The siege of Orleans was raised. But it was some time before any feeling of security could be restored to the city; before the rescued citizens could feel sure that the flying squadrons of the nimble Tartar horsemen were not merely wheeling away in some of their bewildering manœuvres, to dash back with redoubled force against the walls.
All that night, therefore, there was anxious watching kept from rampart and tower. Between the almost incredible joy of rescue, and the moans of the wounded and dying, there was little sleep in Orleans that night.
Baithene kept guard near one of the breaches of the shattered walls, and gradually the silence of the deserted fields, so lately the camping-ground of a nation, flowed over him with a sense of deliverance and peace. For some time there was a distant sound of the multitudinous movements of a retreating host; but the sounds were like those of an ebbing tide, growing fainter and fainter and more broken, till they died away altogether, and he felt that the foe was really gone.
Joyful and solemn was the early Eucharist in the cathedral the next morning. Baithene met Ethne at the portal. Bishop Anianus and all the clergy were there. The church was full, and every prayer and anthem went up with the throb of a great multitude. But again in the moment of triumph, as in the moment of anguish, the Eucharistic hymns rose up beyond the moment. Deep in every heart was thanksgiving for rescue from ravage and ruin; but deeper and higher still flowed the eternal tide of joy in the rescue and redemption of the world, not for a moment but for ever, not by a victorious army but by a willing Victim, not through the triumph of force but through the weakness of the Cross. As through the anguish of suspense had risen the Eucharistic song, “We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee,” so through the triumph flowed the tenderness of the Eternal Sacrifice, the love that was perpetually giving itself.
Roman and Gothic soldiers knelt together. Ethne’s head was bowed, and her eyes, when she lifted them, were full of tears. Perhaps alone among that exulting multitude, in her prayers the vanquished and retreating enemy had a share. The ugly brown head of the dying boy so near her brother’s age, his feeble, grateful smile, his groans of pain, were in her heart. Perhaps in that worshipping multitude there were few besides who felt as she did how far the tide of redeeming love might reach from the heart of “the Lamb of God, Who taketh away the sins of the world.”
As they left the church, at the door they met once more the young Roman officer who had watched them from his horse while the Tartar boy was dying. He evidently recognized them, and respectfully made way for them.
The city was full of joy. Every house in it for the moment seemed like a side-chapel of a cathedral, so deeply had the intercessions of Bishop Anianus with God and man, with the Roman general and the Gothic king, day and night in the church, in the streets, and on the ramparts, moved every heart.
Ethne and Baithene had already many friends in Orleans, and began to feel at home there in a community of brethren. They would gladly have stayed there, but Eleazar was restless to depart, and, to the dismay of Miriam, nothing would dissuade him from going northward in the track of the retreating army. He had fellow-countrymen and commercial relations in Troyes. The city of Troyes was a great commercial emporium, the central point of a network of Roman roads, and once there, he thought he could make his way whither he would. The second morning after the raising of the siege, the little party therefore started from one of the gates of Orleans. They had hired of a citizen two strong mules, which were to accompany them to the nearest point on the river Seine, by which Eleazar had determined to reach Troyes. Danger was everywhere, but he felt safe and less likely to be observed in a boat on a river. As they went through the gate, the young Roman officer was there, commanding the guard. He saw them at once, and this time came forward and asked if he could render them any assistance.
“Surely,” he said, “you are not going forth on the track of the enemy across this waste land?”
Eleazar was disposed to resent any interference with his private affairs, but he dared not refuse to state whither and on what errand they were going.
“We must needs go hence without delay,” he said; “but we are only poor folk, and our poverty will be our best protection against plunder. In a short time we hope to be safe amongst friends.”
Marius, the young Roman, felt he had no right to inquire further. Besides, what protection had he to offer? Already a portion of the Roman and Gothic armies had left in pursuit of the retreating Huns, and that day the rest were to follow, leaving Orleans to repair her own walls and defend herself. Therefore, though with a sore heart, and much perplexed as to the relations between the fair-haired youth and maiden and the dark, Oriental-looking old man, he let the little company pass on. To direct attention to them might, he felt, only increase their peril, but he watched them far across the desolate plain, until the little band disappeared from his sight on the edge of a forest.
Eleazar was well versed in making his way through perils. They rather avoided the imperial roads, and crept along through by-ways. As it happened, their present peril was rather from hunger than from robbery, so thoroughly had the Huns ravaged the land and massacred or hunted away the inhabitants. By day they travelled miles without seeing a human being. The green corn had been cut down for the cattle; the vineyards were a tangle of scarred and broken stems; the husbandmen and vine-dressers had fled no one knew whither. The June sunshine shone down on a broad waste of trampled desert. All along the way, moreover, there were ghastlier traces of the invasion; unburied corpses lying by the wayside in heaps, or one by one, smitten down in their flight; and at night, when they sought shelter behind the walls of some burnt village, only the dogs gathered round them—cowed, lean, hungry dogs, whom the Irish deer-hound for the most part frightened away—poor famished dogs, finding terrible food in the human bones scattered around the ruined homes.
