THESE days in Tsarskoye Selo which seemed so hard to bear were Paradise compared with what awaited the previous masters of this Imperial place.

Soon there came one August morning when a man who a few months before had been known only as one of the leaders of that Socialist party which the Government of Nicholas II. had taken such trouble to suppress, and whom the tide of events had transformed into one of the Ministers of the new Russian Republic, Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, entered, uncalled for and unannounced, into the private apartments of the former Czar, and acquainted him with the new decision to which the Government of the day had come in regard to his person and to the fate of his family. How he did it, how he mustered the courage to inform the fallen Monarch that he was about to be exiled to that distant Siberia, where so many people had been sent during his reign and had gone cursing his name, no one knows. None of the actors in this scene ever revealed its details.

It is probable, however, that Kerensky had experienced far more emotion in signifying to the deposed Sovereign the horrible punishment to which he had been condemned than the latter had displayed when receiving the terrible news, the nature of which must have completely bewildered him. Of all the things he had expected, this was certainly the last. The possibility of a public trial, in imitation of the one of Louis XVI. in France, had been discussed between the Emperor and the Empress, and they had in a certain sense both schooled themselves for such a supreme ordeal. But exile in cold, bleak Siberia, in that land of mystery and of crime, of heroic deeds and ignoble deaths—this solution of the difficulties of a position which was daily growing more threatening had never presented itself to the mind of the last Russian Autocrat. Tobolsk, too! This dreariest spot in a dreary country; this accursed place from which all those who could do so fled away with alacrity! What could have been more awful than to have chosen it as the future residence of a Monarch who, if all was well considered, had by his own act rendered himself impossible as a ruler in the future? No political necessity required his being sent so far and there were many other places where he might have been just as safe, and not quite so unhappy, as in that small Siberian town. Can one wonder if despair took hold of the souls of the unhappy Czar and of his wife? Can one wonder if he exclaimed that he would have preferred to die rather than have to meet such an atrocious fate?

There were his children, too; his innocent children, who had done no harm and who were to share this miserable destiny to which he was condemned. Kerensky had told him that the young Grand Duchesses and their brother would be left free to follow their parents in that distant land whither they were to depart, or to remain in Russia if they preferred. But this was almost adding insult to an abominable injury, because the children could hardly do anything else than decide to accompany their father and mother. Verily nothing was to be spared to Nicholas II., not even the knowledge that his daughters and his idolized boy were about to be exposed to hardships which it was hardly likely they could survive.

Nevertheless, he took the news bravely, and neither he nor Alexandra Feodorowna murmured. The latter is credited with having remarked that the new Government had evidently wanted to please her by sending them to a place that could only be dear to her on account of its associations with Raspoutine, who had been born there. Whether this is exact or not I will not undertake to say. What is true, however, is that she left with dry eyes the place where she had spent so many happy years, and that not even during the religious service, which was celebrated in the private chapel of the Palace, when the blessings of Heaven were invoked in favor of people about to start on a long journey, did she shed a tear. All the other assistants, including her daughters, sobbed passionately and bitterly the whole time that it lasted.

Though the hour of the departure of Nicholas had been kept as secret as possible, the whole town of Tsarskoye Selo knew that he was about to leave it forever. The population for once was awed before the immensity of the disaster. One was used in Russia to people being sent to Siberia; one had seen a Menschikoff, a Biren, a Dolgorouky, and more recently a Prince Troubetskoy, and a Mourawieff-Apostol, start on this dreaded journey whence so few ever returned. But here was something different. Here was a Romanoff about to go there where his ancestors and himself had deported so many, so many, entirely innocent people. Here was the dreaded Sovereign, whose name had been for such a long time mentioned only with reverence and with fear, exiled like one of those persons whom he had sent to Siberia with a mere stroke of his pen. Here was Nicholas II., formerly Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, here was the mighty Czar who had been crowned at Moscow, reduced to the condition of a common criminal by the subjects whose rights he had violated, whose consciences he had trampled upon, whose liberty he had taken away, and whose lives he had in so many instances tried to destroy. Truly the sight was appalling, and there were but few among those who in the early twilight of a summer morning looked at that mournful train which was carrying away toward the distant north so much dead grandeur and such awful misfortune, there were but few who did not realize that they were witnessing something more tragic and more solemn even than a funeral, that they were looking upon the end of a great chapter in Russian history, and that it was not only a Czar who lay buried under all these ruins, but also something of the past glories of the country.

They had been, after all, together with the future of the Romanoff dynasty, a great race that had produced great men and they deserved to have, as their last crowned descendant, some one better than Nicholas II. had proved to be. They had often been cruel, more frequently even unjust; they had never respected what the world is used to venerate and to esteem; they had shown themselves hard in regard to their subjects; but they had made out of dark, ignorant Russia an immense Empire on which even more immense hopes had been built. They had exercised on several occasions a restraining influence over the exaggerations of half-educated and half-instructed men with all the instincts of the savage and but few of the qualities of the civilized being. They had led their people through danger, through war, through many momentous days of rejoicing as well as of anguish. They had been a part of the Russian nation, and with their disgrace and fall something in that nation, too, had been dishonored and had perished.

With the personal failure of Nicholas II. this book has nothing to do. From the very first day that he had ascended the Throne of Russia it had been evident to any person gifted with the talent of observation that his reign was bound to end in disaster and in ruin; that all the work performed by his late father, who, after all, when things are well considered, had been a great man and a wise Sovereign, would very soon be destroyed by his want of character and of principle and by his abominable selfishness. People, however, had hoped that during the years supreme power remained concentrated in his hands at least blood would not flow. No one’s imagination had conceived the horrors of Mukden and of Tsu Shima, nor the massacres which took place at Tannenberg and in the Polish plains. No one had suspected that the rivers would be dyed red while he went on living unconscious and unconcerned about all the misery which would remain forever associated with his name. When destiny was at last fulfilled in regard to him, it was discovered that it had also been fulfilled in regard to Russia, and this was what the country could not bring itself to forgive him; this is what his ancestors also would not have pardoned him had they been able to arise out of their graves, and to

in horror at all the evil perpetrated by their unworthy descendant.

Yes, in the past they had been a strong race, these Romanoffs, about whom no one thinks any longer to-day in the vast realm that owned them once as its masters and lords. But it would be useless to deny that crimes without number were committed by them and that injustice flourished during the centuries when they could dispose absolutely of the fate of millions and millions of human creatures whom they killed and tortured at their will and according to their fancies. Perhaps it was a just punishment for the ruthless cruelty of some of them that the glories of their race came to an end and perished, together with all the traditions that had surrounded them for such a long time, because of the follies, sins, mistakes, blunderings, iniquities, and indecisions of a weak, characterless, and half-witted man and of a superstitious, intriguing, and half-demented woman.

THE END