‘I must marry her or die, Tsar,’ I said, ‘wherefore I dare less to marry.’
Vera laughed and pressed my arm. ‘Make him Hetman, Tsar,’ she said: ‘he will serve thee better than the fox thou hast set up.’
But in this matter the young Tsar was immovable.
‘Good Lord, girl,’ he said, ‘must all things go as thou wouldst have them? He shall be Hetman of all the Cossacks now in Moscow—does that satisfy thee?—with reversion at Batourin when Mazeppa shall have proved himself the fox you think him!’
And with this appointment, which was indeed an excellent one, I was obliged to remain content, hoping ever that Mazeppa must one day show himself for what I knew him to be. Yet though the Tsar received from far and near almost daily complaints of Mazeppa’s deceitfulness—how he misruled his Cossacks, coquetted with Pole, Swede and Tartar, and was faithless to every friend he possessed—yet Peter, in this one instance, mistook his man from first to last; believing his word, trusting him in face of overwhelming evidence, and standing his friend and ally through every attempt, whether political or private, to shake his faith in the Hetman. The Tsar was usually a better judge of character than he showed himself in Mazeppa’s case!
A fox among foxes, and certainly the most plausible liar the world has ever seen, was this fox Mazeppa, with whose cunning my poor feeble wits had lately essayed to cope. And will it be believed that the great and wise Tsar himself was perhaps the only human being who was blind to the real character of the man? Was he indeed blind? Rather men will say that if Mazeppa was a fox, Peter was no less; and that he saw his advantage in being served by such a Hetman!
Nevertheless there came a day, after many years, when at length the scales fell from Peter’s eyes. For Mazeppa himself—at the first great opportunity in his life when he must choose definitely a side—proved that he was but a dabbler in politics, and that he no more understood the greatness of his master than the rest of the world had then realised it.
That day was one of those stirring ones which preceded the battle of Pultowa.
CHAPTER XXXIX
By this time Vera and I were both middle-aged, and as happy a married pair as were to be found in all Russia. The old Boyar Kurbatof was dead long since, and Vera was a rich woman, possessor of three thousand souls, or serfs, and the mother of five children. My place in the realm and in the esteem of the Tsar was high, for I commanded almost more Cossacks in Moscow than Mazeppa could assemble under arms at Batourin.