Part 6 (1/2)
Thus thrown off his guard and rea.s.sured, the steward, who, like his master, had probably drunk not wisely, confessed that he had loved Dyveke, and had asked her to be his wife. ”But, sire,” he added, ”that was the extent of my offence. I was never intimate with her.” During the remainder of the banquet Christian was most affable to the indiscreet steward, not only showing no trace of resentment, but treating him with marked friendliness.
The following day, however, Torbern was flung into prison, and charged, not only with his confession, but with the murder of the woman he had so vainly loved; and, in spite of the storm of indignation that swept over Denmark, the pleadings of the Papal Legate, Arcimbaldo, and the tears of the Queen, was sentenced to death for a crime of which there was no sc.r.a.p of evidence to point to his guilt.
This gross act of injustice proved to be the beginning of Christian's downfall. His cruelties and oppressions had long made him odious to his subjects, and the climax came when a popular uprising hurled him from his throne and drove him an exile to Holland. An attempt to recover his crown ended in speedy disaster, and his last years were spent, in company with his favourite dwarf, in a cell of the Holstein Castle of Sondeborg.
As for Sigbrit, the woman who had played such a conspicuous and baleful part in Christian's life, she deserted her benefactor at the first sign of his coming ruin and ended her days in her native Holland, bemoaning to the last the loss of her ”little dove,” whom she had seen raised almost to a throne and had lost so tragically.
CHAPTER IX
THE ROMANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL SWEDE
Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, owes his place in the world's memory to his brawny muscles and to his conquest of women. Like the third Alexander of Russia of later years, he could, with his powerful arms, convert a thick iron bar into a necklace, crush a pewter tankard by the pressure of a mighty hand, toss a heavy anvil into the air and catch it as another man would catch a ball, or with a wrench straighten out the stoutest horse-shoe ever forged.
And his strength of muscle was matched by his skill in the lists of love. No Louis of France could boast such an array of conquests as this Saxon Hercules, who changed his mistresses as easily as he changed his coats; the fairest women in Europe, from Turkey to Poland, succeeded each other in bewildering succession as the slaves of his pleasure, and before he died he counted his children to as many as the year has days.
Of all these fair and frail women who thus ministered to the pleasure of the ”Saxon Samson,” none was so beautiful, so gifted, so altogether alluring as Marie Aurora, Countess of Konigsmarck, the younger of the two daughters of Conrad of Konigsmarck. Born in the year 1668, Aurora was one of three children of the Swedish Count Conrad and his wife, the daughter of the great Field-Marshal Wrangel. Her elder sister, little less fair than herself, found a husband, when little more than a child, in Count Axel Lowenhaupt; her brother Philip, the handsomest man of his day in Europe, was destined to end his days tragically as the price of his infatuation for a Queen.
Betrayed by a jealous woman, the Countess Platen, whose overtures he spurned, this too gallant lover of Sophia Dorothea of Celle, wife of the first of our Georges, was foully done to death in a corridor of the Leine Schloss by La Paten's hired a.s.sa.s.sins, while she looked smilingly on at his futile struggle for life, and gloated over his dying agonies.
On the death of her father, when she was but a child of three, Aurora was taken by her mother from her native Sweden to Hamburg, where she grew to beautiful young womanhood; and when, in turn, her mother died, she found a home with her married sister, the Countess Lowenhaupt. And it is at this period of her life that her romantic story opens.
If we are to believe her contemporaries, the world has seldom seen so much beauty and so many graces enshrined in the form of woman as in this daughter of Sweden. Her description reads like a catalogue of all human perfections. Of medium height and a figure as faultless in its exquisite modelling as in its grace and suppleness; her hair, black as a raven's plumage, and falling, like a veil of night, below her knees, emphasised the white purity of face and throat, arms, and hands. Her teeth, twin rows of pearls, glistened between smiling crimson lips, curved like Cupid's bow. Her face of perfect oval, with its delicately moulded features, was illuminated by a pair of large black eyes, now melting, now flaming, as mood succeeded mood.
To these graces of body were allied equal graces of mind and character.
