Soon after the baptism the longing of Ethne’s heart was granted. She and Marius, with Baithene and Lucia and the babes, set off on their long journey to the old Irish home.
They started from Ostia, the port of Rome, from the quays on the Tiber (near the house where St. Monica had died), and coasted to Marseilles, where they landed. Thence they crossed the Visigothic kingdom to the mouth of the Loire, where they chartered an armed vessel for Ireland. Britain it was not possible to cross, torn as it then was by the successive irruptions from the north, Saxon, Jute, and Angle, which for the time made it heathen, but in the end, as we know, made it England. They touched at the cove (Perran Porth) on the western coast, still in the hands of the Britons, where Ethne and Baithene had listened to the epistle of Patrick and to the bell in the little church.
To all of them that little bay was a shrine of sacred memories and a spring of inexhaustible hope. They brought the babes across the sandy cove into the little church, with offerings of gold and silver, and laid them in the arms of the priest for benediction. And then they set sail again across the Irish Channel.
At the mouth of the river Boyne they drew the large flat-bottomed sea-galley up on the sands, and they made their way across the country to the house of the chieftain, the father of Ethne and Baithene. But for Dewi they would hardly have found it. The old chieftain and his wife could not endure the house on the cliff after it had been robbed of the treasures of their hearts by the pirates. For a time the very sight of the sea was terrible to the mother’s heart, like the sight of a blood-stained dagger that had been plunged into the hearts of her children; and they had gone to live on other lands belonging to the clan, near the river Blackwater.
There Ethne and Baithene, with the babes, were welcomed home. That welcome brought a new revelation of what love and loyalty can mean to the hearts of Marius and Lucia. Every man and woman in the regions round rejoiced over them with great joy, as at the return of a son or daughter of their own; and also of something unutterably more important than any son or daughter of theirs could ever be, born chief and lady, yet flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, the glory of their clan, the pride of their hearts, for whom every drop of their own hearts’ blood was due, and would have been freely given.
Marius and Lucia, subjects of a corrupt court, whose Imperial families had often no past and therefore no future, to whom the throne was a mere front seat at a revel or a theatre, and the crown a mere decoration, felt here for the first time the overwhelming tide of the passion of loyalty. Citizens of a city which had no genuine common life of its own, which had flourished too long by draining out all the national and patriotic life in others, they learned for the first time what could be meant by the words Patria, Fatherland, Mother-tongue. Masters of a household of slaves, they had for the first time a glimpse of the honour there could be in loyal homage, to those who received and those who rendered it, of the faithfulness there could be in service based on kinship and affection. And simple as the dwelling was, with halls and chambers of clay and timber, to Marius and Lucia there was an inner grandeur in it higher than all the marble palaces of Ravenna or Rome.
“Sister,” he said to Lucia, when they were alone, “your husband takes you out of a crumbling mass, of which you were simply the upper crust, and grafts you into a living tree, of which you and yours will be the fairest branch.”
The chieftain and his wife stood at the door of the hall to welcome them. Their garments were homespun from the wool of their own flocks dyed in native dyes. But they stood there every inch royal in the grace of their reception of the strangers; and also in every pulse mother and father as they pressed the son and daughter to their hearts, and took the babes tenderly in their arms.
Afterwards Lucia said to Ethne—
“I would have expected that thy father and mother and thy close kindred should be like thee, princely and simple, royally regarding the wants and claims of all, and with sympathetic discrimination measuring the differences in place and character of each. But this charm goes through all your people; there is not one clown, one obtrusive, awkward person amongst them. Every one is as respectful to you as if you were their queen, and as much at home with you as if you were their sister. How is it?”
“I know not,” said Ethne, blushing at the tender compliment, “unless it is that I am as a princess and a sister to them, and that we all belong to each other, as the stem to the flower and the flower to the fruit; each content with its own place, and not wanting or deeming it possible to take the place of any one else.”
“But that would be like the Kingdom of Heaven, my sister,” said Lucia.
