KINGS-AT-ARMS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

I WILL MAINTAIN
DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
GOD AND THE KING
THE QUEST OF GLORY
THE GOVERNOR OF ENGLAND
PRINCE AND HERETIC
THE CARNIVAL OF FLORENCE
“WILLIAM, BY THE GRACE OF GOD”—
THE THIRD ESTATE
GOD’S PLAYTHINGS
SHADOWS OF YESTERDAY

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

KINGS-AT-ARMS

BY
MARJORIE BOWEN

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Published 1919
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

KINGS-AT-ARMS

PART I
THE CONQUEROR

“Presque toutes ses actions, jusqu’à celles de sa vie privée et amie, out été bien loin au delà du vraisemble. C’est peut-être le seul de tous les hommes, et jusqu’ici le seul de tous les rois, qui ait réçu sans faiblesse; il a port toutes les vertus à au ecès où elles sont aussi dangereuses que les vices opposés.”—Voltaire.

BOOK I
KARL XII

“A name at which the world grew pale.”—S. Johnson.

CHAPTER I

A LADY, haughty and fierce in her natural character, but schooled to at least the outward show of a cold patience by long years of training in submission to the wills of men, sat in a little private dining-room of her palace at Stockholm and frowned with an air of discontent and pride at her companion, a gentleman, elderly but much younger than herself, who stood by the fireplace and looked on the ground; he also had an air by no means well satisfied, but though he was only a minister and she was a Queen he had never been as much in the background as she, nor so forced to subdue an imperious spirit, for she was a woman, and women had never counted for much in Sweden.

They did not like each other, Count Piper, the late King’s minister, and Eleanora Edwiga, the late King’s mother; she knew that she owed to him her forced retirement from the brief-prized power that she had held as Regent, and he thought her very presence in the palace was vexatious and that her place was in retirement with her prayer-book and her embroidery, but for the moment they were in the same position and might be useful to each other, therefore, tacitly ignoring mutual dislike, they became allies.

“I do not know,” said the Queen, “why we talk about these things, for, of course, the King will do as he wishes.”

She spoke with a certain chill triumph, and Count Piper knew that her words meant, “If I cannot rule my grandson, neither can you”; he also knew that she spoke from pure malice, and that she found every use in discussing the affairs that composed her life.

“Naturally, Madame,” he answered quietly, “the King will do as he likes. It is for us to find out what he does like.”

The old woman gave him a long and rather bitter look.

“Do you not know?” she asked.

“No, Madame,” smiled Count Piper.

“Well, I do,” replied the Queen sharply. “He likes just what any boy of eighteen likes,” she glanced at the table with covers for three, elegant but not splendid. “And he is late for dinner,” she added, and the love of old age for trifles showed in her acid tone.

Count Piper seemed faintly amused.

“It would be strange if His Majesty should be ordinary—considering his lineage,” he replied. “And he was very carefully trained.”

The Queen was hit through her pride in her husband and her son.

“Karl’s breed will show later,” she said stiffly, “for the moment he is—as I said—eighteen.”

“A good age,” remarked Count Piper, a little sadly. “I wish I was—eighteen——”

“Or King of Sweden at any age,” snapped the Queen. “You always were ambitious, Count.”

“Only to serve,” he answered meekly.

The Queen glanced from the table to the door; expectancy and vexation showed in her face; she was tall and still upright, spare and haggard, a Dane, and of a pure Northern type; she had been handsome in a cold, hard fashion, and was now rather terrible in her gaunt colorlessness, her sunk blue eyes, her pinched nose, her lipless mouth; all the long structure of her face showed and the flesh seemed polished on the temples, the cheek bones, and chin.

No look of wisdom nor compassion nor resignation softened this countenance; her glance was still that of a fighter who has grown bitter in the struggle.

Her dress, of gold and purple brocade, was rich and in tolerable imitation of the fashion of Versailles; a lace headdress crowned her white curls and she wore some costly rubies on her knotted fingers.

The room of this Northern Princess, which was situate in that portion of the Royal Palace of Stockholm that had been saved from the great fire of two years ago, and that was filled with the distant sound of the workmen rebuilding the edifice in a style in keeping with the increased grandeur of Sweden, was simple, yet in a way splendid; the dark paneled walls and ceiling gave the apartment a somber air, as did the inlaid and heavy furniture; it was a cold day in early spring and the sky was gray; from where the Queen sat she could see this grayness reflected in the water from which the palace rose, and the bridges, houses, and waterways beyond all colorless in the cold light of the sad midday.

Count Piper kept his glance on the dark rug at his feet; he was tingling with thoughts of great issues and large events; it was the eve of big affairs for his prosperous and successful country which was menaced by many and powerful enemies eager to seize the chance to despoil a youthful King; Count Piper felt himself equal to dealing with these concerns—but he was only a councilor of state, and must wait the pleasure of that same youthful King who even now was keeping him waiting for his dinner.

A slight impatience with fate darkened his thin clever face; it seemed so cruel a blow for Sweden that the late King, stern, wise, just, should die in his prime leaving his heritage in the hands of a boy and an old woman.

The Queen suddenly broke the prolonged pause.

“I seldom or never hear the truth, of course,” she said abruptly. “But you, Count, must have means of knowing many things. Tell me,” and her tone betrayed an anxiety she would never have owned to, “what do the people say of Karl?”

Count Piper knew perfectly well what was the general opinion of the young King—that he was considered idle, haughty, obstinate, and autocratic—the public was not likely to take any other view of one wholly devoted to amusements, and who gave no sign of being of the breed of his heroic father and grandfather beyond the imperious pride with which, on several occasions, he had asserted his position.

But Count Piper attached little importance to this verdict of the world and did not choose to repeat it to the ears of the Queen Dowager.

“His Majesty,” he replied, “has already given tokens of a spirit such as the Swedes love, and they await his manhood with many hopes.”

“He has spirit enough for ordinary impudence,” remarked the old woman drily; she was thinking how, as a boy of fifteen, he had removed her from the regency and assumed the government himself, and how, at his coronation, he had snatched the crown from the archbishop’s hands and placed it on his brow himself. “Has he spirit enough to go to war, and wit enough to be successful if he does?”

The statesman looked grave.

“I count upon his ancestors,” he replied.

The Queen would have returned a sharp answer, but the door opened noisily and the subject of their talk entered the room with an unsteady step and dropped into the chair with arms at the head of the table.

He wore a very rich hunting suit of violet velvet laced with silver; this was torn and muddy, his lawn shirt and his wrist ruffles were bloody, as were his hands and the sheaths of the long knives he wore thrust into his belt.

“Am I late?” he asked. “I had a mind not to come back at all. It was pleasant in the woods.”

The Queen rose with a glance of disgust for his attire and his condition; he had never yet appeared before her so soiled from the chase. And he was obviously intoxicated. She hesitated for a second, then rang the silver bell by her side and took her seat opposite to her grandson, at the end of the table.

Count Piper came quietly to his place between the King and Queen.

“There is much business for you to-day, sir,” he said.

“Business?” said Karl; he laughed, dragged at his napkin and sent over a glass.

The lackeys entered with the dinner and there was silence in the somber little room; both the Queen and Count Piper were looking covertly at the young King.

His appearance, even in his present dishevelment and intoxication, was most remarkable; he did not need his kingship to make him conspicuous—in any company, on any occasion, he would have been noticed.

He was then in his eighteenth year, fully and perfectly developed, tall and vigorous above the common even in a nation of tall and vigorous men, graceful with the grace of health and strength, and easy with the ease of one born to occupy always the place of command and power.

His countenance expressed nothing but pride, which was, however, tempered by a certain calm tolerance; his brow was low and broad, the nose short, blunt, and clearly cut, the mouth large, curved, and mobile, the chin rounded, the face wide, the eyes very handsome, of a pure blue free from any admixture of gray and well-set under heavy arching brows; these eyes were full of a serenity that was almost a blankness, a look curious and not altogether either amiable or attractive; there was something about the young man’s whole appearance that was strange, something difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe.

Count Piper, who had observed him long and closely, had once said to himself, “Karl is like an animal—or a god,” which he felt to be a foolish comparison, yet knew that it expressed that peculiar impression made by the King—an impression that whatever he was he was not ordinary humanity—scarcely humanity at all, but something beyond, or, at least outside, manhood.

Yet now he was ordinary enough in his clothes torn by the violence of the chase and stained by the blood of the animals whom he had slain, his strength and his wits alike beyond his control through the wine he had drunk.

His hair, which was light brown and very thick, hung in a quantity of loosely entwined curls, through those on his shoulders was tied a long black ribbon; the front locks hung down either side his cheeks and across his forehead into his strange eyes.

His grandmother looked at him with less curiosity and less friendliness than did Count Piper.

“It is as well that I did not bid your sisters dine with us to-day,” she said, as she saw the King fill his glass with a strong shaking hand.

He drank his wine and then stared at her; in silence he set the beaker down, and then laughed in a way that curled his mouth unpleasantly.

It was remarkable how his personality even now, when he was not master of himself, seemed to fill the room, making the other two people and the whole surrounding but a background to his fierce young figure.

Dish after dish was removed; only the Queen ate, as if she disdained to be disturbed.

“Your Majesty enjoyed the chase?” asked Count Piper suddenly; he wiped his mouth with his napkin, using a precise movement.

“I killed three bears,” said Karl; he laughed again, showing his strong, perfect teeth.

“You spend your time well,” said the old Queen bitterly. “And now you will sleep all the afternoon, and drink all the evening. And to-morrow the chase again.”

“And three more bears,” smiled the King.

His grandmother looked at him with a coldness that approached aversion.

“Your father’s death was a great misfortune,” she said—“for Sweden.”

“Sweden does very well,” returned Karl indifferently.

“That,” put in Count Piper gently, “is a question that your Majesty must better acquaint yourself with.”

Karl lifted his head which had sunk forward on his broad chest; his face was flushed and his eyes bloodshot; he spoke thickly.

“No councils of state—no councils of state, and dull speeches and silly disputes,” he said.

“And no interviews with your wretched sister and her ruined husband, who are here to crave your succor,” added the Queen sarcastically.

“Does my sister complain of me?” muttered Karl haughtily.

“The Duchess of Holstein is in terrible straits,” remarked Count Piper gravely.

“Well,” asked Karl, “are not you, Count, capable of helping my brother-in-law to keep his little duchy?”

The minister was quick to seize his moment. “It is only your Majesty can do that,” he said, and leant towards the King.

“Only I,” repeated Karl stupidly. “And why is that?”

“Who else in Europe,” said Count Piper, “can face at once the King of Denmark, the King of Poland, and the Czar of Muscovy?—who but the son of Karl XI, the grandson of Karl X?”

At this open appeal to pride and vanity the Queen pushed back her chair with a movement of contempt; the young man’s eyes gleamed for a second; he put his hand to his forehead in a confused manner, pushing back the tangled light curls.

“Are you frightened by three such names, like the children with talk of ogres?” sneered the Queen. “Indeed, you look capable, sire, of facing the greatest man in the world!”

“And who is that?” asked Karl, still amazed and stupid.

“Why, that is the Czar of Muscovy,” replied the old woman, composed and vicious and heedless of Count Piper’s look of warning, “the man we shall all be begging for pity soon—that will be a pleasant day for me—a woman who has had such a husband and such a son.”

Karl stared at her.

“I am not afraid of the Czar of Muscovy,” he replied.

The Queen laughed, the thin and heartless laugh of old age.

“I am sure your Majesty is afraid of nothing,” said Count Piper quickly, “but you must be a little fearful for Sweden.”

Karl gave a sullen glance at the speaker; he was still drinking and could hardly hold himself upright in his chair; a shadow passed over the face of the minister; he would not look at the Queen for he knew her expression would be one of sour triumph; his tired eyes narrowed and he kept them fixed on the King.

Karl leant forward with a lurching movement and stared into his glass in which still hung, as he tipped it, a drop of brilliant wine.

“The Czar,” he muttered, “the Czar——”

Then he suddenly broke into fury, dashed down the glass, and staggered to his feet.

“God help you, Madame,” he shouted at the Queen, “but do you think that I am no match for the Czar of Muscovy?”

He stood as if he threatened her, flushed and with eyes gleaming as only bright blue eyes can.

The Queen turned a wax-yellow color as her cold blood receded from her face.

“I think you are no company for a lady’s table,” she said bitterly.

Karl turned round passionately.

“Piper,” he cried, “Piper—did I not say I would have no more of old women?”

He tried to leave the table, but being unsteady on his feet and fastened in his place by a heavy chair could not at once do so; Count Piper—for some minutes on his feet—sprang forward to free him, but the King, with fierce impatience, pushed back the chair and stumbled towards the door.

One of his spurs had entangled in the lace border of the cloth, his impetuous movement violently dragged at this, and in an instant all that was on the table, plate, fruit, wine, glasses, and china, was pulled to the ground and scattered over the floor; the King, still with the lace clinging to his spur, staggered back against the wall beside the door and the Queen rose, rigid with anger and disgust.

Karl laughed, lifting his lip from his teeth; Count Piper stooped, tore off the lace from the King’s spur, seized him by the arm and led him from the room, closing the door on the wrecked table and the grim figure of the old Queen ringing furiously her silver bell.

Dexterously the councilor guided the King’s stupid steps down the short corridor; at the end of this they came face to face with two women, who were turning down the passage that led at right angles to the stairs.

One was the King’s elder sister, the Duchess of Holstein, who had come with her husband to Stockholm to implore her brother’s assistance; she was tall, fair, and finely made, like Karl, pure Scandinavian in type and of a demeanor rather cold.

She gave one glance under her lids at the two men and hurried on; but her companion lingered and gazed at the King with wide eyes; she was fairer than the Duchess, so fair that her hair was more like silver than gold, and her complexion more like a lily than a rose, if she should have been praised in poetry, but her eyes were a deep brown and, dilated as they were now, appeared black.

The King pushed back his draggled curls to stare at her, which he did with insolence. Count Piper tried to draw him away; the lady colored till it seemed as if a fire had dyed her in a bright reflection, and hurried away with the haste of shame.

“Viktoria,” said Karl, “she is a pretty creature for a King’s fancy—that woman.” And he spoke so that the object of his speech must have heard.

Count Piper, with greater determination than he had yet shown, dragged at his master’s arm, guided him to his own cabinet, and helped him into a chair there.

Then he closed the door and stood with his back to it; the King stared absently at his clothes stained with blood, and dirt and wine.

CHAPTER II

COUNT PIPER stood looking thoughtfully at the King; he was wondering if the young man was sober enough to make it worth while speaking to him; he doubted this, and yet time was short—a question of hours might decide the fate of Sweden.

Karl sat immovable; across his slightly upturned face fell a pale ray of sun that had faintly penetrated the clouds and entered the small room, and in this light that was so dim as to be almost colorless, the King’s countenance, framed in the loose flowing, light hair, had such a strange effect that it almost startled Count Piper, even though he had known the King from babyhood and daily watched his lineaments. Very obvious now was that inhuman look, a serenity, a reserve that was neither disdain nor secrecy but mere indifferency, a look of something large and noble and cold in the wide, handsome face that did not belong to ordinary mankind.

This was not attractive, this expression, it inspired a certain fear even in one as familiar with it as Count Piper—yet the King was only a haughty boy, soiled from his rough sport and drunk—a boy who had been insolent to his kinswoman and who had insulted his sister’s friend almost in her presence.

“Your Majesty,” said Count Piper, looking away from those calm, blank blue eyes, “will you forgo the chase to-morrow to attend the Council of State?”

The King sighed.

“Yes, I will come,” he said, with a gentleness that Count Piper was not expecting.

“And give your mind to the business in hand?” added the councilor, for he could recollect council meetings when Karl had sat in an aloof silence commonly attributed to a haughty stupidity, with his feet on the table and his hands in his pockets.

Karl slowly turned his fine head and looked at his friend.

“You are very kind to me,” he remarked gravely.

“Your Majesty is not just to yourself,” replied the Count.

An expression of bewilderment crossed the King’s face; he put his strong, blood-stained hand to his forehead.

“I am drunk,” he said.

Count Piper could not repress a movement of impatience.

“Yes, your Majesty is drunk,” he replied, “and at this moment three Kingdoms are in league against you—to deprive you of all you have.”

There was no response in the attitude or expression of the King.

Count Piper tried the name that had roused him to such passionate violence before.

“Is the son of Karl XI going to permit the Czar of Muscovy to add so easily to his laurels?”

Karl remained calm.

“Why are these three princes at war with me?” he asked slowly.

“Because they think that you are a foolish boy,” replied Count Piper instantly. “Because they believe that in such hands as yours Sweden can do nothing against them. Denmark is your hereditary enemy—Saxony is an adventurer, keeping on foot an army at all costs—and the Czar—is the most ambitious man in Europe.”

“What does he want?” asked Karl.

“All the land between the Gulf of Finland, the Baltic Sea, Poland, and Muscovy,” replied the councilor laconically.

Karl laughed; it had a meaningless sound.

“My land,” he said.

“Precisely, sire.”

The King, still holding his head and still confused, spoke again, slowly and insistently, like a child asking artless, but to himself important questions.

“What are the Czar’s objects—tell me, Count?” he asked.

The more stupidly calm his master showed the more the diplomat dared show his annoyance—after all, this boy was eighteen, of a race of heroes, carefully trained and had shown already some signs of greatness as in the matter of his coronation and his refusal to be ruled by a woman, and it was intolerable that he should sit here fuddled with wine, staring with eyes blank as those of any fool.

“The Czar needs an outlet—a fort—on the Baltic,” he replied, in a tone of fierce sarcasm; “the Czar is a man of vast schemes, of a wide ambition—of a fair measure of greatness, too—he has taught his people much—he would teach them the art of war. At your expense, sire.”

“And Saxony and Poland help him—yes, you told me so—we discussed this the other day.”

“We have spoken of it many times,” replied the councilor bitterly.

Karl did not heed him.

“And there is my poor brother Gottorp-Holstein ruined—and my sister weeping here for help,” he said slowly; “that is a pretty creature she has with her, Count——”

“Will your Majesty add that to your other amusements—so soon?” interrupted Count Piper.

