It is not surprising that Charlie Balgonie preferred the society of two beautiful young girls to that of a testy old boyar. To enhance their natural attractions and winning manners, they were always dressed in the most fashionable French _mode_, and wore the rich stuffs which came from Moscow, and even from China.
They and he had many topics in common, on which they could converse, after old Count Mierowitz had dined and dozed off to sleep--such as the theatre erected some years before at Yaroslaff, by Volkoff, whose troupe were now performing the tragedies of Soumorokoff at St. Petersburg, where a government theatre had just been erected by a ukase; while another ennobled the manager, Volkoff, who had died last year, after appearing at Moscow in Zelmira. Their knowledge of French and German opened up the best literature of Europe to the two cousins, which was fortunate; for at the period of our narrative, Russia had almost none, save some barbarous national songs, fabulous ecclesiastical records, and ferocious traditions: nor is she now much advanced in letters, though certainly, two months after publication, Charles Dickens may be read at Tobolsk--that terrible Tobolsk--where, as we have all read in our youth, Elizabeth wept such grateful tears on the bosom of her Smoloff.
Exiled from court, and secluded amid these forests by the Louga, a Russian lady had few resources for amusement then; so the unexpected visit of Captain Balgonie, with whose name and courage they were quite familiar, proved a most welcome and fortunate circumstance to those two handsome girls, who were merely enduring life, or simply vegetating, in the great old mansion of Count Mierowitz.
But there was one topic in which our soldier of fortune could by no means agree with Natalie Mierowna--her bitter and most unwise hostility to the strongly-established power of the Empress, or, as she styled her, "the woman who now occupied the throne of Ivan;" a prince whom she viewed exactly as the Scottish Jacobites did "the Young Chevalier," and a few old Frenchmen do at the present hour, "Henry V.," the descendant of St. Louis. These sentiments, however, she had to utter in secret, or when none were by them; and when he gazed into her dark and beautiful eyes, so full of romantic enthusiasm and of dangerous light, he felt thankful that one so peerless and so perilous was not, at all events, his enemy.