But in the midst of the tide of universal rejoicing (as in the midst of the malaria of almost universal corruption), one little fresh spring of pure and tender joy had burst forth for the household on the Aventine. The ocean tide might and did ebb back from high-water mark; but when it receded, a little fountain of sweet fresh water was found welling up from other depths below earth and sea, as sometimes on the shores of our western seas.
Slowly, with the uncertain gait of one toiling up from the ravine of the shadow of death, Marius was creeping up the Aventine, almost spent with fatigue. Ethne saw him first from the terrace above the gardens. In a moment she was at his side, and they were climbing the hill together, those two who were thenceforth to make their uphill journey together all the way.
For a moment he clasped her to his heart.
“It is through thee I am here,” he said, “through thee that I ever came back at all. It is thou who hast given me back my life.”
She could only murmur a few words of Patrick’s hymn, and then, “I always knew He would bring thee back;” and again accepting her support for his feeble steps, they moved on till he reached the familiar portico with her.
That evening little more could be said. That “he was there,” as one raised from the dead, and that “He Who brought him back was there,” with them all, always, to the end, was for the hearts of all “gladness so complete,” that no more could be poured in.
The welcome, the peace of home, the love, old and new, and at last the falling asleep, watched by his mother’s eyes, as when he was a child, wrought wonders in one night. In the evening scarcely any eyes but those of the love that had never ceased expecting him could have recognized him, with the feeble gait, the hollow eyes, the worn, pale cheek. In the morning the soul had visibly taken her place on the throne again, and he was himself. Still the careful nurses rigidly insisted on rest, until by the next day he had gathered strength to tell his story.
“I was in the tower in Aquileia with the Lady Digna,” he began. “The yells of the victorious Huns were all around us, closer and closer up the steps. When she sprang from the tower into the river, something like madness seized me, as doubtless it had seized her, and I sprang after her, with some wild hope of saving her. I sank and then rose, and seemed to grasp her robe, and swam, keeping desperate hold of it, and then clutched something with one hand, which may have been a post for fastening boats to on the other side of the river. Then something struck my head, whether a javelin from the Huns or the strong current dashing me against the point of rock I know not. I could only cry, ‘Christe Domine, miserere nobis!’ Then I became unconscious, and when I awoke in the night, hours afterwards, I was stretched on the opposite bank of the river, alone.”
“Then thy ‘Miserere’ may have been the last sound on her dying ear?” said Damaris.
“I know not,” he replied. “At all events, the mercy for which I cried, the Christ on Whom I called, was there, and not uncaring or asleep.”
After a pause he went on—
“I was alone. It was night, but the river and all the land around were lit up by the flames of the burning city. And the silence of night was broken by exulting yells of vengeance, by cries of agony and vain entreaty, and, worse almost than all, by the hideous laughter of bacchanalian orgies.
“Something must have wounded me, for my head and hands were bleeding, and I was faint with loss of blood. But I contrived to creep under the shelter of an empty cattle-shed in the desolate fields; and there I lay, I know not how long—lay there,” he continued, turning to Ethne, “until I was saved through thee.
“A poor woman of the Huns was gathering sticks for a fire, and seeing me lying there, seeming, I suppose, at the point of death, she had compassion on me. She went and brought me food and drink; and then in broken Latin, such as the barbarian tribes who settle on our frontiers learn to speak, she said, ‘A Roman woman saved my son. I will save thee.’ Her son was a brother of the dying boy beside whom I saw thee first at Orleans. The brother was among the wounded Huns left in the city when the siege was raised, one of those enemies whom Bishop Anianus desired the Christian women to succour, and thee among them. By degrees, as she tended me, the whole story came out; and, from her description, it could have been no one but thyself who hadst also ministered to the brother of the boy who died with his hand in thine. She was a woman of some consideration among the Huns. I should hardly have been spared but for her pleading. They had at that time no use for captive slaves, to carry about and feed, and no spark of mercy for Roman soldiers; although I think those of us who shared in the defence of Aquileia, when once the first deadly rage of vengeance was assuaged in blood, were held even by them in a kind of rough honour. Again and again I heard men among them say, ‘If all Roman cities had been like Aquileia we should never have been here; but we and Rome might have been not foes but friends.’
