CHAPTER I

The Czar Peter listened in silence to the news from Poland; he had appeared lately to have forgotten the war, and to have become entirely absorbed in the building of his new city and fort on the mud-banks of the Neva.

Anxious to break the spirit of the Malo-Russians who had shown themselves restive under his autocratic rule, he had transported thousands of these men whose forced labor was draining the morass as a preliminary to the foundations of the new city.

That hundreds of them died through the unhealthfulness of the district and the hard conditions of their life was nothing to the Czar.

He had decided that the new capital was to be called St Petersburg, and that the great fortress therein was to be named St. Peter and St. Paul and used for the burial-place of the Czars of Russia, instead of the church of St Michael in Moscow.

When General Patkul joined his master at the little house called Marli, he found, to his great disappointment, that Peter exhibited a moody indifference with regard to the war and the astonishing conquests of Karl XII.

He was now often in his carpenter’s shed dressed like a Dutch skipper, and working with his hands.

“Karl could not do this,” he said one day to Patkul, who was surveying his occupation with some dismay.

“Do what, sire?” asked the Livonian.

Peter touched the planes and lathes on the carpenter’s bench.

“This,” he said. “No, he could not turn a table-leg--nor found a city.”

“He can conquer kingdoms,” said Patkul bitterly enough.

Peter leant back against the rough wall of the shed; his short, soft, dusky curls were hanging over his eyes; his expressive charming face was pale and tired; his large dark eyes full of a veiled fire; his blue blouse was open on a fine cambric shirt (he was always very nice in his linen) and his breeches and woolen stockings were covered with sawdust and chips of wood.

He looked at Patkul kindly.

“Do you think that what that man does will endure?” he asked.

“Conquests have endured, sire, nations have been enslaved for generations through the exploits of a man like this.”

The Czar was not thinking of the freedom of future generations; he meant to build a great nation, not a free one.

“Sweden can never hold the Baltic Provinces,” he replied.

“Who is to prevent him?”

“I shall,” said Peter.

Patkul looked earnestly at the Czar, as if to discover if he spoke in jest or earnest.

“Well,” added Peter, with narrowed eyes and signs of a rising temper. “Do you not think I shall yet utterly crush the Swede? I have had my lesson, Patkul.”

He seized a knife and stabbed moodily at the carpenter’s bench before him.

“Your Majesty has the genius to profit by it,” said Patkul gravely.

“All my battles are not going to be like Narva,” continued the Czar. “I have learnt something of war. The King of Poland is a fool. Why did he not train my Muscovites?”

“He told me, sire, that he had no officers, and complained that the Russians were out of hand and ravaging Lithuania.”

“I hope they may lay it waste from end to end,” said Peter. “At the same time, if any ever return to Russia, I will have them knouted for disobedience.”

He frowned as he thought of Augustus, a character that intensely irritated him; the elegant splendid Elector and the savage Czar had been only able to tolerate each other when both had been intoxicated; only in debauchery had they anything in common.

“He is a fool,” repeated the Czar. “If he had kept to the treaty of Birsen, Karl would have been ruined by now.”

“He lacked both money and means,” said Patkul, who had a certain friendship for Augustus, and a clear understanding of his difficulties.

“I think, sire, you can hardly conceive how he was, and is, hampered by the Polish Diet and families like the Sapieha.”

“He should punish them all. Had I been King of Poland, by now there would not be a rebel left,” answered Peter gloomily. “What is the merit of governing if one cannot overcome opposition?”

Patkul remembered the fate of the Strelitz who had ventured to oppose the Czar’s innovations, and the vengeance he had taken on his own wife and sister; certainly Peter knew how to make himself both feared and obeyed.

“Poland is in reality a Republic,” said the Livonian, “and Augustus is not free, even to punish.”

“Ah, Poland!” exclaimed the Czar impatiently. “What matter the laws and constitution of Poland? She can be dismembered as easily as that,” and he pulled apart a piece of wood he had snatched up in his strong fingers.

“The King of Sweden may take the crown of Poland,” said Patkul, thinking to rouse the Czar.

“And invade Saxony, and frighten the Elector’s fiddlers and dainty ladies!” laughed Peter.

“And invade Russia, sire.”

Peter rose.

“That is his design?”

“I am sure of it.”

“Well, we have a little time in which to drill our armies.”

“Sire, not so long.”

Peter smiled; he still did not seem greatly stirred by the account of the exploits of Karl.

“Is he not at Cracovia with a broken leg, eh, Patkul?”

“He mends fast; he is a creature of iron, and, once he is in the field again, Augustus will be driven before him as he was before.”

“Curse the Saxon,” exclaimed Peter, with sudden violence. “Had I faced Karl with 20,000 trained troops I had sent this Swede reeling backwards in his tracks!”

