He paused and added in a low voice: “I loved Patkul.”
He took a turn about the room in a great and increasing agitation.
“Seven years have I fought him--with no weapons but those that I could forge myself well; he had everything to his hand, and he conquered. But I am ready now. Are not things different, Danilovitch? I have built a city and a fort, a navy; I have trained an army--can I not defeat Karl of Sweden?”
“I never doubted,” replied Mentchikoff, a look of fiery enthusiasm in his little dark eyes, “that your Majesty would bring down this insolent braggart.”
“To break him, Danilovitch!” cried the Czar. “To smash his invincible armies, to send his veterans flying before me, to make him fly--to drive him to ruin, to exile, to make the glory of his victories disappear like smoke before the sun! That would be an achievement, Danilovitch!”
He paused, exhausted by his own passion, and caught hold of the back of the chair in which he had been sitting.
“I did not enter into this war for lust of conquest,” he said, as if justifying himself, yet with an almost wistful dignity. “Not for hate, as Denmark did--not for folly, as Saxony did. I wanted my Baltic ports--the trade, the commerce, the prosperity. No one understands that.”
“These things must be fought for, Peter Alexievitch,” replied Mentchikoff.
“To that end have I built a navy and trained an army,” said Peter sternly. “I perceive that I shall get nothing of what I want as long as Karl of Sweden is master of the North.”
He sat down again with something of a groan; rage at the defection of Augustus so consumed him that he could hardly command his thoughts.
“Sweden does not know,” remarked Mentchikoff, “what he has roused in Russia. He thinks the Muscovites may be scattered by the whip and are not worthy of powder and shot--he insults Augustus with impunity because he does not think that we are to be feared.”
Peter turned his inflamed eyes towards the dark, pearl-crowned ikon that hung above the stove.
“God, help me to do this one thing,” he muttered. “To smite Sweden.”
His face assumed an expression of dark and lowering anger.
“If Patkul is slain,” he added. “Now would Sweden dare?”
Then, with a sudden and entirely unconscious pathos, “Europe will not listen to me--I am only the Czar of Muscovy. They do not take me as a power to be reckoned with, Danilovitch.”