So Yuan was between two fires. He had disobeyed the commands of the Emperor in not coming to Peking and had therefore incurred his displeasure and caused his downfall. He had disobeyed the Empress Dowager in not putting to death the foreigners in his province, and if the Boxers were successful he would surely lose his head on that account. The Boxers, however, were not successful and as his disobedience had helped to save the empire, Yuan, so long as the Dowager remained in power, was safe.
But a day of reckoning must inevitably come. The Empress Dowager was an old woman, the Emperor was a young man. In all human probabilities she would be the first to die, while his only hope was in her outliving the Emperor, who had sworn vengeance on all those who had been instrumental in his imprisonment.
I have a friend in Peking who is also a friend of one of the greatest Chinese officials. This official has gone into the palace daily for a dozen years past and knows every plot and counterplot that has been hatched in that nest of seclusion during all that time, though he has been implicated in none of them. He has held the highest positions in the gift of the empire without ever once having been degraded. One day when he was in the palace the Emperor unburdened his heart to him, thinking that what he said would never reach the ears of his enemies.
"You have no idea," said the Emperor, "what I suffer here."
"Indeed?" was the only reply of the official.
"Yes," continued the Emperor, "I am not allowed to speak to any one from outside. I am without power, without companions, and even the eunuchs act as though they are under no obligations to respect me. The position of the lowest servant in the palace is more desirable than mine." Then lowering his voice he continued, "But there is a day of reckoning to come. The Empress Dowager cannot live forever, and if ever I get my throne again I will see to it that those who put me here will suffer as I have done."
It is not unlikely that this conversation of the Emperor reached the ears of Yuan Shih-kai. Walls have ears in China. Everything has ears, and every part of nature has a tongue. If so, here was the occasion for the last plot in the drama of the Emperor's life, and next to the last in the official life of Yuan Shih-kai.
The problem is to so manipulate the laws of nature as to prevent the Emperor outliving the Empress Dowager, and not allow the world to know that you have been trifling with occult forces. He must die a natural death, a death which is above suspicion. He must not die one day after the Empress Dowager as that would create talk. And he ought to die some time before her. The death fuse is one which often burns very much longer than we expect—was it not one of the English kings who said "I fear I am a very long time a-dying, gentlemen"—and sometimes it burns out sooner than is intended. There were two imperial death fuses burning at the same time in that Forbidden City of Peking. The Empress Dowager had "had a stroke." Hers was undoubtedly nature's own work. But the enemies of Yuan Shih-kai tell us that the Emperor had "had a Chinese doctor," to whom the great Viceroy paid $33,000 for his services. We are told that the Empress Dowager in reality died first and then the Emperor, though the Emperor's death was first announced, and the next day that of the Dowager.
What then are we to infer? That the Emperor was poisoned? Let it be so. That is what the Japanese believed at the time. But who did it? Most assuredly no one man. One might have employed a Chinese physician for him, but the last man whose physician the Emperor would have accepted would have been Yuan Shih-kai's. Had you or I been ill would we have allowed the man who was the cause of our fall to select our physician? But granted that Yuan Shih-kai did employ his physician, and that his death was the result of slow poisoning, could Yuan Shih-kai have so manipulated Prince Ching, the Regent (who is the late Emperor's brother), the ladies of the court, and all those thousands of eunuchs, to remain silent as to the death of the Empress Dowager until he had completed the slow process on His Majesty? No! If the Emperor was poisoned—and the world believes he was—there are a number of others whose skirts are as badly stained as those of the great Viceroy, or long ere this his body would have been sent home a headless corpse instead of with "rheumatism of the leg."
What then is the explanation? It may be this, that the court, and the officials as a whole, felt that the Emperor was an unsafe person to resume the throne, and that it were better that one man should perish than that the whole regime should be upset. They even refused to allow a foreign physician to go in to see him, saying that of his own free will he had turned again to the Chinese, all of which indicates that it was not the plot of any one man.