CHAPTER II

Augustus, with more energy than might have been expected from his easy nature, set himself to redeem the disaster of Klissow.

Having taken advantage of the accident of Karl to spread the news of his death, he summoned a convocation of the Polish nobles, and in the reaction occasioned by the belief in the death of the terrible captain, Augustus, by promises, smiles, and largesses, gained the support of many of the Palatinates, who were only hesitating as to which was the winning side.

The Cardinal Primate himself, who had been so eager to point out to the Diet the necessity of dethroning Augustus to placate Karl, came to Lublin and took, with the other magnates, the oath of allegiance to the Elector.

A fresh army of 50,000 was raised before it became known that Karl was alive, and even in the face of this news it was voted that six weeks be given to the Swedes in which to declare their terms for peace or war, and the same time to the rebel Sapieha of Lithuania, in which to lay down their arms.

Meanwhile Peter showed signs of coming to his ally’s assistance when Augustus had despaired of help from that quarter; moved by the energy and eloquence of Patkul, the Czar sent that General to put some spirit into the wandering Muscovite troops in Lithuania and Ingria, and these, reduced to some order and discipline by the efforts of the gallant Livonian, began to make vigorous attacks on the garrisons the King of Sweden had left behind in the conquered Provinces; and even Karl’s veteran troops admitted that the Muscovites were not so entirely to be despised as they had been led to believe by Narva.

Count Piper saw his master’s glory stationary if not dimmed.

He did not urge the King to seize this moment to conclude a favorable peace, having already proved the uselessness of such advice; but he represented to him, as coldly as possible, that the renown won by his arms might suffer by his entry into the confused field of Polish politics, his meddling with intrigues so involved as to be hardly understandable by a foreigner.

“While your Majesty waits to dethrone the King of Poland, Muscovy grows stronger.”

“After Poland, Russia,” replied Karl from the bed where he lay confined with his broken leg. “But I shall dethrone Augustus if I stay here fifty years.”

And despite the advices of his generals he continued to support the Diet of Varsovia, which, acting in opposition to that of Lublin, had been called together by the intrigues of the Cardinal Primate, and endeavored to give expediency an air of decency by searching the laws for justification for actions sufficiently indicated by necessity, and so giving a glow of dignity to the submissions exacted by the conqueror.

Karl, whose sole amusement was hearing the Scandinavian sagas read to him, and who bore his enforced idleness, so bitter to one of his active spirit, without either irritation or lament, had received greatly into his friendship the young Palatine of Posen, whose chivalrous spirit, high courage, and honorable character were pleasing to Karl’s code of manhood. His brother-in-law, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, had been killed at the battle of Klissow (thus in reality rendering null the object of the war, which was to restore this prince to his domains), and the stern young King had no companion of his own age beyond this Polish noble.

Stanislaus, frank, affable, and generous, neither presumed on nor cringed for Karl’s favor, and cherished no ulterior designs; he was content to see his country delivered from Saxon rule and hoped nothing for himself from Karl’s conquests.

The Elector’s gleam of prosperity was short-lived. As soon as Karl could mount his horse he advanced on the remnants of the Saxon army who, in this brief breathing space, had rallied from their defeat at Klissow.

Gyllenstierna had sent from Sweden troops to the number of over 10,000 of whom 6000 were cavalry, and twenty pieces of cannon.

The Saxons, under Steinau, fell back on Russia. Karl pursued them, and, swimming the river Bug at the head of his cavalry, fell on them at Pultask and utterly defeated them, Steinau and his staff being among the fugitives; then they marched on Thorn on the Vistula, where the again defeated Augustus had taken refuge, and proceeded to besiege the town.

The desperate Elector contrived to escape from the beleaguered garrison and retired towards Saxony.

Karl was now master of Poland; General Rehnsköld with one division of the army holding the center of the country, the frontiers of Russia being guarded by other army corps, and Karl, with the flower of his troops, camped a few miles outside Thorn.

Nothing disturbed his glory which seemed now at the apogee; Denmark respected the treaty at Traventhal and accepted in silence the near approach of his hereditary enemy to its frontiers; Swedish ships were in possession of the Baltic seas; and the arms of Karl threatened at once Saxony, the Empire, and Russia.

North Europe awaited in silence the next step of this conqueror who, as soon as his transports with reinforcements had arrived from Sweden, proceeded to close round the imperial town of Thorn.

After a splendid resistance the city capitulated on the third of October; Karl made a display of generosity by his munificence and courtesy towards Röbel, the heroic governor, and one of meanness by taxing the town, already ruined by the war, far more than it could afford to pay; it was becoming more and more apparent that this King cared for little but war, and knew not how to appreciate any but military merit.

