you might search the person of his aunt: don't be alarmed, good woman."

"I am not, your nobility."

"Oh, no; she has been searched already," said the gendarme, who, giving Vasili Petrovitch a spiteful squeeze of the arm, hurried him forward.

"For the present you must be hand-bound and blindfolded."

"Oh, in the name of the holy Saint Sergius, where am I going then?"

"To the dungeons of the fortress. Speak not a word; but follow me."

In utter darkness, and in perfect silence, Vasili Petrovitch felt himself hurried along; and, in the same unbroken silence and unrelieved darkness, he was led down steps, and left alone in a chill subterranean abode. Here he spent four weary hours; and then finding the confinement of his bonds intolerable, he lay down, having worked himself into a paroxysm of fear.

Let us shift the scene.

Lochadoff and Durakoff, and two or three more of their merry companions are sitting round the table, considerably excited by the wine, which goes sparkling round.

Jakof is introduced.

"A lock of his hair!—a lock of his hair!—a lock of his hair!" shout all the party in chorus.

"Well, gentlemen," said Jakof, "merit, like water, will always find its level at last. The sentiment was feminine, the idea was novel and pretty—to obtain surreptitiously a lock of my hair."

"Don't boast of your conquests," said Lochadoff, laughing.

"Why not, of what is? You, gentlemen, who affect to be severe and witty, are apt to boast of what is not. I remember a certain bet with Durakoff last Monday, that he was to bring the Katinka to sup with us."

"Oh! the bet was not clearly made," said Lochadoff.

"Very clearly made. Now I suppose he won't pay! Why does that Durakoff bet, when he has not a kopek with which to bless himself?—But I hold you responsible for it, Lochadoff."

"If you will not let him off."

"Let him off!—not I. Why does he lay such foolish wagers? I knew the thing was morally impossible:—I tried it myself, and if any body could have got her away, it would have been I."

"You know her then!—now what do you think of her?"

"A large foot, a nose too Roxalana—too fair—too fat—too Russian."

"He has been ill-treated by the Katinka!"

"Not I," replied Jakof, "only surfeited. You may laugh, gentlemen; but she persecuted me:—it was a sort of Obrasoff affair."

Here followed a roar of laughter.

"I have Katinka painted somewhere by Lesseps: and, by the by, do you know what has happened to him?"

"To Lesseps?"

"He called on me this afternoon, he has fallen into profound disgrace. He has affronted the Emperor, and received orders to quit the empire in four-and-twenty hours."

"What, Lesseps!"

"Poor devil! he has played with the lion, till the lion turned angry," continued Jakof; "he came to ask me for what I owed him. Confound it! thought I, I will have a slave sent to Rome, and made a great artist of:—it would be cheaper, though, after all; as you may imagine, under such circumstances, I paid him generously."

"You, generously!—A medal shall record it!"

"Or it shall be graven on the Alexander column; but sit down," said Lochadoff.

"So I will; but what is this bundle of shawls?"

"This bundle of shawls is the fat, fair, large-footed Russian Katinka!" said Katinka, starting up; "but what did you say about my nose?"

"Now, by the body of Bacchus!" said Jakof, looking very sheepish.

"Do you hear me?" repeated the lady, "or are your ears as stuffed with the cotton I see peeping out of them as your mouth with lies?"

"My very excitable beauty," replied Jakof, backing a pace or two, "I said, touching your nose, that it was a Roxalana nose—the most beautiful of all noses."

"What is a Roxalana nose?" said Katinka, appealing to the rest of the party.

"A snub nose!"

"A pug nose!" answered a couple of mischievous voices.

"And do you maintain, now, that you ever saw as much of me in your life before as you have to-night?"

"Never!" said Jakof, in great confusion.

"Then how dared you say so?"

"I!" said Jakof, not knowing what to say; "why how do you know that I spoke of you?—There have been more than one Katinka upon the boards: the name is common enough, I hope."

"Oh! you would find fault with the name, now, would you?" said the irate beauty, and, making a snatch at his wig, in spite of the most scientific of fastenings, she whirled it aloft in triumph amidst the shouts of the rest of the party, and the cries of "Oh! oh! oh!—don't take it all; leave some for the Obrasoffs!"

At length the lady was pacified, and returned to her champagne; the wig was recovered when trampled out of curl, and the jest exhausted.

"Gospodine Lesseps!" said a servant.

"Oh," said Jakof, "you had better not admit him!"

"It is not very prudent," remarked another of the guests; but whilst they were deliberating, there burst upon them a rude voice preceding the full view of the burly painter's figure.

"So ho, gentlemen!—you are carousing here!" said Lesseps, who appeared a little excited: "what! do I see my friend, Jakof?"

No hilarious demonstrations of delight—such as he had been accustomed to hear, and such as it had become a sort of fashion to greet him with—hailed the entrance of the painter.

"You are dull over your cups, gentlemen, very dull; perhaps you have heard that I am going, and that makes you melancholy?"

The young guardsman, next to him, to whom Lesseps seemed familiarly to point his observation, decidedly cut him, turning, without deigning an answer, towards Jakof, and asking a question about the tails of his dogs.

"I had not the felicity of finding a trace of you to-day—not even a lock of your hair, though these tokens are more current amongst the fair than bank-notes amongst ourselves," said the painter, still jocosely, though somewhat disconcerted by his reception, and though the blood, rising to his forehead and tinging it just above his rugged eyebrows, showed that he was chafing inwardly.

But no one noticed this jest of the painter's, who had almost learned to account himself witty, so long had he found it impossible to open his mouth without the interruption of a roar of laughter. As for Jakof, he answered him inanely. "Ah!..." and then turning his head, proceeded to reply with intense abstraction and interest to the guardsman's question, that he always docked the tails of his puppies himself, having taken lessons from the English rat-catcher, and learned to bite them off with his teeth, the only approved method of performing the operation.

Lesseps sat down, and independently filled a tumbler to the brim with champagne, and then, with an air intended to convey at once aggravation and defiance, he sung the following snatch:—

"Quatre Roussel had three hairs white,
Two on the left temple, one on the right;
And when he went his mistress to see,
The rake, he jauntily plaited all three!"

"Hear me," said Lochadoff, who, having ventured at Durakoff's instigation on the madly dangerous frolic of personating the secret police, had felt peculiar awkwardness on being visited by a man ordered out of the empire, and who, being closely watched, might turn on him a scrutiny so perilous: but besides being of a naturally reckless temper, he felt an undefined sympathy with the banned artist. "Hear me," said Lochadoff, shaking him cordially by the hand; "you know, Lesseps, how we are all kept under the ferule; and so, frankly, I had rather you had not come; but once here—in for a penny, in for a pound—we shall be noted whether or not; so by the holy beard of the liquor-loving Noah, the first tippler in point of antiquity, as you are the first in capacity, we will drain a parting cup together."

"All the attendants but one are removed," chimed in Durakoff, "for a reason you will burst your jolly sides to hear, so we may talk freely."

"Well," said Lesseps, raising his voice, and twirling his moustachios, as he looked around, "in quitting this cursed country, which I profoundly despise, with all belonging to it, there are only you two whom I would give a pinch of snuff ever to see again; you are the only two men in the empire, unless when you are quite sober, which is very rarely. As for talking, I am not afraid of being heard."

"Neither is the jester, the fool, nor the dwarf," sneered the guardsman, but in a whisper.

"What did you say. Sir?" asked Lesseps.

"I made a private observation to my friend, Sir," replied the guardsman, superciliously.

Lesseps frowned. But as a glass was refilled for him, and a seat offered him next to Katinka, he went through the ceremonies of introduction with a rude and grotesque gallantry; and his good-humour was partially restored, when Lochadoff whispered to him in a few words the adventure of Vasili Petrovitch.

"And now, my dear fellow," said Lochadoff, "first tell us how have you got into disgrace with the Emperor, you who were such a favourite."

"In this way. He was not inclined to hear the truth; and I was disposed to speak it, just as I am now; so I shall take leave to preface my narration by a little anecdote. You must know, gentlemen all, that I had a friend—a friend for whom I entertained, and still entertain the greatest affection; as good-looking, clever, and sensible a fellow as you would any of you wish to see. This friend, gentlemen, began life like Bacchus, seated on a barrel, which was strapped to the shoulders of his mother, the canteen-woman. He spent his boyhood, like myself, as a drummer, and in time he rose to be sergeant and fencing-master, and lastly to the dignity of an epaulette on the left shoulder at the taking of the Trocadero. At length he was sent, by some misunderstanding, into a regiment of the royal guard; the officers of this regiment were all hopeful scions of that nobility which fled before the storms of the revolution and the empire, and their wars, to return and gather in the hay when the sun shone. Now, my deeply venerated friend was not noble enough, rich enough, or polished enough, for these fastidious gentlefolks. On the second day, they gave him the cut direct. Somewhat to their disappointment—because, when they agreed to hunt him out like a badger, they were prepared for his bite—he took no notice of it all the following day. The regiment was quartered in the environs of Paris; the colonel to whom the affair was reported, was going up that night; he sent to my friend to attend at his quarters on the following morning.

"At eleven my friend repaired thither. The colonel was taking his chocolate: he was an old émigré, who hated every thing connected with the grande armée.

" 'Sir,' said he, without asking him to be seated, 'I have been informed of all that has passed. I was always doubtful of your exactly suiting the body of officers of my regiment; and I therefore cannot say that I so much regret the necessity which you must feel of immediately withdrawing from it.'

" 'I am not aware of the necessity to which you allude, colonel,' replied my friend, coolly.

" 'Oh! you are not. Sir,' said the colonel with profound disgust; 'must I dot your i's for you? I was anxious that there should be no discussion betwixt them and any person who had served the empire;—but after all, the men of the empire have no sympathy with cowardice;—in a word, you have allowed yourself to be grossly insulted.'

" 'Colonel,' replied my friend, 'I have never in my life left any insult unpunished yet: perhaps you could specify.'

" 'Sir,' said the colonel, 'I find you are lost to all sense of shame. Count A—and the Chevalier de B—, and my own nephew, all publicly turned their backs upon you yesterday; in short, if you do not quietly leave the regiment and the service, you shall be turned out of it, since you force me to speak so harshly.'

" 'All these gentlemen have given me satisfaction.'

" 'What! Count A—?'

" 'I dangerously wounded him at nine this morning. The Chevalier de B—...'

" 'God bless me!' said the colonel: 'and what of the Chevalier de B—'

" 'I have just run him through the body: and your nephew—'

" 'Good God!' said the colonel, 'what of my nephew!'

" 'I must beg of you to excuse me, for it is half-past eleven; your nephew is waiting on the ground for me.'

"What! butcher?' said the colonel. 'I forbid you: I place you under arrest.'

" 'Then I will disgrace your nephew; and further, colonel, this letter is to ask my dismissal from the service. And then, when no longer bound by the rules of military subordination, a word from me to yourself.'

"They met: the nephew was buried the next day. The colonel in his phrenzy struck the sub-lieutenant with his horsewhip; and then, when he had left the service, was persuaded by his friends not to meet him on the plea of inequality of rank. Perhaps some of you, gentlemen, might have felt disposed to do the same. But what does my worthy and esteemed friend? He walks into a public place where the colonel was, and squeezing his cheeks between his fists, he makes him open his mouth like a gaping fish, and then spits into it."

Here Lesseps, who, heightening his recital by the pantomime of action, seemed for a moment about to illustrate his meaning on the person of Jakof, paused for a moment.

"Well," said Durakoff, "and did the colonel fight, then?"

"He fought," replied Lesseps; "and as he had been one of the first fencers of his day, a terrible contest it was. They were both run through the body, and fell simultaneously. As for my friend, the sword had strangely slipped upon his fourth rib before it entered, ripping up the flesh like a plough in a fallow field, as I will show you."

Lesseps, pulling open his shirt, showed a terrible scar; and here the guardsman, having politely wished them all good evening, made his exit quietly.

"And now," continued Lesseps, "that our friend the dog-fancier is gone, and that Jakof does not follow him, he apparently emulating the hound that would never go till he was kicked out—"

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Jakof.

"Now let us have a song! a jolly song! and then I will proceed with my story. Give me another glass of wine! Allow me, Madam, to kiss your lily hand and to drink to the health of your liege lord. I hope he is comfortable in the cellar; for, Madam, if under some circumstances husbands are considered worthy of Heaven, they are worthy of a comfortable berth in this nether world, and where can a man be more happily located than in a wine-cellar?"

"Very true," said Katinka; "I don't pity him, he has kept me close enough."

"Come! come!" said Lesseps; "will no one give us a song? Then fill your glasses and here goes:

If the gods when disposing
Of earth and of sea,
Had been better advised, or
Sought counsel of me,
Where the rivers and oceans roll,
Red wine should be;
With the earth for a vineyard,
The seas for a bowl,
And my throat for a funnel
To bottle the whole!

"And now to my story. You want to know then, gentlemen, why your Emperor, the Emperor of all the Russias has fallen into disgrace with Lesseps, the painter. I'll tell you; because he is an empty-headed fool, because his empire is vastly larger than his wit."

Here all looked involuntarily to the doors.

"You must know that, as long as he was in a good humour, he seemed the only man one could talk freely to in his own empire, of which I now perceive the reason, which is, that he is the only man who dare answer you in the same spirit. But then he winces under the truth and does not like to hear it, and though Lesseps never minds telling a lie to pleasure a friend behind his back—though no one but himself dares say so—he never says what is untrue to a man's face to pleasure him, be he who he may.

"Now the Emperor asks me if his Invalides—the fellows who mount guard at the palace in bear-skin caps—are not fully equal to the Emperor's old guard—I mean the Emperor's—for you know, gentlemen, he was the real Emperor, after whom all other monarchs are like the princes of a masquerade."

"My dear fellow," said Lochadoff, "you forget your late Louis XVIII, with all the weight of legitimacy and of corpulence."

"Bah!" said Lesseps, with an expression of contempt; "a king of farce or pantomime beside the 'little corporal,' the 'king of fire,' the man of battles! Louis and his successor are a pair of Roi Dagoberts of the hunting song—King Dagobert, who you know,

in days of yore,
Once donned his shorts wrong side before,
Which Saint Eloi did no sooner see,
Than he said, 'Oh, Sire! it grieveth me
That your Majesty so ill-breeched should be.'
'It is true,' quoth the King, 'I thought they felt tight,
So we'll shift them about, and we'll put them on right."

"It is very funny," said Jakof; "but, my dear Lesseps, we might be convivial without all these dangerous political allusions."

"You are right," said Durakoff; "we do not know on what terms King Dagobert may be with our Court."

"Exactly," answered Jakof, in sober earnest.

"Who is afraid?" replied Lesseps. "Talk of other Kings, Emperors, or Princes, to me who have seen the Emperor! Why your Nicholas is a miserable parody on him!—a child with a paper cocked hat and a penny trumpet!"

"Hush! hush! hush! hush!" said all the auditors in a breath.

"Not I!" said the painter; "I will say my say. Why, your Emperor reminds me of the other verse of King Dagobert,

who always wore
A big sword of steel—in days of yore.
So quoth St. Eloi, 'Oh! my King,
If your foot should slip,
And your Majesty trip,
You will hurt yourself with that ugly thing.'
'It is true,' said the Monarch so good;
'Let us have a blunt broadsword of wood.' "

"Well, but your story?" said Lochadoff.

"Well then, for my story," replied the painter. "Your King Dagobert was vaunting his Invalides against the Emperor's Old Guard.

" 'Now don't you think them better men?' said he.

"I answered nothing. 'Well,' he continued; 'they are as tall, as strong, as well dressed, as well drilled, more faithful, and braver—for, after all, ours beat them.'

" 'Beat them!' said I; 'with the assistance of twenty degrees of frost, or three to one; but never otherwise. I grant you. Sire, that they are as well dressed, drilled, and disciplined—but to be as brave—they must not only have worsted lace and silver medals on the breasts, but a stout spirit within them; and, to be as strong, your Imperial Majesty must feed them on something better than rye bread and cabbage.'

" 'Oh! but they have meat!' said the Emperor.

" 'Oh, yes! as much in a month as I have seen an Englishman take at a mouthful. In short, they want hearts in their bodies and beef in their bellies!'

"The Emperor did not laugh as usual. At length, for he had come, I believe, for the purpose of giving me a subject from Napoleon's history, he said, 'You have thought of nothing.'

" 'Not yet. Sire.'

" 'Then let it be his flight from Russia,' said his Majesty, maliciously.

" 'Sire,' answered I, 'I know a better subject.'

" 'What is it?'

" 'Napoleon on the raft at Tilsit—the Emperor, your brother, on his right hand, the Emperor of Austria on his left, for they both yielded him precedence, and Napoleon commencing an anecdote, 'When I was lieutenant of artillery at the siege of Toulon.' The Emperor turned upon his heel, and so it happens, gentlemen, that I have received orders to quit the empire in eight-and-forty hours."

"I wish," said Lochadoff, "he would serve us all so."

"My dear fellow," said Durakoff, "who would then be left to serve him?"

"But the best joke is to come," continued Lesseps. "I have money owing to me, more than would fill a sledge. I have been round to-day, and not a soul would pay me, or even see me—all knowing that I must be off to-morrow."

"A good joke you call it!" said Durakoff.

"Oh! not their refusal to pay me—though, confound them, I ought to be thankful too for their utterly disgusting me with a country where the ruler is like a mangy dog over a bone, and is yet a prince compared to all his subjects. The joke is the following. You all know that I have committed two great follies in my life; the one was coming to Russia, the other marrying there. Well then, my German wife has taken it into her head to come with me to Paris, and has got her passport all ready. Now of all the people to whom I went collecting cash, as I have told you, I saw only one, and that person gave me a suggestion quite as valuable."

"As valuable as money?" said Durakoff.

"To the full," replied Lesseps. "Imagine that I was requested to take with me a very pretty interesting woman, a foreigner married to a Russian, and seeking to escape from the country. She flying from a husband rendered it necessary that, as a bond of sympathy, I should be running away from a wife; so, instead of starting to-morrow at sunset with my spouse, I am off, en aimable scélérat at daybreak with an interesting substitute."

"Have you seen her?"

"No; but any change must be a gain."

"And if your wife follows?"

"She can't. I am going to make use of her passport."

"I thought that Jakof had paid you most liberally."

"He was out three times to-day, that I called and sent. After all, he is no worse than the rest, and I therefore regret that, as I must be off to-morrow, I shall have no opportunity of meeting any body else, as I have vowed to twist the nose off the first shuffler I meet."

"How very funny," said Jakof, "but you mistake, my friend; I told you that I was about to send to you to-night—I can pay you at once, Sir: what have you painted for me?"

"May the devil burn me if I remember!" replied Lesseps.

"The one is a scene in the Pyrenees—some muleteers—two mules and a donkey, threading a Salvator-Rosa-like path; the other is a portrait of myself—let me see, what did we agree for?"

"Money and fair words I suppose," replied the painter, "but how much, or how many, I cannot tell."

"You must say," said Jakof.

"Well, suppose we take five hundred roubles apiece for each of the mules, and the jack-ass; and for the portrait half the sum."

"Half for his portrait!—rate him lower than a donkey!"

"By no means: but the former would be the portrait; the latter only the copy of a portrait," replied Lesseps.

"And then," said Katinka maliciously, "there is my portrait which he painted for you."

"I don't remember it," said the painter.

"Oh! Jakof does," said Durakoff, "for he was boasting of it."

"Well! well;" said Jakof, taking out his pocket book with a sigh.

"Katinka, do you take punch or champagne? iced?" said Lochadoff.

"Madam," interrupted Lesseps, "I drink to your spouse in the cellar."

"Oh! iced by all means," replied Katinka.

"Which," said Lochadoff, "the champagne or your husband."

"Gentlemen," said Durakoff, "a brilliant idea suggests itself," and, initiating the company into his plot, he led them into an adjoining room, and then quitted them.

"Look," said Lochadoff, taking out a hundred rouble note, with which Vasili Petrovitch had attempted to bribe him in the character of the gendarme, and rolling it up to light his cigar with, "look! Vasili Petrovitch gave me this for taking care of his lady."

"What is the husband's is the wife's," said Katinka snatching it away.

By this time the door of the next room was thrown open, and there stood Vasili Petrovitch, hand-bound, blindfolded, and barefooted, with Durakoff beside him, making pantomimic gestures to enjoin silence.

"Vasili Petrovitch," said Durakoff in a rough feigned voice: "is that the trader Vasili Petrovitch?" "It is he, your Excellency," replied Lochadoff, in a tone of profound deference.

"My lord—" said Vasili.

"Hush! speak not till thou art spoken to. Vasili Petrovitch, tell all thou knowest of this matter, and beware how thou dost hold back or falsify one syllable. You write down what he says."

"What matter, your Excellency?" said Vasili Petrovitch.

"What matter! well, truly that is modest. Art come here to interrogate me, prisoner?"

"Oh! most merciful Lord," replied Vasili; "I am only too ready to obey your excellency, but how can I unless I am informed in what?"

"How!" said Durakoff, "supposing thou knowest nothing treasonable after all, am I to be so negligent of the Emperor's service as to betray his secrets? Thou wilt not speak? I ask thee for the last time."

"Oh!" said Vasili in terrible perplexity, "if you would only tell me what you wish to know!"

"Then," said Durakoff sternly, "apply the red hot irons to his feet, and sear him to the quick."

"Oh mercy! mercy!" roared Vasili in an agony of terror, "I will say anything."

But he was pitilessly seized, and, from a wine-cooler, in which a goodly number of bottles were arrayed, to prevent the necessity of any intrusion of domestics, two or three lumps of ice were rubbed against the soles of Vasili's feet, whose imagination was so impressed with the idea of being burned, that his shrieks obliged them partially to gag him, whilst Katinka clapped her hands with delight and laughed outright.

"What was that?—do I hear her voice?" said Vasili Petrovitch.

"His head wanders," said Durakoff; "put him into an ice-cellar, and let him remain there till we next call him up for interrogation."

Vasili was lifted aloft, and carried several times round the room, and at length deposited in the wine-cooler.

"Oh! Oh! I am on hot coals again. Oh mercy! mercy!"

"Nonsense, you are ankle deep in the ice-slush," replied Lochadoff, "it is not comfortable to lie down in, I grant you, but you can stand up, it will do your burnt feet good."

"Oh, your nobility! you are the gendarme officer; I know you by your voice. Oh, shall I ever get away from here?"

"Who knows? You should have answered his Excellency."

"Oh, 'tis awfully cold," said Vasili, lifting up first one leg, and then the other, like a dancing bear.

"And how long am I to remain here?"

"Till you are next called up."

"And when will that be?" asked the trader piteously.

"I don't know. Perhaps in April next."

CHAPTER VIII.

The pale sister who had watched beside Blanche through her contagious malady, in the place of meeting of the sect over which the brickmaker presided, was a wealthy and noble lady, who, becoming deeply interested in her strange story, continued actively to befriend her, though for many reasons shrinking from recognition.

She had committed Blanche to the care of the German widow of an officer, a woman to whom personal sorrow had taught kindness and compassion, and who was besides discreet, unprying, and trustworthy. Living in a retired situation, she had hitherto gained her livelihood by devoting her time to an insane lady, with the care of whom the immediate relations had not only entrusted, but to whom they all appeared utterly to have abandoned her—all excepting one, and this was the pale sister, who was so distantly connected that she could hardly have claimed the right to exercise the active vigilance she did over her destiny, but for the generosity with which she doubled the somewhat parsimonious allowance made by the lunatic's guardians, so that the widow should have no temptation to resort to any other occupation which might divert her attention and solicitude from this one object.

Here Blanche had spent the period of her convalescence and of her confinement—here the sister had solaced her with sympathy and inspired her with hope, and the widow soothed her with attentive kindness. The woman whose reason some terrible calamity had overthrown, inspired all the interest with which youth, and gentleness, and the traces of beauty, invest unfortunates in her situation.

Her insanity had assumed the form of tender, dreamy melancholy. Most frequently lost to all surrounding objects, she would muse for hours, and then her eyes would fill with tears and distil large burning drops, whilst her countenance was serene and almost happy in expression, like a moment's heavy rain with a sunny sky which is not perceptibly clouded—such as the reader may remember to have seen once in the course of many summers—an anomaly startling not in its own aspect, but on account of the rare and unnatural contrast which it offers.

And then, whenever she awoke from the entangled world of thought, in which a bewildering drowsiness seemed to yield repose to her faculties, she busied herself with mingled joy and misgiving in restless preparation both of her person and of the apartments for the reception of some beloved one expected, yet, alas! who never came.

But, withal, she was not insensible to the kindness of those around her; and still more impressed by sympathy and sorrow, so that a great part of her time she had learned to spend by Blanche's side.

There was only one day in every month—one unvarying day on which, towards evening, she seemed to rouse under the influence of a painful excitement, and in the morning Blanche never saw her, though the shrieks and ravings of the lunatic rang through the house in the wild paroxysms of her insanity.

And on these occasions, as regularly as they recurred, the pale sister, with a beautiful devotion to her suffering kinswoman, was always closeted with her through the live-long day and night, till the unfortunate maniac at length found refuge in sleep, and then she left her, so exhausted that she often fainted over the cup of cordial wine which the widow held prepared to refresh her after her long and trying vigil.

After these terrible four-and-twenty hours were passed, the violence of the patient always gave way to a natural reaction, and she became as gentle as before, except that she dreamed much, and shed more tears than usual.

Now the day on which Blanche went with the old sectarian to reclaim from his brother the deposit of Mattheus, was the day of the mad woman's periodical fury. The widow had received a message to repair immediately on urgent business to the house of an influential personage, whom her protectress had interested in Blanche's fate. The pale sister had not yet come, but she had never failed to do so, and it was not till towards midday that the patient became violent. The widow, therefore, left her bolted in an apartment lighted only by a skylight, and the walls and flooring of which, being padded, left no means of injurious self-violence to her charge.

The mad woman watched with intense anxiety for her accustomed visitant; and when, at length, hour after hour passed away without her arrival, her anxiety gave way to fury. Hitherto, during these fits, the pale sister had always been there to struggle with and restrain her, so that the fastenings of the door, which opened outwards, had never been tried. Everyone knows that the excitement of insanity, like that of anger, if it does not permanently increase the strength of the human body, still often fearfully augments it for the moment by concentrating into a brief period the power of exertion, leaving afterwards the exhausted frame proportionally weakened. With this ephemeral force of the maniac, the patient burst open the door of her chamber, and when Blanche, returning from her fruitless visit to the house of the perfidious Vasili, hastened to her child, there stood the mad woman in the middle of the room.

Her hair was dishevelled and floating in disorder, her garments hung in rags about her body, her eye sparkled with the wild and fitful brightness of insanity, her brows were contracted into a fearful distortion.

"Hush!" she said, putting her finger to her lip, "he sleeps—"

"He sleeps!—my child!" shrieked Blanche, who with a terrible foreboding rushed to the bedside of her sleeping infant; but there it lay in its deep, calm, dreamless sleep, its cheeks like the budding rose, and its little bosom regularly heaving.

"Oh, thank God!" said the mother with unutterable gratitude.

"He sleeps!—hush! hush!" said the maniac, "rude stranger, you will awaken him!—it is not yet the hour—the troops have not yet beat the morning drum—not that he awakens easily—you may pass to and fro and stamp upon his grave, and he says not even, 'don't disturb me!'

"If he were easily disturbed, you know, those hammers would awaken him—knock, knock, knock, knock!—do you hear them?—did you ever hear those sounds before! Oh yes, it is our wedding day to-morrow, they are nailing up the drapery and festoons, and the platform for the orchestra—poor fellows, they were early at their work.

"The platform—oh! what bloody band is to play on it? What do I see uprising there—oh God! oh God!—five gibbets! One for Pestel! one for Kahovski! one for Bestoujeff, and one for Mouravief! One, two, three, four,"—and the maniac counted on her fingers—"but who is the fifth for? Merciful Heaven! not for him!—oh no! no! no!—men, living men, with bodies sensible to pain, and with immortal souls, are not thus hanged up by the neck like dogs!"

"Poor sufferer!" said Blanche, "oh what a world of trouble!" And then, pressing the mad woman's hand, she kneeled to induce her to kneel too, and pray according to her wont.

"What!" said the maniac, "pray!—pray! when even the Saviour has refused to save"—and then, quoting the words of the mad wife in Krasinski's beautiful drama, "The Infernal Comedy," she raised her hands despairingly towards Heaven, "Oh! he has seized with both hands his cross, and cast it into the abyss! Hark! dost not hear that cross, the hope of the wretched, crashing as it falls from star to star!—it is breaking, and it scatters through the universe the fragments of its wreck!—"

Here she covered her eyes for a few moments with her hand, and the looks of Blanche wandered anxiously from this sad spectacle to her sleeping child.

At length the maniac stared again wildly around her, and her thoughts again reverted into their former all-absorbing train.

"And they, what do they here, why do their drums beat? Why do their arms shine so brightly? Why dance the black and white plumes? And why glares the scarlet in the morning air? Oh God! all those brave men, who bear themselves so gallantly, will not stand by with arms in their avenging hands and sanction a deliberate assassination? If you want life,—if you are quite remorseless,—then take theirs—'twas they persuaded him,—they all rebelled in deed as well as thought,—and if there be devotion in the hearts of all of them there was no pity for his danger, and there is blood on some of their hands, but not on his. Hang them! but not the husband of my bosom, not my soul's love, not him! you shall not touch one hair of his blessed head—for the sacred affection of a wife protects him.

"Reflect, Sire," continued the maniac, throwing herself at Blanche's feet, "reflect! you are young yourself,—you have a wife who loves you,—you have children whom you love, you are one of the earth's demigods, you have power, you are victorious—oh then why not look down and pity? Your rule is absolute now over sixty millions, there are sixty million lives, any of which you may extinguish by a dash of your imperial pen! and I implore you, Sire, only for one,—there is only one I care for,—that is not my own, and that pitiful one you will grant me? For when a beggar, Sire, stands by your ample store and asks one kopek in the name of Christ, who can refuse it him? Oh, Sire! that life your heart will not deny me, consider that I am a fond, weak, loving, woman. No—no—oh God! let me rise up, I have profaned those knees which should only bend to thee—this is not the Emperor, this is not Nicolai Paulovitch! this is the hangman."

Blanche made a vain effort to pacify her: she continued with wild vehemence, "This is the hangman, the vile, loathsome hangman, who is to tie the murderous rope about that neck which nothing but these arms ought ever to encircle. Make way, make way, you are the hangman, but where is the Emperor? Show me to the Emperor! Show me, gentlemen, I implore of you to the Emperor.... But hark!—it is too late, oh God! oh God! he is dangling aloft, he has fallen once with the breaking rope; they have tied him up with his broken limb, which hangs suspended loosely from his body, just like his tender body as it dangles by the fatal cord from that foul tree!.... look, look, look!" and the maniac, grasping Blanche by the hand, led her to the windows and then, turning round, and looking into her face, she said, "Ah, now I know you! so you are come at last, Madame Obrasoff, what then—if you will save him from himself,—what then? Though I am the injured wife, and you the adulterous mistress. Oh save him! save him! save him!" and with a wild shriek she kneeled again and seized Blanche by the hem of her garment. Then rising, she continued wildly,

"Hark, hark! to the hammers, knock, knock—knock! Oh they will waken him, and he sleeps so sweetly now, outwearied, on his dungeon straw—look, lo, he dreams! he murmurs out a name. Oh God! it is not mine—it is not his fond wife's,—it is thine, vile woman! thine murderess! for oh! thou hast not saved him—oh trust her not, trust her not! turn not, my husband, from my fond embrace, to hide thy head on her false bosom, for the night that thou were first doomed to lie a cold corpse with thy warm blood curdled—that night, with her plumes and diamonds, the wretched woman smiled in the Emperor's presence! She, in his murderous presence smiled her murdering smile,—oh I have heard it all!

"For thou didst murder him, woman! say not nay. There was a time when first he wooed me: if I had asked him then, as afterwards in vain upon my knees I did beseech him to fly these dangerous men and their conspiracies—there was a time he would have listened to me; but thou didst win his constant heart away, and then that heart—filled with another love—was deaf to my entreaties. How didst thou win it from me?—tell me then pale sorceress?—and yet—oh God! you say the sentence is pronounced—oh then forgive me if I have spoken harshly, forgive me gentle lady, so you can only, only, only, only save him....

"Oh thou wouldst fly from me!—stop, stop! adulterous murderess, stop!—knowest thou not that he is dead, and thou art dead, and I am dead—and here below, where we both howl for light, thou art doomed to suffer for ever thus."

And here the maniac flew like a wild beast at Blanche, whose enfeebled frame bent like a reed, as she was borne to the ground before she had time to call for succour, a call which would, if heard, have been vain in a house where the only servant was accustomed to the periodical ravings of the lunatic.

"Now, look you," continued the mad woman, pulling loose her victim's hair, and twisting her fingers into it, "in this manner it is doomed that I shall drag thee for ever and ever through the long night of time. Ha! ha! it is pleasant to hear, as I have so often heard before, thy head bound over the ground as I dash thee upon it—for this, this is the ninth, and on the ninth he died!"

Here the maniac paused; and Blanche, stunned, breathless, and affrighted, had not even strength to call for help.

"Now, tell me, tell me," continued the wife of the conspirator, "how didst thou win his true and constant heart from me? Let me look at thee—my form was surely taller and more graceful—my hair more long and silky—my skin as fair—my eyes more soft and bright—and yet—and yet he left me for thee! What is, then, this expression that men rave about? Where are these changing hues of the rainbow which they say are in thine eyes?—I see them not. Why say they that thy step is like the fluttering of the butterfly—thy voice like the Æolian harp? Why did he call thee Euphemia—the fairy-like, ethereal, and impalpable Euphemia! who didst look as if fed in thy grossest meal on the egg of the humming-bird, and the bloom collected from the fruit,—as if thy thirst was slaked with dew stored up in the chalice of a flower? What saw he in thee that was not in me?"

At this moment, Blanche's infant, at length awaked from its sleep by the mad woman's violence, turned on its side, and cried aloud.

"Oh God! a child—a child! the babe's mouth answers me! Oh, therein lay thy spell, then, sorceress, in that child! Oh, merciful father, thou didst leave me barren, and didst give a child to this adulteress—and thus I lost his love! Ha, woman! then it was not thou, it was this babe; if so—if thou hast heard of Herod's massacre, where they dashed out young children's brains against the pavement—look thou here!"

At these words, Blanche—feeble, and stunned, and bleeding—started to her feet with a wild, heart-rending shriek; and no sooner was the infant in the maniac's hands, than the terror of the affrighted mother braced her unstrung nerves, and, with the energy of the lioness, whose whelps a serpent is enfolding, the fainting woman bounded forward, and also seized her babe.

The tender infant was thus precariously placed betwixt the malignant strength of insanity and the tenacious grasp of a mother holding on to her child. Another instant might have seen the judgment of Solomon realized on its person, only that just as there arose, galvanically, as it were, a mightier force to brace the mother's nerve, so her instinctive perception was more rapid—she loosed the child—she seized the maniac's throat—she cast her down with preternatural strength—that woman whom two strong men could not hold when in her paroxysms; and then, snatching up her babe, she fled like the hunted deer.

In the next chapter it will be explained why the pale sister had, for the first time, stayed away.

CHAPTER IX.

The Prince Isaakoff had been ten days at Moscow; in four more he was to return. Horace, who had agreed to follow him thither on the third day, still lingered behind, although he often wished he had accompanied him; and, although he had only to call for horses to fulfil this promise, he lingered—unable to escape from the fascination which Nadeshta exercised over him through her beauty, her enthusiasm, and her touching confidence. And then he longed to break the spell, because his gratitude, his admiration, and the absorbing interest with which she had inspired him—the vivid consciousness of the impassable gulf which divided the Count de Montressan from the slave-girl—led him for the first time to dread that he might be tempted to villainy which would have filled him with remorse, or folly, of which he felt the bare idea ridiculous.

Now the excitement of a strangely unnatural position when, in the presence of approaching death, he stood face to face with a creature of angelic beauty, whose living features seen for the first time were yet familiar to him; for whose misfortune his sympathies had just been strongly roused by his interview with her brother; and who was about to die in her attempt to save him—had all conjoined to lead him to a solemn declaration, which—in the same sincerity—in the enthusiasm of his gratitude for their deliverance, he had repeated when they stood on the bank in safety; a declaration to do that which was socially impossible, and which, notwithstanding its solemnity, in the sober moments of his reason, he could only regard as a rhapsody of its temporary aberration. And yet he felt an undefined dissatisfaction at the very reasons which, when reviewed, not only served to palliate his course of action, but seemed to leave no other reasonably open to him.

