whatever in after years he might become, never would he taste this
delight of his child's nature again. He was inexpressibly sad and
depressed.
As he wandered on, not knowing where he went, and growing almost stupid,
and indifferent even to pain, he found himself suddenly surrounded by a
throng of dancing and laughing girls. It was easy, in this magic garden,
to steal unobserved upon any one amid the bosky hedges and arcades; but
to surprise one so abstracted as the dreamy and listless boy required no
effort at all. With hands clasped and mocking laughter they surrounded
the unhappy Mark. They were masqued, with delicate bits of fringed silk
across the eyes, but had they not been so he was too confused to have
recognised them. He tried in vain to escape. Then he was lifted from the
ground by a score of hands and borne rapidly away.
The stories of swan-maidens and winged fairies of his old histories
crossed his mind, and he seemed to be flying through the air; suddenly
this strange flight came to an end; he was on his feet again, and, as he
looked confusedly around, he found that he was alone.
He was standing on a circular space of lawn, surrounded by the lofty
wood. In the centre was an antique statue of a faun playing upon a
flute. He seemed to recognise the scene, but could not in his confusion
recall in what part of the vast garden it lay.
As he stood, lost in wonder and expectation, a fairy-like figure was
suddenly present before him, from whence coming he could not tell. The
slim and delicate form was dressed in a gossamer robe, through which the
lovely limbs might be seen. She held a light masque in her hand, and
laughed at him with her dancing eyes and rosy mouth. It was the little
Princess, his pupil.
Even now no thought of plot or treachery entered the boy's mind; he
gazed at her in wondering amaze.
"You must come with me," said the girl-princess, holding out her hand;
"I am sent to fetch you to the under world."
Behind them as they stood, and facing the statue of the faun, was a cave
or hollow in the wood, half concealed by the pendant tendrils of
creeping and flowering plants. It seemed the opening of a subterranean
passage. The child pushed aside the hanging blossoms and drew Mark,
still dazed and unresisting, after her. They went down into the dark
cave.
* * * * *
Meanwhile from early dawn the palace had been noisy with pattering feet.
For its bizarre population was augmented from many sources, and the
great performance of the day taxed the exertions of all. As the morning
advanced visitors began to arrive, and were marshalled to certain parts
of the gardens where positions were allotted them, and refreshments
served in tents. They were mostly masqued. Then strange groups began to
form themselves before the garden front of the palace, and on the
terraces. These were all masqued, and dressed in variety of incongruous
and fantastic costumes, for though the play was supposed to be
classical, yet the necessity of entertaining the Princess with
something startling and lively was more exacting than artistic
congruity. As we have seen, the Prince had always inclined more to the
fairy and masqued comedy than to the serious opera, and on this occasion
the result was more original and fantastic than had ever before been
achieved.
As the morning went on, there gradually arranged itself, as if by
fortuitous incident, as strange a medley of fairy mediaeval legend and of
classic lore as eye ever looked upon. As the Prince and Princess,
surrounded by their principal guests, all masqued and attired in every
shade of colour and diversity of form, stood upon the steps before the
palace, the wide gardens seemed full of groups equally varied and
equally brilliant with their own. From behind the green screens of the
hedges, and from beneath the arcades, figures were constantly emerging
and passing again out of sight, apparently accidentally, but in fact
with a carefully-devised plan. Strains of delicate music filled the air.
Then a group of girls in misty drapery, and masqued across the eyes, the
same indeed that had carried off Mark, appeared suddenly before the
princely group. They had discovered in the deepest dell of their native
mountain a deserted babe--the offspring doubtless of the loves of some
wandering god. They were become its nurses, and fed it upon sacred honey
and consecrated bread. Of immortal birth themselves, and untouched by
the passing years, the boy became, as he grew up, the plaything, and
finally the beloved of his beautiful friends. But the boy himself is
indifferent to their attractions, and careless or averse to their
caresses. He is often lost to them, and wanders in the mountain
fastnesses with the fawns and kids.
