Faustina did not reply, and the Princess played several bars of the hymn before she spoke again.
"Do you not see," she said at last, "the blessing it has been also to my brother the Prince?—for the desire that he felt, surely a noble one, to refine the life of art by the sacred touch of religion—the effort that he made, though it seemed a failure, and was made—it may be, I dare not judge him—blindly, and in a mistaken fashion; yet this effort has to-night proved his own salvation, through you."
She stopped, and again the notes of the hymn sounded through the room.
"Carricchio was right," she went on, "when he told the Prince that you alone of all of us had solved the riddle, for on you alone has art exercised its supreme, its magic touch, in drawing out and developing the emotions, the powers of the soul. You alone possessed the perfect gift of nature—the untainted well-spring of natural life—which assimilated Mark's spirit with your spirit, and reproduced his life within your own."
Faustina dropped the Princess's hand, which she had taken, and bent her head still lower, as if shrinking from her kindly praise.
"The Prince also had something of this gift, and, in so far as he had, he built up by his own action what, in his supreme need, saved him from his lower self. I have come to see that the world's virtues, which, in my self-righteous isolation, I despised, are often, as I blindly said to the boy, nearer Christ's than my vaunted ones; that the world-spirit is often the Christ-spirit, and that, when we begin to see that His footsteps may be traced in paths where we little expect to find them, we shall no longer dare to talk of the secular life. Your little brother that died was not without his work, and the canary even was the type of a nobler life, even as Mark's death was the type of a nobler death. In strange and unlooked-for ways the mission of sacrifice and love fulfils itself, and, living in the full light of its influence, we can never realise the blessing we have derived, the changed aspect of the race we have inherited, from the Cross of Christ."
IX.
The next evening there was given, at the Imperial Palace, a ball and supper, to which none but la haute noblesse were invited. The dancing began with a brilliant Polonaise, which, headed by the Empress-Queen and her husband, passed through the rooms in stately procession, in singular and picturesque contrast and harmony with another faded and more solemn procession and array of figures in antique armour and dainty ruffs and doublets, and gold chains and princely mantles, the ancestral portraits who watched the formal slow dance-movement from the walls.
After the Polonaise came the supper, which was somewhat prolonged. The supper over, a minuet was danced, and afterward, the company being now happy and cheerful, and being, moreover, of sufficiently high and similar rank to dispense with somewhat of the rigid court etiquette, began to wander through the rooms in an informal manner, and to arrange contre-danses among themselves.