Attila the Hun had been nursing his vengeance and preparing his forces beyond the Danube all through that silent winter which had brought such peace and light to the palace on the Aventine. And early in the spring came the terrible tidings that he was coming with his hundreds of thousands, always, it seemed, to be renewed from the inexhaustible regions of barbarian life in the wilds of the East; and this time he was to be turned back by no diplomacy, nor turned aside by any intervening prey. Attila and his Huns were already at the frontier, besieging the great frontier fortress of Aquileia, on their way to capture and plunder Rome.
There was little time for consideration. It was no moment, they all felt, for a woman to venture into the perils of a journey across Europe. It was therefore decided that Baithene should go back with Dewi to Ireland. It was also a time, Marius felt, for every Roman who was able to devote himself to the defence of the Empire against a force whose triumph would mean the destruction of Christianity and civilization, the laying waste of all Europe into a Tartar wilderness, creation lapsing again into chaos.
And so the four, so recently drawn together, had to part. But the parting brought in some ways a new certainty of their inseparable union, like the ripening of a “sudden frost.”
Baithene said to Lucia—
“I am going to my Ireland, with no doubt in my heart as to the welcome my father and mother would have for thee. Only for thee, sometimes I scarcely dare to ask that thou shouldst come forth to share our rough life, to be exiled from such a home as thine.”
“My father,” was Lucia’s answer, “thinks of that island of thine as a haven of peace and simplicity, and my mother as an isle of saints, compared with our Rome.”
“But thou thyself?”
“I am not sure of any country being a haven, or a heaven,” she said. “Perhaps,” she added with a smile, “neither thou nor I may be ready for either yet. I may have to grow younger, and thou older. But we should be together, in the storm or in the calm. And I am well content.”
And Marius said to Ethne—
“How can I leave thee, who hast made earth dear to me and heaven real? who hast given me back faith in God and hope in man?”
“Thou art not leaving me,” Ethne replied. “We are in one path, in the steps of the pitiful, redeeming Lord. Thou wilt not despair of the slaves, however degraded, or of the Huns, however savage, for His sake.”
“For His sake and thine,” he replied, “for the sacred memory of thy captivity, and the dear first vision of thee beside the poor dying boy. Thou feelest then, beloved, that we are beginning our life together now?”
“Have we not begun?” she said. “Our paths may be divided for a little while, but we never.”
And so they parted.
For three long months, throughout the spring, the tidings of the ruin and ravage of the Huns on the northern shores of the Adriatic continued to reach the household on the Aventine. The great hordes were still swarming in the neighbourhood of unconquered Aquileia, whither they knew Marius had gone, and where the Roman garrison were making a stand worthy of old Rome.
One letter reached the mother from her son—
“I am once more in the house of the lady Digna, the young matron who, in her beauty and truth, seems to belong rather to the grand simplicity of the Republic than to any people or any period since. Close to her house is a high tower rising above the river, flowing crystal clear as if fresh from the blue hills which you see from the top. We cannot despair of saving the city, the virgin city, that has kept off so many enemies. The traditions of the ancient heroism seem to inspire its men and its women to-day. There are stories of days not so long gone, when the Emperor Julian floated wooden towers on rafts up the river to penetrate into the place where it had no walls. But the citizens set fire to the towers and baffled the Emperor. Impregnable this city of the north wind has been, as the north wind himself in the fastnesses of those rugged mountains. If we can but keep her impregnable this once more, who knows but the hordes of Attila may turn back again from Italy, as they did from Gaul after our battle on the plains of Châlons? There are rumours of discouragement and division in Attila’s camp. The ancient spell of Rome, some say, is falling on them, the memory of Alaric lying dead beneath the river-bed so soon after that last siege and sack; it is said even to have in some measure benumbed Attila himself. Glorious it would be if this old stronghold should by her heroic stand keep back the tide of devastation from our Italy, perchance even drive back for ever the flood of barbarism from the world; and Jerome’s birthplace become the birthplace of a new order and freedom for all Christendom, a new Vulgate or translation of the great old Scriptures of righteousness and peace into the common tongue of men.
“The trade has indeed for the moment vanished from her port; the fleets of her merchantmen behold her from afar off; the sea is silent, and the busy fields around are dumb and waste. But if this unusual quiet in the camp of Attila does indeed mean that discouragement has fallen on his hosts, this silence may prove the silence of dawn. But whatever the end, the many heroic deeds done here can never be lost.”
After that letter, week after week flowed on, but brought no tidings from Marius. They heard indeed from time to time that Aquileia still held her own, that the great hordes still surrounded the city, apparently checked and baffled there, unable to press on to further destruction while that brave garrison remained unconquered in their rear.
From Baithene no one expected tidings until he brought them himself.
And so the four on the Aventine were drawn closer to each other, through their common suspense, their common love, their common prayers. Happily for them the natural spring was also the Christian Lent, with its prayers and fasts, to be followed by the Passion-tide, and the solemn, immortal joys of Easter which no sorrow ever more could quench.