“Also,” Marius continued, turning to his mother, “I told her of thee, and,” with a lowered voice to Ethne, “of thee and our betrothal, and that touched her heart. As my strength returned, I was able to be of some service to her, and she insisted on bringing me to the notice of her king, Attila himself. It was perilous, for he has frightful streaks of savage fierceness and haughtiness, not blending, but violently jarring, with occasional vibrations of affection and kindliness, and flashes of grim humour and wit, all crude and unmixed, so that you can never tell which you will find uppermost. Moreover, as you all know now, he has a wonderful keen eye and a genuine honour for truth, the truth of which he has had so little experience amongst us. And I suppose he felt in some way that I was true. So it happened that I was much about his court and in his presence, and saw strange and unexpected things in Attila and in his Huns. For you were right, mother,” he went on, “there are no ‘half beasts’ in the creation of God, though, alas! there are half devils, fallen as the original devils of old. And you were right,” he added, looking at Ethne; “if all the Christians Attila had met had been saints, indeed had been ordinarily good or true, who can say what Attila might have become?
“He has a royal contempt for mere tinsel and glitter. While his courtiers prank themselves in the borrowed splendours of the vanquished, he still wears his old Scythian skins and tanned leather. While they emulate the banquets of the Imperial court, he lives on the simplest, roughest food. It is said he never eats bread, but only meat, and that often half raw.”
“An independence of cookery which scarcely disproves his likeness to the beasts,” interposed Fabricius, with a grave smile; to which Marius made no retort.
“I saw Attila among his sons,” he said, “at a banquet, accompanied by wild music, with panegyrics on him and his victorious warriors and chiefs, no doubt as harmonious and satisfactory to the Huns as the strains of Greece or the rhetoric of our Sidonius Apollinaris to our Emperor. But Attila did not seem to heed them. All the time his heart and thoughts seemed set on a young lad, his youngest son, as he kept caressing his curly hair with his hand, and jesting with the child who will, he hopes, succeed him.
“And then came the strange, grotesque pomp of his enthronement in the Imperial palace at Milan, the palace from which Constantine issued the edict proclaiming Christianity the religion of the Empire, and where the great Theodosius listened to Ambrose.
“There is a painting on the palace walls which greatly offended Attila, representing the Scythian (or some barbarian) chieftains crouching in homage (and some of them stretched vanquished and slain) before the two golden thrones of the two Emperors of the East and West. As an expiation he commanded a Roman or Greek artist, not to paint this picture out, but, leaving it to satirize to itself, to paint opposite to it another picture representing the two Emperors of East and West, laden with sacks full of the gold coin of the tribute to the Huns, humbly emptying them at the feet of Attila. Happily for me, my mother, I have not the genius of thy forefathers, and could not paint; otherwise a difficult dilemma might have been set before me. But all the time I was in the camp of the Huns, and at the court of Attila, I could not but observe an uneasiness and uncertainty and vague dread ever growing and gathering over the rude warriors, and even over Attila himself. They seemed satiated with slaughter, and in some dim way under a spell, afraid of losing their plunder, afraid of the avenging power of the civilization they were ruining, afraid of the ancient names of Italy and Rome, haunted by the fate of Alaric, our Rome’s last conqueror. Not a few of the bravest even ventured to suggest that the host should return beyond the Danube to enjoy their spoils and employ the captives they had already won.
“And then,” he concluded, “as you all know, came the embassy from suppliant Rome. Every ambition of Attila’s for the recognition of his power and glory was gratified in this appeal for mercy from the humbled Empire, from the helpless City which had so long been mistress of the nations. Leo was at the head of the procession, simple and stately, representative of the great Christian Church.
“Never to my dying day can I forget that confronting of the worshippers of the scimitar, the conquerors by force, and the disciple of the Crucified, the conqueror by the Cross;—one more great incident in the long warfare between the forces of division and of peace, of good and evil, as real as that in which ‘Satan as lightning fell from heaven,’ and perhaps not more silent.
