"Who will betray them to you?" asked Balgonie, making a terrible effort to appear calm and unconcerned, as he played with his sword knot and the tassels of his sash, and forgot to eat.
"Who?" exclaimed Bernikoff, grinding his teeth, and eating very fast. "Their own friends—their own dear comrades—adherents, which you will. Russia is full of people, yea of many nations. The Empress can reckon her faithful slaves by millions; yet, when a Russian hath his hat on his head, its rim contains the only friend on whom he can rely."
"This is a severe libel on your country surely, Excellency."
"'Tis truth though; so Basil Mierowitz, Usakoff, and the rest, are all doomed men. No one was ever lost on a straight road; thus the soldier who diverges from the straight line of duty must speedily find himself face to face with degradation and death. Punishment to those traitors will be swift and sure! So, I only fear that the Grand Chancellor will never give me the pleasure of having them under my judicious care in Schlusselburg. We have certain old vaults, built below the tide mark by Ivan the Terrible, for some of those people of Novgorod who leagued with the King of Poland. They are always full of fog; and I am curious to know how long an able-bodied prisoner might live there, or rather how long he would be in dying. But excuse me, Hospodeen, I confess me to-morrow, and there rings the bell for vespers already;" and making many Greek signs of the cross and other genuflexions, Bernikoff, after having gorged himself at table, hurried away to the chapel, where Father Chrysostom officiated.
Charlie gladly sought the solitude afforded by the stockades and outworks of the fortress on the side towards the Lake of Ladoga. There, as elsewhere, was of course, a chain of sentinels; but they did not interrupt his lonely communing with himself.
By his interest in Natalie, by his deep love for her, and more than all, perhaps, by his recent visit and interview, he already felt himself "art and part" (to use a Scottish legal phrase), or particeps criminis, with the rash adherents of Ivan. If one of these deserted the cause in which they had embarked, then would their lurking place be at once discovered, and the story of his recent visit be revealed.
He dreaded lest Bernikoff and others suspected his friendly interest in the family of Count Mierowitz, and that more might yet be learned of it; thus he would have experienced neither shock nor surprise, had he, at any hour, in that land of treachery and espionage, seen either Captain Vlasfief, Lieutenant Tschekin, or any other officer of the fortress, advancing towards him sabre in hand, with an armed party, to demand his sword, to make him a prisoner, and march him off to the same prison which already held the old Count and Mariolizza, the innocent betrothed of Basil, and might soon hold another, who was dearer still—Natalie!
"If I love her," he would say to himself at times, "why should I shrink from sharing all that she suffers now—all she may yet endure? Yet it would be wiser to watch well for her sake, and seek to save, or bear her away; but how—and where to?" was the next bewildering thought.
And the generous Basil, the fiery and chivalrous Usakoff, oh that he might save them too! He mourned for Usakoff, who was the very soul of honour and heroism, the worthy grandson of that Mazeppa who, when Charles the XII. was retreating from Pultowa, swam the Borysthenes by the side of the fugitive king, and of whom the latter said in the words of the bard;—
"Of all our band,
Though firm of heart and strong of hand,
In skirmish, march, or forage, none
Can less have said or more have done
Than thee, Mazeppa! on the earth
So fit a pair had never birth,
Since Alexander's day till now,
As thy Bucephalus and thou;
All Scythia's fame to thine should yield,
For pricking on o'er flood and field."