all that Basmanov had said. It was in the thought that the nobility of
Poland was flocking to the house of Wisniowiecki to do honour to this
false son of Ivan the Terrible, that Boris found the chief cause of
uneasiness. There was famine in Moscow, and empty bellies do not make
for loyalty. Then, too, the Muscovite nobles did not love him. He had
ruled too sternly, and had curbed their power. There were men like
Basil Shuiski who knew too much—greedy, ambitious men, who might turn
their knowledge to evil account. The moment might be propitious to the
pretender, however false his claim. Therefore Boris dispatched a
messenger to Wisniowiecki with the offer of a heavy bribe if he would
yield up the person of this false Demetrius.
But that messenger returned empty-handed. He had reached Bragin too
late. The pretender had already left the place, and was safely lodged
in the castle of George Mniszek, the Palatine of Sandomir, to whose
daughter Maryna he was betrothed. If these were ill tidings for Boris,
there were worse to follow soon. Within a few months he learned from
Sandomir that Demetrius had removed to Cracow, and that there he had
been publicly acknowledged by Sigismund III. of Poland as the son of
Ivan Vassielivitch, the rightful heir to the crown of Russia. He heard,
too, the story upon which this belief was founded. Demetrius had
declared that one of the agents employed by Boris Godunov to procure
his murder at Uglich had bribed his physician Simon to perform the
deed. Simon had pretended to agree as the only means of saving him. He
had dressed the son of a serf, who slightly resembled Demetrius, in
garments similar to those worn by the young prince, and thereafter cut
the lad’s throat, leaving those who had found the body to presume it to
be the prince’s. Meanwhile, Demetrius himself had been concealed by the
physician, and very shortly thereafter carried away from Uglich, to be
placed in safety in a monastery, where he had been educated.
Such, in brief, was the story with which Demetrius convinced the court
of Poland, and not a few who had known the boy at Uglich came forward
now to identify with him the grown man, who carried in his face so
strong a resemblance to Ivan the Terrible. That story which Boris now
heard was soon heard by all Russia, and Boris realized that something
must be done to refute it.
But something more than assurances—his own assurances—were necessary if
the Muscovites were to believe him. And so at last Boris bethought him
of the Tsarina Maria, the mother of the murdered boy. He had her
fetched to Moscow from her convent, and told her of this pretender who
was setting up a claim to the throne of Russia, supported by the King
of Poland.
She listened impassively, standing before him in the black robes and
conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When he had
done, a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so hard in these
last twelve years since that day when her boy had been slain almost
under her very eyes.
“It is a circumstantial tale,” she said. “It is perhaps true. It is
probably true.”
“True!” He bounded from his seat. “True? What are you saying, woman?
Yourself you saw the boy dead.”
“I did, and I know who killed him.”
“But you saw him. You recognized him for your own, since you set the
people on to kill those whom you believed had slain him.”
“Yes,” she answered. And added the question: “What do you want of me
now?”
“What do I want?” He was amazed that she should ask, exasperated. Had
the conventual confinement turned her head? “I want your testimony. I
want you to denounce this fellow for the impostor that he is. The
people will believe you.”
“You think they will?” Interest had kindled in her glance.
“What else? Are you not the mother of Demetrius, and shall not a mother
know her own son?”
“You forget. He was ten years of age then—a child. Now he is a grown
man of three-and-twenty. How can I be sure? How can I be sure of
anything?”
He swore a full round oath at her. “Because you saw him dead.”
“Yet I may have been mistaken. I thought I knew the agents of yours who
killed him. Yet you made me swear—as the price of my brothers’
lives—that I was mistaken. Perhaps I was more mistaken than we thought.
Perhaps my little Demetrius was not slain at all. Perhaps this man’s
tale is true.”
“Perhaps...” He broke off to stare at her, mistrustfully, searchingly.
“What do you mean?” he asked her sharply.
Again that wan smile crossed the hard, sharp-featured face that once
had been so lovely. “I mean that if the devil came out of hell and
called himself my son, I should acknowledge him to your undoing.”
