"Heaven be blessed for this new omen of success!" exclaimed Balgonie, in French. "And you were not drowned?"
"No; I swam down the Neva, under water, escaping many a bullet--got ashore, and reached the old place in the wood, where Olga, the gipsy, stained my face, trimmed and dyed my beard, as you see. She is quite an artist, that girl! Even Mariolizza would not know me now."
Balgonie sighed as the poor fellow spoke. Mutilated and disfigured as she was now, would he have known _her_? He evidently knew nothing of the barbarities to which she had been subjected, so Balgonie resolved, mercifully, to keep him in ignorance; and they proceeded at an easy pace together, he keeping his horse close by the shaft of the kabitka, on which the pretended peasant rode; and, as they spoke in French, a language unknown to their ignorant and half-savage escort, Usakoff, in referring to the late event and its failure, poured out all the bitterness, the hate, and fury of his soul, against the Government, the Councillors, and the rule of the Empress; and, of course, entered with fervour into the scheme of an escape with Natalie. But still their ultimate plans were undecided, when they saw the red flash of the evening gun, as it pealed from Schlusselburg, amid the murky haze of a wet and stormy sunset; and erelong they saw the lights that glittered at times from amid the massive towers and black outline of that old castle (the scene of so many terrors, sufferings, and atrocities) streaming and wavering on the turbulent waters of the lake, and the wet slime of the sluices and ditches.
When, all dripping and jaded, the escort halted and dismounted under the castle arch, Balgonie found that some changes were taking place in the executive of the fortress.
Bernikoff, whose wounds had been inflamed to gangrene, by passion, rage, and vodka, was at that moment actually on his death-bed, with Father Chrysostom kneeling by his side. The old sinner was in all the agonies and terrors of reviewing his past life on one hand, and anticipating the coming change on the other. Many pounds of perfumed wax candles were flaming now round the effigy of St. Sergius, whom, in weak and querulous accents, he implored for intercession, alternately with the Chaplain, to whose cassock he clung tenaciously, and to whom he was mingling threats of punishment, if he permitted him to fare ill in the other world, or omitted masses for his soul's repose. And that superstition and absurdity might not be wanting amid this solemn but repulsive scene, from which Balgonie hurried away with more disgust than pity, Bernikoff was dying in the habit of a _friar_, with cowl, cord, beads, and sandals, hoping even on his death-bed, as Ivan the Terrible hoped, when similarly arrayed and disguised, to cheat the devil, if that dread personage came for his sinful soul.