And through all they had the great sermons of Leo, strong against all despondency, firm against all yielding to the enemy as Aquileia herself, with the bracing force as of the north wind through them. Their Roman reticence and brevity made them a rock of strength amidst the floods of dread and suspense surging through every heart; they seemed not so much words as the sympathetic sustaining grasp of a strong hand. And from Damaris Ethne learned how those powerful words were the tried weapons of a warrior who had proved them on many battle-fields with many foes, of a commander who by them had many a time rallied the wavering forces of the Church. On two great campaigns Damaris dwelt, especially the first—the warfare which had ended in the victory of Chalcedon. Damaris told the story how the great letter of Leo, called the “Tome,” was planted as a battering-ram against the heresies of the Latrocinium, the “robber-council” of Ephesus; the letter addressed to the Council through the good Bishop Flavian of Constantinople, which he was never suffered to read, the letter being drowned in the furious cries of the heretics, who with fierce blows and buffetings actually did Bishop Flavian himself to death. But that defeat, she said, had been repaired by the victory of the ancient Catholic faith at Chalcedon, on the Asiatic shore opposite Constantinople. The great Council assembled there enthusiastically welcomed Leo’s letter, and cried with one voice—“This we all believe! Peter has spoken by Leo! This is the true faith! This is the faith of the Fathers.” And with the story of that battle was linked a touch of tender feeling, the only record left of Leo’s having shed tears. The Empress Placidia wrote from Rome to her niece the Empress Pulcheria at Constantinople, that when Leo was imploring her to bring about the assembling of the great Council of Chalcedon to reverse the fatal decision of Ephesus, so full was his heart of the truth he was defending, that “he could scarcely speak for tears.”
The second campaign of which Damaris told the story was that with the Manicheans, in their two divisions of false asceticism and false freedom. These battles he fought in Rome, upholding against the ascetics, who crept about with sad countenances and sordid garments, the truth that “every creature of God is good, and to be enjoyed with thanksgiving;” on the other hand, contending against the licentious, who, declaring the body to be essentially evil, regarded whatever evil was done by it as indifferent, and thus fell into frightful depths of cruelty and impurity, and repressing them with resolute severity, or driving them from the city they polluted, as those smitten with a malignant or infectious disease.
It was with no shadows that Leo fought, but for the foundations of Christian faith and human morality; to preserve for the Church her Divine and human Christ, His Divine omnipotent love, His suffering human sympathy; to preserve for the world the sacredness of family life, the pure love of husband and wife, of father, mother, and child, the Divine creation of the body as well as the soul. For in those days paganism was scarcely dead, or, at all events, scarcely crumbled into harmless dust, with powerless poetic shades, noiselessly gliding around their former haunts; but still retaining in death a deadly malaria of corruption and disease.
Leo’s fervent words Ethne found, more and more, were no mere holiday strains of soothing or exciting music, but a clarion call making no uncertain sound, summoning for the perpetual battle with sloth and selfishness, with the paralysis of hopelessness or of lazy content, with sin and wrong within and without.
In the sonorous, sententious Latin, Leo’s strong words rang out, in the grand language of law and war which held its own so long in the Church, which at that time had been softened into none of its daughter-tongues, but stood, amidst the countless, shifting dialects of the barbarians, the one great language of law and literature, and of the Christian worship of the West. Leo himself knew no other; of Greek he was ignorant, or, at least, did not speak or write it. His letters had to be translated for the Eastern Church.
From Damaris Ethne began indeed to learn something of her native Greek, but as yet only as a beautiful foreign language. Latin was becoming to her familiar as a mother-tongue, and she listened enrapt as Leo spoke in the great basilicas words such as these: “Templum Dei sumus, si Spiritus Dei habitat in nobis. Plus est quod fidelis suo habet animo quam quod miratur cœlo”—words which gained a double significance and force, because, like so many of Leo’s utterances, they were watchwords, they were weapons used against a lingering paganism which made many turn in idolatrous worship towards the sun, on the very steps of the Christian basilica.
And again—“Oh, man, recognize the dignity of thy nature! Remember that thou art made in the image of God; once corrupted in Adam, now moulded anew in Christ.”
She listened with eager delight to Leo’s “seven steps” of the Beatitudes: the first, Poverty of Spirit. “He commends the humility of souls, rather than the indigency of faculties.” Humility, he admitted, might be easier for the poor than for the rich, “nevertheless,” he said, “in many of the rich a mind is found which uses riches not to swell the tumour of pride, but to do works of loving-kindness, that is, counts it the greatest gain to relieve the miseries of others.”
Again, of another of those “steps” of the Beatitudes, of the “hungering and thirsting after righteousness,” Leo said, “It is with God Himself man would be filled.” To love righteousness is nothing else than to love God. “Nihil aliud est diligere justitiam quam amare Deum.” And when he reached the last of those seven upward steps, fervently he spoke of the purity of heart which cleanses the mirror (of the heart) to see and to reflect God, “whose reward is to see Him not in a mirror darkly, but face to face.” The fine balance of his words throbbed on the heart like the vibrations of a church bell.