This noble girl, it was true, had saved his life, and, in a moment of transport, he had promised that which was clearly impossible—to make her his wife—a promise so frequent in its violation by men of birth towards their inferiors, as almost to be excusable when not made with premeditated guile, only that here, the life which she had devoted to save his gave it a character of more than usual sanctity. But then, on the other hand, the Count was about to rescue her and those dearest to her from their miserable situation. He had already tested the gratitude of the Duchess by writing to implore her to watch over the destiny of the wife of Mattheus; Mattheus, and Nadeshta herself, he was determined to redeem from their slavery, not only at the expense of all that wealth so lightly won, but of his own patrimonial fortune if required, or by his blood, if wealth was insufficient to effect his object; but as for marrying—it was too preposterous! and yet, how strange that, if it had been possible to link that beautiful and ingenuous peasant-girl a gem, and not a gem in its unpolished roughness, but only one unflawed by contact with the world—if it had been possible to link to the genealogical tree, even of her tyrant, whom he now despised, that beauteous maiden, Horace felt then, for the first time, that he, who had railed so bitterly against matrimony, would have hastened to secure her as a prize that some one might have ravished from him.

Horace, in fact, felt that he had the misfortune to love, where alike his honour as a man and his self-dignity imperatively forbade the gratification of his passion. That, however, which touched him most was the confident simplicity with which Nadeshta had evidently accepted his wild promise, without ever for an instant doubting its validity or his intention to fulfil it.

Always singularly isolated at school by her consciousness of the contempt with which her companions would have treated her if cognisant of her real station; and since then cut off from all communion by her utter want of sympathy with all surrounding her, she had lived, as we have heard from her own avowal, in the past and the future—such as she had gathered the one from books, and gilded the other in her warm impetuous imagination. The momentary disenchantment occasioned by the condition of her brother and the conduct of Horace had been effaced by his subsequent behaviour; and the indefinite illusions she nursed so long, had resumed all their influence, based upon a stronger semblance of reality.

She only saw in Horace—young, generous, noble, wealthy, and accomplished—one of that class of Western men, not only lords, but masterless themselves, whose eloquence and whose blood have been poured forth so freely to advocate the equality of all human rights; for, alas! Nadeshta's enthusiasm turned over unobserved the more numerous pages which record the bigotry and narrow selfishness of caste, struggling to increase all trammels but its own.

And here he came like the errant knights of old, who broke through the tangled meshes of the destiny most hopelessly interwoven with misfortune, or rather like a guardian angel, to snatch her from the darkness of despair. He had enthusiastically promised, at any sacrifice, to free, not herself alone, but all connected with her, from their ignominious bondage. She saw and felt that he loved her; and he had said that he would marry her—his word was passed—that bond, among the Western men—that treble bond of all the chivalrous class of which he was a noble scion.

What marvel then that Nadeshta, in her simplicity, never doubted! And, in truth, this marriage was the last object that occupied her thoughts, filled so entrancingly with her love, the salvation of her brother, and the fulfilment of those dreams of wandering through the lands and scenes of her unceasing aspirations, not only free as a wild bird, but with Horace and Mattheus.

Horace, who loved, be it remembered, felt strangely disquieted at the idea of disturbing his own image from the pedestal on which this enthusiastic girl had raised it in her thoughts; and so—ever resolved to break the charm—yet when face to face with her, he yielded to the influence of the hour; and thus every meeting had only served to strengthen an impression which he felt to be so fatal.

Sometimes, indeed, after these interviews, Horace had looked with envy on the moujiks at the cottage doors, and wished that fate had placed him in their humble station—at least, if they had not been slaves; for then what happiness in a life spent with Nadeshta, unembittered by all thought of the world's scorn and ridicule, and by all consciousness of derogation!

But hence arose, however, the reflection that, if he could have changed places with a peasant, would not Nadeshta in the superiority of her education and her knowledge have met his love with scorn? And then, was the most passionate love of women worthy of any sacrifices?—That love, which, even when sincere, they call up like the emotions of a mighty actress, who, for the moment, identifies her being with the feeling which she casts off with her stage attire; and which even in utter coldness of heart they can simulate with the most deceptive pathos; and here his thoughts recurred to the sad story of the conspirator, and to the Obrasoffs.

In this frame of mind, Horace sought out Nadeshta—still incapable of varying in all the generous resolutions he had formed; but steeled at length to speak the first words which he had ever uttered to shake illusions he was determined to destroy. If then, after clearly learning his resolution, the slave-girl, rendered free, should choose to follow him with her unaspiring love, his great name was unsullied, and his conscience satisfied.

But, first snatching his hat, he walked up and down before the mansion in an agitation which he himself thought ridiculous—profoundly ridiculous!—when he, the Count de Montressan, the experienced man of the world, was going into the presence of a village beauty.

He turned the angle of the building, and there stood Nadeshta before him. She was equipped for a journey. Two rough-looking horses were harnessed to one of the light country carts, used indeed by the gentry in the terrific cross-roads; and a very old peasant, miserably clad, stood ready to drive them.

The steward, doubtful how to act with regard to Nadeshta, and perfectly sensible that the Prince considered her as the attraction which kept his visitor in the autumnal desolation of his country-seat, dared not refuse her the vehicle and horses which she had imperatively demanded, although he did not think it necessary to show any good- will in their selection.

Nadeshta greeted the Count with unusual coldness; but then her thoughts were evidently pre-occupied by a letter which she was re-perusing.

"Nadeshta!" said Horace, "what is this? Where are you going?"

"I am summoned to go immediately," replied Nadeshta, "I fear to the bed-side of my earliest friend."

"Is it far?"

"Forty versts."

"These horses will never drag you forty versts. The roads are dreadful."

"Then," said Nadeshta, coldly and resolutely, "when they break down, I must walk the rest."

"But," said Horace, "I have the command of my host's stable. Will you not let me drive you where you wish to go!"

"Oh yes," replied Nadeshta.

"Had you forgotten all that I owed to you? All the deep interest that I feel. Why did you not apply to me?"

"I could not ask, unless you offered."

"This is unkind; have I not proffered my services the moment I knew your wishes?"

"Have I not accepted the moment you proffered them?"

"And do you desire to go immediately?"

"This instant," replied Nadeshta, with all the imperious haughtiness of a Princess or a beauty.

"Bring out directly," said Horace, "the lightest droshky, and the four best horses in the stable—the four we have driven English fashion."

"The droshky will be dashed to atoms in our roads, my Lord," said Johann obsequiously, "if you drive with any speed; no spring carriage will stand it,—unless you take the landau suspended above the trunks of two pliant birch saplings."

"You are right—then get it ready; and let us have six horses abreast and a driver with his axe. If it breaks down, he will cut a young tree and repair it."

In a few minutes the vehicle was prepared. The wind was cold and piercing—the sky, dark and cloudy, threatened a premature snow-storm.

"You will be cold," said Horace; and he threw his cloak, lined with costly sable around Nadeshta's shoulders. She mechanically thanked him; and, throwing it down, wrapped it with as much nonchalance about her feet as if she had been an Empress.

"Now drive—drive fast," said she.

The driver of this new team was the Starost, whose cruelty Horace had concealed at Nadeshta's entreaty; and as he turned his face towards them when he got on his box, Horace was involuntarily startled at the countenance which was terribly impressed on his memory from the fact of his having last seen it glaring upon him, with diabolical malignity, when he lay hopelessly imbedded in the moss.

"I hear! I hear!" replied the vigorous old man; and he urged his horses at a ruinous pace, impelled alike by his wish to obey Nadeshta, to whom he owed her companion's late forbearance, and by the satisfactory idea that he was injuring his Lord's cattle without fear of punishment.

So jolting was the motion of the vehicle as it was rapidly dragged along, notwithstanding its rude springs, that all conversation was impossible till the driver stopped to breathe his horses; and then Horace found Nadeshta incomprehensibly absorbed in her own thoughts, uncommunicative, and silent.

Again they hurried forward; and, at length, in the deep rutty road, in two feet of mud, in the midst of a dark pine forest, again the foaming horses could only drag the vehicle through at a snail's pace.

Here the Starost turned round on his seat, and addressed Nadeshta in Russ.

"Hear me, daughter: some strange sorrow has come over thee. Our people, who have learned to watch thy countenance as the sun in harvest time, have all seen it—so have I. Thou art not, and yet thou art, more than one of us. Thou hast the science and the tongue of the foreigner: but yet we are not blind. Somehow, it is this man hath made thee sad. Say only the word, and I throw the Niemetz under the carriage wheels, and crush the life from his accursed body. I have seen the Lord's look at him: it will not anger him much—it will be accident: at worst, Siberia—and this will shortly be as bad. Say only the word, daughter!"

"Hush, brother!" replied Nadeshta; "thy thoughts are always of violence: have a care lest thou perish violently. Now I order thee, drive on, drive speedily."

"Well, well, 'tis all one, not even thanks!" grumbled the old savage; and with his hoarse voice he encouraged his horses to drag the vehicle more speedily through the slough.

"What does he say?" asked Horace.

"Nothing intended for your ear," replied Nadeshta. "The Starost, who has long learned contempt of equals, hate and mistrust of superiors, has no more confidence in foreigners; and in his untutored prejudice, the stern old slave is right."

The horses having got out of the hollow road, here put forth their speed, and interrupted the observation of the wondering Horace. At length they paused again, and Nadeshta said,

"You have expressed curiosity to know whither and to whom, and wherefore, I am going this hurried journey, on which you have, of your own free will, accompanied me. Well, listen; it is not, after all, unfitting that you should hear, Count Horace."

This "Count" struck harshly and gratingly on her companion's ear; but, without allowing him time to speak, she continued:

"Know then that I had, that I have now, a friend—a person with whom some of my school years were spent in intimacy. She is young, attractive in person, high-born, and wealthy; she is generous and sincere. I remember her when her heart, overflowing with its kindly merriment, reminded one of the birds that flutter on the branches in the bright spring sun, when, inspiring all who hear, they pour out in one gush of melody, their joyous notes. I remember, for alas! it is not long to remember, a month or two ago, when she was admired of all, and when, joined to her natural graces, her rank, and her large fortune—without which those graces are nothing in men's eyes,—would have allowed her to command almost any alliance in the empire. I remember, when there was not one who might have touched her young heart but would have been proud of her preference. Alas! she dreamed like me; and no wonder, for we had indulged one dream together, seeing and despising her own countrymen, and regardless of the factitious brilliancy which gilds their selfish, servile meanness. She dreamed that foreigners were all that our Muscovites are not; attributing to slavery—for all but one within this empire are slaves, with the exception of such as I, who are the slaves of slaves—attributing to slavery that which is inherent in man's nature.

"Ignorant, as I then was, of what we have learned so bitterly, that custom and self-love, and pride and prejudice, impose an equal servitude, and corrupt as certainly as that which weighs upon us all,—driving out every noble sentiment from the heart to take refuge on the lips,—this poor, misguided girl, Count Horace, guileless, without ambition, open as the day at noon—she who had scorned to share the fortune of the powerful, the opulence of the high among her people—she gave confidingly, without reserve, her young and pure affections, and her maiden love to a stranger—she cast her vast fortune, and her affection as a daughter and a sister, as dross into the balance, offering to sacrifice them all to him, to fly with him whithersoever he guided!

"Well, what did this man of nice honour and of ancient name—this man who had led her on with vows of love to pour out all her gentle soul in vows of reciprocal love? I will tell you what he did; I will explain his infamy. By a cruel jest, he made that tender and confiding woman a scorn, a by-word, a thing to be trampled by the envious ridicule of her peers—he cast her wantonly to earth when clinging fondly to him, to leave her with a broken heart, and bruised and wounded spirit, in her incurable despair! But look, if you would know all, read this;" and Nadeshta, giving him two letters at the same time, called sternly to the Starost to slacken the pace into which he was again urging the jaded horses; for they had turned from the heavy cross-road on to a broad paved way, bordered on each side by rows of oak, forming an avenue along which benches of stone were scattered, indicating their proximity to some habitation.

"Good God!" said Horace with a start, and overwhelmed with confusion, "these are my letters to the Obrasoffs!—these are the two most wily and deceitful women in Christendom, Nadeshta. They were seeking to deceive me!"

"Then," said Nadeshta, "to that suspicion, to the thought that he might be deceived, the blind, mean self-love of this man has sacrificed my gentle Anna!"

"How," said Horace, "this is very strange. Was I mistaking, or are you? Where are we going? It is impossible that I can go to the Obrasoffs, though, it is true, they must be still at Peterhoff."

"In ten minutes more you will stand in your victim's presence," said Nadeshta.

"It is impossible, Nadeshta. Anna Obrasoff has imposed upon your gentle nature."

"Anna Obrasoff is dying!"

"Dying!" repeated Horace, his heart filled with remorse and doubt. "Dying!—oh, God! was I deceived? Stop, stop! it is impossible that I should face the mother or the daughter!"

"Hark," said Nadeshta, "Count Horace, if there be any pity in your soul you shall follow me into that house to see the sorrow you have caused. If not, my fate is desperate, on every side despair darkens around me, shutting all outlets. If there were a rising of the slaves to-morrow, I, with this woman's arm, would seize the axe or the torch. So, if you are remorseless—I call to our driver—this slave, oppressed into ferocity, and he will throw your body beneath the carriage wheels, and crush the life out of the felon heart that seeks to fly the ruin it has made. Was not Anna's fate bright enough, mine full enough of terror, that you should change her happiness to desolation, that you should wring the last hope from my misery?"

"Hear me, Nadeshta!" said Horace, "do not talk so wildly. Hear me, dear Nadeshta, if what you say be true—if you be not imposed upon,—then I have dealt very cruelly, so after all I follow you whether the deceived or the deceiver."

"On, on, on, on!" said Nadeshta, and in a few minutes more they stand before the country-house of the Obrasoffs.

The glass doors intended for summer are all shut, the bleak wind, which whirls the withered leaves in eddies, howls at them for admission; no human being is attracted by the sound of the carriage wheels: all is silent; the house seems tenantless and abandoned.

The Starost alights and rings—an interval elapses without answer; nothing is heard but the hard breathing of the panting horses, as the steam from their foaming sides rises visibly into the frosty air.

"The house is uninhabited," said Nadeshta.

"Not so," replied the driver, "I saw the smoke curling from several chimneys. The door you see is open though the lock wants oiling."

"Let us go in," said Nadeshta, "something has happened here."

All the doors along the passage are thrown wide open excepting one, which moves at the sound of their footsteps; a serving maid, in her village costume, utters an exclamation of surprise, and, pushing it quite open, half invites them to enter. There is a look of such profound awe, such unspeakable terror, expressed in her countenance, the sight of black heaped upon a table, and the glimpse of a figure habited in the same sable hue are, under the peculiar circumstances of their visit, so appalling, that Nadeshta and Horace press past her with one accord, and they stand in the presence of the youngest daughter, who is trying on a suit of mourning before the glass.

"Feodora, Feodora!" almost shrieked Nadeshta, in a tone at once interrogatory and full of agonising anxiety.

"Ah Nadeshta, at last!" said Feodora, turning and displaying the same calm, dreamy, impassible countenance as ever, and in the same cold, quiet, manner, "and the Count de Montressan—I did not know he was expected."

"Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna! where is, where is Anna?"

"Anna lives, she has been these few days delirious—she has had the fever,—she is better now."

"She lives!" said the slave girl.

"And Madame Obrasoff?" said Horace eagerly, his eye still wandering over the black.

"Oh, did she invite you?" said Feodora quietly—"pray be seated—but she cannot see you, Sir—mamma is dead."

"Dead!" said Horace, who felt the blood curdle in his veins and his knees stagger under him, whilst Nadeshta stood motionless with horror, so astounding was the intelligence, so appalling the unfeeling indifference of the daughter, whose unimpressionable idiotcy of mind her silent reserve and a glance beaming with intellect had hitherto concealed.

"Dead! dead! impossible! when did she die?"

"Ah, that is it, who can say when? Perhaps you, for Anna says you killed her, I know you drove us from Peterhoff just as our court-mourning too was made for the Princess of Sommerhausen. Three days ago we came; three days my mother had been locked up in her boudoir; this morning Anna was worse; we knocked and no one answered; we shouted—no reply—at length we burst the door, and there was my poor mother dead. Anna started from her sick bed, she is with her now, which is folly, for my mother died of a fever, and what care the dead for watching—and in her wild and inconsiderate way, she has sent out all our people—all but Masha, who never knows how to dress one—she has hooked these hooks in the wrong eyes, I feel she has."

Leaving her by a simultaneous impulse, Nadeshta and Horace intuitively made their way to the boudoir. The brick and plaster were scattered about, and the iron-plated door, with its distorted bars, lay unhinged and battered, just as it had been broken through by the axes of the serving men, who, fearful of the sight of death, had all eagerly obeyed the mandate of their young mistress, and had spread right and left across the country for useless succour.

Let us enter the mysterious boudoir, which is an oratory, with cold, bare walls and a brick floor, divested of all furniture: a few of the old Sclavonic books of prayer are on the ground.

In the centre of the apartment sits Anna Obrasoff in her night dress, her long hair flowing loose about her shoulders, along with her dead mother, whose head reclines upon her knees, and whose lips of lurid blue, she presses with her lips which burn with fever.

There is still an expression of intense suffering about the features of the corpse, not merely of the body's pain, which death obliterates when he triumphs over pain and life; but of that mental agony which stamps even the cold clay so long and plainly. Their ever changing character, wont to vary like the chameleon's colours or the rainbow's tints, are fixed for ever now in those sad dolorous lines to which they were distorted when she died.

The feet are bare, for thus she prayed and fasted in this place of penitence; the bust uncovered, because a cloth of rude and prickly horse-hair, the only covering of her body naked to the waist, has fallen from her shoulders.

By the stripes,—some raw, some livid—which scar their deadly whiteness, by the scarce healed flint marks on her tender feet—even without the black hood which lay beside her—the reader might have recognised the pale sister who watched by the bed-side of Blanche.

The taper fingers of her icy hand were tightly closed upon a rope—a rope knotted in the middle—the last fearful relic of the primary cause of this long penance—the rope that strangled her young lover, the fifth of the conspirators executed: a terrible memento which recalled even the minutest horrors of his death scene, because that very knot recorded an appalling incident, dissevered by his living weight, when he fell from his high gibbet through the scaffold, and reunited when they tied him up again with crushed and mangled limbs.

After this calamity, Madame Obrasoff had been led to join the congregation at whose meeting the reader has assisted, and her remorse, her love, and her maternal tenderness, had all been mingled and consulted, as the vague and mystic tenets of the nascent sect admitted, when she began her long and agonizing work of expiation, a work of expiation which its object rendered sublime, since undertaken in the hope that it was his soul and not hers which would benefit by her suffering.

On the floor of this cold cell, so bare that, as the midday light fell upon it, any object was readily discernible, a lock of hair was lying, just as the deceased, remembering that she had worn it next her bosom, had thrown it from her with disgust. This lock of hair had served to furnish merriment to the whole capital, and to Horace no less than to all the rest, though not now as it accusingly met his eye, for he felt that, like the last drop which makes the cup overflow, this lock had been the crowning feather, which, piled upon the overloaded heart—so silent now—had broken it.

CHAPTER X.

Horace, before the Prince's departure for Moscow, had seen cause to conceal from him the suspicion, or rather the conviction, which he entertained of having been deliberately left by him to perish in the marsh. Now, on Isaakoff's return, the motives which had urged his guest to this dissimulation, operating not less powerfully, may account for the assumed composure of the Count as his host commented in a strain of heartless pleasantry on the death of Madame Obrasoff.

Although it was true that the dull motionless sky, before a storm, or the lurid clouds tinged with light by the still unobscured sunset, and furiously driven by the gust which speeds them on so rapidly, are not each in their way less thunder-charged, or less indicative of the tempest, than the impassible gravity of Horace, or the malignant levity of the Prince, still they sat again in hollow companionship, notwithstanding all the hatred that lurked alike beneath the solemn calmness of the Count and the gaiety of Isaakoff.

"How very good," said the Prince, "the idea of my having killed her with a jest! What a compliment to one's powers of pointing a story! I only know of one similar triumph, and that I submit does not equal it. It does not equal it because consisting only in the annihilation of an individual to whom a mischievous story was told, not of whom it was related. People don't so easily die of anything you can say of them—a fact to be philosophically accounted for, by reason that people are so little accustomed to hear a very good story that every one is unprepared for it; whereas to be slandered is a thing to which habit hardens one. And then I had forgotten to say that the other victim had his mouth full when the fatal fit of laughter overtook him."

"Let us change the theme, I pray you," said Horace.

"No, by the body of Bacchus, not. Just when in these dull days one has found a diverting theme!—To think how a fool may be witty, and a liar tell the truth in spite of his teeth! Only fancy that the last time I saw Jakof, he had borrowed a laudatory epithet applied by his English groom ten minutes before in my presence to the cherry-coloured ribbon he had twisted round the front piece of a chesnut horse's bridle, and, as our millionnaire complacently surveyed his factitious curls in the glass, he said they were killing."

"Hark, Isaakoff," said the Count, scarcely able to conceal his disgust, "the scene—the unhappy event the consequences of which I have witnessed has produced on me a deep and painful impression. To speak seriously, I do not relish any allusion to it at this moment, particularly from you to me, who are neither perhaps entirely guiltless of what has happened."

"Reassure your tender conscience," replied the Prince, "you and I are as guiltless as if a mad woman had hanged herself with one of our neckcloths. The inimitable Madame Obrasoff's career was in the most natural order of progression in the world; not the French order of progression, which is as you know, the femme galante from her spring upwards, the femme savante and the bel esprit on the wane of her summer, and lastly the dévote to the end—but as it is more commonly practised by our Russian dames, who omit the intermediate stage, and so of course blend their gallantry and devotion at the period of transition.

"But what is most amusing in the matter is, that she should have puzzled us all by stepping on one side out of the regular march of female mind into the labyrinth of insanity, and that we should, like a parcel of fools, have endeavoured to unravel the clue of her fanciful aberrations by unwinding the thread of reason."

"There is an insanity of the heart more hideous than any of the mind," said Horace, and then he checked himself in what he was about to say, and rather ejaculated to himself than addressed to the Prince, the exclamation of "Poor Anna Obrasoff!"

"Madness, my dear fellow," replied Isaakoff, "is hereditary, nay more, it is in some measure catching. You seem disposed to classify; well, there is insanity of the brain, such as the Lady Obrasoff's; there is insanity of the heart, as you call it, when a young girl resolutely falls in love with something coated, as in the case of Miss Anna, that is, if there be no other of a family nature; there is insanity of the digestive organs, from which, alas, I am suffering now; and then, lastly, there is the impression which mental insanity makes on weak nerves and ardent temperaments. If I had not an insurmountable dread of being personal, I should have ventured to observe that your spirits are depressed, your cheek pale, your eye wild and bloodshot; I should have ventured to recommend gentle cathartics, bleeding, the head kept cool—"

"Yes! the head kept cool—it shall be," muttered Horace to himself; and he filled his glass to the brim, which the reader may perhaps think a strange way of keeping down the effervescence of inward passion— but then it was with water. The Prince also, who had his own point to carry, saw that he had pressed his temper to the extreme verge of endurance—so he said:

"After all, my friend, you know me—I believe in nothing—nothing excepting in the unfitness of water as a beverage."

"I prefer it."

"Then, by the majestic Neptune, by the gods of the limpid rivers, the nymphs of the clear spring, you shall have it bright and cold! Ho! there, rascals, bring us fresh iced water—this is tepid—and now, without any disrespect to the pure element which your preference renders estimable, I may be permitted to observe, that it is not a liquid stimulating to the spirits; so I will give you the last witticisms of Narishkin, and the abortive puns of his heavy imitators, from the Grand Duke Michael downwards."

"Isaakoff," replied Horace gravely, "I have a serious proposition to make to you."

"What! directly after dinner—run the risk of destroying your friend through indigestion?—Nay, proceed, for by a merciful dispensation of Providence I take nothing seriously."

"Listen then!—you are the possessor of innumerable slaves."

"I wish I had more."

"Now, I have learned enough of your usages to know that you only regard them in the same light as in the West our proprietors do their butts of wine, or their growing timber, their sheep or oxen."

"Pardon the interruption," replied the Prince, "but there is this notable difference, that our serfs do not improve in value by age, like the juice of the grape or an increasing oak; and they are quite useless when dead; they do not leave even fleece, like a sheep, or a hide like an ox—but, for all that, as you observe, we regard them as a sort of humble property, and there is this advantage, that we can pawn them, which you cannot do by your beef and mutton. Pray proceed."

"In a word," said Horace, "will you sell me some of your slaves?"

"Sell them?—I will make you a present of a hundred and fifty, if you will only allow me to select them, and win enter in an agreement to take them off my hands altogether. I had proposed to hire them to a Moscow manufacturer for their keep and the engagement to bury them; but I will give you the preference."

"I am speaking in sober earnest, and, you may imagine, far from desirous of becoming a slave proprietor; but I am willing to purchase of you, even at a price exorbitantly beyond their market value, three of your people."

"My dear fellow," said the Prince, "are you aware that no foreigner can purchase slaves, unless he holds at least the rank of an ensign in the imperial service? And then, unless he be naturalised, he can only retain possession of them during the period that he remains in Russia."

"I am aware that the law stands thus," replied Horace; "but I am also aware that it is constantly evaded by effecting the purchase in the name of some qualified party. And then," he added, "in the present case, even that subterfuge need not be resorted to, as I wish to purchase, not a right to their ownership, only their absolute freedom."

"I wish," said the Prince, "whilst you are so generously disposed, that you could make me such a present: you are versed in Russian law. Now, if I were willing to part with one of the coveted trio, would not a certain damsel be chosen, whom I once offered to exchange for a grey horse?"

"I mean Nadeshta," said Horace.

"What! still harping on my daughter?—A tall swan-like figure, a voice that the opera house would pay for—a grace which the ballet-master would value—a Spanish foot—an Andalusian port—a dash of the devil to give a raciness and flavour to the whole, like the grateful aroma of bright old claret. Look you, my friend, if ever a slanderous world should say that you lack discretion in your demands, turn you round and retort upon it, that at least you have excellent taste."

"I ask no gift—I offer you value for value; I will not bargain in this traffic for an immortal soul."

"If it is only respecting the soul that you are solicitous, I can assure you, not perhaps that the hundred and fifty serfs I offered you have souls—for that I would not venture to affirm—but that they have as much as Nadeshta has."

"You do not answer me."

"I can only answer you by a question. If I were to come to you, Count de Montressan, and to say, 'Will you oblige me by selling two or three of those hereditary acres which lie under your window; that portrait of your grandfather; that old bed in which your father and several generations of your ancestors died; the sword that hangs upon the wall, and two or three other little heirlooms—I will give you more than a broker would offer for them:'—what would you say to me?"

For a moment Horace was posed for an answer; then he replied:

"What the difference of custom might render strange in one country is not so in another. In one part of the world I show disrespect by remaining covered: in another by baring my head. Have not I seen all your friends willing to sell and barter everything from the houses and palaces they inhabit, down to their pipes, sabres, pistols, watches, and fur garments?"

"Well then hear me; if I were dealing with one of my own countrymen, it might be according to their pedling habits; but I adopt the principle of your own Napoleon code, of treating foreigners as their laws treat you. If you had received me in your own château, your good breeding would not have allowed you to make a remark if I had ruined the horses you lent me, or wounded your favourite dogs, through awkwardness or carelessness: but, if I remember rightly, I think I have seen you, under similar circumstances, very starchly refuse compensation, saying that you did not sell:—so it is here—whilst you are my guest, my hospitality is not niggardly. Amuse yourself as you please with my slaves or my horses—but I do not sell."

Horace was silenced for a moment by this refusal; but then, remembering not only that the vital importance of the occasion sanctioned any violation of the conventionalities of courtesy, but that his host had really placed himself beyond its pale, he resolved—notwithstanding the dignified decision of the Prince's answer—to press the question further.

"If I urge the matter," he said, "it is because I think that we do not rightly understand each other. I can readily comprehend that whether or not it be the custom of his country, a man of birth or fortune does not risk imbuing himself with the degrading spirit of barter, by condescending to the piece-meal sale of all he may possess, as some of your countrymen do; but after all it is a matter of taste, not of principle,—and a man sells an estate, or a princely gem, or a property of magnitude, without exposing himself to the humiliation—or without falling within the category of gentleman-pedlar. A caprice of the moment—a whim—if you like to call it so, has inspired me with a deep interest in three of your slaves, and has given them a value in my eyes which they cannot possess in yours, however high you may prize them. I was about to offer you the price of a whole hamlet for them!"

"I am not surprised," sneered the Prince, "you can afford it. Money, say the political economists, is measured by labour, and labour by money:—one cast or two of the dice, and you can pay me out of my own heritage."

"Listen, Isaakoff," said Horace: "I am a wealthy man in my own country, a poor one in yours. I have never been a thorough gambler—at least I have never felt the slightest temptation to risk more than the superfluous accumulations of my patrimonial revenue. I confess that my first losses beyond that point would have driven me from the green baize for ever. I had never any wish to win from you more than what I should myself have hazarded: you forced my fortune on me. In fact, to be frank with you, the enormity of its extent has been a painful restraint which has kept me near you, in the same hope which I take it has animated yourself—that your luck would change and equalize our fortune."

"A chivalrous generosity," said the Prince: "it may yet be equalized."

"Not readily," said Horace, "for I play no more."

"What!—refuse to go on!" exclaimed the Prince, with visible agitation, "when you hold my acknowledgments for more than a million of silver roubles!"

"At least my banker holds them," answered Horace.

"Well," said the Prince, "every eunuch who keeps a money-changer's stall; every lavoshnik (shop-keeper) in Moscow, or St. Petersburg, will tell you that my property is worth the double. You will find me quite solvable, Monsieur le Comte, if you win as much more."

"I neither doubt you, nor intend to try," said Horace, coldly and resolutely. "If you will place yourself for one moment in my position, you will see that no further motive can induce me to play. Already my winnings, disproportioned to the risk, have accumulated through my anxiety delicately to return them. Thank God, I enjoy a sufficient hereditary competence to place me beyond the temptation of increasing my wealth by the ruin of another:—to say nothing of the stigma, which ill-nature would attach to such exorbitant good fortune. Under these circumstances, Prince Isaakoff, sell me your slave, Nadeshta, her brother, and his wife, and I return you all your acknowledgments."

"You are very considerate," said the Prince, after a moment's reflection; "but I decline your offer."

Horace bit his lip, and turned from red to a deadly white; he had thought his offer too magnanimous to be refused. His next thought was to fix on his host a mortal quarrel; but then whether he fell, or the Prince was slain, the future of Nadeshta remained full of painful incertitude.

"You may readily conceive, my valued friend," continued Prince Ivan, "that there are gratifications which a man does not choose to forego for any sum, whilst still the possessor of a million silver roubles:—mine happens, unluckily, to be connected with the ownership of those identical three slaves, whose liberty you covet. If I were penniless, then I might reflect upon your offer. Now I do not see how I could be reduced to that condition, unless I were to play you double or quits for the million you have won; and even that, as the English say, 'a sporting thing to do,' I offer to oblige you."

"After all," said Horace, starting up, with a strange inspiration of confidence in his fortune, "why not?"

"Why not!" said the Prince, "so that you can only master your scruples."

"What, stake your whole fortune on a single cast?"

"On a single cast."

"What, now!"

"This moment."

"After all, it is horrible," said Horace, "the thought of two men—"

"Face to face, like starving wolves, you would say, and thirsting for each other's warm blood—for this gold is the blood that vivifies the veins of the social, as the red stream is the blood of the physical man."

The thought flashed across the Count, that, since the Prince resolutely refused to sell, he could be in no worse position if he lost. He reflected that his end must be attained by good fortune, which he intended using with moderation; and of which, by a strange infatuation, he never doubted.

"Do you speak seriously?" said Horace.

"As a priest at a burial," replied the Prince, "Shall it be cards, or dice?"

"Dice," said Horace.

"Then there, behind you, you will find those that we played with last—"

Horace drew from the interior of a backgammon-board of veneered ebony, with squares of inlaid silver, a set of dice.

"Once, twice, thrice," said the Prince, turning them out upon the table. "You see that they are true. Now then for the conditions:—double or quits upon the highest throw. We throw for precedence—a size—an ace. It is you to begin, Count Horace."

Horace rattled the dice loudly, though with some trepidation: he felt that, perhaps for the first time since dice had been invented, on that throw depended the relief of the oppressed—the freedom of the fatherless—the happiness or misery of four individuals!

"Six—six—five!" he exclaimed at length, with a shout of exultation.

The highest number on any of the faces of the cube is a six: three sixes were, therefore, the highest he could have thrown, and there remained only one possible combination by which Isaakoff could beat him.

"Hark!" said the Count, "you have not thrown yet. Let us compromise this business. I renew my offer. Give me up those three slaves and I draw the game and restore my preceding winnings."

"Not," said the Prince, quietly but determinedly, "not if you cast all you possess into the balance. Look!" he continued, raising the crystal goblet to his lips; "look! my hand is not as tremulous as yours," and then, stretching back wide his arm, in his attempt to replace it still half filled with wine upon the table, it fell and smashed upon the floor.

Horace's attention was for an instant diverted, and in that instant the Prince changed the dice.

"Reflect!" said Horace, "there are but two throws can prevent your losing. There is but one of the two—the three sixes—can possibly give you the victory."

"There are three sixes!" said Isaakoff, with confident exultation even before he removed the box, when, lo! three little abortive aces stared him in the face! At this sight, Ivan Ivanovitch sank back in his chair, and turned so pale and faint, that Horace threw over him a glass of water. The Prince Isaakoff was a beggar!

By one of those strange mischances which sometimes mar the most cunningly combined plans, the ruined magnate, after perfecting himself by a fortnight's instruction and practise, had mistaken one set of loaded dice for another!

CHAPTER XI.

"Well!" said Horace; "by heavens, your nerve was wonderful! I thought it must give way."

"My nerve!" replied the Prince, who had recovered his external composure, though feeling all the uneasiness natural even to the boldest man whose safety no longer depends upon his own skill or courage, but upon the problematic faults of an enemy. "My nerve! What is the matter with my nerve? I have just been suffering from a provoking twinge in the abdominal region, that's all. That infernal cook is getting heavy in his dishes. As for our game, you have won and I have lost, as must have happened to one of us. I can afford to play no farther. Now look," continued Isaakoff, tearing off a piece from the envelope of a letter. "As to nerve, did you ever see me write a clearer hand than I am doing now in making out this acknowledgment, of which I cannot specify the value, because ignorant of the exact amount of your previous winnings, therefore I only subscribe myself your debtor for double whatever sum they reach to."

"All this is unnecessary," said Horace. "I do not want your gold—the representative of your human property. You let the proper documents be made out for the liberation of those three individuals, whom the infamous customs of a barbaric society has placed in your power, and I give you back my winnings; so we shall part quits, if not friends. Prince Ivan Ivanovitch, perhaps you will give me your answer to-morrow? Perhaps you will summon your people that I may retire?"

The object of Horace, in leaving the Prince the interval of a night for reflection, was his dread lest the excitement of the moment might betray him into a refusal, which obstinacy might afterwards lead him to maintain.

"As to your offer," replied Isaakoff, trying a few careless throws with the dice, "I beg leave unequivocally to refuse it, as I will do again to-morrow if the repetition will amuse you. And then, as to calling the servants, there is a hand-bell close to you, unless you prefer to clap your hands, as you have always seen me do myself. Do not think me rude; oh, no! fortune may vanish with the cast of a die—as mine has done—but I have never staked either my temper or good-breeding, and so have not lost either. This house, the lands and villages surrounding it, the slaves who serve us are yours now. Count Horace, it is for you to call them."

"This is childishness!" said Horace; "this is an impossible termination to such a scene!"

"Unlucky, not impossible; whatever is, is more than possible. I was about to add that, as this whole estate is to be sold to liquidate a portion of your claim, I consider it from this hour as yours, excepting from it only my slaves, Mattheus and Nadeshta."

"Confound your slaves! A malediction light on all your property! It is Nadeshta, and her brother, and her brother's wife that I must have—if not, there is ruin staring you in the face. I will use my good fortune—by the God that made us! I will use it to push you to beggary or to degradation! It is not avarice which might feel shame or pity—but it is pity itself; and that revenge, which all men must applaud, will push me to it."

"So be it!" said the Prince. "Ruined I am, for one so wealthy, not beggared. Some thousands will remain from the wreck, and I shall still enjoy as great a gratification as fortune could give me—an intensity of hate towards those three slaves, whom I shall connect with my ruin. Consider for a man—whose appetite is as uncertain as the sunshine—who would have given a limb for one soul-stirring sensation which might rouse the stagnating blood—consider the delight of hating soundly, and of daily sating one's revenge by scientifically husbanding its dainty pleasures!"

"Is it possible that there can breathe such a fiend in human shape," said Horace, who was losing head before the coolness of his adversary; "are you then quite heartless?"

"Quite, in a sentimental point of view," replied Isaakoff, throwing down the dice-box, "and anatomically speaking, they say, almost without a liver. If, indeed, you were again disposed to try your fortune—"

"Truly," said Horace, "to play with a ruined man!"

"To play," answered the "Prince, "with the master of Nadeshta. Though I will not sell, I might be induced to stake the three slaves against the fortune I have lost."

"No," said Horace, after a few moments' consideration, "brave it as you will, you cannot persuade me that the advantage I hold over you is not worth more than the even chance of winning or losing everything."

The Prince clapped his hands: a domestic obeyed his summons.

"Send hither the steward."

"What are the commands of my high-born master?" said Johann, following it by an exclamation of "Herr Jesu!" as he trod on the broken glass, and cut through the leather of his boot.

