LATER on in the day Mark was told that the Princess wished to see him, and that he must wait upon her in her own apartment. He was taken to a part of the palace into which he had hitherto never been; in which a luxurious suite of rooms was reserved for the Princess when she condescended to occupy them. The most easterly of the suite was a morning sitting-room, which opened upon a balcony or trellised verandah, shaded with jasmine. The room was furnished in a very different style from the rest of the palace. The other rooms, though rich, were rather bare of garniture, after the Italian manner their ornaments consisting of cabinets of inlaid wood and pictures on the walls, with the centre of the room left clear. These rooms on the contrary, were full of small gilt furniture, after the fashion of the French court. Curious screens, depicting strange birds of gaudy plumage, embarrassed Mark as he entered the room.

The Prince was seated near a lady who was reclining in the window, and opposite to them was a stranger whom Mark knew must be the Count. The lady was beautiful, but with a kind of beauty strange to the boy, and her dress was more wonderful than any he had yet seen, though it was a mere morning robe. She looked curiously at him as he entered the room.

“This, then,” she said, “is the clown who is to educate my children.”

At this not very encouraging address the boy stopped, and stood silently contemplating the group.

The Count was the first who came to his assistance.

“The youth is not so bad, Princess,” he said. “He has an air of society about him, in spite of his youth.”

The Prince looked at the Count with a pleased expression.

“Do not fear for the children, Adelaide,” he said; “they will fare very well. Their manners are improved already. When they come to Vienna you will see how fine their breeding will be thought to be. Leave them to me. You do not care for them; leave them to me and to the Herr Tutor.”

Mark was looking at the Count. This was another strange study for the boy. He was older than the Prince a man of about forty; more firmly built, and with well-cut but massive features. He wore a peruke of very short, curled hair; his dress was rich, but very simple; and his whole appearance and manner suggested curiously that of a man who carried no more weight than he could possibly help, who encumbered himself with nothing that he could throw aside, who offered in every action, speech, and gesture the least possible resistance to the atmosphere, moral, social, or physical, in which he found himself. His manner to the Prince was deferential, without being marked, and he evidently wished to propitiate him.

“Thou art very pious, I hear,” said the Princess, addressing Mark in a tone of unmitigated contempt.

The boy only bowed.

“Is he dumb?” said the Princess, still with undisguised disdain.

“No,” said the Prince quietly. “He can speak when he thinks that what he says will be well received.”

“He is wise,” said the Count.

“Well,” said the Princess sharply, “my wishes count for nothing; of that we are well aware. But I do not want my children to be infected with the superstitions of the past, which still linger among the coarse and ignorant peasantry. I suppose, now, this peasant schoolmaster believes in a God and a hell, and in a heaven for such as he?” and she threw herself back with a light laugh.

“No, surely,” said the Count blandly, “that were too gross, even for a peasant priest.”

“Tell me, Herr Tutor,” said the Princess; and now she threw a nameless charm into her manner as she addressed the boy, from whom she wished an answer; “tell me, dost thou believe in a heaven?”

“Yes, gracious Highness,” said Mark.

“It has always struck me,” said the Prince, with a philosophic air, “that we might leave the poor their distant heaven. Its existence cannot injure us. I have sometimes fancied that they might retort upon me: ’You have everything here that life can wish: we have nothing. You have dainty food, and fine clothes, and learning, and music, and all the fruition that your fastidious fancy craves: we are cold and hungry, and ignorant and miserable. Leave us our heaven! At least, if you do not believe in it, keep silence before us. Our belief does not trouble you; it takes nothing from the least of your pleasures; it is all we have.’”

“When the Prince begins to preach,” said the Princess, with scarcely less contempt than she had shown for Mark, “I always leave the room.”

The Count immediately rose and opened a small door leading to a boudoir. The Prince rose and bowed. The Princess swept to the ground before him in an elaborate curtsey, and, looking contemptuously, yet with a certain amused interest, at Mark, left the room.

The Prince resumed his seat, and, leaning back, looked from one to the other of his companions. He was really thinking with amusement what a so strangely-assorted couple might be likely to say to each other; but the Count, misled by his desire to please the Prince, misunderstood him. He supposed that he wished that the conversation which the Princess had interrupted should be continued, and, sitting down, he began again.

