Part 2

"Poor boy," she said, "you shan't be teased any more. Come with me, I will take you to the _Barotin_, and present you to the little serene Highnesses. They are nice children--for Highnesses; you will get on well with them."

Taking the boy's unwilling hand, she led him through several rooms, lined with old marquetterie cabinets in the Italian fashion, till she found a page, to whom she delivered Mark, telling him to take him to the Baroness, into whose presence she herself did not appear anxious to intrude, that he might be presented to his future pupils.

The page promised to obey, and, giving him a box on the ear to ensure attention, a familiarity which he took with the most cheerful and forgiving air, she left the room.

The moment she was gone the page made a rush at Mark, and, seizing him round the waist, lifted him from the ground and ran with him through two or three rooms, till he reached a door, where he deposited him upon his feet. Then throwing open the door, he announced suddenly, "The Herr Tutor to the serene Highnesses!" and shut Mark into the room.

His breath taken away by this atrocious attack upon his person and dignity, Mark saw before him a stately, but not unkindly-looking lady and two beautiful children, a boy and girl, of about eight and nine years of age. The lady rose, and, looking at Mark with some curiosity, as well she might, said:

"Your serene Highnesses, this is the tutor whom the Prince, your father, has provided for you. You will no doubt profit greatly by his instructions."

The little girl came forward at once, and gave Mark her hand, which, not knowing what to do with, he held for a moment and then dropped.

"My papa has spoken of you," she said. "He has told me that you are very good."

"I shall try to be good, Princess," said Mark, who by this time had recovered his breath.

The little girl seemed very much insulted. She drew herself up and flushed all over her face.

"You must not say _Princess_ to me," she said, "that is what only the little Princes say. You must say, 'my most gracious and serene Highness,' whenever you speak to me."

This was too much. Mark blushed with anger.

"May God forgive me," he said, "if I do anything so foolish. I am here to teach thee and thy brother, and I will do it in my own way, or not at all."

The little Princess looked as if she were about to cry, then, apparently thinking better of it, she said, with a half sob, and dropping the stately "_you_":

"Well, my papa says that thou art an angel. I suppose thou must do as thou wilt."

The little boy, meanwhile, had been staring at Mark with solemn eyes. He said nothing, but he came, finally, to the little schoolmaster and put his hand in his.

What more might have been said cannot be told, for at this moment the page appeared again, saying that dinner was served at the third table, and that the Herr Tutor was to dine there.

The Baroness seemed surprised at this.

"I should have supposed," she said, "that he would have dined with the Chaplain at the second table."

"No," asserted the page boldly, "the Prince has ordered it."

When alone, the Prince seldom dined ostensibly in public; but often appeared masqued at the third table, which was that of the actors and singers. He had given no orders at all about Mark. The arrangement was entirely of the Signorina's making, who desired that he should dine with her. It was a bold stroke; and an hour afterwards, when the Court Chaplain discovered it, measures were taken to prevent its recurrence--at least for a time.

In whatever way this arrangement came to be made, however, the result was very advantageous to Mark. In the first place, it was not formidable. The company took little notice of him. Signor Carricchio made grotesque faces at others, but not at him. He sat quite safe and snug by the Signorina, and certainly stared with all his eyes, as she had said. The long, dark, aquiline features of the men, the mobile play of humorous farce upon their faces, the constant chatter and sport--what could the German peasant boy do but stare? His friend taught him how to hold his knife and fork, and how to eat. The Italians were very nice in their eating, and the boy picked up more in five minutes from the Signorina--he was very quick--than he would have done in weeks from the Chaplain.

He was so scared and frightened, and the girl was so kind to him, that his boy's heart went out to her.

"What shall I call you, Signorina?" he said, as dinner was over. "You are so good to me." He had already caught the Italian word.

"My name is Faustina Banti," she said, looking at him with her great eyes; "but you may call me 'Tina,' if you like. I had a little brother once who called me that. He died."

