The Historical Nights' Entertainment. Second Series Page 4

  Hope began to revive in the heart of Boris; but as months passed and no decision came, those hopes faded again, and the canker of the past gnawed at his vitals and sapped his strength. And then there was ever present to his mind the nightmare riddle of the pretender's identity. At last, one evening in April, he sent for Smirnoy Otrepiev to question him again concerning that nephew of his. Otrepiev came in fear this time. It is not good to be the uncle of a man who is giving so much trouble to a great prince.

  Boris glared at him from blood-injected eyes. His round, white face was haggard, his cheeks sagged, and his fleshly body had lost all its erstwhile firm vigour.

  "I have sent for you to question you again," he said, "touching this lewd nephew of yours, this Grishka Otrepiev, this unfrocked monk, who claims to be Tsar of Muscovy. Are you sure, man, that you have made no mistake—are you sure?"

  Otrepiev was shaken by the Tsar's manner, by the ferocity of his mien. But he made answer: "Alas, Highness! I could not be mistaken. I am sure."

  Boris grunted, and moved his body irritably in his chair. His terrible eyes watched Otrepiev mistrustfully. He had reached the mental stage in which he mistrusted everything and everybody.

  "You lie, you dog," he snarled savagely.

  "Highness, I swear..."

  "Lies!" Boris roared him down. "And here's the proof. Would Sigismund of Poland have acknowledged him had he been what you say? When I denounced him the unfrocked monk Grishka Otrepiev, would not Sigismund have verified the statement had it been true?"

  "The brothers Nagoy, the uncles of the dead Demetrius..." Otrepiev was beginning, when again Boris interrupted him.

  "Their acknowledgment of him came after Sigismund's, after—long after—my denunciation." He broke into oaths. "I say you lie. Will you stand there and pelter with me, man? Will you wait until the rack pulls you joint from joint before you speak the truth?"

  "Highness!" cried Otrepiev, "I have served you faithfully these years."

  "The truth, man; as you hope for life," thundered the Tsar, "the whole truth of this foul nephew of yours, if so be he is your nephew."

  And Otrepiev spoke the whole truth at last in his great dread. "He is not my nephew."

  "Not?" It was a roar of rage. "You dared lie to me?"

  Otrepiev's knees were loosened by terror, and he went down upon them before the irate Tsar.

  "I did not lie—not altogether. I told you a half-truth, Highness. His name is Grishka Otrepiev; it is the name by which he always has been known, and he is an unfrocked monk, all as I said, and the son of my brother's wife."

  "Then... then..." Boris was bewildered. Suddenly he understood. "And his father?"

  "Was Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. Grishka Otrepiev is King Stephen's natural son."

  Boris seemed to fight for breath for a moment.

  "This is true?" he asked, and himself answered the question. "Of course it is true. It is the light at last... at last. You may go."

  Otrepiev stumbled out, thankful, surprised to escape so lightly. He could not know of how little account to Boris was the deception he had practiced in comparison with the truth he had now revealed, a truth that shed a fearful, dazzling light upon the dark mystery of the false Demetrius. The problem that so long had plagued the Tsar was solved at last.

  This pretended Demetrius, this unfrocked monk, was a natural son of Stephen Bathory, and a Roman Catholic. Such men as Sigismund of Poland and the Voyvode of Sandomir were not deceived on the score of his identity. They, and no doubt other of the leading nobles of Poland, knew the man for what he was, and because of it supported him, using the fiction of his being Demetrius Ivanovitch to impose upon the masses, and facilitate the pretenders occupation of the throne of Russia. And the object of it was to set up in Muscovy a ruler who should be a Pole and a Roman Catholic. Boris knew the bigotry of Sigismund, who already had sacrificed a throne—that of Sweden—to his devout conscience, and he saw clearly to the heart of this intrigue. Had he not heard that a Papal Nuncio had been at Cracow, and that this Nuncio had been a stout supporter of the pretender's claim? What could be the Pope's concern in the Muscovite succession? Why should a Roman priest support the claim of a prince to the throne of a country devoted to the Greek faith?