“I suppose, Herr Tutor,” he said, “you propose to train your pupils so that they shall be best fitted to mingle with the world in which they will be called upon to play an important part?”

The Prince motioned to Mark to sit, which he did, upon the edge of an embroidered couch.

“If the serene Highness,” he said, “had wished for one to teach his children who knew the great world and the cities he would not have sent for me.”

“What do you teach them, then?”

“I tell them beautiful histories,” said Mark, “of good people, and of love, and of God.”

“It has been proved,” said the Count, “that there is no God.”

“Then there is still love,” said the boy.

“Yes, there is still love,” said the Count, with an amused glance at the Prince; “all the more that we have got rid of a cruel God.”

The boy’s face flushed.

“How can you dare say that?” he said.

“Why,” said the Count, with a simulated warmth, “what is the God of you pious people but a cruel God? He who condemns the weak and the ignorant the weak whom He has Himself made weak, and the ignorant whom He keeps in darkness to an eternity of torture for a trivial and temporary, if not an unconscious, fault? What is that God but cruel who will not forgive till He has gratified His revenge upon His own Son? What is that God but cruel But I need not go on. The whole thing is nothing but a figment and a dream, hatched in the diseased fancies of half-starved monks dying by inches in caves and deserts, terrified by the ghastly visions of a ruined body and a disordered mind men so stupid and so wicked that they could not discern the nature of the man whom they professed to take for their God a man, apparently, one of those rare natures, in advance of their time, whom friends and enemies alike misconceive and thwart; and who die, as He died, helpless and defeated, with a despairing cry to a heedless or visionary God in whom they have believed in vain.”

As the Count went on, a new and terrible phase of experience was passing through Mark’s mind. As the brain consists of two parts, so the mind seems dual also. Thought seems at different times to consist of different phases, each of which can only see itself of a faith that can see no doubt of a doubt that can conceive of no certainty; one week exalted to the highest heaven, the next plunged into the lowest hell. For the first time in his life this latter phase was passing through Mark’s mind. What had always looked to him as certain as the hills and fields, seemed, on a sudden, shrunken and vanished away. His mind felt emptied and vacant; he could not even think of God. It appeared even marvellous to him that anything could have filled this vast fathomless void, much less such a lovely and populous world as that which now seemed vanished as a morning mist. He tried to rouse his energies, to grasp at and to recover his accustomed thoughts, but he seemed fascinated; the eyes of the Count rested on him, as he thought, with an evil glance. He turned faint.

But the Prince came to his aid. He was looking across at the Count with a sort of lazy dislike; as one looks at a stuffed reptile or at a foul but caged bird.

“Thou art soon put down, little one,” he said, with his kindly, lofty air. “Tell him all this is nothing to thee! That disease and distraction never created anything. That nothing lives without a germ of life. Tell the Count that thou art not careful to answer him that it may be as he says. Tell him that even were it so that He of whom he speaks died broken-hearted in that despairing cry to the Father who He thought had deserted Him tell the Count thou art still with Him! Tell him that if His mission was misconceived and perverted, it was because His spirit and method was Divine! Tell the Count that in spite of failure and despair, nay, perchance who knows? because even of that despair, He has drawn all men to Him from that cross of His as He said. Tell the Count that He has ascended to His Father and to thy Father, and, alone among the personalities of the world’s story, sits at the right hand of God! Tell him this, he will have nothing to reply.”

And, as if to render reply impossible, the Prince rose and, calling to his spaniel, who came at his gesture from the sunshine in the window, he struck a small Indian gong upon the table, and the pages drawing back the curtains of the antechamber, he left the room.

The Count looked at the boy with a smile. Mark’s face was flushed, his eyes sparkling and full of tears.

“Well, Herr Tutor,” said the Count not unkindly, “dost thou say all that?”

“Yes,” said the boy, “God helping me, I say all that!”

“Thou might’st do worse, Tutor,” said the Count, “than follow the Prince.”

And he too left the room.