"You are so very kind to me, Tina," said the boy, "I am sure you must be very good."

She looked at him again, smiling.

IV.

THE next morning early Mark was sent for to the Prince. He was shown into the dressing-room, but the Prince was already dressed. He was seated in an easy-chair reading a small closely-printed sheet of paper, upon which the word "Wien" was conspicuous to the boy. The Prince bade the little schoolmaster be seated on a fauteuil near him, and looked so kindly that he felt quite at his ease.

"Well! little one," said the Prince, "how findest thou thyself? Hast thou found any friends yet in this place?"

"The Signorina has been very kind to me, Highness," said the boy.

"Ah!" said the Prince, smiling, "thou hast found that out already. That is not so bad. I thought you two would be friends. What has the Signorina told thee?"

"She has told me of the actors who are so clever and so strange. She says that they are all in love with her."

"That is not unlikely. And what else?"

"She has told me of the Princess and of her servente."

"Indeed!" said the Prince, with the slightest possible appearance of increased interest; "what does she say of the Princess?"

"She says that she is a bad woman, and that she hates her."

"Ah! the Signorina appears to have formed opinions of her own, and to be able to express them. What else?"

"She says that the servente is the devil himself! But she does not mean the real devil. She says that the servente is a much more real devil than he! Is not that horrible, Highness?"

The Prince looked at Mark for two or three moments, with a kindly but strange far-reaching look, which struck the boy, though he did not in the least understand it.

"I did well, little one," he said at last, "when I sent for thee."

There was a pause. The Prince seemed to have forgotten the presence of the boy, who already was sufficiently of a courtier to hold his tongue.

At last the Prince spoke.

"And the children," he said; "thou hast seen them?"

"Yes," said Mark, with a little shy smile, "I did badly there. I insulted the gracious Fraeulein by calling her 'Princess,' which she said only the little Princes should do; and I told her I was come to teach her and her little brother, and that I should do it in my own way or not at all."

The Prince looked as though he feared that this unexpected amusement would be almost too delightful.

"Well, little one," he said, "thou hast begun well. Better than this none could have done. Only be careful that thou art not spoilt. Care nothing for what thou hearest here. Continue to hate and fear the devil; for, whether he be thy own devil or the servente, he is more powerful than thou. Say nothing but what He whom thou rightly callest God teaches thee to say. So all will be well. Better teacher than thou my daughter could not have. I would wish her to be pious, within reason; not like her aunt, that would not be well. I should wish her to care for the poor. Nothing is so gracious in noble ladies as to care for the poor. When they cease to do this they lose tone at once. The French noblesse have done so. I should like her to visit the poor herself. It will have the best effect upon her nature; much better," continued the Prince with a half smile, and seemingly speaking to himself, "much better, I should imagine, than on the poor themselves. But what will you have?--some one must suffer, and the final touch cannot be obtained without."

There was another pause. This aspect of the necessary suffering the poor had to undergo was so new to Mark that he required some time to grasp it. The visits of noble ladies to his village had not been so frequent as to cause the malign effects to be deeply felt.

* * * * *

Acting upon this advice so far as he understood it, Mark pursued the same system of education with the little Highnesses as he had followed with the village children; that is, he set them to read such things as he was told they ought to learn, and encouraged them to do so by promising to relate his histories and tales if they were good.

It is surprising how much the same human nature remains after generations of different breeding and culture. It is true that these princely children had heard many tales before, perhaps the very ones the little schoolmaster now related, yet they delighted in nothing so much as hearing them again. Much of this pleasure, no doubt, was due to the intense faith and interest in them shown by Mark himself. He talked to them also much about God and the unseen world of angels, and of the wicked one; and, as they believed firmly that he was an angel, they listened to these things with the more ready belief. Indeed, the affection which the little boy formed for his child-tutor was unusual. He was a silent, solemn child; he said nothing, but he attached himself to Mark with a persistent devotion.