  At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of this business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and Sigismund had fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an elected King of Poland, Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious son of Stephen Bathory one who might perhaps supplant him on the Polish throne. To divert his ambition into another channel he had fathered—if he had not invented—this fiction that the pretender was the dead Demetrius.

  Had that fool Smirnoy Otrepiev but dealt frankly with him from the first, what months of annoyance might he not have been spared; how easy it might have been to prick this bubble of imposture. But better late than never. To-morrow he would publish the true facts, and all the world should know the truth; and it was a truth that must give pause to those fools in this superstitious Russia, so devoted to the Orthodox Greek Church, who favoured the pretender. They should see the trap that was being baited for them.

  There was a banquet in the Kremlin that night to certain foreign envoys, and Boris came to table in better spirits than he had been for many a day. He was heartened by the thought of what was now to do, by the conviction that he held the false Demetrius in the hollow of his hand. There to those envoys he would announce to-night what to-morrow he would announce to all Russia—tell them of the discovery he had made, and reveal to his subjects the peril in which they stood. Towards the close of the banquet he rose to address his guests, announcing that he had an important communication for them. In silence they waited for him to speak. And then, abruptly, with no word yet spoken, he sank back into his chair, fighting for breath, clawing the air, his face empurpling until suddenly the blood gushed copiously from his mouth and nostrils.

  He was vouchsafed time in which to strip off his splendid apparel and wrap himself in a monk's robe, thus symbolizing the putting aside of earthly vanities, and then he expired.

  It has been now and then suggested that he was poisoned. His death was certainly most opportune to Demetrius. But there is nothing in the manner of it to justify the opinion that it resulted from anything other than an apoplexy.

  His death brought the sinister opportunist Shuiski back to Moscow to place Boris's son Feodor on the throne. But the reign of this lad of sixteen was very brief. Basmanov, who had gone back to the army, being now inspired by jealousy and fear of the ambitious Shuiski, went over at once to the pretender, and proclaimed him Tsar of Russia. Thereafter events moved swiftly. Basmanov marched on Moscow, entered it in triumph, and again proclaimed Demetrius, whereupon the people rose in revolt against the son of the usurper Boris, stormed the Kremlin, and strangled the boy and his mother.

  Basil Shuiski would have shared their fate had he not bought his life at the price of betrayal. Publicly he declared to the Muscovites that the boy whose body he had seen at Uglich was not that of Demetrius, but of a peasant's son, who had been murdered in his stead.

  That statement cleared the last obstacle from the pretender's path, and he advanced now to take possession of his throne. Yet before he occupied it, he showed the real principles that actuated him, proved how true had been Boris's conclusion. He ordered the arrest and degradation of the Patriarch who had denounced and excommunicated him, and in his place appointed Ignatius, Bishop of Riazan, a man suspected of belonging to the Roman communion.

  On the 30th of June of that year 1605, Demetrius made his triumphal entry into Moscow. He went to prostrate himself before the tomb of Ivan the Terrible, and then to visit the Tsarina Maria, who, after a brief communion with him in private, came forth publicly to acknowledge him as her son.

  Just as Shuiski had purchased his life by a falsehood, so did she purchase her enlargement from that convent where so long she had been a prisoner, and restoration to the rank that was h
er proper due. After all, she had cause for gratitude to Demetrius, who, in addition to restoring her these things, had avenged her upon the hated Boris Godunov.

  His coronation followed in due season, and at last this amazing adventurer found himself firmly seated upon the throne of Russia, with Basmanov at his right hand to help and guide him. And at first all went well, and the young Tsar earned a certain measure of popularity. If his swarthy face was coarse-featured, yet his bearing was so courtly and gracious that he won his way quickly to the hearts of his people. For the rest he was of a tall, graceful figure, a fine horseman, and of a knightly address at arms.

