But Death was still waiting, inexorably. No doubt Ivan had long forgotten the apparently trifling illness from which he had suffered after the death of his first wife, or rather soon after his second marriage, but it had not forgotten him. Nature never forgets and seldom forgives, as so many doctors have said about Life. A frightful portent, a comet, appeared in the sky, and as Ivan saw its horrid tail the thought struck him that it had come to warn him of his death. All Russia was at once in a ferment. Soothsayers were summoned from all the ends of the Tsardom. No less than sixty were collected to save the life of the Tsar, that religious lunatic, who had thought himself to be God; but the best they could do was to promise him that he would not die until twelve days had elapsed. “It will be the worse for you if your promise holds good,” said Ivan in a fury; and with that he made up his mind to slay the soothsayers if he should survive the twelve days. The wife of his surviving son, who was to succeed him as the half-imbecile Tsar Feodor—syphilis again!—came to comfort him in his terrors, that this mighty Tsar should not have to go down into the dark his hand unpressed by any woman’s; but Ivan indecently assaulted her and she fled in terror. To the later Ivan every woman was less feminine than female. The twelfth day dawned and Ivan prepared the scaffold for the execution of the soothsayers. He himself took what precautions occurred to his simple soul, and spent most of the day on a sofa playing draughts with one of his male favourites—surely the most harmless and safest of joys; surely Ivan could have done nothing better unless he had forestalled fate by a good course of mercury thirty years before! At last, just as Ivan was beginning to congratulate himself that he had beaten fate, beaten the comet and beaten the astrologers, and was glutting himself with the anticipation of his next merry jest, he suddenly choked, uttered a stifled cry and fell back dead. Fate and syphilis had won; the astrologers had predicted so accurately that their heads were even then trembling on their shoulders. What had happened? No doubt his syphilis had affected the aortic valve of his heart, as it frequently does to-day. The blood, instead of coursing on its orderly way throughout his body, had run back into his heart, which, being overfull of blood, had stopped; and in a moment Ivan the Terrible was dead. The people wept for him, as being the Tsar. “Such was the Tsar,” sobbed an admirer. “Such as he was, God made him.”