His glance went wistfully over the splendid young man who stared at him so stupidly. “I must learn to make my court to a Marquise de Maintenon or an Aurora von Königsmarck!” he added.

“Who is she—Aurora von Königsmarck?” asked the King.

“A thing like this piece your Majesty admires—one of those creatures who get their feet on the necks of kings!”

“Not great kings!” said Karl, with a sudden short laugh, showing his teeth in a disagreeable manner.

“Mostly great kings,” replied the Count drily. “From Thäis to our poor Aurora—you may search history and you will never find your conqueror, your hero without them—and it is human nature—you can no more avoid them than you can flowers at a feast, or flags at a victory—and is this to be your Majesty’s choice? I know nothing of the girl.”

The King had been listening with some intentness; he unaccountably flushed.

“I like neither flowers nor flags,” he said. “I will rule without women, Piper.” His eyes narrowed with a look of intelligence. “Is there any king in the world now, Piper, who is free of women?”

The councilor shook his head.

“There is the King of England, sire, who is a grave and great Monarch—but he largely owed his fortunes to his wife and has been a different man since her death——”

“I will have no wife,” said Karl instantly. “I will be greater than the King of England—Count, were there women in the sagas? Did the Vikings care for maids or wives?”

The older man smiled.

“I will forgive you your women, sire, and your chase, and your wine—if you will but keep Sweden great—and make her greater.”

But the glow of energy had passed from the King’s strange face, the broad lids dropped over the wide blue eyes.

“Talk to me later,” he muttered, and turned his head away on the dark cushions of the chair.

Count Piper hesitated a moment, then, seeing that the young man was falling into a heavy sleep, he, with a little bitter shrug, left the cabinet, gently closing the door behind him, frowning as he did so with an annoyance that he could, for all his training, scarcely control.

He went straight to the apartments of the Duchess of Gottorp, the King’s sister, whose husband had been the first victim of the league against Sweden.

She was in her hood and cloak, ready for some poor diversion of a ride or walk, a sad, anxious lady beneath her air of princely reserve.

The dreary air of the old palace, which was both dull and unhomelike, pervaded these apartments of the fugitive princess; she looked and felt like an exile as she drew off her gauntlet and gave her bare hand to Count Piper.

She knew that he was her ally and could be of more use to her husband than any man in Sweden, but she was surprised at seeing him now as she had just been with the Queen Dowager and had heard in what condition the King had left the table; therefore she had hoped for nothing to-day, which she had already put aside as another space of wasted time.

“Madame,” said Count Piper, “you have a lady in your service named Viktoria?”

The Duchess frowned, instantly cold.

“I do not like her, Count.”

“I do not think that I do,” replied the Count reflectively, “but I want to speak to her, Highness.”

The Duchess looked at him sharply.

“What do you know about her?” she asked quickly.

“Nothing at all,” smiled Count Piper. “It is you, Madame, who should know what there is to know about this lady.”

The Duchess seemed vexed.

“Her father is a great man in Gottorp—I found she had a right to come to court”

“And to come with you here, Highness, to Stockholm?” asked the Count, with a shade of regret in his voice.

“How could I help it?” demanded the Duchess on the defensive. “They were ruined—like ourselves—had lost everything. I could do nothing but offer this shelter to one who had been sacrificed in our cause.”

Count Piper fingered the brown curls of the wig that hung on to the heart of his somber coat and looked reflectively at the floor; the Duchess eyed him, and her fair face was hard in the shadow of her hood and her blue eyes had darkened with emotion.

“It is not pleasant to return to one’s country as I have returned—an exile and a fugitive,” she said, in a heavy voice, “to wait here day by day, like a poor petitioner, to gain my brother’s ear—but it is an added bitterness to think that I have brought with me one who will be a mischief in Sweden.”

“So your Highness thinks of this lady as a mischief?” asked the Count thoughtfully.

“You know, sir,” she replied, disdainful of pretense, “that is what you came to tell me.”

“No,” he said, looking at her straightly. “I think she might be useful.”

“To whom?” cried the Duchess.

“To Sweden.”

As the King’s sister understood the King’s minister, she colored swiftly and drew a step away from him.

“This is not Versailles,” she said. Then in a tone of real disgust, “Heavens! would you seek to rule the King through women?”

“If it was the only way.”

“A boy!”

Count Piper lifted his shoulders.

“She is the type—the temperament—they have noticed each other. He speaks of her.”

“Not when he is sober,” flashed the Duchess.

“Believe me, Madame,” he answered gravely, “he is ensnared. And his first love. It will be serious.”

The Duchess tapped her foot impatiently.

“And I came to Stockholm for this!” she exclaimed, full of contempt and revolt.

“So much depends on the lady—why should she not be our friend, Highness? The friend of Sweden? That wench might save the country if she chose to persuade the King that way—let us use her, instead of flouting her, Madame.”

The Duchess was silent a second, struggling with a pride that bade her speak scornful words; she knew that Count Piper but followed the usual procedure of courts, but his worldly wisdom disgusted her, and, desperate as she was, and cause as she had to be angry with her brother, she did not care to think of him as sunk in foolish weakness; the men of her house had never been feeble.

Yet she knew, by a deep instinct and a jealous observation, that Viktoria had greatly attracted the King, and she thought that, bold, fair, and worldly as this woman was, she would not forgo any advantage for any scruple.

“I leave it in your hands,” she said at last. “I cannot speak to her myself. I will send her to you while I go for my walk.”

She went from the room as if not too well pleased with Count Piper, and he, left alone in the dreary atmosphere of the narrow apartment, began to slightly doubt the wisdom of the course he had set himself.

But he was aroused; he was afraid as only a brave man can be afraid, mistrustful as only a wise man can be mistrustful, roused in his pride as a statesman and as a Swede; he believed the Czar Peter to be terrible—more terrible than anyone yet guessed; ambitious, fierce, one eager to rule who yet did not disdain to learn—a dangerous combination; he believed the King of Denmark malicious and active; and the third of the King’s enemies, Augustus of Saxony, King of Poland, he believed to be equally formidable—a fribble, a rake, but an important pawn, a sharp tool in the hands of others—a valuable asset to such a man as the Czar.

Sweden had possessions all of these envied—they did not hesitate to stretch out their hands and take them from one whom they knew to be a boy and believed to be defenseless.

The two former Kings had made Sweden great—this King might lose all that greatness so easily.

Count Piper’s shrewd face hardened as he thought of the tipsy youth slumbering in his cabinet; his delicate mission seemed easier as he reflected on that foolish degradation.

And it was not likely that the woman was of finer clay than the man whom she sought to enslave; Count Piper was hardened towards her with whom he had to deal before he had spoken to her; her quiet entry found him cold and prepared.

Her curtsey was slow; she had her eyes fixed on him the while.

It was the first time that he had seen her close and face to face; his practised glance noted, first that she was not a girl, secondly that she was as clever as she was fair; it was an intelligence equal to his own that looked at him out of those clear brown eyes.

And she was certainly very fair; there was no fault in her exact features, in her pure complexion, none in her exquisite form, unless it might be that she was too tall and too slender.

Her dress was over-rich and over-gay for her surroundings; a court ruled by an old woman had not seen before a creature so splendid.

Her pale blond hair was worn in cunningly disposed ringlets through which was passed a little braid of pearls, and fastened by a fair tortoiseshell comb adorned with squares of dark amber.

Her dress was of rose-colored velvet, cut low in front, with a fall of silver lace on the bosom, and showing a silver petticoat in front.

She had a great scarf of black silk wrapped like a shawl over all her attire, and no jewels at all but one square sapphire on the first finger of her right hand.

“You are very gracious, Madame, to grant me this interview,” said Count Piper; he looked a dull, a wizened figure beside her radiant grace.

“Was it not a command?” asked Madame von Falkenberg.

She stood facing him, with one hand on her hip, almost in the attitude of a man who feels for his sword hilt.

“I am not powerful enough to issue commands to you, Baroness,” he replied suavely.

She flashed into a sudden animation that accorded ill with her frail pallor and look of languid grace.

“I think you are not powerful enough to do anything, Count,” she said, “not powerful enough, certainly, to save Sweden.”

He did not understand her mood or her attitude, but he answered boldly.

“Therefore I am going to ask your help, Madame.”

Viktoria von Falkenberg moved impatiently towards the window, like a creature confined against her will.

“Are you not ashamed,” she asked, “that you cannot manage one wilful boy?”

This was so unexpected that Count Piper could think of no reply whatever.

“This King of yours,” continued the lady, “was drunk to-day, and unwashed from the chase, sat down to his food with spotted linen and muddy boots, was rude to women—I should not be proud to be his tutor.”

She had completely turned the tables on him; he had meant to tactfully reproach her with the effect of her influence on the King—to point out how Karl was drifting to disaster—and she had snatched his weapons from his hands and left him defenseless.

She threw up her head impetuously and struck her open palm on the window-pane.

“Oh, for something beautiful!” she cried, “were it but the waving of a spray of leaves against a gray sky! Your palace stifles, Count, and while we wait your King’s graciousness we lose our life!”

“It is of that I would speak to you,” said the Count, endeavoring to keep to his first point of view, “of your desires—and the King.”

CHAPTER III

“YOU think that I have any influence with your King?” asked Madame von Falkenberg.

Her directness did not displease Count Piper; he saw that she was more experienced than he had thought and wise enough to be simple.

“I know you have,” he replied, then added: “His Majesty has never looked twice at any other woman.”

“His Majesty is only eighteen,” said Viktoria; her large dilated eyes looked searchingly at the shrewd, withered face of the minister. “What do you know of me?” she asked.

He had his answer ready.

“I know that you are of one of the noblest families in Gottorp—that you are a very attractive woman, and, I think, ambitious.”

“You know nothing about my husband?”

The question seemed to Count Piper quite irrelevant.

“I know that Baron von Falkenberg was killed in a duel a few months after his marriage, and that that is five years ago.”

She gave him a narrowed glance.

“And so you think that I have influence with your little King?” she demanded abruptly.

Count Piper was surprised into irritation.

“Madame, it is a Viking!” he exclaimed with pride.

Madame von Falkenberg lifted her slender shoulders.

“He seems like a child to me,” she answered, “and if,” she added, “you think so well of him, why do you come to bargain about him with a woman whom you think is a greedy adventuress?”

Count Piper looked at the lady with dislike; her attitude was one with which it was impossible to deal; for all her directness she was hindering him in the object of his conversation; vexation rose in his heart against boys and women and this kind of bed-chamber intrigue; he longed for such a master again as the late King had been.

“Sweden is threatened,” he replied, with some sternness, “and to save her I must use any weapons I can.”

“Even soiled ones,” said the Baroness.

“I have not said so—but I am dealing with a youth, one who has no interest beyond his games and his sports—one who is self-confident, arrogant——”

The lady interrupted.

“And you can do nothing with him?”

“No.”

“And the Queen?”

“He smiles at the Queen.”

“What do you want him to do?”

“What his father would have done,” replied Count Piper—“lead an army against Denmark, Poland, and Russia.”

“I see—you want an antique hero—a Viking, as you say, in this modern age of ours!” She seemed scornful, and her lips shook as she spoke. “And you think that a woman’s smiles can rouse a demi-god from a tipsy boy! You think that he might go to war if he could find me among the spoils of victory!”

Count Piper was silent; he could not understand her mood.

She seemed in considerable agitation and leant against the window-frame, pressing a little handkerchief to her mouth; the sharp eyes of the minister noted the stains of red on the cambric as she rubbed off the moistened rouge.

“You think to find in me an Aurora von Königsmarck—a gilded puppet whose strings you can pull!” she cried.

Count Piper felt bound to defend himself.

“Madame, you have not seemed displeased at the King’s notice.”

“No,” flashed Viktoria, “and the Duchess has told you that she does not like me and that I am a light creature, and so you think you can affront me with impunity.”

“Madame, it can be no affront to suggest that you might be the King’s friend and influence him for good.”

She sighed a little at these conventional words and put her thin hands, with a gesture of weariness, to her fair brow.

“Will you let me see the King, alone?” she asked quietly. “Perhaps I might be able to turn him to what is the wish of all of us.”

The Count did not affect to understand this change of front, but he was eager to grasp at her suggestion.

“His Majesty is now in my cabinet,” he replied.

“I wish to see him when he is sober.”

“When he wakes he will be sober.”

“Take me to him.”

Count Piper glanced at her somewhat doubtfully; if she did become his puppet he did not think that she would be a particularly easy one to manage; so far, at least, she had shown no good-humor and a certain enmity towards himself; he agreed with the King’s sister in not liking her; what charm she had, he decided, lay solely in her rather colorless beauty.

He conducted her to his cabinet without any very great hopes as to the success of his experiment, but, at least, he consoled himself, he had forced an issue that might have hung long and vexatiously, and this interview would decide how much or how little Viktoria von Falkenberg was going to count for in the life of the King of Sweden.

When the cabinet door opened Karl looked round.

He was still in the chair where Count Piper had left him and seemed to have but lately awakened.

The Baroness entered and closed the door. The King at once rose, and stood, with one hand on the back of his chair, looking at her in rather an amazed fashion.

His eyes were clear and his hands steady; he had already thrown off the effects of the wine—an easy matter for his superb and vigorous constitution.

But his hair was still disordered, his dress disheveled and stained with blood, and dirt, and wine.

The lady, in her fair exquisiteness, rose color and silver, her finished beauty and artificial grace, was a curious contrast to the young man in his vigor and careless attire.

“Ah, Madame von Falkenberg,” said the King, “who do you wish to see—Count Piper?”

“No, sir.”

“This is Count Piper’s cabinet,” replied Karl, with a look of confusion.

“He has been lecturing your Majesty?”

The blood rushed up under the King’s fair skin.

“He spoke to me of the Czar of Muscovy, but I do not rightly recall all he said.”

The Baroness advanced a little; all that there was of light in the dull, small apartment seemed to be gathered in her brilliant figure.

“I also have come to speak of the Czar of Muscovy, your Majesty.”

Karl looked at her doubtfully.

“Oh, yes, Count Piper sent me,” she added, “but I do not come on his errand, but on my own.”

The red still showed in the King’s strange face; he glanced at his clothes.

“You take me at a disadvantage,” he said, with dignity.

Viktoria smiled faintly.

“Ah no, sire—you have all the advantages!”

Karl suddenly smiled also; it changed his face, not agreeably.

“You think I have all I want?” he asked.

“I think that you could have.”

“That rests with you, Baroness,” he replied; now that he was sober it was noticeable that his demeanor was cold and his manners of a freezing haughtiness; only towards this woman his behavior was softened; he was being as gracious as he knew how; his large serene eyes gleamed as they rested on her loveliness; he approved her openly and with a lack of all subterfuge that had something large-natured in it; indeed, it was impossible to associate him with anything small of any kind.

They stood facing each other, and for all that she was tall she was hardly to his shoulder; he stared at her, and behind all his arrogance was a certain shyness.

“Sir,” she said, “it is a pity that you should depend on a woman for anything.”

That seemed to strike a responsive chord in his nature; he drew up his magnificent figure and a look of intense pride darkened his face.

He put his hand to the hilt of the short sword he wore and turned away rather abruptly.

“What could I give you?” asked Viktoria softly.

He looked at her over his shoulder.

“I think you know,” he said rather sullenly.

“But tell me,” she insisted.

The King gave his ugly smile.

“You are such a pretty creature,” he answered, “you give me more pleasure than any fair sight I have ever seen.”

She did not receive his compliment in the usual fashion of blush and confusion.

“I am sorry that your Majesty has seen so few pleasant sights,” she said quietly, “but you are very young.”

“You think of me as very young?” demanded the King, with narrowed eyes.

“What are you, sire, but a boy?” replied the lady calmly. “Ah, when will you be a man?”

“With God’s help, when I choose,” he said shortly.

Viktoria von Falkenberg smiled sadly.

“Sire,” she said, “I do not come to lecture you as Count Piper or the Queen do. I think I have no right to speak at all, save this little right that you have noticed me.”

“I have noticed you,” he interrupted heavily.

“And that others think that I might influence you,” she continued.

“Ah, they think that, do they? Count Piper thinks a woman could influence me!” cried the King. “Forgive me,” he added quickly, “I am not courteous.”

“Indeed,” replied the Baroness, still with that little fixed smile, “your Majesty is more fitted to the camp than the court.”

Again the King flushed, and his eyes were narrowed and gleaming.

“Ah, I am boorish—I know,” he said, then, suddenly, “but I could be gentle to a woman, a woman like you.”

“I want you to be gentle to me now, sire,” she replied quickly, “for what I have to say may try your patience.”

“Nay, that could never be.”

He did not speak in a tone of gallantry or artificial compliment, nor even with any of the confusion or shyness likely in one so young and so unused to dealing in affairs of love, but with a certain hardness and hauteur, the mark of absolute sincerity and complete self-command.

It was impossible to believe that he would ever waste himself in mere pleasantness; he did not trouble even to smile, but looked at the lady gravely with his strange blue eyes that were of so rare a color and so curious an expression.

“You think that I please your fancy,” she said, with a flutter of color in her face.

“I know that you do,” he replied seriously. “You are very wonderful. But Count Piper was wrong,” he added grimly, “when he thought that you could influence me.”

“Yet I am going to try and do so,” said Viktoria.

“Yes?” he seemed faintly amused.

“I want you to forget me, to forget the chase, to leave the wine, and become the man your father was.”

These words were so unexpected that for a moment his composure was disturbed.

“Forget you?” he asked.

“Sire, whether my words have any effect with you or no, after to-day I shall never speak to you alone. I am not the woman your councilor takes me to be. He thinks that I would be your plaything, and that through me he would work his way with you.”

“And so you will have none of me?” asked the King quietly; “I could have loved you.”

“Sire, I have done with love. And I was never ambitious.”

“But I,” smiled Karl, “I have not even begun with love. And I was always ambitious.”

She flashed at him with sudden animation and force.

“Then if you are ambitious leave love alone. Turn your back on women until you take your Queen—be the one King in Europe who is not ruled by a petticoat. Be a man like the hero of antiquity, feared, obeyed, revered by men, not cajoled, flattered, led by women!”

He gave her a dazzling look.

“And if I wished I could be such a one,” he said strongly.