“In Christ,” he proclaimed, “we are all one. All the regenerate in Christ the sign of the Cross constitutes kings, the unction of the Holy Spirit consecrates priests, in order that, besides that special service of our ministry, all the whole body of spiritual and rational Christians should recognize themselves to be partakers of royal race, and of sacerdotal office. For what is so royal as a soul subject to God and ruler of the body? And what is so sacerdotal as to dedicate to God a pure conscience, and the sacrifices (hostias) of a spotless piety from the altar of the heart?”
Spring, with its wealth of beauty on the earth, and its Lenten discipline in the Church, was slowly passing away in Rome; and all the time Aquileia was holding out through the three months’ agony of her siege, a perpetual reminder and symbol to the household on the Aventine of the spiritual conflict to be waged always by all. For Marius, their own Marius, was there, in what might prove the last death-struggle of civilization and Christianity, or might prove the travail-pangs of the birth of a new world of life and light. And now the fast of Lent was deepening into the shadows of Gethsemane, and the Passion-tide was bringing the pathos and strength of the Cross; and again the voice of Bishop Leo rang through the basilicas with its deep, inspiring tones.
“So it is, dearly beloved, that the true ground of Christian hope is the Cross of Christ. Whilst the blindness of the Jew does not see what is Divine in Christ Jesus, and the wisdom of the Gentiles despises what is human; whilst the former speak deprecatingly of the Lord’s glory, and the latter assume airs of pride about His lowliness, we adore the Son of God equally in His own might and in our infirmity.”
As Ethne listened, to her, Jew and Gentile were no lifeless, technical expressions; her heart went up to God for Miriam and Eleazar, that they might look up, and looking, be no longer blind, but see the love which is the glory of God. Again, in Leo’s words, she prayed “for that nation by whom the Lord had been crucified, and desired that mercy might be obtained by that people, on account of whose stumbling we have received the grace of reconciliation.”
Of the conflict in Gethsemane Leo said—“The lower will gave way to the higher, and it was shown to us what may be prayed for by one in distress, and what ought not be granted by the Healer. For since we know not what to pray for as we ought, and it is good for us that what we wish should not for the most part take place, when we seek for what would hurt us, our good and righteous Lord is merciful in refusing it. Therefore, when our Lord had by threefold prayer settled the mode of putting our own wills right, He said to His disciples, ‘Sleep on now and take your rest.’”
And the three women—mother, sister, and bride—in the agony of their Gethsemane of dread and longing for their beloved, at Aquileia or in all the perils of their journeys by sea and land, listening to those words of pardon and peace, comforted one another, and went home that night, and prayed Thy will be done, and slept and took their rest.
Even for Judas Leo had a word of sympathy, recognizing the yearning of the Master even for the traitor.
“From this man,” he said, “was withheld no condescension, lest some vexation should give him the motive for crime; for after the Lord had died for all, perhaps even this man might have found mercy if he had not hurried to his death.”
And so the tide of tender, sacred adoration flowed deeper and higher on through the days of the Passion, without a touch of morbid, melodramatic sensation, or of weak introspection. “The Festival of our Lord’s Passion,” as he called it, “suffers us not to be silent amid our exulting bursts of spiritual joy. For since the prophet says, ‘Seek His face evermore,’ no one ought to presume that he has found the whole of what he is seeking, lest by seeking to advance we fail to draw near.”
“The lowliness we see in God amazes us more than the power; we find it harder to grasp the emptying of the Divine Majesty than the carrying up on high the form of a servant.
“He shed righteous blood which was to be both the ransom and the cup of life (pretium et poculum) for the reconciliation of the world. Not a reluctant victim, but a willing sacrifice. For the nature which in us was ever guilty, in Him suffered, innocent and free.
“What is inflicted by ferocity is welcomed by free-will, so that the audacity of the crime completes the work of the Eternal will.
“He submitted Himself to the impious hands of infuriated men, who were busy with their own wickedness, and were doing the behests of the Redeemer. Even towards those who were killing Him, so strong was His feeling of tenderness, that in His prayer to the Father from the Cross, He asked not that He should be avenged, but that they should be pardoned.
“The might of that prayer, ‘Father, forgive them,’ had this result, that the hearts of many who said, ‘Let His blood be on us and our children,’ were converted by the preaching of Peter the Apostle, and in one day three thousand were baptized; and they all became of one heart and of one soul, and ready to die for Him Whose Crucifixion they had demanded.
“He was not only wont to heal bodily infirmities, but the wounds of sickly souls, saying to the paralytic, ‘Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.’
“For He, without any infirmities of sin, took on Him all the infirmities that come from sin; so that he lacked not the sensations of hunger and thirst, of sleep and weariness, of sorrow and weeping, and endured the cruelest pains, even to the extremity of death. For no one could be loosed from the entangling nets of mortality, unless He in Whom the nature of man was innocent allowed Himself to be put to death by the hands of the ungodly.”