He spoke with a passion and a simple grandeur that warmed Patkul’s heart with some glimmerings of hope, unlikely as it seemed to him that out of the chaos that was Russia even Peter could raise an army that would overthrow the Swede, before whose arms the finest troops in Europe had broken.

“Klissow was extraordinary, sire,” he said. “The Saxons had never a chance----”

“And the Poles?”

“They broke and fled at the first cannonade.”

Peter made an impatient gesture.

“And Augustus still thinks to raise an army from these materials?”

“He is at Lublin or Marienbourg, sire, endeavoring to rouse the Palatinates.”

“Oh, he had better return to Dresden and amuse himself with his toes,” said Peter contemptuously.

“Karl would not leave him in peace, even in Dresden.”

“He will grovel?” asked Peter.

“I think he will,” replied Patkul. “He sent the Countess von Königsmarck to make terms. I know this, although the matter was kept secret.”

“A fribble and a fool!” cried Peter. “Have I ever had a chance, Patkul, with two such allies? This Saxon weakling--and Denmark, what does Denmark do?”

“He maintains a prudent silence, sire, and respects the treaty he dare not break.”

“A couple of dogs, of spiritless dogs!” said Peter fiercely. “But I, my friend, do not need either of them. The issue lies between Sweden and me.”

He paused, and fixed his dark powerful glance on the slight, energetic figure and resolute face of his general.

“Do you think,” he asked, in a quieter tone, “that this man’s work is to be compared to mine? I construct--he destroys. Is it easier to knock down a house with cannon or to build it up, carefully, brick by brick, with your own proper hands? And which is the more useful to mankind? I make Russia and Karl destroys Sweden.”

“But these conquests will enrich--as did those of the great Gustavus.”

“Nay, he does not fight for trade, for liberty, for the advancement of his people--for forts or markets, but for the empty fame of armies; he drains Sweden of men and money--to the point of exhaustion--for what? That he may make Europe stare at barren conquests.”

Peter, roused, as was his capricious manner, suddenly from a gloomy indifference to a deep enthusiasm--from melancholia, almost despair, to firm self-reliance and confidence--spoke with a power and a force that encouraged as it impressed Patkul, who hailed the man of genius and the great ruler in this young man in the peasant’s blouse who paced amid the litter of a workman’s shed; would to God, he thought, the Czar could always have his faith in himself, this clear outlook, this patience and calm judgment.

“All these lands will belong to Holy Russia,” continued the Czar. “Aye, and Poland too; his glory shall vanish, leaving but a name for children’s tales. I shall leave a power that will fight the world.”

He smiled, mournfully, almost tenderly, at Patkul.

“Are you dismayed at the progress of this Swede?” he asked, “and at my inaction? Do you think I show poorly beside his glory?”

He stepped up to the Livonian and laid a hand on the sleeve of his rich uniform.

“Look you, Patkul,” he said, with a noble air far removed from boasting, “he takes Varsovia and Cracovia--but I built St. Petersburg! He sets his heel on Poland, I give my hand to Russia, and raise her up--a nation among nations.”

Patkul was both moved and comforted.

“Ah, sire, would that you were always in this mood!”

A shadow passed over the Czar’s expressive face.

“Sometimes the devils get hold of me,” he muttered, “and nothing on earth seems real. When this war is over, I shall travel again. I should have seen Venice,” he added, irrelevantly, “had not that rebellion of the Strelitz called me back--think, a city on the sea! I, too, will have my city on the sea. A pity that Gordon died--he was a good man, a keen soldier, a faithful envoy. Poor Gordon, but I gave him a fine funeral.”

“Your Majesty is as well served now,” said Patkul gently.

“I know,” replied Peter warmly and affectionately.

“And those who serve me well shall be well rewarded.”

“Your Majesty’s success would reward me sufficiently,” said the Livonian simply. “Could I see the Swede defeated and my country freed----”

Peter interrupted.

“If you do not go down in these wars you will see Sweden ruined. As for your country--I shall be an easier master than Karl, if only because of my friendship to you,” he added, with a smile.

With this Patkul had to be contented, nay, grateful; perhaps in his innermost heart was a misgiving that Peter might prove as stern a tyrant as ever Karl or his father had been; he admired the Czar, he was fond of him, but he had not been able to deceive himself as to the terrible aspects of Peter’s character; he knew of his excesses, his cruelties, his fierce vengeances; it might have occurred to him that he was but devoting his life to rescue his unfortunate country from one master to place her under another, and that there could not be much liberty under the autocratic rule of Peter, but he trusted, with something of the faith of desperation, in the Czar’s love of progress and enlightenment, and hoped that a man so remarkable would by degrees reform himself as he reformed others.

There was, however, a shadow on his pleasant expressive face as Peter pronounced these words that referred to the future fate of his beloved Livonia.

The searching, though wild and mournful gaze of the Czar noted the shade that clouded the ardor of his general’s look.

“Patkul,” he said, “_believe in me_.”