“And do you hesitate? There is a man’s work—a King’s work ready to your hand—a nation that your forefathers left great looking to you for help against three terrible enemies, the world before you in which to win glory.”

“And if I wished I could win it,” said Karl, in the same tone.

“Sire, first you must conquer yourself—to-day you were intoxicated.”

The King flushed hotly.

“You came to the Queen’s table blood-stained from the chase. You dragged the cover to the floor with your spur in the cloth. You insulted me in the corridor.”

Karl looked at his disordered clothes.

“Before God,” he said in broken voice, “I am sorry.”

“And because of these things Count Piper resorts to a woman to influence you.”

“I am ashamed,” said the King. “I am ashamed. Yes, I was drunk. I went into my grandmother’s presence like any stable boor—I remember now. And Count Piper led me here—and I fell asleep when he talked politics.”

He hid his face in his strong hands, resting them on the back of the chair, his tangled curls falling over the dark tapestry.

Viktoria Falkenberg had not known him long, but she was quick to perceive that he was moved to emotion rare in such a nature.

She came quickly up to him, and laid her thin hand on his bowed shoulder.

“Sire, what does it matter? You are young and splendid. Think what may be before you—think what you have in your hands. What is the chase compared to war? What is wine-drinking compared to the joy of victory? What the pursuit of women compared to the pursuit of nations?”

He raised his strange face that was now quite pale.

“You are right,” he said. “You are very right. I have always thought like that. Yet there seemed nothing to do. And I amused myself with games,” he added simply.

“There is now plenty to do,” said the lady, with a faint smile. “You must give your brother-in-law back his duchy—humble Denmark—subdue Poland—hold the Czar in check.”

“You think that I could do that?” he asked quickly.

“Sire, you come of a race that has done such things.”

He looked at her with an intensity almost painful.

“You are interested in me, but yet you do not care about me.”

“I do not love you, sire,” she replied quietly. “I loved once. It was enough. I loved my husband and he did not love me. For the sake of another woman he was killed soon after our marriage.”

She drew from behind the silver lace on her bosom a golden locket which she opened, and showed no portrait, but a fragment of blood-stained rag.

“That I cut from above his heart the day they brought him home,” she said. “It is all I care for in the world. I—I have suffered so much that it is as if I had died. That is why, sire, I can speak to you so coldly now.”

The King looked at her calmly; by contrast with her own words she herself appeared insignificant, his fancy for her, which she might have formed into the strongest passion his cold nature was capable of, had died on the instant before the images her words had evoked.

No one had ever spoken to him directly with strength and sincerity; the sneers of his grandmother he had always despised and everyone else had been his inferior, not daring to tell him plainly that which men thought of him and his actions.

Never before either had he been so degraded as to-day when he had returned to the palace intoxicated and shown himself so before women, and in the revulsion of shame and disgust that he felt the words that this lady had dared to speak to him made the deeper impression.

He looked at her with respect and a slight amazement; she seemed thin and pale and artificial in her gorgeous stiff gown, very different from the heroines of his beloved sagas—yet she had shown qualities that were admirable in his eyes.

“Enough,” he said suddenly. “I think I have done with childish things. I have had my dreams—maybe some of them I can realize. I thank you, Madame, for your timely speech.”

He offered her no compliment nor courtesy and his expression, as he gazed at her, was hard, but she believed that she had accomplished her purpose and she did not care how soon he forgot her; she had very truly done with the emotions of love and vanity.

“I thank you for your attention,” she replied gently. “I have, sire, no more to say.”

With a little curtsey she left him; he did not give a sigh to her going, but turned with brusque eagerness to study the map of North Europe that hung above Count Piper’s desk; with intent blue eyes and a steady finger he traced the positions of those provinces his three enemies wished to wrest from Sweden.

CHAPTER IV

HE was eighteen years of age, of a superb constitution, perfect health, and noble descent, absolute monarch of a prosperous and well-governed country, troubled by neither plots among his nobility nor factions among his people.

He felt as if the world had been put into his hands, as a small globe to crush or fondle; his deep but hitherto sleeping pride, his vast and arrogant ambition were now finally roused by the humiliation into which his idle habits had led him, and the direct words of the woman who had attracted his cold fancy by her pretty, sad grace.

As a personality she was now dismissed from his thoughts, but he dwelt on her speech with a deep, mighty resolve forming in his powerful mind.

In every way he was equipped to play a great part in history; his father, a stern, just, and haughty prince, had educated him with great care and wisdom; his natural gifts for languages and mathematics had been developed by training and diligence; he was proficient in history and geography, well-versed in the lives of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome whose example suited his temperament, and familiar with the sagas of Scandinavia, the only form of any art that had ever moved him; his understanding was beyond the common, and he had not as yet displayed any vice or weakness likely to obscure his fine qualities, beyond this indolent absorption in rude sports that he had shown since he came to the throne; he was neither cruel and given to abuse of power nor was he liable to the weakness of being led by flatterers. His notice of Viktoria Falkenberg was the first attention that he had ever accorded a woman.

He seemed to be without affection and without passion; to his father he had shown the only obedience he had ever displayed to a human being; his mother he had despised, for he had early observed how slight a value his father had set upon her gentleness and how harshly he had treated her; his feelings towards his sisters were the same, the old Queen he could only tolerate by ignoring. Count Piper, the one man to whom he had shown special favor, he liked but was not fond of, nor had he any warm feelings towards his country which he admired only inasmuch as it was his own.

He was conscious only of the desire to dominate, to be without a rival as he was without a master; and, now that the words of Viktoria Falkenberg had taken root in his mind, to be great, to master kings, and nations, and peoples, and stride over them to fresh conquests; the reinstatement of his brother-in-law, Sweden’s ancient ally, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, in his dominions, was a good excuse for him to enter the arena of European politics where his fellow-monarchs considered him too young to play any part.

The true greatness of his strange character showed in his haughty resolve to conquer himself before ever he attempted to overcome his enemies.

He decided to be the one King without weakness or vices, and as easily as he took off his soiled garments of the chase he cast from him the vulgar amusements and rude diversions that had hitherto occupied his leisure.

The evening of the day that Viktoria Falkenberg had spoken to him he joined the Queen at her supper table.

His two sisters were present and the husband of the eldest, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.

Karl took his place at the head of the table; he was now absolutely sober and extremely cold in his demeanor; his disordered clothes of the morning had been changed for garments of black velvet and a muslin cravat fastened by a white pearl; his bright and waving hair was confined by a broad black ribbon save the foremost locks which fell over his shoulders; in this grave style of dressing, with his great height and noble person, he appeared much older than his years.

The Queen, who had, as usual, a bitter speech ready for him, snapped her lips together after she had glanced at his face; when he was master of himself she was afraid of him; he gave her a by no means friendly glance and his beautiful eyes traveled to the harassed countenance of his brother-in-law and the quiet faces of his sisters; the Queen, who was watching him shrewdly and with no predisposition in his favor, noticed that now more than ever before he dominated his company; the women, Count Piper, the young Duke all seemed pale and incomplete, like people cut out of paper, compared to his calm and overwhelming personality.

He did not sit down, but, pouring out a glass of wine, raised it almost to the level of his lips.

“Madame,” he said, addressing the Queen, “I must ask your pardon for my great discourtesy and boorishness to-day. I do ask it. I ask these gentlewomen to forgive me some insolences. I was not sober. That will never happen again.”

He paused for a second; there was no flush in his face, his eyes looked as hard as sapphires; he never glanced to where Viktoria Falkenberg sat beside the Duchess of Gottorp.

“I drink your health, Madame,” he continued, bowing towards the old Queen, “and I drink it in the last wine I shall ever taste.”

He emptied his glass and set it down quietly. “And now forgive me my absence,” he said. “I have much to attend to. Count, will you wait upon me later?”

Without pausing for a reply he left the room.

The Queen wiped her lips in a certain grim satisfaction.

“Well,” she remarked, “he is capable of keeping his word.”

Count Piper glanced at the downcast and weary face of Viktoria Falkenberg; she sat next to him and spoke, under the little murmur of talk that had arisen since the King’s departure.

“He will do, your master,” she said, “he is quite heartless, quite just, and inhumanly strong.”

“You spoke to him?”

She raised her eyes.

“Our interview was not what you think. We have really no interest in each other.”

Count Piper could not pretend to understand her; nor did he really care to explore the intricacies of feminine sentiment and feminine intrigue; if Viktoria Falkenberg was not going to influence King Karl she ceased to in the least concern Count Piper.

“His Majesty will help Gottorp, you think?” asked the Duchess.

“I think so,” said Count Piper.

He hastened his dinner that he might rejoin the King, who was already, he knew, in his cabinet.

And there he found him, standing by the window through which the long Northern twilight fell into the narrow apartment; his arms were locked over the back of a high chair and he leant forward, in the attitude of one dreaming.

Though he was so splendid in his magnificent youth there was something in his demeanor more terrifying than lovable, and his proud noble face was marred by the ugly smile that curved his full lips.

As soon as the Count entered he spoke, without raising his head.

“I shall go to war,” he said, and his voice that was always expressionless had a hard ring in its clear quality. “I shall return Gottorp to his duchy and I shall engage Denmark. Saxony must be brought from the throne of Poland, and from these I menace this Emperor of Muscovy—this Czar of the Russias.”

“I believe,” replied Count Piper, with perfect sincerity, “that your Majesty can do these things.”

“I believe that I can,” said Karl. “The most dangerous of my foes is Russia. He affects to be a mighty man, does he not?”

It was plain that this greatness of the Czar rankled with him; it was almost as if he had a personal hatred of this political enemy of his country whom he had never seen; this was the only person towards whom he had ever evinced the faintest anger or jealousy.

“The Czar is great,” replied the Count, “but your Majesty might be greater.”

“I would like to break him!” exclaimed the young man looking up. With that startling flash in the darkening blue of his eyes, he looked more human, more moved than Count Piper had ever known him. “’Tis a savage, a Tartar ... and he defies me ... wants my provinces ... mine, by God ... you have seen me drunk to-day, you will not see that again ... we will see if the Czar drunk can match me sober ... and Poland with his Aurora.... I will have no women, Count.”

He seemed greatly moved by a deep and restrained emotion.

“You owe something to one woman,” thought Count Piper, “if she has wrought this change of mind in you.”

And he wondered what Viktoria Falkenberg had said.

“Russia does not think that anyone is likely to oppose him,” continued Karl. “Is it not so? He believes that there is no man in Europe would face him and his savages.”

“He certainly thinks,” replied the minister, “that your Majesty will be easily despoiled. ’Tis a man with many noble qualities who seeks to bring his country forward in an honorable manner in Europe—yet unscrupulous and fierce—a barbarian teaching civilization to others—but,” he added, “before your Majesty thinks of Russia, there is Denmark.”

“I attend the council to-morrow,” said Karl, “and in a week’s time I hope to leave Sweden. The Dutch and English will help us—at least indirectly. I think it is not to King William’s interest that I should be overwhelmed. I mean to make a feint on Copenhagen and compel Denmark to a peace.”

“The Danish fleet protects Spaelland, sire,” said Count Piper quickly.

“But I have looked at the map,” replied the King, “and I see that one might pass through the Eastern Sound.”

“Which is not held to be navigable, sire.”

Karl did not seem to pay much attention to this remark.

“King Frederick is older than I, by ten years,” he said, reflectively. “Do you think that he is a great man, Count?”

“He is popular in Denmark, sire.”

“I am vexed,” added Karl, “that I let him take Gottorp—but,” he paused, then seemed to resolve to say no more on that subject. “England and the Netherlands will stand by us?” he asked.

“They certainly will not wish to see Denmark in possession of the commerce of the North, nor the Czar of Russia overspread his dominions. I believe we could count on the junction with the Anglo-Dutch fleet.”

“And Poland marches on Livonia,” said the King. “I hear his Saxon soldiers are very fine troops.”

“One thing has just come to my ears, sire—Patkul is with Poland.”

The King’s face hardened instantly at mention of this man who had led the Livonian revolts that had disturbed his father’s reign and whose intrigues had broken out again on his own accession; Patkul had been the only jarring note in the last years in Sweden; and rebellion was a hideous sin in the King’s rigid code of honor.

“When I make peace with Poland,” he said, “I shall bid him send back to me the traitor Patkul.”

Count Piper looked at him curiously; the certainty of his speech, the confidence of his bearing were amazing things, for they were entirely free from braggart vanity or youthful swagger.

The King saw his minister’s glance and slightly flushed.

“Perhaps,” he said quickly, “I seem vainglorious in my speech, but I was not thinking of myself, but of Sweden—Sweden could do great things, do you not think so, Count?”

It was like an attempt to conciliate, and the minister could not forbear a smile.

“Under such a King as you will be, sire,” he replied sincerely.

“Well,” said Karl, with his strange simplicity, “I do not see that it should be very difficult to defeat these three Kings.”

The next day he made his appearance at the council board in a mood different from any in which he had appeared there before.

The councilors had been used to seeing him with his feet on the table and his hands in his pockets, lolling and yawning; now he came erect and composed among them, and in a few words announced his intention of making war on Denmark, Poland, and Russia.

This swift facing of their enemies was not what the council had been expecting; they had already begun to consider the advisability of negotiations with the three sovereigns who were taking advantage of the youth of their King.

But Karl’s words left no doubt as to his intention and his spirit.

“Sirs,” he said, “I have resolved to never make an unjust war, but never to finish a just one save by the conquest of my enemies. My decision is taken—I shall attack him who first—who has declared himself against me, and when I have vanquished him I shall hope to inspire some fear in the others.”

That same evening he heard that the Saxon troops of the King of Poland, the regiments of Brandenbourg, Wolfenbüttel, and Hesse-Cassel were marching to the assistance of the King of Denmark, who after having taken Gottorp was besieging the town of Tönning in Holstein.

Against these were sent 8000 Swedes, some troops from Hanover and Zell, and three Dutch regiments, Holland, as well as England, having taken up arms against Denmark on the excuse of her having broken the Treaty of Altona.

In the early days of April, King Karl took private leave of his family (a cold farewell of his sisters and the Queen), and, accompanied by Count Piper, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and General Rehnsköld, left his capital for the port of Karlskrona, where he embarked on his flagship “The King Karl,” which was mounted with 120 pieces of cannon, and at the head of forty-three ships set sail for Copenhagen, on his first campaign.

As the shores of Sweden were receding behind them Count Piper told the King that he had heard that Viktoria Falkenberg was very ill; he had wondered that Karl had not remarked her absence from attendance on his sister.

“Ah, Viktoria Falkenberg,” said the King thoughtfully. He offered no comment, and that was the last time he ever spoke her name.

BOOK II

PETER ALEXIEVITCH

“C’etait par des actions plus étonnantes que des victoires qu’il cherchait le nom de Grand.”—Voltaire.

CHAPTER I

THE short Russian summer was in the commencement of its glory; a clear sunshine penetrated the groves of beeches and firs, the thickets of lilac and senna plant, and shone on the brilliant flowers that carpeted the woods which spread about the wide estuary at the mouth of the Neva. Here and there, through the radiant blossoms, could be seen a glimpse of cold blue sea; the sky was of the pale green tint peculiar to the last hours of the day; no sound disturbed the peace of the little house on the lake in the woods, the residence that it pleased the Czar of Russia to call “Marli,” in imitation of the French King, and which was one of his favorite places of retreat, being, indeed, more suited to his tastes than the gorgeous palaces he had built in Russia and the antique magnificence of the Kremlin.

It had also the advantage of being near to Cronstadt, the port he was building and in which he took such a personal interest, where he kept the nucleus of the Navy he was creating and of which he was so intensely proud, and where he had personally worked at some of the twenty-six trades that he had learnt in his journey through Europe.

Save during the brief loveliness of the summer there was little beauty in these marshy woods; neither birds nor animals seemed to inhabit them and the stillness and the vastness added to the melancholy of the solitude.

Marli was a two-storied house with a tiled roof, a door with plain steps and a window above with a balcony.

It had no defined garden but stood solitary in the woods; it was not far from the swamps where the Czar had resolved to build his new capital, nor from the spot where his favorite Mentchikoff was raising a superb palace, but it had, despite the bright flowers and the sunshine, an air of solitude that was dreary.

There was no sign of cultivation round the lake, and the wild flowers grew up to the very door, bending over the shallow steps; the yellow plaster front of the house was stained with damp and the windows were without curtains, the shutters being all fastened back. The door stood open and there was no sign of servants or of any domestic work being in progress.

At the edge of the lake and looking up at the house was a man whose appearance and attire were in entire contrast to his surroundings.

He was tall and stoutly built, with dark hair and eyes and an expression of some fierceness, his locks were cut short into his neck, and he was attired in native Russian costume untouched by European fashion.

His long coat of fine gold-colored silk brocade, shot with blue and red flowers, was open on a vest of fine muslin, fastened with sapphire buttons, and belted above the full skirt with scarlet leather.

His full breeches of pale blue velvet were gathered into high vermilion leather boots, much polished and soft.

He carried a short sword of Oriental design, the hilt studded with tourmaline and rose quartz, and wore a close cap of scarlet silk round which was twisted a fine gold chain which held in place a buckle of diamonds that clasped a long white osprey. After looking at the little house thoughtfully this personage went slowly round the lake and in at the open door.

The two front rooms were closed; the newcomer went to the back and looked into the kitchen; it was here very hot, for the cooking stove was lit and several dishes stood on it from which exhaled an odor of onions, cabbages, and rancid grease.

On a side table stood pots and pans and dishes containing fish under vinegar and salted gherkins, also some jams and jellies and a few fine spoons of silver gilt; flies and mosquitoes buzzed over everything; all was dirty; the floor and the stove filthy with dropped grease and spillings of food.

A Tartar servant with a flat yellow face was watching the cooking; he wore a soiled blue blouse and trousers; his throat and chest were bare and the perspiration rolled from under his oily hair.

He regarded the newcomer with a look of complete stupidity and turned his gaze again to his cooking.

He appeared to be no more impressed by the gentleman’s brilliancy than the gentleman was by his dirt and disorder. Only, as that person was leaving the kitchen, the taciturn servant vouchsafed a warning.

“If you come with unpleasant news, Danilovitch Mentchikoff, you had better keep them for a while.”