"Johann, you will send a messenger with a vehicle to the Capitan Tspravnik: he is to send two men to punish a slave upon the spot."

"My Lord," said Johann, "we can inflict any punishment here; we are beyond the distance which requires that we should send for the police."

"Only as a man may die under the lash, which will probably happen at last, one is thus free from all responsibility."

"Your reasoning is frill of wisdom—you shall be obeyed," said Johann, obsequiously.

"Stop," said the Prince, "to-morrow, at daybreak, you will assemble the village, and cause the slave, Mattvei, to be punished in the presence of his sister; and then you will take her yourself to Moscow to Madame A's, the milliner; you will tell her that I send her an apprentice, to whose services she is welcome for the next three months, and that, as soon as he can move, she shall have the brother for a porter. Now, begone!"

"I obey," replied the steward, and he hobbled out with numberless bows.

"What," said Horace, "if I were to fix on you a deadly insult?"

"If irreparable," replied the Prince, "we should fight."

"What!" said Horace, "if I were to kill you like a dog?"

"Then," retorted Isaakoff, with an inward chuckle, "my acknowledgments would be waste paper."

"Good God!" said Horace, "what is to be done?"

Isaakoff pointed to the dice-dox.

"Risk everything on a cast when one holds such cards in hand!" was the thought of Horace, which the Prince divined, for he said,

"If my suggestion suits you, we might meet half way—you shall stake one million against the three slaves."

"And, if I lose, be in the same position as before."

"No; if you lose, I will stake Nadeshta alone against the other million."

At this moment the voice of Johann was heard calling lustily in the yard, as he proceeded to dispatch a messenger in obedience to the orders of the Prince.

"Come," said Horace, seizing the dice-box with desperate resolution, and with the mental reservation of having the heart's blood of his adversary if he lost.

"Come," said the Prince, with fiend-like satisfaction, for whilst he had been apparently casting the dice upon the table for amusement, he had rectified the error which had led to his late disaster, and he now played with the certainty of fortune, "let us understand each other; the highest throw wins—you stake one half your winnings against my three slaves?"

"Nadeshta, and Mattvei, and Mattvei's wife," specified Horace, with anxious caution.

"Shall we throw for lead, or will you play first?"

"What matters," said Horace.

"Play, then."

"Here goes," said Horace, and his eyes lit up with a gleam of satisfaction, when he saw two sixes and a three, and then scarcely doubting of victory, two thoughts contradictory in their influence flashed almost simultaneously across his mind. In another instant he thought to see the Prince, stripped, not only of his fortune, but baffled in his cruelty, and he now determined to divert the generosity he had originally intended from his unworthy adversary, to scatter it with princely profusion amongst those over whom he recently tyrannised, and then at the same moment the idea first struck him—what if Isaakoff should deny his debt of honour? Horace could ruin him then—his enemies would make a handle against a rich man and a magnate of what is daily passed over in others—the Emperor himself would seize the pretext—but then Nadeshta!

At this instant Isaakoff threw—Isaakoff conquered.

"You have won," said Horace, filling a glass to the brim with wine, and tossing it hurriedly off, "You have won; well, now we play the other million against Nadeshta!"

"If you prefer water," said the Prince, "I will call for some fresh iced. The turn of one of those little cubes of ivory, the fraction of an inch, has made me master again of all surrounding us, and entails therewith the necessity of attending to all the amphytrionic courtesies."

"Throw," said Horace, sternly.

"Oh," replied Isaakoff, filling himself a glass, the contents of which he raised to his lips and sipped, "play on, it is your right, you are the loser."

"Here, then!" said Horace, "here!" and with a violence intended to conceal his trepidation, he thundered down the dice upon the board.

In the result of this action there was nothing to relieve his anxiety, for Isaakoff said directly,

"Three quatres, that is only twelve; now, Monsieur de Montressan, you lose!" and seizing the dice in his turn, the Prince looked intently at Horace, and shook them long and tantalizingly.

There was something in his glance so full at once of anticipatory triumph, and of cold and passionless malice, as, enjoying his adversary's suspense, he paused instead of throwing, and then again began to shake the bits of ivory, big with fate, that a cold perspiration broke out on the brow of Horace. To his unstrung nerves and over-excited mind, the gaze of the Prince recalled the eye of the rattlesnake when meditating where to inflict its venom; and the clatter of the dice, as he shook them to and fro, of the fatal rattle, which warns all living things that the death sting is about to make an inlet for its poison—the mortal poison, which festers incurably in the victim's flesh.

This presentiment of evil proved prophetic, as how could it otherwise, considering the fraud which his host was practising?

"Lost!" gasped Horace, "oh God! it is lost!"

"Lost," replied Isaakoff, "that is to say, that the Count de Montressan and his humble servant are quits, just as when he did me the honour to take up his abode beneath my roof. The case is a hard one."

At this moment a vehicle rattled out of the yard; Horace knew that it was the messenger dispatched to the Ispravnik; he rose without any determined purpose, but the blood throbbing to his temples, and maddened to an irresistible vindictiveness.

"You will remember," said the Prince, "that you hold my distinct acknowledgments for some two millions of silver roubles. Do you forget the quittance?"

"Here," said the Count, tearing the paper he had received into pieces, and scattering it on the floor.

"That is half; perhaps you will write a receipt in full for those you have so cautiously deposited with your bankers."

"Look you," said Horace, "when a man, your creditor, lies in his death-struggle, smothering in a marsh—"

"If ever," interrupted the Prince, "you can be so unfeeling, that must be the time to leave him there. Ho, there! clear away this litter. Your hand trembles, Count Horace; this is a poor specimen of calligraphy, though, after all, it makes us quits. Send us the coffee when I clap, and request, in my name, the company of Nadeshta with her guitar. I feel at home again, my valued friend, amongst my household gods. She must sing here to-night, if to-morrow at Moscow."

Horace, with his clinched fist, approached Isaakoff. "Fiend!" he said, in a hoarse and husky voice.

"I was an unlucky devil an hour ago, at least," said the Prince, and then seeing that there was danger in the Count's eye, and that he had driven him to the last extremity, he dexterously stopped him short in the very act of resorting, perhaps, to some personal violence, by saying: "Would you like another throw for this Briseis? If so, my intemperate Achilles, you will find me magnanimous as the king of men!"

Horace stopped short at this proposition, which flashed on him a ray of hope.

"And what can I stake?"

"You have a patrimonial fortune; stake that as I did mine."

"Impossible," said Horace, "the heritage of my fathers!"

"It is about a seventh of my own: modesty is my prevailing weakness, or I should say that I was generous to propose it."

"Impossible!"

"As you will; I offered you your revenge, one half your fortune against the three slaves, and if you lost, the other half against Nadeshta."

"Well," said Horace, "well, so be it then! It is a strange stake, one half of estates whose value is not even definite, against the freedom and the happiness of three immortal beings, made after God's own image, who will surely guide my fortune."

"It would be so easy for Providence, if you could only inspire it with a taste for gambling," sneered the Prince, "just to incline three bits of dotted bone two sixteenths of an inch."

"Go on," said Horace, "it is your throw."

"Now," said the Prince, "I defy the Archangel Michael himself to beat that, if sent to succour you with Miltonic weapons."

Three dark sixes stared Horace in the face, like rows of black grinning teeth. His only chance was of throwing the same, which would neutralise Isaakoff's fortune. He failed.

Horace said nothing; he tossed off a goblet full of wine, but there was that in his manner which induced the Prince to clap for his attendants.

"No not coffee!" and then he added in Russ so rapidly that Horace could not understand him, "be four of you at hand, the Count has drunk."

"Now," said the Prince, "it is you to throw."

Horace threw silently, he breathed: this time he had too thrown the triple sixes.

Fortune had done for him with fair dice what Isaakoff was sure of by dexterously changing them for a biassed or loaded set, whenever he took them up.

Isaakoff played, he threw three sixes, they were even.

"This is strange," said Horace, "nothing but triplets!" and then with desperate boldness he commenced again. "Four, four, and six!"

The Prince took up the dice, Horace felt that the ruin not only of his fortune, but of all his hopes hung so completely by a thread, he knew that it would be so utter and so hopeless that he only waited the result to fly at Isaakoff's throat like a dog, determined as he was to throw his life after his fortune or to take his enemy's.

At this moment,—whilst the wrongs of Nadeshta, of Mattvei and of Blanche, and the image of Madame Obrasoff were flitting in his mind and pointing his gaze with an intensity of hatred on the Prince,—the Prince conscience-stricken and coupling his guest's fierce look with his last observation, imagined himself suspected. He grew confused, he missed the opportunity of changing dice. It is true that, in an instant regaining his self-possession, he meditated overturning the table and in the confusion recovering the chance he had lost; but then—besides the consideration that so doing might possibly give rise to the very suspicion which, a moment before, he had causelessly apprehended,—by one of those strange anomalies which are quite unaccountable, though common to human nature, he was influenced by a momentary feeling of rude pity—at least in thus far that when he reflected that he was now only risking the possession of Nadeshta he felt inclined to give her the fair hazard of the game. He did so, he played with the same dice as Horace:—he lost.

"Nadeshta is mine! I have won—I have won!" shouted Horace impetuously as he rose from the table.

"She is yours," said the Prince, "from this hour."

"Then this hour," said Horace, "let the necessary steps be taken for her manumission!"

"It shall be so; but you have an acknowledgment to write for half your broad lands—this is a good bold hand; but we have been playing an exciting game, perhaps you would like to pit your prize against my winnings?"

Horace shook his head with lofty disdain. He heard the voice of Nadeshta in the anteroom, he rose and rushed to meet her.

CHAPTER XII.

This room was on the opposite side to the one occupied by the attendants.

Nadeshta and her brother, aware of the proposition Horace was about to make to their Lord, had been long awaiting here its issue in breathless anxiety. From the rattle of the dice, they had intuitively divined that their fate was being thus decided. At length the last exulting exclamation of Horace had burst upon their ears, as he shouted joyously, "Nadeshta is mine! I have won, I have won!"

Mattvei had sunk into a chair, and Nadeshta held his trembling hand in hers. It was the cry of delight responding to his own, which had attracted the attention of her lover.

"Nadeshta," said Horace, "dear Nadeshta, you are free!"

"Free!" repeated Nadeshta, "Oh God, how strange it sounds, free, free!"

"Free as the birds—the winds—the beams of light. This night, this very night you shall fly from the scene of your serfage, far away and for ever."

"Oh!" said Nadeshta, pressing his hand to her lips and falling on her knees, "Oh, bright and glorious being—my guardian angel—light of my soul—my Horace! yes, let us fly for ever and at once, but not together, you are too good, too great, too pure, too generous; no shadow of a stain must rest upon you; yours must be the spotless image which a maiden may, in her thoughts enshrine, and treasure in her heart, to worship through her life and die in blessing. Think not of impossible promises—I see, I feel it at this hour, they are impossible."

"Nadeshta," said Horace, who had raised her up, "there is nothing impossible but to leave you. Look, Sir, this ring which I put on her finger was my mother's wedding ring. You are her brother—join our hands, and be the living witness as I call the eternal testimony of the departed, that now I claim the faith your sister plighted me as I, before God, redeem the word I pledged her, swearing to seal that bond by indissoluble links the moment we can find a priest. My love, my wife, my countess! oh yes, we will fly directly—for ever, and for ever together."

Mattvei trembled violently. He joined their hands; but he could find no speech: like the traveller in the fable where the wind and sun dispute their influence, he had wrapped himself in a mantle of impassibility against the tempests of fate; but the unexpected sunshine of good fortune, making him throw aside this stoicism, quite unmanned him.

"Oh, do I dream?" said Nadeshta, "am I—am I truly waking, my Horace? Shall we all, all fly this night?"

That fatal word all recalled to the mind of the Count what he had forgotten in the rapture of his first success, that Blanche and Mattvei were still in the Prince's power, and it showed him at once the cruel error into which Nadeshta and her brother had fallen.

"All—oh no! you do not understand me, I have lost all my winnings, I have lost you all, I have forfeited half my patrimonial fortune. I have only won, with my last stake, Nadeshta's freedom."

Mattheus seemed stunned for an instant by this terrible disappointment; but then his composure, so slow to restore in his good fortune, at once returned with his unhappiness.

"All that it has been in my power to do, my brother," said the Count, "I have done. All that I can yet do, I will do—but it will be more in the capital than here. You would not have me leave this child?"

"No, no, no, no!" said Mattheus, "no, God forbid, that will be one weight taken from my heavy heart."

"Oh!" said Nadeshta, "I knew, I knew it was a dream, I knew it must be like those bubbles, rainbow-tinted, which burst in my infantine hands. Oh my poor brother, do not think I shall quit you. Go Count Horace, go, go bright meteor of my soul's dark night! go and bear with you the slave girl's heart, for she will not even choose to be free whilst Mattvei is a captive."

"This cannot be, Nadeshta! Take her, my glorious brother, take her with all the blessings of her only relative."

"You are mine!" said Horace, "you may no longer choose, you are no more my love alone, you are my wife, my countess!"

"Press me no more," said Nadeshta, "you should know me both—my brother, you, and you, my Horace. You should know how unalterable is my purpose, you should know that mine is not the weak will of a faltering woman, and being so—immutable and fixed—it is cruel—it is cruel, Horace, my own Horace, thus to urge me."

"Hear me," said Horace, "you are fatherless; your brother in your father's stead commands; by staying you cannot alleviate his misery. I implore, entreat, command—in the name of that sacred token which has made you mine—"

"Look!" said Nadeshta, plucking off the ring, and casting it from her, "why bruise my heart farther? There is a monitor within it that I obey—why tyrannise over our very affections—what right has father or brother to command? I have no obedience, I have only affection: I have only the unchangeable will to suffer with him. I shall have only the unalterable constancy to love you to the last, my Horace, not the baseness to follow you. No! I must die here like the trampled wood flower on the humble ground on which it grew, breathing my benedictions on you to the last, as the crushed plant exhales its odour. I have my destiny, you yours. Go, Horace, and be happy—go! knowing there is one who in her loneliness will worship your very memory, and from a distance regard you as a dreamy child of earth regards a twinkling star, so far—so long outliving its frail frame."

At this moment a loud, shrill, prolonged laugh burst upon them, and the Prince's head was seen thrust in betwixt the opened door.

"Very good! very good! you have a pretty turn for acting, Nadeshta, genteel comedy, or the melodrame, another accomplishment worth all the other."

Horace bounded forward like a tiger. He pursued the Prince into the next room; the Prince hastily placed a table between them.

"Stop! stop! stop!" said he, "this is becoming tragedy—and the comedy was so excellent—besides it is not over. Try your luck again, you shall stake Nadeshta against Mattvei and his wife.

Horace was tempted. Nadeshta's refusal to quit her brother—his knowledge of the indomitable firmness of her character—the reflection that the case was desperate—the rapid succession of startling changes which these magic bits of ivory produced—all led him to renew a trial of his fortune. He restrained his anger, and they sat down once more to play.

"Believe me," said the Prince, "it was a delightful scene, and admirably acted—Count Horace taking the trouble to persuade his slave that he would marry her, and she affecting to believe it."

"Prince Isaakoff," said Horace, "I was serious then, I am serious now."

"Now, by the body of Bacchus!" said the Prince, falling back in his chair, in an inextinguishable fit of laughter, "now by the body of Bacchus! you will soon be the only living creature so. The Count Horace de Montressan marry—marry my slave girl! Why we need never have gambled for her; I would have given her you and welcome, for the sport's sake."

"Play!" thundered Horace, "and then—"

"What then?"

"Throw, and I will tell you."

"I have thrown, I have won. What now?"

"Now," said Horace, seizing him by the cravat, "oppressor! tyrant! scoundrel and assassin! thus I strike you, craven, on the face: thus I would strangle the life from your carrion body, if it were not that I shall yet let the black blood out of your heart—the victims of its corruption will guide my avenging arm!"

"Help! help! help!" screamed the Prince, who had grown from livid to black in the face.

In an instant, Horace was overpowered by the attendants who rushed in from the adjoining room. By the Prince's order they twisted round him the table-cover, pinioning his arms.

"He is very drunk," said the host, "lay him on the sofa. Send Dietrich, and get ready my carriage. I start immediately for Moscow.

"Count Horace, you are mad with vexation and passion. No wonder—half your hereditary acres have been wasted to gain an object in which you have failed. I cannot fight you before you have paid me or given me some security on which I can recover; for my hand is lucky with the pistol as with the dice-box. By sending to St. Petersburg for the attestation of your Consulate, you can procure a valid document—then I am your man. Meanwhile, business calls and pleasure beckons; I entrust to you this mansion, my stud, my cellar, my cook, and the ladye Countess. When your messenger returns, so will I, and then we will square accounts. Only, whilst you are dabbling with deeds and parchments—one word of parting advice—do not forget your will."

Whilst Horace was struggling in the covering in which he was encased with all the fury of an angry child, the Prince vanished with a graceful salutation as he crossed the threshold of the door.

CHAPTER XIII.

Horace was again struggling in his toils, after an interval of exhaustion, when Johann appeared before him.

"My Lord, who has just started for the city, has sent me to you with his most humble excuses for this little violence. Calm yourself, illustrious Sir! I will unbind you. You really, really must pardon us. It is provoking, Sir, to lose at play, and then, Sir, the wine is heady."

"Rascal!" said Horace, "rascal! thou liest like thy master. I have drunk nothing but water."

"Then it is play that has made you outrageous, high born Sir. There is only one game which never ruffles the temper, a game of my own invention, at which both parties win. I shall be happy to teach it you, noble Sir."

"Unbind me," roared the Count, "only unbind me and I will twist thy infernal neck!"

"Nay, now truly," said Johann, stopping short with a look of alarm at this ungracious promise, in the very act of freeing the captive from his bonds, "it would be unphilosophical in the extreme to do so. Pardon me, my Lord, but, if you were to twist your humble servant's neck, you would put it quite out of his power to serve you further. You would put it out of his power to obey his honoured master, who has strictly commanded him to attend to all your wants and wishes till his return. That is to say, as soon as the effect of the wine—I mean of the water—has passed away."

"Fool," said Horace, "I am perfectly calm. Unbind me, I will not do thee any mischief."

"I hope not," said Johann, still parleying, "I hope not, my high-born Lord. I have no wish, but according to the instructions of my honoured master to obey you in every thing. The slaves, the stud, the kitchen, the cellar—only," added the steward in prudential parenthesis, "only that I have mislaid the key of it this evening—are all at your disposal. So is Johann Sauer, your humble servant, with whatever philosophical knowledge and mechanical talent he may happen to possess."

"Come, unbind me, Master Sauer," said Horace, as calmly as he could.

"I am doing so—I am doing so. And then my Lord further said, that his noble guest might wish to send some one to St. Petersburg, for whom I am to procure an immediate passport—if it be so desired. These knots are very tight."

"Cut them, worthy Johann," said the Count; and Johann, now quite re-assured as to his prisoner's sanity, released him in a moment.

"Now, rascal!" said Horace, seizing him; "thy master is gone. Where is Nadeshta? where Mattheus?"

"Oh, mercy!" exclaimed Johann, "they are both in the next room." This was true; the Count had himself turned the key upon them.

"Oh! he has not taken them!" said Horace, greatly relieved, and releasing the steward.

"He has not taken them," repeated the steward, gaining the door and keeping his hand cautiously on the handle. "My Lord has left them both at your disposal."

Horace reflected for a few moments, and divined that the orders which the Prince had given had been dictated by an injurious suspicion, since they evidently originated in a wish to retain him beneath his roof until he had given some tangible security for the sum he had lost to him. Now, although Horace was not aware of the good reasons which his host had for this conduct, he considered that he could profit, without scruple, by this pseudo-hospitality.

In truth, the Prince had some years ago been detected in a very infamous gambling transaction, which had been widely bruited, more on account of its extent than of its nature. Now this, according to the custom of Russian society, instead of excluding him from its pale for ever, had only enveloped him in a temporary cloud. But although a few years' absence had cleared it away, Isaakoff was aware that its memory was not quite extinct, and would be so thoroughly awakened, if Horace published the amount of his losses, as to be sure to reach his ears, arouse his suspicions, and cause him perhaps to demur to the payment of his debt.

"My worthy Johann," said Horace, "pardon my vivacity. I will give you my instructions in an hour or two—meanwhile, perhaps you will send me coffee to the library. I shall spend the evening with Mattheus and his sister."

"Oh, Sir!" said the steward, "they have both been educated to serve as company to any gentleman at a pinch. You would not find better, excepting perhaps myself, for forty versts round about."

Horace opened the door; there stood the brother and the sister in mute, calm, sorrowful resignation—but a resignation utterly differing in its expression—for the eye of Mattheus, half upturned to Heaven, gave his face a mild and martyr-like character, whereas the cold pale lip of Nadeshta seemed fixed as marble in fate-defying scorn.

Nevertheless, in this important crisis, where every event had a fearful significance, the entrance of Horace was a singular relief to them. They had heard the carriage drive away; they thought it was Horace departing, and, when he opened the door, they were prepared to encounter the Prince.

"Come!" said Horace, "come both of you. My brother! my Nadeshta!" and, opening the door of the room beyond, he led the way into it.

This was the library. Like many other Russian libraries, it was furnished with blocks of wood covered with leather backs, printed with the titles of various books in gold letters, and of course the key of the brass net-work doors that kept them in was perpetually mislaid. But this was only the case on three sides; the fourth contained real books, magnificently bound, though without attention to the completeness of the works, the subject, or the language in which they were written.

In the mean while, Johann had no sooner quitted the room in which he had been left by the Count, than his place was occupied on the scene of the late struggle by another individual, who stole in at one door as Johann vanished through another—being Hans, his son and heir; he was, in one sense, the most appropriate personage who could have succeeded his father.

It must be premised that Hans, particularly since the rivalship of the Count had left him hopeless, Hans had grown contemplative towards the hours of sunset—and yet it was not the declining sun that he loved to contemplate.

He had lived to see his ideal materialized—the dreams of his young imagination rendered real—though not for him. He loved, in short, to feast his eyes, since he could not feast his palate, on the glorious fruits, the pine-apples, the conserves and the confectionary, which were laid in their tempting array amid flowers and coloured crystals for the Prince's dessert.

And then it must be remembered that this dessert both went in and came out, so that Hans had a double opportunity of delighting his eyes and licking his lips, to say nothing of the chances it offered of pilfering; and so it happened that Hans was lingering near the spot when the sounds of the storm burst upon his delighted ears. With instinctive sagacity he foresaw that it must turn up something, and he was not deceived. When the Prince took his abrupt departure; when Horace was unbound, the serving-men, little anxious to remain in his vicinity, retired, and then Horace himself, and, lastly Johann left at once the scene of action, and all the treasures which Hans coveted unprotected.

Hans rushed to the table: he filled his pockets with trepidation; and then, returning once more when near the door, he bethought him that his cap was empty. He crammed into it a pot of guava jelly topsy-turvy, a pine-apple, some sweetmeats, and he was hurrying from the door when his foot struck against something. It was, as he thought, a sugar-plum—he had seen many such before; he put it in his mouth, and bit hard at the crisp sugar, so hard that he bellowed, and spat out his broken tooth and the two fragments of the ivory die—for it was one of the dice that had dropped when Horace rose in his fit of desperation and overturned the table.

"Follow me!" said Horace, returning to the room; "follow me, both of you. I must not lose sight of you. How is it no one answers? We must beware of treachery. Stop!" he exclaimed; "stop!" as he caught the sounds of the retreating footsteps of the marauder, who at this summons fairly took to his heels, dropping his booty and putting on his cap, guava jelly and all.

We will pass over the touching scene which ensued when Hans appeared before his mother, roaring with the pain of his broken tooth, and the jelly mistaken for coagulated blood. We will pass over the terror and paternal anxiety of Johann, who doubted not that his master's furious guest had knocked out the brains of his son and heir, spoiling, and effectually spoiling in one moment a youth whom it had been for years his study not to spoil. We will leave Hans, in short, to return to the lost fragment of broken tooth, which has caused the quid pro quo. There lies beside it the die bitten in two; and just as Horace was saying: "Oh! if I could only establish the fact!" Mattheus stumbled upon it.

"What is this? One of the dice?"

"Good Heavens!" said Horace. "This is providential! May I never move from this spot if it be not loaded!"

And, on examination, so it proved—a hole had been bored through one of the dots, and a piece of lead inserted, one half of which was left exposed by the splitting of the ivory. Of course this partial counterpoise was calculated always to leave the lighter side uppermost—the lighter side was marked with the six, the highest number on the cube.

CHAPTER XIV.

"After all, this discovery can only avail me in the matter of least importance at this hour," said Horace. "I can publish his infamy—I can refuse to pay; but what is all that to the terrible position in which we stand? I cannot dream of leaving you; and if I were to take you with me—"

"That is impossible," replied Mattheus. "He holds your passport, and even you cannot proceed without his knowledge. Not only would you be stopped for the want of it, but you could not find horses one post along the road. No post-master durst furnish them without a pa-darogne; or permit, only to be obtained passport in hand."

"And yet," said Horace, "we must profit by this providential breathing time,—something we must devise—time flies—we owe his forbearance only to his avarice; and yet gold will not tempt his avarice to humanity."

"No," said Nadeshta, "there is no hope: we are the doomed children of misery. But as for you, Count de Montressan—as for you, my Horace—there is but one course by which you will not add to it. You must leave us; you must go. Must he not Mattvei?"

"Oh yes, you must go," said Mattheus, grasping the Count's hand with a tenacity which belied his words, and then he added, pressing it with affection, as if a sudden thought had reconciled him to his departure: "Oh yes, you must go, because I know—I know, my noble brother, that you will see to her safety."

Horace was thoughtfully silent.

"Yes, you must leave us, dear Horace," said Nadeshta, "you must go, consoled by the thought that your love has gleamed like a ray of light into the night of my soul, remembering that death might have divided us, as it must at last; for death is a common occurrence—death is quite as inexorable as our fate—quite as implacable as our Lord—"

"What do you say?" exclaimed the Count, as if abruptly awaking from a reverie to the comprehension of her words. "What can you believe, either of you—do you believe, Nadeshta, that the thought of leaving you has crossed my brain for an instant?"

"No," said Nadeshta, "no. I knew you never entertained it; but oh! what it is to be a woman! If you had been disposed to leave us then, you might have gone or stayed; and now because I know you would remain, your tarrying would break my very heart. You will not stay when you know this, Horace."

"No," said Horace, "I will not stay: we will not any of us stay. No human power would induce me, Nadeshta, to leave you at his mercy. If I were to remain, nothing could ensue but ruin and bloodshed; we must therefore take a desperate resolution and fly together."

"Oh it is impossible to fly."

"Impossible perhaps to fly by a post-road; but what if I were to make an appeal to the Emperor, what if we were meanwhile to seek concealment in the forests!"

"That would be worse than useless," said Mattheus, "the Emperor's heart is cold and unyielding. What are you to expect from the man who hardly ever alters the terrible sentences of his courts, martial or civil, but to add to their punishments!—the man deaf to the entreaties of wife, mother, and sister! He might, it is true, in his hatred to his great nobility, be glad of a pretext to strike the Prince; but do you think the slave would fare any the better? Is he not himself the greatest slave master in the empire? Is he not perpetually augmenting their number—already twenty millions—by the forfeit of mortgaged lands and confiscations? Is not the pretence of enfranchising his slaves a mere blind for credulous Europe, when he, by one dash of his pen,—without offending any interest—might restore one half the serfs in his Empire, those of his own private domains, to freedom? What sympathies can this man have with our condition if his ear were reached?"

"Well then," said Horace, "you and I are men; and as for this noble girl, her resolution is more manlike than either yours or mine. We cannot wait here like victims caught by the tide till it rises above our heads. We cannot perish without an effort: let us strike into the forests, shunning the haunts of men and shaping our course westwards, towards the setting sun. In time, from wood to wood, we may reach the Russian frontier."

"This cannot be," said Mattheus, mournfully. "Not only the spirit of his race, but the very elements, the very surface of his mother earth conspire against the Russian slave, to give him hand-bound, foot-bound, to oppression. Nature and the climate are alike the accomplices of his tyrants, in every part of this vast prison-house."

"These boundless forests must yield a shelter, however comfortless," said Horace.

"These forests," continued Mattheus, "in the summer season, are a woody marsh. There is scarcely here and there a dry patch on which man can take repose; and then for miles and miles he must toil through a sort of morass, where at every step he sinks betwixt tree and tree up to his middle in the slough, and moss, and stagnant water, advancing a mile or two by toiling on the live-long day. With night comes either a chill, damp, penetrating cold, or else clouds of mosquitoes; in the day time, as he labours through the forest, the sun scorches his skin to blisters, and the flies and blue bottles buzz around him in myriads, settling upon him, till he regrets that, like the bear and the elk, he cannot hide all but his nose and mouth in the water; and then, after such a day, at night comes the reflection that two or three versts are got over of the thousands that he before him; and then the winter—many winters—must overtake the fugitive. He must spend five long months like a bear in his den, because the snow betrays his footsteps; he must live on the frozen portions of the carcases of animals, which he has stolen like a beast of prey, before the first snow falls. There are few spirits and still fewer human frames can outlive such terrible privations. This is not to be thought of!"

"What a fearful situation!" said Horace. "There is then no hope."

"I have but one," said Mattheus, "that my profound submission may avert his wrath till she is saved."

"And then—" said Horace.

"Then come what may," replied Mattheus. "Once I should have longed to follow the example of Pugatchef, the Russian Spartacus, who not much more than fifty years since made the lustful Catherine tremble on her throne—Pugatchef, who, with his twenty thousand insurgent slaves, roused all the country as he came along to vengeance and revolt—Pugatchef the destroyer, who, as if in bitter irony, personated Catherine's murdered husband Pugatchef, of whom, to hide her fears from Europe, she affected to jest, calling him 'her Marquis' though she sent against him the Generals Tcherbatof, Gallitzin, Tchernichef, Carr, Tolstoy, Freymann, Michelson, and Colon; though she could only vanquish him by treachery; and though our sovereigns to this day cause his memory to be still annually cursed in our churches with Mazeppa's.

"The old Starost, as a boy, followed in the human torrent; and like a hound once blooded, he took part in a subsequent revolt;—his experience looks forward to another here. The estate on which we live is surrounded by disaffected peasants, and our own will rise at the next failing harvest. Oh! all these are chances which I should have once looked forward to, though now the resignation to which I have bowed has softened my heart—like the iron whose hardness is lost in the fire through which it has passed—forcing it to recognise that truth to which so long I had obdurately closed it. Now, I shall but look on. I feel the curse upon my race, like that upon the seed of Ham. I feel that to raise one's hand against oppression is to struggle with the Almighty. I feel it almost sin to hope for any of our people—"

"Mattveus, my poor Mattveus," said the Count, "we must always hope."

"You and I have nothing in common," replied Mattheus: "listen, and I will tell you the awful secret of the predestined stock I come of. I have gathered it through long nights of study. I have confirmed it by wandering over the world of the ancients, and by decyphering the old inscriptions carved on the ruins of those mighty temples and cities, which arose when the young world was in its spring. When this truth first burst upon me, it was so terrible that I shut out the conviction. I sought to disbelieve the curse which works around me now."

"Dear Mattvei," said Nadeshta, "thy head wanders."

"Oh! no—Alas! its thoughts are strong and clear, and definite as you shall hear: do not interrupt me. You are a scholar, Count Horace, and can follow me—listen then:

"Sur and Assur, or the Assyrians and their Syrian brethren,—with Babylon and Nineveh for capitals—spread their colossal empire, as you know, ages ago, over Mesopotamia, Persia, Arabia, Canaan, and the whole of Asia Minor. But this race—the people of Nimrod, Bel, Semiramis, and Ninus,—first committed against God and man the crime of deifying man, and of subjecting the multitude to the passions of an individual; thus introducing into the world priestcraft, idolatry, and despotism, which have never since been rooted out.

"For this crime the Assur were swept from the earth's surface. The Sur less guilty—driven far from the heritage of their fathers—have since multiplied and passed through three thousand years of protracted suffering—the elders of the Hebrews in the sad companionship of expiation.

"We, the Sclavonians—the Slavi, Servi, or Surbs, are the descendants of the Sur.

"All the old Syrian and Assyrian names are derived from words of our living languages, the Russ, or Polish, or Serbian, or Bohemian. We can read the inscriptions on the ruins of their Asiatic cities, by our modern Sclavonic dialects.

"The very name of Nebukadnezar, if written in Sclavonic, Nebuh-odno-tzar, records at once our ancestry and the crime for which we suffer. It means 'There is no God but the King.'

"The four Jewish captives, Daniel, Hananiah, Michel, and Azariah, brought up for his service, received from the chief eunuch the Assyrian names of Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.* These names may all be put together from Sclavonic words, which would indicate that they were bred to fill the offices—still customary in the East—of bearers of the royal arms, and purse, curator of the tents, and purveyor of the table.

[*Belteshazzar from Balta and tzar—weapon and king; Meshah from Meshok—purse; Sadrach from Shatior, tent; and Abednego from Obedniak—repast.]

"This race, a conquering race, when it offended, has gone through so long a servitude, that its very name has become, in every language, an opprobrium and a term for slavery.

"In the Latin, Arabic, Persian, German, English, French, &c. the word serf, servitor, and slave, is derived from the different names of the unhappy stock from which we are descended, from Assyrian, Syrian, Serb, or Servian, and from Slavi, Sclavonian, which is notoriously to this day the same people, or from that of the Venedæ, a Sclavonic offshoot.

"The Roman called his slave, servus, from serb: the slave too in the Latin comedies is named nearly always Syrus. The Persian calls him Venede from Venedæ; the Arab El-Assyr from Assyria. The English slave; the French esclave; the German sclave, are all derived from the word Sclavonian.

"Our race it was that fed so long the slave-markets of Rome, that perished in her arenas. The statue which images the dying gladiator, when

his eyes
Were with his heart; and that was far away:
He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize;
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play;
There was their Dacian Mother, he their sire
Butchered to make a Roman holiday.

—the famous knife-grinder, whetting his knife to undergo the last humiliation of servitude, that of torturing a fellow slave at a master's bidding—are both without doubt Sclavonic in physiognomy.

"When the heel of the Roman ceased to trample us—when the grasp of fierce enemies was at his throat in his old age—the nations that flowed westward to assail him, to conquer and become your western ancestry, passed over our prostrate bodies.

"Every other people has its glories, we have none since the days of Nineveh and of Babylon. The Scyth, the Goth, the Teuton, the Hun, the Scandinavian, the Mogul, the Tartar—in short, all the countless tribes that sprang hideous from the Ourals—blood-thirsty from the Tartar highlands—or fierce and beautiful and ruthless from the Caucasus, all had for their mission to tyrannise and inflict as the human stream swept by; it was ours to be resigned and suffer. Not to suffer and perish, but to endure and live; for, from the Black Sea to the Baltic—from the Bohemian hills to the Ouralian mountains—through centuries and centuries has our doomed people multiplied; and conquering hordes have ruled to uphold the curse, till time had softened by blending them with us, and then a fresh and fiercer migration has invaded us, like the fresh lash which the executioner attaches, when, after a few strokes, he feels the blood-soaked knout-tongue growing soft.

"When the great storm had ceased that rocked the world whilst the Roman empire was crumbling—when all the human avalanches that were scattered by the tempest had fallen—other nations found repose, not ours. Poland was overrun by a Sarmatian warrior tribe: the children of these Sarmatians—the Polish nobles—were free; but what were the people? Now that time has fused them into one, the spell works on again. Our ruler makes us Muscovites play in Warsaw the part of the knife-grinder when he whets his knife; just as ages back the children of the Sarmatian led the Sclavonians of Poland to desolate Sclavonian Muscovy.

"Where are our Servian, Bulgarian, and Bohemian brethren? As for ourselves in Muscovy, first the Norman sea-kings subdued us, then the Mogul and Tartar, then the spirit of the German. You see how it now bends the science and civilization of the world!—gathering its sacred fire to weld our fetters, and to reproduce again a mighty and benumbing despotism:—the image of that old Assyrian empire which was our fathers' crime—for which we suffer.

"Who are those who govern us?—Who are our Lords?—There is ever some tinge of foreign blood about them:—but as for our pure race, the Almighty's curse still rests upon it! All this the slave knows not, and yet he is resigned. Travel and deep research through ancient lore have taught it me.... And I rebelled against the unwelcome light! I would not bear my burden!—I would not take up my cross. I would be as other men, not born with the ban of the Eternal on them, and so his punishment has fallen upon me. I would not bend, and I am crushed!"

"Come, come!" said Nadeshta; "calm yourself, my brother: this is madness. Do not believe that God can punish the innocent for the guilty."

"Alas!" said Mattheus, "I feel around me now His malediction on my people!"

"Do not give way to this dark fatalism," said the Count, "or you will do nothing."

"What can we do, but pray that it be removed?" replied Mattheus; "and yet what is the prayer of one amongst so many millions? Still it has weighed upon them long enough—three thousand years!"