“On one side the great barbaric host of the mighty king who had conquered and devastated Europe from the Euxine to the Baltic, in all its savage pomp and pride; on the other, the little company of peace-makers, led by our Leo, his tall, slight figure arrayed in the pontifical robes, his abundant silvery hair flowing down from beneath the silken, gold-embroidered mitre, the purple chasuble, the pallium with the small red cross on the shoulder and the large red cross on the breast, Roman courage and dignity blended with sacred majesty in his look and bearing. For some minutes there was a hush of expectation and suspense; then followed the brief speech between Attila and Leo. What was said has not been told. Some report, as no doubt you have heard, that Attila said he could fight with men, but not with the wolf and the lion (Lupus and Leo). But I believe and am sure that, whatever he said, Attila felt he was face to face with a courage nobler than his own, with a Power to save mightier than his to destroy—felt indeed that he could fight with men, but not with God.
“And so it was that Leo won the day. The countless hosts of the destroyers went back with Attila to their own place among their wildernesses; the little embassy of the peace-makers went back with Leo to Rome. And Rome is saved.”
It was not many days after the rescue of Rome from the Huns by Leo that Baithene came back from Ireland. He found the city full of noise and stir, the people crowding to the Circensian games; the Coliseum echoing to the shouts of the spectators of the chariot races, athletic games, and dramatic performances.
Rome had not indeed received her deliverer as for a time misguided Troyes had received the Bishop who had risked his life for her. But her response to the great gift of her rescue was far from satisfactory to Leo.
When Baithene reached the Aventine, he found the family absent in the basilica, at the Festival of St. Peter and St. Paul. He followed them thither, and through the betrothal veils recognized Ethne and Lucia, with Damaris, Fabricius, and Marius. And resounding through the lofty pillared spaces, once more he heard the voice of Leo in grave warning and remonstrance.
“The religious devotion, beloved,” he said, in deep and mournful tones, “with which, at the time of our chastening and our liberation, all the people of the faithful flowed together to render thanks to God in acts of praise was soon neglected by almost all. This has given sore pain to my heart, and has also smitten it with fear. For the peril is great when men are ungrateful to God, and by their forgetfulness of His benefits show that they neither feel compunction at reproof, nor rejoice in their remission and pardon. Therefore, beloved, I dread lest this voice of the prophet should be applicable to us—‘I have scourged them and they have not mourned, they would not accept correction’; for how can correction have been accepted by hearts so turned away? It shames me to say it, but it is necessary not to be silent; more is rendered to demons than to apostles, and insane spectacles are more frequented than the shrines of the martyrs. Who has restored this city to safety? Who has rescued her from captivity? Who has defended her from slaughter? Is it the games of the circus? or is it the care of the saints, through which the sentence of Divine condemnation was softened, so that we who had deserved wrath might be preserved for pardon?
“I beseech you, let this saying of the Saviour touch your hearts, Who, when by His might and His compassion He had cleansed ten lepers, observed that only one of them came back to give thanks; signifying that those ungrateful ones, although by an act of pity they had obtained health of body, retained, through their impiety, disease in their souls. Lest such a sentence should be pronounced, beloved, on you, turn ye back and consider, and understand the wonderful things that He has deigned to accomplish for us; that, no longer attributing our liberation (as some impious ones have done) to the operation of the stars, but to the unspeakable mercy of Almighty God, Who deigned to soften the hearts of the furious barbarians, we may unite together in full vigour of faith in the commemoration of such a benefit. Grave negligence must be remedied by testimonies of gratitude all the greater.” Then tenderly reminding them of the sufferings of the saints and martyrs, Peter and Paul, whom they were commemorating, he commended them to the mercy of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
It was in the porch of the basilica, as the congregation dispersed, that the family of the Aventine first met again. When they reached the gardens of the palace, and sat in the shade of the ilexes, there was much to hear and tell. From Ireland the tidings were full of joy. The Irish chieftain, on hearing of the welcome of his son and daughter in the Christian household at Rome, had laid aside his last faint hesitation as to embracing Christianity, and had been baptized by Patrick at the great Easter Baptism. He and his wife welcomed Lucia to their hearts and kingdom; they trusted to receive her as a daughter in the place of the daughter they were willing to give as a bride to Marius, however sore the parting might be to them. They only stipulated that, as soon as might be in those perilous days, the four might come back to Ireland; Baithene and Lucia to remain as the joy of their home, and the stay and strength of the clan; and Ethne and Marius to sojourn there as long as they could be spared from their Roman home. Also they desired that Baithene should for a time take a fair dwelling of his own in Rome, to receive his sister there, that she might be led thence, as became a lady of free and noble birth, to the house of her bridegroom. And they consented, they even generously wished, for the sake of their own country and people, that Baithene and Lucia should remain a year or two in Rome, that he might bring home to their far-off Ireland the learning and training of that great city, which they understood to have been so long the centre of the world’s greatness and wisdom, and the channel of Divine wisdom and order to the Christian Church.