Dantzic and Ebling, two free and imperial towns on the Vistula, having been too nice in granting consent to the passage of the Swedish reinforcements, were soon made to feel the terror of the conqueror’s arms, Dantzic being forced to pay a heavy fine and Ebling being entered by the Swedes, soldiers quartered with the burghers, cannon packed in the squares, and the inhabitants reduced to throw themselves on their knees in the streets before his triumphal entry imploring mercy.

Karl mulcted the town in a large sum, seized her arms, and left a garrison there, proceeding, with unmoved grandeur, on his implacable conquests.

The intrigues of the Cardinal Primate, waxing bolder as the fortunes of Augustus waned, succeeded in inducing the Diet to declare the Elector of Saxony incapable of wearing the crown of Poland. The Diet, inspired by the wish of the conqueror, would have crowned the life-long intrigues of the Cardinal with success, by offering the throne to James Sobieski, son of the last King of Poland, but this Prince, together with his brother Constantine, was kidnapped by Saxon troops at Breslau and sent to close confinement in Germany.

The assembly at Varsovia therefore found themselves bound to find another rival to Augustus.

The Elector’s fortunes now indeed seemed desperate; there was little more to be hoped from Saxony, where he had exhausted every resource, and nothing to be hoped from Poland, where his party had dwindled to a faction among factions, and where Karl was more absolute master than Augustus had been at the height of his prosperity.

The Swede had taken up his winter quarters at Heilsburg in Polish Russia, and from there surveyed tranquilly his conquests and his neighbors who regarded him with the respect of fear.

The war, which had now lasted four years, had been for him a series of unchecked victories; his arms had suffered no reverse and his reputation flamed in Europe; there had been no such invincible captain since the great Condé, and men could not remember a king who made a war of conquest with justice and mercy; no outrage, no massacre, no pillaging, or burning, no excesses, large or small, could be imputed to the soldiers of Karl.

He had attained, in a few years, a glory which is seldom the reward of a long and splendid career.

“Are you not now satisfied, sire?” asked Count Piper, with a real curiosity.

Karl smiled; he was in a good humor, for he had made an end of the Polish intrigues and was on the eve of giving a new King to Poland; he gave little confidence to his minister, but continued to employ him as one useful in those matters so distasteful to his own spirit, now entirely absorbed in war.

“You think to get me back to Stockholm, Count?” he asked.

Count Piper smiled in his turn; he knew too well the iron obstinacy with which he had to deal to attempt to persuade Karl to any design.

“Sire,” he counter-questioned, “on whom now do you intend to make war?”

Karl lifted his cold blue eyes.

“There is always the Czar.”

“But he has withdrawn himself, sire. I believe he cares no more about the war, despite the appeals of the Elector. He is absorbed in building his new city.”

“I will topple over the foundations of his city,” replied the stern young King. “Piper, have you ever known me alter my mind? I told you some while since that I had a mind to dethrone the Czar.”

“The occupation of your Majesty’s life is to be war?”

“What other occupation is there for a gentleman?” asked Karl.

Count Piper did not attempt to argue with him nor to express any opinion on this speech; Karl’s career had been so startlingly and dazzlingly successful that it seemed useless to warn him or advise him; the cautious and prudent minister did not even venture now to point out the immense difficulties of an invasion of Russia, and the almost superhuman task it would be to subdue such a country and dethrone such a man as Peter.

Karl could point to achievements so splendid that it seemed an impertinence to hint at possible disaster, or to urge caution on one whose exploits had been heroic to the point of miracles.

“At least, sire, accept some of the fruits of your victories.”

“You mean the crown of Poland?” said Karl thoughtfully.

He rose and went to the door of the tent, and stood looking out into the encampment that was fresh with spring breezes.

The minister gazed at him with the questioning curiosity and amazement that this young man had never failed to rouse in his heart.

Karl was now twenty-two years of age; a temperate, active, and simple life had developed his already splendid constitution into perfect hardihood; physically he was like the ancient Vikings whose exploits formed the subject of the sole literature he cared to read; tall, in fine proportion, with powerful shoulders and slender hips, and with the easy carriage of the soldier and the horseman, a creature of bone and muscle, nerve and sinew perfectly attuned.

His face had slightly changed, broadened and grown harder in the lines, but the expression was the same, the full lips, the curved nostrils, the blank eyes showed the same unmoved courage, the same indifference to things about him that had once made Count Piper liken him to a god--or an animal.

