But immediately after, Neumann, the King’s surgeon, entered.
“The King is having all the Arab chargers given him by the Sultan shot,” he announced, “and the carcases flung to the Tartar troops.”
The Swedes were silent.
In their hearts they knew there was no excuse for Karl’s behavior, and that reason, right, and justice were all on the side of the Sultan, who had from the first been forbearing, chivalrous, and generous to a stranger whom he neither liked nor understood, and who had been the cause of much annoyance to him and of many distractions in his court. Yet they all loved Karl, who till the days of his exile had awakened little affection in any heart, and who now exhibited few lovable qualities.
But his unyielding determination, his iron inflexibility, his austere life, his high ideals of heroic virtues had inspired a feeling that was almost reverence in the hearts of those who had shared his dreary exile.
And in this bitter pass to which his obstinacy had brought them it was not of themselves they thought, but of the King—it was his peril, not their own, that forced the tears to their eyes.
CHAPTER II
THE answer from Adrianople was to the effect that the Swedes were to leave Bender at all costs and that all who resisted were to be forcibly ejected, and, if need be, slain.
Their commands were not at all to the liking of the Khan or Ismail Pasha, both of whom had come to like Karl, a type admirable in the eyes of a Mussulman, and M. Fabrice again tried his talents as mediator.
All these efforts, like so many others, proved fruitless, and for the same reason—the inflexibility of Karl.