Only one night did they happen to find any traces of the inhabitants. It was the last day before they reached the banks of the Seine. They had encamped for the night on the edge of a forest, and spread their rugs and garments on the ground inside the ruined walls of a hovel. In the middle was a hole full of ashes, and on these still lay some charred chestnuts. Outside was a stone trough by a little spring, which bubbled up and trickled into it; a broken pitcher had been left beside it. In a corner of the little ruined home Ethne discovered a rude wooden cradle and a child’s rattle. When she saw it she burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping. When Miriam tried to comfort her in this rare burst of emotion, “Where, where is the poor mother?” was all she could say, “and the little child?”
When she recovered, and had begun with Baithene to gather chips for the fire among the trees near at hand, they heard a faint hushed wail near them, as if some one were trying to soothe the cries of a child. Creeping softly on into the forest, they came on a little family group, an old man and a young woman, with two children crying for hunger. Something in Ethne’s face and voice always made people trust her, and to her delight she found she understood what they were saying to each other.
“They are of the Bagaudæ!” she said to Baithene. “The poor oppressed peasants of our own race!” and she insisted on bringing them all to the hovel.
Eleazar was not altogether pleased at this addition to the family circle; but Miriam welcomed them as her father Abraham might of old. The fire was lit, and cakes of flour were laid on it, and shared with the hungry peasants. The children were evidently quite at home. They ran up to the cradle, and for the moment all their sorrows were blotted out at the discovery of their own lost toys; and soon all slept, except Ethne and the mother, who held a whispered conversation.
“What will you do to-morrow night?” Ethne asked, a royal instinct of providing for others always deep in her heart.
“Perhaps we may creep back home again,” the woman said.
At first she seemed afraid to say more; but no one could hesitate long to confide in Ethne. And soon her story came out.
“The Huns are gone,” Ethne said, “and the Romans and Goths are pursuing them.”
But that scarcely seemed to comfort the poor mother. She explained that though the Huns were their worst enemies, as they destroyed their crops and burnt their homes, still, whoever ruled, they, the peasants, were always slaves, sure to be compelled to work as hard and live on as little as possible, whether the masters were Goths or Romans; and it seemed that in some respects the Roman tax-gatherers were the worst oppressors of all, because they understood best how to wring out the last farthing.
Then, seeing Ethne’s sympathetic distress, she took to comforting her in turn, and confided to her that her husband and the men of the family were in hiding not far off, and that they had little secret storehouses of fruits and grain. She told her also of a wonderful old man, who lived alone in a cave of the forest, and spoke of the good Lord and Saviour, and baptized the little ones and taught them, and sometimes gathered them together for the Holy Eucharist. And so Ethne was comforted.
At last they reached the river Seine, and found a few frightened boatmen willing to row them up to Troyes, which they reached in safety on the fourth evening after they left Orleans. There Eleazar found his friends, but received a scant welcome.
“Why came you hither?” they said. “Of what use is it to be at the meeting-place of roads going in every direction, when the stations on all the roads are abandoned, and many of the roads themselves broken up? The Huns are pushing on through the country. Some of their horsemen galloped past the town yesterday, and to-morrow we may be overwhelmed by the whole flying host.”
The wilful old man was convinced for once that he had made a mistake, but he said—
“Who can say which way is the worst? Southward are the Romans and Goths, victorious; here are the Huns, defeated. The victorious Romans are as bad for us to encounter as the defeated Tartars. Little choice for us between heathen vanquished and Christian victors. What will the citizens of Troyes do?”
“We have no defence,” was the grim reply. “Troyes has no walls.”
“Why then,” said Eleazar, “do you not all take flight at once?”
“Troyes has a Bishop,” was the reply; “a great saint, who is clothed in rough raiment, and lives on nothing, they say, like our Elijah. He is called Lupus. The people believe in him; they believe the city is walled around by his prayers.”
“Another Anianus! another living saint!” murmured Ethne, turning with shining eyes on her brother. “We shall be saved, but I wonder how!”
Eleazar’s acquaintance resumed—
“It is strange; it makes one think of our old histories in spite of oneself. It is like Elisha and his wall of fire.”
Miriam’s face quivered with emotion.
“The God of Elisha is living,” she sighed, “and surely He is never far off.”
Eleazar made no reply but a despairing groan, and went out to find a safe hiding-place for his chests. But when Miriam and he were alone together again he said reproachfully—
“Thinkest thou the angels of God will build walls of fire around these Gentiles? As they have done unto us so shall it be done unto them.”
“I know not,” was Miriam’s reply. “I was thinking of the old words, ‘Should I not spare Nineveh, the great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left, and also much cattle?’”
“But that,” said Eleazar, “is in the Book of Jonah, a wonderful and mysterious apologue, which it is dangerous for the people who know not the law, especially for women, to interpret.”
That evening Ethne reminded Baithene that a monk of Tours had given them on the second tablet a letter to Lupus, Bishop of Troyes—the very man whose prayers, as Eleazar’s acquaintance had said, made a wall of fire round the city.
