After a time he mustered sufficient energy and sense to beg that he might be permitted to retire, as he had his journey to resume betimes on the morrow; and he was escorted to his chamber by the Count in person. Its four corners seemed to be in rapid pursuit of each other now, and the floor and the ceiling to be incessantly changing places; then his senses reeled, and the light departed from his eyes. He found himself fainting.
The sudden and rapid journey from Novgorod, the lack of food and the toil he had undergone for one night and two entire days, while wandering with the treacherous Podatchkine, the crossing of the Louga, and the bruises he had unconsciously received from several pieces of floating ice, had all proved too much for his system, and brought on a relapse of an old camp fever from which he had suffered once when serving with the army in Silesia,—and in the morning he was delirious.
Though weak, bewildered, scared by the prospect of loitering thus when proceeding on urgent duty (for obedience and discipline become a second nature to the soldier), enduring a raging thirst and a burning pang that shot with each pulsation through his brain, stiff in every joint and covered with livid bruises, he had still strength left as dawning day stole through the double sashes of his windows, to stagger from bed, and search for the dispatch, which, on the hazard of his life, he was to place in the hands of Bernikoff, the Governor of Schlusselburg.
He hurriedly, and with a tremor that increased, examined each of his pockets in succession, then his sabretasche, and lastly the pocket of the robe-de-chambre; but the dispatch—the dispatch of the Empress—entrusted to him as a chosen man by Lieutenant-General Weymarn was gone!
Lost, or abstracted, it was irretrievably gone!
Was he the victim of treachery or of a snare? Was it a dream that the voluptuous and beautiful Natalie, with her snowy skin, her dreamy eyes, and her fascinating smile, had been hovering about him—a dream or a reality?
Alas! he knew not; for again the walls and windows were whirling round him in wild career, and he sank on the floor insensible.
Poor Charlie Balgonie knew not that the morning on which he made this alarming discovery was that of the second day since his arrival at the Castle of Louga.