And again, lest that sacred season should become the mere commemoration of the dead, and not the communion of the living, Leo said—“We ought to honour the Lord’s Passover as present, rather than remember the Passover as passed.”
Again—“He it is Who, making no exception of any nation, forms out of every nation under heaven one flock of holy sheep, and is daily performing what He has promised in the words, ‘And other sheep I have which are not of this fold, them also I must bring; and they shall hear My voice, and they shall be one flock and one Shepherd.’
“For although it is to blessed Peter in the first instance that He says, ‘Feed My sheep,’ yet the care of all the sheep actually belonging to all the shepherds is under the direction of the one Lord; and those who are on the rock He nourishes in such pleasant, well-watered pastures, that numberless sheep, strengthened with the fulness of love, hesitate not themselves to die for the name of the Shepherd, even as the Good Shepherd Himself was pleased to lay down His life for the sheep. He it is in Whom not only the glorious courage of martyrs has a share, but also the faith of all who are new-born.
“The fiery sword by which the Land of Life was shut in has been quenched by the sacred blood of Christ.
“Before the true Light the gloom of the old night has given way. The Christian people are invited to the riches of Paradise; and to all the regenerate has been laid open a path of return to the lost Fatherland, if only no one causes that way to be closed against himself, which could be opened to the faith of the robber.”
Ethne’s thoughts went back to Dewi the pirate.
So the forty days of the fast and the week of the Passion passed on, and the lives of Christians were gathered into the life and death of Christ; until at the close the grave voice of Leo, as a faithful leader of souls, led the people from the contemplation of the Sufferer into the fellowship of His sufferings.
“If it was a grievous offence to neglect the Paschal Festival, it is more dangerous to take our place in Church assemblies whilst we are not gathered into the fellowship of our Lord’s Passion. For who does really honour Christ as having suffered, died, and been raised again, save he who also suffers, dies, and rises again with Christ? These events are carried on in the children of the Church. The warfare is perpetual, the enemy malignant and strong as ever. Here then, at the Cross, let the Christian station himself, where Christ lifted him up with Himself; and to that point let him direct all his life, where he knows human nature was saved. For the Passion of our Lord is prolonged even to the end of the world; and as in His saints He is honoured and loved, and as in the poor He is fed and clothed, so in all who suffer for righteousness’ sake He suffers too. Unless, indeed, we are to think that since faith has been multiplied all over the world, all the persecutions and all the conflicts which raged against the blessed martyrs have come to an end; as though the necessity of taking up the Cross had been incumbent only on them. But very different is the experience of pious men who are serving God, and very different the witness of the Apostle. ‘All who resolve to live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.’ By which sentence he is proved to be sadly lukewarm and indolent who is attacked by no persecution. For none but those who love the world can be at peace with it; and there is ‘no fellowship at any time between iniquity and righteousness,’ no concord between falsehood and truth, no agreement of darkness with light. It is safer for man to have earned the devil’s enmity than his friendship; therefore the wise souls who have learned to fear and love our Lord do not stoop either to dread their foes or to do them homage. For they prefer God’s will, ever, to themselves, and love themselves all the better, inasmuch as for the love of God they love themselves not.
“For in those who, after the Apostle’s example, chastise the body and bring it into servitude, the same enemies are being despised by the same courage, and even now the world is being overcome by Christ.”
At length the light of Easter Day broke in on Christian Rome, the first Easter Ethne had ever spent in a city, had ever spent in Christendom. The joy of the festival swept her away in its great tide, the bells pealing from every basilica, the stately Ambrosian hymns filling the churches, the streets, and the homes with their grave and exulting music. The morning broke with the “Aurora lucis rutilat,” and the “Hic est dies verus Dei.” The voices of priests and people, in what was then the vulgar tongue of all, rose high in the “Ad cœnam Agni Providi.”
And still through all, penetrating and rising above all the tides of sound, sounded the deep voice of Leo. Through the Passion-tide he had been preaching to them the duty of the taking up the Cross of Christ, that their actual life might enshrine within it the Paschal solemnity. “If then, dearly beloved,” he said, “we believe in our hearts what we profess, we also have been raised the third day, for ‘ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.’ Let the people of God acknowledge themselves to be a new creation in Christ Jesus, and, with souls on the watch, understand Him by Whom they have been apprehended, and Whom they may apprehend.
“Let not the things that have been made new return to the old state which abideth not; and let not him who put his hand to the plough give up his work, but fix his attention on what he is sowing, not looking back to what he has left.”
Again—“Though the rolling away of the stone, the emptying of the sepulchre, the laying aside the linen, the shining of the angels, did abundantly establish the reality of our Lord’s Resurrection, yet He mercifully appeared to the women; He suffered Himself to be handled with careful and inquisitive touch by those of whom doubt was taking hold.”