“He is in a bad humor?” asked the Prince quickly.

“He was drinking all night,” replied the Tartar. “And now he seems to be in a melancholy. What am I to do about the dinner, Danilovitch Mentchikoff? He will not bear me in the room—and as for you, he will beat you like a dog.”

“Well, when he has beaten me, we will have dinner,” replied the Prince, and he turned away and went upstairs.

He entered the front bedroom which was that with the balcony over the door; a good-sized chamber very plainly furnished with a low bed, a table, a few chairs, and one or two half-open boxes filled with clothes.

The pale melancholy light streamed in uninterrupted through the curtainless window and lit every crevice of the apartment.

Above the bed was an ikon of the Saviour, very dark and indistinct and adorned with plates of silver; two candles in sticks of violet jasper stood on a shelf beneath this; on the stove was the unfinished model of a ship in wood; these were the only remarkable objects that the room contained.

The one occupant was a young man who sat in a low chair by the stove, and who was intent on carving with a small knife a large fir cone.

Peter Alexievitch, Emperor of Muscovy and Czar of all the Russias, was at this time twenty-eight years of age, and it was not long since he had been recalled by rebellion at home from that extraordinary journey in disguise round Europe whereby he had sought to learn the various means by which nations secure prosperity and greatness, that he might instruct his subjects; he had since gained some glory by a victory over the Turks, but his present league with Poland and Denmark against Sweden was his first real entry into war and politics, the first attempt to put into practise the schemes by which he sought to render his vast Empire secure and mighty.

He did not look up as Prince Mentchikoff entered, but continued, with ostentatious disregard of a presence he was certainly aware of, to chip at the pine cone.

His friend, standing inside the door, eyed him with some apprehension.

The Czar’s appearance was as remarkable as his character and his history.

Unlike the Prince, he wore European clothes, a shirt of very fine linen, much ruffled, faded green cloth breeches, white cotton stockings and leathern shoes, and over all a full dressing-gown of brown wool which was tied round his waist by a cord.

Even as he sat so, doubled up on a low chair, it was noticeable that he was of gigantic height, and slender and graceful in his proportions; the hands that were busy with his minute work were slim and elegant, his head was of a noble shape and covered with smooth short curls of a dusky brown color; his face, of an Asiatic type, was singularly beautiful, though already marred by passion and vice.

The short blunt features were finely formed, the dark eyes, large, lustrous, and full of sweetness, eagerness, and ardor, the complexion of a warm brown, darkened by exposure to sun and wind; a close mustache outlined the full lips; for the rest he was well shaven, and there was something both robust and boyish in the smooth contours of his face.

He was extremely attractive and gave the impression of being simple and lovable to an almost childish degree; his complexion, naturally so smooth and clear, was now rather pale, the eyes heavy and stained beneath; the hand that held the knife very slightly shook.

Mentchikoff noticed a dirty glass full of flies on the floor beside him and a number of bottles, mostly empty, scattered about, a strong smell of brandy being in the air.

“I come, as you bade me, to dine with your Majesty,” said the favorite.

Peter did not even look round; he took a pinch of clay from a board on top of the stove and began to model it on to the fir cone.

The Prince was vexed by this reception; he had begun to think he could do what he liked with the Czar, who had raised him from the position of a pastry cook’s lad to that of greatest noble in all the Russias.

“Well, Peter Alexievitch,” he said drily, “there is some news that you must hear. But I would keep it till after dinner.”

Peter turned now; one side of his face twitched in a slight convulsion.

“Why did not this news come to me?” he asked sullenly.

Mentchikoff saw that whatever his potations had been he was now sober, and went warily accordingly; the Czar sober was not so easy as the Czar drunk.

“Who dares to come to your Majesty when you are withdrawn into your solitude? Therefore the dispatches from Moscow were brought to me.”

“Is it bad news?” asked the Czar gloomily; he turned again to his work, and began coloring the clay with his finger dipped in rough pigment which he had arranged on the same board as the clay.

“Well,” said Mentchikoff, “I certainly think that your Majesty should be at Moscow.”

And irritated at his reception he seated himself near the window with an air of impatience.

“I will not go to Moscow,” said the Czar, in a tone of suppressed violence. “I wish to be here—this is where I will build my city and my fort. Why cannot I be alone here? I care nothing for your news.”

“Well, then,” replied Mentchikoff exasperated, “it will not destroy your appetite, Peter Alexievitch. The King of Sweden has defeated Denmark, taken back Holstein-Gottorp, and signed a victorious peace.”

Peter stared.

“The King of Sweden!” he ejaculated.

“Yes, that boy who was to be so easily despoiled. Europe remembers nothing like it. In fifteen days he has ended the campaign.”

The Czar’s face was a ghastly color.

“This is greatness,” he said.

With the mechanical movement of one who has received a shock he continued his work, staring at the clay he continued to mold and color.

“Eighteen years old,” added Mentchikoff, “and his first campaign.”

“Tell me about it,” said Peter, in an agitated and humbled manner.

“Do you really want to hear?” asked the Prince in some surprise; he had known the Czar to have messengers of ill-tidings knouted.

“I want to hear,” replied Peter, without looking up.

“Well, the Swedes made a descent on Copenhagen and joined the Anglo-Dutch fleet by Spaelland—they sailed through the Eastern Channel of the Sound, a thing not before thought possible—and then they landed and attacked Copenhagen by land.”

“The King led them?”

“The King led them—he was the first to land, and waded with the water to his waist and his sword in his hand—under the musket fire of the Danes, you perceive. There was a short engagement in which the Swedes were completely victorious, and Copenhagen lay at their mercy.”

“Where was King Frederick?” asked Peter.

“I do not know—still besieging Tönning, I suppose—at least he sent to negotiate.”

“To negotiate!” cried the Czar, looking round.

“Sire—the Baltic Sea was covered with the Swedish ships, King Karl master of Seeland, Copenhagen beseeching mercy—but our young hero must do the magnanimous—he fought not for conquest, he said, but justice. In brief, there was a congress called at Tarrenthal and there is a peace to be signed this month.”

“And what are the terms?”

Mentchikoff shrugged his shoulders.

“Sweden wants nothing for himself—Gottorp is to get his indemnity and his Duchy, and Denmark is never to meddle again against Sweden.”

Peter was silent a moment he was still very pale and one side of his face twitched convulsively.

“What news from Poland?” he asked at length.

“There were those dispatches yesterday, but you would not listen to them.”

“Tell them to me now.”

“Augustus has raised the siege of Riga.”

“Why?” demanded the Czar, trembling all over.

“The excuse is that the town is full of Dutch merchandise and Poland would not offend Holland. The truth is that Augustus could not take the town.”

“Curse Augustus and curse Frederick,” said the Czar heavily.

He put down the little toy he was making and clasped his head in his hands.

“So of all the enemies of this young man there remains but yourself, Peter Alexievitch.”

The Czar was silent; he could have imagined no greater blow than this appearance of a rival to his glory in Northern Europe, a man ten years younger than himself who had already achieved what he never had.

How often had not Peter dreamed of dictating terms to a conquered city and setting conditions of peace to vanquished Kings, of seeing a great many obey his commands and thousands of fine soldiers march behind him to conquest; all things that this youth had experienced in a few days, while he, Peter, had been indulging himself in a sullen retirement broken only by those drunken debauches with which he sought to cure the terrible melancholy that periodically assailed him.

A bitter scorn of himself, a bitter envy of the King of Sweden, a wild yearning to be other than he was, settled on him like the mantle of despair.

“Tell me what this young man is like,” he asked, in a muffled voice; his curiosity as to what was admirable and good and great was insatiable; even now it dominated his emotion.

Prince Mentchikoff did not know much; this young hero, whose name was now in everyone’s mouth, was a new figure in Europe.

“He is very austere and prides himself on his justice, they say, and his army is so disciplined that they are at prayers twice a day, and they pay for all they take and do not despoil the dead. But this young man must be ambitious—he will lose his head.”

“You know nothing about it, Danilovitch,” replied Peter, “they are brave and cold, the Swedes. And this boy was well-trained and taught,” he added enviously.

“Well,” said the Prince, “he is something to be reckoned with—and I hear from Stockholm that he is angry with the four envoys you have sent. He thinks that when you are at war you should drop the pretense of peace—he is of a rigid honor.”

“Oh!” said Peter.

He glanced up at the toy he had made; it represented an old woman in cap and shawl, the cone being her skirt and the upper part being cunningly fashioned of clay.

“That is what I can do,” he added fiercely.

The Prince swung on his heel with some impatience. “You should be in Moscow,” he declared. “Will you wait till the Swede is over the frontier?”

The Czar did not reply.

“The Saxons have left Livonia,” continued Mentchikoff goadingly. “Patkul has proved a poor statesman and the treaty of Préobrapenskoè a failure—you can go on building Cronstadt and St. Petersburg, for this war is over.”

The Czar gave his friend an ugly look; his hands trembled on his knees.

“Do you think that this boy has vanquished me?” he cried.

“I think that he may, Peter Alexievitch.”

The Czar sprang to his feet.

“Faithless, insolent, and foolish!” he shrieked, in an instant at the height of passion. “Where did you find the courage to presume on my kindness! Have you forgotten that I am Peter!”

The Prince stood passive, only holding up his hands to protect his face; the Czar grappled with him and flung him down; Mentchikoff prostrated himself at his master’s feet, face downwards on the dirty floor.

Peter was not mollified by this submission; he took off his belt and beat the shoulders of the favorite until the gay brocade was torn to ribbons.

He ceased as suddenly as he had begun, and staggered out into the head of the stairs, dragging his shirt open at the throat.

The Tartar servant was coming up with dishes on a tray; Peter gave one glance at the food then tipped it all out of the man’s hands so that cabbage, soup, and fish rolled down the stairs; then he gave a great cry that seemed like a shout for air and fell backwards; a little foam flecked his lips and his eyes turned in his head.

The Prince and the Tartar with the air of men doing a usual thing, dragged and pushed him somehow to his bed.

CHAPTER II

THE Czar Peter lay at full length on his camp bedstead, his hand at his forehead, sheltering his eyes, his mind full of bitter and angry thoughts.

Seated on a low chair near him was Danilovitch Mentchikoff, who regarded him with an expression like that of a favorite dog who has been beaten, and who waits patiently until his master chooses to forgive him.

For two reasons Mentchikoff would take anything, blows, kicks, and violent abuse, from Peter; first because of the traditional implicit obedience of a Russian towards the Czar, a sentiment that had caused men dying under torture to bless the monarch who had condemned them, and secondly because he loved and revered Peter with a deep, passionate fidelity.

Insolent towards all the world, easy and familiar even with his master, with whom he frequently presumed too far, he yet never resented any caprice that humbled him by word, look, or whip; he did not fawn from policy but from an intense devotion to the man whom he considered the greatest in the world.

There were some elements of greatness also in Danilovitch Mentchikoff; he shared not only the Czar’s views, but some of his capacity for carrying them out; he had been his companion in the labors of the dockyards of Amsterdam and Wapping, as well as in the barbaric splendors of Russia; he also had seen and judged that Western civilization that the Czar burned to emulate; he also dreamed the same dreams of the future greatness and glory of his country, and to this cause was eager to devote his strength and his intellect.

Some personal ambition colored his attitude; Peter had raised him from cook-boy to page, from page to noble, friend, minister; he was already wealthy, honored, feared, but though he might be an insolent tyrant to all the world, to the man who had raised him he was absolutely submissive, even abject in his love and admiration.

Peter, whose nature was warm and affectionate, loved this creature of his own making, to whom he allowed liberties never permitted to the most powerful of his boyars, but he had more often than once made Mentchikoff the victim of his insane furies in a manner that had nearly cost him his life; but the servant had never uttered a sound of complaint, and, when the outburst was over, had never failed to drag himself, bruised and bleeding and faint, to lick the boots and kiss the hand of the man who had chastised him.

He now was watching the Czar with some anxiety; he had been vexed for the last few weeks because Peter had made no steps in the campaign against Sweden, but, seized with one of his attacks of melancholy, had retired to Marli to brood over the plans of Cronstadt and St. Petersburg and drink himself into fits of false gayety that were followed by black and dangerous depression.

And now the blow had fallen; a new captain had arisen who in a few days had forced Denmark into peace; Poland was retiring from Riga; a young, vigorous King who had shown himself possessed of resolution and martial genius, with a perfectly equipped, trained, and victorious army behind him, was free to turn his attention to the third enemy who had so wantonly provoked him.

Mentchikoff’s long dark and rather haggard face was shadowed with anxiety.

Not only did he wish his master’s political and military schemes to fructify, he wished the Czar to be personally great and without rival in this greatness.

He was concerned that Russia should have Livonia and a port on the Baltic, he had concurred in the plans laid down by Patkul, but he was still more concerned that Peter Alexievitch should shine resplendent, without a rival, in the Northern firmament.

Already he hated Karl of Sweden, who had the advantage in education, tradition, and breed; who was controlled, humane, just, and honorable—with none of these things could even the blind devotion of Mentchikoff credit Peter—and who had the added interest of his extreme youth and the justice of his quarrels; a young warrior, stern, outraged, fighting only those who had attacked him, conquering easily, and, with a haughty generosity, claiming no benefits from his victory, but only the restoration of his friend to what was rightfully his—this was a figure on heroic lines and one sure to appeal to the imaginations of men.

And how would the world account Peter by contrast?

A half-savage monarch of an almost wholly Eastern realm, never yet taken seriously into the reckoning in the affairs of Europe, one who had taken eccentric means to learn the means of civilizing his people and who yet was notoriously incapable of controlling his own meanest passions, one who had been guilty of fierce cruelty and bitter revenge and excesses beyond ordinary debauchery—how did such a one show beside the cold, fast, calm, and mighty figure of the young King of Sweden?

Mentchikoff was jealous for his hero, who to him was the greatest man on earth; Peter’s faults were not faults to him; he came of a people long used to cruelty in their rulers, it was in his blood and in his training to submit to tyranny, but he had been the Czar’s companion in his journey through Europe and he had seen, with his strong native shrewdness and perception, the qualities admired and respected by civilized peoples, and he knew exactly where Peter failed to reach the standard of the West—it was one to which he could not attain himself, but that did not prevent him from keenly observing his master’s failure. He still passionately dreamed of seeing the Czar a King after the fashion of the Kings of France and England, and had been one with him in every effort to attain this end; so complete was the devotion and abnegation of Danilovitch Mentchikoff that his life was one with his master’s life, his glory and ambition one with the glory and ambition of Peter Alexievitch. And the Czar’s moods, melancholies, and passions, that went so far to hinder his glorious schemes and tarnish his brilliant qualities, caused the keenest pangs to the fiercely loyal heart of his servant.

And now there was this new hero to reckon with; a man such as Peter was not and never could be.

The long figure at which the Prince gazed with his small brilliant eyes stirred on the rude bed; Peter dropped the arm that shielded his eyes and stared before him.

He also had his thoughts of Karl of Sweden; they were as intense and bitter as those of Danilovitch Mentchikoff.

He was conscious of his own greatness, conscious of his own failings, and overwhelmed by the task which destiny and his own will had laid on his shoulders.

He was the master of a continent, the undisputed lord of millions of human beings, enveloped in a grandeur almost mythical, possessed of a power almost godlike; better for him if he had been content with this, satisfied as his ancestors had been satisfied by an enclosed splendor, instead of being tortured by dreams of making Russia what she had never been, what she perhaps never could be.

All the sciences, the arts, the trades and commerces that had been the result of such slow and painful growth in Europe, he hoped in one generation to implant in the sterile soil of a nation almost wholly savage from the point of view of the West.

A great capital must be built, a great port made, a trained army raised, a navy built, trade established, people educated in commerce and handicrafts—marshes drained, forests cleared, swamps turned into profitable ground—his people must learn the utmost resources of their country and how to turn them to account.

The beautiful arts of other countries must be introduced and made to flourish; all that was wonderful, fair, or great must find a home in Russia.

Such were the dreams of Peter; his breed, his tradition, his character were against these dreams.

Half an Asiatic, his type was largely Eastern, his outlook wholly so; he was nearer Timour Beg than Louis XIV, despite his admiration of this latter ideal of kingship.

He had admired Europe and copied Europe and envied Europe—he had little in common with Europe.

His story was one of a violence and terror difficult to find in the annals of any country but this, full of dark splendor, of flights, revolts, dangers, imprisonments; the brother who had shared his throne had disappeared to a mysterious death, the sister who had been his regent was languishing in a close prison; he was separated from his wife, his one son was sickly, almost witless.

In his blood lurked horrible diseases; his brother had been an idiot, tortured by convulsions, his sister was afflicted by dropsy and ulcers, he himself had been given to epilepsy since childhood; unbridled passions, unlimited power, unchecked lusts had tainted his whole race with a mental unbalance akin to insanity; melancholy, nightmare horrors of glooms and broodings, wild extravagance of thought and action were in his heritage.

Heavier burdens even than the scepter of all the Russias had come from his forefathers to Peter Alexievitch; clouding and torturing his brain and body were the dread shadows of mortal maladies, the black form of madness. No one knew his sufferings; he himself was ignorant of their cause and terrified at their power; only alcohol could allay them, and then the payment exacted was horrible as death in agonies.

The dark horrors of delirium, the monstrous fancies of fever, the tortuous labyrinths of the underground ways by which the borderland of delusions, dreams, hallucinations, and unbidden imaginings leads to the utter starless abyss of insanity were often more real to Peter than the strenuous world in which he lived; shadows from realms that he tried to deny the existence of, ghastly gleams from hells at which his soul dared not glance, clouded and colored his thoughts and his actions.

A continent was at his feet and he had undertaken a task as tremendous as any man had yet put his hand to—but even this was not sufficient to distract him from the terrors of the unseen and the unheard who haunted those foul, secret places where his soul was doomed to wander.

He was weak now after his fit and there was a dullness on his spirit almost akin to peace; he was frowning, and his beautiful eyes were well stained with blood, but his glance sought with a certain gratitude the cool peace of the green beyond the square window, and he was glad of the quiet, watchful presence of his friend.

“Danilovitch,” he said, in a low voice, “I must get back to Moscow,” then “If Cronstadt were built and I had a navy, I would batter this boy by sea.”

