Historic Girls Part 15

What manners indeed! The courier might well ask this. For, plump against him, as he spoke, dashed, first a girl and then a boy who had darted from somewhere into the council-chamber. Too absorbed in their own concerns to notice who, if any one, was in the room, they had run against and very nearly upset the astonished bearer of dispatches.

Still more astonished was he, when the girl, using his body as a barrier against her pursuer, danced and dodged around him to avoid being caught by her pursuer--a fine-looking young lad of about her own age--Karl Gustav, her cousin. The scandalized bearer of dispatches to the Swedish Council of Regents shook himself free from the girl's strong grasp and seizing her by the shoulder, demanded, sternly:

"How now, young mistress! Is this seemly conduct toward a stranger and an imperial courier?"

The girl now for the first time noticed the presence of a stranger. Too excited in her mad dash into the room to distinguish him from one of the palace servants, she only learned the truth by the courier's harsh words. A sudden change came over her. She drew herself up haughtily and said to the attendant:

"And who is this officious stranger, Klas?"

The tone and manner of the question again surprised the courier, and he looked at the speaker, amazed. What he saw was an attractive young girl of thirteen, short of stature, with bright hazel eyes, a vivacious face, now almost stern in its expression of pride and haughtiness. A man's fur cap rested upon the ma.s.s of tangled light-brown hair which, tied imperfectly with a simple knot of ribbon, fell down upon her neck. Her short dress of plain gray stuff hung loosely about a rather trim figure; and a black scarf, carelessly tied, encircled her neck. In short, he saw a rather pretty, carelessly dressed, healthy, and just now very haughty-looking young girl, who seemed more like a boy in speech and manners,--and one who needed to be disciplined and curbed.

Again the question came: "Who is this man, and what seeks he here, Klas?

I ask."

"'T is a courier with dispatches for the council, Madam," replied the man.

"Give me the dispatches," said the girl; "I will attend to them."

"You, indeed!" The courier laughed grimly. "The dispatches from the Emperor of Germany are for no hairbrained maid to handle. These are to be delivered to the Council of Regents alone."

"I will have naught of councils or regents, Sir Courier, save when it pleases me," said the girl, tapping the floor with an angry foot. "Give me the dispatches, I say,--I am the King of Sweden!"

"You--a girl--king?" was all that the astonished courier could stammer out. Then, as the real facts dawned upon him, he knelt at the feet of the young queen and presented his dispatches.

"Withdraw, sir!" said Christina, taking the papers from his hand with but the scant courtesy of a nod; "we will read these and return a suitable answer to your master."

The courier withdrew, still dazed at this strange turn of affairs; and Christina, leaning carelessly against the council-table, opened the dispatches.

Suddenly she burst into a merry but scarcely lady-like laugh. "Ha, ha, ha! this is too rare a joke, Karl," she cried. "Lord Chancellor, Mathias, Torstenson!" she exclaimed, as these members of her council entered the apartment, "what think you? Here come dispatches from the Emperor of Germany begging that you, my council, shall consider the wisdom of wedding me to his son and thereby closing the war! His son, indeed! Ferdinand the Craven!"

"And yet, Madam," suggested the wise Oxenstiern, "it is a matter that should not lightly be cast aside. In time you must needs be married. The const.i.tution of the kingdom doth oblige you to."

"Oblige!" and the young girl turned upon the gray-headed chancellor almost savagely. "Oblige! and who, Sir Chancellor, upon earth shall OBLIGE me to do so, if I do it not of mine own will? Say not OBLIGE to me."

This was vigorous language for a girl of scarce fourteen; but it was "Christina's way," one with which both the Council and the people soon grew familiar. It was the Vasa(1) nature in her, and it was always prominent in this spirited young girl--the last descendant of that masterful house.

(1) Vasa was the family name of her father and the ancient king of Sweden.

But now the young Prince Karl Gustavus had something to say.

"Ah, cousin mine," and he laid a strong though boyish hand upon the young girl's arm. "What need for couriers or dispatches that speak of suitors for your hand? Am not I to be your husband? From babyhood you have so promised me."

Christina again broke into a loud and merry laugh.

"Hark to the little burgomaster,"(1) she cried; "much travel hath made him, I do fear me, soft in heart and head. Childish promises, Karl. Let such things be forgotten now. You are to be a soldier--I, a queen."

(1) Prince Charles Gustavus, afterward Charles XI., King of Sweden, and father of the famous Charles XII., was cousin to Christina. He was short and thick-set, and so like a little Dutchman that Christina often called him "the little burgomaster." At the time of this sketch he had just returned from a year of travel through Europe.

"And yet, Madam," said Mathias, her tutor, "all Europe hath for years regarded Prince Karl as your future husband."