All this and more was told in action, in song, and recitative, upon the
palace lawns before this strange audience, themselves partly actors in
the pastoral drama. Rural dances, and games and sacrifices were
presented with delicately-conceived grouping and pictorial effect. Then
the main action of the drama developed itself. The most lovely of the
nymphs, the queen and leader of the rest, inspires a devoted passion in
the heart of the priest of Apollo, before whose altar they offer
sacrifice, and listen for guiding and response. She rejects his love
with cruel contempt, pining always for the coy and errant boy-god, who
thinks of nothing but the distant mountain summits and the divine
whispers of the rustling woods. The priest, insulted and enraged,
invokes the aid of his divinity, and a change comes over the gay and
magic scene. A terrible pestilence strikes down the inhabitants of these
sylvan lawns, and gloomy funerals, and the pathetic strains of dirges
take the place of dances and lively songs.
The terrified people throw themselves before the altar of the incensed
Apollo, and the god speaks again. His anger can be appeased only by the
sacrifice of the contemptuous nymph who has insulted his priest, or of
some one who is willing to perish in her place. Proclamation is made
across the sunny lawns, inviting a victim who will earn the wreath of
self-sacrifice and of immortal consciousness of a great deed, but there
is no response.
The fatal day draws on; the altar of sacrifice is prepared; but there
spreads a rumour among the crowd--fanned probably by hope--that at the
last moment a god will interfere. Some even speak of the wandering boy,
if he could only be found. Surely he--so removed from earthly and
selfish loves, so strange in his simplicity, in his purity--surely he
would lay down his guileless life without a pang. Could he only be
found! or would he appear!
The herald's voice had died away for the third time amid a fanfare of
trumpets. At the foot of the steps of the long terrace, by the Roman
fountain, a delicate and lovely form stood on the grassy verge before
the altar, by the leaping and rushing water's side; a little to the
left, whence the road from Hades was supposed to come, stood the divine
messenger, the lofty herald--clad in white, with a white wand; behind
the altar stood the wretched priest, on whom the fearful task devolved,
the passion of terror, of pity, and of love, traced upon his face; all
sound of music had died away; a hush as of death itself fell upon the
expectant crowd; from green arch and trellised walk the throng of
masques, actors and spectators alike, pressed forward upon the lawn
before the altar.... The priest tore the fillet from his brow and threw
down his knife.
* * * * *
The darkness of the cave gave place to a burst of dazzling sunlight as
Mark and the little Princess, who in the darkness had resumed her
masque, came out suddenly from the unseen opening upon one of the great
stone bases by the side of the steps. To the boy's wonderstruck sense
the flaring light, the mystic and awful forms, the thronged masques, the
shock of surprise and terror, fell with a stunning force. He uttered a
sharp cry like that of a snared and harmless creature of the woods. He
pressed his hands before his face to shut out the bewildering scene,
and, stepping suddenly backward in his surprise, fell from the edge of
the stone platform some eight feet to the ground. A cry of natural
terror broke from the victim, in place of the death-song she was
expected to utter, and she left her place and sprang forward towards the
steps. The crowd of masques which surrounded the Prince came forward
tumultuously, and a hurried movement and cry ran through the people,
half of whom were uncertain whether the settled order of the play was
interrupted or not.
Mark lay quite still on the grass, his eyes closed, the Signorina
bending over him; but the herald, who was in fact director of the play,
waved his wand imperiously before the masques, and they fell back.
"Resume your place, Signorina," he said, "this part of the play has,
apparently, failed. You will sing your death-song, and the priest will
offer himself in your stead."
But the girl rose, and, forcing her way to where the Prince stood, threw
herself upon his arm.
"Oh, stop it, Highness, stop it!" she cried, amid a passion of sobs;
"he is dying, do you not see!"
The Prince removed his masque; those around him, following the signal,
also unmasqued, and the play was stopped.
PART SECOND.
I.
