Suddenly he swung round on the Prebendary, and asked: "What think you, Nordin?"
"If you feel that you can trust him, Majesty," answered the cleric quietly.
Gustavus looked at Roger. "Are you prepared to buy your freedom by taking service with me?"
Roger felt little beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead. He knew that his fate lay in the balance, and that to this impatient, impulsive monarch he must make an immediate answer. At any age the thought of being cast into a dungeon, with no guarantee of ever being released, holds all the horror of a nightmare, and at the age of twenty even a violent and painful death seemed preferable. Yet he knew that there were some things he could not do if he was ever to have any respect for himself again. Rallying all the firmness he could muster, and desperately seeking the most tactful way to phrase his reply he said: "I would count it a high honour to serve so wise and gallant a King as your Majesty, were I not already committed to my own. I beg you to believe, Sire, that during my stay in Stockholm I have heard so much in praise of you from the common people, that in this I speak the honest truth."
"Well said, Monsieur!" exclaimed the King; and with a pleased glance at Nordin, he added: "See you, he is trustworthy; and I judged as much."
Turning swiftly back to Roger, he went on: "In the matter that I have in mind you can serve your own master and myself at the same time. But to start with you must disabuse yourself of the idea that you or anyone else can hope to change the nature of that she-devil Catherine. She is a born thief, and had she been bred in the gutter would have delighted even more in picking her clients' pockets than practising the monstrous whoredoms that are her very breath. As it is she has become a robber on the grand scale. She covets land and subject peoples, and will grab them at every opportunity that offers until the day of her death. You may take my royal word for that, and I am in a far better position to judge her than Mr. Pitt can ever hope to be. I have talked to her for hours at a stretch, and after my last visit to her court, in '83, I came away with the conviction that war between Sweden and Russia was inevitable. I have been planning for it and strengthening my forces ever since; by playing the part of David to Goliath is the only way we Swedes can hope to keep our independence."
There was something infectious in Gustavus's obvious conviction that he must risk everything by going to war with a far greater power in order to save his people from a foreign yoke, and Roger, realising with immense relief that he was no longer threatened with life-long incarceration in a dungeon, caught it. Forgetting for a moment that he was addressing a King, and should have waited until his opinion was asked, he cried impulsively:
"From all that I have learned while in the north I judge you right, Sire. But what of your nobility? I gravely doubt if one-tenth of them see the matter with the same clarity as yourself. They are blinded by their own petty interests, and I beg you not to count on their support."
" 'Tis true enough," declared the King. "Their mean and narrow outlook is the gravest danger that I have to face. For their own aggrandizement they would pull me down to-morrow if they had the chance. They prate of patriotism yet have not an ounce of it between the lot of them, and would rather see the Russians masters here than lift a finger to help me save the country. For nigh on seventy years the stiff-necked hide-bound aristocracy has been the curse of Sweden. Yet I made myself their master when little more than a boy and I am their master still."
Gustavus's eyes were gleaming and in his excitement he began to pace up and down. Suddenly he swung round on Roger. "Did you ever hear tell, Monsieur, how I put a period to their rapacity which was bleeding the country to death, and brought them to heel?"
Roger bowed. "I have heard, Sire, that with great courage you defied your Riksdagin 1772 and assumed the reins of Government yourself; but never the details of how you accomplished that great feat."
"I will tell you, then," said the King, evidently delighted to have a new audience for his favourite story. "You'd scarce credit the humiliation to which the monarchy was subjected when I was a boy. My father, Adolphus Frederick, was nearer to being a figurehead of the nobles while lacking the freedom they enjoyed, than a King. He had but two votes in the Senate, no power to make peace or war, levy taxes or raise recruits; and he could not even grant new patents of nobility except on the occasion of his Coronation. His ministers were chosen for him and he was not allowed a say in the filling of any of the principal appointments of the State. My tutors were selected by the Senate; not for their learning but on account of their subservience to it, and they were changed regardless of my education each time the Caps outed the Hats or vice versa. The Palace was so full of spies that we dared not talk of our private concerns above a whisper; and my father and mother were not even allowed a voice in the choice of a wife for me. Would you believe it, Monsieur, that odious oligarchy actually picked on the sister of the mad Bang of Denmark as my bride; and did so out of pure malice, well knowing the hatred the two royal houses had long borne one another."
Roger made an appropriately sympathetic face. He had not known the circumstances leading up to Gustavus's marriage, and while they could not possibly excuse his abominable treatment of the unfortunate Sophia Magdalena, they certainly gave grounds for his initial prejudice against her.
"Yet the protests of all my family were of no avail," Gustavus hurried on. "I was forced to marry her whether I would or no; and, year by year we became more obviously naught but prisoners in a gilded cage. The insolence of the Senate grew to be insupportable. They took to nominating their creatures as our chaplains, ordered our clothes and decided what we should have to eat. The final limit was reached when they announced that in future they meant to dispense with the King's signature on documents of State and, instead, use a name-stamp."
Gustavus's handsome but slightly foxy face had gone a bright pink, and his prominent eyes were popping with anger as he repeated indignantly: "A name-stamp! Just think of it; a name-stamp!
"But that was too much, even for my father. He was a studious, and kindly man, but a poor weak creature. I doubt if he would have jibbed even then had it not been for myself and my mother. Louisa Ulrica was a worthy sister of Frederick the Great. For her wisdom, taste and learning she well deserved the appellation of 'the Minerva of the North.' And she had courage, too; abundant courage. That rabble of a Senate feared her, and endeavoured to bring discredit on her by an accusation of sending to Berlin some of the jewels which had rightfully been presented to her from the Royal Treasury. She flung the lot back in their faces and told them to keep their trash. When the crisis arose she and I, between us, forced my father to threaten to abdicate unless they abandoned their project of the name-stamp. For a few days he feared that he would share the fate of your Charles the First; but we kept him firm, for once, and I made a personal tour of every department of State, forbidding them to act on any order that did not bear the King's written signature. The Senate found that it could not govern without even the shadow of a King, and collapsed like a pricked bubble."
Abruptly the speaker relapsed into silence, evidently becoming absorbed in his memories; so Roger, thinking it to be the end of the tale and that some comment was called for, said: "That was indeed a most satisfactory outcome to your Majesty's fine display of initiative."
"Nay, nay!" cried the King, looking up. "That was but the beginning; the testing time which taught me that when called to book the Senate were no more than a pack of craven fools. The affair of the name-stamp occurred over two years before I came to the throne. While still Crown Prince I had to bide my time, but I began to make my preparations for a coup d'etatin secret. When my father died I was in France. The Estates busied themselves against my return by wrangling over the terms of an even more stringent coronation oath than any that had been forced upon my predecessors; those stupid babblers little knew that I was already taking measures for their overthrow. For my project I needed an ample supply of money wherewith to bribe key-men and suborn my own troops. I managed to persuade old Louis XV to subsidise me to the tune of six million livres; though what that cost me by way of a pourboireto the Du Barry, I shudder to recall."