CHAPTER IV
Next morning M. Fabrice obtained permission to see the King.
He found him closely guarded by the janissaries who had captured him, in an apartment of Ismail Pasha’s palace at Bender.
Karl was as the fight had left him; he had slept in his coat and top-boots, to the great amazement of the Turks, and received M. Fabrice seated on a divan covered with costly cushions, in his torn and burnt uniform, his person all stained with blood and powder.
He looked at M. Fabrice with his extraordinary straight and expressionless gaze; his eyes were slightly bloodshot, his cheeks unshaven, his fair hair disheveled, but his demeanor was calm and even gentle; there was nothing of yesterday’s Viking fury.
He raised M. Fabrice, who had gone on his knees beside him, and passed over the envoy’s emotion by asking with a smile what the Turks thought of the battle of Bender.
“Sire,” replied M. Fabrice, “they say that your Majesty killed twenty janissaries with your own hand.”
“Ah, these tales are only half true,” remarked Karl.
M. Fabrice now informed him that M. Grothusen, M. Görtz, and the principal officers had been ransomed.
“Who by?” asked Karl sharply.
“Ismail Pasha, sire, who paid for M. Grothusen out of his own pocket, the English minister, and that French nobleman, La Motraye, who came to Bender to see your Majesty.”
“And you yourself,” said the King keenly. “You have contributed your best.”
“Sire, it was my bare duty.”
“You shall all be repaid,” answered Karl briefly; pecuniary obligations weighed very lightly on him, for he made no account at all of money in which he had no interest, and which he profusely scattered whenever it was in his possession.
Still the obligation to the generous Pasha slightly galled him.
“Is Frederic ransomed?” he asked abruptly.
“Alas, sire, he was slain by the Tartars who captured him, and who quarreled over their victim.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Karl, then he added, “I think first he must have slain a dozen of these barbarians with his own hands!”
M. Fabrice was silent a moment, and the King stared down at the floor.
“I have other bad news for your Majesty,” said he sadly. “King Stanislaus has been made a prisoner by the Turks and is being brought to Bender.”
Karl’s hard chest heaved and he raised his head as if to speak.
His eyes shot a fiery glance, but he was silent.
“A messenger came from Moldavia this morning,” continued M. Fabrice, “to say that the King was stopped at Jassy. He was traveling as a Swede with a message for your Majesty, but was recognized by the hospodar of Moldavia----”
“Why could he not stay in Pomerania?” demanded Karl sternly.
“Sire, he certainly hoped that his presence might accomplish what his letters have not been able to--and that he might persuade your Majesty to permit him to resign the crown you gave him.”
Karl rose impatiently, towering over the envoy, himself a tall man wearing a high peruke.
“No more of that, M. Fabrice,” he said. “I will not hear these arguments.”
But M. Fabrice insisted, thinking, not unnaturally, that his present misfortunes might soften the inflexible spirit of Karl.
“Sire, the King of Prussia offers a treaty whereby Poland and your Majesty league to keep the Czar in check. This cannot be until Stanislaus resigns his claim, and this he is willing to do--to benefit your Majesty whom he loves,” added M. Fabrice simply.
But Karl was not to be moved; not even this powerful alliance against his arch-enemy, not even the prospect of gaining the dearest wish of his life in humbling Peter could shake him for an instant from the course that he considered the just and right, nor into forsaking his friend, even at that friend’s request.
He was no politician, and, now that Count Piper was not there to guide him, solved these questions by the simple code of a soldier’s honor, a proceeding strange indeed to the councilors of Europe.
“I will never make peace with Augustus, who has broken the peace of Altranstadt like the villain he is, nor with Denmark, who has broken the treaty of Traventhal, nor with Prussia and Hanover, who have vilely bought my lands from the false princes. Times will change--do you think I shall always be like this--and then I will smite them as I smote before. Mark you, M. Fabrice, it was only behind my back they dared to raise their heads--and when I return----”
He made an instinctive movement towards his sword, and finding only the empty straps gave a start, while the color paled in his face.
Instantly recovering himself, he turned to M. Fabrice with a proud smile.
“You know that I am not given to boasting,” he said. “And you know that when I return the affairs of Europe will change.”