He sat up slowly, a languid, graceful figure in the soiled dressing-gown; he had bitten his tongue when he fell and his mouth was still marked with blood; a few tiny spots of red were on the front of the fine cambric shirt; his forehead was damp with perspiration and the soft glossy curls hung in wild disorder; yet his face, so round in the contours still, with a certain bloom and freshness, attractive, gentle in expression, was the face of a youth, sensitive and dreamy.

Prince Mentchikoff did not answer; he was not yet sure of his master’s mood and feared to say something that might irritate him.

“And if I had an army I could batter him by land,” added Peter, with a hard smile.

“Your Majesty has an army,” ventured Mentchikoff.

“Has it ever been tried in battle?” demanded the Czar grimly. “Is there anyone in the whole of Russia who knows anything of the art of war?”

“It is for you to teach them,” ventured the Prince.

“There is much I have to teach Russia,” remarked the Czar.

He stood up, to the full of his great height, and pushed back his hair impatiently with both damp hands.

“Is this how I get my Baltic port?” he cried scornfully. “Is this how I wrest a province from Sweden? I should have been in Moscow months ago.”

“God knows you should, Peter Alexievitch,” said Mentchikoff mournfully.

“But I had to labor with my hands, Danilovitch, there is no other cure for these infernal torments. I must make things, and be near the sea.”

The Prince knew that Peter alluded to the black melancholy fits to which he was subject and made no reply.

“This boy now,” continued the Czar, in a quieter tone, “he would be sober? Not chased by phantoms or mocked by the infernal ones, eh, Danilovitch?”

“A cold Norseman,” replied Mentchikoff. “They say that for this campaign at least, his life has been austere.”

“That is it,” replied Peter, with an eagerness that was almost wistful, “an austere life—to train the body, to eat bread and drink water, to sleep on the ground, to live as the meanest foot soldier—and I could do it—if he, why not I?”

Then, in a sudden fit of gloom, he added:

“I have no troops worth naming beyond the Strelitz and the Germans—savages, peasants, this King will laugh at me—and Riga is lost and Tönning? Curse both the Saxon and the Dane.”

He spoke wearily, without passion; Mentchikoff rose and touched him gently, with an infinite tenderness, on the arm.

“Come, Peter Alexievitch,” he said softly, “come out and look at the sea.”

He had never known when a glimpse even of the ocean had failed to soothe the Czar.

Peter did not reply, and Mentchikoff deftly drew off the dressing-gown and put on an old green coat of European cut that hung over a chair; the Czar silently permitted the change.

The Prince fetched a bowl of water and helped him bathe his face, a comb and smoothed out the tangled hair, performing these menial tasks with an unconscious joy in the doing of them and a tender love for the person whom he served that was touching to behold in one so stern featured and haughty as Danilovitch Mentchikoff.

Peter did not speak; he seemed in an apathy that chilled his faculties like the languor of a mortal illness; he suffered his friend to lead him from the house and showed neither dissent or assent.

It was now fading to the cool of the evening; the sky was translucent and almost colorless against the motionless forms of the trees that had not yet lost the freshness of early summer; the lake was placid beneath the borders of bright grasses and trails of wild flowers that flung themselves in lightly woven wreaths over the tiny wavelets that spent themselves against the banks.

In the distance a nightingale made the silence of the wood tremble with the intermittent rehearsal of his sharp, sweet song.

The two fine figures, the servant so splendid, the master so humble in attire, the King leaning on his minister with a sad and fatigued air, passed the little clearing round the house and through the first trees of the wood until they came to a spot where, through a break in the forest, was a view of low swamps and the distant sea which had the pale splendor of a tourmaline in the light of the sunset.

Peter sighed, with a long shiver of relief; his very muscles seemed to relax; his was the panting satisfaction of one who is fevered, and, after much delay in heat and pain, finds a cup of cool fragrant water at his lips.

The air was of a keen freshness and ocean salt; it seemed to be wafted, pure and strong, from the distant shores of some dreamland beyond the verge of the pale confining sea; the perfect silence seemed charged with a sense of vitality, of the joy of life, of nature; the song of the hidden bird, that now and then sharply broke the stillness, was like a chant of calm triumph in the eternal majesty of nature’s solitudes and untouched places; there was now no melancholy in this loneliness; a tender magic filled the marvelous hour of the twilight and something more than mortal was abroad in the gathering dusk.

The young Czar felt his lassitude fall from him; new energy shot through him like a flame touching his heart; once again all seemed possible; the grandeur of his manhood, the splendor of his rulership, again became palpable things; the nightmares fled leaving a sane world about him; the Swede no longer seemed a thing to so greatly fear or envy.

He was Czar of All the Russias, and a strong man in his youth.

With a laugh he pressed his friend’s arm, and Mentchikoff laughed also, knowing his master cured for a while.

“Shall we trouble for that Northern boy, we who are Peter?” demanded the Czar, holding up his head and staring at the sea; he spoke thickly, for his tongue had swollen where he had bitten it, but the unhealthy pallor had left his face and his eyes had the calm of a healthy man.

“Come and have supper, now that your melancholy is over,” said Mentchikoff, in a happy voice, “and I will show you a gay creature who will make you glad.”

“Until it is dark I will stay under the trees,” replied Peter, “and I shall not drink to-night.”

CHAPTER III

WHEN the last glow of the sun had faded, the air of desolation, of vast gray spaces isolated from the world, returned.

The nightingale had ceased to sing and there was no other living creature abroad; the swamps beyond the wood were devoid of life, the night sky had the lead-colored look of the North, and there was no moon; there was no sense of summer now that the moon was gone.

Peter turned away; the sea being hidden from his view, he had no interest in the landscape; he moved slowly and with a ponderous step through the last trees of the woods, until he came to the chain of lilac thickets, now past their blooming, that led to Danilovitch Mentchikoff’s house, Oranienbaum, a palace that he was erecting near to his master’s cottage of Marli.

The night air refreshed the Czar; he was now perfectly sober and completely master of himself, but his spirit was plunged in a profound melancholy and his mental vision filled by the cold mighty figure of the young Scandinavian who had so suddenly crossed and blocked his path.

He felt no hatred towards this rival and no common envy, but a sad sense of his own failure beside the triumph of this heroic youth.

He had a long walk to the palace of Mentchikoff, which was situate almost at the mouth of the Neva, and on the opposite shore to where the fort of Cronstadt was being raised; but the exercise pleased him and he would not go to Marli for a horse, or a light, or a servant, but strode alone through the gloomy dusk, without hat or cloak.

There was nothing new to Peter in this experience, though it was a remarkable one for the Czar of All the Russias; he had wandered through Europe alone, and poorly clad. When he reached the gardens that Mentchikoff was laying out, it was already completely dark, for the cold stars gave no glow, and Peter was guided only by the lights that shone through the open windows of the palace on to the parterres of brilliant flowers and the high hedges of clipped hornbeam; some one was playing the bailaika; the thin music sounded sadly in the empty gardens; Peter slowly went in at the principal entrance, the door of which stood wide.

The first floor of the palace was finished and furnished in a gorgeous style that was a mingling of the West and the East, of Europe and Russia.

The hall was hung with arras sent from France, and lit by Dutch lanterns that had come from the prows of ships.

The room that Peter entered had vermilion walls, vases of purple jasper on malachite stands, and Chinese furniture of ebony inlaid with ivory; on top of the great enamel stove was a beautiful ormolu clock which was not going; lengths of French silks and Eastern damasks covered the couches of which there were several, and a silver branched candlestick of Italian workmanship held seven candles that were the sole light of the room.

This stood on a long table of gray marble mounted in heavy gilt, which occupied the center of the apartment.

In one corner was an ornate black cabinet set with various colored stones, in another a beautiful Dutch bureau in oak; the tops of these were crowded with goblets, boxes, bottles, and trays of silver, gold, enamel, and glass, some heavily encrusted with precious stones. Near the window which was curtained with cut velvet in orange and blue, hung an ikon, one mass of carved silver and rubies, and still hung with the Easter offerings of wreaths of wax fruit.

The air had been scented by the burning of pastilles, and a faint bluish smoke still obscured the atmosphere.

The whole effect was one of brilliant and crowded confusion, tasteless and barbaric; to Peter it was very splendid; a feeling of pleasure touched him that his favorite should have such a magnificent house.

“Danilovitch!” he called and went up to the table, and stood there, resting his hands on the gilt edge.

The twinkling notes of the bailaika stopped, and, from an inner door that Peter had not hitherto perceived, a woman entered carrying the little instrument.

They looked at each other across the candle light.

She was as tall as he, and beautiful, with a robust and splendid beauty; her carriage was magnificent; she wore a robe of crimson satin with an overdress of scarlet, stiff with gold embroidery, that reached the floor and stood out about her, only being open at the sides; a square plate of gold set with rubies shone at her breast, hung by rope on rope of twisted pearls her dark brown hair fell on her shoulders, from under the stiff Russian headdress of gold satin studded with turquoise, and to her feet behind, depended a long white gauze veil. Her fair, bold face, firm and beautiful in line and color, and sweet and pleasant in expression, was turned full towards the Czar.

He, in his worn green coat, disordered appointments, and tired bearing, was in a contrast almost sad with the room and the woman.

“You must be the Czar,” she said; she put down the bailaika and came towards him, moving lightly on gold-shod feet.

“I am Peter Alexievitch,” he replied, “and you?”

“My name is Marpha,” she said simply. “I hardly know who I am.”

“A Russian?” he asked, for her speech was strange, as if she used a tongue with which she was not familiar.

She shook her head.

“A Livonian, sire—a Lutheran—I do not know who my parents were,” she added, anticipating his next questions, “nor why Prince Mentchikoff should bring me here.”

“Why,” said Peter, “you are the person he spoke of who could cure me of my melancholy.”

She again shook her head.

“No, it could not be I—I am only a servant—in my best clothes”—she laughed gaily, glancing at her attire. “I have never been so fine before, but to-night Danilovitch Mentchikoff ordered me to dress so!”

The Czar was interested in her; she had an air of extraordinary vitality, of serene courage, and generous good-nature; she gave out an atmosphere of pleasant warmth and kindliness, of enthusiasm and joy of life, more remarkable than her beauty; Mentchikoff’s vivacity and high spirits had always been his greatest attraction for Peter, but this girl’s calm happiness and aspect of radiant health were more potent than the favorite’s gay humor in their effect on the Czar’s somber mood.

“Why are you melancholy?” she asked, with a straight look from her large clear gray eyes. “The Czar of Holy Russia, and sad?”

Her glance seemed to have a certain pity for his marred and weary comeliness; it was as if she were the Empress and he the peasant, so splendid and composed was she, so shabby and downcast was Peter.

“I have something to make me sad, Marpha,” he said.

“And many things to make you happy,” she replied simply, “but you great men are never gay. There is supper to-night in the pavilion. Will you come and I will pour your wine?”

“No,” said Peter, “I shall not drink to-night.”

Remembrances of the cloudy horrors of the day darkened his face; he glanced round the gaudy room with the restlessness of a creature finding itself suddenly caged.

“I will go into the garden,” he said; then abruptly, “You are a Livonian. Do you know anything of your King—Karl of Sweden?”

He paused in the open window, looking at her keenly, and ready to break into anger at whatever answer she might make.

But Marpha’s simple sweetness was too strong for his suspicious anger; she defeated him by the sheer frankness of her reply.

“I know nothing of him,” she said, “and what can he matter to such as the Czar of Holy Russia?”

Peter glanced at her, baffled; his vanity was soothed by this ignorant creature’s perfect faith; his pride began to rise against this dread and envy of the threatening figure of the unknown young King.

“Yes, I am the Czar,” he said sullenly, “and I can put a million men into the field for his every thousand, and if they are not as good soldiers I can knout them into being so.”

With that he turned into the garden, and his tall figure was immediately lost in the darkness filled with the sound of the waving sumach boughs.

Marpha gazed thoughtfully at the open window; her hands that were white and smooth, but thick and strong, the hands of a peasant, played with her heavy jeweled breastplate.

Prince Mentchikoff entered from the hall where he had been waiting behind the open door.

“Has he gone?” he whispered.

“Into the garden,” said Marpha.

“What do you think of him?” asked Mentchikoff eagerly.

“He is comely,” replied the girl.

Mentchikoff laughed.

“He is the greatest man in the world.”

“Ah, yes, the Czar of All the Russias.”

“Not that only—he is a hero and a genius,” said Mentchikoff, with passionate enthusiasm. “He is creating a new Russia.”

“I understand none of these things,” replied Marpha. “The world seems to me very well as it is—but I like Peter Alexievitch.”

“Then—if you can—make him happy—keep him cheerful,” said Mentchikoff; “in many ways his life is barren.”

The girl looked at him with those clear eyes that were full of an almost startling sincerity and truth.

“Then you are tired of me, Danilovitch Mentchikoff, and wish to hand me to your master?”

He returned her look frankly; both were of the same class, one by talent, the other by beauty elevated to these surroundings of royal luxury; she had been little better than a camp follower and he was from the gutter; neither was disguised to the other by their present splendor and the pomp of their surroundings; both held their positions by the frail tenure of another person’s favor—he by that of the Czar, she by his; for the powerful Prince was, after all, but a dependent on the favor of Peter, as the peasant girl was dependent on the caprice of Mentchikoff.

The two adventurers looked at each other keenly and there was a laugh between them; hers was wholly indifferent, perhaps heartless, his was gay and confident, for she cared for no creature but herself, nor ever would, while his least thought and meanest action was ennobled by his love for his master.

“I am not tired of you, Marpha,” said Mentchikoff, “and never shall be. I think you are a wonderful woman. I think you might help the Czar where I fail—as now when he is in his melancholy—and when he is drunk, and when he is ill.”

“I do not like sick people,” said the Livonian slowly.

“You have enough health and vitality to be able to share it,” replied Mentchikoff sharply.

She drew up her superb body that so proudly bore the heavy ornate trappings, and turning her beautiful head slowly, looked out into the darkness of the garden.

“We speak of the Czar of Holy Russia,” added the Prince, with some offense at her indifference.

“We speak of a dangerous man,” she replied, with that shrewdness that had already earned for her Mentchikoff’s respect. “I do not wish to be raised up to be dashed down. He can be cruel, and he has all the power. Let me keep out of the way of Peter Alexievitch.”

“You said that you liked him,” said Mentchikoff sternly; he had been hoping more than he admitted to himself from this second influence on Peter, that was to have been like a doubling of his own.

“I like him, but I am afraid of him,” she answered concisely. “He has many devils. I saw them peep out of his eyes. Keep me for yourself, Danilovitch Mentchikoff, for you are a peaceful man.”

The Prince replied violently: “If you will not please Peter Alexievitch, you shall not please me”—and passing her roughly, followed his master out into the murmuring darkness of the garden.

Marpha colored, and her serene pleasant face was overcast.

She had been quite content with her lazy life of ease and admiration, which had been like Paradise after the hardships of her earlier years, and she was sorry that Mentchikoff, for whom she felt a placid affection, had put her in the Czar’s path, for she was without ambition, fond of ease and comfort, and entirely uninterested in statecraft and politics; she could not write her own name, and was in every way entirely ignorant save in the natural arts of reading men and managing them; she would rather have been left in peace, and this though the dark sad face of Peter attracted her as she had never before been attracted.

With a little sigh she turned to her own apartment to take off the garment whose splendor rather constrained her, and put on the peasant costume that she usually wore.

In the pavilion Peter and Mentchikoff were discussing the coming campaign, the Czar showing a sudden fervent interest in those events that he had refused hitherto to even glance at; he would not drink, but turned half a glass of wine out on the table, and dipping his finger in it, proceeded to draw a rough map of the scene of the King of Sweden’s operations on the green marble.

His knowledge of the country was accurate; he correctly placed Copenhagen, King Frederick at Tönning, Augustus of Saxony falling back before Riga and the victorious forces of Sweden.

Then he drew a swift line through Poland towards Narva.

“There he will fall on Russia, Danilovitch.”

“Here we can meet him,” replied Mentchikoff.

Peter frowned; his dark head with the full short curls was bent low over the stains of wine on the malachite table; carved wooden dishes with birds’ heads, full of fruit, beakers of pierced steel and horn, had been pushed aside by the sweep of his right arm; the light of the candles fixed to the white walls of the pavilion shone on his stooping figure, and the harsh, earnest face and brilliant caftan of Mentchikoff.

Peter, staring at the smears of red on the green, was seeing those vast disputed provinces that he coveted, Ingermanland and Karelia ceded to Sweden nearly 100 years ago, Livonia and Esthonia lost by Poland to the same power in 1660; the possession of these lands would secure that Baltic port which had been the dream of Ivan IV, and which was so passionately desired by this first Czar who had beheld and loved the sea; the first ruler of Russia who had aspired to seize the trade with Asia and open up sea-going commerce. He had believed that the boy King of Sweden would be utterly incapable of defending his provinces, and that his secret league with Denmark and Poland would be easily and successfully pursued to a victorious conclusion.

Now Denmark had fallen out of the fight and Poland was a wavering ally; but Peter still put some faith in Augustus, because of the trained Saxon soldiery.

So he remained for a while, staring at that crude map, his swift mind filled out with all detail; then he suddenly smeared the wine spillings together with his open hand and looked up at Mentchikoff, who was regarding him eagerly.

“This is a more difficult task than punishing the Strelitz or subduing the Cossacks,” he said, with glittering eyes. “Surely it is more pleasure, Danilovitch, to overthrow free men than to put one’s feet on the neck of serfs.”

“The Cossacks will join Karl,” remarked Mentchikoff, kindling eagerly at the Czar’s fire.

“To-morrow we return to Moscow,” said Peter, and his face was as fierce as it had been in the days after his return from his travels, when the streets of the capital had run red with the blood of the old Moscovite army, which had revolted against his foreign reforms.

He pushed back his tangled hair with his wine-stained hand.

“Send for that Livonian woman,” he said, “she amuses me.”