Thus in the midst of that tumultuous, tormented age, began one of those quiet melodies of love and rest which are always flowing on in soft musical tones through the din of storms and wars, scarcely heard at all in the great orchestral chorus of history, yet without which the world itself, and therefore its history, would soon fall back into chaos and cease to be.
First came the betrothal. Fabricius and Damaris kept to ancient customs as far as might be, Damaris leaning to the rites of her Greek forefathers, and both of them to the customs of those early Greek Christians of Rome, to whom the Greek inscriptions of more than two centuries in the catacombs bore witness. The ceremonies of the veiling and the ring were therefore celebrated at the betrothal, which took place in the Oratory of the Ecclesia Domestica on the Aventine. There also were given the dowry by the fathers of the brides, the Irish chieftain and Fabricius, with the “Arrhae,” or pledge in money; there also the hands of the betrothed were joined, the sacred kiss given, and the ring placed on the hand of the bride, a signet ring, in token that she should henceforth seal and have charge of her husband’s property; and there, finally, they received the solemn benediction of the priest. Afterwards the betrothed separated, Lucia returning to her father’s house, and Ethne going with Baithene to a country house belonging to Fabricius, among the Sabine hills, high amidst the wooded mountains above the town of Subiaco.
This separation was considered as especially important in their case, in order to efface all traces of captivity and bondage; that the marriage might be recognized as between those who always had been and were for ever free men and free women. For so deep and enduring was the degradation stamped legally and socially on the slave, that there had been a prolonged contest, scarcely yet decided, whether marriage between slaves was to be treated as legal marriage at all; whilst marriage between a free woman and a slave was regarded as in a sense a crime; and marriage between a free man and a slave woman was liable to be annulled at any moment. It was therefore arranged that the forty days between the betrothal and the marriage festival, customarily spent together by the betrothed apart from each other, should be spent together by the brother and sister in the villa on the Sabine hills.
To Ethne, and indeed to both of them, those days were like a fresh baptism into childhood. The long year of humiliation and terrible suspense was over; to their unspeakable joy their father had become a Christian; and their parents in Ireland were content. Bright visions of re-union with his people were before Baithene; and before Ethne hope of a life of noble service with him to whom her heart was given. But she was to devote these weeks to the dear companion of all her past life, in an island of rest between the past and the future, in the midst of the voyage of life.
As the great Roman thoroughfare, the Via Valeria, branched off into the narrower road along the banks of the Anio, and climbed up the mountains by Sublaqueum and the Roman villa of Nero, her spirits rose at every step. As they passed picturesque village after village perched for safety on the crests of the hills, or plunged deeper and deeper into the mountains and among the luxuriant forests, her whole spirit seemed to rise and breathe the bracing air of the heights. The country house was comparatively simple; the decorations and conveniences of the villa of the Roman noble, hot and cold baths, halls and corridors with mosaic floors, and quiet inner chambers, were there; but the corridor in front was like a trellised rustic pergola, with the vines clustering around the pillars. It opened on a terrace from which there was immediate access to the free wild hills. Baithene, from his long residence there with Fabricius, was familiar with it all, at home with the place and the people; his many acts of care and kindness had won for them both an enthusiastic welcome, which almost made the brother and sister feel as if they were amongst the men and women of their own clan; they were understood, beloved, and honoured there, and free to do what they would, and go whither they would, without restraint.
Baithene knew all the mountain paths, and it was their delight to climb crag after crag with feet nimble as the wild goat’s, to gaze from the heights across fold after fold of the great range of the Apennines, or over the lower hills to the far-off plains and the sea. But most of all, Ethne’s delight was in the fountains and streams, the springs bubbling up on the hill-sides, and pouring out their crystal waters from under the crags.
“We have come once more from the aqueducts to the fountains,” she said; “the waters are no more imprisoned and enslaved in rigid stone channels, they are free. And we are free,” she added, “free to go forth like them, and make the world glad, and to minister freely to its humblest needs.”