Thus the faithful voice led the people on through Easter to the Ascension. Very quiet were the words, not exhausting the joy in a burst of rapture, but leading it onward and upward in an ever-rising tide of certainty and victory “too deep for sound or foam”; very quiet, quiet and strong as the first flood-tide of the first joy of the first Easter.
Nor did he forget the doubt, the heavy weight of apprehension, the slow reviving to faith of the hearts of the disciples benumbed by sorrow; the magnitude of the weight which gives the true measure of the power which lifted it.
“For the death of Christ,” he said, “had sorely disturbed the hearts of the disciples, and a kind of torpor of distrust had slowly crept into minds oppressed by sorrow, on account of the humiliation of the Cross, the yielding up of the spirit, the burial of the lifeless body.
“For when the holy women in the gospel history had announced to the disciples that the stone was rolled away from the tomb, that the body was not in the sepulchre, and that angels bore witness that the Lord was alive, their words seemed to the apostles and disciples as idle tales; and surely this uncertainty would in nowise be allowed by the Spirit of Truth to exist in the hearts of his preachers, unless their trembling anxiety and inquiring hesitation had laid the foundation of our faith. It was for our perturbations and our dangers that provision was being made in the case of the apostles; we, in them, were being instructed against the calumnies of the impious, and against the triumphs of the world’s wisdom; we have been taught by their seeing, we have heard by their hearing. Let us give thanks to the Divine Providence, and to that necessary tardiness of our holy fathers. Doubts were felt by them, that no doubts might be felt by us.
“Those days, dearly beloved, between the Resurrection and the Ascension did not pass away in an inactive course; but in them great and sacred truths were confirmed, great mysteries were revealed. To the Magdalene He said, ‘Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to My Father;’ that is, ‘I will not have thee come to Me corporeally, to recognize Me by the sensations of the flesh; I am putting thee off to something loftier, I am preparing thee for something greater. When I shall have ascended to My Father, then thou shalt handle Me more perfectly and more truly, being about to apprehend what thou touchest not, and to believe what thou seest not.’ When He took Himself away to the majesty of the Father, He began in an ineffable manner to be more present in His Divinity. And a truly great and unspeakable cause of rejoicing it was, when, in the presence of that holy multitude, the nature of manhood was ascending above the dignity of all celestial creatures, to pass above the angelic ranks, and to be elevated above the high seats of the archangels; and not to let any degree of loftiness be a limit to its advancement, until it should be received to sit down with the Eternal Father, and associated in the throne with His glory, to Whose nature it is united in the Son. Since then Christ’s Ascension is our advancement, and whither the glory of the Head is gone before, thither is it the hope of the body to be summoned, let us, dearly beloved, exult with befitting joys and devout thanksgiving. For to-day have we not only been confirmed in the possession of Paradise, but in Christ we have penetrated to the heights of Heaven, having won through the unspeakable grace of Christ nobler gifts than we had lost through the wiles of the devil.
“This faith, increased by our Lord’s Ascension, and strengthened by the gift of the Holy Spirit, has not been overcome by chains, nor imprisonments, nor banishments, nor famine, nor the sword, nor the teeth of wild beasts, nor by any torments invented by the cruelty of persecutors. For this faith, throughout the whole world, not only men but even women, not only young boys but tender maidens, contended to the shedding of their own blood; whatever had before caused them fear now turned into joy.
“Let us therefore, dearly beloved, follow after charity, without which no one can shine; that through this way of love whereby Christ descended to us, we also may be able to ascend to Him, to Whom with the Father and the Holy Ghost belong honour and glory for ever.”
So the tide of Christian joy flowed on fuller and fuller to Whitsuntide, when the great company of the newly baptized gathered around the fonts in their white robes, as at Easter. Then Ethne’s heart went back to that glad white-robed company of neophytes which had gathered around the well, beside the little chapel of rough-hewn stones in her own island. It was but a year since she had sat with her brother in the white robes of baptism on the cliff by her father’s house. And in looking back from the pomp of these great assemblies in the stately basilicas on that homely gathering, she felt more than ever how glorious had been that simple beginning of new life in the new world, as at the first Pentecost. “From Him, the Holy Spirit,” Bishop Leo said, “comes the thirst; from Him, the calling on the Father; from Him, the groans of suppliants. As in that first exultant choir of all human tongues, the majesty of the Holy Ghost was present, let the minds of the faithful rejoice, because now through all the world our God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is praised by the acknowledgment rendered in every tongue, and because that indication which was given in the form of fire is still witnessed, alike as a work and a gift. For the Spirit of Truth Himself makes the house of His glory shine with the radiance of His own light, and wills not to have in His temple anything dark or lukewarm.”
“The house of His glory also,” Ethne murmured to Damaris, “was that little round stone cell of Patrick’s building in our Ireland.”
“The house of His glory is Patrick’s heart and Leo’s, and, in their humble place, thine and mine,” Damaris said. “Did not our Leo say, Templum Dei sumus, si Spiritus Dei habitat in nobis? Greater is what the faithful Christian has in his heart than what he wonders at in the heavens.”