As he spoke these words, the quiet confidence of which was not affected, he was without any resource in the world, not even master of his own person.
His enemies had indeed reared their heads in his absence; Denmark had fallen on his provinces and succeeded in achieving some success despite the Swedish victory of Helsingborg; Augustus was again firmly established on the throne he had vowed to renounce; the Elector of Hanover, now King of England, and for that reason dangerous, had bought some of the territory wrested from Karl in his absence, and was prepared to defend what he held; and Frederic of Prussia would be Sweden’s foe if Karl did not consent to the resignation of Stanislaus.
Therefore Karl had practically the whole of Europe either secretly or openly against him, and no friend or ally; both Louis XIV and the Emperor were unfriendly to him, and it had been one of the excuses he had made for not leaving Bender that he could not trust himself in the territories of either of these nations.
The condition of his own country, without her ruler, drained of her best manhood, with commerce ruined, the command of the Baltic lost, and surrounded by enemies, was deplorable.
It seemed as if Count Piper’s worst forebodings were to come true, and the exploits of Karl XII would lose all that Karl X had won by the Peace of Brömsebro and the Peace of Roskilde, and Karl XI consolidated by the Battle of Lund.
M. Fabrice, steeped in the politics of Europe, and whose main interest in life was the fortune of the realm over which his young master was one day to ride, looked with amazement at the fortitude of Karl in face of events so untoward and a future so uncertain.
Yet in his own heart he felt a certain spark of hope inspired by the sheer strength of this strange character.
It was Karl who broke the thoughtful silence.
“Go to King Stanislaus, my dear Fabrice,” he said quietly, “and tell him never to abandon his claims, for I never shall, nor make any peace with our mutual enemies. And that if I live, all will be different.”
“If only your Majesty would return to Stockholm!” exclaimed the envoy.
Karl gave his ugly smile.
“That I shall never do,” he replied, “until I can return victorious. But perhaps it is time I went North.”
By which M. Fabrice concluded that the King had now resigned all hopes of that Turkish army for which he had waited and Poniatowski intrigued for nearly four years.
The envoy from Holstein-Gottorp wondered where Karl hoped to find the means to carry out these defiances he still hurled at his enemies; the task seemed to him fairly hopeless, and yet, as he stood in the presence of this man, he could not feel disheartened.
“You have no longer any faith in me, M. Fabrice,” said Karl, looking with a smile at the envoy’s perturbed face.
M. Fabrice did not answer, but with a swelling heart turned away.
The King looked at his bloodstained hands with some disgust and was about to call for water, when Ismail Pasha entered, conducting M. Grothusen.
The Swede gave an exclamation on seeing the state of his master.
“It is a shameful thing to leave his Majesty without a sword!” he exclaimed.
“Allah preserve us,” answered Ismail Pasha, “he swore that he would cut off our beards.”
With that he retired, leaving the King and his two friends alone.
As if he wished to prevent M. Grothusen from referring to his present plight, Karl began to speak at once of the arrival of King Stanislaus at Bender.
“I must see him,” said the King. “I must tell him to return at once to Pomerania and fight there to the utmost.”
“Sire,” replied M. Grothusen sadly, “King Stanislaus comes under a military escort, and I do not think that anyone will be allowed to approach him.”
“But they bring him to Bender!” exclaimed Karl.
M. Grothusen averted his face.
“I do not think that your Majesty will stay at Bender.”
At this reminder of his captive position the King, who had not allowed a single impatient word to escape him since he had been made prisoner, colored and made a haughty movement with his head.
“Where do they propose to take me?” he asked haughtily.
“I cannot discover, sire. I think to Adrianople.”
Karl glanced at M. Fabrice whose face was still further overcast.
“Well,” he remarked, “perhaps we shall yet get our 200,000 men from the Porte. See if you can get a message to King Stanislaus to say that we are still unshaken in our designs.”
He was silent a moment, and then added in an impetuous manner, rare for him:
“If they take me to Adrianopole I will punish Mahomet Baltadgi--I will disclose to the Sultan that my letters were intercepted and that Count Fleming was corresponding with the Khan.”
That evening the King was taken in a scarlet litter to Adrianople, and King Stanislaus arrived at Bender, having received on the road, by the mouth of M. Fabrice, the message of his inflexible friend.