He still wore a dark blue uniform of the plainest cut, a black satin cravat, and was without peruke or lace or ribbons or jewels; never in the slightest particular had he deviated from the austere conduct he had vowed to follow; his living was of the simplest, his couch a straw pallet or his own cloak; his food such as that eaten by the meanest foot soldier; since he left Stockholm he had never tasted wine nor spoken to a woman beyond the few words he had been forced to exchange with Aurora von Königsmarck. He passed his life in the camp, his companions were all soldiers, and little seemed to interest him beyond the things of war; the affairs of Sweden he left entirely in the hands of the regency; he cared nothing for the news from his capital, and never corresponded with his sole surviving relations, the Queen Dowager and his sisters.

Count Piper could not love him; perhaps because he had schooled himself to be above human weakness, no one loved him; certainly he never asked for anyone’s affections and disclosed to no one his thoughts; his immense pride seemed to be satisfied by the fear he inspired even in his friends and respect accorded him even by his enemies.

“The crown of Poland, sire,” said the minister, who could not resist looking upon the present situation from a statesman’s point of view. “Your Majesty is aware how easily you might obtain this for yourself?”

“Yes,” replied Karl dryly.

“It is what policy indicates.”

“I never loved your policy, Count,” said the King.

“Yet it is not to be disdained, even by a conqueror.”

Karl gave his short, ugly laugh.

“I think I can dispense with it. As for this crown, I think it pleases me more to give it away than to wear it.”

Piper had been expecting this; yet he resolved to endeavor to turn Karl’s fantastic pride in another direction, and inspire him with the desire for a glory more useful to Sweden and mankind.

“Your Majesty might be truly the liberator of this distracted country and unite all factions in concord under your protection; the Romist faith whose arrogant clergy have enslaved these people might in this manner receive a shrewd blow, and your Majesty appear as defender of the Evangelical faith.”

Karl did not reply to this proposition with that rude coldness with which he generally received suggestions not entirely in accordance with his own preconceived plans.

The truth was that the prospect held out by Count Piper tempted him.

The great Gustavus had established the Lutheran faith in Sweden and had banished forever from the North the corruption, the tyranny, and the superstition of the Roman priests; to do the same in a country as large and as important as Poland would be a feat that recommended itself to the ambition of Karl.

To take Poland not only from Augustus, but from the Pope, would have been a triumph such as he would have keenly enjoyed, for, while religion had had little influence on his life, he accorded his hereditary faith full respect and always enforced the observances of Lutheranism in his camp.

Count Piper watched him in silence, seeing that he was at least pondering the idea.

“Where will your Majesty find a King for Poland?” urged the minister. “Not even your entreaties will prevail upon Alexander Sobieski to accept the crown while his elder brothers are prisoners--and where is there any other pretender worthy of notice?”

Karl knew that he spoke the truth; with the romantic chivalry characteristic of the Polish nation, the youngest Sobieski had refused to accept the crown that the fortune of war prevented the eldest from enjoying, and there was, indeed, no one else especially indicated.

But to take this throne for himself was not sufficiently glorious for Karl; he wished to do the unusual, the extraordinary, to make the world stare--not by what he accepted, but by what he refused.

Even the design of appearing as champion of the reformed faith lost its attraction for him, because a great prince lately dead had made his chief fame in this part; Karl did not wish to follow in the footsteps of anyone.

“No,” he said sternly, suddenly letting the tent flap fall and turning to look at his minister. “I have more pleasure in giving away crowns than in taking them.”

“You would, sire, sacrifice your interest----”

Karl interrupted.

“My interest!” he repeated as if offended, then with his ugly smile: “You should have been minister to some Italian prince, Piper, you are so fond of intrigues.”

The Count bit his lip and was silent; he would have liked to have mentioned Sweden and _her_ interests, but knew the cold repulse he would meet with.

The King crossed to his camp table and turned over some papers the secretary had left for his inspection, but with an absent look and a careless hand.

Count Piper was about to take his leave when his soldier servant ushered in the young Palatine of Posnania and Alexander Sobieski.

This latter had waited on Karl to urge him to revenge the capture of his two brothers by Augustus; it entirely suited both the temper and the policy of the King of Sweden to promise him satisfaction, but he was not now so cordial towards the young prince whose obstinate refusal to accept his father’s crown had rivaled and perhaps shadowed the generosity and strangeness of his own action.

But he greeted the two young Poles pleasantly, and offered each in turn the strong white hand from which he had drawn the long buffle glove worn with rein and sword pommel.

They were both brilliantly dressed, charming and graceful in manner and looks.

Karl’s eyes, blue and cold as frozen water, cast a strange glance on the elegant figure of Stanislaus Leczinski.

“Count,” he said, “here is the future King of Poland.”

The minister was startled into an imprudence; staring at the amazed face of the young noble, he cried impetuously:

“The Palatine is too young, sire!”

“He is older than I am,” said Karl dryly.