“It is not your fault, but mine,” he said, “for putting you where you are.”
Katherina, grateful that his wrath had passed, dared not risk inflaming him by another word, but sat meekly pulling at the folds of her blue silk skirt.
Peter shrugged his shoulders and left her abruptly; his mood had been crossed and he had no wish for the company even of Mentchikoff, who was, like Katherina, a creature of his own creating, and accordingly sometimes despised by the Czar, who, despite his Western reforms, remained Eastern in his ideas of autocracy and his own almost divine power and privileges.
He went heavily downstairs, called for his horse and rode, alone, round the counterscarp of Poltava.
Karl would molest him no more—North Europe lay open to his armies; he could pull Stanislaus down as quickly as he had been set up, and put whatever puppet he chose on the throne of Poland.
He had accomplished his army, his navy, his port, his capital—and yet in his half-savage heart was still this brooding melancholy, this lingering dissatisfaction.
His own cruelties, his own excesses, seemed even to himself to mar his triumph.
The wife and the friend he had chosen dragged him down and he knew it, yet he could have no more avoided them than the diseases that hampered his body and clouded his brain.
He reined up his beautiful black Arab on the ramparts and gazed across the plain where he had broken Karl XII.
And even at that moment he felt a half-wistful envy of the man whom he had vanquished—the man who could conquer himself.