Thus the pent-up hate and bitterness of years of brooding upon her
wrongs broke forth. Taken aback, he quailed before it. His jaw dropped
foolishly, and he stared at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
“The people will believe me, you say—they will believe that a mother
should know her own son. Then are your hours of usurpation numbered.”
If for a moment it appalled him, yet in the end, forewarned, he was
forearmed. It was foolish of her to let him look upon the weapon with
which she could destroy him. The result of it was that she went back to
her convent under close guard, and was thereafter confined with greater
rigour than hitherto.
Desperately Boris heard how the belief in Demetrius was gaining ground
in Russia with the people. The nobles might still be sceptical, but
Boris knew that he could not trust them, since they had no cause to
love him. He began perhaps to realize that it is not good to rule by
fear.
And then at last came Smirnoy Otrepiev back from Cracow, where he had
been sent by Basmanov to obtain with his own eyes confirmation of the
rumour which had reached the boyar on the score of the pretender’s real
identity.
The rumour, he declared, was right. The false Demetrius was none other
than his own nephew, Grishka Otrepiev, who had once been a monk, but,
unfrocked, had embraced the Roman heresy, and had abandoned himself to
licentious ways. You realize now why Smirnoy had been chosen by
Basmanov for this particular mission.
The news heartened Boris. At last he could denounce the impostor in
proper terms, and denounce him he did. He sent an envoy to Sigismund
III. to proclaim the fellow’s true identity, and to demand his
expulsion from the Kingdom of Poland; and his denunciation was
supported by a solemn excommunication pronounced by the Patriarch of
Moscow against the unfrocked monk, Grishka Otrepiev, who now falsely
called himself Demetrius Ivanovitch.
But the denunciation did not carry the conviction that Boris expected.
It was reported that the Tsarevitch was a courtly, accomplished man,
speaking Polish and Latin, as well as Russian, skilled in horsemanship
and in the use of arms, and it was asked how an unfrocked monk had come
by these accomplishments. Moreover, although Boris, fore-warned, had
prevented the Tsarina Maria from supporting the pretender out of
motives of revenge, he had forgotten her two brothers; he had not
foreseen that, actuated by the same motives, they might do that which
he had prevented her from doing. This was what occurred. The brothers
Nagoy repaired to Cracow publicly to acknowledge Demetrius their
nephew, and to enrol themselves under his banner.
Against this Boris realized that mere words were useless. The sword of
Nemesis was drawn indeed. His sins had found him out. Nothing remained
him but to arm and go forth to meet the impostor, who was advancing
upon Moscow with a great host of Poles and Cossacks.
He appraised the support of the Nagoys at its right value. They, too,
had been at Uglich, and had seen the dead boy, almost seen him slain.
Vengeance upon himself was their sole motive. But was it possible that
Sigismund of Poland was really deceived, as well as the Palatine of
Sandomir, whose daughter was betrothed to the adventurer, Prince Adam
Wisniowiecki, in whose house the false Demetrius had first made his
appearance, and all those Polish nobles who flocked to his banner? Or
were they, too, moved by some ulterior motive which he could not
fathom?
That was the riddle that plagued Boris Godunov what time—in the winter
of 1604—he sent his armies to meet the invader. He sent them because,
crippled now by gout, even the satisfaction of leading them was denied
him. He was forced to stay at home in the gloomy apartments of the
Kremlin, fretted by care, with the ghosts of his evil past to keep him
company, and assure him that the hour of judgment was at hand.
With deepening rage he heard how town after town capitulated to the
adventurer, and mistrusting Basmanov, who was in command, he sent
Shuiski to replace him. In January of 1605 the armies met at
Dobrinichi, and Demetrius suffered a severe defeat, which compelled him
to fall back on Putioli. He lost all his infantry, and every Russian
taken in arms on the pretender’s side was remorselessly hanged as Boris
had directed.
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 her 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.