"Whom do you mean?"
"Old Count Mierowitz and his family. Warrants have been issued by the Chancellor to arrest them all."
"All!" said Balgonie, in a faint voice.
"Yes, women as well as men: an escort of the Regiment of Smolensko arrived at St. Petersburg yesterday with the Count and the Hospoza Mariolizza. His daughter, who seems to be deeply involved in some plot, has for the time effected her escape. But they will soon be all before the Secret Chancery, and then the knout and the wheel will be at work with a vengeance!"
The reader may judge how these and similar remarks affected poor Charlie, while the Governor, as if pleased that he could thus inflict pain, walked away with a malicious smile on his sombre visage, cramming tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.
There were times, however, when the captive Prince, after his acquaintance with Balgonie, was a little less resigned, and had strange longings to see something of the great world that lay beyond his prison walls, and the waves that lashed them; to see other faces than those of the fierce and bearded Tchernemoski and Volga Cossacks who guarded him; a longing even to do something great and daring, to be remembered in after years with love and reverence; to be remembered, as he said, "in tradition, like Demetrius." Then, feeling all the utter hopelessness of such new aspirations, he would strive to be contented, to repeat with fresh energy the daily prayers set for him by Father Chrysostom, and to be grateful for life, lest he should die even as Demetrius died.
"Who is this Demetrius, of whom he constantly speaks, and whose fate he fears so much may be his own?" asked Balgonie one day.
"It is an old, but a strange and terrible story," replied the chaplain. "When Ivan Basilovitch died about the end of the sixteenth century, his widow was banished to Northern Russia by the new Czar Feodor, whose Prime Minister urged that he could never reign in peace or security unless he imitated the Turks by sacrificing all who were nearly allied to the throne; so he exiled his mother, as I have said, and ordered an officer to assassinate his younger brother Demetrius.
"The officer, being a humane man, was filled with horror on receiving an order so barbarous; but fearing alike to disobey, or to leave the terrible task to be fulfilled by one less scrupulous, he took the child with him to a remote district, travelling many days' journey from Moscow. Then he wrote some words indelibly on the skin of the little Prince, tied a cross of brilliants about his neck, laid him at the door of a peasant's hut, and galloped away.
"To the tyrant Feodor he gave a circumstantial detail of how and where he had killed the infant Prince, and sought the promised reward.