For they were indeed in a land of fountains and brooks, which run among valleys and hills; the Aqua Marcia, and the Aqua Claudia, and the Fons Ceruleus of heavenly blue, the crystal springs which fed the waters of the great Claudian aqueduct, kept perennially full the magnificent fountains of Rome, and sparkled in Constantine’s porphyry basins in the great baptistery of the Lateran.
Many a gracious kindness they found means and opportunities of doing to the peasantry, and the dull, cowed expression on many of the faces was for them transfigured into a trusting smile of welcome. The heavy, universal shadow of slavery weighed indeed on all the toilers; yet a hope dawned on Ethne of penetrating it with the light of Christian redemption and human brotherhood. Thus for the most part those happy days were for both of them a bathing of body, soul, and spirit in the fountain of youth, in the beauty and strength and freedom of nature.
At last the day of the nuptials came. Before dawn Ethne and Baithene started with the lectica and the cavalcade, and pausing once on the way, at last reached the great basilica of the Lateran. There the party from the Aventine met them, and Marius himself wondered at the fresh power and beauty in Ethne’s face, the radiant glow, the shining of the happy eyes. The sadness and the worn, weary look had indeed passed out of his own face, but still he felt as if the weight of the ages rested on him in comparison with her.
“It is the old world wedding the new,” he said to her with a tender gravity.
“I have been among the fountains,” she said; “we are going there together.”
“You are my fountain of youth,” he answered; “I need no other.”
The Bishop and the priests met and received them at the porch, and they entered the great basilica; it was crowded. Bishop Leo himself was to give the benediction, and the rank of the betrothed, the romance of the foreign, far-off origin of Ethne and Baithene, the story of their sorrows and their joys, had gathered a great company together, touched with a sympathy unusually real and deep.
The white and purple veil was folded by the Bishop himself around the bride; at the close of the ceremony he solemnly joined the hands of bride and bridegroom, laid his own hands on their heads, and then through the vast spaces of Constantine’s basilica, in his grave, deep tones sounded the benediction—“O God, Who by Thy mighty power hast made all things out of nothing, Who, after other things set in order, didst appoint that out of man created in Thine own image and similitude woman should take her beginning, teaching that it should never be lawful to put asunder those whom Thou hadst pleased should be created out of one! O God, Who hast consecrated the state of matrimony to such an excellent mystery (or sacrament), that in it Thou didst typify the sacrament (or mystery) of Christ and the Church! O God, by Whom woman is joined to man, and so blessed a union was instituted at the beginning, as not to be destroyed even by the judgment of the Flood, look mercifully upon this Thy servant now to be joined in wedlock, who seeks to be defended by Thy protection. May there be on her the yoke of love and peace; may she be a faithful and chaste wife in Christ, and may she continue a follower of holy women; may she be lovable to her husband as Rachel, wise as Rebecca, long-lived and faithful as Sarah. May she strengthen her weakness by the help of discipline; may she be modest, grave, bashful, and instructed in godly learning; and may she see her sons’ sons to the third and fourth generation; and may she reach the rest of the blessed in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
As the last act of the ceremonial, the Bishop placed on the head of Ethne a golden crown, of Greek workmanship, and on that of Lucia a golden diadem, delicately wrought with fine Celtic art. Ethne would rather have chosen a crown of flowers, but the gold was considered an honour due to her birth, as for Lucia it was a token of the rank Baithene was able to offer her.
And so with pomp and music the bridal company were conducted to the old palace on the Aventine. When they were alone together, Damaris blessed her son and Baithene according to the old Greek form of her people—“The servant of the Lord is crowned for the sake of the handmaid of the Lord, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
And afterwards to her daughter and Ethne she said—“The handmaid of the Lord is crowned for the sake of the servant of the Lord.” Then embracing them with tears, she said the ancient words—“With glory and honour didst Thou crown them, Thou hast placed a crown of precious stones upon their heads;” and she added in her own words with a radiant smile—“These golden crowns, beloved, will be offered in a few days on the altar in the church, but ye shall be a crown of joy to each other for ever.”