  But he soon found himself in the impossible position of having to serve two masters. On the one hand there was Russia, and the orthodox Russians whose tsar he was, and on the other there were the Poles, who had made him so at a price, and who now demanded payment. Because he saw that this payment would be difficult and fraught with peril to himself he would—after the common wont of princes who have attained their objects—have repudiated the debt. And so he was disposed to ignore, or at least to evade, the persistent reminders that reached him from the Papal Nuncio, to whom he had promised the introduction into Russia of the Roman faith.

  But presently came a letter from Sigismund couched in different terms. The King of Poland wrote to Demetrius that word had reached him that Boris Godunov was still alive, and that he had taken refuge in England, adding that he might be tempted to restore the fugitive to the throne of Muscovy.

  The threat contained in that bitter piece of sarcasm aroused Demetrius to a sense of the responsibilities he had undertaken, which were precisely as Boris Godunov had surmised. As a beginning he granted the Jesuits permission to build a church within the sacred walls of the Kremlin, whereby he gave great scandal. Soon followed other signs that he was not a true son of the Orthodox Greek Church; he gave offence by his indifference to public worship, by his neglect of Russian customs, and by surrounding himself with Roman Catholic Poles, upon whom he conferred high offices and dignities.

  And there were those at hand ready to stir up public feeling against him, resentful boyars quick to suspect that perhaps they had been swindled. Foremost among these was the sinister turncoat Shuiski, who had not derived from his perjury all the profit he expected, who resented, above all, to see Basmanov—who had ever been his rival—invested with a power second only to that of the Tsar himself. Shuiski, skilled in intrigue, went to work in his underground, burrowing fashion. He wrought upon the clergy, who in their turn wrought upon the populace, and presently all was seething disaffection under a surface apparently calm.

  The eruption came in the following May, when Maryna, the daughter of the Palatine of Sandomir, made her splendid entry into Moscow, the bride-elect of the young Tsar. The dazzling procession and the feasting that followed found little favour in the eyes of the Muscovites, who now beheld their city aswarm with heretic Poles.

  The marriage was magnificently solemnized on the 18th of May, 1606. And now Shuiski applied a match to the train he had so skilfully laid. Demetrius had caused a timber fort to be built before the walls of Moscow for a martial spectacle which he had planned for the entertainment of his bride. Shuiski put it abroad that the fort was intended to serve as an engine of destruction, and that the martial spectacle was a pretence, the real object being that from the fort the Poles were to cast firebrands into the city, and then proceed to the slaughter of the inhabitants.

  No more was necessary to infuriate an already exasperated populace. They flew to arms, and on the night of the 29th of May they stormed the Kremlin, led on by the arch-traitor Shuiski himself, to the cry of "Death to the heretic! Death to the impostor!"

  They broke into the palace, and swarmed up the stairs into the Tsar's bedchamber, slaying the faithful Basmanov, who stood sword in hand to bar the way and give his master time to escape. The Tsar leapt from a balcony thirty feet to the ground, broke his leg, and lay there helpless, to be dispatched by his enemies, who presently discovered him.

  He died firmly and fearlessly protesting that he was Demetrius Ivanovitch. Nevertheless, he was Grishka Otrepiev, the unfrocked monk.

  It has been said that he was no more than an instrument in the hands of priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly he met his doom. But something more he was. He was an instrument indeed, not of priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris Godunov the hideous sins that stained his soul, and to avenge his victims by personating one of them. In that personation he had haunted Boris as effectively as if he had been the very ghost of the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and tortured, and finally broken him so that he died.

  That was the part assigned him by Fate in the mysterious scheme of human things. And that part being played, the rest mattered little. In the nature of him and of his position it was impossible that his imposture should be other than ephemeral.

  III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA

  An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville

  Apprehension hung like a thundercloud over the city of Seville in those early days of the year 1481. It had been growing since the previous October, when the Cardinal of Spain and Frey Tomas de Torquemada, acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns—Ferdinand and Isabella—had appointed the first inquisitors for Castile, ordering them to set up a Tribunal of the Faith in Seville, to deal with the apostatizing said to be rampant among the New-Christians, or baptized Jews, who made up so large a proportion of the population.