"In one thing I understand you now, my brother," said Nadeshta, "I too have but a single hope:—a hope, my Horace, which it depends on you to realize—the hope that, yielding to an inevitable fate, he who has infused so much that was sweet into the bitterness of servitude will mourn me, as I wish that he should mourn—avenge me, as I wish he would avenge me—devoting to my memory, his life—I mean preserving it to devote it, together with his rank, his fortune, and his courage, in every clime, on every stage, incessantly to battle with that oppression of which Nadeshta was the victim."

"Impossible!" replied Horace; "I have not that enduring heroism of soul; and, if I had—I love: and all is said. If, when Isaakoff returns, he will not fight me, then, calling the benediction of Heaven upon my arm, I stretch him dead at my feet; and if I perish too, at least with him dies his personal animosity to you both!"

"Oh! never—never!" said Nadeshta. "I would sooner warn him. His hueless cheek reflects his craven heart; and he will so escape the doom, and you the penalty."

"Hark!" said Horace, "a thought strikes me: what if I were to use my prayers—my entreaties—my influence, with the Grand Duke's wife, to appeal to the gratitude she has expressed:—what if she could interest the Grand Duke Constantine?"

"The gratitude of a Princess!" said Mattheus.

"Oh! say not so of this one!" exclaimed Nadeshta; "Anna Obrasoff knows her: she is gentle, generous,—and all-powerful with her brutal Lord."

"There is a hope, perhaps!" said Mattheus.

"Oh, go—go—go!—fly to the Duchess, my Horace, and Heaven speed you!"

"No," replied Horace; "that would ruin all. I would not risk leaving you if it were needful, and it is needless. The Prince awaits the return of my messenger, my English groom. You know him, Mattheus, he is perfectly trustworthy. I will dispatch him instantly. Johann shall accompany him to the city to procure his pass: let us call him."

"Bob Bridle!—my friend!" said the Count, pressing his hand with warmth, "our common safety depends upon you."

"Sir," said Bob, "you cannot expect anything uncommon from a poor groom," and Bob, looking at his hands, thought internally, "I wasn't hired to wait at table, nor to shake hands with. If I had been, I'd have put on Berlin gloves."

"Our safety depends upon your mission:—I want you to start for St. Petersburg this night."

"This night!" said Bob, "and Lucifer just off a six hundred mile journey, and taken a bran mash!"

"I do not mean you to ride. You must drive as fast as six post-horses will carry you."

"Well, Sir, and Lucifer?—We might in England have shut him in a van; but you would not, surely, think of putting him into a sledge. As well think, Sir, of packing up a tiger in a clothes-basket."

"You must leave Lucifer till your return."

"Leave Lucifer!" repeated Bob, whose countenance fell, "leave Lucifer among all these Rooshian savidges?"

"I will attend to him myself."

"That won't be better," said Bob.

"Look you, Bob," and here the Count detailed the particulars which it was necessary that he should know; terminating his instructions by an appeal to his feelings in behalf of the daughter of his old master.

Bob's countenance remained unmoved; but not his determination, for he said:

"When shall I start?"

"At once."

An hour sufficed to get Johann ready to accompany him to the city, and for Horace to prepare his letters and his instructions.

The kibitka was at the door.

"Above all, you will personally see the Duchess, if by any effort you can do so."

"She is the wife of that spicy Grand-Duke, is she, Sir?"

"She is, Bob."

"I hope she ain't as wiolent," said Bob; "it's awkward with a woman."

"Oh! no, she is an angel of gentleness."

"They all call theirselves so," remarked Bob.

"You will see her yourself. Bob."

"You will see the chill taken off that horse's water. Sir?"

"I will watch over your beautiful horse," said Nadeshta.

"Thank you, Miss," replied Bob.

"And now, God bless and prosper you!" said the Count. "If you succeed, my boy, I need not say—don't tarry on your homeward road: for remember you will bear with you the fate of four individuals."

"Besides that, no one can rub down Lucifer till I get back again," said Bob; and with a shout of "padi! padi!" the coachman started his horses, and Bob Bridle started on his career as a diplomatist.

CHAPTER XV.

"That is right," said the Lieutenant Alexius, surveying Bob Bridle from top to toe.

Bob Bridle was habited in a neat suit of black; but he looked ill at ease and disconcerted, because for the first time in his life he had donned a pair of trousers; it was a sacrifice he had made to the greatness of the occasion, when he was informed that there would be no possibility of introducing him into the presence of the Duchess whilst retaining any portion of his menial attire.

"Now step into the carriage, and seat yourself beside me; drive on, coachman. It is your master's request so urgently expressed," continued Alexius, "that you should personally see the Grand Duke's wife, that I have endeavoured to accede to his wishes, although just now it is a matter both difficult and dangerous. The Grand Duke's people watch narrowly all who come to ask favours of his Duchess; the moment is unfortunately chosen both to obtain speech of her, and I fear unpropitiously as regards her power to serve the Count.

"I must however warn you, that if you should be stopped and brought before Constantine Pablovitch, your only chance will be to assume in your character of Englishman boldness and frankness in your speech. He is a rude giant, with shaggy brows, and tempestuous speech: his anger will make a bold man quail, and yet your safety will lie in concealing your agitation."

"I know the Grand Duke," replied Bob, "and though he is ginger-like, and as broad in the chest as a drayman, and as tall on his pins as a French pig, I don't much mind him. In partikilar as the odds is five to three I don't see him at all; but his lady, Sir, is she like him?"

"Oh the very reverse and antipodes."

"The reverse and contrairy is she. Sir; well that is all right and tight. I do prefer a little woman with a mild temper to have dealings with."

"Do you?" laughed Alexius, "well that is against the rule, little men are said generally to admire tall women, just as little women secure the preference of tall men."

"I don't know nothing of the preference of life-guardsmen," observed Bob dwelling rather scornfully on the last words so as to convert the noun into an epithet, "but I ask you, Sir, if that had been the taste of my father and grandfather whether I mightn't have been at this time being, as heavy as the Grand Duke hisself? It was not the taste of any of the Bridles or the Horseflys either that I knows on, though the former was given to books and the latter to dog's nose."

"Oh a family predilection for exiguity of stature?"

"I call it, Sir, a family maxum,—little and good, short and sweet,—was the maxum as directed the choice of the women, whilst that of the men when they looked about for a wife was among many evils to choose the littlest, which they did, Sir, by always u-niting theirselves to the smallest females as suited 'em."

"When I said that the Duchess was exactly the reverse of her husband, I only meant in temper: she is mildness, and kindness, and gentleness personified."

"That is satisfactory," replied Bob; "a woman—to say nothing of a lady—is awkward if she be the contrairy, and have turned her temper out to grass. As to the Grand Duke, though I've known him try on two of the wickedest tricks as a vicious individual could be guilty on in one morning, still I will manage to play my cards with him."

"Why, what have you ever seen the Grand Duke do?"

"Behave his self like a savidge, though in a way perhaps he was not so much to blame for, because it is the custom of the country. One thing he did though which oughtn't to be the custom in no country, and which would make my hair stand on end when I think of it if I hadn't had it cut so short this very morning. His imperious Eyeness Sir, turned restive and called on me to stop, which—as he was neither master, nor trainer, nor even head groom—I declines following his advice, in particklar as I was mounted on the best horse in our stables—a slapping thorough bred grey, by Swap out of a Whalebone dam, as sound as a bell, and as beautiful as paint—a beast as could run neck and neck with a gale of wind, with bottom enough to tire it out if it worn't the equinox, and speed enough to beat it by a distance—a beast Sir, as knows me, better than I knows my bible; more credit to the horse for it and the less to me—a beast as understands what I say to him better than half the Rooshians—a beast as will whinny an answer when I speak to him, fish a lump of sugar out of my boozim, and let me put his hind legs into my great-coat pockets as long as I like to keep 'em there—a horse as will go over a wall like an Irish hunter, or take a double rail and ditch, at a long leap, like a Leicestershire clipper, and withal as mild as a lamb, excepting that he can't abide trumpets and drums, and soldiers and foreigners, and all awkward people as wants to meddle with him, and small blame to him for that, if any. This horse, Sir, which the Grand Duke never saw his like before—when the poor animal gets into the mud instead of helping him out which he would have done by such a pretty bit of horseflesh, if he had the feelings of a man or even of a Frenchman, or a life-guardsman—instead of jumping off to lend a hand—he begins slashing away at his haunches with a great carving knife of a sabre, just as I've seen the keeper of an ordinary, or the master of a cook-shop slice at a round of beef! There is the mark on Lucifer's quarters till this very hour, the length of your hand."

"Well and then?" said Alexius, who had heard the story though he had not recognised Bob as the hero of it, "then—he suddenly relented?"

"I don't know," replied Bob, "I saved him the trouble at any rate, and I should have crushed the soul out of his big body for the walley of a shoe nail, though I'm glad I didn't, for as he is the Emperor's brother, it would been disrespectful to do so."

"And then when you had un-horsed him in one of his capricious fits of generosity, his anger changed into admiration?"

"He did grow pleasant like. It's my opinion that his Eyeness is like the missus of the 'Plough and Horses;' the lightenin' was deliberate and the thunder mild and quiet to that widow, till she got a husband as beat her, and then she turned as civil spoken and agreeable as a man-milliner."

"Well, but did he not insist on conferring some favour on you?"

"That," said Bob, "was the slyest and most underhanded part of the business, he wanted to make a soldier of me."

"He wanted you to enter the service under his especial protection. His aide-de-camps are soldiers. I am a soldier myself!"

"There are things," replied Bob with sententious gravity, "we can't help, or I should ride a stone or two lighter, but that don't make'm desirable. 'Thank you all the same', says I to the Duke, but says I to myself, I wonder where you've seen the green in my eye? I have travelled. Sir, and seen a good deal of foreign parts and have heard more. In England we send people to Botany Bay or hang 'em in a respectable manner, in a suit of black,—like this one which I've got on,—with a night cap pulled comfortably over the eyes; but foreigners acts different. In Turkey I've heard say they spit them, and in Spain they roasts 'em, that is to say, when they catch 'em reading their bibles, which is wicked, cruel, and stupid, because if they think that what people does a purpose to perwent it is safe to send 'em to hell flames, what is the use of wasting their faggots? In France they cut off heads, on a great thing like an overgrown rat trap. All of which is bad enough, though it is all one when a man has overed the post; but in Rooshia—which is worst of all—to punish a man they makes a soldier of him. And that was how the Grand Duke wanted to gammon me. A many an old woman I've seen do the same with a knife in her hand, when she 'ticed a chicken to cut its throat."

At length, the gardens of the palace of Strelna appeared in view; and they drew up opposite to a petty traktirs—a kind of low tavern, where, under pretext of baiting the horses, they waited till the Lieutenant was joined by a confederate, with whom he entered into lengthened converse.

"We are baffled again," said Alexius at length with visible disappointment; "the Grand Duke does not go out this morning excepting to the riding school. The Duchess had sent word that at twelve she will walk in the grounds as the day is so dry and fine, and there will see you; but unluckily, there is no means of getting you in unnoticed; all the Grand Duke's people are about, and he himself at home and stirring—it is impossible. I really dare not venture to present you."

"Are those the palace grounds skirting the road before us?" said Bob.

"Those are the grounds where she must be walking now."

"Look you, Sir," said Bob, "if the lady expects me, she would not be much startled if I were to walk up to her. If I do look like a highwayman on a trip to Tyburn in this here suit of black, I may be also mistook for a parson. If you could only point out near abouts where I should fall in with her, I could be over that paling in the twinkling of a bed-post, you know."

"If you will only risk it," replied Alexius. "The case is desperate;—if we miss this opportunity, another may not for days present itself; and your master writes me that time presses. This person will perhaps succeed in announcing you to the Princess; and at all events will make a signal to inform us whether she be actually in the grounds. If under these circumstances you will venture, say so."

"There is no question of risking, when one ought. I must obey the master whose bread I eat," said Bob; but uppermost in his mind was the thought of her who had been his young mistress.

The Lieutenant's confederate departed; and they remained beside the park paling waiting for the signal for Bob to climb over it, and repair to the spot which had been pointed out. Both were silent.

"I hope you will succeed," said Alexius at length. "Notwithstanding the sunshine, there is a something lugubrious in the scene before us—in the dry frosty air, the snowless ground, the wind raising up those withered leaves in eddies, which is not inspiriting—those old oaks, bare and stripped of their summer foliage, look like—"

"They look queer sticks, no doubt," interrupted Bob; "but was not that the signal?"

"Oh yes, if that be our friend upon the road. Does he lift off his cap?"

"Then thank you kindly, Sir," said Bob. "You've done a good act this day. Though the start is a rum one as leads me to trespass on these premises for the sake of circumwenting a lady; so here goes for the Princess;" and Bob, touching his hat respectfully, vaulted nimbly over the paling.

"To the right," soliloquised Bob; "and then the alley to the left. Here it is; and then along the clump of firs and evergreens till you meet a bench and a path to the left. Here it is too, all right and tight as a trivet." Here he heard voices; and he felt for the first time a little trepidation at the idea of addressing the great lady. "I had quite as lief meet her husband," said Bob, as he turned the corner, and his wish was gratified; for he stood face to face with the terrible Grand Duke.

"If this isn't a regular man-trap!" ejaculated the groom.

The Grand Duke, whose temper appeared as irritable as a volcano in a state of irruption, was accompanied by Generals Rhoda and Le Gendre, on whom he was venting his ill-humour, when his eye rested on Bob Bridle.

"Who is that fellow?" he roared out, and his two satellites instantly seized on the intruder.

"Gentlemen," said Bob, "I did not mean to run away with either yourselves or this here park and grounds. Don't stifle me!"

"Who are you? What are you? Who let you in here?" reiterated the Duke.

"The park paling," said Bob, "which by your Eyenesse's leave, wasn't high enough to keep me out."

"Perhaps a conspirator, your Highness!" said General Le Gendre.

"Well," said the Grand Duke, "he is a bold rogue; and God bless me, unhand him; unhand him!—I have defiled your mothers!—I know him well. This is a better man than any of you—what there is of him. Which of you will try me with the lance or sabre? And this abortion has baffled your master; but what is he doing here? How didst thou get in here?"

"Over the fence!" replied Bob, who had doffed his hat and was pulling his forelock with respect.

"Well!" said the Grand Duke benignantly, "I took you at first sight for one of the missionaries—one of the rascals who want to introduce Bible and Temperance societies amongst the Emperor's soldiers, to divert their attention from their duties; but your coming here, though I owe you a favour or so, is irregular. It is not po formè—I don't like it."

"More is the pity," replied Bob, "that it isn't pleasant to your Eyeness."

"Well," said the Duke, "by the Lord! I never saw a man sit more firmly in his saddle; but you want something of me, I suppose? You have come in a bold way to ask it—a way I wouldn't advise you to try again; but what is it?—let us hear."

Bob fumbled with his hat, kneading the rim with his fingers, but said nothing.

"Speak out," said General Le Gendre; "his Imperial Highness wishes to hear."

"Your Eyeness is very good," said Bob.

"Well," exclaimed the Grand Duke, who was losing patience, "speak out—I have defiled thy mother!—what is it?—my promise is given—don't be bashful."

"Don't be timid," said General Le Gendre, "but speak out. His Imperial Highness wills you should."

"Well then," said Bob, "since his Imperious Eyeness is so good, if I was sure of not offending—"

"Gad's blood!" thundered the Duke, "speak out, man; don't stay mincing your words."

"I should like—"

"Go on," said General Le Gendre with a nudge.

"Ask what you like," said the Duke.

"Speak up," interrupted Le Gendre. "He is alarmed, your Imperial Highness—timid—bashful!"

"Come, speak up, what do you want?" said Constantine.

"Some private conversation with your lady," replied Bob, at length, with resolute modesty.

The two Generals looked anxiously at the Grand Duke, and the Grand Duke raised his shaggy eyebrows in unspeakable astonishment.

"What does the fellow want? A private conversation with my wife—"

"If you would be so good," replied Bob with composure.

The Grand Duke looked in amazement at his followers, who returned a look of unspeakable horror at the intruder's incredible audacity.

"Well," said Constantine at length, with more surprise than anger, "of all the bold rascals that ever I met, you beat them. What in the name of impudence, can you want with my wife?"

"I want to speak with her," replied Bob with simplicity.

"But what do you want to say? People only go to the Duchess to get at me. Here, fool! you are at the fountain head. I can give you what you want at once."

"I don't wish to take," replied Bob, and very quickly unfolding the emerald bracelet which the Duchess of Lowicz had sent to Horace, "your Duchess has lost this, I wish to bring it back to her."

"Where did you pick that bracelet up?" said the Duke, "I remember well having seen it upon her arm. If that is all you want with the Duchess give it to me."

"By your leave," said Bob, "I'd rather give it to the right owner."

"He is a determined rascal," said the Grand Duke, "I think you were disinclined to serve."

"If you have no objection."

"I wear the Emperor's uniform myself," observed Constantine.

"And I have livery already," answered Bob.

"By the way," said the Duke, "you are in the service of that French Count; like master like man. There is many a foreign diplomatist be-starred and be-titled, who is presented to the Duchess, who has not half this fellow's value, and who comes the proxy of a royal master not worth half his master. I wish I had a hundred thousand, or say two hundred thousand like him, with the power of making two into one. Come, come, you shall go straight to the Duchess."

They turned rapidly—for Constantine was impetuous in everything—into several alleys till they perceived two female figures in the distance.

"Look, there she is," said the Grand Duke; "now go and say what you have to say; but remember after this favour I grant no others, so it is no use to ask any of her. Come, gentlemen, to the riding-school," and so Bob felt himself rudely thrust forward by the shoulders, and then left alone.

When he saw the Princess advancing, he felt unusually nervous and embarrassed.

"It's all these cursed trousers as makes me feel so awkward," said Bob to himself, "though I dare say if I was to complain, people would tell me that I should feel more so without 'em."

CHAPTER XVI.

The lady accompanying the Duchess was no other than Anna Obrasoff—pale, thoughtful, clad in the deepest mourning.

The sorrowful, yet determined gravity of her countenance, showed that at a single step she had crossed the chequered interval which leads insensibly from youth's sanguine visions to the dis-illusions of maturer years.

Great disappointment and cruel usage, though commonly souring the temper and hardening the heart to cynicism, still refine, and purify, and soften where its inherent nobility enables it to resist their action. For the many whom misfortune has misanthropically inclined, we all remember a few whose sorrow-chastened spirit breathes in their words, beams in their eyes, and so pervades their actions as to draw insensibly the sympathies of old and young, inspiring an indefinite and instinctive confidence. So it is with Anna Obrasoff; she has passed simultaneously through two of the three greatest trials which can ever mark a woman's existence—the loss of a mother, and the sudden undeception which had dispelled the dream of her first love. And yet, there she stands with heroic self-control and a sublimity of devotion, pleading eloquently with the Duchess for her early friend and recent rival. She joins her supplications to the homely and earnest persuasions of Bob Bridle, whose hard features seem for the first time marked by the lines of anxious thought.

"For only look you, kind and noble lady," said Bob, "our fellow creatures, mortal man or female woman, was not made for slavery; but then, though it may not strike a body when they sees a great coarse cart-horse, with ragged fetlocks and a sleepy eye, and action like a snail's, a-toiling, overloaded in a heavy waggon; although I say, it may not strike one, shameful as it is to overwork a living beast, which our bibles says it is, still what is that to when we see a young blood-horse—a high-bred, noble filly—with its legs like a light deer's, its sleek coat like the satin of your cloak, and its quick eyes bright as your'n, with straining sinews, and with bursting veins, and with wrung withers, a-breaking its poor heart in a vile cart? Lord love you, Ma'am, I see that you shed tears; what wonder? I could cry myself, and I would cry, till half my eyes was cried away, if that would mend the matter, even though I had to ride all my remaining days in spectacles; but then it wouldn't. I have known that young Miss Blanche, God bless her! from her childhood up'ards. I have seen her tended with all the care her uncle's orders, and the love of servants could bestow; she might have eaten gold if she had relished it, and have walked abroad upon a carpet of fine kerseymere, I have seen her good, and kind, and gentle, grow up like a playful colt, with the wide world before her, like a meadow in the sunshine, when the May is a-flowering in the hedges, and the cowslips in the grass. And now, where is she, and what is she? Her husband, too, I have seen him month after month as a guest at my master's table; and then I have seen him treated, as we do not even treat dogs in England, barring that scientific gentlemen gets hold on 'em. Think on this, noble lady, since you are a princess."

"As for your former mistress," said the Duchess, "I have already interested myself in her fate; but what can I do in this case? It is horrible, very horrible; but I fear the utmost I can do will scarce enable me to save even her."

"And yet," replied Bob, "that would be only half to do a job as won't admit of splitting. He is her husband now—they are man and wife—one flesh. You will say, perhaps, how came Miss Blanche to marry? But it's a folly which all respectable people has committed since the world begun, excepting Adam and Eve, which they could not have found a clergyman. Believe me, she will not leave him; she has too much game and blood about her, that young lady. She will run too honest, I will pound it, to let herself be saved alone. You cannot therefore purvide for the wife's safety without the husband's. And he, do you think that he can be so cur-like, so rotten-hearted, as to leave his sister behind him? Such a sister!"

"The argument of the faithful servitor is full of truth, Janna," said Anna Obrasoff.

"Alas! alas! dear Anna," replied the Duchess, in Russ; "woe is me that it should be so—to say nothing of my debt of gratitude to the Count—you know how deep is my sympathy with these miseries, you know how irresistible would be your prayer. But then, my Constantine has no feeling for such misfortune. Class and rank are things inviolable for him; the slave must remain in his servitude as the soldier in the ranks. You know that he pretends no sympathies to which he is a stranger. Rude as he seems—and as perhaps he is—he has always scorned the affectation of his brothers, Alexander and Nicolai, to be the protectors of the slave against his Lord. 'Whilst we have twenty millions of slaves in the domain of our own family, and mean to keep them thus,' he says, 'it is contemptible in an Emperor to interfere with petty serf-holders. If these Lords are not submissive, let us crush them without such a pitiful subterfuge.' How then can I ever hope to interest him in the fate of these poor victims?"

"You will befriend us?" said Bob.

"Oh! if I only could," replied the Duchess. "But I know that as long as the master keeps within the limits of the law, his Highness will not meddle between the Baron and his serf."

"Oh! he cannot surely say you nay to any thing?"

The Duchess shook her head mournfully.

"What a brute!" thought Bob; and then, after a moment's pause, he said aloud, with more emotion than he had yet betrayed, "But my good, my blessed Lady! you will not let 'em all go to the wall without a trial? You are soft-hearted, but do not let us all be soft-headed. Where there is a will there is a way. If they could only be brought to St. Petersburg, if they could be only got out of the clutches of that white-livered.... Rooshian Prince."

"He is right," said Anna; "if we could at least gain time."

"There are those gentlemen with cocked hats and cocktail feathers," suggested Bob, "who sit so stiff on their kibitka's without springs, and who whisk off the first Lords in the land they say, which no one knows where they comes from or where they goes to—as no wonder they shouldn't, since they never asks—there are plenty of those gentlemen about St. Petersburg."

"He means the feldjagers of the Emperor," said Anna; "and in truth if, under any pretext, the Grand Duke could be induced to have them all conveyed to St. Petersburg, no one—not of the highest rank of the empire—dares resist or question such an order, or comment on it. He is quite right; who, high or low, dares ask who is the prisoner seated next to the feldjager, what is his transgression, and whence he comes, or whither he is going?"

"That is true," replied the Duchess; "but in St. Petersburg it would be but the reprieve of a few weeks. Alas!" she continued in Russ to Anna, "I have no power, since my Constantine has formally abandoned all his claims to the throne at my persuasion, no prayer of mine is listened to now that I am no longer needed."

The Princess spoke truly; but she did not, till the death of Constantine, learn that the Emperor's seeming indifference was in reality an implacable aversion. He, the autocrat, the omnipotent, could not forgive that he owed his throne to the intercession of a Pole and of a woman; he could not forgive that the Russo-Greek church, with all its pretensions to immutability—not only in the dogmas and doctrines of early Christianity, but in its very forms—should on account of this woman for the first time have sanctioned a divorce, which till then it had ever condemned.

Yet so it had been: the first wife of Constantine, a Princess of Saxe-Coburg, was living when Constantine married Jane Grudzinska; but their common husband was resolved that his second marriage should be quite legitimate, so he referred the question to the synod of the Russian Church.

The synod—made acquainted with the Emperor Alexander's wish that his brother's marriage should be somehow legitimatised—was sorely puzzled, it had hitherto rigorously prohibited and severely branded all divorces, under any pretext whatever; but what is ever an article of faith or practise with the synod of the Russian Church when weighed against the wishes of a Tsar? It complaisantly declared the second marriage to be valid and licit, routing out some old text from the writings of Saint Basil, Archbishop of Cappadocia and Pontus, and straining it into authority as vague as the Sybilline predictions.

But then, Constantine was not entirely to be trusted; he might in some fit of insanity, at some inopportune moment, have changed his mind, and the Duchess was still useful to soothe him into reason; besides, she was the only thing on earth he loved, in his savage way; and to offer her insult or injury, would have been like meddling with the cubs of a tigress, the most certain way of rousing him to madness. But when the husband was no more, then—if the reader be unacquainted with that passage of history, he may glean how she was treated, either from the trial now pending before the Courts of Berlin, between the creditors of the Grudzinski family and the Emperor Nicholas, or from some notions from the brief mention at the conclusion of these volumes. We must now return to Bob Bridle, who replied, to the Duchess, after some cogitation:

"If they was once in Petersburg, couldn't one have passports for 'em to start with; and if they was once out of the country could they be brought back again?"

"What would be easier?" said Anna, eagerly. "It must be possible to get them foreign passports; and once beyond the frontier, they would be saved."

"It could be done, but only by deceiving him; and he would never forgive me," replied the Duchess.

"Heaven will," said Bob.

"Your conscience will absolve you of the deceit," observed Anna.

"I must try what can be done," continued the Duchess. "My word is pledged to the Count, and he calls on me to redeem it in the name of humanity. And yet if I succeed in this, it may deprive me of the means of serving hundreds and hundreds. I am, you know, but like an icicle, which without inherent warmth, refracts the sun's ray."

"Or which reflects the glare of a destroying comet, rendering that heat beneficent," said Anna to herself.

"Or cooling down hell-fire," thought Bob, "and making it feel comfortable."

"If that light," proceeded the Duchess, "be withdrawn, all power ceases for me; though, after all, perhaps it may be wisdom to prefer the certain and immediate good it lies within our power to do the few, to that which is uncertain and remote towards the many; for after all, we are but creatures of the present. In sacrificing the present to the future. I might die within a week, a day, an hour!"

"Be on the safe side, lady," said Bob, "and then how shouldn't you live with so many to heap blessin's on you?"

Bob Bridle was arranging in his mind certain biblical quotations, which he thought would tell with great effect in persuading—the fraud of Jacob, which without approving, he thought might be cited as a precedent, when, as he was about to argue "there was a question not of choosing one of one's brethren out of his birthright, but of restoring three of them to it," he was, however, prevented by the Duchess, who said resolutely:—

"Well then, be it. When to serve these poor victims I risk that influence which would have shielded so many;—I must not think on his wrath;—I must not even think on this deceit:—I will only remember thy sacrifice, my gentle Anna."

Anna heaved a deep sigh, and Bob's eyes lit up with a gleam of satisfaction. Poor Bob! whilst pleading so earnestly was, perhaps, not proving the least abnegation of the three; and he would have sighed too—if he had ever done such a thing in his life—at the prospect of losing his grey, and of being left in the heart of Russia, which he knew would be the result of the success of his mission.

"As for the foreign wife of the slave, your late mistress, we must cause instant search to be made, for she has been some days missing. I will consult on the proper steps to be taken, with those who can advise. I will watch my opportunity with the Grand Duke; and I will give you some one to conduct you where you must wait, and be prepared to start at a moment's notice for Kalouga. Is there anything I can do for such a trust-worthy, and courageous servitor?"

"Nothing," replied Bob, "my sweet and noble lady; but to succeed, and make all straight."

* * * *

"What!" said the Grand-Duke, whose brow was lowering, "again?"

"Oh! this time, Constantine, I am not interfering with your justice," replied the Princess; "this time I myself demand it."

Constantine raised his grizzled eyebrows in astonishment, and then rubbing his hands together with a savage grin, he said:—

"You?—Well—well!—who has wronged?—who has offended?—who has vexed it?—They shall smart for it: I have defiled their mothers!"

"Constantine, as I have been not offended, but angered, I wish to punish—when I please, and as I please."

"Which will be not at all!—I know your soft heart," said the Grand-Duke; "but they shall not escape me."

"Then I will tell you no more, Constantine.—So, you refuse my request?—you will not give me power to do as I think fit?"

"Well—well; it would be a pity they should escape, who have done anything to rouse the indignation of my soul—my gentle dove. So that you do not ask me for reprieves and pardons, do what you will:—at least whatever I can do for you; and if it be not more you know, that is your own fault, Janna.—You would not let me be an emperor—you would not be an empress!"

Here a cloud crossed the Grand Duke's brow again, and his eyes showing the red veins with which the whites were netted, as he rolled them, seemed to become instantaneously bloodshot with the rising gust of passion.

"Oh! it is so little that I ask," said the Duchess, carrying his rough hand to her lips: "I only wish to frighten some one. I wish a wild young nobleman to be placed for a week under the strict surveillance of the governor of the province—kept incommunicate—"

"Is that all!—Let it be a twelvemonth!"

"And then—and then I wish a request—an order—to be forwarded to that young French Count to return to St. Petersburg, and for three of the other slaves to be sent me here, that I may question them."

"And what is all this for?"

"That is my secret," said the Duchess, who felt her heart dying within her, as she made an effort to smile archly, "you shall know all by and by when my plot is matured."

"Some folly!" said Constantine. "Well, I will send Le Gendre to Benkendorf in my name:—you tell him what you want."

CHAPTER XVII.

In an apartment of the police office sits an official, in whom the reader might have recognised the Chinovnik, who at the post-house so cruelly maltreated his slave the ostler. He has left the department of the minister of justice, to enter the secret police, into which the judicious use of his savings has obtained him admission, and his quickness procured rapid promotion.

In an adjoining room some dozen clerks, over whom he presides, are looking through the police biography of different individuals, for in the secret office are kept the copies of annual passports which every one not enslaved or in the service is under the heaviest penalties obliged to take out—or the copies of the imperial commissions, and to each of these are attached such extracts from all the reports of the innumerable spies as may contain any mention of that individual's name, besides a full account of all his transactions, however trifling, with any of the departments of the government.

Thus, many an unlucky wight, who fancies that his insignificance has shielded him from all notice, has volumes and volumes of manuscript attached to his name; and whenever he falls under the displeasure of the secret office, he is startled and confounded by the minuteness with which the most trifling circumstances are recalled to his memory, and if there be nothing wherewith he may have to reproach himself—he dares not hope that those whose knowledge of so much of his past life is more accurate than that which his own memory furnishes—if really disinterested in their judgment—will doubt the truth of the innumerable calumnies which are sure to have crept into these voluminous reports.

The secret remarks on every man, therefore, always afford the means of ruining him, by judiciously extracting the damning passages; and under this hair-suspended sword lives (with half a score exceptions) every one in the empire.

In the complex administration of this Chinese government, those who spy are themselves spied upon; and those who make the dangerous records, at which thousands of pens are day and night employed, live in the consciousness that their own deeds are being equally recorded.

If indeed malignity, untruth, or misrepresentation were not inevitably the basis of this espionage, its effects might be in some measure salutary; but used as it is, not as a check on the all-pervading vice and corruption, but to place every man hopelessly in the power of every superior, its only result is to make each individual bend to those above him with blind submissiveness, and accept with passive resignation the most unmerited persecution when he incurs their displeasure, aware that it is always in their power, if irritated by resistance to give a colour to still greater severity than that from which he suffers.

Our friend Vasili Petrovitch was ushered into this apartment, which he entered with many bows.

"What dost thou want now, Batushka?" said the Chinovnik; "why dost thou still insist on seeing me? Thou hast demanded justice and obtained it. Our Lord the Emperor is prompt in his decision: the aggressors have been degraded to the ranks, declared incapable of ever rising; and this day at noon, they are dispatched to the army of the Caucausus, as food for the yatagans of the Tcherkesses."

"It is true, your excellency," replied Vasili humbly, "but I should wish to take home my Katinka."

"Don't excellency me, I am only colonel."

"But you soon will be general."

"Hark ye, Vasili Petrovitch! dost thou remember what happened when thou didst last demand thy little wife?"

"Yes," replied Vasili, changing from red to deadly white, as fear and jealousy alternated in his recollection. "Yes, his excellency the general was very hard upon me; I led the life of the damned for the ensuing week," and in fact his wan and careworn aspect attested the truth of his assertion. "But then I understood his excellency to have said yesterday that her examination was over, that I might take her back when I pleased, so I kept her from plaguing him."

"Vasili Petrovitch, I think thou presumest; I think that, because two young men of the first families in the empire have been ruined and degraded through thy instrumentality, thou fanciest in thy folly that thou art more than the dust which those who wear the imperial button shake from their feet. Know then, that they were punished for outrageously daring to personate the servants of the secret office; but thou art already noted as overweening and troublesome. His excellency's good humour saved thee once, and, though he has done with thy Katinka now, that is only as far as he is concerned. I wish now to examine her; the examination may last weeks, or months, or years; perhaps, when I am satisfied, they may insist on examining her in some inferior department; I cannot say, thou must settle it with them. At present ruin hangs over thee; so be discreet, humble, and submissive, and begone without a reply."

At this moment Katinka with her French bonnet and cloak on, entered from an inner room. She started on seeing Vasili, but instantly recovering her composure, vouchsafed him an indifferent nod.

"Come," said she to the Chinovnik, "I thought you were ready; and I want the lace of this boot tucked in."

"Tuck in that lace," said the official to Vasili Petrovitch so imperatively that the old man knelt down trembling between terror and jealousy.

Katinka unblushingly held out her little foot, shod in a grey satin boot; and then giving her Lord an impudent nod, she put her arm in the Colonel Samoilov's, and walked out, scarcely suppressing her laughter, as she left her grey bearded husband still upon his knees unable to rise from the emotion which overpowered him.

* * * * *

In another chamber of this same building, a personage of very much higher rank than the Colonel Samoilov, was seated at a table, consulting a sort of diary. About the fourteenth on his list, he called for Dimitri Gregorief. Dimitri, the valet of Isaakoff, who had been waiting for seven weary hours, was ushered in by an officer of gendarmerie.

But the humility of the great man in admitting so humble an individual to his presence was not without sufficient motive.

"You have a letter for me?"

"Here, your Excellency."

His Excellency having opened the letter upon his knee, so that the intervening table prevented any one but himself from seeing its contents; and being satisfied that it contained fifteen bank notes and the halves of another fifteen of a thousand roubles each, said to Dimitri at length:

"This business shall be managed for thy master; but to-day it is impossible."

"If I dared make so bold, as to explain to your Excellency the humble prayer of my master, it urgently craves that you would take immediate steps for the protection of his interests."

"Look ye," replied his Excellency, "I can serve him, and will serve him. The Grand Duke will rescind his order the moment one can reach his ear; but that is impossible either to-day or to-night, or indeed until this time to-morrow, then it shall be done. You have my promise to your master, now go."

Dimitri, who dared not remonstrate with one so high in the secret office, and so powerful, felt for a moment convinced of the inutility of their tardy interference; but then he bethought him that, if slow, it would be both sure and effective; and that, with boldness, intelligence, and money, he might yet succeed in impeding the design of the adverse party till he had the opportunity—which the delay of a single day would offer him—of checkmating it altogether, so he bowed himself out.

"Thirty thousand roubles—hum!" said the police mandarin to himself. "Now I remember too, this Isaakoff offered me a hundred thousand to ruin Bamberg. But then Isaakoff is rich, of ancient family; he has not served; he has lived abroad; he stinks in the Imperial nostrils. Fifty thousand would have decided me from any other man; for though Bamberg is useful, I do not like him. Yes, I must get rid of Bamberg; and it is true that I can do it safely enough, if I strike Bamberg first, and then come down mercilessly upon Isaakoff. Yes, it is a combination I must bear in mind, and see to."

CHAPTER XVIII.

Bob Bridle was conducted back by the person who had made the signal from the park gate, and who, as the Lieutenant Alexius explained to him, was to lead him to a place in St. Petersburg, where he must wait prepared to start at any hour of the day or night; and then, pressing his hand and congratulating him on the success of his mission, which he considered as assured, Alexius took his leave.

Bob Bridle's guide was taciturn and uncommunicative. Russians are proverbially reserved; but what loquacity would not have been tamed in the Grand Duke's household? As the sledge traversed the city, its progress was arrested by a motley crowd hurrying towards one of the many market-places.

"It is an execution," said his companion. "Our sledge can neither proceed nor turn back, till it is over; let us push through the crowd on foot."

"Come," replied Bob; and, as they walked along, a kind of sleigh passed them in the midst of a procession of the civil and military police.

On this sleigh were seated the culprit and the executioner. The culprit was a grave old man; his cheeks were wan, his hairs were few and grey, and his ragged beard was frosted as much by age as by the damp that condensed upon it in the wintry air. Bob Bridle thought that he had seen his face before; and so he had; for it was Ivan Petrovitch, the roskolnik or sectarian.