THERE was no change in the bright sunlight or in the festive colours of
the gay crowd. The grass was as green, the sky as blue, the rushing
leaping water sparkled as before, nevertheless a sudden change and
deadness fell upon the garden and its throng of guests. The hush that
had preceded Mark's appearance was of a far different kind. That had
been a silence of awe, of expectation, of excitement, and of life; this
was the scared silence of dismay. Those who were most distant from the
Prince, and who could do so with decency, began to scatter like
frightened children, and were lost in the arcaded hedges and walks. The
Prince remained standing, his masque in his hand, the Signorina still
weeping on his arm; she was too excited to admit of comfort, he stroked
her hand kindly, as he would that of a child. The Herald, who was
evidently exceedingly disgusted at the turn things had taken, and the
quite unnecessary stop that had been put to the play, had retired a few
paces, and was in conference with Carricchio, who was apparently trying
to console him. The Princess, scared and startled, was drawing the Count
after her to leave the scene, when a tall and beautiful woman emerged
from a trellised walk and, through the respectful crowd that fell back
to give her passage, advanced towards the Prince.
"You may resume your play, Ferdinand," she said, and her voice was very
sad but without a touch of scorn; "you may resume your play. It is not
you who have killed this child; it is I."
Then, stooping over the lifeless body, she raised it in her arms, and,
in the midst of a yet more perfect stillness, as in the presence of a
being of a holier and a loftier world, the Princess Isoline disappeared
with her burden into the forest depths.
She followed the path under the narrow avenue, where she had once walked
with Mark, till she reached her quiet and melancholy house; and,
entering at once into the hall, she deposited her burden upon the long
table, where the household was wont to dine. She laid it with the feet
at one end of the board, and, straightening the stiffening limbs, she
knelt down before it and buried her face in her hands.
"_The good are not happy, and the happy are not good_"--was she then
good because she was so miserable? Ah no! Or was this wretchedness a
wicked thing? Again, surely not!
As she lay thus, crushed and beaten down, her form contorted with sobs,
a quiet footstep roused her, and, raising her eyes, she saw the Prince
through her blinding tears. He was standing by the table, near the head
of the child. His face was very pale, and the eyes had lost the
habitual languor of their expression, and were full of an earnest
tender grief. The Princess rose, and they looked each other straight in
the eyes. Through the mist of tears the Prince's form became refined and
purified, and he stood there with a beauty hitherto altogether unknown,
even to her.
"I told this child, Isoline," he said; "I told this child that I had
done well to send for him."
"Ferdinand," she said again, "it is not you who have done this; it is
I." She stopped for a moment to recover control, and went on more
passionately--"I, who pretended to the devoted life! in which alone he
could breathe; I, to whom he looked for help and strength; I, who
deserted him and gave a false report of the promised land."
The Prince looked at her with eyes full of compassion, but did not
reply.
"You did what you could," continued his sister; "your effort was surely
a noble one. More, in fact; you came to the help of his faith against
evil. It is always so! The children of the world act always better than
the children of light!"
In her self-abasement and despair the Princess did not remember Mark's
words, that the greatest trial of his faith had been the Prince: a
tolerance which is kindly and even appreciative, and yet, as with a
clearness of a farther insight stands indifferently aside, must always
be the great trial of simple faith.
"It is easier, Isoline," said her brother at last, "to maintain a low
standard than a high. It seems to me that we have both been wrong, but
yours is the nobler fault. You attempted an impossible flight--a flight
which human nature has no wings strong enough to achieve. As for me,
this has been a terrible shock--more than I could have thought possible,
I who fancied myself so secure and so serene. That such a terrible
chance could happen shows how unstable are the most finished schemes of
life. I fancied that my life was an art, and I dreamed that it might be
perfected--as a religious art. Fool that I was! How can life or religion
be an art when the merest accident can dissolve the entire fabric at a
blow? No art can exist in the presence of an impalpable mystery, of an
unknown, inappeasable, implacable Force."
"No," said the Princess; "art is not enough!--morality, virtue, love
even, is not enough. None of these can pierce the veil. Nothing profits,
save the Divine Humanity, which, through the mystery of Sacrifice, has
entered the unseen. You know, Ferdinand," and she looked up through her
tears with a sad smile, "in your art there was always in old times a
mystery."
She rose as she said this, and stood more lovely than ever in her grief
and in her faith; and the Prince moved a step forward, and put his hand
upon the breast of the child. As they stood, looking each other full in
the eyes, in the notorious beauty of their order and of their race, it
might have seemed to a sanguine fancy that, over the piteous victim of
earth's failure, art and religion for the moment were at one.
