The Empress's court of Secret Chancery soon decided on the fate of Basil Mierowitz; the Count, his father, and his cousin Mariolizza, who had been passive, though suspected in the matter, had their cases taken into future consideration, so they were kept close prisoners while their properties and possessions were given up to pillage and military execution. Basil was condemned to be broken alive upon the wheel; but the Empress, who had a particular tenderness for handsome men, "mitigated his punishment to the less severe one of being beheaded."
A brief paragraph in the London Gazette of the 23rd October records this brave fellow's death, just fourteen days after his rash affair at Schlusselburg:
"M. Mierowitz, in pursuance of his sentence, was publicly beheaded on Wednesday last; he behaved at his execution, as he had done throughout the whole transaction, with the greatest resignation. Six of the soldiers and under-officers who were engaged with him ran the gantelope the same day; they were so severely whipped that it is said three of them are since dead. Many more are to be punished. One, Usakoff, a Lieutenant in the Regiment of Welikolutz (sic) who was privy to the design, was accidentally drowned."
Notwithstanding his rank and years, old Count Mierowitz was retained in a dungeon among a number of miserable Russian rogues and Polish prisoners, clad in filthy sheepskin shoubahs, many of them being afflicted with the terrible disease known as plica polonica, or matted hair, which hung over their necks in clotted lumps, every tube being swollen and dilated with globules of blood.
The lower vaults of Schlusselburg were those built by Ivan the Terrible, for the reception of a few of the revolters of Novgorod, after he had put twenty-five thousand of her citizens to the sword. They were such prisons as—let us hope—are no longer in use, even in Russia, although the London press has asserted that, until lately, exactly such oubliettes or dungeons were in active operation, and never without tenants, under the royal rule of the deposed Francis II., and prior to the remodelling of Italy by Victor Emmanuel.
They were like the frightful cells of the Bastile, which Victor Hugo has described in "Notre Dame;" those of the Inquisition at Goa or Madrid, or of old castles of the middle ages; but apart from the happily departed horrors of such places, even English jails have been little better than living graves within the memory of many now alive; for one of the greatest glories of modern civilisation, in all countries, has been the amelioration of prisons and their government, and the substitution of mercy and protection in their general economy for that irresponsible despotism and wanton cruelty which have formed such ample materials for the romancer and novelist to excite compassion and even dismay.
Yet it is exactly such a place—a prison of the middle ages—a rival to that Chillon to which Byron's genius has given a greater name than ever its terrors won it—we are now about to describe: one of the lower vaults of Schlusselburg, a den, the floor of which was below the rocks whereon the seals of Ladoga basked in the sunshine, and which was consequently liable to be flooded during those inundations that at certain seasons, overflow all the country for a great way north, so that no crops will grow save upon the eminences.
Vaulted with stone, it was nearly square, and measured twelve feet each way, with a floor that sloped down at one end, having been unevenly hewn out when the rock was pierced; and from a portion of this rock sprang the solid arch of granite blocks which formed the roof. A narrow slit, six inches broad by twelve high, and having even in that small space a thick iron bar, admitted to the interior a feeble ray of light. This slit was partly built of stone, but its sill was the living rock of Schlusselburg. It opened towards the lake, but gave no prospect save the clouds, for it was high up in the wall; yet the melancholy cries of the waterfowl and of the seabirds, which often came up the Neva from the Baltic, were heard through it at times.
The prisoner, when seated on the stone bench which formed a bed or seat alternately, could only see the changing hues of the sky and patches of cloud, and know by the darkness which gradually obscured this mere shot-hole that day was passing away, and that another night, chill, dark, dreary, and hopeless, was at hand.
As the floor sloped down some twelve inches or more, the lower end was always full of water, into which the slime that gathered on the vault of the arch fell at intervals with a regular plash that, to the silent and apparently forgotten prisoner, became maddening in its monotony of sound, by day and night, by morning and evening, by dawn and sunset. Then, as the tides rose and fell, or as the waters of the vast inland lake of Ladoga are affected by the Baltic stopping the downward flow of the Neva, or by rains flooding the many tributaries that join them, so did this dark pool in the dungeon rise and fall, when the current oozed through secret and unknown channels or crannies in the granite rocks.