The executioner was a man of middle age and robust build, whose features and aspect were the very type of coarseness and brutality, heightened by habitual intemperance and the present excitement of liquor. The consciousness of filling an office which men regard with dread and horror, had added to the natural ferocity of the assassin; for it is from such a class of criminals that he is commonly selected.

The handling of the knout demands a long apprenticeship, besides a natural aptitude of nerve and muscle. The chief executioner, always himself a criminal condemned to the punishment which he inflicts—the only capital punishment in the Russian empire—receives a free pardon, and is sent home at the expiration of twelve years, during which he is kept in durance excepting when led out to operate. In his cell he gives instruction to his pupils, whom it is his duty to instruct in the horrible art of torturing, which he has derived from his predecessor. They practise daily upon a sort of lay figure; and he shows them exactly where and how to deal their blows, so as only to cut into the muscle of the loins when it is merely a civil criminal, a murderer, or a felon; how to inflict immediate death, by making the victim dislocate his own neck; or how to render death inevitable in a day or two, by curling the lash scientifically round the body to make it cut into the peritoneum, or tear the intestines, according to the instructions he receives. The accomplished knout-master can hit every time within a space the size of a crown-piece, and he can smash a brick-bat into dust at a single blow of the formidable instrument which he wields.

When he has served his time, and is succeeded by a pupil—a vacancy occurring in the little college by this promotion,—a recruit is sought for among the prisoners capitally condemned; and it is not a little to the credit of the lower order of Russians that, even among those knout-threatened and Siberia-doomed, he is not easy to be found.

This sledge pauses before every kabak or spirit shop; for, according to an old custom, the executioner has a right to demand a dram of vodka at every one by which the procession passes. This day, the only day that he gets abroad from his prison, and that he enjoys the privilege of calling everywhere for liquor, is therefore for him a day of merriment and rejoicing. He leers horribly, and utters some obscene jest as he tosses off his dram. The spirit-seller crosses himself, and breaks the glass to pieces when he has emptied it, and the sleigh drives on again.

The old man, sitting erect in pious abstraction, is alike prepared for martyrdom, and even now doubtful of its crown, when he thinks on Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, delivered from the furnace, and on Daniel from the lion's den. His voice, enfeebled by suffering, is heard exclaiming as they move along:

" 'They cried unto thee, and were delivered; they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

" 'I will declare thy name unto my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee.

" 'He removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom to the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding.

" 'Woe! woe! woe! to the Niconite. Woe to his cursed children. Woe to you, deluded brethren. Why eat ye of the poison into which the false priest Nicon has changed the bread of life?' "

The crowd presses closely together; but it is quite silent, except where here and there a new comer asks what is the matter, and is answered, "that it is the roskolnik going to execution, for having spit in the face of the Metropolitan of Novogorod and St. Petersburg." But the multitude, though, with a few exceptions, of the established religion of the empire, lets not one sign of satisfaction escape, nor one comment pass its many lips; and as the old iron-monger continues to heap his curses upon Nicon (the patriarch who changed the old version of the Scriptures and opened the way to innovation), as he grows more violent in his denunciations and reproaches, a feeling of uneasiness and shame seems to pervade them. For the people of the modern Russo-Greek church do not reciprocate the contempt entertained for them by the Stare-vertsi or men of the old faith, who, since the great roskol or split, have been growing more austere in their practises, whilst the imperial church has increased its forms and superstitions. There seems to be a misgiving about them that the Stare-vertsi may after all be right.

At length the place of execution appears in view. It is lined by the military, who keep back the crowd. The military governor of St. Petersburg is there, surrounded by his staff. Stars, orders, tags, tassels, feathers glitter and wave upon their uniforms.

" 'They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood,' " said the old fanatic; and at this moment, just as Bob Bridle's eyes are attracted by a wooden bar stuck at right angles on a short perpendicular post, like a T, with two iron rings affixed to each of its extremities, the crowd closes before him.

It is only after many minutes, and a great deal of labour, that the groom again succeeds in obtaining a view of what is passing.

Ivan Petrovitch is now stripped and bound down by a rope passing through the iron rings of the kobilitza. The first blows of the knout are descending, its mighty thong wielded by the two arms of the executioner, who steps back and makes a bound forward as he strikes, adding the weight of his body to his muscular strength.

Three or four blows, given with hideous precision on the same spot, bruise and macerate the flesh to the depth of a couple of inches, and then thus loosened, at the next the tongue of the knout is made to take it as it were by suction, and to tear it out in a long collop.

The executioner pauses, with a savage grin at his dexterity, and his victim shrieks out:

"I saw her—oh! oh! I saw her—drunk with the blood of saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus! Oh! oh!—woe! woe! her plagues shall come in one day."

Here the blows of the knout deprived him of breath and utterance.

"Oh! oh! death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire! Woe! woe! O people! Woe to the Niconite!—woe to the Antichrist!"

The crowd shudder, the knout descends again, and when the executioner next pauses between his blows as he often does to change the tongue of the knout, or dip it in powdered brimstone, to prevent the blood from softening it, when he wishes it to be hard—nothing is heard but the low moaning of the victim. At length he is detached, insensible, from the Kobilitza—his forehead marked with the hot iron, and being thrown upon the sleigh—some mats are heaped upon him, the sleigh drives away, and as usual the bystanders shower upon the rude covering the copper pieces which are to purchase the culprit some indulgence from his jailors, or on his dreary pilgrimage towards Siberia, if he recovers to undertake it.

These are usually disposed of by anticipation to the knout-master, to bribe him to be merciful—but this time neither has the old ironmonger made the customary compromise with him, nor would his orders have allowed the executioner to engage in it.

When the vehicle draws toward the gate of the prison, he puts his hand under the mat; he knows that his mangled victim will not recover—but he may linger—no!—the kopek pieces are all his own—the old sectarian has been dead many minutes. The frost has seized his extremities already, and they are cold and hard as stone.

Ivan Petrovitch when brought before his judges, had persisted in his denunciations. In his wild enthusiasm he had declared that all his sect were ready to repeat the outrage of which he had been guilty, on the person of the Metropolitan. He was capitally condemned. The Metropolitan interceded for his pardon with the Emperor—the Emperor was inexorable—the prelate suggested his confinement as a lunatic, but he was sternly told to mind his own concerns. He desisted. Perhaps he remembered that the humble and learned Philaretes, the Metropolitan of Moscow, had been snubbed in his own Cathedral, even by Alexander, for the freedom of a sermon—perhaps the manner of the refusal recalled a truth he was forgetting, that he was only in reality a subordinate in that hierarchy, of which the Emperor was the hereditary chief master; and hence, as the most deeply interested party, the most fitting judge of what should be done to uphold its dignity.

Bob Bridle, full of horror and disgust, now followed his companion, who installed him in a room in a Track-tirtchiks, close to the market-place.

He was still musing over the scene he had witnessed, when he was suddenly accosted by a familiar voice. He started—it was Dimitri's!

The sudden appearance of Dimitri, whom Bob had left at Moscow with the Prince Isaakoff, in whose confidence he was daily gaining ground, struck him as boding no good; for his natural shrewdness told him the improbability of his having casually found him within so short of space of time in a vast and crowded city.

"How very odd!—Bob Bobovitch—I beg your pardon, you do not like the name—how very odd that we should meet," said Dimitri, advancing to embrace him, an attempt which Bob repulsed, by holding out his hand with dignity, and offering him three fingers as he remembered to have seen Mr. Mortimer do.

"Not so very odd that people should meet when they both walks into the same room."

"You do not mean to say that you are here?"

"No," replied Bob, "you see I'm over the way."

Dimitri, who knew of old the impracticability of Bob, soon ceased to question him when he found him incommunicative: but he proposed that they should discuss a bottle of wine to their happy meeting and old friendship.

"The meeting is so happy," muttered Bob, "that I'd as soon have put a limb out of joint; and the friendship so old that I don't remember it"—but as his present duty was to wait where he was, it struck him that by drinking with Dimitri, he would at least so long keep him under his own eye, and away from perpetrating mischief.

He therefore not only accepted his offer, but aware from his experience that he could very easily "sew up" his companion, without being himself in the slightest degree affected—he encouraged him to drink. But notwithstanding all his efforts to appear convivial, Dimitri at length rose, and quitted him abruptly.

As Bob attempted to detain him, he felt his head reel and his legs so unsteady, that he was obliged to resume his seat. A strange heaviness weighed on his eyelids, an irresistable somnolence stole over him.

"What! what!" said Bob to himself, "is my wits wool-gathering with that thimble full? Have I come to be dru.. dru.. drunk, which a Bridle never was before; nor a Horseflys either, 'cepting with do—do—dog's nose. Damn that Dimitri—which I wouldn't a swore if he hadn't a made me drunk—may the devil founder him if he hasn't hocused my drink."

The groom was right: Dimitri had given him an opiate, the strength of which would utterly have disabled any ordinary individual and which had overpowered even his iron constitution. Nevertheless, its effect was rather on his body than on his brain; to which his wiry nerves did not give easy access. His reason was not distorted, although he felt that it was about to sink into a state of torpidity, and he had presence of mind enough to open the little moveable pane in the hermetically closed windows of the apartment, and to wet a napkin, and wrap it about his head before he sank to sleep.

* * * * *

"How unfortunate that these English can never be trusted where liquor is in the way!" said the Lieutenant Alexius. "But he wakes at last. Come, come."

"Wo, wo, there Lucy; what would you?" said Bob, still dreaming, "what, Lucifer, would you hurt them as rubs you down, would you be turned out like an uncombed dirty devil of a Rooshian?"

"Come, come, rouse yourself, if you can; it is past seven o'clock."

"Past seven?" said Bob, rubbing his eyes and fumbling for the key of the stable, "I—I have over-slept myself."

When Bob was thoroughly awakened, and restored to consciousness the Lieutenant Alexius—having assured himself of the fact, and having been made acquainted with the manner of his inebriation—informed him that he must start directly.

He gave into his hands a parcel addressed to Count Horace, containing an order for the government of Kalouga to afford the Count every facility in proceeding to St. Petersburg in such manner as he should think fit, taking with him two of the Prince Isaakoff's slaves, without allowing them, under any pretext whatever, to be impeded or delayed.

The dreaded signature of the Grand Master was appended to this order, and Bob Bridle was further directed to convey to Count Horace by word of mouth, the plan which the Princess of Lowicz had combined for their evasion and her instructions how to act.

Without confiding in any one agent, she had cautiously taken the advice, and profited by the experience of several competent persons, who were all separately anxious to secure her good graces, by the zeal with which they served her in a matter which appeared without difficulty or danger.

Thus to General Le Gendre who was, in point of fact a spy of Count Benkendorf's on the Grand Duke whose confidence he betrayed, she had stated her wish to interrogate two of the Prince Isaakoff's slaves as well as Count Horace; but so that they should not be in any way influenced by the menaces of their master, whilst at the same time so privately that it would be at her option to frighten instead of punishing.

The General who had received the Grand Duke's order to attend to her instructions, declared that nothing could be easier. The benevolence of the Duchess satisfied him that she would be guilty of no severity which would ever lead to discussion in higher quarters; and if there were anything in this mystery,—for in all the terrible panoply of its power the secret office of which he was the real servitor, starts even at shadows, and grows pale at the thought of any secret undivined,—what could be a more ready means of ascertaining it than acceding to her wish?

When the Duchess found how easily her demand would be complied with, she further observed that being neither sure that her suspicions were justly founded, nor that the Prince Isaakoff would attempt to prevent the departure of his slaves, nor that the Count would judge fit to bring them to St. Petersburg, it was her wish that the whole matter should be kept as private as possible. With the tact of a woman anxious to carry her point, she so introduced the name of Anna Obrasoff as to lead Le Gendre to believe, that it was perhaps after all a mediation in some lover's quarrel, and he therefore suggested placing the document above named, at the disposal of her protégé, and merely dispatching a courier to acquaint the governor, that an order had been issued from the secret office which he was to attend to if called upon by the Count de Montressan, so to do, and further instructing his Excellency in that event to detain the Prince Isaakoff and keep him incommunicate till he should hear further.

The Prince Isaakoff belonged to that class marked out by the personal antipathy of the Emperor, the old and wealthy nobility of the empire who keep away from court and office as far as circumstances will allow. The desire of the Grand Duke for his temporary detention, conveyed as it was by Le Gendre—a secret agent of the secret office, who would have detected in it anything dangerous or important,—was therefore a request too trifling to demand even the consideration of the Grand Master, who at once acceded to it.

After thus far making use of Le Gendre, through another channel,—one which she had opened to effect the escape of Blanche in whose fate Madame Obrasoff had deeply interested her,—the Duchess had provided for their further safety, by obtaining passports from Berlin for three of her foreign servants.

For Blanche this was no longer needed. Many days since Blanche had disappeared from the place of refuge provided for her, and the fruitless inquiries set on foot left the conviction of the terrible alternative either of her having escaped already or perished with her child.

All that remained therefore for Horace to do was to proceed with Mattheus and Nadeshta to Kalouga, to show the document enclosed to the Governor, and to come with all speed to St. Petersburg. The Prince on taking the first step to impede or pursue them, the moment he showed himself, would be detained.

Before entering the capital at the last post station, the party would be met by a trusty messenger who would deliver to them the foreign passports, and then changing their route, and assuming the characters of the individuals therein mentioned, they had only to pursue their journey without losing a minute to the frontier.

When Bob Bridle had convinced Alexius how well he understood him by the shrewd questions he put, as to the minutest steps to be followed by his master in all sorts of hypothetical cases, the Lieutenant led him into his sledge, and with a hearty shake of the hand saw him start upon his journey.

The pa-dorogne, or permission to obtain post horses was an extraordinary one, and this together with the distinct promise of a very high na chai, or tea-money, induced the driver so to put forth the speed of his six horses that Bob was whisked along at a rate at which he had never yet travelled off an English turnpike-road.

Notwithstanding some occasional misgivings, he hardly doubted that Blanche had succeeded in effecting her escape, and the exhilaration of rapid motion, the lightness of the air and the success of his mission had put him in high spirits, when as he stopped at a relay to change horses a kibitka drove up, and his quick eye recognised Dimitri, muffled up as he was.

Even the indignation which his recent treachery excited in Bob's breast, was mingled with a vague feeling of apprehension. "What can he do after all?" said the groom to himself, and yet he proceeded thoughtfully and anxious to the next station.

CHAPTER XIX.

The cold Siberian wind which has traversed thousands of miles of frozen deserts, howls savagely—the snow covers the monotonous level of the landscape, only relieved by the dark pine forests, looking black by the contrast with its whiteness. It creaks under foot with the intensity of the frost, where the passing sledges have flattened it upon the high-road; and when it has not been pressed down, it lies deep and friable, as drifted by the rude blast which raises it incessantly in eddies.

In this inclement weather, amid this cheerless scene of desolation, a solitary female figure toils along. Cold, weary, footsore and hungry—the mother with her child is struggling to make way before the night should overtake them.

Clad in an old sheepskin, her head enveloped with cloths, and her feet in those ungainly boots of felt, which alone keep out the snow—who would recognise the high-bred Blanche? Yet it is she who presses her infant closer to her bosom, as the unpitying wind blows into her face the sharp crystals of the snow, which glitter in the dying light of the red declining sun. It is Blanche who welcomes the slight flush of fever which over-exertion has produced, because it enables her to impart warmth to her babe.

Ever since the mysterious friends of Blanche had proposed that she should profit by the departure of a traveller, who was willing to take charge of her, (and who was no other than Lesseps) on condition of leaving her child behind her, an indefinable dread had haunted her of being separated from it.

When she found that her fortune was lost through the dishonesty of Vasili Petrovitch, and when she had been alarmed by her contest with the mad wife of the conspirator, her intellect, weakened by her recent illness, rendered her distrustful of all who sought to serve her; and then, yielding to all the feminine impulses of her gentle heart which suffering had not impaired, she snatched up her first-born, and—regardless of her weakness, of the cold, and of the distance;—unheeding the dangers and difficulties of her enterprise; alone, poor, and on foot, she set forth upon a journey of six hundred miles, to seek out and comfort the father of her child.

She had been robbed on the very outset—and perhaps, but for this incident, would hardly have been allowed to proceed so far; for thus deprived of the clothing, which marked her superiority of station, she both attracted less notice, and more readily excited the sympathy of the peasantry, whose charity supplied her with the rude garments in which she appears upon this scene.

The Russian Moujik, notwithstanding all the oppression which brutalizes him, is profoundly charitable, at least to his own brethren. He never turns the cold and weary from his hearth, nor the hungry from his door whilst he has a crust to share with them. The very robbers who had plundered her would have let her pass, and perhaps have helped her on her way, had her dress not shown her to be of a class above their own. And then, in the spectacle of the mother, worn and weary, wandering onwards with her infant there was that which moved the homely bosoms of the peasantry, and which would in every land have touched all but those pampered in luxury, who have nothing but the cold vaults of a Union, rendered purposely more comfortless—an unwilling charity which necessity extorts—to offer to the wretched.

Perhaps in all countries the prosperous might gather in this respect a lesson from the indigent, a truth set forth by de Berenger, the French Anacreon of the lower orders, who, as it were to the clink of pothouse glasses, has scattered through his coarse and simple songs so much of wit, philosophy and foresight. De Berenger who says:

Les gueux, les gueux,
Sont les gens heureux;
Ils s'aiment entre eux.
Vivent les gueux!

Not only had Blanche found a refuge in every Moujik's cottage, but more than once her host had by his counsels protected her from worse robbers than those who stole her more valuable garments—from those who wearing the imperial livery ruthlessly despoil in the imperial name.

She was taught, that if caught without proper papers, to prove her freedom, she would be detained and considered as a slave by the police.

According to the established regulation, every one thus detained is advertised in the public papers; a minute description of the person is ordered to be given, with the intimation that the owner may regain possession of his slave, on proving his title, and paying the expenses of advertisement and keep, just as we see done by stray dogs in England—only that it is a frightful feature of the administration of the Russian empire, that on minute examination we discover wheel within wheel, fraud operating upon iniquity, and villainy again within fraud.

Thus, if unclaimed within a given period, all individuals, who cannot prove their freedom, are adjudged to be sold to cover the expenses of their detention; even if they be runaway slaves, it is almost impossible for the owner to indemnify them, because the description of their person is purposely incorrect. When once detained, they are therefore nearly always sold—the Emperor is the only purchaser, and thus they are added to the twenty millions already in his domain: but then again, here and there, just as they have become the Emperor's property, the police myrmidons who happen to be slave proprietors, whenever one of their own people has died, substitute a runaway for the defunct, and report the death to His Majesty's charge.

The imperial ukase thus first outrages the rights of humanity, apparently in favour of the slave proprietors; then the Emperor's servants cheat his fellow slave-holders to his advantage; and lastly often terminate by robbing him.

Blanche has therefore been taught by her kindly hosts, where and how to avoid those who would have discovered that she was without a passport.

She has now, as she goes toiling on, left many many versts behind her the old city of Novogorod, the republic founded by a handful of her mighty Norman ancestors; but Blanche, the high-born and tenderly nurtured, has forgotten alike her ancestry, her pride, the station she has forfeited, the fortune she has lost—her thoughts are of the present; she longs to reach, before darkness overtakes her, the roadside village, the wooden roofs of which appear in the distance.

Her solicitude is to arrive in a place where she can find for her child that warmth which she fears will forsake her—to secure the shelter of a roof—and then the village reached, do her thoughts recur to the past? Oh no!—where, if she did, would she gain that courage which supports her feeble frame? no!—then she thinks of Mattheus, and counts the versts she has to traverse.

The place of refuge she has reached is a cottage, resembling all the others in the village. It is built of logs dove-tailed together and the interstices filled with moss. The projecting eaves of the wooden roof, and a slight gallery before the second row of windows, remind you of the Swiss chalets. This dwelling is situated in a happy village: its inmates are well to do amongst their fellows.

The sitting-room into which Blanche is received is rendered oppressively hot by the warmth which the huge stack of bricks containing the pech or oven give out. Its walls, originally whitewashed, are very filthy: thick, wooden planks inserted in them, form benches along them, and above are shelves, on which are ranged wooden bowls, and earthen jugs, and vessels bound with birch-bark. Bunches of hackled hemp, and bags of flour, ropes of onions, old clothes, spinning-wheels, axes, and sheepskin couches, are scattered about the apartment.

The family to whom it belongs, own also a new house opposite; but this they do not yet inhabit in the winter, because the smoke of the fires, they say, would blacken it.

Just now there are only the two daughters at home: they invite her to rest, and warm herself, and then continue, amidst much noisy merriment, a pastime in which they were engaged with other village maidens.—One of them holds a cock, and the others throw down before it grains of corn, and according to the manner in which they are picked up by the bird, do these girls—renewing unconsciously a superstition of the heathen—augur the realization, or non-fulfilment of their amorous, or matrimonial dreams.

At length, however, the swetlana is interrupted by the appearance of the elders. Blanche is welcomed again. The father shakes his head when he learns how far she has come—how far she has to go: the wife and daughters pity the mother and her babe; and all wonder awhile at the Niemetz woman. At length they light some fir splinters, incessantly replenished, and sit down to their evening meal, which Blanche is called to share, with the addition of a bowl of milk. After the repast the hearty Moujik hands her a little glass of brandy, flavoured with an infusion of the berries of the mountain-ash; and then, taking off her head-gear, her pelisse, and her felt-boots, she is glad, at their invitation, to lie down upon a sheepskin, spread on the broad plank which serves for a bench; and there, betwixt sleeping and waking, as she suckles her child, and then nurses it to sleep, she listens, without attending, to the merriment and conversation of her hosts.

The next day is the prasnik, or holiday. They are all in high good-humour: and at length, at the general request, the patriarchal host, who is a professed story-teller, and more than professionally conscious of his value, after much pressing, agrees to favour them with a tale. He has long proceeded with it when, at last, the attention of Blanche is attracted to his recital, of which the comprehension is assisted by his active and ingenious pantomime.

"Grigory," said the old Moujik, continuing his tale, "thought, therefore, that he could safely cut across the lake: he had half traversed it, when the moon became clouded," here the narrator, according to the custom of the Russian tale-teller, extinguished the fir splinter, and continued in the dark: "The wind rose; the waters became angry under their sheet of ice, and it began to crack—crack—crack! with a sound like God's thunder, or our lord, the Emperor's cannon. No wonder, for though it split as you crack a pane of glass, every rent went two score versts from one side of the lake to the other.

"Then it broke across in another direction, and Grigory felt that he was tossing about on a large raft of ice, a verst or two in length; but through all the night, and the next day, it kept dashing crash—crash! against other floating fields: each breaking, and crumbling, and leaping on the other, as the waves pushed them, till piled several deep, or till diminishing to nothing.

"But, with the daylight Grigory saw on the same sheet some twenty wolves—he could not say exactly, for, as often as he tried to reckon them, so often did he count differently. The wolves did not alarm him as much as the wild waters, for they kept afar off on the edge of the field of ice; but, at last, towards nightfall, it had crumbled away, bit by bit, to the size of a desiatine. Grigory now began to think that if the waves did not swallow him up, or the wolves fall on him, hunger would force him to attack them;—that he must eat or be eaten;—that he must be torn limb from limb, or feed on the rank, raw, tainted flesh of a loathsome wolf,—which nothing but a wolf will touch.

"He did not stir, neither did the wolves move:—they only sat howling on the brink; and in this uncertainty he let hour after hour pass, till cold, and fear, and hunger, so overpowered him, that he entirely lost the faculty of motion. The wolves now gathered round him;—they snapped their long, white teeth;—they howled;—their eyeballs glared!"

Here the peasant, taking hold of an ember blew it, so that the glowing spark should be reflected in his own eyes, and imitated the howl of the animal he was describing.

"Grigory saw them put their heads together, as if whispering; and then, whether they thought he could tell no tales, I cannot say; but they spoke boldly out with human voices:—

" 'Let us begin!' said one and all. 'Give me the hot liver!' said one. 'Give me the heart:—I will tear it out!' said another. 'Give me the crisp bones to crunch;' cried a third 'or the skull to gnaw, if the hair did not get entangled in one's fangs.' 'Hoo—hoo—hoo!' said an old, grizzled brute, with white bristly hairs about the jaw, and teeth worn down and blunted, 'let me have a draught of the warm blood from his throat, for a full-grown man is tough after the young babe I have eaten. There is nothing—nothing—nothing like a young, human babe from the mother's breast, for the liquorish tooth of a true old wolf.'

"At these words, and by the voice in which he uttered them, Grigory knew him at once to be his neighbour, the old Stephan, whose own grandchild had been devoured, and thus he discovered that he was one of those accursed men who take the form of savage beasts to prey on the unwary.

"And how did Grigory escape?

"Grigory, who had called on all the saints of paradise, bethought him of Saint Nicholas. He called on his name thrice;—he called on it thrice three times, and he repeated it fervently in nine times nine invocations. At this moment the ice split in two, and he was cast on the shore insensible, where a fisherman picked him up."

"He is a mighty Saint, father:—is St. Nicholas."

"Mighty! I dare say you do not forget the old saying—'If God could die, and were to die, the Emperor would promote St. Nicholas, and make him God Almighty.' "

"But I like better a tale of young princes and of fairy lands," said one of the daughters.

"Well then, listen," replied the father.—"The young Prince Rouslan was crossing a meadow; he was looking up to the sky, and wondering why the modest moon should be so afraid of the sun, and hide itself in the daylight, when a large bird flew rapidly across. Its colours were as beautiful and bright as if you could mix up those of a rainbow with the light of a shooting star; and, as it flew away, it dropped a single feather from its glittering wing, which came slowly, very slowly, down, and fell at the Prince's feet, upon the green grass. He picked it up, and hied him home. The moon that he had wondered about was not out that night: his cottage was quite dark; but what was his surprise, when he brought in the feather, to see it flash a bright blaze of light:—look at it."

Here, to render his story dramatic the old Moujik suddenly blew into a flame some pine chips, which he had been meanwhile preparing to ignite.

"The Prince did not sleep; it was like day in his room, and then he resolved to seek out all over the world the wondrous bird which had dropped the strange feather. He wandered on, on, on, all day, and many following days. He inquired of the fleet winged swallow and of the nimble squirrel and of the humble-bee, if they could tell him where to find the bird;—all they could say was, that it lived far away, where it was difficult and dangerous to seek it. The Prince fell asleep at the foot of a tree, wishing that he only knew where; and in his sleep a fairy appeared to him.

" 'Hark!' said the fairy, 'since you are so bold, I will show you the crystal palace in which the enchanted bird reposes; but beware if you do not discover it amongst thousands and thousands of others exactly similar;' and drawing aside the veil, she exhibited to his view myriads of bright glittering halls of light and crystal, more numerous than the stars that sparkle in the Heavens. Look at them!" and throwing open the door, the story-teller, in fresh illustration of his tale, which he thus contrived to tell with great effect upon his auditors, exposed to their view the stars shining out on the dark frosty sky. Here Blanche, overpowered with the fatigues of the day, sank at last to sleep, and thus lost the remainder of his narrative.

Once in the night she awoke; all the numerous family were lying on their greasy sheepskins, as many of these primitive couches as it would hold being placed upon the top of the very oven. The heat, the sense of oppression in the heavy and tainted atmosphere, were so unendurable, that she opened the door; but the bleak bitter wind soon reconciled her even to the stifling sensation of the interior of the dwelling.

When morning came, as she took up her felt boots from the shelf beside her, a dark black patch, marked like a stain, the place where they had lain. It moved; it dispersed; it consisted of an assemblage of hundreds of tarracanes—a sort of nimble brown beetle, which swarm in all Russian houses and cottages, and love to gather in the inclement season under any light object casually laid down, which they literally seem to lift up by the compact mass into which they huddle together.

* * * * *

The day continues boisterous and stormy; it is only by increased rapidity of pace that Blanche can keep up the circulation of the blood; but her strength gives way before this additional exertion; and at this moment she descries another female on the road. She too is a mother. She too carries a child. This is already a bond of sympathy.

"It is very cold, mother," said the stranger; "the wind cuts keenly; we must seek shelter, for we shall not long be able to keep our infants warm. Mine is not many hours old."

"Not many hours?" asked Blanche.

"No," replied the woman. "It first saw the light yesterday."

"Is it yours?"

"Oh yes," said the mother with pride.

"And where are you going? and how can you be thus upon the road?"

"I am going to the village; it was born in the house of my baron, who has sent me home for the purification, and to nurse it; and I thank God I am hale and hearty; we are not like your blagarodie (nobility) he fits the back to the burden. Where are you going?"

"Far—very far," said Blanche.

"You look weary," said the woman; "and sound or footsore, this searching wind will oblige us to seek some shelter. The next village along the high road is three hours' tramp; but there is one if we strike off, somewhere through this wood to the left. The wind never lasts with this intense cold. It is well it don't; the very light would freeze. It may go down by sunset; and then the cold without the wind is nothing."

Blanche followed her guide. The village was not distant. It was the prasnik, and the woman led the way into the kabak or pothouse of the place. One of the bath-houses, not licenced establishments like those in the cities, but the joint property of several neighbours, is situated opposite to the kabak, and male and female figures, in a disgusting state of nudity, come out parboiled by the steam into the doorway to cool themselves or roll in the snow—a spectacle now banished from St. Petersburg and Moscow.

The kabak, in a little while, began to fill with customers; but they who lingered longest smoking their pipes were not the most profitable customers. It was strange to see those who had the means of keeping holiday, come in and have as large a measure as they could afford of polougar, the coarse corn brandy poured out; this the Moujik drains off like a dram, only panting for breath as he gulps down the potent draught.

Its effect is almost instantaneous: in a few minutes he reels and falls upon the ground, and is carried out a dead weight by the arms and legs, and laid in an outhouse or a stable, where in three or four hours he sleeps off the effect of the poison.

It is true that the Russian Moujik does not always become dead drunk; but that depends on the quantity of the potation which he can afford—much or little, his mode of swallowing it is the same. When it does not suffice to realize his ideas of a jollification, by reducing him to the level of the brute, its effect is to render him singularly loving in his cups: he embraces every one near him; he protests his devotion, and he begs your pardon, or he prostrates himself to kiss your feet, entreating forgiveness of all sorts of imaginary offences.

Perhaps in all countries, a study made of the physiology of drunkenness would lead us to discover a strange difference in causes which operate to make the dram-drinker and the toper. Dram-drinking is the propensity of the wretched; it is a draught of the Lethean waters, an effort to drown care and shun reflection. Those who throng our crowded lanes and alleys, who people our workhouses, are dram-drinkers; but the jovial sot who sips and sips is generally an individual yielding not to misfortune and despair, but seeking and sacrificing to an animal enjoyment.

Is it not with nations as with individuals? Is it not the long oppression under which the Moujik has groaned, which makes him place his enjoyment not in viewing the present through the inspiriting medium of the fumes of liquor, like every other people, but in utter oblivion.

According to its acknowledged operation, intoxication bringing out the latent tendencies of disposition and the predominant thoughts which occupy the mind, thus renders the Russian kindly and submissive in all the stages of inebriation preceding insensibility; because his natural disposition is gentle, and because an unconscious dread weighs perpetually upon and harasses him.

In the midst of the unceasing din and the coarse rude kindness of these half-besotted boors, Blanche found some refreshment in sleep.

The woman with the new-born child having struck up an acquaintance with one of the carriers, seemed disinclined to proceed. The wind had lulled. Blanche felt her strength somewhat recruited by rest, and she went forth again alone.

The village in which she had sought shelter was not situated directly on the high road; and whilst attempting to regain it she lost her way. On endeavouring to retrace her steps, she became at length quite bewildered; and, after wandering for many hours, the sudden night of winter overtook her still upon the road.

The faint light of a few stars and the refraction of the snow's whiteness, alone rendered discernible the unfrequented track she was pursuing. Although the wind had subsided, the frost was—as it had been for several days—exceedingly bitter. Blanche, in the frozen solitude she was traversing, knew not when or where she should find a place of refuge, or even whether she was not going from it.

But her maternal fears gave strength to her weary limbs, and she redoubled her pace as she pressed her infant more closely to her bosom. At length, she thought she could discern some dusky object moving behind and then before her, and then several similar to it:—they were wolves—the faint starlight in certain positions lit up their glaring eyeballs; and at length, as they drew nearer, turning round and round her, she could hear their deep growl; for though the wolves make the Russian forests resound with their howling, it is only in the autumn: in the winter season, when hunger pinches, they are never heard to howl.

First three or four, and then eight, ten, and twelve, were distinctly visible; they followed; they preceded; they moved noiselessly along upon the snow on each side of her. She was, with her tender infant, in the middle of a pack of wolves! With her blood curdling—with an agony of terror at her heart—she fled along; but her very flight emboldened the cowardly and ferocious animals, who, only when pressed by hunger and in numbers, ever venture to attack a human being; and then nearly always a woman or a child, or one who flies before them.

At this moment, Blanche descried an abandoned hut—roofless, windowless, and doorless—and in this inhospitable tenement, her terror prompted her to seek shelter.

For a time her purpose was answered; for the wolves were shy of approaching anything resembling a human habitation; but, by degrees, as hunger gripped them, they gained confidence, and every now and then a fierce head intruded through the doorway, with glaring eyes, and long sharp fangs, and blood-red jaws, distilling the white saliva, as the tongue was expectantly passed over them.

There was an old grizzled wolf—just such a one as the peasant had described in his improvisation—bolder, or more ferocious, or more hungry than the rest; and, as Blanche, bewildered by her awful situation, recalled to memory the narration of the preceding night, it acted so powerfully on her imagination, that she fancied she could hear it speak in human accents and call out for her infant.

The old wolf had crossed the threshold; perhaps in another instant he would have been at her throat; but the mother was beforehand with him; for with a wild outcry she sprang forward, shrieking frantically:

"Away! away! I have struggled with the mad woman, and I have baffled her! I will save my babe!"

Her assailant made a bound backwards; and, stretching her arms across the doorway, she seemed to defy the pack which had slunk back, and glared with hungry eyes upon her from a distance as the cries of her child tempted them from within the ruined hut; for even famine-stricken wolves are overawed by a fearless human form, which they must attack in front.

Nevertheless, the frost would soon have done the work of these ravenous besiegers, when the tinkling of bells was heard:—it was a sledge approaching—she was saved!

CHAPTER XX.

Notwithstanding all the efforts made by Bob Bridle to urge on his driver, as they approached the town of —— the kibitka in which Dimitri was seated shot ahead, and at last vanished from sight on the straight and level road before him.

When Bob stopped at the post-house, the post-master and six or eight other persons were standing at the door, and appeared to be awaiting his arrival with intense curiosity, for they had not yet unharnessed the horses, which stood smoking in the other kibitka.

As Bob alighted they stepped on one side with an alacrity which he mistook for deference. When he peremptorily demanded horses the post-master only stared at him.

"Wait till I show you the ticket, my boys!" says Bob producing his pa-dorogne, which—being a special one—had all along the road procured immediate attention and respect.

The post-master took it with some trepidation, and perused it with curiosity.

"It contains no description of the person!" he observed to his neighbour, without answering the traveller, and then the bystanders began to talk among themselves.

Bob Bridle, although in a general way he plumed himself on neither drinking nor swearing, rapped out a terrible Russian oath, whereat those at whom he swore backed a pace or two; but before it had time to produce the salutary effect which he expected from it, a police officer entered, accompanied by several stout assistants and tapped him on the shoulder.

"What!" said Bob, "you dare not detain me, bearing as I do a special pa-dorogne."

"You must follow me to the governor's," replied the official; and Bob, being placed in a sledge, between two sturdy police-soldiers, was whisked off to the residence of that functionary.

After not more than an hour's delay, he was led into the presence of the potentate.

The governor, an elderly man, sickly and hypochondriac, was reclining on the sofa on which he had spent the night. The chief of the police of his government, his aide-de-camp, his physician, and his secretary, together with several attendants, were present.

His bare feet were inserted into Turkish slippers, and his robe de chambre, lined with costly sable, displayed a very dirty coloured shirt, for weeks unchanged beneath it—they were the only two garments he wore; but his full uniform was displayed on a chair beside him—and every one else, even at this early hour was stiffly buckled up, in all the full rigidity of regulation.

None but the highest authority in a place dares dispense with the exact costume of office, and negligence in this particular is therefore a sign of superiority;—a rule, however, to which the Emperors have long offered a remarkable exception, for a Russian Emperor never quits his uniform.

The words of Scripture, "Naked I came from my mother earth, and naked shall I return to it," do not apply to him; for, though he may come into the world naked, he is consigned to the dust in his martial attire.

"The uniform," says a Sclavonic writer bitterly, "is the skin of the Knoutopotent Tsar! he is reared, lives, dies, and rots in it."

His physician was a Greek—one of those corrupt and intriguing Greeks of the Fanar, whom their free Moreote brethren have been obliged to exclude from the fraternity of citizenship, which they had at first extended to them. The powerful intellect of his people—undirected in this individual by self-respect, or the elevation of a single feeling—would have enabled him easily to attain a skill in his profession, but which he found easier to counterfeit;—and it still shone forth in the ascendency which the empiric had obtained over those to whom he appeared to cringe.