Eleazar had found the introduction to Bishop Anianus of Orleans too satisfactory for him to refuse that the captives should make use of this second tablet. The next morning, therefore, Ethne and Baithene went to the church to present their introduction. The good, aged Bishop himself lay prostrate before the altar in sackcloth and ashes. After a time he rose, lifted his hands in benediction, and went forth through the streets at the head of a procession of clergy and people, also in penitential robes of sackcloth, with ashes on their heads, chanting litanies. Ethne and Baithene followed. They had been impressed by the power and light in the sunken eyes and on the worn and hollow face of the Bishop; but they had little hope of getting near the holy man himself, until, as he entered his own door, they saw him pause on the threshold, that the poor mothers might draw near for him to lay his hands on their children and bless them. Then Ethne and Baithene ventured to press near, and present him with the old monk’s tablet. It was at once accepted with a gracious welcome, and the brother and sister were led into the house, and committed to the care of an aged priest.
“Alas! my children,” he said, “I fear you have come to the very den of the lion. Attila and the Huns are at our doors; walls and gates we have none. This very morning the tramp of the host has been heard, and the Bishop is to lead us forth in solemn procession to plead with Attila for mercy. Perhaps you will help us more by your prayers than we can help you.”
It was indeed too true. The savage cries of the horsemen, the heavy grind of the wagons, all the signs of the advance of the savage horde, with which they had grown so terribly familiar during the siege of Orleans, were around them again, growing louder and louder, nearer and nearer, every hour. And there was absolutely no defence; no walls, no garrison, nothing but a multitude of unwarlike citizens, with the women and children; absolutely no defence but faith and prayer.
When the brother and sister returned to Eleazar, they found him far more gentle than usual, and reproaching himself.
“Miriam, my wife,” he said, “I have brought you all into this den of lions, and I am no Daniel; and I had no command to come!”
As he spoke, a procession of clergy drew near in white robes, and at the head the aged Bishop in full sacerdotal vestments. Slowly they advanced, chanting the psalms of Eleazar’s own people, in Latin, David’s familiar Miserere, “In the multitude of Thy mercies, blot out my iniquities.” And the old Jew reverently bent his head, swept away on the tide of prayer. It seemed also as if some individual arrow had pierced his own conscience, for as the captives followed the procession, and he was left alone with his wife, he said to her—
“I had no call to come hither; no call to make slaves of these children! Miriam, what is driving me hither and thither through the earth? Surely there is the child; we shall find her; we will ransom her and make her all a child of our house has a right to be. It is for her I am striving and bargaining, and wandering like Cain to and fro through the earth. But is it of the Lord? Or can it be that the Adversary is hunting me hither and thither by his enchantments?”
Then, after some hesitation, Miriam ventured to say, in a voice quivering with emotion—
“Have you not told me, my beloved, that there is an idol, an enchantment, an enchanter, a thing, a demon, called Mammon?”
“It may be,” he replied, with a startled look of horror, as one half-waking from a nightmare. “But however that may be, this Bishop has the look of an Elijah. Let us go in and pray!”
Slowly the procession moved on with the Bishop at its head, and closely following him, a young deacon called Nemorius, clasping to his breast the book of the Gospels bound in gold. Numbers of the townspeople were following. Ethne returned to Miriam, but Baithene was swept on in the tide.
Close on the outskirts of the town they encountered the advance-guard of the host pressing on to the plunder of the city. The nimble brown men with the swift horses, which were as part of themselves, wheeled around them. Javelins were raised to hurl at them, spears were pointed, with the fierce howls and cries which seemed to have caught the tone of the wild beasts of the desert. Nor were these aimless, unmeaning menaces. Even while the procession advanced towards the enemy, Attila had given the order to cut them all down. Nemorius the young deacon fell pierced to death, with his golden Gospels still clasped to his breast; and many sank wounded or dead beside him. It seemed as if there would be a general massacre. But still the old Bishop Lupus pressed on, until he reached Attila; and then, something in the venerable figure and the worn, aged face, with its fire undimmed by the seventy years, something in the man himself, seemed suddenly to impress the fierce and haughty conqueror who had insulted emperors without fear, and had destroyed cities and devastated provinces without mercy.
Attila gave order for the carnage to cease, and at a nod, at a look from him, javelins were lowered, spears were couched, the eager war-horses were held in check, and the procession with the white-haired Bishop in his priestly robes stood still, surrounded by the checked host of foes, confronting the Desolator of nations.
It was as if a raging sea had been arrested at full tide, each foaming wave frozen into stillness in the curve of its breaking.
What was said in that wonderful interview can scarcely be known. Few who could understand were near enough to hear.
It was rumoured afterwards that Attila himself claimed to be “the Scourge of God,” and that the Bishop with lofty meekness replied—
“If thou art the Scourge of God, chasten us as much as the Hand that holds thee permits.”
Probably this was merely a dramatic echo in words of the deed done. Whatever was said, what was felt and done cannot be denied.