The Livonian eagerly seized and eagerly pressed to his lips the work-worn hand of the Czar.

“Did I not believe in you, sire, I could not live,” he said quietly, but with intense feeling.

Peter smiled.

“Come into the house,” he answered.

The two men, the Czar in his workman’s apparel and Patkul in the splendid uniform of a Russian soldier, entered the little house called Marli.

In the room on the ground floor a meal was laid, roughly, yet many of the articles were of carved gold and beaten silver.

By the window where the late lilacs hung their blossoms from their thicket of close-packed leaves against the casement, Patkul saw his country-woman, now no longer Marpha, but baptized into the Orthodox Church by the name of Katherina.

She wore a handsome Russian dress of green velvet and orange-colored silk, both embroidered with gold; a long white gauze veil with a pearl edging hung from her stiff satin head-dress.

She was seated in a clumsy attitude, eating sweetmeats; neither her hands nor her face were clean, and already prosperity, idleness, and good-living were coarsening and spoiling her opulent beauty.

Patkul, looking at her, marveled at Peter; he was used to the refined loveliness of women like Aurora von Königsmarck, and to a court where women such as the Livonian would not have been tolerated as chambermaids.

Prince Mentchikoff entered, very splendid in European clothes, with a great curling peruke and a star on his breast, and looking very much like a courtier of King Louis.

Peter eyed him with satisfaction.

“My Lord Carmarthen had such a coat as that,” he said, fingering the skirts of heavy gray silk. “Do you remember, Danilovitch, what a fine gentleman he was? I should like to see him again--and his boat--that was a fine boat, Danilovitch.”

“When the war is over we will go again to England,” replied Mentchikoff. “They are the most sensible people in the world, and live in the most comfortable fashion.”

“Yet in too confined and precise a way,” returned Peter. “Nothing is to be changed or upset or altered.”

“Having achieved a fortunate constitution, under which it is a happiness to live,” said Patkul, “they are jealous to preserve it, and this temper shows in small things.”

The Tartar servant brought in the dinner; several kinds of drink, kvas, and pungent liquors, boiled cabbage and beetroot, pickled cucumbers and a great dish of parboiled fish, another of stewed meat.

The four took their places.

Katherina smiled pleasantly and placidly at every one; her breath already smelt of brandy, and she began drinking before she ate; her finery was stained with grease, for she was as often as not in the kitchen among the pots, and stale sugar disfigured her veil.

Patkul sat opposite to her, and his glance rested puzzled on this woman who had so entirely fascinated a man like Peter--perhaps the greatest man in Europe.

She accompanied him everywhere he went now; it was believed that he was going to marry her, even to make her his Empress if he could divorce Eudoxia; she was his confidante, and it was said, his adviser, in everything.

Her birth and breed made her sympathize with his schemes for a reform that would humiliate the nobility, and with the abolition of customs and conventions that made her own extraordinary elevation possible; like Mentchikoff, she was in favor of a new Russia where she could find her own fortunes; unlike him, no motives of patriotism, no appreciation what the task Peter was endeavoring to perform, mingled with her satisfaction at her personal good luck.

She was fond of the Czar; she had been as fond of Mentchikoff; she was ready to be as fond of any man whom it was her interest to serve; but as she could look no higher than Peter, her placid affections had concentrated on him; she was in many ways a remarkable woman, shrewd, well-balanced, quick and courageous; but it was difficult to know wherein Peter found the supreme attraction that caused him to be inseparable from her unless it was the immovable good nature and placid, healthy calm that took all his melancholies and caprices with a smile.

Patkul contrasted her in his mind with Hélène D’Einsiedel, so fair and soft and gentle; she seemed in his memory like a creature of another world, and his heart contracted with a sense of bitter loss as he recalled how she had come to him through the dark, snowy streets of Varsovia and placed her cold hands in his and offered him her chill lips in a mute sorrow of farewell.

And he had let her go, because he had shrunk from bringing her to Russia, among such company as the Czar kept.

But was she any happier now, in flight before the conqueror, and in what way, save for outward grossness, was Katherina worse than Aurora von Königsmarck, who pandered to a worse man, and exacted a higher price than did this peasant. While he was asking himself, with some bitterness, these questions, Peter, hitherto absorbed in his food, suddenly spoke:

“I shall keep you here, Patkul, Saxony is not worth your pains.”

The General flushed and started, the words came so pat on his reflections.

“I wish to return, sire,” he said.

“Why?” asked Peter, with a certain annoyance, but Katherina good-humoredly interfered.

“Why, let him go--his lady is there.”

Peter gave him a keen glance.

“You are safer in Russia,” he said. “Never trust a weakling,” he added shrewdly.

“Sire,” replied the Livonian, “as your envoy I am safe anywhere.”

“Never trust a weakling,” repeated the Czar.

But Patkul was resolute to return to Saxony.