With this he lay down, and put his head on the hard pillow.
A faint, half-stifled sigh escaped him, then he lay silent and still, and either was or feigned to be asleep.
Count Piper did not leave the tent, but stood at the open door, looking sometimes at the tall figure of the King stretched on his narrow bed, and sometimes at Poltava, dark against the paling midnight sky up into which the moon was rising.
A sadness was on Count Piper and yet a calm; at that moment his was the clear vision of a man who has a premonition that his work is over, and looks back quietly and steadily on his life.
How differently he had dreamed it all!
What had he not meant to do for Sweden. Karl XI, his beloved master, had left his country greater than she had ever been before, and Count Piper had resolved to continue his work, to carefully add stone to stone till the fair edifice was complete—to do in his way and with his means what Peter was doing for Russia.
Instead there had been this nine years’ war, empty of all but that glory that a day’s mischance might eclipse forever.
Nothing had been done for Sweden—she had been drained of men, of money, left unprotected, her King a mere name.
There was no direct heir; it seemed as if a grandson of Karl XI would never rule in Stockholm, as if the fine line was at an end.
The King began to toss in the heat of the fever, and in his sleep a groan of pain now and then escaped him.