Bob's eye did not catch the figure of Dimitri till he heard him answer, "That is he, your Excellency," and Dimitri coming up to Bob threw his arms round his neck and embraced him tenderly.

The feelings of the groom were so grievously outraged by this salutation, that his temper for an instant forsook him, and he dealt Dimitri a blow which made him stagger.

"God bless us," said the governor starting, "he will do us a mischief."

But the police soldiers instantly and dexterously pinioned the poor groom, who, deeply regretting that he had been aggravated into this unpropitious violence, determined to repair it as far as possible by the calmness of his demeanour.

"To think," said Dimitri, in whose eyes notwithstanding his hypocrisy there stood real tears, "to think that he should have struck me, who love him as a brother!"

"Hush," said the governor, "I will interrogate him myself. Who are you, fellow?"

"My name is Bob Bridle:—I am servant to the Count de Montressan."

"What countryman?"

"An Englishman."

"Where do you come from?"

"St. Petersburg."

"Where are you going to?"

"To my master at Kalouga."

"What to do?"

"To carry him some important documents."

"Why did you strike that man?"

"He is a rogue: he provoked me to it. I forgot myself. I beg your Excellency's pardon."

The governor looked at the physician—the physician shook his head, and said in an under-tone, "the eye is wild—mad—mad as a March hare."

"I don't see that," said the governor, "his replies are very sensible"—and then, turning to Dimitri, he said sternly, "beware, fellow; if thou art deceiving us."

"My Lord!" said Dimitri, "I must be as mad as this unfortunate creature to dare attempt it: but his madness is only occasional and full of method. His master, as I have the honour of telling your Excellency, is the intimate friend of my own, and at this moment visiting him. This poor fellow—for whom the Count has a true regard—was taken with one of his occasional fits and he has knocked down his cousin and fellow-servant, and escaped, making use of his pa-dorogne and carrying off some important documents, which it is to be feared he may destroy."

"This is a singular case," said the governor to his secretary, "I know the Prince Isaakoff well; do all the documents bear out his statement?"

"Here they are, your Excellency," replied the secretary: "the Englishman is bearer of his own passport, and of a special pa-dorogne—the surname is the same, but the christian names do not agree: one is Bob, and the other Robert."

"Just so;" observed Dimitri, glibly, "his name is Bob, and his cousin's Robert."

"The Englishman is the bearer of a sealed packet, addressed to Count Horace de Montressan, at the village of Bialoe Darevnia, in the government of Kalouga, at the house of the Prince Ivan Isaakoff. The other bears a pass in his own name, declaring him to be in the service of the Prince Isaakoff, and a special pa-dorogne also: but both containing a description of his person, which strictly tallies."

"Why did not the cousin start in pursuit of him?"

"He is too severely injured, your Excellency," replied Dimitri, with effrontery.

"Hold him very tight!" said the governor aloud; and then, seeing the impassibility of Bob's countenance, he added, partly perhaps to contradict his doctor; "and yet I do not see a sign of madness."

"If your Excellency's unprofessional eyes could detect every bodily and mental ailment, where would be the use of a physician?"

"I can assure your Excellency," said Dimitri, "that, with all his quiet manner, his outbreaks are both very strange and very terrible. I do not know whether the marks remain; but I remember that he once had his body tattooed."

"Tattooed!" exclaimed the governor, "that would be something like a proof, and one easily produced."

"Only turn up his cuffs," suggested Dimitri. It was done, and a number of arabesques, pricked in with gunpowder, and recording various names, appeared in view.

"Let us see further," exclaimed the governor, curiously taking up his eye-glass; as Bob's arm was laid bare.

"What do you call that, my friend?"

"That," said Bob, a little disconcerted, "is a foolish pedigree."

"And those letters?—what do those particular letters mean?"

"Those letters mean," replied Bob, "that Semiramis was got by Voltaire out of the Duchess of Marlborough."

"That will do," said the governor, quietly putting down his glass. "I have done with him. You may remove him, doctor. You had better try upon this patient your cure by friction."

"I will," said the triumphant physician, "when he has been duly bled, blistered, and dieted."

CHAPTER XXI.

"It is very strange," said Horace, breathless with mingled joy and apprehension as he perused a letter which he held in his hand. "I learn by this that Bridle left St. Petersburg the night preceding the day on which this was written. He did not take the steps I had pointed out, in the event of failing in his mission; therefore he must have succeeded; but then, having left twelve hours at least before this letter, what has detained him?"

As the Count spoke, the bells of a team of horses and the last shouts of the driver as he turned his sledge into the yard were audible.

"There he is!" said Horace, Nadeshta, and Mattheus with one accord.

But, instead of Bob Bridle, they were met in the corridor by the Prince Isaakoff. "How goes it, my friend—my worthy friend?" said the Prince with exquisite urbanity, throwing off his bear-skin shube, and without taking notice of the others, extending to the Count his hand, which was coldly refused.

"What," continued Isaakoff, allowing some irony of manner now to pervade his words,—"what? so much ceremony amongst friends? This is a cool reception when one has travelled fast and far to bear you pleasing intelligence. I knew that you, Count Horace, had a powerful friend; but I was not aware that my own people were honoured by such protection. In twenty minutes, my worthy guest—or I suppose I must say my guests now—I will join you in the library."

There was a bitterness about the Prince's manner, as, pronouncing the last words, he turned with mock deference towards Mattheus and Nadeshta, which led Horace to infer that the steps he had taken had not proved fruitless, particularly when coupled with the negative evidence afforded by the letter which he had just received.

The Prince, as he had promised, was not more than twenty minutes before he joined them; and, during this time, they waited full of uncertainty, which, with Horace and Nadeshta lightened into sanguine hope, and with Mattheus, darkened into anxious disbelief.

When Isaakoff joined them, he closed the doors of all the apartments; for the library was situated at the extremity of a long suite of rooms. He smiled benignantly as he threw himself into an arm-chair, and begged the Count and the two slaves to be seated.

Horace felt himself in a position so strange, so widely different from anything he had ever heard of or imagined, that he was utterly at a loss what line of conduct to pursue, and in this perplexity seated himself in silence.

So deeply interested was he in the fate of Nadeshta and her brother, so curious to hear the explanation of the words which the Prince had let drop, that in this feeling merged all thought of resenting the insult which the overstrained politeness of his host's manner in reality conveyed, after what had passed between them.

"In the first place," said the Prince, taking out the parcel, which had been confided to Bob Bridle, "though I think you have not used me well in withholding from me your confidence in this little matter, here. Count Horace, allow me to give into your hands these documents. Although intended as a surprise to me, they cannot fail to give you pleasure:—read."

The Count tore open the envelope, and discovered several letters and papers.

"Mattheus," said he, "your wife has escaped with her child."

"Thank God," exclaimed Mattheus, clasping his hands together in a transport of delight, and lifting up his eyes in fervent thanksgiving; but, an instant after, there shot athwart his features a momentary expression like that to which a sudden twinge of pain gives rise. His expiation had availed; his sacrifice had been accepted; but she had left him alone—for ever—without a word of kindness or forgiveness.

The Count continued to read on with an astonishment which he could not conceal,—an astonishment occasioned less by the contents of the documents he was perusing, than by the unaccountable fact of their having come into the possession of the Prince, and then been delivered, as we have just seen, into his own hands by him. For an instant the thought flashed across him that they might be counterfeited; but the handwriting of a letter which he recognised, and the signature of the Grand Master, forbade him to entertain this idea.

"Prince Isaakoff," he said at length, "I imagine, by the assurance of your manner, that you are ignorant of the contents of the parcel you have so kindly remitted to me;" and then he checked himself, reflecting that perhaps his wisest course would be to proceed instantly to Kalouga, to obtain assistance from the governor.

"Pardon me," replied the Prince blandly. "I am acquainted with it, word for word. Do not harbour the injurious idea that your seal has been tampered with. I have had exact copies transmitted to me through the kindness of a friend.

"The one is an order to the governor of Kalouga, signed by Benkendorf, commanding him to afford you every assistance in proceeding to St. Petersburg, with two of my slaves, whose names are left blank, empowering you to remove them forcibly, if requisite, which I do not think it will be,"—here the Prince smiled at Nadeshta and Mattvei—"and declaring that on no account and under no pretence whatever are you to be impeded or delayed. The other instructs the same personage to arrest, confine, and keep incommunicate your humble servant, the Prince Ivan Isaakoff, until further notice, which, I think, will not reach him till such time as Count Horace has repaid his hospitality by carrying two of his slaves beyond the frontier.

"This personal detention is really the unkindest cut of all—unkind, unmerited, unfeeling, inconsiderate!" said the Prince, affecting to whimper: "though it is bad enough to rob me of Nadeshta and her brother—when I consider that the Moscow milliner would have wiped out the score the Italian singer ran me up, to be allowed the privilege of introducing Nadeshta into life—when I look at her Greek profile, and consider what a classically voluptuous Lais the future Countess of Montressan would have made;—when my eyes dwell on the Herculean proportions of her brother, and I reflect what a magnificent caryatide he would make, with that gigantic torso bowed, the muscles of those powerful arms brought into play, beneath a basket of ore in a Siberian mine."

"Hark!" said Horace, "you may proceed, if you will, with this ill-timed pleasantry; but do you know that I am fully aware of the power of the Grand Master's signature? Do you know that, at the same time these papers were dispatched, a private order was transmitted to the governor of Kalouga? Do you know that I am armed—that with a pistol in one hand and this signature in the other, I am going now to order out a sledge to proceed with Nadeshta and her brother straight to the city? and woe to those who attempt to impede me!"

"If that signature be Count Benkendorf's," said Mattheus, "the Prince will command in vain. The Lord's will is powerful, but only till any one speaks in the Emperor's name. Johann himself dares not detain you."

"Well," replied the Prince calmly, though now his eye lit up with that infernal expression that sometimes came to waken its cold death-like impassibility, "well, this is a pleasingly devised surprise to repay my hospitality, and I admit to you that nothing can resist the Grand Master's positive order; nothing can be more potent than his signature; there is nothing can destroy or weaken its efficacity, excepting his own signature, and here I hold it (the Prince drew a paper from his pocket) it is dated, as you see, the 11th, a day after yours. It provides, in the first place, that the two slaves in question shall only be sent on to St. Petersburg in the event of their Baron,—the Prince Ivan Isaakoff—thereunto consenting; and in the next, that if he decline so doing, the governor shall take down the accusation of Count Horace against the Prince; and, with regard to the slaves, if its nature do not affect the Imperial interests, conform to the established law—which law I need not tell you is, that no slave can give evidence against his master. The governor is further directed only to detain the Prince in custody in the event of the Count de Montressan's charge being of sufficient gravity to demand this step; and, in that case, he is instructed not to allow the accuser to proceed, till the affair is thoroughly sifted. This little slip of paper has cost me fifty thousand roubles; but it is fair and perfectly satisfactory—if not satisfactory to all parties," said the Prince. "Surprise for surprise."

A dead silence followed this overwhelming blow. The papers fell from the powerless hand of Horace. He felt faint, and gasped for breath.

"It is tantalizing," continued the Prince, with a diabolical smile, "to think that, but for this little piece of paper, nothing could have prevented you all escaping—Horace with his Nadeshta, Nadeshta with her Horace, and Mattvei to join his foreign wife—to think that, beyond all doubt, some confederate is waiting upon the road to favour your flight—to think that your messenger started four-and-twenty hours, before it was possible to gain the ear of the Grand Duke or to obtain from the Grand Master this pleasing modification—to think that my Dimitri got your English groom detained by the most laughable stratagem, and to enjoy the reflection that, even at this moment if you only stood with those papers which you treat so negligently in the governor's house at Kalouga, if it were not for these few lines—which would be there as soon as you could—there would be nothing to impede you."

"Look! said Horace, drawing forth his pistols, "I told you I was armed. Take one. Get up, stand at ten paces, or I will shoot you like a dog!"

"Oh no!" said the Prince, reaching the bell, "I will not meddle with your pistol. You dare not murder me."

"You have not yet wiped out the blow I gave you," said Horace hoarsely.

"You have not paid me yet," replied the Prince, sarcastically.

"Horace," said Nadeshta, seizing the arm of the Count, whose eyes flashed fire, "Horace! dear Horace, do no murder;" and then she added with a sudden inspiration, "Horace! Mattheus! he is alone, why not seize him, bind him, destroy that document, and fly?"

With the speed of thought, Horace and Mattheus flew at the Prince and overpowered him, but not before he had time to utter one faint cry and ring the bell.

At this sound Dimitri, who, without their knowledge, was in the adjoining room, entered the apartment. When he saw the Prince grasped in the powerful arms of Mattheus, who placed one hand on his mouth as Horace quitted hold of his throat, he advanced a few paces to his rescue, and then turned about to fly for succour; but Nadeshta had locked the door behind him, and with flashing eye and dilating nostril, and lips that without utterance spoke her determination, presented at his head one of the Count's pistols. She looked the image of the Judith in the beautiful French engraving, where Judith, rather Arabian than Hebrew in character and outline, draws the sword of the sleeping Assyrian.

Count Horace, having torn a curtain to shreds, proceeded to bind and gag the Prince securely, and then performed the same operation by Dimitri, who, disinclined to fire-arms, and fascinated by the pistol on which his eyes were riveted, offered no resistance.

All this had taken place without a word being spoken.

"Now," said Count Horace, "let us take counsel how to act; with a little good fortune we may yet be saved; for he himself has pointed out the way."

The result of this deliberation was the conviction, that, if they could so contrive that the Prince should not for some hours be discovered by his domestics, there were only two circumstances which could prevent their escaping from the empire; the first, if the Prince had not spoken truly in saying, that no counter order had yet reached the governor of Kalouga; the second, in case the Duchess of Lowicz—alarmed by the Grand Duke's angrily rescinding the order which had been extorted from him—should have neglected to prepare, or have failed to provide for their flight from St Petersburg;—and yet, once in the capital, even there all was not hopeless.

"See!" said Mattheus, addressing the Prince, who could hear though he could not speak, "see! how, by a singular retribution, the very cruelty which thou didst practise, Ivan Ivanovitch, furnishes, from its minutest details, weapons wherewith to baffle thee. Cruel son of a generous father! thou didst think to break my heart by imposing on me menial offices: and so it happens now, that when I give orders to thy people not to disturb thee till morning, it will excite no suspicion or surprise."

It was then agreed that, having given these instructions, and brought in tea, Mattheus should order, in his master's name, a sledge to be harnessed with the fleetest horses, to convey the Count immediately to the city. This sledge Mattheus was to drive himself. Nadeshta, stealing out, was to meet them where the cross-road joins the highway.

The two captives being then secured afresh, so as to render the loosening their bonds impossible without assistance, and all necessary precautions being taken, they prepared to leave him.

"Prince Isaakoff!" said Nadeshta, "she, whom unoffending thou wouldst have given over to shame and ruin, bids thee farewell; she does not curse thee for what thou didst intend to her; but she tells thee in parting, that the prayers of thy forty thousand slaves, when they rise up like the dew of earth to Heaven, accumulate there into one stupendous curse, which, like the thunder-cloud, will burst upon thy head!"

"Ivan Ivanovitch!" said Mattheus, "he whom thou hast so provoked, aggrieved, and persecuted, wishes thee farewell for ever; he whom thou didst doom to play the Caryatide, wishes, for thy departed father's sake, that thou mayest fare better than thou deservest!"

"Ivan Ivanovitch, Prince Isaakoff!" said Count Horace, "foul blot on the face of humanity!—vile stain to the order which your name disgraces, I bid you farewell! But I leave you three mementoes of the past: one is, the recollection of the blow unavenged wherewith I smote your cheek; the other is this document, which I place upon your very bosom, although you cannot use it till too late; the third, is this little half of an ivory loaded die, wherewith I redeem the gaming score you hold against me; the other half I keep as my quittance and the proof of your infamy to the world at large. Farewell!"

The Prince made a violent effort in his bonds; and then, convinced of its futility, he was motionless, closing the thin, blue tinted lids over his eyes, whose lead-like orbs seemed kindling with a spark of baffled, self-consuming hatred.

They locked all the massive double doors of the whole suite of rooms, taking with them the keys; and then, about half an hour afterwards, Mattheus drove out the Count, and took up Nadeshta at the cross-road.

CHAPTER XXII.

But, just as Nadeshta was seated in the sledge, just as her brother was about to give the rein to the snorting horses, a man stepped forward from the road-side, and seized them by the head with a vehement oath.

It was the old Starost.

"Back!—back!" he said; and drawing his axe from his girdle, prepared to cut the traces.

"What art thou doing?" said Nadeshta. "Desist! It is I."

"I know thee well," replied the old man, doggedly. "Woman of the beauteous brow, of the bold heart, of the strong arm and head! Slave, who wouldst leave behind thy fellow-slaves, I have thwarted thee once. I gave information to the Prince of the Count's design when he sent his servant to St. Petersburg!"

"What!—thou didst betray us! Thou art mad!" said Mattheus, jumping out.

"Father!" said Nadeshta, "thou wouldst not surely injure us? Loose thy hold."

"No, no!" replied the Starost, "thou passest not onward. I have a kind of love for thee whilst here; but, like the damned, I will not suffer alone!"

"Do!—it will rouse all the domestics!" replied the Starost, still endeavouring to cut the traces, which now hanging loose, could not easily be severed by a blow.

"Father, let go!" said Mattheus, "or be your blood on your own head!"

"I can defend it," replied the old man, brandishing his axe fiercely; but Mattheus closed with him. The struggle was violent, but brief: the murderous weapon was wrenched from the Starost's hand; and his young and powerful assailant struck him with the blunt side a blow upon the skull, which felled him like an ox.

"You have not killed him, brother!" said Nadeshta.

"I do not know," replied Mattheus; "let us drive on—not over him!"

Horace, who had gathered up the reins when Mattheus alighted, now drove on at a pace so terrific, that no farther allusion could be made to this accident. Before reaching Kalouga, one horse dropped dead; it was detached; and still the sledge flew on with the same wild speed.

Their reception by the governor of Kalouga was of such vital importance, they were drawing so near to the crisis of their fate, that not a syllable passed their lips. The city was reached, and Mattheus, who had re-assumed the reins, drove to the governor's residence, where the Count alighted—Blanche and her brother awaiting in an agony of suspense without.

After nearly half an hour's delay, Horace rejoined them. "It is all right, let us proceed"—but the jaded horses after this half hour's inaction had grown so stiff that they could no longer move. A messenger had however been dispatched to the post-house for a fresh team, which soon arrived, and they resumed their journey full of hope.

Post after post, hour after hour, they flew along; threats and gold gave them speed, and the thought that perhaps their safety depended upon the start of a few hours which they had gained; and that happiness, and love, and freedom were to crown their exertions, inspired them not only with strength to sustain the fatigues of their rapid flight, but made them feel impatient even at all unavoidable delay.

Two days and two nights they had been incessantly upon the road, when towards sunset they were driving through a forest. The frost had caused them to muffle themselves so closely in their furs as to leave only the eyes, nose, and mouth exposed; the very breath froze in icicles upon the soft sable hair of their cloaks and upon the long beard of the post driver.

The driver, kept in awe by the special pa-dorogne which Horace had obtained from the governor, and stimulated alike by the high recompence offered and by his wish to get out of the piercing cold, was urging on his horses with utter disregard to the interests of his master, when they dashed rapidly past some human being seated by the road side.

"Stop! stop! stop!" said Nadeshta, "that poor wayfarer will perish."

"Dear Nadeshta! we may all perish if we lose a single hour," said Horace.

"Alas!" said Mattheus, "the world is full of miseries, but we have no time now to look to this unfortunate. Drive on."

"No, stop," said Nadeshta, "I will not go on: it is a woman—the poor creature will perish in this bitter frost, if she sits there only for a few minutes longer—perhaps she is already frozen."

Mattheus stepped out and approached the figure, whose sex, thus huddled together and muffled in its sheepskin was not at first discernible, although on closer examination he discovered that it was a woman already half stupified by the cold.

"Come! come! matushka (mother)," said he in Russ.

She did not answer, though she moved.

"Come," continued Mattheus, endeavouring to raise her, when to his utter amazement, she exclaimed in English:

"No, not my child—you shall not take my child; the mad woman has relinquished her hold, and the wolf shrunk back."

"Good God!" said Mattheus, drawing aside the garment which covered her head, and embracing his wife as he recognised her. "Good God! my Blanche, is it you?"

"Mattheus! Mattheus! my own Mattheus!" said Blanche, "Oh! warm our babe, it is so cold"—and then, overpowered by hunger, weakness and emotion, she sank insensible. By this time Horace and Nadeshta were by her side.

"My child—my child! on whom its father's eyes have never yet lighted," said Mattheus, and from the mother's bosom he drew forth his first-born, to gaze upon it with a father's pride: but alas, life had been long—perhaps many days—extinct; the little thing was stiff, and stark, and cold; its once tender limbs felt stony as the ice into which its young blood was curdled; and its blue and tiny lips seemed frozen into a livid smile. The last, the very last offshoot of the once illustrious house of Mortimer had perished of cold and misery, by the road side, for want of a shelter in which to lay its houseless head.

* * * * *

"I always told you so," said Mattheus, whose wife had been lifted into the sledge; "thus the curse works on our predestined race! How dared I ever hope the contrary—worm as I was—to think that the immutable decrees of fate should bend to my mean personality! Oh no, we cannot shun the destiny pre-ordained tens of centuries back. Nadeshta, may'st thou escape the doom which I perpetuate; and as for her she is not of our blood. I have just seen thee kissing her cold cheek with the affection of a sister; and so, Nadeshta, remembering how in thy thoughts thou hast wronged this noble woman—thou wilt be kind to her and foster her: let me hear thee say thou wilt before we part."

"Before we part!" replied Nadeshta—"you are dreaming, brother."

"A dream that knows no waking then: our fates like two diverging lines now clearly separate, never to meet again except in Heaven. Our passport is but for three: now that Blanche is with us, I should make a fourth. I know the jealous vigilance of the authorities. I know too well that to accompany you would bring detection and heap ruin on you all. God bless you, my fond sister—God bless you, noble brother. God bless you, my poor Blanche. Dead as my last words fall on your unconscious ear; insensible as are your cold lips to my kisses—God give you consolation and forgetfulness! Blanche, Nadeshta, Horace! fare you well!"

"This cannot be," said Horace, "you cannot quit us thus:—we cannot leave you to fall afresh into your tyrant's hands."

"No," said Mattheus, "that trial will be spared me now. I shall take to the wild woods. I shall mate with the fox, the wolf, and the bear. I shall trust to the mercies of the elements: I shall bear with me my child till the spring comes, and I will bury it then far in the wilderness, for now the wolves would dig it up. The cruel frost which has nipped it in the bud will keep it from decay for me to gaze upon, and I will bury it when flowers are springing. So once more, fare you well!"

And so saying, Mattheus waved his hand, and, plunging into the thicket with his first-born, vanished amid the low serried branches of the white fir.

"Oh my brother! my brother, he shall not go alone!" said Nadeshta, with an effort to follow him; but Horace held her firmly, imploring, entreating, and endeavouring to bring her back to reason; till in fact it became so obvious that any attempt to follow him in the boundless forest could only lead to their own destruction without availing him, that the Count was at last enabled to proceed with the two women:—the one in a state of distraction, the other of insensibility.

* * * * *

Two months, to the very day, after this harrowing scene, Nadeshta, who had been already married in England, to avoid the interminable formalities of the Napoleon code—which renders marriage more difficult than divorce—was again united at his own desire to the Count de Montressan in the old chapel of his ancestral manor-house in Britanny; and, the ceremony over, husband and wife went to watch by the bedside of the convalescent Blanche.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Nearly two years have elapsed since the escape of Blanche and Nadeshta from the power of the Prince.

Already all his estates have been sold excepting those in the government of Kalouga, for he has preferred selling his slaves and property outright to pledging them to the crown, fully aware that in that case they are equally lost, being, from one cause or other, scarcely ever redeemed.

By a trait which would appear strange and anomalous in other nations, but which is characteristic enough of the higher order of Russians, the Prince Isaakoff urged by an irresistible impulse—with a cool head and with his eyes open—has plunged into a course of boundless and ruinous extravagance. Profuse without generosity, and magnificent without dignity, lavishing millions whilst still mean in trifles; he clearly foresaw and yet by a strange fascination could not shun this reckless dissipation of his once colossal fortune. Like those gamesters, who, aware of all the chances in favour of the tables, of the advantages of its superior capital, and without any illusive confidence in their own luck, are still fascinated to play without a hope of eventual success.

Now, although the estate of the Bialoe Darevnia which he still possessed was unmortgaged, his necessities had caused him long since to neglect all prudence in extracting from it all that could momentarily be squeezed out of his peasantry to supply the exigencies of the moment; and as a most fitting instrument for this purpose he still retained Johann Sauer in his employment. As the misanthropic old Starost had prophesied from his keen observation alike of men and of the rotation of the seasons, the harvest failed, just when everything was shaven closely from the surface of the land, reducing the estate to the condition of one or two which happened to adjoin it.

Some hundred thousand slaves, amongst them the ten thousand of the Bialoe Darevnia, were famine-stricken: the other owners had already mortgaged them, and like Isaakoff (who still resolutely refused to do so,) were unwilling or unable to raise any immediate fund for their relief. The winter passed, but with the spring disease and hunger began to decimate and render desperate this unhappy population.

A wretched crowd battled eagerly for the garbage thrown out from the dwelling of the sleek Johann Sauer, notwithstanding all the dread which his now unbridled rapacity and severity inspired. His comfortable stacks of corn rose round the farm-yard, his cattle lowed, his poultry cackled within it; he was rich and well to do in the world, and he had established on the estate itself, a manufactory for the fabrication of beet-root sugar.

Bob Bridle, left behind by Count Horace, had sought out the Prince, a step which will be at once accounted for by the fact that the grey horse Lucifer had been tacitly confiscated by the latter, and, as he was found utterly unmanageable, the services of Bob had been eagerly secured: he had trained him, and ridden him, and won with him at Moscow, and he was now settled with him for the winter in the village of Bialoe Darevnia.

Nothing could exceed the affection which had grown up betwixt the fiery stallion and his groom. The loose box which Lucifer inhabited formed an anteroom to Bob's own apartment. The walls were whitewashed, and it was neatly paved, cleanly swept, and kept warm by the same stove as Bob's own chamber, indeed, it only differed from it in being boarded, furnished with a bed and chest of drawers, and ornamented with a print of the last winner of the Derby before Bob had quitted the turf, mounted by the jockey who had ridden him—a work of art which, from the care he took of it, the Russians mistook for the image of his patron saint.

When a distinction is made between the apartments of Bob and his horse, it must be explained that it existed more in form than in reality; for, long before daylight in the winter, Lucifer used to make his way into the groom's bed-chamber, sometimes playfully lifting the bed-clothes with his teeth, and sometimes touching his cheek with his black muzzle till he had awakened him; and then on the other hand Bob spent a large portion of his leisure in the horse's stall, seated on a barrel placed next the stove to keep the water thawed, and which he had painted pea-green, tastily picking out the hoops with white. Here he either polished the bits, or stirrup irons, or perused his bible, or peered with avidity into the racing calendar, of which he had added a few volumes to his library.

The upper half of the stable door, on which Lucifer's racing plates had been nailed, was open; he had been properly attended to, and, this operation performed. Bob had prepared his own breakfast consisting of tea and toast. Using the green cask as a table, he had spread on it a snow-white napkin and drawn a chair beside it. The grey horse's head intruded inquiringly over his shoulder as the groom raised to his mouth the tea, which he had poured out into a saucer.

"Now then!" said Bob, "now then, Lucy! do let other folks have their breakfast, you've had yourn. I'll put that ere head into a bag if you don't take it away; don't you see that the sugar basin is covered, and you can't get it into the milkpot, though I'm agreeable to admit that it is a small head, and as well set on as a horse's need be."

Lucifer, thus spoken to, whinnied an answer, rubbing his muzzle gently against Bob's cheek, and then smelling the plate of toast.

"Now then! do you want to put your nose too near the Sammy what's-o-name," continued Bob, alluding to the Samovar, or tea-urn, "and spill the tea over my leathers as you did yesterday? No, don't meddle with that plate, I never heared of a horse being cocked up with such dainties as buttered toast 'specially when he gets the best of oats, beans, and, carrots, and so many poor creatures of Christians, which they calls theirselves, is glad to pick the leavins off the dunghill. Come, let me have my breakfast, you always gets your feed, full measured and carefully sifted, and I hav'n't had a mornin's belly-full these three weeks."

And it was true that, every morning, the hungry children who looked in wistfully had excited such pity in Bob's breast that he divided the best part of his breakfast between them, always protesting that "he wished the young shavers would go and stare Johann out of his appetite instead of him," and inquiring whether they thought he was to feed the whole village and have his own breakfast out of that ere plate of toast?

"It's a blessin," continued Bob, looking at Lucifer to whom the best part of his conversation was generally addressed, "it's a blessin' that they hav'n't thought of me this morning, though," he added after a moment's reflection, "poor things, perhaps some on 'em is laid by the heels with hunger," and so saying he compassionately laid aside on a shelf all the remainder of his loaf.

Now the reason why no one had come that morning to Bob Bridle's door was, that it was a day of terror in the village. During the night a daring band of desperadoes, ravenous with hunger, not contented, as Johann said, with the refuse of the beet-root (after the sugar had been extracted from it) which he regularly distributed amongst them, had actually dug into the deep pit in which the roots were stored to keep them from the frost. When the tardy daylight dawned, Johann discovered the ground not only strewed with the remains of roots on which the famished wretches had assuaged their appetite, but many tons deposited in the same place frost-bitten and destroyed.

His rage knew no bounds. As for his wife, she even allowed this event to derange the immutable course of her household economy. The making up the ley for the great wash was postponed, and the bleeding of the pigs was deferred, for this thrifty manager, of whom Bob observed, "that she would squeeze milk out of a flint, and pick the kernel out of a paving-stone"—had accustomed these hapless animals to the operation every ten days for a month or two preceding their being converted into pork; thus drawing the blood regularly as a cow is milked to make black puddings, a proceeding which had the further advantage of rendering the swine dropsical, in which condition they were slaughtered, frozen, and sent to market, where they sold by weight.

All the efforts of Johann to discover the guilty parties failed. There was no indication by which to trace them, excepting a single distinct footprint on the snow, but this footprint was of very ordinary dimensions, so that more than eighty adult males were discovered in the manor village of whose tread it might alike have been the impress.

"You will keep them apart," said Johann to the Starost, "for to-morrow I expect both my brother Dietrich and the Captain Ispravnick. You are right, you are always right, Batushka (father), I am too lenient with them. An example must be made, or we shall have them in open rebellion."

The old Starost grinned savagely, as he always did at the prospect of any additional severity.

"Oh, your blagarodie's brother comes to-morrow?"

"Yes," replied Johann, "we have nothing to feed these rogues with yet, and when we have—if we procure anything—they shall have nothing in this village till the refuse of the beetroot is eaten. Now Dietrich will take off our hands by contract a hundred and eighty, and I am sure all the sick and decrepid will never recover in such an unfavourable season. So better let him take them at thirty roubles a-piece, or even at half for his manufactory, than let them die upon our hands like sheep of the rot. Only you must bear in mind two things—firstly that you must bring out all the sickliest portion for him to select from, for we shall find him dainty, seeing that he can choose in the villages round; and secondly, that we let them here believe that it is done to punish that barefaced robbery. They don't like going to the manufactory, do they even now, the fools?"

"They don't like going to the manufactory," replied the Starost.

"I should like to go anywhere if I was fed when starving," said Johann.

"Your blagarodie is wise," answered the Starost; "those foolish creatures say, those who sell us for twenty-five roubles know that there is not much more than twenty-five roubles' worth of work in us; and those who buy us, when once they have filled our bellies with food, will not wait to get their money slowly out of us: it will pay them best to work us to death, and buy another set. But then what is that to the Oupravitel? He has only to consider whether it is advantageous for the estate."

Such is unhappily the system on which many of the manufactories in the empire are supplied with labour. Where the average price of the sound slave is £12 or £15 or £20, sets of labourers—the sick, the consumptive, the decrepid—are leased out for an indefinite period, or actually sold as artisans, for premiums varying from twenty to fifty shillings. The condition of these human hells furnishes a terrible answer to those, who cite the horrors of our own workhouses and factories to palliate the condition of the Russian serf.

A few hours after these cruel orders had been given to the old Starost, Hans, Johann's son, arrived alone. Hans had been established in Moscow as a dealer in comestibles, an occupation more congenial to his taste than any other upon earth, had it not been, as he said, for the sad drawback of daily parting with so many dainties to his customers. He was little changed, excepting that his cheeks were more rubicund and plump, and that a premature abdominal rotundity showed that he was still as much as ever given to gastronomic indulgence.

"How is this, Hans?" said the father. "Where is thy uncle Dietrich?"

"He would remain upon the road," replied Hans. "He is on the next estate with the Captain Ispravnik:—they will both be here to breakfast to-morrow."

"Dolt, lout, and idiot," said Johann, "I wrote for thee to come with him purposely, that he should not tarry and find out that there are other estates exactly in the condition of our own. I have no partnership with thy uncle Dietrich now; and he would have driven a bargain hard enough, without knowing that he had all the country round about to pick from. At least, thou shouldst not have left him."

"I would not," replied Hans, "if I had not known that this was the day on which mother sends off the black puddings."

CHAPTER XXIV.

It was eleven o'clock in the morning. Neither Dietrich nor the Ispravnik had yet arrived; but breakfast was prepared, and two distinct bodies of slaves were ranged before the manor-house—the one consisting of two or three hundred of the most emaciated, ailing, and decrepid villagers, the other a promiscuous crowd of adult men, whose soles had matched the guilty footprint.

The wretches had been waiting outside for a couple of hours, till Johann, having taken his coffee and drawn on his worsted stockings, carefully warmed by the fire, and then his list shoes over them, and donned his shube, so that it snugly concealed all but the tip of his nose, walked out of his dwelling. The old Starost, cap in hand, preceded him.

"Now," said Johann, turning to the group, which he was satisfied contained one at least of the culprits, "you had better explain to them, Batushka, that the Ispravnik, with some of his people is expected every minute, and that, unless they dutifully point out to me those who broke into the store, and the ring-leaders, they will every one be unmercifully punished, painful as such a proceeding is to me."

"Master!" said the Starost, "here is a man confesses to have headed the plunderers. Stand forward!"

A tall, gaunt, and yet powerful figure, clad in a long-haired horse-skin, stepped forth. His hair was rugged and uncombed, and his beard and whiskers not only of unusual length and thickness, but entangled and matted together, and hanging in ragged lengths, as we see the fleece of mountain sheep.

"Who is he? He is not of this village?" said Johann.

"He is not of this village," repeated the Starost; "but there is another who also confesses to have led the thieves. Stand forward."

A red-haired man, with a malignant blood-shot eye, advanced a step.

"Well," said Johann, with a smile, "I dare say that they are both right. We will make an example of them both."

"Yes," repeated the Starost; "but each contends that the other was not there; and each points out a different set of accomplices. Now, if you should punish those who were not present, the example will be lost; for when the real criminals find that others have suffered for their transgression, they may become further emboldened to break into another of your nobility's stores—perhaps even plunder a granary."

"That is true," said Johann, changing colour at the bare suggestion. "I see clearly that we must punish both the sets denounced."

"One moment," interrupted the Starost, whose eyes glistened with a fierce brightness, "I will never interfere on the side of mercy; but since one of these accusations is evidently false, why may not both be so? and thus the guilty will still escape."

"It is puzzling," said Johann; "the matter is becoming serious. I have many thousand roubles worth of corn and roots, my private property. Truly, I wish Dietrich were arrived."

"You are so wise and learned," said the Starost.

"Philosophy and mechanical genius," replied the steward, gratified at this unusual compliment from the old man's sullen lips,—"philosophy and mechanical genius do not always assist us in the ordinary walk of life. With all I know—to unravel this matter, I wish I had my brother's head."

"Dost thou?" said the Starost, with a loud, shrill, laugh of infernal exultation, repeating aloud: "He wishes for his brother's head!" and giving at the same time a signal, which he was induced for its frightful point and aptitude to make prematurely, the red-haired man advanced; and, drawing from beneath his sheepskin a heavy ball, rolled it up to the feet of the steward.

It was a human head, defaced and livid, with the gore coagulated and frozen into the same fixity as the hideous expression of its features—the well known features of Dietrich!

"Harkye, brethren all," said the Starost, "here you are brought up like oxen to the slaughter-house, like sheep to the shambles; but lo! the axes and the knives are wrested from the butcher's hand and placed in your own. Nine villages have risen before day-break: they are roaring in the flames."

"And the flames are being quenched in blood," replied the red-haired man with a hiccup, "though the brandy feeds them. I have driven fourteen versts—look at that head; I cut it off!"

"Off the body of the Niemitz, who came to buy you, like overworked horses in Moscow for the knacker," said the Starost; "and this is the brother who wished to sell you."