CHAPTER IV

PETER held his councils in the Kremlin surrounded by the pomp of the old world and the new; the reforms that he had introduced with so fierce and imperious a violence had not as yet greatly affected the nation, but the nobility who came directly under the influence of the Czar had been largely forced to adopt European ways, much as they might hate them and the men like Gordon and Lefort, who, mainly because they were foreigners, had so great an influence over Peter; these were both lately dead, but their inspiration remained. The Czar gathered his boyars together in the Golden Hall of the Sign Manual where his predecessors had sat on a silver throne under the gilded vaults, clad in robes stiff and blinding with jewels, and holding a rich orb as symbol of the universe they commanded; there Peter himself had sat in splendid pomp as a child with his idiot brother enthroned beside him. Peter was not magnificent to-day; in his plain green uniform and short hair he looked like a European foot soldier and utterly out of place in this great hall hung with scarlet, carpeted with Eastern tapestries, and decorated with jasper and silver, malachite and lacquer. The silver throne stood on a dais under a crimson canopy, and on the steps of it sat Peter, his hands clasped round his knees. The boyars had gone with their breastplates and caftans, robes, and caps, and there remained only the Duke of Croy, the German who commanded the army, and Mentchikoff.

All these were in the habit of Europe, Mentchikoff gorgeous in laced coat, star, cravat, and a flowing French peruke which heavily framed his long, harsh face.

Peter, though affecting the most utter simplicity himself, liked to see those about him richly clad, and his favorites vied with each other in the splendor of their appointments; nothing pleased him more than to see the man who had worked beside him at the carpenter bench at Wapping and Zaandam, clad in workman’s overall, appear in all the trappings of a French or English courtier. To-day he was in a good humor; the boyars had been compliant before his every command; his blood-thirsty vengeance on the reactionary party who had dared to raise a rebellion during his absence abroad was indeed too fresh in the minds of all for anyone to risk angering the terrible Czar.

“I will teach Russia the arts of war as I am teaching her the arts of peace,” he remarked, looking at the Duke of Croy whom he admired as a tried soldier.

The German made a suitably loyal reply, but Mentchikoff broke in with a sharp remark.

“How many years do you think it will take you, Peter Alexievitch?”

“All my life,” replied the Czar humbly.

“All your life,” smiled Croy, “and not the meanest serf in All the Russias will thank you for your labors.”

“What do you mean?” asked Peter.

Croy lifted his shoulders.

“Oh, go on with your wars and your politics and your reforms,” he said cynically. “You are a strong man—but stronger is Holy Russia!”

Peter looked at him with a certain eagerness entirely devoid of anger; though he was so haughtily autocratic with his boyars he would take even insolence from these men whom he had put in the position of his masters; for a long while Croy and his like had represented European civilization to Peter.

But Mentchikoff resented on his master’s behalf this speech made so sharply by the German.

“The Czar holds the Russias in the palm of his hand,” he said haughtily.

“Oh, la, la!” cried the Duke.

Peter smiled grimly; he was thinking of the little chapel a few yards away, from the window of which his uncle had been hurled out on to the pikes of the soldiery below, and of his own boyhood of flight, and peril, and hiding; not far away in this same fierce fortress was the Red Staircase where Ivan the Terrible had stood to watch the cross-formed comet that had predicted his own ghastly end, that staircase where, one blood-stained June, Feodor Borisvitch, strangled by the sheltsi, had been flung down, this but in revenge for another murdered Czar; the history of his predecessors might indeed teach Peter that Holy Russia was not so easily governed or so rapidly subdued.

“The House of Romanoff has had its misfortunes but also its greatness,” he said simply.

“And yet may give a lesson to the impertinent Swede,” said Mentchikoff haughtily.

“He is a great soldier,” added Croy, in his stern way.

The Czar’s face darkened; he rose abruptly, his great height overtopping all of them.

“If he throws himself against Russia, he breaks himself,” he remarked gloomily.

“He will attempt anything,” said Croy; his imagination like that of most men of action had been fired by the figure of the Northern hero, who, like another Viking, had arisen to defend his country with so much majesty and cold magnanimity.

Peter did not care to hear his General praise his enemy.

“Where is Patkul; has he not returned?” he asked briefly. “He should have been here—I want news from Livonia.”

No one knew where Patkul might be; it was not easy to travel in the vast kingdoms of the Czar, and a man might be late in obeying his sovereign’s commands, and his letters might be lost, for no other reason than the size of the country and the primitive confusions of all its services.

Peter would have liked the presence of the fiery Livonian, with his rage against Swedish tyranny and his hatred of Karl XI, who had condemned him to death for protesting against the wrongs of his countrymen, and his scorn for the present King as a haughty boy who would soon be tripped up in his giant’s stride.

But Patkul, at present with Augustus of Saxony as ambassador of Russia, had not come nor answered the summons, and Peter knew very little of what was happening in any of the Baltic provinces; he saw them in his mind as a vast confusion, and felt impatient considering how much there was to be done and how inadequate his means were; his military plans had got no further than a proposed expedition to Esthonia, to seize, if possible, that province, and to send help to Augustus in Poland, or rather to effect a juncture with him, as Peter greatly relied on the trained Saxon troops and the polished diplomacy of the Elector; General Patkul should be with the Polish army, Peter knew, but since Dahlberg had worsted him at Riga, the Livonian’s credit as a soldier had fallen in the Czar’s eyes and he wished to consult with Augustus.

He was conscious of defects in his own statecraft; the Muscovite envoys whom he kept in Stockholm to swear friendly relations with Sweden had merely angered and disgusted the severe honor of the Northern King, and the Russian manifesto, in which the most puerile reasons were given for declaring war, had been better if never published; but so far no Czar of Russia had ever published any document concerning European diplomacy; in everything Peter trod new ground and was keenly conscious of his numerous mistakes.

“I will go to Poland,” he said, his words following out his train of thought.

“You will have to defeat Sweden first, sire,” replied Croy.

“Well,” said Peter gloomily, “one can try. We march against Narva. The Swedes do not fear a winter campaign—since they are willing to fight amid the ice we must learn to do so also.”

Saying these words with a certain simplicity, he abruptly left the chamber, and, passing through a maze of gilt and painted apartments, came out on the great terrace of the Kremlin that overlooks Moscow and the bridges over the Moskva.

He felt neither excited nor elated; perhaps he knew better than either Croy or Mentchikoff the difficulty of this, his first great enterprise, for, by the measure of his own wild heart he could judge of the greatness of his rival in glory; extraordinary himself, he found it easy to credit the extraordinary in others, and just as he was prepared to open war in the depth of winter, in a Polar climate, so he believed that Karl would be ready to meet him; nothing could prevent him from carrying out his ambitions, even if he had to perform feats that in the eyes of ordinary men were madnesses, and he rightly gauged his enemy’s character to be the same in this respect.

He was glad that it was not possible to open the campaign till the winter, for he considered the added difficulty an added glory; with that sense of his own deficiency that was his truest greatness he did not intend to command his army himself, but to serve in it as a lieutenant, thereby giving the Russians a lesson in discipline and the value of training, for he was aware that his soldiers would consist of a horde of armed slaves and his officers of lawless nobles without experience or any capacity for warfare.

But here again his pride supported him; the more impossible the material, the greater the glory of creating for Russia an army that should out-rival those of Europe.

With a quiet step he walked the terrace of the fierce old palace, half-fortress, half-monastery, filled with churches and tombs, treasures and chambers, haunted by the remembrances of cruelty and bitter passions, all old, half-decayed, half-vividly splendid, dirty, holy, secret, and foul.

Peter did not greatly care for this residence of his predecessors; he preferred the little cottage that he called Marli or any of the humble houses in the Dutch style that he had built since his return from Europe; the Kremlin oppressed him; there was something in the atmosphere that seemed to drag him back into the old ways of his ancestors here; his green uniform and his foreign friends could not disguise from himself his Tartar origin, his Asiatic breeding, which everything he touched reminded him of; neither did he love Moscow with that reverent love that he knew was in the heart of most Russians; he dreamt of that other city that was to spring out of the mudbanks of the Neva and rival Paris and London.

Pausing in his walk, he turned his soft and beautiful eyes over the prospect of the barbaric city which glittered in many brilliancies under the pale, greenish sky which was fading towards the evening hour; near by, beneath the battlements, was the river, full of reflected light, but void of color; beyond the plain was covered with crowded houses, a confusion of roofs of a dull brown hue above which rose the myriad cupolas and towers of the churches, shaped like strange fruits and decorated with fantastic designs in every color and shape, only alike in this, that each had the Christian cross surmounting the Tartar crescent, memorial of the time when the Asiatic hordes had possession of Russia and had changed the churches into mosques and of Ivan Vassilivitch who raised the symbol of Christ above that of the Infidel.

These crosses were all fastened by golden chains to the cupolas, and many were hung with discs, orbs, and stars that swung and glittered with every changing wind or shifting sunbeam.

Despite the splendor of the churches there was something dull, colorless, and melancholy about this prospect.

The Kremlin (a city in itself) was also gloomy; when Peter turned from looking over the city he could see, across the sandy, weed-grown courtyard, the whole of the citadel; the golden domes rising above walls disfigured and neglected, the three old cathedrals where the Czars were crowned, married, and buried, the great tower built by Boris Godunof, and behind all the red structure of the palace and fortress.

Peter was never pleased when his glance fell on these three churches that crowded round his royal residence; they reminded him too forcibly of the position assumed by the Church.

Peter meant to deprive the Patriarch of much of his power, and to vest in himself the religious as well as the temporal prerogatives of Aristocrat of All the Russias.

He began pacing up and down the terrace again, and presently took from the skirt pocket of his uniform a little letter which he read while the evening breeze fluttered it in his hand.

It was an appeal from his sister, miserably confined in the convent of Novo-Devichi, for a slightly better treatment; she was very ill, she said, having grown too stout and being covered with ulcers, and she begged for a little air and exercise.

Peter read the appeal with unmoved serenity; Sophia had inspired the late rebellion and could never be forgiven.

“A pity,” thought Peter, “for she is clever and might have been useful to me.”

He considered that he had been extremely generous in allowing her her life; the heads of her supporters still rotted on the battlements of Moscow; his wife, Eudoxia, suspected of favoring the rebels, was enclosed in a convent with a shaven head that last day of September, in the Krasnoi Ploshtshad, Peter had executed with his own hand several of the wretched rebels already broken by torture, and had himself shaved the beards the nobility wore as a sign of their adherence to ancient custom; on the first day alone of the executions, two hundred persons had been ferociously put to death in the presence of their frantic wives and children; in the seven days’ vengeance more than a thousand had perished; the bleeding members of the rebellious Strelitz had been nailed to the bars of Sophia’s prison; every square in Moscow, every corner of the battlements of the Kremlin, had been hung with corpses.

And Sophia, who had been spared, ventured to complain of her prison!

The only effect of her letter was to make her brother resolve that if she gave any trouble during his present absence she should be strangled in the jail she found so irksome.

Tearing the paper into little pieces he cast it away, so that the fragments floated down the terrace and lodged in the broken pavement and the weed-filled terraces of the wall.

The sunset glow, pale and dim, but faintly tinged with a warm light, was now full on his smooth and rounded face with the large soft eyes and the loose curls; he looked younger than his years, an ardent boy; his thoughts had turned to his new adventure, the coming experiment of war.

He returned to his own chamber, not speaking to those whom he met on the way, walking softly through the gorgeous and dismal apartments of the Kremlin, with his hands locked behind the skirts of his coat and his head bent.

His room had a gold-domed ceiling and walls of sparkling mosaic, a holy picture set with precious stones between two pillars of gilt vermilion and Eastern carpets of silk on the floor, but the furniture was that of a camp, and the iron bedstead was covered only by the meanest blankets.

On a bright green cushion by the closed window sat Marpha, the Livonian peasant; she wore a plain white wool robe girdled with scarlet, and orange leather shoes; her head-dress had been removed and her bright opulent hair hung in heavy locks over her broad shoulders.

On the floor in front of her stood the crowns of the Russias, and she was playing with these in turn, like a child fondling toys, while on her lap was a bag of sweetmeats from which she fed herself continually, eating noisily and licking the sugar from her lips.

When the Czar entered she had in her left hand the plain gold crown of the Crimea, and before her the massive crowns of Astrakan, Kazan, Siberia, and Georgia, which pulsed with the light held and given forth by a thousand precious stones.

Peter looked at her with the eyes of love.

“Have you ever had such pretty playthings?” he asked.

Marpha glanced at him without either greed or envy in her expression.

“I would rather have an ivory comb,” she said simply, and rose with the crowns in a half-circle at her feet.

“You shall have,” answered Peter tenderly, “as many ivory combs as there are hairs in your head.”

He crossed over to her and embraced her, resting his head, with a little sigh, on her bosom; she looked down at him calmly and with a certain indulgence.

“Marpha,” he asked, “will you come to the war with me?”

“Still thinking of the war?” she replied gaily. “Have you had your supper? Will you eat here with me instead of with your boyars to-night? I have the kvas ready.”

Peter lifted his head and looked at her; the atmosphere of the room was close and foul, the air full of flies and mosquitoes; both the room and the woman were dirty; her gown was soiled, her face and hands sticky with perspiration and sugar; the taint of brandy was in her breath, and her expressionless beauty was clouded by her slovenliness. But the Czar saw none of these things; he felt as happy as he had ever felt in his life as he flung himself into one of the camp chairs, and she hastened to bring him his drink; the native spirit and fine French wine in equal parts.

He drank this, glass after glass, as the woman went into the inner room and prepared the rude supper, singing in a sweet voice and thinking of nothing much but the good, plentiful food and the fine, plentiful drink and the gay dresses and lazy days now within her reach.

And Peter, as he became inflamed with the spirit, imagined himself crushing the Swedes as he had crushed the rebellious Strelitz, and he nodded at the pale-faced ikon between the scarlet pillars, promising it an egg-shaped emerald when he should have taken Narva.

BOOK III
JOHN RHEINHOLD PATKUL

“His grief was but his grandeur in disguise
And discontent his immortality.”

CHAPTER I

BY the first day of October, Peter, after ravaging Ingria, found himself before Narva, swiftly bearing the thunders of his vengeance against his Northern rival, who, despite the extreme severity of the climate (it was already midwinter in this bitter latitude), was steadily advancing to meet the last and most powerful of his enemies.

Peter was on fire to prove to the people, who were half unwillingly accepting his gigantic efforts to lift Russia into the position of a great power, that his new methods of warfare were capable of rendering null the treaties of Stolboro and Plivia, and Karl was equally resolute to prove that he was invincible in defense of what he had every right to consider his own territory.

John Rheinhold Patkul, the Livonian noble who had been largely instrumental in forming the threefold secret treaty against Sweden, who had been first in the service of the Elector of Saxony and afterwards Peter’s envoy at Dresden, was now with the Muscovite army, and the report of his presence there further inflamed the cold anger of the King of Sweden, who, crossing the sea with a fine fleet of transport, was marching towards Narva six weeks after Peter had commenced the siege, regardless alike of the increasing rigors of the winter and the disparity of numbers between his own army and that of the Czar.

He had reason for his confidence, for it was in numbers only that Peter had the advantage.

A skilled general with a disciplined army would have been able to reduce the little town of Narva into ashes in a few days, perhaps hours; Peter had sat down before it six weeks in vain, while the Baron de Horn, in command of the beleaguered garrison, was able, with his few pieces of cannon, to again and again level the trenches, redoubts, and fortifications that Peter had constructed round his camp, in accordance with what he had learnt in his travels.

These rude attempts at the science of war were complete failures; 150 cannon could scarcely be fired and could never hit their objective; nearly 65,000 men remained helpless before a garrison of 1000, in a small ill-protected town.

Peter, in no way sparing himself (he still held the rank of lieutenant in his own army), spent his days going from one part of his camp to another, instructing, working, exhorting, threatening, enduring all the hardships of the terrible weather and the inadequate supplies of the badly provisioned army.

The Duke of Croy was in command; an able soldier, trained in the traditions of European warfare, he yet was incapable of controlling an army consisting largely of a horde of peasants, dressed in skins, armed with scythes, pruning knives, and officered by a haughty and ignorant nobility, who knew neither how to enforce obedience nor how to submit to discipline.

There was not one good gunner in the whole army and no one who had seen a siege before; the only passable troops were the Strelitz, decimated by Peter’s late vengeance on their reactionary spirit and only accustomed to Eastern and Asiatic methods of warfare.

Day after day Peter, dressed in the old green uniform, with a worn fur cap and mantle, smoking a Dutch clay pipe, watched, with a dogged patience, the erections of fortifications that Horn’s artillery always accurately demolished; his brooding gaze traveled over his soldiers, courageous, robust, and willing, but completely ignorant and uncontrollable, and he thought of what he had yet to do for Russia.

Easier to build his city on the marshes of the Neva than to frame out of these an army that would defeat Karl of Sweden! He became melancholy and fierce; neither Mentchikoff nor Patkul nor Croy could divert his gloomy musings; the only creature who had any power to soothe him was Marpha, the Livonian peasant, whom he had brought with him and who bloomed like a winter rose amid the rough life of the camp; she enjoyed her surroundings, could give or take a rude jest with the least of the soldiery, wait on the Czar like a foot-boy, yet be a wild Aspasia to this strange Pericles.

The King of Sweden, with about 8000 men, of which the half were cavalry, landed at Pernau in the gulf of Riga; with all the horse and about half of the foot he advanced at once on Revel, without waiting for the rest of his troops.

Peter meanwhile had left the army before Narva in charge of the Duke of Croy, and had himself hastened to Pskov to bring up a new body of 30,000 troops; his design being to enclose Karl between two armies; he had already thrown across the road from Revel to Narva 55,000 men, including his best troops, the Strelitz, 5000 of which formed an advance guard, who soon found themselves facing the first regiments of the King of Sweden’s army.

The Strelitz were so well posted among the rocks that a far fewer number than they possessed could have easily hindered the approach of a much larger army than that possessed by Karl, but the Russians, not knowing what they had to face and believing the Swedes innumerable as well as excellent, fled with little resistance. This panic communicated itself to their compatriots behind them, and in two days the Swedes had swept before them 25,000 men, taken all the Russian outposts, and appeared before the Czar’s entrenchments before Narva.

It was a black morning of dreadful cold, the last day of November, when Karl found himself before the army of Peter.