II.
THE pleasure Palace was deserted. Mark was buried in a shadowy graveyard
behind the old manor-house, where was a ruined chapel that had been a
canonry. The Princess Isoline gave up her house, and dissolved her
family. They were scattered to their several homes. She said that her
place was by her brother's side. It would seem that none were sorry for
some excuse. The Prince could no longer endure the place; he said that
he had neglected his princely cities, and must visit them for a time.
The Signorina was inconsolable, but her singing improved day by day.
The Maestro began to have hopes of her. He wrote to Vienna concerning an
engagement for her at the Imperial Theatre there, without even
consulting the Prince, who for the moment was disgusted with the very
name of art. Old Carricchio said that the northern sunshine was more
intolerable than ever, and that he should return to Italy, but would
take Vienna in his way. It might be supposed that this old man would
have been much distressed, but, if this were the case, he concealed his
feelings with his usual humorous eccentricity. He spent most of his time
listening to Tina's singing. Even the Maestro and the pages seemed to
miss Mark more.
In the general disorganisation and confusion the Princess even was not
entirely unaffected. She was continually speaking of Mark, whose
singular personality had struck her fancy, and whose sudden and pathetic
death had touched her with pity. She appeared unusually affectionate to
her husband and to his sister, and she despatched the Count to secure a
residence in Vienna, where she expressed her intention of taking the
entire family as soon as the Prince had satisfied his newly-awakened
conscience by a sight of Wertheim. The children were delighted with the
thought, and were apparently consoled for the absence of their tutor.
Perhaps already his tales had begun to tire.
The Maestro and Carricchio were walking side by side upon the terrace
where Mark was used to sit.
"I shall make a sensation at Vienna," said the Maestro; "that little
girl is growing into an impassioned actress with a marvellous voice. I
have an idea. I have already arranged the score. I shall throw this
story into the form of opera--a serious opera, not one of your farcical
things. It is a charming story, most pathetic, and will make people cry.
That boy's character was exquisite: 'Ah,' they will say, 'that lovely
child!'"
"I don't understand your pathos," said Carricchio crossly,--"the pathos
of composers and writers and imaginative men. It is all ideal. You talk
of farce, I prefer the jester's farce. I never knew any of you to weep
over any real misery--any starving people, any loathsome, sordid poor!"
"I should think not," said the Maestro; "there is nothing delightful in
real misery--it is loathsome, as you say; it is horrible, it is
disagreeable even! Art never contemplates the disagreeable; it would
cease to be true art if it did. But when you are happy yourself, when
you are surrounded by comfort and luxury--_then_ to contemplate misery,
sorrow, woe! Ah! this is the height of luxury: this is art! Yes, true
art!"
"It seems selfish, to me," said the Arlecchino surlily.
"Selfish!" exclaimed the Maestro; "of course it is selfish! Unless it is
selfish it cannot be art. Art has an end, an aim, an intention--if it
deserts this aim it ceases to be art. It must be selfish."
There was a slight pause, then the Maestro, who seemed to be in great
spirits, went on:
"I always thought the Prince a poor creature, now I am sure of it. He is
neither one thing nor the other. He will never be an artist, in the true
sense."
"He is very sorry for that poor child," said Carricchio.
"Sorry!" exclaimed the Maestro. "Sorry! I tell you when the canary died
I was delighted, but I am still more delighted now. I predict to you a
great future for the Signorina. She will be a great actress and singer.
The death of this child is everything to us; it was just what was
required to give her power, to stir the depths of her nature. _Mio
caro_," he continued caressingly, putting his hand on Carricchio's arm,
"believe me, _this_ is life, and _this_ is art!"
"He is a cold-blooded old devil," muttered Carricchio savagely, as he
turned away, "with his infernal talk of art. I would not go to Vienna
with him but for the Signorina. I will see her once upon the stage
there. Then the old worn-out Arlecchino will go back into the sunshine,
and die, and go to Mark."
III.
THE Maestro's romantic opera was a success. He was at least so far a
genius that he knew where he was strong and where he was weak.