Troyes was no Rome guarded by the glory of centuries and the magic of a great name. It was an unhistorical, unwalled town, such as Attila had burned and sacked by scores. The Bishop bore no great title such as he could have heard of; it was simply the man, the saint, the man of God that moved him,—moved him not merely to turn aside from an intended enterprise, but to curb his fierce hosts in the full career of plunder and slaughter; a host that was not composed only of his own people, but of the fiercer and more lawless elements of the Gothic tribes, and of Alans and Vandals. One stipulation only the leader of that savage host made; and the stipulation was almost a greater tribute to the Bishop’s character and influence than the granting of his request. Attila said he would spare the city on one condition, that the aged Bishop should leave it and accompany him and his hordes to the Rhone. Perhaps he meant it as a test of the saint’s courage and sincerity. If so, they stood the test. The old man yielded himself up to Attila, and the procession, with the grateful citizens, returned to the rescued city. Perhaps some of them felt that they owed their deliverance to a double sacrifice: the aged Bishop, who offered up his life amidst the perils of the hostile army; and the young deacon, who had laid it down pierced by their spears.
Silently Baithene re-entered the dwelling where his sister awaited him with Eleazar and Miriam.
“Has anything come of this bearding of the lion?” Eleazar asked.
“Everything,” Baithene replied. “The Bishop has given himself up to the Huns, and the city is saved.”
“In the lion’s den!” said Eleazar, bowing his head and hiding his face.
“With Him Who can stop the mouths of the lions,” murmured Miriam.
“With the Creator of the lions!” said Ethne. “He made everything good, they told us in Ireland. Even the lions! Even Attila is not only a destroyer.”
Afterwards, when they were alone, she said to Baithene—
“Who can tell what even Attila might have been if the Christians he met had all been saints!”
“He seems to have a wonderful eye for a saint,” Baithene admitted. “But we must pray hard for the Bishop.”
“I do not believe Attila will hurt a hair of his head,” rejoined Ethne. “He is, after all, nothing worse than a Hun, and I cannot forget the poor ugly brown head that I had to hold, or the kind dying eyes that looked into mine.”
So the flood of destruction was turned aside from Troyes, and swept on to the deadly encounter with the armies of Rome and her allies, under the command of Aetius the great Roman general, and Theodoric the Gothic king, in the Catalaunian plains near Châlons.
The great shock of the battle of the nations (the Hunnenschlacht) came at last.
It was said that before the battle, Attila had a solemn consultation in his tent with his augurs, and by various methods of divination they warned him of disaster, but said that a great leader of his foes would fall on the field; and that Attila, believing that this leader must be Aetius, deemed that the loss of thousands would be compensated by the death of that one. Probably personal resentment also may have entered into his dislike of Aetius, once a hostage among the Huns, and afterwards their ally.
But whether the battle was forced on him or chosen by him, and how it began, none seem able to say. The confusion that hangs about the story of great battles does not begin with gunpowder; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke, and the dust of the arena hang in blinding clouds around them all. And this conflict on the plains between Troyes and Châlons was one of the great critical battles of the world. A little shallow runnel of water, it was said, became a great torrent of blood on that fatal field. Three hundred thousand were left there dead. “A battle ruthless, manifold, immense, obstinate,” fought on from the afternoon into the night. In the morning after it the Romans and the Gothic allies, left in possession of the field, strewn with corpses, saw that the Huns did not return to the fight, but kept encamped behind their wagons, where they had fled for shelter. This was all the proof they had of victory. The battle was scarcely won; but the Huns were gone, and they were suffered to go unpursued. Gone as it proved for ever; from Gaul and all Teutonic Europe. But of that no man then could be sure.
Marius wrote on the morrow of the battle—“The messengers are to start for Rome at once. Fortunately only my left hand is wounded, and that but slightly, and so I can write. The battle is won; or at least it is over. The battle-field and the dead are left to us. The Huns are behind their wagons. Theodoric, the brave old Gothic king, is slain. Some say Attila would have been content to lose the battle if Aetius had fallen, as he thought the augurs promised. But Aetius lives and diplomatizes still. And the heroic old Goth is dead—a hero and king to the last. Unmindful of his threescore years, I saw him galloping to and fro, cheering on his people to the fight, when he was thrown from his horse, and fell under the feet of the advancing horsemen. They are searching now for his body among the heaps of slain who died around their king.
“They say Attila in leading on his hosts bade them despise our Roman forces with the ancient defensive array of the shields locked into the testudo, and make their onset on the young nations who could not only defend themselves but assail. ‘Cut the sinew and the limbs will relax,’ he cried. ‘Him who is fated to conquer no dart will touch; him who is doomed to die Fate will find amidst the sloth of peace.’ He might have spared his taunts to us Romans. Romans or barbarians, who could say who fought best when all fought with the hope of beating back the flood of destruction for ever, and with the certainty that if it were not beaten back, it would overwhelm them all? It was no conflict between machines and battering-rams and Roman walls, but between flesh and blood, fierce and desperate men fighting hand to hand for life or death. They say three hundred thousand lives were lost upon this fatal field; three hundred thousand souls there passed away—whence or whither, who can say? Every kind of weapon was there—javelin, spear, huge Tartar bow, Roman shield and sword; amidst the din of every kind of language. Never, I should think, could confusion have been greater; and to confusion of tongues, before the battle ended, was added the bewilderment of darkness. We began at three o’clock, and the conflict raged on through the night. Aetius himself strayed in the dark amongst the Huns, whose language, fortunately for him, he knew. And yet, in spite of the confusion of tribes and tongues, the issue is clear, clearer I think than the issue of battles can often be. For it is, at bottom, the conflict of civilization with barbarism, of hope with despair, of building with destroying, of order with anarchy, of heathenism with Christianity, of life with death; and in the main, civilization, order, hope, Christianity, life, have won the day.