"Rise!—rise!" continued the old man to the slaves, pushing down and placing his broad foot on the chest of the affrighted Johann, who, speechless in his terror, fell to the ground without a struggle. "Rise ye! whose backs smart—whose bellies are gripped by hunger—who are doomed to the manufactory, the churchyard, and the lash! Your holiday is come! Death to the stranger!—death to the Niemitz, and the Oupravitel, and the Baron! Kill!—burn!—destroy and eat!"

"Hurrah! hurrah!—Death to the Niemitz and the Baron! Blood and food!" shouted the slaves.

"But the Captain Ispravnik....!" suggested a timid voice from the crowd, distinctly audible, as its simultaneous cheer was hushed.

"The Captain Ispravnik's head is gone through the other villages!" replied the Starost. And then addressing the man in the horse-skin: "Stand forward, Mattvei Mattveitch! Do you not know him, brethren?" he knocked him down with a blow of his axe just as he spoke and lied in the Emperor's name. "Long live the Emperor!—for that blow I forgive him the one that laid me low."

"Yes," said the red-haired man with some jealousy, "he fought, but he has more of the soldier than the Moujik. He has no heart but when his blood is up. I cut the Ispravnik's throat when his people were down. Come, follow me!"

"Come, follow us!" said the Starost, still mindful of the times of Pugatchef, and judging of the condition of the whole country by his own immediate district. "Each one to his taste; the axe, the plough and the fire, are all good in turns. Blood, food, and brandy first, my children!—and then the fight; for those who only love the strife!"

"Death, death, death, to the Oupravitel!" roared the crowd.

"Death to the Niemetz and his seed!" replied the Starost; and the red-haired Moujik, leading the way, and the crowd having bound the steward, rushed into the house to wreak their vengeance on its other inmates.

Mattheus leaned upon his axe and smiled gloomily as they passed him. He looked on as he would on the waters of a torrent, taking no more part to aid or check its fury.

"Riot and bloodshed!" he said; "one hour of vengeance to interrupt the long monotony of this fate: then death, Siberia, and the knout, for the few—happy alternatives! The famine-stricken will eat their fill: the long-oppressed will glut their hatred: and then for the many, the common curse will work on again—the long curse of three thousand years!"

* * * * *

We will draw a veil over the bloody saturnalia of the revolted slaves. It was the common history of the partial rebellions constantly occurring in some part or other of the Russian empire—probably somewhere whilst you, reader, are perusing these pages—where the peasantry, only rising when goaded like the overloaded camel to a state of rabid desperation, are animated by a ferocity usually as foreign to their nature as to the camel's, but which nevertheless displays itself in acts of cruelty that would startle the red Indian.

It is worthy of remark, that this same Russian peasantry, in its ordinary, or what may be termed its normal frame of mind and temper, should be, with many striking faults, gentle, humane, submissive, and difficult to rouse from its enduring and submissive apathy; whilst the peasantry of Poland, comparatively turbulent, excitable, and prone to violence, are humane and forgiving when the struggle is over; and, easily urged to plot, and threaten, and rebel, have seldom heart to strike the blow, except in the hot blood of actual strife. Nothing but the most terrible oppression can drive the Muscovite to incur the dangers of resistance; but when once he is urged thus far, there is no imaginable barbarity which he dreads committing. The Pole, ever ready to draw on his head the penalties of rebellion, shows only a noble cowardice in striking his victim. This pleasing trait is characterised in a well-known Polish anecdote.

The four serfs of two Polish noblemen, in their cups, canvassing the hardships they endure, conspire against their lords, and resolve to murder them that night; they fix the very hour. As it approaches, one of them observes:

"After all, it is difficult to cut the throat of a man, be he what he may, whom one has known from one's childhood; still he must die, so suppose that we two go and kill your lord, and you ours?"

"We were just thinking the same thing," reply the other two; "let us go." And, stimulating their resolution with a few more drams, they each depart upon their errand.

But the first speakers, as they approach the dwelling of their comrade's lord, consult together, and say:

"Who is it we are going to slay?—a man we do not know—a man who has never done us any harm! It is impossible to kill him in cold blood;" and they turn back, and abandon their design.

Meanwhile, the same scruple has suggested itself to the other couple, on the very threshold of the doomed man's door; but, to put an end to their irresolution, the bolder of the two knocks at once.

"Come in, my children!" said the lord, "it is a cold night; I suppose you have lost your way. Warm yourselves by the fire, and take a drop of something."

One of the serfs nudges the other, and whispers:

"You must do it, I can't."

"Nor I," says the other. "One can't hurt such a man;" and, with a profusion of bows, the two would-be assassins, disarmed by a kind word, take their leave.

Such is the Polish peasant, but not the Muscovite. Only an hour has passed; one half the village is in flames. Gorged with food, and stupified with brandy, many of the rioters lie insensible amidst the slaughtered cattle, and the dissevered and still palpitating limbs and mangled bodies of the steward, his wife and daughter, and his immediate servants. The famished wretches, in the madness of their fury and intoxication, fire the long-coveted stacks and granaries, which in burning will consume or crush them. But, in the midst of their terrible revelry, in which the Starost takes no present part, but which he encourages, seated on a cask, with a reeking knife in his red hand, a shout is heard; some distant shots follow, and an alarm is given:

"The Cossacks!—the Cossacks!"

A sudden panic seizes the crowd. The old Starost, who has been in fact resorting to a stratagem, now resumes his authority.

"Come, my children! let us seek the protection of the woods and of the deep snow; let us make our way to the seven villages, and join our brethren! they have musketry."

The old man, bent on effecting some organization, and full of hopes which Mattheus never shared, thus drew after him the whole population of the village from the scene of riot and murder, leaving only the dead and their drunken companions, and the scattered plunder of the mansion-house upon the field.

* * * * *

All was now silent except the crackling of the flames; and Bob Bridle, hitherto shut up with Lucifer in the stable—against the door of which waggons and logs of wood, and the wreck of furniture had been piled—now finding the coast clear, made his way out of the window.

The whole building, excepting the extremity of this wing, was already either consumed or one roaring furnace. His first step was on to the body of the red-haired Moujik, who was lying quite besotted, with a knife in one hand, a bottle in the other, and the head of Dietrich still beneath his arm.

A strange outcry met his ear: the door of the store-house or larder, one of the apartments still unconsumed, was open; and here, as he cast his eyes about him for an axe, he discerned Hans suspended by the heels, although his arms reached the ground.

Bob Bridle hastened to relieve him. He had turned from red to a deep purple in the face, but was otherwise uninjured. Whether the rioters had forgotten to wreak further vengeance, or that the marked sympathy which he had evinced for their condition had hitherto saved him; for the notion of their being hungry had touched the most sensitive chord in his bosom.

"Either I have stretched, or the rope has," said Hans, regaining his legs, "for my head was three feet from the ground at first; a pretty way to settle one's breakfast!"

"Come!" replied the groom, not displeased to see the steward's son so little agitated; for no impression, even of fear, could be immediately produced on the unconquerable dulness of Hans, whose understanding was, besides, still in the position from which his body had just been relieved.

"Come, be alive."

"A pretty way to treat one," continued he, "when I came to stay for a week's holiday."

"Ay, they will treat you worse if you don't look sharp. Come, help me to get out the horse, and I will take you up behind me."

But all Bob's eloquence could not persuade the youth to aid him;—the larder had only been half plundered; and no sooner had his bewildered eyes rested on the scene of blood and ruin before him, than they reverted to the strings of smoked geese, the hams, and ropes of onions. Of these objects alone, and of the danger that menaced them, did his disturbed brain seem to conceive any distinct idea.

The smoke was already beginning to fill the stable, the grey horse neighed loudly from within, and the groom, therefore, fell to work alone. Nothing could exceed the energy with which he exerted himself. He cleared the door—the door itself was giving way before the redoubled blows of his axe—when the roar of the rioters was again heard. Instead of the Cossacks, a furious body of revolters from the seven villages had just joined them, and they returned to the scene of devastation rendered fiercer by their recent panic.

Hans was seized, just as, after placing in safety a large portion of the provisions, he was in the act of rolling out a huge cask of sauer-kraut. His hands were still upon the edge of the tub, and his lips were sententiously and mechanically repeating "Waste not, want not!" when his heels were tripped up, and he was plunged head foremost into the mess of fermented cabbage, amidst the savage laughter of the peasants.

"Now for the groom! now for the grey horse! now for the Niemetz who gave the horse fair oats whilst our children hungered!"

Bob had just broken through the door—he had saddled and bridled Lucifer, and donned his great-coat; he had secured his pipe, his Bible, and a horse-cloth—his foot was almost in the stirrup, when he was seized, knocked down, and bound.

"Hark!" said Mattheus, who now joined them, "touch him not, brethren! be just, if not merciful. Which of you has he ever harmed?"

"Down, down, down with him!" replied the infuriated mob.

"Mattvei Mattveitch," said the old Starost, shrugging his shoulders, "what is he to thee or me? do not exasperate them."

"Stand back," said Mattheus, advancing to release the groom; but Mattheus had made no imposing display of his courage to acquire influence with the rioters of his own village;—he had not even taken part in their violence or cruelty to place his zeal beyond suspicion, and so a dozen arms were raised to resent his interference, and he was struck senseless to the ground.

"Hark ye!" said a voice, "it is stale to hang, or burn, or disembowel, let us lash him to the heels of his own grey demon-horse, and start the horse with a wisp of lighted straw beneath his tail."

"Hurrah!" replied the mob, delighted at the grotesquely barbarous malice of the proposition, so thoroughly in the spirit which animates these jacqueries of the Russian boors.

"Hurrah!" no sooner said than done. Emboldened by liquor, or ignorant of the stallion's fierceness—with axes, poles, and ropes, they rush into his box—but a loud, terrific scream of fury from the angry animal vibrates above the din of this strange scene. Tearing the intruders with his teeth, and battling with his forelegs as he tramples them right and left, the mighty steed bounds out of his box over their prostrate bodies.

With a half affrighted, half triumphant neigh, he gallops round amidst the flying crowd, his black nostrils dilating into red transparency, his wild eye flashing, and his mane and tail streaming in the breeze, like the flames which now blaze lambently in it from every part of the building.

Whilst this is passing, a half-drunken woman, who has been gorging her two infants with the food now wasting and trodden under foot, approaches Bob Bridle.

"Niemetz, or no Niemetz," says she, "no one shall harm the little man who fed my babes;" and cutting the only cord that bound him, she bids him stand upon his feet.

At the same moment Lucifer, who, scouring wildly round, had been "scattering his enemies," as the author of God save the Queen expresses it, bounds playfully up to his master. Bob seizes the rein—his foot is in the stirrup—he leaps into the saddle in an instant.

"Now through 'em, Lucy, never say die!" and, pressing his heels to the horse's flank, Bob gallops resolutely through the densest part of the mob which is just gathered before him, upon the only outlet to the high road.

Some shots are fired, the blows of axes, knives, and clubs rain down to arrest his progress;—but the rider and the horse emerge from the human cloud—and then, still at a furious gallop, the fugitive responds to the savage yell of disappointment which pursues him; but, as Bob turns to utter it, he sees that the blood of the gallant grey is flowing fast, as well as his own.

* * * * *

When the Uradnik of the Cossacks with his detachment had arrived within a few versts of the first revolted village, they discovered Bob Bridle, regardless of his own wound, seated by the road side with the head of the dead Lucifer upraised upon his knees.

"Poor Lucy!" was the only observation which escaped his lips, and then he wiped mechanically, not the two small tears—the first and last he ever shed—but the bloody froth which oozed from the stiffened tongue of the lifeless steed. The gallant stallion, without slackening in his speed, had borne him to a place of safety, and then, choked by the inward hæmorrhage, he suddenly fell down upon the road as if shot through the heart, and expired in full career.

The Cossacks who, from their long habit of playing the sheep-dog and the hunting-hound, have no feeling for the miseries of the human victims on whose trace they are loosened, all showed their rude sympathy with the mute but significant grief of the fond rider over his dead horse.

They rode on without troubling him with unnecessary questions, and many a rough bony hand was stretched out to pat affectionately the lean ewe-neck of the steed which the passing horseman was bestriding.

* * * * *

Beside the smoking ruins of the manor-house, the Uradnik's attention was attracted, as he dismounted to warm himself by the embers, and looked coldly and indifferently on the mangled limbs and corpses scattered around, by the cask of sauer-kraut with the feet and legs of Hans still sticking out of it.

"Here," said he, pushing Mattheus with his foot, "this fellow, too, is strong-built; set him apart from the rest with the other three drunken prisoners;—he will make a guardsman."

CHAPTER XXV.

A strong corps of the Russian army of the Caucasus is encamped on a height a few miles south of Anapa, on the Notwash coast. This half of the Circassian isthmus adjoining the Black Sea, contains the higher range of the Caucasus inhabited by the Tcherkesses and the Abazeks.

A range of forts has been built and garrisoned on the very shore, protected and supplied by the Russian ships of war; but they have never even succeeded in establishing any land communication between one and the other, and indeed the sole object of this occupation has been to prevent the mountaineers from receiving foreign succour.

The most sanguine of the Russian governors and commanders have long abandoned all notion of penetrating into these mountains by force, and in reality despaired of effecting by policy or corruption what they cannot by the sword, at least till the western portion of the Isthmus is subdued.

There are several reasons for this: the Tcherkesses, or pure Circassians, and the Abazeks, are as numerous as all the other mongrel people inhabiting the middle and west, and they are as superior to them in courage and intellect as in personal appearance.

Terrible defeats have always followed any attempt to penetrate into their mountains; and such are their shrewdness and patriotism that they are no more to be bribed, cajoled, or intimidated, than conquered. At least the unremitting efforts of the Russians during three parts of a century have failed in making the slightest progress by any of these means.

The successes of the Russian arms or policy, in Circassia, which we often read of, refer, therefore, only to the eastern half; and even here, when with incredible pains-taking, Russia has made some advance, the events of a single summer have always thrown her back to the point at which she began it some five or six years preceding.

The General commanding in this instance is only desirous of reaching the next fort along the shore with as little loss as possible; not that this attempt to open a communication which will be closed the moment his army has passed, can produce the slightest result; but then it will tell well in a dispatch to the Emperor, and if the Emperor is not entirely deceived as to its insignificance, it will figure in the Prussian State Gazette and the Allgemeine Zeitung, and thence go the round of the European press.

The warlike inhabitants of the coast who pasture their flocks almost within reach of the Russian cannon, have no particular interest in preventing the column from effecting this military promenade, though they lose no opportunity of harassing these enemies who usually keep so securely within their walls, protected by their redoubted artillery and abundant ammunition.

The people of this coast are the most daring in the whole world—the most skilful in the use of arms—the Russians possessing, perhaps, as little individual courage—as awkward in use of weapons—as any race existing; it is, therefore, not to be wondered at that an utter discouragement pervades the army, and that the contempt of these fearless mountaineers for their invaders incredibly increases their hardihood.

They dread the Russian grape and volleys; but the Russian once isolated, or brought to close quarters with the Tcherkess, dreams no more of resistance than if naked in the clutches of the tiger.

The Russian column has halted on a hill, but it has sent out a close line of skirmishers—so numerous that they can almost join hands—and yet it is only here and there that, behind a rock or knoll, a few straggling natives take an occasional aim, always with deadly effect, in answer to the incessant fire of the Russian line.

One of these skirmishers has unbuttoned his coarse great coat, for in the Caucasian campaign carte blanche is now allowed for any infringement of the regulation, though General Yermoloff was disgraced for having ventured upon it.

"So," quoth the soldier, pausing to breathe, "these are the mountains of the Caucasus, the cradle of the human race! famous in hoary antiquity! and yet—I never thought to see them thus. I have often sympathised with the gallant barbarians who laugh to scorn even his power, and yet here I am pitted against them. I must endeavour to slay—or be slain. This is the most galling vengeance of a tyrant."

At this moment, three Tcherkessian horsemen, watching behind a point of rock, were daring each other on. The young Ouzden Abdallah wanted a slave, and the other two joined him in his martial frolic.

Swooping down, like the eagle from a cloud, they descend the hill side at a gallop, and dash right at the line of skirmishers. The shot rattle around them; but such is the trepidation of the soldiers that their aim becomes more uncertain. The horsemen are amongst them—they scatter them—a lasso tightens around the neck of the contemplative soldier—he is dragged along the ground at the full speed of a horse—then thrown across it insensible, and when he awakes to consciousness a vassal of the Ouzden is pouring water over him, and he sees the Russian column on the hill, and the line of skirmishers still popping away, many hundred feet below him.

* * * * *

The captive is given over to two of his host's slaves; these slaves are fellow countrymen, who were made prisoners together many months ago.

After all the terrible accounts of the cruelty of the Circassians, purposely propagated in the Russian armies to prevent desertion, he is a little reassured at their healthy and almost contented appearance.

"Now," said one of the slaves to the other, "by the beard of the old Mollah, for whom we smuggle the wine, this fellow reminds me of some one we both knew—"

"Of Alexi Alexeivitch, to be sure," replied his companion.

"Good God!" said the Lieutenant Alexius, starting back—for it was he: "how do you know me?"

"It is! it is!" shouted Lochadoff and Durakoff in one breath, and folding the ex-Lieutenant in their arms, "welcome! welcome, old fellow!"

"Welcome?" repeated the Lieutenant at length with a faint smile.

"Ay, welcome—do we not see you in the dress of a private?" replied Durakoff. "I can tell you that you will find this a place of enjoyment compared to the confinement in a soldier's great-coat, pent up within the walls of Anapa, together with other great-coats with human beings in them, and fed on sour mouldy biscuit."

"Is there no chance of recovering one's freedom?"

"Not much; but then on the whole one lives freer here than one did before."

"We are under less restraint," said Lochadoff, "than when we held commissions in the guards. Our Tcherkess master, like all the rest of them, is reckless of life, free with his yataghan, but not cruel. Slavery with these people partakes of the patriarchal character of the East and of Biblical times. We are regarded now as humble members of the family. You will be tolerably comfortable as soon as they have performed the operation."

"The operation!" said Alexius with a shudder, "is it true then?"

"Yes, your master will slit the skin of your heel with his sharp yataghan, and introduce a little chopped horse-hair. The scar heals, and you will feel nothing more; you are then left at large—he knows that on a long march you would fall lame again."

"It is better than chains or prisons," added Durakoff. "Should you be sold to another master who wants you to use your legs, the skin is slit afresh, the horse-hair poulticed out, your wound healed, and you are as well as ever. I wish we could have the luck to be all three bought by the old Mollah with the red nose who is always quoting the Koran."

"And now tell us," said Lochadoff, "how you came to be degraded to the ranks. Our own story, and the foolish frolic for which we paid the penalty, is well known to you."

"Well," said the Lieutenant, with a sigh, "it was a sad and sudden business. No sooner was my friend the poet—the great bard of his country—laid in his grave—"

"What P—?—is he dead then?"

"God bless me, I forgot that you had been buried alive here. The whole empire has been ringing with it. But let me hurry over as briefly as I may my sorrowful narration. You know then, gentlemen, that the great deceased always laboured under a painful jealousy of the two beings he loved best in the world—his wife and her sister's husband, D—. This jealousy became at length a madness. About a month ago, he fell upon one of those strange expedients which the eccentricity of his genius so frequently suggested.

"His wife, his brother-in-law, and himself were dining together, and as they rose from the table he first put out one candle, and then—pretending to snuff the other—extinguished that also. Drawing a burnt cork from his pocket, he hastily blackened his lips, and kissing his wife in the darkness, hurried out to seek a light, thus leaving her and the presumed paramour together."

"Our great poet was not original in his expedient," observed Durakoff, "I remember it in a French vaudeville."

"Whether original or not," continued Alexius, with some irritation, "this incident has occasioned the saddest tragedy recorded in our annals, for it has quenched the brightest genius that ever shed lustre on his people.

"When he returned into the dining-room with a light, his brother-in-law's lips were blackened, having taken from the wife's the damning impress which stamped her infidelity!

"To you who both knew him, I need scarcely explain that nothing but blood could wash out such an injury—an injury the suspicion or the presentiment of which had for years embittered his existence. Notwithstanding all the protestations of his brother-in-law, he resorted to those means which left him no alternative but to meet him. Our gifted friend was struck to the earth by a fatal shot; but he rose again to his feet, and taking a full aim at his adversary, fell dead as he pulled the trigger.

"Strange in his life, his death was stranger still—in this respect, that he left irrecusable evidence to the whole world of the spirit of prophecy which enabled him to forsee it in its minutest details; for he died so exactly like the hero of his last poem even in his very words, that I who saw him die could not more graphically paint that harrowing scene than by quoting his own works."

"This is strange indeed!" said Lochadoff.

"Poor P—!" observed his companion, "though, as for the prophecy, it was about as wonderful as if I were to prognosticate that we should get drunk to-night upon the Mollah's wine."

"And what became of D—?" said Lochadoff.

"D—," replied Alexius, "has left the empire, but strangely enough protesting still his innocence. He says—as he did before the duel—that when the poet put out the lights, in his agitation, he kissed him, the brother-in-law, instead of his wife, and thus his lips were blackened; that if his fury had not blinded him he might have seen that hers were unstained as her purity."

"But what has the death of P— to do with your disgrace?"

"You shall hear. No sooner were the last pulsations of that mighty heart silenced, than the Emperor, who you know had all his life persecuted P— until within the last few years, and even then treated him with disfavour and held him in aversion, the Emperor was the first to raise the note of woe, to which a whole nation with one voice responded.

"All the honours that could be lavished on the dead gathered in mockery around the grave of him whose life the Imperial contempt had branded."

"He thought, no doubt," observed Durakoff, "that a dead poet, like a bottled scorpion in the collection of an entomologist, was no longer noxious, and that it would redound to the glory of his reign to have paid these exaggerated honours to a great man. Don't look so frightened, Alexius, it is difficult to believe at first, I know, but you might laugh at the very beard of Nicolai—if he would only wear one—and nothing but the echo of the free rocks would answer you here."

"I for one, was however deceived by this Imperial pantomime of sorrow. It seemed that the petty animosities which once pursued him with their persecution had been buried with him, and succeeded by regret and appreciation. You know both of you the sincerity of my own fond admiration of his genius—how I have followed him to catch and treasure every flash radiating from it—to note down with religious care each plaintive sound of harmony that broke from that bruised spirit—that incarnation of a nation's suffering—and so, gentlemen, was it not pardonable in me to dream—not that his mantle had descended to his sorrowing follower, but that I had inherited, perhaps, some humble shadow of his inspiration?

"I am not a bold man, I care not to avow it. I was not made to struggle with danger or adversity, and I should never have dared the remotest risk of the Tsar's displeasure. But when I saw him scattering laurels on the bier of the great deceased, and when that magic voice was hushed for ever, I said, 'this is a propitious moment for a child of song,' and I published an ode to my departed idol.

"I did not receive laurels, or praise, or an Imperial message, or a diamond ring, as perhaps I had anticipated; but an order—"

"That is of no use to you here, my good fellow," interrupted Durakoff.

"An order," continued Alexius, "was issued for my degradation to the ranks, and transfer to the Caucasus. I cannot to this hour discover what there was offensive in my stanzas, as you shall judge, for I will read them to you."

And out of an inner pocket of his coarse, greasy great-coat he took a piece of tattered oilskin in which he had wrapped with all the care of a fond author a well thumbed copy of his verses.

"Stop," said Durakoff, "I dare say they are innocent enough; but I can guess the cause of your disgrace—perhaps you offered to read them to him."

"You shall judge," said the ex-Lieutenant.

"Not I, replied Durakoff, "read them to Lochadoff; the sun is going down, I must go to see after the old Mollah's wine."

CHAPTER XXVI.

More than three years have elapsed since we last introduced the Grand Duke Constantine to the reader. He is now with his Duchess in Warsaw, the capital of his brother's Polish kingdom, which he governs with a rod of iron. Time has neither diminished his affection for her, nor curbed the cruel violence of his temper. The austere republican, Joachim Lelewel, writing the Polish history for his nephews, says, "He began to lead a more regular life. He was said to have corrected his faults, and to have become more gentle; which means that he no longer fired at human beings; that he no longer killed them at a blow, as he was wont before to do; but that he now caused them to die a lingering death by his severity."

When the jealous vigilance of autocratic power in Russia proper is considered, where it watches the lifeless corpse of the only party which it had to dread, as a wild beast watches the carcass of its prey, mangling it whenever a falling shadow seems to its suspicious hatred a faint movement of vitality—it may be readily imagined with what acuteness and severity it was exercised in the kingdom of Poland, where the rooted hatred of all ranks of the people really menaced its existence.

Legions of spies were dispersed among all classes of society. There were the spies of the Russian secret police watching both the Poles and the conduct of Constantine, and there were the Grand Duke Constantine's own immediate spies.

The country was at once abandoned to all the frivolous violence of the Grand Duke, which was supposed to strike terror, and oppressed by the suspicious and Machiavelian policy of the cabinet of St. Petersburg.

In a truly infernal spirit, it forced the youth of Poland into the public schools, where, fearful that such portion of its time as was not absorbed by military exercises, if devoted to instruction would give rise to a spirit of investigation and resistance, it systematically introduced and encouraged all those vices which lead to physical and mental deterioration and demoralization.

Those who resisted the pernicious influence exercised, and turned with horror from the examples set before them, were sent to Siberia, or transported into Russia as common soldiers, or shut up in fortresses and dungeons. The infamous Novosiltsof, in the city of Vilna alone, (containing the celebrated university), converted ten convents and monasteries into prisons, which he filled with the Polish students.

All the chief Russian agents of authority were men anxious to propagate their vices, boastful of their debauchery. Novosiltsof, to whose care the superintendence of youth was entrusted, and a companion in infamy within whose especial province it fell to interfere in spiritual matters, both died the death of Herod, the loathsome consequence of the crapulous orgies with which it was their custom to relieve the monotony of their cruelty.

Even Warsaw, the gay and beautiful Varsava, so long accustomed to smile sweetly through her tears, appears in mourning now.

Varsava! which with her misfortunes and her levity, just as Venice, amongst cities, with her crimes and guile, recalls Lucretia Borgia, just as St. Petersburg images Semiramis or that second Catherine whose lusts and triumphs shamed its walls—by a similar analogy brings to mind the captive Queen of Scots—Mary! most loveable yet frail of queens, whose hair, when the headsman's axe came down on her fair neck, was turned already grey before time had yet destroyed one line of her beauteous features—Mary! for whose fate with all her faults and foibles, the pity of ages has been upon men's tongues and in their hearts, and yet in whose behalf, whilst living and defenceless so few of the most restless swords leaped forth!

And then—if every capital typify a nation, and the history of every nation have its moral; if Rome and Athens rise like parasitic plants from the trunk of the old fallen tree, to prove the mutability of human things, the possible abasement of the mighty; if Holland's cities, pile-supported in the marsh, point out the power of industry—if Madrid, the diseased heart of a nation, in its atrophy—on whose possessions once the sun could never set—show in its humiliation, the effects of bigotry and absolutism—then Warsaw stands the living witness of the cruel rapacity and bad faith of princes, the ingratitude and apathy of nations.

Warsaw, so difficult to depress to dulness, is rendered sad at last. Mothers are mourning for their sons, and citizens live in hourly dread of falling victims to the malice of the all-pervading spies—veterans and their young hot-blooded sons, forced to serve beneath the Grand Duke's tyranny, commit suicide to escape it.

Two post-carriages traverse the Saxon Square. If they had arrived a little earlier, their inmates might have seen a Polish nobleman and his lady forced to sweep one of the avenues leading to it, because their country coachman had not recognised and saluted the Grand Duke Constantine when he passed by, the coachman being condemned to a thousand lashes.

There is a secretary in that second carriage, with long flowing locks à la Raphael, and a broad-brimmed hat; if he were caught by the tetchy tyrant in a garb that savours so much of innovation, he would be served in the same manner as several foreigners yesterday, who were marched by beat of drum to this very spot, where the redundant locks of their hair, and the borders of their beaver were clipped together by a pair of shears.

The report soon spreads amongst the bystanders, that these are the carriages of the Marquis de St. Armand—the young and promising French diplomatist, whose departure from Vienna has been announced, and who is proceeding to St. Petersburg.

The spectators feel an interest they dare not evince; for, since the revolution, which has drawn the elder branch of the Bourbons into their second exile, the police spies and agents are more active, vigilant, and malevolent than ever.

The Emperor Nicholas has frowned sternly on tricoloured France, and everything indicates that he is watching his opportunity to pour his legions across the frontier—a report already spreading among the Polish army that it is to be forced to draw the sword against a people with whom it has so many intimate and mutual sympathies, though by its various governments it has been perpetually betrayed—by its absolutism under Louis XV—by its Republic, and by its Empire; for it was then still reserved for Poland to experience similar abandonment from the constitutional monarchy of the country for which it cherished so hapless an affection. The spectators, therefore, wonder among themselves whether the Marquis, though purposely chosen from an old legitimatist family, will be allowed to proceed to the Russian capital; whether even the Grand Duke will receive him with civility; whether he will be admitted at the Belvedere?

CHAPTER XXVII.

General le Gendre is seated in an apartment of the palace of the Belvedere, accompanied by General Sass, another of the Grand Duke's satellites, when the chief of the police of Warsaw, Matthew Lubovidski, enters, and is informed that he cannot yet have access to the Grand Duke.

"We are all waiting to see him; but she is with him."

The chief of the police shrugged up his shoulders imperceptibly.

"Well, well, we must have patience; but these are stirring times. It is a trial, gentlemen, to 'furnish' an antechamber when there is work to be done."

"Or pleasure to be harvested," said Le Gendre. "When gold flows in faster than one has time to gamble it away; when the glass sparkles to tempt us, and smiles woo us. Work or play for me, but not inaction."

"My good Le Gendre," said the police chief, "plunge into orgies to your ears. We are no saints any of us, and will join you in proper season; but there is a time for all things. This is a moment for vigilance."

"I can blend business and pleasure wonderfully," said Le Gendre. "When my mouth is parched, my head oppressed, my appetite gone, and my pocket-book empty, my vigilance is sharpened, and I can scent you out a traitor or a brooding malignant by very instinct."

"Well, gentlemen, how do you like your new colleague?" said the police master.

"Krilov?" asked Sass.

"I mean Krilov. You know, of course, that such is not his name. You know, probably, who he really was. That name might sound gratingly to ears supreme. His vast fortune was forfeited in the mother country; but his services have well redeemed his errors. It is gratifying to see Poland made a place of probation, where those who have offended can wipe out this disfavour by their zeal. I commend him to you as a master spirit, though driven from the seventh heaven."

"He is none the worse for that," said Le Gendre, who, as before mentioned, had been dismissed with disgrace from the Russian service.

As the words of the police-master implied, Poland had been made a sink, into which all that was most flagrantly corrupt and infamous in the rotten administration of the Russian empire was poured, so that it promised to be useful.

"There is one thing I do not like about him," said Sass; "he is not a jovial companion; he never quite unlaces; he shies the bottle and the orgie."

"Not so," said Le Gendre, "but he will not drink wine which is not perfect in vintage, keeping, and aroma; he scorns a figurante or a chorus singer."

"At least," said the Grand Master, "I trust, gentlemen, we shall all pull well together. Our separate paths, though they may meet at the cross-road of head-quarters, are chalked out without interfering with each other. We have the Polish nation at large to work upon, a wide field, with room for every one. Krilov is—at least professionally—a good companion, an active, zealous, indefatigable servant, invaluable since poor Novosiltsof's death."

"Ay, talk to me of jolly Novosiltsof!" said Le Gendre.

"Well," continued the Grand Master, "though Krilov is not such a roaring, ranting debauchee, his talents and his zeal are not far inferior to Novosiltsof's. Bamberg is good, but Krilov beats him; and I swear to you, that at least the two together are more dreaded than Novosiltsof was alone."

"Ay," said Le Gendre to himself, "they hunt in couples; they ruined each other reciprocally in the mother country; and so, with mortal hate betwixt them, are linked together, to work in emulation of each other's conduct, and to be spies upon it here. It is a weary trade, but it pays." And here Le Gendre cast an involuntary glance at Sass, to whom he had long divined that he was bound in similar companionship.

At this moment Krilov joined them. He was a man prematurely stricken in years. The sarcastic expression of his features, and their very bilious,—almost jaundiced—hue, rendered them still more cynical.

He was greeted with well simulated cordiality.

"We are all losing our time here," said the Police Master.

"Are no dispatches come yet from St. Petersburg respecting the Marquis de St. Armand?" inquired Krilov.

"None," replied Sass.

"What a strange business!" said the Police Master; "from what his Imperial Highness said, I was apprehensive of seeing him turned back without being permitted to alight, a mode of proceeding the Imperial cabinet would have censured; and now, he is not only received with a courtesy which will excite disapprobation, but his women are greeted with tokens of favour and distinction, which give rise to all sorts of remarks and rumours in the city."

"Ay," said Le Gendre, "the wind blows that way; they have been taken into the sudden favour of the Princess."

"They are with her now," said Sass.

"This I will say," said Le Gendre, "that I have never beheld at once two women so beautiful in one family as the Marchioness de St. Armand and the sister of the Marquis."

"You are not singular in your observation," observed the Police Master, "their beauty is the common theme."

"But then the one—the sister," said Sass, "as mournful as a Magdalen—would impart a chill to an icicle; and the wife as haughty as Lucifer in petticoats would put even Le Gendre, with his brazen look, out of countenance."

"They are two magnificent creatures in their way," replied the Police Master; "there is no denying it; so much so, that I should have wondered less had the predilection been on the part of his Highness than of the Princess; but they are cold, proud, and distant as the d—l!"

"The magic of the Princess dreads no rivalship," said Le Gendre. "I am sure this compliance with her whim is the greatest proof of it; but, as I was saying, I never but once before saw two such handsome women in one family, and that was at Vienna with jolly Novosiltsof. They were Poles: and there is no gainsaying that your lashkas (Polish women) are sometimes very fair. Novosiltsof had no eye for beauty, or I no powers of description. I could not make him recognise these beauties by the account I gave him of them.

" 'It is either this family or that family,' said he, 'or the other; but, to make sure, you shall have them all kneeling at your feet before supper-time to-morrow. They have all sons, or brothers, or lovers at the university, or they would not be here.'

"That night he picked out from the schools, and arrested all the students connected with all the fair dames he had named. It was reported that they were to be conveyed away. And, by the Lord! old jolly Novosiltsof kept his promise. Sisters, and mothers, and distant relatives, who took a touching interest—the most charming groups you ever saw—were besieging the old sinner's door.

" 'Le Gendre is the man you must apply to,' said he, 'two at a time.'

"And there, in couples, I had them weeping, interceding, coaxing, kneeling to me!"

"Well, and did you let the youths go?"

"Not all," replied Le Gendre; "I wished to have dismissed them all; but Novosiltsof was a tough old Turk. 'We must not make this quite a jest,' he said; 'these Poles, I have defiled their mothers! are all seditious in their hearts;' so three or four students were sent off to hard labour."

"Well," observed the Police Master, "I wish this disdainful Marchioness and her seductive sister had relations in the schools of Wilna. I should vastly like to see them kneeling to one of the Emperor's servants I could name."

"Gentlemen," said Krilov, "there is nothing impossible to genius; it is a word Napoleon struck out of the dictionary. There should be nothing impossible to one of our body wishing to gratify the wishes of a superior."—Here he bowed to the Police Master of Warsaw.—"If your Excellencies "—turning to Le Gendre and Sass—"will bet me a thousand silver roubles, I will wager that you shall see the Marchioness and her sister-in-law kneeling to the proxy of my respected patron, in the person of your humble servant."

"Oh, oh, oh!" replied Le Gendre, "how very probable! Why, for fascination, I would back my grog-blossoms and Sass's gouty legs against your dead eye and your livid skin."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

The Marchioness of St. Armand and her sister had just left the Duchess of Lowicz; a chamberlain was conducting them to their carriage.

The Marchioness stepped with the port of a princess over the gorgeous arabesques figured on the deep, downy carpet; and her sister, pale and thoughtful, moved on with a vacant eye, accustomed or indifferent to the surrounding splendour.

Krilov advanced from the recess of a window. He whispered to the bewildered chamberlain, who retired to the other end of the apartment.

"Ladies," said Krilov, "pardon the assurance of one who is fascinated. O let me conduct you whither I can say, between four walls, all that my heart dictates!"

The surprise of the two ladies may be imagined. The disdainful and imperious expression which had risen to the face of the Marchioness at the offensive impertinence of the speaker's manner, gave way to wonder at this singular and unaccountable address.—Was he a madman?

But before an answer could suggest itself, he whispered one sentence, and its effect was electrical. A deadly pallor overspread the brow of the proud Marchioness; and a hectic flush rose to the pale face of her sister, who leaned for a moment against the doorway to support herself; and then Madame de St. Armand, waving back the Chamberlain with her hand, followed the police-agent into the room to which he led the way.

* * * * *

Having closed the door, Isaakoff—for Krilov, the police-agent was no other than the ruined Prince Isaakoff—turned to his victims, and said:

"Welcome, my runaways! welcome, Blanche! welcome, Nadeshta! first a Countess, now a Marchioness; but your change of name and coronet left me really ignorant of the honour you intended us."