Afterwards she gave a little sealed packet to Ethne. It contained a precious jewelled clasp of oriental workmanship from Miriam, with the words from the old Hebrew marriage ritual written in Latin folded round it—“Make these two to rejoice with joy according to the joyousness which Thou gavest to the work of Thy hands in the Garden of Eden of old.”
Before long Ethne and Marius went away to the country house, now so dear and familiar to her, amongst the Sabine hills; whilst Baithene and Lucia remained to be the son and daughter of Fabricius and Damaris in the old palace on the Aventine.
Thus Ethne went back to be the light and joy of the home among the mountains, which had grown so familiar to her; but she came with a new light and a new joy. The gaiety and buoyancy of her race, and the free, imaginative delight in nature were still there, but there was added the tender grace of matronhood; the old world and the new, the sunset and the dawn, had blended; the weight of the cares of that old world of Marius were on her, as the power of her new hope was on him.
“It is conjugium,” they said, “no mere (contubernium) dwelling together, but working under a yoke together; His yoke which is fruitful, His burden which makes us run the swifter, as ‘the burden of wings to a bird, or sails to a ship.’”
For always the burden of this universal slavery, which was crushing the Roman world, weighed on Ethne; denying as it did the sanctity of married life to the toiling many, and making unholy life so terribly easy to the luxurious few; degrading all, in fact, to one level of evil, because virtually rejecting the sacred equality of a common humanity. The Christian Church had indeed begun her long battle with this evil as with all others; but to Ethne, coming from a social life of another kind, entangled no doubt with its own difficulties and wrongs, but not debased with these, it seemed as if the way made hitherto through all these centuries of Christianity was very little.
“It was written so long ago,” she said, “that tender letter of Paul the Apostle interceding for a runaway slave. Not even a good slave, but ‘unprofitable.’ Yet the great Apostle calls him ‘My own son in the faith,’ and says to his master—‘Receive him not as a slave, but a brother beloved.’ To the master, think, four hundred years ago! And what master acknowledges this now?”
“Scarcely even our own Leo,” Marius said. “Does not this perplex thee in Leo?”
“Why should it?” she said. “Does not Leo himself say to God continually, ‘We can do nothing good without Thee’? I suppose if he finds by and by that he has made a mistake, he will say in his humility, as he would say now if he saw it, ‘I must have done that without Thee.’ Besides, beloved, it is not so easy, I know, for him or for you, or for any of us, even to ‘think the thing that is rightful,’ much less to do it.”
“What indeed can we do?” he said. “To emancipate the slaves would be to doom them to starvation, unprotected, disorganized, helpless, degraded.”
“We must be Christian,” she said, with her victorious smile, “and let the rest follow! We must love them, worship with them, believe in the image of God in them, however defaced; in the brotherhood of Christ with them, however unrecognized. He is sure to conquer in the end. And He is sure to give us our bit of His battle to fight.”
One day of their wanderings together among the mountains remained stamped for ever on Ethne’s heart. The dusk was falling on the valleys, but on a crest of the mountains above them, a temple of the ancient gods (Marius believed of Apollo) shone golden in the evening light. A little company of mountain folk were moving slowly towards the portals, bearing a lamb garlanded for sacrifice. After a time they reappeared, and a strain of wild, weird music wound in and out, echoing among the hills. Heathen rites were indeed still practised there, and forbidden worship was still offered, which would not have been ventured on in less remote places. At the same time, below, on the other side, on the top of a low hill near them, Ethne saw a rude uncouth wooden cross, like a gibbet, standing alone, stretching out its arms; a ghastly horror confronting the beautiful marble temple on the height.
At the foot of that uncouth cross knelt a man, clothed in rough dark garments, with a sheepskin capote, such as was worn by the shepherds of the region. But as they drew nearer Ethne saw that his head was tonsured. His arms were clasped around the cross. Ethne and Marius stopped beside him and reverently bowed their heads. They felt in a sacred place.
“Patibulum crucis, the gibbet of the cross!” Marius said in a low voice, quoting a well-known Ambrosian hymn. “The legend in the country is, that this cross is the last left of a multitude on which the vanquished slaves of one of the terrible Servile Wars were crucified ages ago. The cross, you know, was a punishment only awarded to a slave.”