“At this moment I hear the death-wail of the Goths around the body of their king. They think they have rescued the royal corpse from the heap of slain beneath which it lay.
“Still the Huns keep behind their wagons. Attila their king is among them; but around him there is no shout as for a king.
“The field is won; the host of the Huns, the great flood of devastation, is ebbing back to its deserts. God grant it be for ever.
“It seems decided that we make no pursuit, but let the flood ebb away beyond the Rhone. To-morrow I go southward with a detachment to Troyes. Farewell.”
All the day of the great battle tidings kept flowing in to Troyes. None ventured beyond the city, for the battle was said to be raging not more than five miles away. There was indeed no roll of the thunder of guns; but the echo of distant tumult came faintly now and then through the hush of the July afternoon.
Troyes knew that her Bishop was there. Who could say that if the battle were lost, vengeance might not fall on his head? But if Attila won, all was lost.
All day prayer went up ceaselessly in the churches, but mostly in silence, or following the low litanies of the choir, so heavy was the weight of suspense.
A confusion of contradictory rumours reached the city: first it was reported that the Romans had won the height on which all might depend; then that Theodoric the great King of the Visigoths was slain. After that fell the darkness. And through the night people took refuge in the churches, and silent prayer went up; until at last, in the quiet dawn of the July morning, came the news that the battle was over, that Attila and his Huns had fled behind their wagons, and that the Roman army held the field. Soon came the further news that Attila and his host were retreating towards the Rhone, carrying Bishop Lupus with them. The city and the land were saved from the destroyer, but who could answer for the saintly life so freely offered up for the people?
To Ethne and Baithene the city, in a sense they themselves, seemed orphaned afresh; and in their different ways and words, the little group of four, Irish and Hebrew, poured out their hearts together for the prophet still in the den of lions.
There was much to be done for the crippled and wounded who were borne in from time to time from the battle. Baithene went out with the wagons to carry them in; Ethne was again among the deaconesses and consecrated virgins, succouring the wounded.
Late in the evening Baithene came with a cart to the door of the house where Eleazar was sojourning; he asked to be allowed to bring in a young Roman officer who had recognized him. True to the hospitality of their race and their religion, Eleazar and Miriam would not refuse. Was not Abraham, “the father of the faithful,” also the “father of guests”? Had he not received the heathen stranger into his house? yet had not the Almighty been more merciful than Abraham, rebuking the patriarch for not tolerating the imperfect worship of his heathen guest? The Romans had indeed destroyed Jerusalem, but this wounded Roman must be welcomed as a guest from God, and the guest-chamber was made ready for him.
The stranger was Marius, whose wounds were more severe than he had chosen to report in his letters to his family.
For the first day he lay quite still, weak from loss of blood; but Miriam’s homely skill in nursing and preparing food for the sick proved of good service, and on the third morning he was able to creep out with Baithene and Ethne to the church. On the way they told him of the rescue of Troyes from the plunder of Attila’s host through the intercession of Lupus, and how the aged Bishop had given himself up to the Huns for his people.
By degrees the whole story of the Irish captives became clear to him: the baptism by Patrick, the father’s rank as a chieftain among his people, their capture by British pirates, their hearing of the letter of Patrick to Coroticus, their purchase by Eleazar the Jew, their interview with the friendly monk at Tours, and his letters to Bishop Anianus of Orleans and Bishop Lupus of Troyes.
His heart went out to them as captive nobles, in their own land of a house as ancient as his own; as in unjust bondage to a Hebrew, yet so far legally his, that except legally they could not be set free; and above all as Christians, Catholic Christians of the old faith, yet in some way of the old faith in a new way, so fervent, and simple, and unaware of all the controversies that had for many worn its poetry into prose; glowing with a Christian faith that seemed in some unspeakable way steeped anew in the freshness of dawn, baptized into the death and life of Christ the Lord. So, during those days in the house together, the sweet household way and gracious services of Ethne stole into his inmost heart and took possession of it before he was aware. She was like his mother, yet unlike, as the rose of dawn to the tender glow of evening.
At last the day came when Marius had to leave with his detachment. The day before he left he was trying to console Ethne for the loss of Bishop Lupus.
“He is not lost,” she said, with a triumphant smile in her dark-grey eyes. “Attila will not harm him.”
“Your heart has room even for the Hun,” he replied, remembering his first sight of her beside the dying boy at Orleans.
“The Huns are terrible heathen, I fear,” she said, “but they do seem to know the saints of God when they see them. At least they are not what Patrick calls apostate Christians.”
