‘That requires little guessing! If you had been long in Moscow I should have seen you. I can guess a little more if I be allowed.’
‘Guess on, then!’
‘You have come for the bride-choosing of the Tsar Ivan, but you have seen him and taken fright; and in spite of your father’s commands or desires, you are attempting to escape from the fate you fear. And, indeed, if you do not wish to be Tsaritsa, either for this on another reason, you are wise to escape, for by all the saints I think there is only one among the maidens to equal you, and assuredly none to vanquish you if the prize go by looks!’
She laughed merrily.
‘Bravo!’ she said. ‘You are wrong from beginning to end. In the first place, it is my father who has seen the Tsar and who has taken fright; in the second, I would give half my life to become Tsaritsa, even Ivan’s; lastly, I am escaping from my father, not from the terem, to which I long to obtain admission, though he has sworn I shall not.’
This was a surprising state of things, and quite the opposite of that which was usual as between daughters and fathers—the fathers being, so far as I had seen, for ever ambitious, while the maidens often preferred love to ambition—love, that is, for some lover who was not the Tsar; or perhaps even presumed to allow a sense of personal antipathy to stand between themselves and their chance of high advancement.
‘If that is so,’ I said, ‘the matter should be easily arranged. Your father dare not withstand the ukase of the Regent. She need but be told that you are here, and that your appearance is worthy of the Tsar’s regard, and you shall soon find yourself among those assembled for his inspection. Go home, if you are wise, and you shall be sent for.’
‘But my father threatens to leave Moscow with me this very day; that is why I attempted to escape. I dare not go home to him, for in an hour I should be on my way back to our own place, which I loathe. It has taken us two months to journey from there to here, and I do not care if I never see it again.’
‘Where, then, is this unloved home?’ I asked.
‘My father is Soltikof, Governor of Siberia. He is a good father, and loves me. He saw this Tsar Ivan for the first time yesterday. The youth became angry with someone and frothed at the mouth, afterwards bursting into tears; lastly, he fell in a fit! Lord knows what ailed him. “No daughter of mine,” said my father in telling me afterwards of what he had seen at the palace of the Regent, “should marry such a creature as this, not if he were Tsar of all Christendom. Tfu!” he said, “the thing is a frog, not a man; fie upon her who should marry such a creature!”’