"Success, Hospodeen."
He almost laughed, as he slipped into her hand two xervonitz (the largest coins he had), and in a moment more was galloping over the soft grass of the forest path she had indicated.
"By Jove," thought he, as he spurred on, "I shall not be sorry when this infernal dispatch is safe in the hands of old Bernikoff; and to think of that wretch of a Podatchkine! I always expected the fellow to be a rogue, but not of so deep a dye!"
The unfortunate Corporal, now, as he deserved, hanging head foremost downward in the draw-well, stark and stiff and cold, had been to all appearance a good Russian, Balgonie reflected: he neither confessed, fasted, nor did penance (too much bother all that would have been for the Corporal of Cossacks); but he kept Lent regularly to all appearance; made a sign of the cross fussily before and after every meal; always went to church when in camp or quarters; and never omitted his prayers and genuflexions at night, if in haunted places or when passing a wayside cross, especially if any one was by. All this was no doubt studiously hypocritical; and Charlie remembered that his worthy Uncle Gram kept Fast-days and "Sabbaths" with stern and gloomy rigour; that he said a long and sonorous prayer before meals—a longer prayer after them; that he went thrice daily to kirk at the ordained periods, and had nightly a noisy expounding and out-pouring of the spirit that would have put the great John of Geneva himself to the blush.
"Ah," thought poor Charlie, as he trotted on his lonely way through the darkened forest, "decidedly there are Podatchkines in Scotland as well as elsewhere, and in Russia."
The light was beginning to dawn, for it was the morning of one of the first days of May, so long had he been detained by illness—shall we say by love?—at the castle by the Louga, that Muscovite Eden, as now it seemed to him. The birds were chirping merrily in the woods; and in some places he saw the brown rocks shaded by a species of graceful silver birch and dark rowan tree, similar to those that grew in his native strath at home.
By midsummer he knew that the birchen glades he traversed would be in full foliage, and that the rowan berries would hang in ripe red clusters among the thick green leaves; and that there, too, would be grey lichens on the granite cliffs, and in their clefts soft emerald moss, the wild strawberries, and the drooping bells of the purple foxglove, just as he had seen them where the Earn "gurgling kissed her pebbled shore" as it flowed towards the Tay.
They seemed like old friends in that strange place, and with a sigh of gratitude for his escape from a perilous and deadly snare was mingled one of hope—a wish—a bootless wish, that one day he might sit by the banks of the lovely Earn with Natalie by his side, amid all the security his native land afforded, and under the white blooming hawthorns that cast their sweet fragrance to the soft winds of the Perthshire valley.
Beloved Natalie—so fair and delicate, so dark haired and so bright-eyed! Her diamond ring, and still more her lock of soft and silky hair, brought all the charm and sense of her presence vividly before him. He counted the brief hours since they had parted, and sighed to think how many hours and days and weeks must inevitably elapse before they met again.
In memory and imagination, he conned over and over again each tender speech and glance, each mute caress and passionate kiss, with every circumstance and minutiæ of their occurrence and bestowal; and what lover has not done so since time began, and apples grew, and roses bloomed in Eden! Even his recent narrow escape and the gipsy's gratitude were forgotten in the ardour of his thoughts.