“No,” he replied, very gravely. “Attila does seem to recognize a saint; and, alas! he has seen so many apostate or unworthy Christians. Think of Chrysaphius, the minister of the Emperor of the East, trying to bribe Attila’s own ambassadors and friends, and to assassinate him treacherously; and think of Attila finding it out, yet, when the embassy charged with the base project came to him in his camp beyond the Danube, being magnanimous enough to distinguish between the villains who planned the treachery, and the envoys who were sent to carry it out without knowing what they were doing. It was not like an ordinary savage to let one of that embassy escape.”
Ethne sighed.
“How indeed was Attila to know that to be a Christian means to love good and hate evil? The Huns are not devils; for the devils did wrong when they knew what they were doing. And how were the Huns to know? And even if they were devils,” she added, “Patrick has taught us the Name before which the devils fly.”
“In the Creed?” he said.
“In the Creed,” she replied, “and in Patrick’s own hymn.”
“What is Patrick’s hymn?” he asked.
“I thought all Christians knew Patrick’s hymn,” she said, with some surprise, and she began to chant softly some of her beloved Irish lorica and “breastplate.”
“But I do not know your language,” he said.
Ethne translated—“‘Christ at my right hand, at my left; Christ in the fort, in the battle, on the sea; by the way, at the end.’ Is it not sure to be so with all Christians? Is it not sure to be so with the holy Bishop Lupus?”
He hesitated a moment, and then said—
“Christ our Lord suffers some very hard things to happen to His Christians.”
“I know. We were told so,” she answered. “He said so. But the hymn says He is with us on all the ways, however rough; and certainly always at the end, however dark.”
He was silent. Her faith and hope were stealing like sunshine into his heart, but, like the sunshine, silently.
“I am going with my soldiers,” he said, after a pause, “to keep them from oppressing the poor peasants. The Huns have robbed them of nearly everything, and an army of hungry men following the Huns must not be suffered to take the little that is left.”
“I know,” she said, with a flash of quick sympathy; “the Huns are not the only robbers. The people seem to suffer everywhere, from every one. Baithene has heard them say the misery was there long before the Huns came. There are the tax-gatherers and the slave-masters everywhere.”
“Everywhere,” Marius replied, “and always.”
“And you will help the oppressed and save them from the oppressors?” she said, her whole face lighting up, the royal heart going forth to the poor and the down-trodden.
“I will try,” he said; “I am going back to Rome.”
“They are taking us there also,” she said; and she parted from him with a smile which was to him as an illumination from heaven.
He wrote to his sister—“The wound was worse than I knew. But I have had tender care and nursing in the house of a Jew called Eleazar, from his wife Miriam, and from two young Christian captives, and I am quite strong again. And, beloved, I think I have found the Fountain of Youth at last; and I hope may bring some drops to thee also. Tell my mother of these two young Christian captives, son and daughter of a king or chieftain from the farthest West, the Scottish-land, Hibernia, the island Rome never conquered. They were kidnapped by British pirates, and bought by Eleazar, an aged Jew, who with his wife Miriam lives at Rome, and is taking them thither. They must be ransomed. Farewell.”
Great was the exultation in Rome at the news of the victory on the Catalaunian plains, the defeat of Attila, and his retreat with his Huns to their camps beyond the Danube.
The echo of the triumph soon reached the quiet portico of the palace on the Aventine, where Damaris and Lucia were sitting together in the hush of a July noon. Fabricius came in with the news.
“Attila is in retreat; there has been a battle, with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, and here is a letter for thee.”
It was the one Marius had written from the battle-field. In a few days followed the second from Troyes. It was to Lucia, and she read it as they sat together in the quiet evening.
“‘The wound was worse than I knew.’”
“I felt sure of that,” said the mother.
“‘But I have had tender care and nursing in the house of a Jew called Eleazar, from his wife Miriam and two young Christian captives.’”
“In the house of a Jew!” exclaimed Fabricius, doubtfully. “God grant they dealt fairly by him. The Jews have many wrongs to avenge on us and ours.”
Lucia read on—“‘I am quite strong again,’” and then she paused a moment before she proceeded, “‘I think I have found the Fountain of Youth, and I hope to bring some drops home to thee.’”
“A curious mixture of religions,” said Fabricius. “A Jew, and the old Pagan fountain. What can he mean?”
“He means, I suppose,” said Lucia, “that the world around us seems rather old, and that he has found among these new people some freshness of new life.”
“I understand,” said Damaris.
Lucia read on—“‘Tell my mother of the two young Christian captives, the son and daughter of a king or chieftain from the farthest West, the land of the Scots, Hibernia, the island Rome never conquered. They were kidnapped by British pirates, and bought by the old Jew Eleazar, who, with his wife Miriam, lives at Rome, and is taking them thither. They must be ransomed.’”
“It seems a very wild story,” said Fabricius. “Are you quite sure it is from Marius?”