Every one in the palace, indeed, took to the boy: the pages left off teasing him; the Signorina petted him in a manner sufficient to deprive her numerous lovers of their reason; the servants waited on him for love and not for reward; but the strangest thing of all was, that in proportion as he was kindly treated--just as much as every one seemed to love him and delight in him--just so much did the boy become miserable and unhappy. The kinder these people were, the more he felt the abyss which lay between his soul and theirs; earnestness and solemn faith in his--sarcasm and lively farce, and, at the most, kindly toleration of belief, in theirs.

Had they ill-treated or wronged him, he would not have felt it so much; but kindness and security on their part, seemed to intensify the sense of doubt and perplexity on his.

It is difficult to realise the effect which sarcasm and irony have upon such natures as his. They look upon life with such a single eye. It is so beautiful and solemn to them. Truth is so true; they are so much in earnest that they cannot understand the complex feeling that finds relief in sarcasm and allegory, that tolerates the frivolous and the vain, as an ironic reading of the lesson of life.

The actors were particularly kind to him, though their grotesque attempts to amuse him mostly added to his misery. They were extremely anxious that he should appear upon the stage, and indeed the boy's beauty and simplicity would have made an excellent foil.

"Herr Tutor," said old Carricchio the arlecchino to him one day, with mock gravity, "we are about to perform a comedy--what is called a masqued comedy, not because we wear masques, for we don't, but because of our dresses. It consists of music, dancing, love-making, joking, and buffoonery; you will see what a trifle it is all about. The scene is in the garden of a country-house--during what in Italy we call the Villeggiatura, that is the month we spend in the country during the vintage. A lady's fan is found by an ill-natured person in a curious place; all the rest agree not to see the fan, not to acknowledge that it is a fan. It is all left to us at the moment, all except the songs and the music, and you know how delightful those are. If you would take a part, and keep your own character throughout, it would be magnificent; but we will wait, if you once see it you will wish to act."

No one, indeed, was kinder to Mark, or seemed more to delight in his society than the old arlecchino, and the two made a most curious sight, seated together on one of the terraces on a sunny afternoon. Nothing could be more diverse in appearance than this strangely assorted pair. Carricchio was tall, with long limbs, and large aquiline features. He wore a set smile upon his large expressive mouth, which seemed born of no sense of enjoyment, but of an infinite insight, and of a mocking friendliness. He seldom wore anything but the dress of his part; but he wrapped himself mostly in a long cloak, lined with fur, for even the northern sunshine seemed chilly to the old clown. Wrapped in this ancient garment, he would sit beside Mark, listening to the boy's stories with his deep unfathomed smile; and as he went on with his histories, the boy used to look into his companion's face, wondering at the slow smile, and at the deep wrinkles of the worn visage, till at length, fascinated at the sight, he forgot his stories, and looking into the old man's face appeared to Mark, though the comparison seems preposterous, like gazing at the fated story of the mystic tracings of the star-lit skies.

Why the old man listened so patiently to these childish stories no one could tell; perhaps he did not hear them. He himself said that the presence of Mark had the effect of music upon his jaded and worn sense. But, indeed, there was beneath Carricchio's mechanical buffoonery and farce a sober and pathetic humour, which was almost unconscious, and which was now, probably owing to advancing years, first becoming known either to himself or others.

"The Maestro has been talking to me this morning," he said one day. "He says that life is a wretched masque, a miserable apology for existence by the side of art; what do you say to that?"

"I do not know what it means," said Mark; "I neither know life nor art, how can I tell?"

"That is true, but you know more than you think. The Maestro means that life is imperfect, struggling, a failure, ugly most often; art is perfect, complete, beautiful, and full of force and power. But I tell him that some failure is better than success; sometimes ugliness is a finer thing than beauty; and that the best art is that which only reproduces life. If life were fashioned after the most perfect art you would never be able to cry, nor to make me cry, as you do over your beautiful tales."

