As the sun sank beyond the Gulf of Finland, and the shadows deepened on every plated dome and granite rampart, the great gilt crosses of our Lady of Kazan (a fane which was ten years in building) and of many other noble churches glittered, or rather seemed to burn like stars, amid the deep blue of the cloudless sky beyond.
Balgonie's satisfaction, on finding himself so near the end of his journey, was somewhat clouded by a trivial circumstance.
After entering the city by a palisaded barrier, where stood a guard of the Regiment of Valikolutz, he checked his horse's pace, while the caravan of pilgrims, whom he now wished to quit, traversed a long street of small wooden houses that lay beyond. Here, close by the margin of the Neva, lay a man with his loose caftan wet and dripping, and a piece of sack or old canvas spread over his face. On his breast lay his fur cap, as if to receive alms for his burial; for none doubted that he was a poor drowned fellow just fished up from the Neva, and that money was required of the religious and charitable alike for his obsequies and masses for the repose of his soul. So all the pilgrims from the Troitza threw something into the fur cap, where denuscas, kopecs, even roubles and Polish ducats, jingled fast together, while the passers muttered prayers and made signs of the cross.
All the caravan had passed, so the clatter of Balgonie's charger, steel-scabbard, and accoutrements, seemed to create a different effect on the attentive ear of the seemingly drowned man; for the knave, who had only been acting, started up, and, with his spoil, fled like a hare down one of the little alleys that opened off the wooden street. He vanished in the twilight, yet not so quickly but that Balgonie was able to recognise in his face and form, the bulky and muscular half-bred, the gipsy, Nicholas Paulovitch.
What had brought him to St. Petersburg? Was he still dogging the luckless dispatch-bearer, or had he only fled thither that, among its thousands, he might elude the punishment with which Count Mierowitz would be sure to visit him, if the murder of the Corporal was discovered?
This episode made Balgonie feel uncomfortable, and suspicious that other and hidden dangers yet menaced him, as he rode steadily but watchfully through the densely crowded, but monotonously regular streets of houses, which are stuccoed, white-washed, and decorated with different colours, roofed with wood and iron, painted in most instances green, and nearly all pillared and piazzaed—each long vista, with its oil lamps, being terminated by domes and spires; and erelong he saw the lights shining in the lofty windows of that magnificent crescent, which, for a time, was the palace of Catharine's most cherished favourite, "the fair-faced Lanskoi," as Byron has it—
"A lover who had cost her many a tear,
And yet but made a middling Grenadier."
And now the melodious bells were ringing for vespers in the towers of our Lady of Kazan—a Greek cruciform fane, which was founded as a rival to St. Peter's at Rome, and named after the Tartar kingdom of Kazan. It is the greatest church in the city, and one of high sanctity.
Along the northern margin of the Neva, a river broad as the Thames at London Bridge, but (unlike the Thames) deep, blue, and transparent as crystal, lined with solid granite quays, and bordered by many stately palatial edifices, Balgonie pursued his way; but the stars were shining at midnight on the vast sheet of water called the Lake of Ladoga, before he, weary and worn with fatigue, dismounted beneath the formidable gates of the castellated prison of Schlusselburg, which had been strengthened and fortified anew by General Count Todleben, whose arrest and quarrel with the Empress had made so much noise three years before the time our story opens.