Thus the great festivals of the Church swept on, and spring had conquered winter in the natural and the Christian year.
All through those months the household on the Aventine knew that Aquileia was still holding her own, and trusted that there also the summer was beating back the winter.
Ethne remembered Orleans, with her brave garrison, and her brave aged Bishop Anianus and his victorious prayers; and Lupus with his peaceful victory over Attila at Troyes; and her hope was strong that victory must come for Aquileia also, through Aquileia for the Roman world.
Moreover, one more little volume of waxen tablets reached them from Marius, still within the unconquered city.
“We are holding our own,” he wrote; “the walls still stand unshattered, the heart of the enemy, they say, is failing, the besiegers seem to slacken at their work. Glorious it will be if this great host is driven back, baffled by one faithful stronghold. Despair not for us; hope and pray!”
But they had scarcely read these words of courage and hope, when another message brought the fatal tidings that Aquileia, the impregnable, had fallen, was being razed to the ground and burnt to ashes, and, with the terrible Hunnish genius of destruction, smitten to the dust never to rise any more.
A flight of storks had done it; a flock of harmless, innocent birds had accomplished the ruin of Aquileia.
Just as the assailants were wearying of their work, and murmurs of retreat were spreading in the camp, and Attila himself was pacing round the unbroken walls, moodily meditating whether to go or stay, the flapping of wings and the cry of birds arrested his attention. He looked up, and saw the white storks which had built their nests on the roofs of the city soaring high in the air, and alluring their callow young to follow them, evidently with the intention of abandoning the beleaguered city, and, contrary to their usual habits, betaking themselves to the open country. He caught at the augury. “Look there!” he cried to the dispirited soldiers; “see those birds, whose instinct tells them of the future; they are leaving the city which they foresee is to perish, the fortress which they know will fall.”
The courage of the Huns revived at his words. Once more they pushed their engines up to the walls, and plied their slings and catapults; and the walls yielded; and Aquileia, the impregnable, the city of the north wind, fell, as was the fate of cities that sank beneath the Huns, never to rise again.
There was need indeed now of Leo’s strong words in the sorrowful little family on the Aventine. The fellowship of the Passion was theirs; the cup of the martyrs was held to their lips. But it was Christ, the ever-living, the ever-loving, the all-conquering, not himself, that Leo had set before them; and He, “the Ransom from death, and the Cup of Life” (pretium et poculum), would not fail His Christians. All else in the world—emperors, armies, generals, statesmen—were failing Rome. Would Leo himself fail?
Leo did not fail!
The people of Rome had done well in electing him during his absence, and waiting the forty days for his return. Every one else among their rulers failed them, but not Leo.
The feeble Valentinian was present in the city; he had fled to Rome, it was said, as a safer refuge, for the moment, than his Imperial Ravenna, enclosed in her marshes. The port of Ravenna on the Adriatic was too near the fallen city of Aquileia, so long the queen of the Adriatic; too near the hordes of the Huns. Aetius, the great general, the Count of Italy, seemed to fail them. The foremost place which he obtained for himself by basely betraying his great rival Boniface, Count of Africa, had proved no post of ease or real power to him. The feeble Emperor himself had become his rival, using him (as was afterwards terribly proved) not a moment longer than the hour of danger lasted. Boniface was dead; Africa, through his treachery, was lost to the Empire, to civilization, and, as it was proved afterwards, to Christianity; and Italy lay bare to the foe. He himself had become the dread and detestation of the weak and wicked court, and now it seemed as if a palsy had fallen on his own strong will and clear intellect; it was rumoured that Aetius was counselling the Emperor that they should take flight together and abandon Rome to her fate.
Only Leo was left. But Leo stood firm, a rock of strength because he stood on the Rock. Still his protecting presence and his words of power were there—“Christ Himself has not abandoned the care of His beloved flock.”
“Throughout the universal Church Peter is still saying day by day, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God;’ and every tongue which confesses the Lord is clothed with the majesty of this voice. This faith overcomes the devil and dissolves the fetters of his captives; those who are torn away from the world it engrafts into heaven, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.”
And from day to day, in those days of earthquakes and storms, went up the prayer for ever associated with Leo’s name and with this great conflict—
“Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by Thy governance, that Thy Church may serve Thee in all godly quietness, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Never could the world have seemed less peaceably ordered than then; yet it was indeed not under the governance of Valentinian, or of Aetius, or of Peter, but of God. Never could there have been less external quiet; but the Church, and Leo, kept the “godly quietness” within, in the presence of God. Never could the waves have seemed more likely to overwhelm the Rock than then; but it stood firm as ever. “Our fathers all ate the same spiritual meat, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.”
And again from every basilica and every house rose Leo’s prayer—“Grant us the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful, that we who cannot do anything that is good without Thee, may by Thee be enabled to live according to Thy Will.” Leo’s prayers were indeed fulfilled for him in the way his inmost soul desired. Of Leo personally scarcely a trace is left, as to the persons he loved, the life he lived, the death he died; his only monument, the rescue of his Rome, and the Rock of the great Apostle’s great confession of the Christ, on which he stood, and which he held for the Church.