A gray sky hung heavily over the desolate landscape and seemed to press heavily on the bare trees; the Swedes were fatigued with the march from Pernau and the encounters with the Russians on the road; Karl called a halt.

A young Scotchman in his army, who had several times proved himself useful in delicate work of espionage, had managed to get ahead of the army and penetrate the Russian lines; the news he brought was considered interesting enough to cause him to be taken before the King.

He had never seen Karl XII face to face, and it was with considerable curiosity that he followed the staff officer who took him into the royal presence.

The army was taking a few hours’ repose, but no tents had been set up, and the Scotchman found Karl seated on the great roots of a huge pine tree, with him Count Piper and several generals.

He was already completely inured to hardships for which his childish training had well fitted him, and suffered from the severities of warfare perhaps less than any of his soldiers.

He was now only a few months past his eighteenth birthday, but in every respect had reached his full development; his great height and powerful figure made him conspicuous even among an army of robust and vigorous men; he had the grace of the athlete and the dignity of a king in his carriage, yet there was an awkwardness, a stiffness in his manners that might have been haughtiness or indifference or even shyness; his expression was cold and unchanging, his speech abrupt and plain; he gave no impression of youth save in the softness of his traits and the slackness of his figure.

He wore a blue uniform, tight waisted and with a full skirt, closely fastened with buttons of gilt leather up to the throat and showing no shirt, but only the plain band of the black satin cravat; an ordinary leather belt and strap supported his sword, and long gauntlet gloves reached to his elbow, his soft knee boots and his breeches were alike of leather; he wore a three-cornered black hat set well on his head, and his fair hair arranged in curls like a peruke on his shoulders.

He had a mantle of blue cloth, lined with fur, but this, despite the freezing cold, was cast on the ground beside him; his face, yet beardless and showing, notwithstanding the exposure to intemperate weather, still the bloom of extreme youth, had hardened in outline since he had begun the life of a soldier; the features were firm as a mask of stone, fresh with the warm tints of health, generous and full in line and curve; neither enthusiasm nor humor, nor pride, nor tenderness showed in his expression; his blue eyes looked out with a cold, level, and serene glance; he had the air of one dwelling in a world of his own with little care for others.

The Scotchman thought him remarkable but neither agreeable nor attractive; the King had a personality too aloof from warm and human weaknesses to command sympathy from ordinary men; he had many servants but few friends, much admiration, but little love.

“Tell me,” he said at once, as the young man was presented to him, “did you see the Czar of Muscovy?”

The Scotchman saw that the King attached much importance to this question, and was chagrined that he could not answer in the affirmative.

“Sire, the Czar has left his army to hasten up the reserves.”

“I should like to have met him in the battle,” said Karl, but without a trace of annoyance. “The reserves could have come up without him. I think he did ill to leave his post now.”

“It looks,” said one of the generals who stood beside the King, “as if he was afraid of your Majesty.”

“That is impossible,” replied Karl quietly, “for I take him to be a great man.”

“But it is true, sire,” put in the Scot, “that the Muscovites have a great terror of your Majesty; I was in their camp last night and heard them speak of you and your exploits as they might have spoken of supernatural things.”

“It needs but a poor prowess to achieve a reputation in the eyes of savages,” replied the King, still cold and unmoved. “These Russians are both ignorant and wild. How came you, sir, to escape detection?”

“I speak the German very well, sire, and passed for the servant of a German officer, of whom they have several, and their camp is in such a confusion one might almost come and go as one pleases.”

“They know nothing of war,” observed Karl, “but the Czar will teach them.”

“He seems much loved—though unjustly cruel and unwisely generous. I saw his friend, Mentchikoff, and the Livonian woman who they say has a great influence over him.”

Karl smiled, as if he was glad to hear of this weakness in his rival; there was not a woman in the whole of the Swedish army; the Scot remarked how disagreeable his smile was; it seemed to disfigure his noble face.

“Saw you this woman?” he asked.

“Yes, sire, at the door of Peter’s empty tent, making kvas, as they call the stuff they drink. She had a fur coat of uncouth cut and was all smeared with meal and honey, but in her way she is as beautiful as Aurora von Königsmarck.”

The King abruptly changed the subject as if he regretted having shown even so much interest in the affairs of his enemy.

“You learnt nothing of importance?” he asked with great indifference; he had only spoken to the spy because he wished to know if Peter was with his army; as to his own actions, he had decided what they were to be ever since he had landed at Pernau.

The Scotchman proceeded to tell him of what he had learnt of the enemy, their number, disposition, and probable plans.

Karl listened with patience, but with so cold a mien that the young man faltered in his speech; the King’s face, blank as it was of all but courageous steadfastness, overawed him and made him uneasy; he felt that he spoke to one utterly beyond his knowledge or liking; he was glad when he was dismissed.

As he went Karl rose from the tree roots, overtopping, by nearly half a head, his tallest officer; the air was still and freezing, and a few flakes of ghastly white snow began to flutter from the bitter sky.

“We should be able to attack at midday,” said the King; it was then about ten o’clock.

“Your Majesty has considered the peril?” asked General Rehnsköld. “By all accounts we must be outnumbered by a hundred to one, and they are entrenched and fortified.”

Karl stooped and took up his mantle, shaking from it the first flakes of snow that were large and hard.

“Do you doubt,” he answered, “that I, with 8000 Swedes, can pass over the bodies of 80,000 Muscovites?”

He swung the mantle round his great shoulders and then added instantly, fearful that he had seemed to boast, a thing his pride loathed: “Are you not really of my opinion, Rehnsköld? I have two great advantages—he cannot use his cavalry, and as the ground is enclosed his great numbers will be but an encumbrance. It is I who am really stronger than he, and have all the advantages.”

General Rehnsköld bowed his head in assent; there was not one of the staff officers behind him who did not consider the young King’s action rash to madness.

Karl saw this; for their opinion he cared nothing; but he greatly disliked to be suspected of bravado; his was not the unconscious modesty of a man who knows not he is great nor that his actions are remarkable, but the conscious austerity of one who is aware he is extraordinary and wishes to be acclaimed, but not by his own tongue.

“If I defeat the Czar here, Cracow and Varsovia are open to me,” he said, turning his blue eyes on the quiet faces of his officers.

Again General Rehnsköld bowed.

“I am entirely of your Majesty’s opinion.”

“At least you submit very gracefully, General,” replied Karl, with his ugly smile.

He turned away and Count Piper followed him.

“He will be as hard and obstinate as his father,” remarked an officer, shivering under his fur, for the cold was of Polar intensity.

“Eight thousand men against eighty thousand!” exclaimed another. “He thinks to rival Leonidas or one of his saga heroes.”

“Gentlemen,” said Rehnsköld, “I think he will do it.”

The King and Count Piper mounted and cantered along the lines of the resting army; Karl had taken no deliberations and held no councils. He considered that there was nothing to do but to give the order to attack; after a brief survey of his men he would be back with his staff under the great pine.

Count Piper, who was not a soldier but a true patriot, glanced several times at what the black hat and full fair curls allowed him to see of the King’s face.

He had been very eager to urge him into a defensive war, but he had never dreamed of these reckless projects, this complete absorption in war for war’s sake; he secretly suspected that all the cold but deep passion of the King’s nature was concentrated, not on the desire to better Sweden, but on the design of making for himself the reputation of an invincible captain; the main object of the war was achieved in the restoration of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp to his dominions; but Karl had never said a word of returning to Stockholm, even for a visit, and the last advices from the Council of Regency in the capital he had thrust in his pocket without reading, and he had embarked on this desperate winter campaign, with no purpose that Count Piper could see but that of making the world stare.

“As long as these mad exploits are successful——” thought the statesman, “but his first failure will cost us all Gustavas Vasa gained!” He could not resist the endeavor to rouse Karl from his passive hardness.

“When your Majesty has beaten the Czar of Muscovy, will you be content?”

“There is still Augustus,” replied the King; he glanced up at the snow-filled air. “Look, the storm is blowing towards the enemy, we shall have it at our backs, they in their eyes—did I not say I was fortunate?”

Count Piper shivered; the weather was black and bitter enough to freeze a man’s soul; he wished Karl’s ardor for glory had stopped short of battle in midwinter at a latitude of 30 degrees Polar, with odds of a hundred to one.

“You are cold?” asked Karl. “I like the snow. I wish Peter was with his men. Surely he will return from Pskov.”

His blue eyes cast a bright glance over the precise ranks of his perfectly disciplined soldiers; men who had prayers twice a day and lived like athletes in training.

“I had an item of news from Stockholm when last I heard,” said the Count, as they turned their horses’ heads. “Viktoria Falkenberg is dead. It seems that she had long concealed a fatal complaint.”

The King’s expressionless face did not alter; he was skilfully guiding his horse over the rough ground, already white with snow.

“The signal for the charge,” he remarked, “will be two shots—the passwords—‘God with us.’”

A darkness enclosed the world with the soft descent of the snow; the flakes hung in the folds of the King’s mantle and in his curls; his hat was covered; the ground was frozen, the tops of the gaunt pines hidden in the whirling storm; the rigid ranks of Sweden showed a darkness amid the dark; facing them were the black gaping cannon of the vast army of the Czar; even beneath their fur caftans the Russians were numb; Marpha, wrapped in skins and wools, stared at a picture of St. Nicholas Mentchikoff had thrust into her hands, but she was not praying but thinking of the absent Czar; she wished he was back in the dirty tent where she could minister to him and prepare him for the fight.

“I wonder if he is afraid of that boy?” she thought, then suddenly crouched low as the sound of the Swedish cannon scattered the storm; Karl and his eight thousand were hurling themselves on the ranks of Muscovy; Marpha crept to the tent door and looked out, but the snow swirled in and blinded her; again the cannon and distant shouts; she sat huddled and silent, hating her lover for not being there.

CHAPTER II

“IF you do not believe that I shall redeem Narva you are a fool,” said Peter rudely. “The Swedes themselves will teach us how to defeat their own armies.”

It was three months after his bitter failure when the King of Sweden had scattered his immense forces in a few hours, and he himself, coming with the reinforcements from Pskov, had withdrawn from the path of a conqueror with troops so greatly inferior to his own; Karl was spending the winter encamped near Narva and Peter had come to Birsen, a little town in Lithuania, to meet informally (indeed it might be said that the Czar never did anything formally) his ally, Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, on whose trained troops Peter still relied, though Augustus had shown to but little advantage in the war, and had done nothing since he had gracefully submitted to necessity in raising the siege of Riga.

It was to Augustus whom Peter spoke now; the King Elector’s heart was hardly in the war that for him had been mainly an excuse to keep a standing army with which to overawe Poland, and that he had never intended to go to these extreme, expensive lengths, and he had several times referred, with that calm elegance that irritated Peter, to the disastrous day of Narva, so fatal to the Russian arms that the terrified inhabitants of Moscow, on hearing of the news, had not hesitated to attribute it to magic on the part of the Swedes. And Peter had suddenly broken out into violence.

“Perhaps you are a fool,” he added loudly.

Augustus flushed, but smiled and slightly raised his eyebrows, glancing at the third occupant of the chamber which was the best parlor of the best house in Birsen. This gentleman was John Rheinhold Patkul, the prime author of the league against Sweden, at first in the employment of Saxony, now in the service of Peter whom he continued to represent at Dresden.

He looked at the Czar now with a glance of affection and spoke quietly.

“I am sure that your Majesty will completely revenge Narva.”

“Thank you, General Patkul,” said Peter sullenly, “but whatever you or any other man believe, I am sure I shall humble that haughty boy.”

He put his elbows on the corner of the black oak table near which he sat and supported his face in his brown hands.

The persons of these three men were in great contrast, and it was plain that some extraordinary event outside their own volition or inclination had brought them together. Peter wore his shabby green uniform, cracked and old top-boots, a sword and belt like those of a common soldier, his own tumbled short and dusky curls, only his linen was fine and clean where it showed above the high buttoned coat; for the rest he might have been a trooper, disordered after a day’s march.

Augustus, who sat in a great chair with arms near the log fire, was a man of a physical strength famous throughout Europe; he was as tall as the Czar and far more powerfully made, the splendid Karl would have appeared a stripling beside him for he was now in the prime of his manhood; a magnificent prince like the hero of a fairy-tale to the eye, for he was extremely good-looking in a pleasing, conventional fashion, gracious, easy in manner, full of fire and chivalry, and elegant as any courtier of Louis XIV; his court was considered next to that of Versailles for brilliancy, extravagance, and elegance, and he had made Dresden nearly as fashionable as Paris.

He also wore riding costume, but in complete contrast to the habiliments of the Czar; a mantle of dark blue silk, lined with black fur, was flung back on his shoulders and fastened across the breast with gold clasps; his coat was of fine deep crimson cloth gallooned with silver; his rich laces, fastened with a black bow at the throat, fell over a white satin waistcoat heavily embroidered in colored silks; his close knee-boots were of the softest leather, his spurs gilt, his sword and baldrick very handsome and tasseled; his kindly, charming face was framed in the rich curls of a long peruke, and on the chair beside him were his huge gauntlet gloves, his black hat with long white plumes and his gold-headed riding-crop.

He looked both disinterested and slightly ill at ease, though his air was one of perfect courtesy, and he seemed to pay more attention to the Livonian nobleman than to the Muscovite Czar—finding the former more to his ideas of civilization.

This man, who had already played such a considerable but more or less secret part in the politics of Northern Europe, and who now defied Karl XII with his sword as he had defied Karl XI with his eloquence, was still young, but of an appearance ordinary compared to that of the two princes.

He was fair, of medium height, with blunt features and earnest gray eyes, an expression enthusiastic and serious; he wore the uniform of a Saxon General, and his peruke was tied with a black ribbon; his personality was sincere and attractive, and to any who knew his history there was round him the fascination of lost causes and forlorn hopes, the romance of the fanatic and the patriot, for Patkul had only lived with the one object of rescuing his country from the tyranny of Sweden.

He had been elected as spokesman to put the wrongs of Livonia before Karl XI; that stern monarch had received him graciously.

“You have spoken for your country like a brave man, and I respect you for it,” he had said, but the next day Patkul had been arrested on a charge of treason; he had broken prison and escaped abroad, and from then had been the steady enemy of Karl XI and his son.

To Augustus he had been of infinite value, and he had only left the court of Dresden because his single-mindedness, his haughty spirit, and ardent purpose had accorded ill with the frivolous atmosphere, bed-chamber plots, and petty intrigues of the Elector’s court; in Peter he had found a more congenial master, but a sentimental tie still bound him to Dresden; he was betrothed to a good and beautiful Saxon lady, Mdle. D’Einsiedel.

The sincerity and simplicity of this love affair was in contrast to the fashion of the moment; Augustus was slightly cynical and Peter did not understand, but Patkul was not greatly concerned in these princes’ opinion of his private concern; they were to him but instruments to free Livonia and humble Sweden, though for Peter Alexis he felt a certain affection, for the Czar was also struggling with a gigantic, perhaps hopeless, task.

Augustus glanced with some disgust at the somber figure of Peter; the moods and melancholies of the wild, diseased Muscovite were very repellent to the healthy, ease-loving Saxon; secretly he cursed the alliance with Russia (though he was too good-natured to blame its author, Patkul), and wished that he had found some less dangerous excuse for keeping his standing army.

However, he had to force on his reluctant and somewhat lazy mind that he was in a perilous position; Karl had defeated Denmark (who no longer counted as a member of the league) and defeated Russia, and there could be little doubt that the stern and haughty young conqueror would now turn his arms against Poland; the King-Elector saw no ally and no chance of support save in the Czar.

The treaty of Altona kept England and Holland tacitly at least on the side of Sweden, and Augustus had never been looked upon well by France, whose princes he had defeated in the candidature for the Polish throne.

His defensive measures must be taken in concert with Peter; a defeated man, certainly, but one of immense resources and genius.

“While we talk, Sweden will act,” he said, with a slightly quizzical smile, his good humor after all carrying the day in the struggle with his irritation against the mood of the incomprehensible Peter; he rose, very gorgeous and making the room look mean. “Let us have our dinner,” he added, “and then come to some serious conversation.”

“Which has been too long delayed, sire,” remarked General Patkul quietly; already the meeting between kings and ministers was several days old, and nothing had taken place but mutual compliments and mutual entertainments in which all had joined from Peter and Augustus to the meanest secretary in their train; Patkul, the only man who had kept quite aloof, was probably the only man in Birsen now completely sober; it was the reaction from debauch that had plunged Peter into melancholy, and Augustus was heavy-headed and heavy-eyed.

“Too long delayed,” he agreed smoothly. “Karl will not spend much longer before Narva—why, having achieved his end, he cannot go home——”

Peter looked up.

“Achieved his end?” he questioned.

“Has he not got back Holstein-Gottorp and checked the invasion into his Baltic provinces?”

“And you think that was his end!” exclaimed the Czar contemptuously. “No, he wishes to dethrone you and me.”

Augustus laughed at this abrupt statement.

“A second Alexander? Not in these times, sire,” he replied. “Not even a vain boy would dream of world conquest now—especially after the lessons of Ryswick; what Louis could not accomplish Karl will hardly attempt.”

“I think that he will,” said Peter, measuring the Swede’s spirit by his own.

He was seconded by the Livonian.

“I think that you are right, sire; there is no end to what Karl will attempt—perhaps no end to what he will achieve. I think his Saxon Majesty can hardly conceive the type, hard, cold, justly cruel and justly generous—a man without mercy for himself or others, austere, awkward, without grace or charm, yet underneath half-mad with pride, with obstinacy, with the old Viking blood lust, the old Berserker fury against those who oppose him.”

Patkul spoke with a feeling that pleased Peter, always intensely interested in anything to do with his rival.

“He is reputed virtuous,” said the Czar.

“Virtuous!” exclaimed Patkul, with a flush in his blond face. “Yes—he has prayers twice a day in his camp, and his soldiers do not take a slice of bread that they do not pay for; he lives the life of a Spartan and a monk, for it is his vanity to be considered above the weaknesses of mankind, but he would see Sweden go to perdition sooner than forgo one of his mad schemes or sacrifice one leaf from the laurels of his barren victories!”

“You speak from your knowledge of his father,” said Augustus.