"And what care I for that?" demanded the girl, hotly. "Have done, have done, sirs! You do weary me with all this. Let us to the hunt. Axel Dagg did tell me of a fine roebuck in the Maelar woods. See you to the courier of the Emperor and to his dispatches, Lord Chancellor; I care not what you tell him, if you do but tell him no. And, stay; where is that round little Dutchman, Van Beunigen, whom you did complain but yesterday was sent among us by his government to oppose the advices of our English friends. He is a greater scholar than horseman, or I mistake. Let us take him in our hunting-party, Karl; and see to it that he doth have one of our choicest horses."

The girl's mischief was catching. Her cousin dropped his serious look, and, seeking the Dutch envoy, with due courtesy invited him to join the Queen's hunt.

"Give him black Hannibal, Jous," Christina had said to her groom; and when the Dutch envoy, Van Beunigen, came out to join the hunting-party, too much flattered by the invitation to remember that he was a poor horseman, Jous, the groom, held black Hannibal in unsteady check, while the big horse champed and fretted, and the hunting-party awaited the new member.

But Jous, the groom, noted the Dutchman's somewhat alarmed look at the big black animal.

"Would it not be well, good sir," he said, "that you do choose some steadier animal than Hannibal here? I pray you let me give you one less restive. So, Bror Andersson," he called to one of the under-grooms, "let the n.o.ble envoy have your cob, and take you back Hannibal to the stables."

But no, the envoy of the States of Holland would submit to no such change. He ride a servant's horse, indeed!

"Why, sirrah groom," he said to good-hearted Jous, "I would have you know that I am no novice in the equestrian art. Far from it, man. I have read every treatise on the subject from Xenophon downward; and what horse can know more than I?"

So friendly Jous had nothing more to say, but hoisted the puffed-up Dutch scholar into the high saddle; and away galloped the hunt toward the Maelar woods.

As if blind to his own folly, Van Beunigen, the envoy, placed himself near to the young Queen; and Christina, full of her own mischief, began gravely to compliment him on his horsemans.h.i.+p, and suggested a gallop.

Alas, fatal moment. For while he yet swayed and jolted upon the back of the restive Hannibal, and even endeavored to discuss with the fair young scholar who rode beside him, the "Melanippe" of Euripides, the same fair scholar--who, in spite of all her Greek learning was only a mischievous and sometimes very rude young girl--faced him with a sober countenance.

"Good Herr Van Beunigen," she said, "your Greek is truly as smooth as your face. But it seems to me you do not sufficiently catch the spirit of the poet's lines commmencing

[gr andrwn de polloi tou gelwtos ouneka].(1)

I should rather say that [gr tou gelwtos] should be----"

(1) The commencement of an extract from the "Melanippe" of Euripides, meaning, "To raise vain laughter, many exercise the arts of satire."

Just what [gr tou gelwtos] should be she never declared, for, as the envoy of Holland turned upon her a face on which Greek learning and anxious horsemans.h.i.+p struggled with one another, Christina slyly touched black Hannibal lightly with her riding-whip.

Light as the touch was, however, it was enough. The unruly horse reared and plunged. The startled scholar, with a cry of terror, flung up his hands, and then clutched black Hannibal around the neck. Thus, in the manner of John Gilpin,

"His horse, who never in that way Had handled been before, What thing upon his back had got Did wonder more and more.

"Away went Gilpin, neck or nought; Away went hat and wig; He never dreamt when he set out, Of running such a rig."

Minus hat and wig, too, the poor envoy dashed up the Maelar highway, while Christina, laughing loudly, galloped after him in a mad race, followed by all her hunting-party.

The catastrophe was not far away. The black horse, like the ill-tempered "bronchos" of our western plains, "bucked" suddenly, and over his head like a flash went the discomfited Dutchman. In an instant, Greek learning and Dutch diplomacy lay sprawling in a Swedish roadway, from which Jous, the groom, speedily lifted the groaning would-be horseman.

Even in her zeal for study, really remarkable in so young a girl, Christina could not forego her misguided love of power and her tendency to practical joking, and one day she even made two grave philosophers, who were holding a profound discussion in her presence over some deep philosophic subject, suddenly cease their arguments to play with her at battledore and shuttlec.o.c.k.

A girlhood of uncontrolled power, such as hers, could lead but to one result. Self-gratification is the worst form of selfishness, and never can work good to any one. Although she was a girl of wonderful capabilities, of the blood of famous kings and conquerors, giving such promises of greatness that scholars and statesmen alike prophesied for her a splendid future, Christina, Queen of Sweden, made only a failure of her life.

At eighteen she had herself formally crowned as KING of Sweden. But at twenty-five she declared herself sick and tired of her duties as queen, and at twenty-eight, at the height of her power and fame, she actually did resign her throne in favor of her cousin, Prince Karl,--publicly abdicated, and at once left her native land to lead the life of a disappointed wanderer.