Sorely indeed were the strong words of consolation needed in the household on the Aventine. No further sound reached them from Aquileia, no record of individual heroism or deliverance. What voice indeed could come from ashes and a charnel-house?
The fame of only one act seemed borne above that raging storm of murder and rapine; only one name was borne to them through the death-silence that succeeded. It was reported that the good and beautiful young matron Digna, the friend of their house and of Marius, had covered her head like a Roman matron of old, and from the tower on the walls adjoining her house had plunged into the glassy waters of the Natiso which flowed deep and strong below, to escape the insults of the Huns.
When these tidings reached them, for the first time Damaris uttered a cry of despair. “Alas! alas!” she said, “too surely our Marius is slain, or he would have saved her.”
But Fabricius shook his head.
“Fond mother’s thought! Against such a flood of furious savagery Marius would have been as powerless as when he lay a babe in thine arms;” and then, with a flash of the old patrician fire, he added, “It is not Digna only, it is our old Rome, who chose death rather than dishonour at Aquileia; our Rome has fallen, she is dead, but never could she have perished save by suicide. Our vices have killed us. Yet she has fallen fighting to the last, not as a slave and captive, but as free and the mother of the free. The brave garrison of Aquileia could not save our Rome from ruin, but they have saved it from the worst dishonour; Digna stands for ever as a symbol of her great old glory. And Marius, thank God, our Marius was there!”
But with those words the old man broke down; and the father and mother wept together.
Sadly and slowly after that the terrible days and weeks passed on. The great festivals of the Church were over. The daily festival of the perpetual Eucharist indeed went on with its ceaseless pleading of Redeeming death, and ceaseless participation of the ever-renewing Life, its blending of triumph and of tender tears, “Pretium et poculum,” for ever.
And day and night in Ethne’s heart Patrick’s hymn still made melody—
“Christ in the fort; Christ on the sea; Christ above, beneath, around, within, for ever.”
For in Ethne’s heart alone nothing could quench the hope that Marius would yet return.
Still came in, day after day, the tidings of mourning, lamentation, and woe. The long resistance of Aquileia had enraged the Huns to madness; and her capture and destruction had apparently awakened in them an insatiable thirst for blood and ruin. For the time even plunder seemed subordinate to mere wild waste and ravage. Week by week came the cry of cities sacked and burned and laid waste for ever; Concordia, thirty miles from Aquileia, and Altinum.
Then followed another phase of horror. The mere blind fury of revenge seemed at last assuaged; and the hideous savage hordes entered on another stage of devastation; the lust of plunder and of drunken orgies seemed to revive and gain the upper hand. The rich plains of Lombardy had been laid waste, the flourishing cities of the coast had been blotted from the earth, and now the great cities of the interior, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia, and finally Milan, appalled by the fate of Aquileia, opened their gates, and from these came the tidings how the Huns, “bacchabantur,” were holding hideous revels and orgies there night and day. Meanwhile Rome herself had virtually no walls to defend, no gates to open. Rome, with her temples and palaces, each as a city within itself, lay absolutely defenceless and bare before the Tartar hordes.
The thunder-cloud drew nearer and nearer, and more and more the Aventine household realized their utter helplessness. It was reported that Aetius was on the point of taking flight with the Emperor. But still Leo stood firm, still the prayers went up from the basilicas. More and more the mother, the sister, and the bride seemed to find themselves most at home in the ancient churches of the catacombs, by the tombs of the martyrs of the early days, as the darkness deepened around them; until, at last, faint rumours began to creep into the city, of debate and division in the camp of Attila himself. The spell of Rome began to work; too much, his chieftains began to feel, was staked on the life of one man. The last royal life that had braved the great enchantress, the great queen City, had paid the penalty of victory by death. If Attila were to fall as Alaric had fallen, some began dimly to feel, who would hold his unwieldy empire, his hordes of many divided tribes, together? Moreover, the inevitable curse of polygamy was in Attila’s own house. Which of all the sons of his many wives would win the allegiance of these disorganized hosts? The great defeat and slaughter of the previous year, the Hunnenschlacht, on the plains of Châlons, could not have been forgotten; and something stronger than defeat in battle was doubtless beginning to dissolve the terrific forces of dissolution from within. Cruelty and lust and violence cannot create or unite; man remains human through all; and the avenging of such crimes must eventually grow out of the crimes themselves. No inspiring loyalty, no sacred memories or hopes, no great purpose of patriotism or even of conquest, held that vast horde together; nothing but only that one gigantic will. And if Attila hurled his life against Rome and conquered, and fell, like Alaric, what would become of his Huns? Probably, moreover, this hesitation and division of purpose began to invade the heart and will even of Attila himself.
At length the echo of these debates and divisions penetrated faintly to Rome itself, and vague suggestions began to be made of sending an embassy to Attila himself, entreating peace.