He reproduced with great exactness the play in the palace gardens, but
he kept the person and character of Mark enshrouded in mystery, allowing
him to appear very seldom, and trusting entirely to the singing of the
principal performers, and especially of the Signorina, to impress the
audience with the idea of his purity and innocence. He surpassed himself
in the intense wistful music of the score; never had he produced such
pathetic airs, such pleading sustained harmonies, such quivering
lingering chords and cadences. At the supreme moment the boy appears,
and, after singing with exquisite melody his hapless yet heroic fate,
offers his bosom to the sacrificial knife. But a god intervenes. Veiled
in cloud and recognised in thunders, a divine and merciful hand is laid
upon the child. Death comes to him as a sleep, and over his dead and
lovely form the anger of heaven is appeased. Incapable as the Maestro
was of feeling much of the pathos and beauty of his own work, still,
with that wonderful instinct, or art, or genius, which supplies the
place of feeling, he produced, amid much that was grotesque and
incongruous, a work of delicate touch and thrilling and entrancing
sound. The little theatre near the Kohl market, where the piece was
first produced, was crowded nightly, and the narrow thoroughfares
through private houses and courtyards, called Durch-haeuser, with which
the extraordinary and otherwise impenetrable maze of building which
formed old Vienna was pierced through and through, were filled with fine
and delicate ladies and gay courtiers seeking admission. So great,
indeed, was the success that an arrangement was made with the conductors
of the Imperial Theatre for the opera to be performed there. The
Empress-Queen and her husband were present, the frigid silence of
etiquette was broken more than once by applause, and the Abate
Metastasio wrote some lines for the Signorina; indeed, the success of
the piece was caused by the girl's singing.
"Mark is better than the canary," the Maestro was continually repeating.
In his hour of triumph the old gentleman presented a quaint and
attractive study to the observer of the by-ways of art. Amid the rococo
surroundings among which he moved, he was himself a singular example of
the power of art to extract from bizarre and unpromising material
somewhat at least of pure and lasting fruit. He had attired his withered
and lean figure in brilliant hues and the finest lace, and in this
attire he trained the girl, also fantastically dressed, to warble the
most touching and delicious plaints. The instinctive pathos of inanimate
things, of forms and colours, was perceived in sound, and much that
hitherto seemed paltry and frivolous was refined and ennobled. Mark's
death, and even that of the poor canary, was beginning to bear fruit.
Nature and love were feeling out the enigma of existence by the aid of
art.
The reference to the canary was not, indeed, made in the presence of
Tina, for the Maestro found that it was not acceptable. Nevertheless, a
strange fellowship and affection was springing up between these two. The
critics complained that the Signorina varied her notes; but, in fact,
the score of the opera never remained the same--at least as regarded her
parts. As she sang, with the Maestro beside her at the harpsichord,
imagination and recollection, instructed by the magic of sound, touched
her notes with an unconscious pathos and revealed to her master, with
his ready pencil in one hand and the other on the keys, fresh heights
and depths of cultured harmony, new combinations of fluttering,
melodious notes.
This copartnership, this action and reaction, had something wonderful
and charming about it; the power of nature in the girl's voice
suggesting possibilities of more melodious, more artistic pathos to the
composer, the girl's passionate instinct recognising the touch, and
confessing the help, of the master's skill. It seems a strange duet, yet
I do not know that we should think it strange.
The girl's nature, pure and loving, was supremely moved by the discovery
of this power of realisation and expression which it had obtained; but
at times it frightened her.
"I hate all this," she would cry sometimes, starting away from the
harpsichord; "they are dead and cold, and I sing!"
"Sing! _mia cara!_" the old man would say, with, for him, a soft and
kindly tone; "you cannot help but sing: and when did love and sorrow
feel so near and real to you as when, just now, you sang that phrase in
F minor?"
"It is wicked!" said the girl; but she sang over again, to the perfect
satisfaction of her master, the phrase in F minor.
"It is true," she said, after a pause. "I knew not how to love--I knew
not what love was till I learned to sing from you. Every day I learn
more what love is; I feel every hour more able to love--I love you more
and more for teaching me the art of love."