Ethne’s whole face quivered, and tears streamed from her eyes. As they stood there speechless, the kneeling figure arose. Approaching them, and seeing Ethne weeping, the stranger said, looking up at the cross, “Lady, dost thou understand?”
She could not speak. She had indeed understood too keenly. Then a radiant joy shone from the stranger’s face, and looking up at the pagan temple glistening on the opposite height, with a slight accent which they recognized as Greek—
“This will conquer that,” he said; and looking down on a fetter on one of his wrists, he added, “will conquer that and this. I also have been a slave.”
“No longer a slave,” she murmured, taking his hard, wrinkled, aged hand in hers, “a brother beloved!”
“Thou dost indeed understand!” he replied, in a tremulous voice. “But how couldst thou have known? I also was a runaway slave. I was in one of the stateliest and most wicked households in Rome; myself among the worst there,—only a child in years, but old in degradation and sin,—when one memorable day, at the games in the Coliseum, in the arena suddenly appeared that unknown monk from the Egyptian deserts, and tried to stop the combat, and was listened to for a moment, and then crushed to death beneath the shower of stones. But he saved Rome from that iniquity for ever, and he saved me! The vision of that sacrifice of pity haunted me night and day, until I fled from that den of iniquity—fled hither to the Cross, to the Christ, for ever.”
And without another word he left them, and vanished among the rocks.
“Was it an angel of God?” Ethne said, when he was gone.
“An angel of God to us at all events, my beloved,” Marius replied, as they walked slowly homeward.
Those were, moreover, to Ethne, months of much happy learning of many things. Still in many ways a child of the wilderness, it was a constant joy to her to learn through Marius the secrets of his ancient world. And above all, she delighted, with ever-increasing wonder and joy, in drinking with him of what to her, lover of all fountains, was the new and perennial fountain of “the Testaments of God.”
“Freedom, law, life: order, beauty, truth: everything is there,” she would say. “My own people at home cannot indeed taste of all the riches of your learning. But they can have, they will have, through Patrick they have this, the best of all!”
In another of these walks among the deepest recesses of the hills, they came on a little cluster of dwellings which had a different look from those around. Flocks of sheep were feeding high up on the sweet mountain pastures, and a boy and girl were watching them. At the door of the farm buildings stood a young woman, with a fine expressive face and large dark eyes, and, beside her, her husband, an athletic, soldierly-looking man, apparently some years older than his wife. They greeted Ethne and Marius with a frank equal greeting, very different from the shrinking or sullen look common among the slave labourers. There was something in the young wife’s face which greatly attracted Ethne, and seemed familiar to her in a way she could not account for. When they passed the farm she said to Marius—
“Those people seem more like our own upper clansmen at home than any others I have seen here. Who are they?”
“The man was a centurion,” he replied. “After one of the late Eastern wars, he left the army and retired here to his father’s lands. His mother is said to be of Gothic birth, and his wife comes of some Eastern race. I believe his father was of ancient Sabine descent, as ancient as our own. Would to heaven there were more such! I think then Rome need not fear the Goths!”
“Are they Christians?” Ethne asked.
“They are,” he replied. “Christians, it is said, from the days of Nero.”
Thus the months passed swiftly on in a deep calm flow of peace and love; whilst meantime Baithene was devoting himself with single-hearted earnestness to learning everything of art or science, of handicraft or state-craft, of law or literature, that would be of use to his people.
Before long a tragic echo from the world outside did indeed break in on this sunny calm.
The year after the retreat of the Huns from Italy and rescued Rome, came the news how, at one more of his numerous nuptials, with a beautiful young maiden called Ildico (a name which seemed a suspicious echo of some Gothic word enfeebled by Latin lips), on the day after the wedding, after waiting until late in the afternoon, at last the attendants ventured in to see what their master might require, and found him stretched on his face on the bed, quite dead, the blood which had streamed from his face staining the ground below; while the bride sat weeping beside him, closely veiled, and speechless.
No explanation was ever made as to how it happened: if by the hands of the young bride, no vengeance seems to have followed; if as the result of the hard drinking at the wedding feast, this did not lessen the lamentations of his people. For them indeed all their long career of victory and plunder ended with the life of their chief. His Tartar horsemen wheeled with wild lamentations around his bier. He was buried in secret, and the captives and slaves who laid him beneath the earth were killed when their work was done, that none might ever violate his grave. No man knoweth of his tomb to this day; and his empire crumbled into dust with its founder.