"Oh God!" said Blanche, "do the dead rise up?" and then, after a moment, she added, "but you pronounced a name—his name—in mercy where is he?"

"Ladies," replied the Prince, endeavouring to subdue his previous irony of manner, "great changes have taken place since we parted: I, the wealthy Prince Isaakoff, if not dead as reported, have been beggared and disgraced—you have both risen in the world, to rank and wealth. I will not say that misfortune has not changed my disposition, and taught me a fitful benevolence; but then the bitter recollection of the past sometimes stirs up my soul to its old vindictiveness; I have become by turns an angel and a fiend—your Mattheus is at this moment in my power."

"He lives!—oh God! he lives!" said Blanche.

"Your Mattheus is in my power, and so are you, you are still both my slaves. I will grant you that your husband's diplomatic character might, under other circumstances, have shielded you; but the Emperor is now incensed—perhaps about to draw the sword against your revolutionary France; he would delight in this indignity to its agent, he would for once protect a Russian Baron's rights. As for the Grand Duke, when he learns, which he has never learned yet, how he was deceived in your escape, he will prove inexorable. Now I am strangely moved by turns both to avenge upon Mattheus and on you my fallen fortunes, and then at times, what you will call, perhaps, a more Christian inspiration, urges me to forgive, and to see you all made happy, though, on the whole, you used me very ill."

"Oh!" said Blanche, kneeling, "listen to the voice of this good inspiration: you have suffered, let your suffering teach you mercy! Oh, save him!—save us! noble, generous Prince!"

"You would tempt a devil to mercy," said Isaakoff; "but Nadeshta—she whom I can make my slave again, or leave a Marchioness—stands haughtily and coldly there, suspicion in her eye, and hatred and defiance on her lip."

"Oh, sister, sister, sister!" said Blanche, in accents of heart-rending supplication.

"I pardon; but if I pardon," continued the Prince, "I must see that proud spirit curbed for once. She, too, must bend the knee, unless she be unmindful of her brother, whom I can show you one minute hence alive and well."

Nadeshta sunk upon her knees. Her fears and her affection had triumphed over her aversion and her pride.

At this moment Isaakoff clapping his hands, the door opened, and the Police Master, and the Generals Le Gendre and Sass appeared in the doorway indescribable astonishment depicted on their countenances.

"Gentlemen," said the Prince, "I hope my wager is won," and then turning to Matthew Lubovidski, "Here, your Excellency, is my report upon these strangers; as I think you went me halves on the bet, I trust you will excuse this little mystification by which I have ventured to withhold it from you half an hour; you will find that I thereby claim the Marchioness de St. Armand as my slave, born on my domains, and married without my permission, and her sister-in-law as equally my property, because lawfully married to another slave. As my estates are under sequestration, in the tutelage of the Crown, you will observe that it is on the Emperor's behalf I advance this claim."

"This is wondrous strange!" said the Police Master.

"Oh Mattheus! where is Mattheus, then?" said Blanche, still kneeling.

"Oh, I had forgotten, that is more strange still. Come hither, I will show him to you; by a singular fatality he is now in sight, I saw him as I passed the gate:—come hither."

Blanche followed him eagerly to the window, and there Isaakoff, pointing down, showed her a Russian sentinel. Was it a cruel jest? Oh no! the quick eye of the wife's love recognised at once the husband of her bosom, notwithstanding the disguise of this strange garb and the changes of time, suffering, and misfortune.

With a wild shriek she bounded from them. So rapid was her step that she reached the terrace unmolested; but there, in conformity with his orders the sentry, seeing a woman running thus precipitately, crossed his bayonet—the musket fell from his hands—and Mattheus was in the arms of his wife.

"What is this?" said the corporal, starting forward.

"Look!" said the Prince, from the window. "He has allowed himself to be disarmed, on guard at the palace! Does the Grand Duke ever forgive that? That will be five hundred lashes."

CHAPTER XXIX.

The increased severity of the suspicion to which the revolutionary tendencies of Western Europe have given rise have rendered the Russian oppression so intolerable, that, tempted by the hopes which they excite, the national spirit is in reality fermenting. Besides, men ask themselves why they should not really conspire, when liable to be arrested and punished on the false suspicion of conspiring? The mine now only waits the match.

At last, in the cadet-school, among that very class of youthful scholars so cruelly oppressed, the plotted insurrection works its hidden way. A determined band of students—conscious that secret associations are everywhere in progress and only wait an inspiriting example to declare themselves—resolve to surprise the Belvedere, the palace of the terrible Grand Duke.

There is one of these conspirators, a youth of ardent temperament and enthusiastic mind, who, weakened by the intense studies, which for the Polish youth had the attraction of being forbidden, has been so excited by the importance of the undertaking, that his mind wanders a little. His brethren judge it fit to remove him to a distance; but, before his departure, he has dropped a word, perhaps a monosyllable or two, which have aroused suspicion: he is watched.

After a fatiguing journey, he is detained in the town of —— by his increasing malady. There is a private mark upon his passport, which points out to the police authorities that they are to keep a vigilant eye upon him. As his illness gains ground, he lets fall another word or two in the delirium of fever.

This is reported to the Baron Bamberg, who presides over that department, and the Baron Bamberg dispatches one of his cleverest agents—our old friend Dimitri—who has profited by his master's ruin, and the pickings which his profusion afforded, to obtain his liberty and enter the police, in which he has risen so rapidly that he has already the mission to report upon his patron, Bamberg.

Dimitri, hearing that the sick youth was becoming alarmed, and anxious for a Romish priest, unhesitatingly personated that character. He led his victim artfully to confess, and, by means of confession, extorted from him all the details of the conspiracy which no tortures would have extracted from his lips. It was late on the 27th of November that he received this confession; the 29th was the night fixed for the attack of the Belvedere.

Now Dimitri had profited sufficiently by the instructions of his master to know that so important a piece of information would suffice to make a man's fortune, and that his chief would be sure to forward it as his own discovery. He therefore resolved to dissemble, and, having declared that he could extract nothing from the patient, he walked beyond the town gate, taking with him the pass of some trader which was lying ready signed.

He made an agreement with a nobleman's servant taking his caleche to Warsaw, on condition that he would not linger on the road; and he took his seat inside. This servant, who after a few stations on the road became deeply inebriated, had a companion. The dignity of Dimitri, who was now a Chinovnik, or man of rank, was somewhat hurt when the drunken servant came into the coach, and was assisted into it by a dapper little man, in whom, not much to his satisfaction, he recognised our old friend, Bob Bridle.

Bob had grown older, and looked care-worn. He was now poor, and was making his way slowly westward. It was his intention to seek service at Warsaw, and then go further with his earnings, when their amount should enable him to do so. His apparel was very seedy; the nap was all brushed off his rusty hat, and his coat was very threadbare; but there was not a button wanting or a hole discernible. His neckerchief was still very white, his buckskins clean, his tops spotless, and his boots bright—though, alas! now sadly patched. All his worldly gear he carried in a handkerchief—a cravat, a shirt, a pair of bootlegs with worn-out feet, his pipe and bible, his veterinary instruments, and the hoof and fetlock of his poor horse, Lucifer.

It was some time before Bob recognised, or chose to recognise, Dimitri, but when he did, he said in his determined manner:

"I've a long account to settle—a bone to pick with you."

"I hope you know," replied Dimitri, who was far from feeling comfortable at this announcement, "that I am a Chinovnik now?"

"I know that you are a d—n rascal, unless you've altered very much," said Bob; and then, as if a thought suddenly occurred to him, he appeared not only to cool down, but there was almost a merry twinkle in the corner of his grey eye. After a while, he observed:

"It was a shameful trick of you to hocus my drink that ere time in St. Petersburg."

"That, upon my honour, is a mistake," replied Dimitri, reflecting that he wished he could dispose of the other expected charges as easily. "There was nothing the matter with the drink except that it was strong."

"Then how warn't you drunk? You soaked in more than I did."

"That," replied Dimitri, "arose from my having a stronger head."

"Did it?" said Bob. "Then look you; my friend there, as is three sheets in the wind, has made me free of the brandy-bottle; now I leave you the option of the choice either to have the strength of it tried by drinking glass for glass with me like a jovial fellow, or by having it punched, as I will otherways do for you upon the spot."

Here Bob first tucked his sleeves up in a workmanlike manner, and then drew forth a huge bottle from the company of several others under the seat.

The earth and water of the Scythian ambassadors were not more significant. Dimitri knew the dexterity and resolution of the groom; he therefore chose the alternative of the brandy, resolved at the town of ——, where he was known, to call for assistance before he could be affected by its quantity. So, holding out his hand for the cup, he said blandly:

"Come come, here's to your health!"

"Don't forget me," hiccupped the other servant.

"That is right," said Bob; "but you must take two thimblefuls to start fair. Here is mine to you, Dimitri. Now it's yours to follow suit."

The third dram, elevating Dimitri's spirits, led him to imagine that he should really outdrink the groom, who was perhaps already half intoxicated, and therefore, as Bob at certain intervals continued to drink, he drank boldly after him; but he had strangely miscalculated, for in a little while he began to hold out his cup, and ask in a maudlin tone for liquor.

Bob Bridle now gave him the bottle, which he lifted occasionally to his lips, until completely intoxicated, with a sort of jeer of defiance as the groom affected to do the same.

"Now, my friend," said Bob. "If you ain't fuddled then no three-year old never started for the Darby." But to make security doubly sure, he took him by the throat, and putting the bottle to his mouth, by judiciously relinquishing and then resuming his hold, he made him swallow an additional quantity, just as he had been in the habit of physicking a horse.

"That's it, my hearty!" said Bob. "It goes down like mother's milk—don't it?"

Dimitri was by this time in a state of utter insensibility, and Bob, quietly drawing from his little stock a pair of scissors, took his head between his knees, and saying: "This is tit for tat," first clipped off his moustachios, then his hair.

"You may boast," continued the groom, "that you have been clipped with the same scissors as I used to poor Lucifer—may the turf lie lightly on him! as they say, which he went so lightly over. I don't say that your head is very smooth, but then you can go to the barber's and get shaved clean when you are sober."

By this time they had reached the town of ——, where Dimitri, well known to the police authorities, had all along proposed to himself to give the groom into custody.

But Bob too was acquainted with the town, and, making the post-driver, whom liquor had rendered complaisant, wait before he proceeded to the station, beside the dead wall of a vast building, he now pinned Dimitri up in an old table-cloth, in which some eatables had been enveloped, and which he discovered under the seat, and then, under pretext of conveying him to his friends, upraised him on his shoulders.

Dimitri was a small man, but still he was double the bulk of Bob, and therefore to see him borne away on his shoulders reminded one of the big larvæ, which may be seen carried by the little ants when you disturb their hillocks.

Bob disappeared with his burden behind the angle of the building, which was the foundling hospital.

There is a sort of cage in a niche of the wall, into which unfortunate infants abandoned by their parents are placed; the bell is then rung, and the cage revolves, so that the child is received without the depositor being seen.

Into this receptacle, which Bob called a dumb-waiter, he crammed the inert body of the drunken Dimitri, doubling up the legs and bending the neck to enable him to get it in; and then ringing the bell when he had succeeded in his task.

"Now, if you hav'n't got a pretty boy in that ere establishment, then I don't know the use of a currycomb," and, with this reflection, Bob left him to his fate, and proceeded forthwith to Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXX.

The Princess of Lowicz returned from the church of the Holy Cross, has been this hour closeted with the Grand Duke: neglecting her usual prudence, she has intruded too rashly on his humour. His voice is heard from without by his immediate confidants like that of a wild beast roaring in its den. While the terrible tempest of passion is raging, the crash of mirrors, clocks, and costly vases resounds as he dashes them in fragments, and the howl of savage and exulting rage, rising above the din, blanches the very cheeks of those whose duty keeps them in such dangerous vicinity; and, frequent as is the recurrence of these scenes, makes them tremble for the frail, delicate, and suffering wife, exposed to the tempestuous madness of her ferocious Lord.

At length exhaustion, or at least utter silence, follows rage, and then her soft clear voice raises its gentle accents, like the beautiful notes of a bird carolling to greet the sunshine, when the roar of the winds is suddenly hushed, and the black thunder-clouds open after speeding their tumultuous bolts—that voice, which must be like an angel's, if its soothing melody, poured forth in life-long intercession for mercy, suffice to such similitude.

The exquisite tact derived from long experience has taught her where to stay her prayer; but, at times, as now, the urgency of the occasion leads her to pass these shadowy bounds. Her intercession now is in favour of those victims whom she has unwillingly deluded; for she had written of Isaakoff's death, and assured them that all recollection of their flight was buried with him. She clasps her husband's knees. Roused into fury by this importunity, he pushes her back with brutal violence, and his heavy spurred boot tramps on the floor, as he hurries to the door and throws it open. All is over—her appeal has failed!

Passion chokes his voice:—he utters an inarticulate sound, but those who are waiting without, in doubt as to who is called, start up together. All these terrible men, at whose very name the inhabitants of Warsaw tremble, stand up in terror in their turn, exactly in the position of soldiers under the drill sergeant's eye—Le Gendre and Sass, Rosniecki and Lubovidski. He beckons to the police-master; the rest stand back.

"To-morrow, to-morrow, at break of day," said the Grand Duke, still full of the subject which had aroused his wrath—"those women shall be forwarded to St. Petersburg—ay if they were wife or daughter to the citizen king! The husband—I have defiled his mother!—stirs not till my imperial brother's will be known. How goes it in the city?"

"Still quiet, your Highness; but they continue to whisper and discuss these western revolutions."

"I will muzzle them," said Constantine. "Hitherto I have ruled them like King Log, they shall now find me King Stork. Have you detected many fresh malcontents since morning?"

"Our united lists mark out two hundred and seventeen persons, against whom there is more or less suspicion of disaffection, and whom it is therefore wise to incarcerate;—there are seven and twenty in the category B. whom it might be well, if your Imperial Highness judges fit, to transfer to Russia for example sake."

"If I judge fit!—I will bridle the tongues of these Poles, I will subdue their rebellious thoughts, if I transplant them all, old men and sucking babes, to the Siberian wastes, and fill their villages with Russians."

* * * * *

"These are stirring times," said Sass—"we sleep on a volcano, on a powder-mine."

"Pooh! pooh!" said Rosniecki, "there is no danger from the powder-mine, so we do not fall asleep and let a candle drop into it."

"Sleep!" said Le Gendre, "I have not eaten, drunk, or slept in comfort these two days. I wish his Imperial Highness would call me—I dare not go; I have hardly breakfasted, and I must hear the reports of thirty of our spies before I dine. Woe, woe, woe, to these turbulent Poles for it!"

CHAPTER XXXI.

Morning dawns on a scene of terror on the last day of November. The gallant band of devoted students have surprised the jealously-watched palace of the Belvedere. The Grand Duke Constantine has barely escaped with life; but how could Providence have denied that boon to the prayer of his gentle Duchess!

The populace has risen—whole regiments have declared in favour of the nation, others maintain neutrality—the people take a terrible revenge. Of the agents of oppression who yesterday crowded the Grand Duke's antechambers, or stalked along, inspiring dread and horror, one and all have either fled, concealed themselves, or perished. Le Gendre and Sass lie cold and mangled—Lubovidski pierced with thirteen wounds.

The resolution of the Grand Duke Constantine is quelled for ever. There is something of the courage of the pitted wolf, with its strong jaws and pointed fangs, about all his family. They are not people to be scared away by squibs, or turned aside one hair's-breadth from their path by threats or impending dangers. Their bite is terrible whilst still at large; but, once fairly collared, their game deserts them, and they yield to fate and humiliation with Oriental resignation. Paul bowed to his assassins, so Alexander to Napoleon's conquering arms, and Constantine to the revolted Poles.

If there be no Ferdinand, no Charles X, and no Don Miguel in their line, there has been no Sardanapalus, no Marc Antony, perishing amid the wreck of his fortunes, no Richard II expiring on the bodies of the murderers whom he had slain, no Richard III dying sword in hand upon the bloody field that saw the crown snatched from his brow.

The prisons are broken into, and thus Mattheus is released from the arrest under which he has been placed for his neglect of duty. He has joined those who have delivered him. Regardless of the cold November wind, he throws off his soldier's great-coat, and, bare-headed, with sleeves upturned, displaying the gigantic proportions of his sinewy arms—he snatches up a musket in one hand, and in the other the national Muscovite axe.

These insurgents are led by one of the conspirators, a youth of the cadet-school, who owes his authority over them to the successful hardihood with which his fellow-students have taken the first eventful step by surprising the Grand Duke.

Mattheus is received with eagerness as a liberated victim, besides which the perfection of his Polish accent does not allow them to suspect that he is Russian. Everything that meets his eye and ear on this unexpected deliverance tends to impress him with a belief—for which recent events in Western Europe have prepared him—that this is not revolt, but revolution; and so he passes from sullen desperation to a state of hope, rapturous, though still alloyed.

Amidst this motley crowd he presses ardently forward. It is now no longer the courage of despair, as in the rising of his native village, which nerves his mighty arm, for he is inspired by the hope of his companions, as they advance to the cadence of patriotic hymns, discordantly mingled with enthusiastic cheers and savage cries of vengeance; and in his turn he inspires them to fresh acts of daring by the example of his confident and earnest resolution.

Wherever the leader of this band—the youthful student—points with his sword, Mattheus moves forward, not with the fitful effervescent valour of the excited crowd, but at a calm, measured, almost stately, pace, which speaks inspiritingly to the beholders his own unshakeable confidence of success, and impresses them with its fatality. If he be not indeed foremost when it makes a rush, wherever resistance stays its march, he is seen to advance with the slow, calm certainty of the shadow on a dial. There is about him—and he infuses into others—a conviction of predestined triumph.

And it is true that, exposed to their full brunt, both lead and steel leave him unscathed. The insurgents have reached a picquet which bars their passage, and, heedless of their warning to stand back, Mattheus advances with unruffled serenity up to the levelled muskets of the soldiers, wavering between patriotism and fidelity, and thus, at the moment that their fingers are upon the trigger, he determines them to join the people!

The mob, swollen by the fraternising soldiery, and gathering numbers as it goes, directs its course towards another post; but here, intrenched behind a hurriedly-erected barricade of sledges, benches, and overturned waggons, a strong detachment defends this important point. A hasty volley brings the head of the advancing column to a full pause, as it debouches from the lane. It is but for a moment: for the maddened crowd rush only the more fiercely to the assault. But the fire is close and hot—the mob turns back more rapidly than it pressed forward. The smoke clears away, and shows only—amidst the dead and dying—two of the assailants who have not fled—their leader, the student, and Mattheus. The former though wounded, is still erect, and cheering on his disheartened followers with cap in hand, and the other uninjured and stalking resolutely up to the defences, from behind which peep the heads of the soldiery and streams their murderous fire; but no bullet strikes this man of destiny, though he has reached the barrier, though, within a few feet of the blazing muzzles of their guns, he hews away with his mighty axe at the barricade, and then, with the strength of Sampson, tears it piece-meal!

The strange spectacle of this isolated man, displaying the power of a giant in his anxiety to remove the barrier which divides him from a multitude of armed and angry foes, inspires his enemies with a superstitious dread, his partisans with enthusiastic admiration. The student, with his maimed leg, advances generously to his support alone. The crowd, with a terrific outcry, rush to the barricade. It is stormed—it is taken,—its defenders writhe and expire beneath the steel of the victorious mob.

This conquest is scarcely achieved, when a vehicle dashes up the street in the distance, already followed by the cry of fierce pursuers. The fugitives evidently thought this point still occupied by the government troops: they perceive their mistake too late; they are arrested by the victors, and recognised as Russians. The savage captors, begrimed with blood and powder, gather round them, when one of their fleet-limbed pursuers gasps out breathlessly that there is amongst them one of Lubovidski's (the police-master's) people. Their fate, dubious before, now seems inevitably sealed: it is only with the utmost effort that the student can stay the arms of his followers for a moment—and only by echoing death to their vociferous shouts of death.

"Yes, death, my brethren, to Lubovidski's agent; but let us learn which is he."

The crowd suspends its vengeance for a while. The pale and trembling prisoners are three in number. One wears the caftan of a coachman, the other two are wrapped in the shubes of civilians; but in the vehicle are found a police uniform which has been thrown aside, and a mass of papers, which confirm the accusation of their pursuer that one of them has been recognised by the mob from which he fled.

"Put to death, if you will, the agent of the infamous Lubovidski; but whoever lifts a hand against the other two, I fell to the earth," said the student.

"They are Russians!" shout the bystanders.

"The good of all countries are brethren!" exclaimed Mattheus. "Lubovidski himself was a Pole and a traitor—these may be Russians and victims."

"It is plain," said one of the insurgents, holding up the uniform, "that this does not fit the tall one, so it must be the other."

At this observation all eyes were turned on the shorter of the two personages enveloped in their shubes, who was evidently the police-officer, the third being a menial.

"Wretched man!" said the student, still covering him with his sword, "prepare to die! I cannot save thee from the death thy many crimes deserve."

"Oh, oh, your merciful nobility!" shrieked the victim, falling prostrate, "I am nothing but a miserable slave; that is my master, the Colonel of Police, who has put on my caftan."

"Oh, your Excellency," artfully replied he in the garb of the coachman, addressing the man in the shube, "I must speak out," and then turning to the mob, "know, worthy gentlemen, that it is true that he did change garments with me from top to toe; but, thinking the danger past, he was making me take back my caftan to go into the presence of the Grand Duke in his own hat and shube."

"Oh, do not believe him; look! look!" said the disguised varlet, throwing off his shube, and showing the coarse clothing of a serf beneath it. "I am his slave!"

But this did not convince the crowd, who were prepared for it by the explanation given by the other; and, although both were lividly pale, the haggard eye and chattering teeth of the last speaker inclined their opinion against him.

"That is my master, the Police Colonel; I am a serf, though he denies it," reiterated the master disguised in the caftan.

"I!" said the wretched slave, slipping off his under garment, and leaving it in a rude hand which had seized him impatiently, "oh, in God's name! gentlemen, do not believe him—look only here—look at the gap left by a tooth which he kicked out—look at these hands horny with labour—look at these scars upon my shoulders—can he show any upon his?"

These deeply indented marks of the lash were indeed a terrible refutation. How readily the master would then have given all the orders and medals which had cost him such a world of troublesome infamy to gain, to have had these ignominious stripes to show! He fell in abject terror, clasping the student's knees.

"Oh, mercy! mercy! grant me only one day's life, and I will lead you to capture my chief!"

During this time, the tallest of the three captives remained muffled up in his shube, in the custody of several of the crowd.

"If," said one of his guards, a fierce old rebel, pointing with his cocked pistol at the kneeling man, "if he only belongs to the Colonel Samoilov's office, I must dip my own hand in his heart's blood!"

"My friend," whispered the tall prisoner, pointing to his fellow-captive, as he clasped the student's knees, "that is Colonel Samoilov."

At these words the old man, who had some deadly wrong to revenge, clapped his pistol to the Colonel's head, and, blowing his skull in pieces, stopped short his revelations.

"Come," said Mattheus, to the disguised slave, "this is the hour of freedom, take up some weapon, and follow us."

"Come!" shouted some of the mob.

At this invitation, the slave seemed to recover from his terror:—he turned to assure himself that his tyrant was dead, and then an intense ferocity gathered in his aspect. He placed his foot upon the neck of the corpse, and this action brought instantly to the recollection of Mattheus, where he had seen the vaguely-remembered features both of the dead master and of the savagely exulting slave. It was at the post-house of Strelna, where the Chinovnik so cruelly maltreated the poor ostler, and it was evidently in horrible mimicry of what he had endured that he now retaliated on his Lord's remains.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Before the mob proceeds, it is necessary to provide for the defence of the important post they have conquered, and to occupy it with a strong detachment. The student, now borne aloft in the arms of the insurgents, designates Mattheus as a fitting leader of this band; and the bystanders, full of admiration for his prodigious strength and dauntless intrepidity, adopt this suggestion and clamorously ratify his choice. Mattheus, fatigued and exhausted, accepts because aware that from this central spot he is most likely in the universal confusion which prevails, to hear something of the fate of those about whom he is in such cruel anxiety.

Within the house adjoining the barricade, first turned into a guard-house by the military, and now occupied by the victors, is confined the tallest of the three Russians. There was nothing against him but the fact that he was attempting to escape, and the company in which he was found, and he has been snatched by the energetic interposition of the student from the horrible fate of his companion.

From the contradictory accounts of those who had pursued the vehicle in which the fugitives were escaping, Mattheus was led to believe that they could have afforded him the intelligence he was so intensely desirous of obtaining; but the liberated slave had moved on with the bulk of the crowd, and there remained, therefore, only the prisoner within to interrogate. Locking the door after him, to keep out his merciless and excited followers, over whom he held but slight control, he went in to his captive.

When the prisoner turned on his entrance, both started back, for, thus meeting face to face out of the wild turmoil of the surrounding mob, the prisoner knew Mattheus, and Mattheus recognised the Prince Isaakoff, pale, haggard, bespattered with the brains and sprinkled with the blood of his late companion. Isaakoff, thus suddenly confronted with his armed slave, raised his hands to his eyes with a shudder, as he exclaimed:

"Mattvei!"

"My Lord," replied Mattheus with mechanical deference, and then he added in a tone of bitter derision. "Yes, my Lord, as in punishment for thy sins Heaven made thee, Ivan Ivanovitch!—though now, in retribution of thy crimes, thou art given over to me."

"Mattvei!" said the Prince still self-possessed in all his terror, and not unmindful of the impression of his words, "Mattvei! what wouldst thou have me do?"

"Prepare to die," replied Mattheus sternly, as he cocked his musket. "The time for resignation is past, so is the hour for pity. Over the wide world the slave is trampling on his fetters, tyranny is withering, thrones are crumbling—Mercy has become guilt—the exterminating angel is abroad!"

And at this moment several rude husky voices were heard without, singing in chorus, in terrible corroboration of these words, the first snatches of a song improvised by some mob poet, which they were learning to repeat.

Poland, old Poland! has arisen from her sleep,—
From her sorrow and pain,—
From her long degradation,—
Not to pardon and weep
But to pay back again,
The tears of long years, by a like desolation!

And then another clearer voice sang in an accent less savage but not less enthusiastic,

Hurrah! for the cock that heralds the morn,
Of Liberty's birth and of freedom's dawn!
The wide earth is waking,
And tyrants are quaking,
Thrones totter and rock,
At the crow of the cock,
For its broad day is gloriously breaking!

Mattheus saying, "Hearest thou?" listened with superstitious earnestness to this augury; but, though his brow was radiant, the severity of his contracted lip, which Isaakoff watched with breathless interest, was not the less appalling for this exaltation.

"Mattvei!" said the Prince, abjectly clasping the knees of his late serf, "see how thou triumphest! Was ever yet abasement such as thou beholdest? The Lord imploring of his serf a few brief days of life—the Lord of ruined, broken fortunes, begging a wretched life of him, whose fathers ate of his forefathers' bread! He whose sire fostered thee, imploring mercy of thee whom that sire fostered, for his unhappy son! Bethink thee that I am ruined and an outcast. Thou wilt not kill me?"

"I will not kill thee," replied Mattheus. "Hark! there are thirty pikes without." And again the song of the insurgents broke upon their ear.

Strike in the name,
Of her wrongs and her shame!
Let not one,
Now the strife is begun,
Live to see the declining sun
Go down to its rest and her justice undone!

It was interrupted by their knocking loudly at the door, and they were heard shouting, "Open Captain! open brother! we have discovered a traitor in the prisoner."

"Good God!" said the Prince. "Hear them! not to save me is to kill me—to let murder be done upon me is to murder me. In the name of him, who was to you a father, in the name of that fraternity—for thus far we are brothers—I charge you."

And again the voices of the singers drowned his voice, as they thundered out with unconscious but startling appositeness,

If all men be brothers,
The deeds of the Russ
Make his murderous brotherhood
Cain's brotherhood for us;
So pour his black blood out,
And strike—for 'tis plain
That with every Russian we strike down a Cain.

"Oh God! oh God!" said the Prince, "so happy and so hardened to the voice of misery! In another hour thou wilt be with thy wife and sister, I saw them rescued at the gate. Oh save me, Mattvei!"

"You saw them rescued!" exclaimed Mattheus, with exulting joy.

"Open! open! open!" shout the mob without.

"Oh! save me!"

"Hark!" replied Mattheus, "my wrath is gone. I may forgive, but I cannot save thee. The mission of the slave in these days of retribution is not to hesitate, but to strike. The sword may not disobey the hand that wields it, unless it would be cast aside; nor we the Lord whose instruments we are."

"Open! open!" roar the mob, "man of the red axe! be quick with thy questions as with thy blows! Open! here is one who can identify the prisoner."

"I come," replied Mattheus.

"Mattvei Mattveitch! in his name, mercy! Hast thou forgotten that grey-headed man, who was to thee more than to me a father?"

"Call not upon that name!" said Matthew sternly.

"Oh, I will bid him witness with my dying voice! Think only if he stood before us, and saw his only son tracked by these hell-hounds, and thee still remorseless."

Mattheus replied not, but he was deeply moved by this appeal.

"If I am known," continued the Prince, "I perish! Hark to that tramp! It is a neutral regiment marching out to join the Grand-Duke. Save me, Mattvei, let me descend by that window!"

It must be explained that the apartment in which the prisoner was confined looked out on a lane at the back, which was utterly deserted.

"It is too high, you cannot leap into the paved street."

"Oh Mattvei, my more than brother, I am saved!" exclaimed the Prince, attempting to throw his arms around his neck.

"Back!" said Mattheus, with a stern expression of disgust. "That embrace would be contamination. Hark! they knock without—their impatience grows to anger. I am not in my guilty weakness proof against the venerable image which thou hast invoked. So go—begone in peace, and, remembering thy infamy and cruelty, repent."

At this moment redoubled knocks were heard outside.

"Open! open! we know thy prisoner! We will not be delayed!" shout the impatient partisans.

"Quick! put thy foot on this ledge, hold on by the stock of this musket and let thyself drop gently." And Mattheus grasped with conscious strength the other extremity of the piece by which the Prince supported his whole weight.

Isaakoff measured with a rapid glance the distance which remained to the ground. It was about seven feet, he was sure that he could leap it without injury. He looked upwards, the broad herculean chest of Mattheus was protruding from the window, and the barrel of the musket was imprudently directed towards him, as he held it to insure the prisoner's safe descent. He had forgotten to uncock it. The Prince, more observant, with diabolical ingratitude pulled the trigger, discharging the contents of the musket into his saviour's body, and then dropped nimbly into the street, the musket clattering after him.

Mattheus, shot through the heart, staggered back into the apartment.

A tremendous cheer from the mob announced some fresh success, and, as it ceased, these words rang on his dying ear:

All hail to the cock of Gaul!
He heralds a light
Which shall never know night,
Now it streams through the wide world for all.

As his brain reeled, as the absorbing thoughts of life chasing each other incoherently flashed through it in his agony—the images of his wife and sister, the triumph of freedom, and the fancied curse upon his people—it would seem as if he expired with the conviction, that he was the victim of its fatality, but the last, for there rose a faint smile of exultation to his lips, and then, the slave Mattheus, the fated and hereditary bondsman, was free; for, muttering, "The doom.... the doom upon the race of Sur!" he fell upon the floor stark dead.

Isaakoff judged more prophetically than the song, which, bringing a last smile to his victim's lips, was only painting there the fallacious hope of a whole nation; for, having at this instant joined the faithful regiment marching out by capitulation to follow the Grand-Duke, he observed to its commander, "If these Poles trust in the Gallic cock, they will find it become so domestic a dunghill bird, that it will not even give our Emperor the pretext of eating it trussed and truffled."

Meanwhile the followers of Mattheus were knocking outrageously without and threatening to burst the door, when the report of the fatal musket was heard.

"Hurrah! he has killed another traitor! Hurrah for Poland!"

Strike! strike
For if every blow
Were to pay back a thousand tears,
Their blood must flow,
And the weary pike
Must ply for a thousand years!

Then, grounding their weapons in savage cadence, there followed an interval of expectation and of silence.

"Open, brother!—Open! open Captain!—You are called for. Open, man of the red axe!"

Still no answer. At length they burst the door, and find him prostrate. He has fallen with his limbs stiff and rigid, like an uprooted tree. His chest is blackened by the powder, his shirt burning like tinder, ignited by the charge, and the hot blood is bubbling out of a large, hideous wound in the region of the heart!

Even the crowd is awed by this sad spectacle; but the emotion—like all other emotions with the multitude—passes rapidly.

"It is a pity," said one, "that so strong, so valiant, he let himself be taken by surprise!"

"Lay him here," observed another, "and let us breathe a prayer over him. He died for Poland!"

"There are many more will die like him," replied a sturdy insurgent. "Every man of us will be thus or free."

Each son of Poland
Will live for her glory,
Or lie on her battle fields,
Cold, stiff and gory!

"Hurrah for Poland!" shout the bystanders, and then the corpse might have been speedily abandoned to its fate, but for the arrival of some new comers. They bring with them two women rescued at the city gate, as they were being conveyed to the Grand Duke's quarters, and they have already led them into the room before they can make their question heard, as they ask for their Captain; so vociferous have the excited spectators become, as they drown the last momentary feeling of regret in the wild and discordant merriment of their song.

Shed not a tear
On grave or bier,
For Freedom—the new born—is nursing here!
And what death-cry is unmeet, so that Freedom it greet?
Or who would not spread his own winding sheet
To deck its joyful cradle?

"This way, this way, ladies," said one of the rude conductors of these two females. "Keep heart; though we be disarrayed and stained with blood a little, we are rough but honest men. Lord love you, we would not hurt you! Nor these either, they are good and true men too, and merry withal as you may hear. Where is our captain?"

But again the question is only answered by the last clamorous shout of the chorus.

Let no alloy
Our mirth destroy,
Or cloud the course of our triumph and joy!

Then, these voices hush into comparative silence, and he asks again:

"Where is our Captain?"

Some of the crowd step aside, and, pointing to the body, expose it to the full view of the two women—Blanche and Nadeshta!

Profiting by the successful insurrection, the Marquis and Marchioness de St. Armand and Blanche returned to France and live in utter retirement—the wife and sister of Mattheus still in that mourning which probably they will never lay aside.

Bob Bridle is with them. He still speaks with emotion of the revolt of the Bialoe Darevnia as having lost therein his favourite Lucifer, whose hoof he has had shod with a silver racing plate. Of the Polish revolution he has been merely heard to observe, with a grave shake of the head, "that it was a sad and unprofitable business for every one;" and when asked whether he had lost anything by it, replies, "his Bible and his pipe," and drops the subject.

Anna Obrasoff resides in Italy, and has married the Lieutenant Alexius, who, sold by his Tcherkess master to a Turkish merchant, was at length conveyed to Constantinople.

Baron Bamberg has recently, been made a Russian councillor of state, and has offered in the German papers to give twenty thousand roubles to any one who will furnish him with proof that the Emperor Paul died of anything but apoplexy. No one has accepted his challenge, which will be worth something to him.

Vasili Petrovitch still prospers in his business, and Katinka has returned to him; but the relations of husband and wife are singularly changed; for Vasili instead of being absolute master at home, is now her very humble servant; and the old aunt is banished to the kitchen. Katinka has become quite independent in her movements, and daily receives some of her police acquaintances, whose rank makes the old trader play a very insignificant part at his own table. Somehow or other, however, their protection is incessantly needed, and proves a very serious drain upon his profits. He is now offering a large sum to escape appointment to some high civic office—an infliction with which he is threatened.

The Grand Duke Constantine took no active part in the campaign which followed his expulsion from Warsaw. With his usual originality, he rubbed his hands with delight at all the early reverses of the Russian armies.

"Since you would go to war, spoiling uniforms and destroying discipline," said he, "I am very glad they have licked you. I knew they would. They are my own children. I disciplined, I formed them."

The Princess of Lowicz, to whom this deprivation of power was a great relief, now turned all her solicitude towards watching her rude Constantine, painfully conscious of the hatred and the jealousies that menaced him.

There is said to have been one person to whom she always entertained an instinctive aversion—to whom public rumour attributed several important deaths. Perhaps the report had gained ground, because the murder of two princes was reckoned in the brief annals of his house.

The Grand-Duke Constantine also died very suddenly. The Duchess, adopting the popular belief that her husband had been poisoned, lingered not long after him; and, broken-hearted at the contumely with which Nicholas treated her, expired with the name of Constantine upon her lips—the only lips that had ever breathed that name with affection.

Constantine had left to his beloved wife all his possessions. Nicholas would not allow her to inherit them; the widowed princess was indebted many thousand pounds, all spent in her uncalculating charities. When she died, the creditors came upon her aged father, the old Grudzinski. He went to St. Petersburg to claim the heritage of his daughter; he was not even vouchsafed an answer by the Emperor, and returned to his humble home to die in misery.

The creditors of the Grudzinski family in Prussian Poland have, however, at length instituted proceedings against the Emperor Nicholas in the Courts of Berlin, and whilst these volumes are going through the press, have caused the seals of justice to be set upon the palace, his private property in Berlin.