Again the King flushed, and his eyes were narrowed and gleaming.
“Ah, I am boorish--I know,” he said, then, suddenly, “but I could be gentle to a woman, a woman like you.”
“I want you to be gentle to me now, sire,” she replied quickly, “for what I have to say may try your patience.”
He did not speak in a tone of gallantry or artificial compliment, nor even with any of the confusion or shyness likely in one so young and so unused to dealing in affairs of love, but with a certain hardness and hauteur, the mark of absolute sincerity and complete self-command.
It was impossible to believe that he would ever waste himself in mere pleasantness; he did not trouble even to smile, but looked at the lady gravely with his strange blue eyes that were of so rare a color and so curious an expression.
“You think that I please your fancy,” she said, with a flutter of color in her face.
“I know that you do,” he replied seriously. “You are very wonderful. But Count Piper was wrong,” he added grimly, “when he thought that you could influence me.”
“Yet I am going to try and do so,” said Viktoria.
“I want you to forget me, to forget the chase, to leave the wine, and become the man your father was.”
These words were so unexpected that for a moment his composure was disturbed.
“Sire, whether my words have any effect with you or no, after to-day I shall never speak to you alone. I am not the woman your councilor takes me to be. He thinks that I would be your plaything, and that through me he would work his way with you.”
“And so you will have none of me?” asked the King quietly; “I could have loved you.”
“Sire, I have done with love. And I was never ambitious.”
“But I,” smiled Karl, “I have not even begun with love. And I was always ambitious.”
She flashed at him with sudden animation and force.
“Then if you are ambitious leave love alone. Turn your back on women until you take your Queen--be the one King in Europe who is not ruled by a petticoat. Be a man like the hero of antiquity, feared, obeyed, revered by _men_, not cajoled, flattered, led by women!”
“And if I wished I could be such a one,” he said strongly.
“And do you hesitate? There is a man’s work--a King’s work ready to your hand--a nation that your forefathers left great looking to you for help against three terrible enemies, the world before you in which to win glory.”