“Quite sure,” said Lucia; and she resumed, “There is a postscript. He thinks the sister would be delightful to me, and that the brother would be invaluable to our father on his lands among the Sabine hills. There is also a dog, a deer-hound of the purest Scottish breed, that he thinks would be priceless for the chase.”
“A wonderful treasure-trove, in good sooth,” said Fabricius, rather grimly. “A dog, two captives to ransom, and a Fountain of Youth.”
Afterwards he said to his wife when they were alone, “Dilectissima, understandest thou what this means? Art thou ready to have thy youth renewed by a daughter-in-law from the Scottish wilds?”
“We will wait and see,” she replied. “Marius is no dreamer. If he thinks he has found a treasure, I believe he has.”
“The Scots are many of them Pelagian heretics,” Fabricius replied, not without malice.
“Then we must bring them under the instruction of our Pope Leo,” she said. “We will wait and see.”
They had not long to wait. The very next evening Damaris and Lucia were in their lectica, with its purple curtains and golden lattices, on the great road leading northward, when they met a little company of four, walking beside two strong, heavily-laden mules. The old man who led the way, walking alone, had the dark, Oriental colouring and aquiline features which they recognized as Hebrew. Behind him walked two women, with veils drawn around the head and shoulders, one dark and stooping slightly with age, the other tall and young and fair, with a sweet light in the grey eyes which met those of Damaris. Behind them came a fair, athletic young man, holding a powerful deer-hound in leash.
Damaris and Lucia looked significantly at each other. They would have followed the strangers, but their horses had suddenly changed their pace, and were galloping towards the hills, rocking the heavy carriage (or highly-decorated wagon) from side to side. The mother and daughter had not a doubt that, as in a momentary flash of lightning, they had seen the group described in Marius’ letter. As they drove on they met a troop of the slaves of the Imperial household.
Meantime in the opposite direction the little company they had met entered the gate of the city, and were passed by the same troop of the Imperial household.
The officer who was at the head of the band of slaves seemed struck by the four travellers, so contrasted in types of face and figure, and yet so evidently belonging to each other. Especially he fixed his eyes on the fair face of Ethne, the athletic form of Baithene, and the dog of the much-prized Irish breed. After he had passed them he turned back, and asked Eleazar where he lived, and if the dog was to be purchased, and said he might look in some day and inquire about it.
Something in the officer’s look and bearing made Ethne look down and draw closer to Miriam, and Baithene look up defiantly and throw his arm around the dog, whilst the dog pricked up his ears, and gave a suspicious low growl.
When they reached Eleazar’s lodging at the top of a tall house on the further side of the Tiber, where many of his countrymen congregated, and had separated into their different rooms for the night, Ethne said to her brother—
“Have you the tablet the Roman soldier at Troyes gave us for his mother and father, who live in a palace on one of these hills?”
“Surely,” he said; “why do you ask?”
“I can scarcely say why,” she answered, with a shiver. “But this great Rome seems to me lonelier than the sea, and stranger than our first step into a strange land, and more like a den of lions than besieged Orleans or the camp of the Huns. The people look at us so strangely, as if we were foreign animals, or pieces of merchandise for sale.”
“And we are!” moaned Baithene.
“Let us say the paternoster and Patrick’s hymn,” she rejoined, “and try and go to sleep.” But they slept little.
Nor did Miriam and Eleazar sleep much better.
“Dost thou know that man with the sinister face,” she said, “who spoke to thee about the dog to-day?”
“No,” he replied, “save that he is of the Imperial household, and must not be offended.”
“He must be escaped,” she replied decidedly. “It is not the dog only that he wants, and he looks a son of Belial. The Imperial household is said to be a sink of iniquity; we must never sell these children into that.”
He was silent; heart and conscience were with her, but he murmured sullenly—
“I told thee these Gentile strangers were no merchandise for us.”
“The God of the fatherless sent them to us,” she replied; “and our own child is fatherless and motherless; and if we suffer God’s orphans to be ruined, how are we to ask Him to care for our own?”
“We are no princes now,” he answered, “to have young men and maidens in our service, and beasts of the chase. What would you do?”
“They have a tablet from that young Roman officer,” she said. “A letter to his family in a palace on the Aventine.”
“What of that?” he grumbled.
“I will go to-morrow,” she said, “with the maiden, to see the lady on the Aventine, the young Roman noble’s mother, and tell her all. Perchance she will have compassion on these Christian captives, and help them and us.”
“Thou wilt do what seemeth thee best,” he rejoined, in a tone of oppressed acquiescence. “If we are ruined, we are ruined; and the All-Merciful have mercy on thee and our lost child.”
Miriam, having gained her point, was too wise to prolong the debate and imperil the victory, which was, she well knew, the victory of his own conscience, by the most brilliant or devout retort.
So the next morning early she gently tapped at the door of the rooms where the young captives were, and said—
“Put on thy raiment quietly, my daughter, and bring the tablet the young Roman gave thee, and come with me, and let thy brother and the dog follow close behind.”
In the dusk of the morning they crossed the Tiber, and gliding along the silent quays at the foot of the Aventine, climbed from their level between the walls of the vineyard and palace gardens till they reached the gate of the house of Fabricius.
