These personages were her successors, the unfortunate Peter III. and Catharine II.
Ivan's mother is said to have died of grief; but Duke Anthony Ulric and his four other children were all confined for life in a house at Horsens, a town of Jutland, at the extremity of the Baltic, where they had a precinct of a mile English; but it was surrounded by high palisades, beyond which they dared not venture under pain of death; and there the Duke, old and blind, passed the last years of his melancholy life.
His youngest daughter, Elizabeth, "was a woman of high spirit and elegant manners," according to Coxe, the traveller, who visited her; "she possessed portraits of her father and mother, and even contrived to procure a rouble of her brother Ivan, struck during his short reign. It is difficult to conjecture how she could obtain a coin, the possession of which was more than once punished by the Empress Elizabeth as high-treason, and it is still more difficult to imagine how she could secret it from the knowledge of her guards during her long imprisonment."
Confinement had rendered Ivan's features unnaturally pale and delicate; and, by years of systematic constraint and oppression, his fine, clear, and very beautiful dark eyes had a soft, subdued, and chastened expression, that was singularly touching and winning.
The tone of his voice was also gentle and alluring.
"Hospodeen," said he, presenting his hand to Balgonie, "I rejoice to meet you, if one who leads a life so strange as mine can be said to rejoice; but you are one to whom I may talk a little without danger—eh, Father Chrysostom? And he has told me, Hospodeen, that you are not a Russian, but a native of some island that is far away in the sea. What are you? A Tartar—a Tcherkesse? Oh no, you cannot be either. I know them; for they guard me," he added, with a little shudder.
"I am your friend, believe me, Ivan Antonovitch," replied Balgonie, who was touched by the childlike simplicity of the poor recluse, who was plainly attired in a caftan of fine green cloth, edged with a narrow trimming of yellow fur; the square crowned cap, which he only wore when in the grated court, was of the same materials. A small gold cross was at his neck, a rosary of amber hung at his right wrist, and a little pipe, the only luxury allowed him, was dangling from one of his breast buttons.
When in his presence, Balgonie always thought with horror of the cruel tenor of the dispatch he had brought, and trembled for the result of his friends' conspiracy.
To teach Ivan anything, even to read or to write, was treason; yet he had gleaned a little of his own history, and that of his family, from the casual remarks of his guards and from the Chaplain, during the long, long years of his captivity, the reason for which he failed to understand, but the system of which had become as a second nature to him; and the little he learned, made a deep, rather than a bitter impression upon him.
The whole energies of each successive Chaplain had been given to preparing him for another and a brighter state of existence, and to turning his hope's and wishes towards it, rather than to this world, of which he was well-nigh weary if not utterly ignorant; and so much was he impressed by the uncertainty of human life in general, and of his own in particular, that daily, for years, he had seen the sun rise from the waters of Ladoga in doubt whether he would see it set; and nightly had he laid down his head without the assurance of being a live man in the morning.