But if such an embassy were possible, who would risk themselves to be the ambassadors? Ambassadors had been sent before to Attila from the Eastern empire with a secret mission of assassination, and he had discovered it; and the ambassadors had barely escaped, through a rare generosity, with their lives. Who would venture on such an embassy from the Western empire, with such a memory of treachery confronting them? It was no mission for a soldier,—a message of abject submission and supplication;—yet to venture on it demanded more courage than any battle-field.
There could have been but one name on the lips and in the hearts of all, the name of the man whom Rome had waited for those forty days so many years before to make him her leader and bishop. There was not a hope but in Leo; not a man besides who could be trusted with such a mission, or would undertake it.
And Leo did not fail. He went; and with him two distinguished civilians—Avienus, once a consul, and Tregetius, a prefect, to propitiate Attila by two high official names,—mere names then, and long since, forgotten names, save as adjuncts to Leo. In this embassy, once more the names of the Emperor, “the Senate and People of Rome,” were united, not in a decree but a supplication; the parody of a People and Emperor and the shadow of a Senate. But the ambassador was a true Roman and a Christian, a genuine man and a living saint. And Attila had shown that he recognized a true man when he encountered him, and would listen to a saint when he saw him.
Silent among the silent multitudes the three veiled women, Damaris, Lucia, and Ethne, watched the procession leave the northern gate and wind along the plain. They felt in their inmost souls the depth of humiliation symbolized: an entreaty from the Imperial city for mercy from a Tartar savage; an appeal from the Christian Church for compassion from a heathen destroyer, the symbol of whose worship was a scimitar planted hilt downward in the earth. But in reality they all felt the appeal of Leo was from man to God, from princes in their vanity and nothingness “to the Lord of those who rule, and the King of those who reign.”
Thus once more a Roman was found to throw himself into the chasm for the salvation of Rome.
The suppliant embassy went northward to the camp of Attila in Lombardy, to the place where the Po and the Mincio meet; and the multitudes of Rome dispersed again to their various forms of labour or idleness, some of them no doubt, like the little company on the Aventine, to the basilicas or quiet oratories to pray the great prayer of Christendom, and the prayers of Leo himself, and to wait.
They had not long to wait. Attila’s movements were not slow, nor his decisions vacillating. He saw Leo and believed in him. But what can any of us say as to the Presence he felt in Leo, or round about Leo? Legend has told and Raphael has painted in his immortal picture, that he saw the apostles Peter and Paul hovering about Leo in the air, as the champions of Rome, and that Attila and his Huns cowered in terror before the heavenly vision. Prosper, Leo’s own secretary, tells us simply that Leo “committed himself to God, Who never fails to aid the labours of those who trust Him; nor did less ensue than his faith expected.” Leo, no doubt, would scarcely have been surprised at the apparition of St. Peter and St. Paul; he certainly believed that the honour and primacy of his See belonged to Peter and not to himself. But always, above and beyond Peter, Leo beheld Christ, “never relinquishing the care of His beloved flock.” In that Presence he lived, and more than once we know Attila had recognized that mysterious, supernatural Presence in saintly men. The spell of Rome may indeed have been upon him, and the superstitious dread of the terrible tendency to revulsions in the affairs of men, which haunts the high places of the world; perhaps also some natural qualms of conscience for the miseries inflicted on myriads of human creatures, some echo in his heart, which was still human, of the cries of tortured men and wronged women and innocent babes. All this probably wrought for Leo, and also the kinship one great man feels for another; the weight of a spirit accustomed to rule, the force of that “saving common-sense” which often has a persuasiveness stronger than genius, and was the genius of Leo.
But it was something mightier than all this, we may be sure, which conquered Attila. The very best and deepest in us all, however seldom it is reached, is after all the strongest. It was the very deepest depths in Leo, the depths over which broods the living Spirit of God, that met the depths of Attila, and moved him irresistibly “to think and to do the thing that was rightful,” to conquer his own evil will, and spare Rome.
Rumour says that he veiled his surrender in a grim humour which was natural to him, saying, “I can fight with men, but the wolf and the lion (Lupus and Leo) are too much for me.”
But whatever the motive, surrender was made. The vast host from the eastern wilds turned back again eastward, never more to sweep in devastating floods over the West; and Leo returned in peace to the Rome he had saved.
Rome, at all events, did not receive her deliverer as Troyes had received the Bishop to whom she owed her existence. To the great city which he had defended when abandoned by all her natural defenders, Leo became thenceforth Rock and Refuge, Chief Shepherd, Supreme Ruler, Father, Pope. Thenceforth Rome and her Pope were identified. The magic of her old Imperial name was transferred to him; the granite of his ancient Roman character guarded her. Leo spoke “to the City”; the city still spoke, as no other voice could speak, to the world. The “ad Urbem” and “ad Orbem” were thenceforth not to be dissociated.
We do not hear of any pomp and ovation to do him homage on his return. The city was saved; but the salvation was from a humiliation only possible through the degradation and corruption of the city itself. And this moral degradation continued.