“From my knowledge of the race, sir. Karl XI thought something of the good of his people, and embarked on no useless conquests, but the type was the same—a man of granite. He killed his Queen with his hardness. I think that he never said a kind word, all his days, to anyone.”

“And no woman was ever found to soften him?” asked Augustus, who was trained in the traditions of Versailles.

“Never. They say that this man is the same,” replied Patkul. “He prefers to govern his passions rather than to risk female domination and has resolved never to look on a fair face.”

“I will send him Marpha,” said Peter gravely. “She would twine round the heart of a saint.”

At the thought of such an ambassadress being sent to bewitch the haughty young conqueror with her crude charms, and the spectacle of the Czar’s entire belief in the illiterate camp follower with her rude speech and neglected person who so offended the fastidious taste of the Saxon, Augustus could not repress a smile of contempt.

Peter perceived it and rose; little flames of wrath sparkled in his full brown eyes.

“Well, send him Aurora von Königsmarck,” he cried violently.

Augustus was utterly taken aback; he had never so been spoken to nor surrounded by other than refinement and elegance; to even hear the name of Aurora on the lips of Peter was a profanation, but to listen to her, one of the admired women of Europe, the Montespan of his Versailles, coupled, in this odious connection, with the Livonian peasant, raised by the mad caprice of Peter, made him put his hand to his sword.

“Well,” said the Czar, with dangerous softness, “why not your woman as well as mine?”

Patkul intervened.

“Leave the names of women, sire,” he said quickly and with some authority. “The King of Sweden is not, in any case, to be outwitted that way.”

Augustus recovered his composure by reminding himself that he had to deal with a man almost wholly a savage.

“At least you will leave the name of the Countess von Königsmarck, sir,” he said coldly.

Peter laughed with rude contempt; he had no respect for any woman, and the brilliant Aurora who ruled the superb court of Dresden was no better in his mind than Marpha, who stirred the kvas and drank brandy in his dirty hut or tent.

Augustus did not like this laugh and spoke again, to avoid a quarrel.

“Surely it is time we joined Mentchikoff for dinner,” and he glanced patiently at the cold winter day beyond the window.

“You are very fond of your dinner,” said Peter, who turned from the French cooking provided by Augustus to devour half-cooked greasy meat and parboiled vegetables soaked in vinegar.

The King-Elector, perfectly master of himself, turned easily to Patkul.

“General,” he said, “escort His Majesty to the dining-hall.”

And with that he left the room, gathering up gracefully his hat, gloves, and whip.

“He is a silly fribble and a besotted rake,” said Peter angrily, as the door closed.

“He has a fine army, sire,” replied Patkul quietly; he was used to managing both these men, so utterly different and both so necessary to his great schemes.

“Yes,” admitted the Czar sullenly, with envy in his eyes.

“The sort of army that is needful to defeat Sweden—come here, sire,” he beckoned Peter to the window and pointed out, in the courtyard of the modest house, the Saxon guard who had been appointed to attend on Peter during his residence at Birsen. “Are they not splendid fellows? And those passing, of the Brandenbourg regiment—and Augustus has thousands of such men.”

Peter’s haggard eyes lit with professional enthusiasm.

“I will have men like that, Patkul.”

“Meanwhile it is useful to tolerate the Elector, sire.”

“And choke myself with his French sauces, and grimace with him over his compliments.”

“Well,” said Patkul gravely, “I think your Majesties have some tastes in common; you have been drunk together for three days on end, and that should have promoted some fellow-feeling.”

The Czar gave no answer and Prince Mentchikoff entered the room; he was dressed magnificently, and in tolerable imitation of the Saxon nobility; the peasant had acquired Western polish more easily than the Czar.

Peter greeted him affectionately, taking his face between his hands and kissing him; it was the first time he had seen him that day for Mentchikoff had been sleeping off the effects of last night’s orgy.

Patkul left the two Russians together, and hastened after Augustus who was already seated at table with several of his ministers and officers.

“You wish yourself back at Dresden, no?” he greeted the Livonian pleasantly.

“Sire,” replied Patkul, “I should not care to be back at Dresden thinking that this meeting had been fruitless.”

“You are right,” said Augustus, gravely, “and the sooner we finish this treaty the sooner we can return,” and his eyes shone, as he thought of his Aurora.

Patkul completed the treaty that day; the Czar was to send into Poland 50,000 men to learn to become soldiers, and, in the space of two years, to pay to the Czar 3,000,000 rix-dollars; Augustus was to levy from neighboring princes 50,000 trained German troops to send into Russia; this treaty, that seemed to lay the foundation for the greatness of the Czar and the ruin of Sweden, once completed, Patkul would have made instant preparations to put it into force; but Augustus, despite the attractions of his gorgeous darling and his fears for the safety of his kingdom, joined Peter in a week-long debauch.

Meanwhile Sweden, breaking camp at Narva, marched on Riga, and Patkul, unable to endure the idle orgies, obtained permission to join the Saxon troops under Courlande and Steinau, who were defending the passage of the Dwina against the conqueror.

CHAPTER III

“WHEN things go smoothly it is well to be a woman, when they go ill I would give my soul to be a man,” said Aurora von Königsmarck.

She was in her beautiful chamber in the Palace at Dresden, seated on a low couch piled with cushions of shimmering brocade, holding in her long fair hand a letter from the Elector.

“I think,” replied her companion, “you would not, under any inducement, be other than what you are.”

Aurora looked up sharply.

“Would you?” she demanded.

The court favorite smiled as she spoke and flung herself farther back into the soft cushions, crushing the stiff violet ribbons and frills of silver lace on her magnificent gown.

“No,” said the other lady; she was fair and pale, and seated on a stool of red lacquer was helping a tiny negro page to feed with sugar a parrot that swung in an ebony ring.

“Why?” asked Aurora.

“Because I am betrothed to General Patkul,” replied the lady, without looking round.

“Romantic love—in this age!” smiled the Countess.

Mdle. D’Einsiedel daintily placed the morsel of sugar in the bird’s huge polished beak; he as daintily accepted it, and twisted round in his ring sweeping his long green tail feathers into the face of the page.

“Tell me about it,” coaxed Aurora, leaning forward so that her beautiful head peered over the gilt edge of the settee. “Tell me what it is like to be in love—in love!—in that way?”

“I am sorry for you that you do not know. Countess,” smiled Hélène D’Einsiedel, still amusing herself with the bird and not looking round.

Aurora von Königsmarck studied her with a curiosity that was not entirely without malice and envy.

The young girl (she was hardly more than seventeen) made a beautiful picture in her full rose-colored dress, seated on rose-colored cushions, with rainbow-hued silk ribbons at her slender waist, and in her loosely dressed pale hair, silk flowers; forget-me-nots and roses were amid the fine laces on her open bosom, pearls in her ears and round her throat; her delicate features shone fair with youth and health, grace and breed; she was wealthy, noble, nurtured in a corrupt and brilliant court, and she had consented to bestow her hand on a man who was no more than a political adventurer; native of a country supposed half-savage and with no particular attractions of person or manner, John Rheinhold Patkul had never been popular with the courtiers of Augustus, but he had inspired this girl with an intense devotion that no opposition could shake.

She continued with undisturbed grace to feed the parrot; behind her was a tapestry of a woodland scene, gray-green in color, which formed the background to her pale beauty which was in piquant contrast to the negro with his scarlet suit and sky-blue turban and the harsh colors of the bird.

“Well, child,” said Aurora at length, “if you will not talk——! You will marry your Livonian, and go to live in his wild country and forget about me.”

The girl looked at the sugar lying in her pink palm; Aurora had always been her friend, to some extent her patroness, but she did not care to talk to her of General Patkul.

“Obstinate!” continued the Countess. “You will not even distract me from my bad news. Augustus is sick. And the fight by Riga goes ill for us.”

“Ah!” Mdle. D’Einsiedel turned her brown eyes now.

“I thought I should move you,” remarked Aurora maliciously. “Have you not heard, then, from your idol?”

Patkul, with Courlande and Steinau, was disputing the sandy reaches of the Dwina against the advancing troops of Karl XII; it was the first shock of the opening of the young conqueror’s second campaign.

“I have not heard for several days,” replied the girl in a low voice, “but why should I grieve or trouble? The cause is a sacred one, and I feel sure that God will protect it.”

Aurora smiled at these trite words which betrayed the touching confidence of youth in the continuance of happiness; she saw that the girl was so wrapt in the splendor of a first and noble passion that she could not think of misfortune as a possible thing. The Countess sighed and pulled at her waist ribbons with restless fingers; all romance had long left her life; her outlook was that of the brilliant adventuress concerned only to keep the splendid position she had attained by talent and beauty.

By now she had forgotten if she ever had loved Augustus, the handsome, generous, good-humored Prince whose favor had made her great; he was simply her world, the thing by which she must stand or fall; his ruin would be her ruin, utterly; she was grateful enough and loyal enough to scorn the thought of leaving him if he was defeated and brought to disaster, but she could not view with calm the prospect of losing her position as mistress of the second most brilliant court in Europe, and all the pleasures and honors she now enjoyed as a famous beauty and a clever and powerful woman. She was of a noble Swedish family with a wild and tragic history; the names of her two brothers had long held a horrid renown; Philip von Königsmarck had been the lover of Dorothea of Zell, the Elector of Hanover’s wife, and, betrayed by a woman’s jealousy, had been caught and horribly murdered as he left the Electress; the other brother had been concerned in the brutal assassination of a wealthy Englishman whose wife the young adventurer hoped to marry; his accomplices were taken and hanged and he had fled, to perish miserably and obscurely in battle.

These tragedies had not been without their effect on Aurora; she found the echo of them in her own wild heart; she had wept with passionate indignation for Philip and scorned the other for a fool.

As for herself she meant to be neither the victim of passion nor of folly, but in every way to avoid disaster; her impetuous spirit was governed by a cool brain; she was intelligent in large matters, clever in small ones, intensely conscious of being an extraordinary woman, not vain of her beauty nor her wit nor her charm, but aware of the value of these things, how men could be led by them, and the power they might purchase.

She had no evil qualities; her most sincere emotion was her passionate love for her beautiful little son, Maurice; perhaps a sense of stifled discontent lay deep hidden in her heart, mingled with the adventurer’s secret longing for haven and security; this she never admitted even to herself, but sometimes it colored her behavior, as now when she was inclined to be spiteful with the young and rather silly girl absorbed in the magic of a great love.

“She really would leave everything for him,” thought the Countess; she wondered what it must be to feel like that; the creature was so shy and reserved about it too.

Aurora had herself, purely as a matter of course, tried to bring Patkul to her feet when he had first come to the Dresden Court; neither her fidelity to Augustus nor the native coldness of her disposition prevented her from endeavoring to subjugate every notable man who crossed her path; that the Livonian had been ice to her and flame to Hélène D’Einsiedel did not add to the good-humor with which she viewed this romantic, old-fashioned love affair.

Vanity apart, her good sense condemned the type of man who could prefer a stupid girl, endowed only with the passing prettiness of youth, to a woman like herself.

She was extremely lovely, vivid in coloring for the North, bright brown eyes, soft brown hair, graceful from crown to heel, every movement charming, every look and gesture radiant with beauty.

“Why are you angry with me, Countess?” asked the girl suddenly, tossing down the sugar on to the rose-colored cushions.

“How did you know I was angry?”

“Oh, la, you look as if you would like to beat me!”

Aurora suddenly moved and clasped her long hands round her knees.

“I suppose I envied you,” she said, in one of her careless generous impulses. “You have something I have never had.”

Hélène did not quite understand.

“Little silly!” laughed Aurora. “Do you not know that I am incapable of loving any man as you love your Patkul?”

“You pretend very well,” said Hélène, with a demureness that might have hid a touch of malice.

Aurora was silent; yes, she could pretend very well, she had often marveled at that herself, often been genuinely amazed at the strength and sincerity of the emotion she could raise in others and her own lack of response; she would have liked to have felt, if only for half an hour, any adoration for any man equal to that this girl felt for General Patkul; she knew that such an emotion would have been entirely in opposition with all her plans and schemes, but in her avid desire for life and knowledge, she would have given much for the curiosity of the experience.

However, she put the thought out of her mind, moved quickly, and glanced again at the letter from Augustus.

She was vexed that he was too ill to take the command of his armies in person, the more so as she guessed this illness to be consequent on his debauches with the Czar at Birsen; Peter to her was a monster, she could not forgive in Augustus the weakness that made him the companion of his ally’s vulgar orgies.

“Yes, ’twere better to be a man now, free on horseback,” she said. “This waiting amid one’s toys is an ugly part of a woman’s life”—she paused, then added quickly, “it must be hateful to belong to a man who is defeated.”

Hélène gazed at her with startled eyes.

“You do not think that Saxony will be defeated, Countess?”

“He has been defeated already,” replied Aurora. “And do you think he has very much chance? The savage Muscovite is no use—every battle will be a Narva for him. Denmark is silenced—and the King of Sweden is great.”

Mdle. D’Einsiedel forgot her negro and her parrot.

“He is a cruel tyrant—a bitter oppressor!” she exclaimed; her pale little face looked sharp with anger, “he fights for the lust of conquest—a heartless, fierce man.”

“So speaks the betrothed of Patkul,” answered Aurora. “You are too bitter against this man to judge him. He is a hero. And young and splendid, a Viking, child.”

“This is not the age for Vikings,” said Hélène coldly, “he is like his father. Patkul has told me of them—hard and cruel—how I loathe cruelty.”

Tears shone in her soft eyes and her lips quivered; she was thinking that it was just possible Patkul might one day be in the power of this same cruelty.

“Nay, he is just and even generous; you heard how, after Narva, he gave all the Russian officers their liberty, detaining only M. de Croy, to whom he paid full honor—and the modesty of his dispatches! ’Tis said that with his own hand he struck out his praises and put in those of the Czar.”

“’Tis his vanity,” said Hélène scornfully, “he wishes to impress the world—see if he is kind to his peasants—to his women-folk—see if he has ever thought of the justice of Livonia’s wish for liberty—he blindly continues his father’s tyrannies.”

Aurora checked her with a light laugh.

“That is none of it women’s business. Augustus is the best-natured person in the world, but I doubt if he knows much of his peasantry in either Saxony or Poland!” and she laughed again at the thought.

“He would be a better prince if he did,” said Hélène, with a sternness strange in one of her youth and frivolous appearance. “Patkul says the day will surely come when all the peoples will rise up and cast down their rulers.”

“Patkul is a fanatic and a visionary—a rebel also. Karl is his King. I am a Swede. Hélène, I have no sympathy with these revolting Livonians.”

Hélène glanced at the vivid lovely face of the Countess and her eyes narrowed.

“The Elector would not care to hear you speak so of Sweden,” she remarked.

“The Elector expects no hypocrisy from me,” replied Aurora haughtily. “I am not his wife. He knows that a man like Karl would attract a woman like me—I have told him I should like to meet him.”

She had, in truth, heard of the austere life and cold manners of the young conqueror whose name was now so famous in Europe, and she had imagined herself subduing him with her charm; she could not resist picturing herself as the Cleopatra to this immaculate Cæsar; Augustus had been amazed with anger at the Czar’s crude suggestion that the famous beauty should be used to beguile their enemy, but the woman herself had long toyed with the idea; it would be a wonderful triumph and, she believed in her heart, an easy one. Karl was only a boy, after all, and had probably never been tempted; it was impossible that he intended to be absorbed for ever in schemes of military aggrandizement and glory; and she had never failed yet. “Perhaps I could do more in half an hour than your Patkul has done in a lifetime,” she said suddenly.

“Oh, would you speak for Livonia?” asked Hélène, then quickly and with a blush, “but no, Patkul would not like that.”

“Let him rely on his sword and his virtue,” said Aurora haughtily. “Saxony may require my services.”

“He would not wish that you should sue to Sweden for him!” exclaimed Hélène.

Aurora rose.

“Wait till King Karl has overrun Poland and is at the gates of Dresden.”

She clasped her hands behind her head, shaking down her bright hair that was undressed, and gazing fixedly at her reflection in a circular mirror framed with gilt balls that hung above the couch.

Hélène sat silent on the rose-colored cushions; the parrot swung idly in the ring above her head; the page had wandered to the window and was flattening his face against the pane; a monkey in a crimson coat that had been sleeping in a basket lined with white satin, now came climbing over the furniture, turning its wizened face from one to the other of the two silent, beautiful women and chattering at both of them. This was the only movement in the gorgeous little room, now filled with the spring sunshine that streamed softly through the long curtains of straw-colored silk. Aurora had dropped her arms, and with her hands clasped before her continued to gaze at her resplendent image.

Her thoughts were entirely personal; she cared very little for politics though she had an intelligent understanding of them; she had watched Augustus undertake this war light-heartedly enough, knowing that it was only an excuse to keep a large standing army with which to overawe Poland, but the quality of Karl XII having surprised them all into disaster, Aurora became angry with the war and those who had suggested it, and impatient with the enthusiastic Patkul, and gradually her attention had become fixed on the figure of the King of Sweden, rendered more arresting by every success, more terrible in the eyes of men and more attractive in the eyes of women.

Aurora knew something of what the Court of Sweden was like.

“He has never met a woman like me,” she thought, and there was a glow, as of coming triumph, at her heart.

The other woman’s reflections had traveled far from herself! they were with a fair, rather ordinary-looking soldier, with short-sighted, anxious eyes, and a blunt-featured face that had a certain pathos in its open sincerity and goodness, who was now probably riding to and fro in the confusion of battle, steadying the Saxon troops against the victorious ranks of Sweden.

She loved him so utterly, so ardently believed in his cause and his life-work that he seemed to her like a being charmed whom no actual danger could touch, yet she yearned over him, child as she was, with a yearning that was near tears; and this, though her whole being was pervaded by the supreme happiness of her love which kept her in a serene and beautiful aloofness from all that was painful or terrifying.

The monkey clambered to the end of the couch, dropped into Hélène’s lap, and began stealing the sugar scattered over the cushions.

Aurora moved slowly from the mirror and told the page to bring her writing materials; when they were given her she began to write, not an answer to her lover’s neglected letter but a paper of French verses to Karl XII.

Hélène, wrapt in her dreams, heeded her no more than she did the monkey crunching sweetmeats on her lap.