Mark tried to understand this, but failed, and was therefore silent. Indeed it is not certain whether Carricchio himself understood what he was saying.

He seemed to have some suspicion of this, for he did not go on talking, but was silent for some time. These silences were common between the two.

At last he said:

"I think where the Maestro is wrong is in making the two quarrel. They cannot quarrel. There is no art without life, and no life without art. Look at a puppet-play--the fantoccini--it means life and it means art."

"I never saw a puppet-play," said Mark.

"Well, you have seen us," said Carricchio; "we are much the same. We move ourselves--they are moved by wires; but we do just the same things--we are life and we are art, in the burletta we are both. I often think which is which--which is the imposture and which is the masque. Then I think that somewhere there must be a higher art that surpasses the realism of life--a divine art which is not life but fashions life.

"When I look at you, little one," Carricchio went on, "I feel almost as I do when the violins break in upon the jar and fret of the wittiest dialogue. Jest and lively fancy--these are the sweets of life, no doubt--and humorous thought and speech and gesture--but they are not this divine art, they are not rest. They shrivel and wither the brain. The whole being is parched, the heart is dry in this sultry, piercing light. But when the stringed melodies steal in, and when the rippling, surging arpeggios and crescendos sweep in upon the sense, and the stilled cadences that lull and soothe--then, indeed, it is like moisture and the gracious dew. It is like sleep; the strained nerves relax; the overwrought frame, which is like dry garden mould, is softened, and the flowers spring up again."

Carricchio paused; but as Mark said nothing, he went on again.

"The other life is gay, lively, bright, full of excitement and interest, of tender pity even, and of love--but this is rest and peace. The other is human life, but what is this? Art? Ah! but a divine art. Here is no struggle, no selfish desire, no striving, no conflict of love or of hate. It is like silence, the most unselfish thing there is. I have, indeed, sometimes thought that music must be the silence of heaven."

"The silence of heaven!" said Mark, with open eyes. "The silence of heaven! What, then, are its words?"

"Ah! that," said the old clown, smiling, but with a sad slowness in his speech, "is beyond me to tell. I can hear its silence, but not its voice."

V.

THE private theatre in the palace was a room of very moderate size, for the audience was necessarily very small; in fact, the stage was larger than the auditorium. The play took place in the afternoon, and there was no artificial light; many of the operatic performances in Italy, indeed, took place in the open air.

Yet, though the time of day and the natural light deprived the theatre of much of the strangeness and glamour with which it is usually associated, and which so much impress a youth who sees it for the first time, the effect of the first performance upon Mark was very remarkable. He was seated immediately behind the Prince. Far from being delighted with the play, he was overpowered as it went on by an intense melancholy horror. When the violins, the flutes, and the fifes began the overture, a new sense seemed given to him, which was not pleasure but the intensest dread. If the singing of the Signorina had been a shock to him, accustomed as he was only to the solemn singing of his childhood, what must this elfish, weird, melodious music have seemed, full of gay and careless life, and of artless unconscious airs which yet were miracles of art? He sat, terrified at these delicious sounds, as though this world of music without thought or conscience were a wicked thing. The shrill notes of the fifes, the long tremulous vibration of the strings, seemed to draw his heart after them. Wherever this wizard call might lead him it seemed he would have to follow the alluring chords.

But when the acting began his terror became more intense. The grotesque figures seemed to him those of devils, or at the best of fantastic imps or gnomes. He could understand nothing of the dialogue, but the gestures, the laughter, the wild singing, were shocking to him. When the Signorina appeared, the strange intensity of her colour, the brilliancy of her eyes, and what seemed to him the freedom of her gestures and the boldness of her bewitching glances, far from delighting, as they seemed to do all the others, made him ready to weep with shame and grief. He sank back in his seat to avoid the notice of the Prince, who, indeed, was too much absorbed in the music and the acting to remember him.

