“Not a father but a villain, a torturer, a murderer,” cried Alexis, “curse him, curse him, the monster!”
“Lord Tsarevitch, your Highness! Invoke not God’s wrath, use not such violent language. Great is a father’s power. It is written: Honour thy father——”
Alexis suddenly stopped weeping, turned round abruptly and fixed on the old man a searching look.
“But something else too, is written: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father.’ Do you heed, old man? God it is who turned me against my father; I have been sent from God as a sword, an enemy, to pierce the heart of my parent, I am his heaven-sent judgment and execution. I stood up not for my own sake, but for the sake of the Church, the Empire, the whole Christian people. Zealous, I was zealous for the Lord. No! I will not humble myself, nor submit, not even if it should mean my death. The world cannot hold us both. Either he or I!”
The face distorted by convulsions, the trembling jaw, the fierce fire in the eyes, suddenly bore an unsuspected likeness to his father.
The old man gazed at him in terror, as at one possessed, he made the sign of the cross, shook his head and with his time-worn lips mumbled the words of time-worn wisdom:—
“Submit! submit! bow before your father’s will”
And it seemed as if the ancient Kremlin walls, the palaces, churches, yea the very ground itself, together with the tombs of the patriarchs, echoed the words: “Submit! Submit!”
When the Tsarevitch entered the house of the sacristan, the latter’s sister, who had been nurse to Alexis, Martha by name, glancing at his face thought him ill. Her anxiety only increased when he refused to share their supper, but went straight to his chamber. The old soul offered to give him lime-tea and to rub him with camphorated spirit. To pacify her he was obliged to take some brandy. With her own hands she put him to bed, on a couch softer, with its mountain of eiderdown and pillows, than any he had slept on for an age. The holy lamps burned peacefully before the images; the air was saturated with the familiar scent of dried herbs, cypress and myrrh. So soothing was the monotonous babbling of his nurse, while relating the old tales about the Tsar John and the grey wolf, about the Cock with the golden comb, about the Bast shoe, the baboon and the wisp of straw, who wanted to cross the river together—the straw broke, the bast shoe sank, and the baboon swelled until it burst—that it seemed to Alexis in his half-sleep he was only a little boy and was lying in his tiny bed in his grandmother’s terem, and that all which had been was not; that it was not Martha, but his granny, bending over him, covering him up, tucking him in, blessing him and whispering, “Sleep darling, sleep, may God watch over thee.” And all is still and peaceful. Only the siren bird, denizen of Eden, is again singing its royal songs, and as he listens to its melodious strains, he seems to die, to sink into an eternal, dreamless slumber.
But just before the break of day he dreamt he was walking inside the Kremlin, across the Red Square, through the throng of people.