The death of Attila did indeed remove a great weight of dread from the wretched Imperial court and from the falling Empire. It remained to be seen whether, after all, it would prove to have been only the lifting off of a weight which had crushed the crumbling State for the moment into some semblance of consolidation.
Soon after the tidings reached Marius and Ethne on their mountain heights, he missed her from his side, and found her kneeling in her chamber weeping bitterly.
“I know the relief it is to Rome and the world,” she said. “I did not want thee to see me in tears; but I could not help weeping for that poor heathen king. If only he had met a few more Christians like Lupus and our Leo, who knows but the heart of the beast might have gone out of him, and he might have become a man again. For he was born a human babe of a human mother.”
Marius said nothing, but drew her out among the hills and streams to soothe and comfort her. Their way that day lay by a road they did not often take, by the ruins of the magnificent villa of Nero, below the artificial lakes, into which he had gathered the waters from the hills. The lakes were still there, crystal clear from the fountains, heavenly blue under that Italian sky, or steeped in depths of varied colour from the reflections of the craggy steeps and wooded slopes around them.
As they stood there Ethne said—
“If only we Christians had remained what the martyrdoms of Nero made us in that awful night at Rome, torches to illuminate the city and the world, how bright the city and the world would have been before this!”
“In truth,” he replied, “it is not martyrdom we have to dread, but the deadly chill in our own hearts. And that,” he added, “every day and for ever thou keepest away from me. And by and by thou shalt take me to thy country, where the Christians are still early Christians, of the stamp of Nero’s Christians; away to thy land of the fountains and the saints.”
“Beloved,” she said, smiling, “you also have your fountains; and Ireland has not all or only saints.”
Sweet human hopes came dawning on the two homes. The year of the death of Attila brought two little sons to the palace on the Aventine and the house among the Sabine hills.
The joy was very great in both homes. If Ethne had been as a fountain of youth to Marius, these babes seemed to bring back youth to Damaris. She travelled backwards and forwards in a flutter of new possession and new hope from Rome to the mountains. North and south, the new world and the old seemed visibly blended in those two precious blossoms of new human life.
“The sunset has indeed met the dawn,” she said, “and naturally the dawn has conquered, and there is a new day.”
On one of Damaris’ first visits to Ethne the mother, Ethne said—
“Mother,” calling her thus for the first time, “I have had a beautiful dream. I saw Nero’s villa, and the heathen temple, and the slave huts dissolve before my eyes. And, instead, a fair church shone on one of the mountains (Monte Cassino, I think Marius called it), the music of sweet psalms echoed among the hills, and happy peasants, instead of taking sheep and lambs garlanded for sacrifice to the pagan temples, brought home their little children from the church, in white robes of baptism. And a holy man clad in white woollen robes met them from the church on the mountain. And I thought he was a man of your old Anician house.[6] And from the church came troops of white-robed men following them; and from the lakes poured forth a great river plashing and dashing through valley and plain on to Rome, and on and on through the world, to our far West and everywhere; and everywhere it brought with it freshness and gladness and life. What can that mean? Must it not mean something very good for this darling and for the world?”
“Thou wilt bring thy little son to God, and God will surely make him a fountain of blessing to the world,” said Damaris, very tenderly. “But we scarcely needed a dream to promise us that!”
Then very earnestly Ethne added to Marius—
“This child may be called Paul, may he not? Because of Paul’s conquering Nero, and because of his letter to the master about his slave.” Which request was solemnly promised to be fulfilled, and the mother forbidden to discourse any further for the time.
Lucia, meantime, having in vain sought loyally for a Celtic name which Latin lips could pronounce, and which would not seem too barbarous for her little son, finally contented herself and every one with the name of Patrick, the Apostle of the Irish.
And so, when the next Baptismal Festival came, at the Epiphany, the two babes were brought to the baptistery of Constantine at the Lateran.
And there, in the water from the fountains on the Sabine hills (as Ethne liked to think), the Aqua Claudia and the Fons Ceruleus, the two little sons of Rome and Ireland were baptized by the great Bishop Leo, and sent forth on their journey of life, to be known thenceforth by the dear and consecrated names of Paul and Patrick.