  Among the many oppressive Spanish enactments against the Children of Israel, it was prescribed that all should wear the distinguishing circlet of red cloth on the shoulder of their gabardines; that they should reside within the walled confines of their ghettos and never be found beyond them after nightfall, and that they should not practice as doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, or innkeepers. The desire to emancipate themselves from these and other restrictions upon their commerce with Christians and from the generally intolerable conditions of bondage and ignominy imposed upon them, had driven many to accept baptism and embrace Christianity.

  But even such New-Christians as were sincere in their professions of faith failed to find in this baptism the peace they sought. Bitter racial hostility, though sometimes tempered, was never extinguished by their conversion.

  Hence the alarm with which they viewed the gloomy, funereal, sinister pageant—the white-robed, black-mantled and hooded inquisitors, with their attendant familiars and barefoot friars—headed by a Dominican bearing the white Cross, which invaded the city of Seville one day towards the end of December and took its way to the Convent of St. Paul, there to establish the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The fear of the New-Christians that they were to be the object of the attentions of this dread tribunal had sufficed to drive some thousands of them out of the city, to seek refuge in such feudal lordships as those of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of Arcos.

  This exodus had led to the publication by the newly appointed inquisitors of the edict of 2nd January, in which they set forth that inasmuch as it had come to their knowledge that many persons had departed out of Seville in fear of prosecution upon grounds of heretical pravity, they commanded the nobles of the Kingdom of Castile that within fifteen days they should make an exact return of the persons of both sexes who had sought refuge in their lordships or jurisdictions; that they arrest all these and lodge them in the prison of the Inquisition in Seville, confiscating their property, and holding it at the disposal of the inquisitors; that none should shelter any fugitive under pain of greater excommunication and of other penalties by law established against abettors of heretics.

  The harsh injustice that lay in this call to arrest men and women merely because they had departed from Seville before departure was in any way forbidden, revealed the severity with which the inquisitors intended to proceed. It completed the consternation of the New-Christians who had remained behind, and how numerous these were may be gathered from the fact that in the district of Seville alon
e they numbered a hundred thousand, many of them occupying, thanks to the industry and talent characteristic of their race, positions of great eminence. It even disquieted the well-favoured young Don Rodrigo de Cardona, who in all his vain, empty, pampered and rather vicious life had never yet known perturbation. Not that he was a New-Christian. He was of a lineage that went back to the Visigoths, of purest red Castilian blood, untainted by any strain of that dark-hued, unclean fluid alleged to flow in Hebrew veins. But it happened that he was in love with the daughter of the millionaire Diego de Susan, a girl whose beauty was so extraordinary that she was known throughout Seville and for many a mile around as la Hermosa Fembra; and he knew that such commerce—licit or illicitly conducted—was disapproved by the holy fathers. His relations with the girl had been perforce clandestine, because the disapproval of the holy fathers was matched in thoroughness by that of Diego de Susan. It had been vexatious enough on that account not to be able to boast himself the favoured of the beautiful and opulent Isabella de Susan; it was exasperating to discover now a new and more imperative reason for this odious secrecy.

  Never sped a lover to his mistress in a frame of mind more aggrieved than that which afflicted Don Rodrigo as, tight-wrapped in his black cloak, he gained the Calle de Ataud on that January night.

  Anon, however, when by way of a garden gate and an easily escaladed balcony he found himself in the presence of Isabella, the delight of her effaced all other considerations. Her father was from home, as she had told him in the note that summoned him; he was away at Palacios on some merchant's errand, and would not return until the morrow. The servants were all abed, and so Don Rodrigo might put off his cloak and hat, and lounge at his ease upon the low Moorish divan, what time she waited upon him with a Saracen goblet filled with sweet wine of Malaga. The room in which she received him was one set apart for her own use, her bower, a long, low ceilinged chamber, furnished with luxury and taste. The walls were hung with tapestries, the floor spread with costly Eastern rugs; on an inlaid Moorish table a tall, three-beaked lamp of beaten copper charged with aromatic oil shed light and perfume through the apartment.