Her conversation sparkled with wit and wisdom; she could hold fluent discourse in half a dozen tongues; she played and sang divinely, wrote elegant verses, and painted dainty pictures. Her manner was caressing and courteous; she was generous to a fault, with a heart as tender as it was large. And the supreme touch was added by an entire unconsciousness of her charms, and an unaffected modesty which captivated all hearts.
Such was Aurora of Konigsmarck who, in company with her sister, set forth one day to claim the fortune which her ill-fated brother, Philip, was said to have left in the custody of his Hanoverian bankers--a journey which was to make such a dramatic revolution in her own life.
Arrived at Hanover the sisters found themselves faced by no easy task.
The bankers declared that they had nothing of the late Count's effects beyond a few diamonds, which they declined to part with, unless evidence were forthcoming that the Count had died and had left no will behind him--evidence which, owing to the secrecy surrounding his murder, it was impossible to furnish. And when a discharged clerk revealed the fact that the dishonest bankers had actually all the Count's estate, valued at four hundred thousand crowns, in their possession, the sisters were unable to make them disgorge a solitary mark.
In their extremity, they decided to appeal to the Elector of Saxony, who had known Count Philip well and who would, they hoped, be the champion of their rights; and, with this object, they journeyed to Dresden, only to find themselves again baffled. Augustus was away on a hunting excursion, and would not return for a whole month. His wife and mother, however, gave them a gracious reception, as charmed by their beauty and sweetness as sympathetic in their trouble.
When at last Augustus made his tardy appearance at his capital, the fair pet.i.tioners were presented to him by the Dowager Electress with words of strong recommendation to his favour. ”These ladies, my son,” she said, ”have come to beg for your protection and help, to which they are ent.i.tled both by birth and their merits. I beg that you will spare no effort to ensure that justice is done to them.”
His mother's pleading, however, was not necessary to ensure a favourable hearing from the Elector, whose eyes were eloquent of the admiration he felt for the two fairest women who had ever visited his land. Aurora's beauty, enhanced by her att.i.tude of appeal, the mute craving for protection, was irresistible. From the moment she entered his presence he was her slave, as anxious to do her will as any lovesick boy.
And it was to her that, with his courtliest bow, he answered, ”Be a.s.sured, dear lady, that I shall know no rest until your wrongs are repaired. If I fail, I myself will make reparation in full. Meanwhile, may I beg you and your sister to be my guests, that I may prove how deep is my sympathy, and how profound the respect I feel for you.”
Thus it was that by the magic of beauty Aurora and her Countess sister found themselves installed at the Dresden Court, feted like Queens, receiving the caresses of the Court ladies, and the homage of every man, from Augustus himself to the youngest page, of whom a smile from their pretty lips made a veritable slave. As for the Elector, sated as he was with the easy smiles and favours of fair women, he gave to the Swedish beauty, from the first, a homage he had never paid to any of her predecessors in his affection.
But Aurora was no woman to be easily won by any man. She listened smilingly to the Elector's honeyed words, and received his attentions with the gracious complaisance of a Queen. When, however, he ventured to tell her that ”her charms inspired him with a pa.s.sion such as he had never felt for any woman,” she answered coldly, ”I came here prepared for your generosity, but I did not expect that your kindness would a.s.sume a form to cause me shame. I beg you not to say anything that can lessen the grat.i.tude I owe you, and the respect I feel for you.”
Here indeed was a rebuff such as Augustus was little prepared for, or accustomed to. The beauty, of whom he had hoped to make an easy conquest, was an iceberg whom all his ardour could not thaw. He was in despair. ”I am sure she hates and despises me, while I love her dearer than life itself,” he confessed to his favourite Beuchling, who vainly tried to console and cheer him. He confided his pa.s.sion and his pain to Aurora's sister, whose hopeful words were alike powerless to dispel his gloom.
When Aurora held aloof from him, he sent letter after letter of pa.s.sionate pleading to her by the hand of the trusty Beuchling. ”If you knew the tortures I am suffering,” he wrote, ”your kindness of heart could not resist pitying me. I was mad to declare my pa.s.sion so brutally to you. Let me expiate my fault, prostrate at your feet; and, if you wish for my death, let me at least receive my sentence from your own sweet lips.”