The beauty of the music only added to his despair; had it been less lovely, had the acting not forced now and then a glance of admiring wonder or struck a note of high-toned touching pathos even, it would not all have seemed so much the work of evil. When the comedy was over he crept silently away to his room; and in the excitement of congratulation and praise, as actors and audience mingled together, and the Signorina was receiving the commendations of the Prince, he was not missed.

He could not stay in this place--that at least was clear to him. He must escape. He must return to nature, to the woods and birds, to children and to children's sports. These gibing grimaces, these endless bowings and scrapings and false compliments, known of all to be false, would choke him if he stayed. He must escape from the house of frivolity into the soft, gracious outer air of sincerity and truth.

He cried himself to sleep: all through the night, amid fitful slumber, the crowd of masques jostled and mocked at him; the weird strains of unknown instruments reached his half-conscious bewildered sense. Early in the morning he awoke. There had been rain in the night, and the smiling morning beckoned him out.

He stole down some back stairs, and found a door which opened on gardens and walks at the back of the palace. This he managed to open, and went out.

The path on which the door opened led him through rows of fruit-trees and young plantations. A little forest of delicate boughs and young leaves lifted itself up against the blue sky, and a myriad drops sparkled in the morning sun. The fresh cool air, the blue sky, the singing of the birds, restored Mark to himself. He seemed to see again the possibility of escape from evil, and the hope of righteousness and peace. His whole spirit went out in prayer and love to the Almighty, who had made these lovely things. He felt as he had been wont to do when, on a fine Sunday, he had walked home with his children in order, relating to them the most beautiful tales of God. He wandered slowly down the narrow paths. The fresh-turned earth between the rows of saplings, the beds of herbs, the moist grass, gave forth a scent at once delicate and searching. The boy's cheerfulness began to return. The past seemed to fade. He almost thought himself the little schoolmaster again.

After wandering for some time through this delicious land of perfume, of light, and sweet sound, he came to a very long but narrow avenue of old elm trees that led down a gradual slope, as it seemed, into the heart of the forest. Beneath the avenue a well-kept path seemed to point with a guiding hand.

He followed the path for some distance, and had just perceived what seemed to be an old manor-house, standing in a courtyard at the farther end, when he was conscious of a figure advancing along the path to meet him: as it approached he saw that it was that of a lady of tall and commanding appearance, and apparently of great beauty; she wore the dress of some sisterhood. When he was near enough to see her face he found that it was indeed beautiful, with an expression of the purest sincerity and benevolence. The lady stopped and spoke to Mark at once.

"You must be the new tutor to their Highnesses," she said; "I have heard of you."

Mark said that he was.

"You do not look well," said the lady, very kindly; "are you happy at the palace?"

"Are you the Princess Isoline?" said Mark, not answering the question; "I think you must be, you are so beautiful."

"I am the Princess Isoline," said the lady; "walk a little way with me."

Mark turned with the lady and walked back towards the palace. After a moment or two he said: "I am not happy at Joyeuse, I am very miserable, I want to run away."

"What makes you so unhappy? Are they not kind to you? The Prince is very kind, and the children are good children--I have always thought."

"They are all very kind, too kind to me," said the boy. "I cannot make you understand why I am so miserable, I cannot tell myself--the Prince is worse than all----"

"Why is the Prince the worst of all?" said the lady, in a very gentle voice.

"All the rest I know are wrong," replied the boy, passionately--"the actors, the Signorina, the pages, and all; but when the Prince looks at me with his quiet smile--when the look comes into his eyes as though he could see through time even into eternity--when he looks at me in his kindly, pitying way--I begin to doubt. Oh, Highness, it is terrible to doubt! Do you think that the Prince is right?"

The Princess was silent for a moment or two; it was not that she did not understand the boy, for she understood him very well.

"No, I think you are right and not the Prince," she said at length, in her quiet voice.