"So Egypt shall be freed,
Her tribes return once more,
Their flocks and herds to feed
Where their fathers dwelt of yore:
When all our warlike powers
From distant climes return,
Then Egypt shall be ours,
While the Turkish turrets burn!"
The last line ended in a shriek, with which a cry from Natalie mingled; for the cruel dvornick had been stealing through the thicket unperceived, and now bestowed a heavy lash across the tender shoulders of the cowering and shrinking girl; but ere he could repeat it, Balgonie sprang forward, arrested the descending whip, and then, placing in the hand of the singer a few Livonian groschen, bade her hasten away, on which she departed, with tears of pain and gratitude, after pressing his fingers to her lips; and, in her terror and confusion, leaving her task undone—her warning of coming treachery untold.
"Oh, Carl!" said Natalie, laying her head again on Balgonie's breast, "dearest Carl, I am so glad she has gone without anathematizing us—or, or weaving some mischievous spell; for, smile as you may, I can't help fearing those people! I am a true Russian, and dread the evil eye!"
Richer by a lock of dark and silky hair and a diamond ring (both the objects of many a secret kiss), but leaving his heart behind him, in one swift hour after this little episode, Balgonie had departed to meet, and, for greater security, to travel in consort with, a caravan of a hundred and fifty boors, who were conveying sugar from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
He was guided again by the sly Podatchkine, who had resolved to take especial good care that the said caravan should be avoided.
"God be with you, Hospodeen—God be with you—adieu," said the old Count, lifting his square velvet cap courteously, as he bade farewell to his guest at the porte-cochère.
Balgonie so respectfully kissed the hands of Natalie and Mariolizza, that none could have detected a difference in his manner to either; and certainly none could have suspected that the tears of the former were yet wet upon his cheek—her kisses lingering on his lip, that he seemed to leave his soul upon her hand, and that the wrung hearts of both were swollen with concealed emotion.
"Uich!" thought Corporal Michail Podatchkine as he rode after the officer into the deep forest, "I'd as soon think of kissing the foot as the hand; who knows among what carrion either may have been stuck? By St. Nicholas, I would rather eat a sheep's tail or a rump steak from an old troop mare than kiss either."
Some hours after Balgonie's departure, and when Natalie in the solitude of her own room was abandoned to tears and unavailing regrets, a trusted messenger from her brother arrived with a brief note, written so enigmatically that none save herself could have understood or deciphered it; but the spirit of it was briefly this:—
"All is arranged for freeing the prisoner of S. (chlusselburg) by a stratagem. A dispatch that may counteract, if not baffle our plans, and fatally compromise us all, has been sent by old Weymarn to St. Petersburg. I know not who the bearer is; but be assured of this, he will never reach it alive. We have set Podatchkine on his track, and he, worthy Livonian, for two hundred roubles, would skin his own father alive."