Eleazar came after them, and stood near them at the gate, in the shadow, a little apart. One or two slaves were stirring, and seemed at first determined not to heed them, but in a few minutes the steward of the household appeared, and demanded what they wanted at that unseasonable hour.
“We want thee to bear this epistle instantly to thy lady,” said Miriam; “it is from her son. He gave it us at the city of Troyes, far away in Gaul, to bring hither to her.”
The steward looked doubtfully at the group, but nevertheless accepted the tablet, went quickly into the house, and in a few minutes returned with his young mistress. Lucia’s smile reassured them.
“Does the matter press?” she asked.
“It presses sore,” was Miriam’s reply. “A few hours’ delay may prove the ruin of two innocent lives.”
Lucia went instantly to her mother’s room.
“Mother,” she said, “it is the people we met yesterday, the people who nursed Marius, with a letter from him.”
Together they glanced at the few words in the letter from Marius, commending the fugitives to the care of his father and mother. In a few minutes Damaris and Lucia received the strangers in the atrium. Miriam asked to see Damaris apart, and few words of explanation were needed between them.
“My husband purchased these captives on the coast of Gaul,” she said. “They are noble. They were taken by pirates. They are Christians. They are good. Lady, save them from becoming slaves in the household of the Emperor. One of his people has seen them, and is coming, I fear, to purchase them to-day.”
“It must not be,” said Damaris. “What would you have us do?”
“Ransom them, purchase them, lady; make them your own. They belong to your Christ!”
“You are not Christian?” Damaris asked courteously.
“My family are of the tribe of Judah—of the family of your Christ. Christians robbed us of all, of our only child. But I believe your Christ was good.”
Damaris looked into the dark, sad, Oriental eyes and read much there. After a moment’s pause she took Miriam’s hand.
“You have pity on these captives,” she said tenderly, “as your great prophets commanded you; you know the heart of a captive. You have pity on this maiden for the sake of your own dead maiden child.”
“Our daughter is not dead,” exclaimed Miriam, with a tremulous voice. “But she is a captive, perhaps a slave, we know not where. We search for her year after year. We pray for her night and day. There is One Who lives and hears.”
“One Who sees and loves!” responded Damaris; “Who sees thee caring for these His children, and I believe brings them through thee to me. I will do all I can.”
She went straight to her husband, who was in consultation with his steward, in his room of business. After dismissing the attendant, she said,
“Fabricius, these captives, the friends of Marius, who helped to save his life, are here. We shall have to ransom them at once.”
“My lady is imperious,” he replied, smiling, “and must of course be obeyed. But where are the revenues? The taxes and imposts for these wars are ruinous. Only just now the forester from our farms on the Sabine hills has been telling me the slaves will not work. They are probably meditating another flight to the barbarians, as in the days of Alaric, and everything is going to ruin.
“We must sell some of our land,” she said.
“No one will buy,” he replied. “They say Attila the Hun will soon return to avenge his defeat and ravage the country.”
“I will part with my jewels,” she said.
He made a deprecatory gesture, and said—
“I was but pointing out to thee we were not Olympians to command the clouds, nor, alas! of those who found the tribute-money miraculously stored in the mouths of fishes. What thou commandest must certainly be done. But what can then be done with the captives we shall have to see.”
They returned together to the atrium, and Fabricius, addressing Baithene, said gravely—
“My son writes that thou art a prince in thine own land. I fear we have too many princes here already to have much room for more.”
“I am no prince now,” said Baithene, raising his frank, fearless eyes to Fabricius, “at least I have no kingdom and no subjects; and what we call a kingdom in our country would perhaps seem but a wilderness to thee.”
There was no complaining in his tone, simply the acknowledgment of an unpleasant fact; and no defiance in his look, only a kind of princely sense that nothing could rob him of his birthright, or change what he was in himself, or prevent his conquering circumstances by making the best of them.
The old Roman patrician was touched, he felt he had met an equal; but all he said was—
“Thy dog, at all events, seems a prince of dogs.”
And Bran acknowledged the compliment by an acquiescent wag of his tail.
Then turning to Miriam, Fabricius said—“I would see thy husband.”
“I will fetch him at once,” she replied. And without another word she went and brought in Eleazar, who was still keeping guard outside the gate.
Fabricius took the old man to his private room, and as a matter of course there was some bargaining between them. The Roman noble pleaded with much truth the badness of the times; the Jewish merchant pleaded with much plausibility the poverty of his race, and his own especial losses on this purchase. But the arrangement was soon concluded; and Eleazar and Miriam returned alone to the tall houses beyond the Tiber, leaving Ethne, Baithene, and the dog in the palace on the Aventine.
As Miriam went, she bowed with an Oriental gesture, and kissed the hand of Damaris.
“Your Christ is good,” she murmured with a quivering voice, “and so are some of His Christians.”
“Our Christ is yours!” said Damaris, in a low voice.
Miriam made no reply for a moment, and then with passionate intensity she said—
“Pray to your God and ours, that if your Christ is ours we may know it in time, I and my husband, and our captive child whom we have lost.”