“I suppose the Kingdom of Heaven is the one Family of the Heavenly Father and the Divine King,” said Ethne meditatively; “and I suppose that is the ideal and the pattern of the clan. And you will find it a help in striving to make it what it should be, to comprehend the highest it can mean. But, my sister,” she added, sighing, “alas! I fear all chiefs and all clans are not what they should be, either to each other or among themselves.”
For only that morning she had heard how one chieftain among Patrick’s converts, King Leoghaire, had commanded his sons to bury him with his face turned towards his foes, on the ramparts of the hill of Tara—“with his face turned southwards towards the men of Leinster, as fighting with them, for he was the enemy of the men of Leinster all his life.”
Baithene had told Ethne and Marius this, on which Marius had mournfully observed—
“Is this then also a land of divisions and crumblings? Do the men of Leinster and the men of Ulster hate each other as the Huns hate the Romans and the Saxons the Britons?”
And Ethne had replied—
“Beloved, I am afraid the whole world is a land of divisions and dissolvings. What Patrick has brought us is the one universal Church of the One Living God, as he told the princesses of our race at the well—‘Our God is the God of all men.’ If our Ireland, if your Italy, can live in His life, we shall be one and at peace, and strong. And this is what we in our little way, what Patrick and Leo in their great way, are labouring for night and day, heart and soul, every day and for ever.”
It became indeed clear to them all, that in Ireland and elsewhere the world is a battle-field, because the heart of every one in it is a battle-field.
Not long after that, it is said, one of the greatest of the Irish saints was baptized with the double name of Wolf and Dove.[7]
“If only,” Marius said, “we could keep the Church from becoming a battle-field! As yet, Ireland seems to have no heretics—Manicheans, Arians, or Eutychians.”
“Only in the germ, at all events,” said Ethne. “I suppose the germs of all the heresies and sins are everywhere.”
But although they were too near the seat of judgment and the throne of rule not to see the dark as well as the bright side, Lucia and Marius felt they had come as to a sacred hearth, glowing with love and life, warm with the natural warm-heartedness of the race towards their own, and still more with the glow of first love in the hearts of Patrick’s Christians.
It was near Easter when they arrived, the great season of the baptisms. Only three years before, Ethne and Baithene, with Ethne their mother, had been baptized among the first converts. And now well-nigh the whole clan—old and young, children and grey-haired men and women—gathered as catechumens around Patrick and his priests for instruction. It was a time of wonderful awakening and joy. Marius had seen Rome lit up for Easter, and at Ravenna darkness turned into day through the night of Easter Eve, by the gigantic candles and torches flaming along all the streets. But never did any illumination seem to him so festive as this in that far-off barbaric island, which the glory of the sunrise had so lately touched.
The halls of Ethne’s home were lit up with torches; every hut and cabin had its humble illumination; and the hills flamed the good news to one another from summit to summit, the great Easter greeting, “The Lord is risen,” “He is risen indeed!”
And when the firelight melted into the dawn, the white-robed catechumens were awake and moving in festive processions from place to place, and all the land was full of songs of joy—new songs. Patrick throughout his mission to Ireland from the beginning had aimed straight at the hearts of her people, at the consciences of her chiefs, at the hearts of her poets.
Among his first converts was the chief poet, Dubthach, the Laureate of the nation. And now new songs were pouring forth from their lips. Their harps were strung to the heavenly music, so that from the beginning, for Ireland, the harp became the symbol at once of patriotism and faith.
From the first all that was best and noblest and wisest in the land—all the artistic skill, all the wisdom and knowledge Ireland had—were laid at the feet of Christ. Druids and bards became priests and singers of the Christian Church. Not as an iconoclast of all the beauty and wisdom already existing did Christianity win Ireland; but consecrating all that was already wise, perfecting all that was already beautiful. As far as possible the existing organization was accepted. Bishops were the bishops, not of a territory, but of a clan, or kindred group of men. The old laws were not destroyed, but expanded and raised into the new. Patrick, though himself a Gallo-Roman, learnt in every sense the language of the people, the language of their hearts. There is scarcely another European nation that has, breathing through the first moments of its Christian life, a hymn in its own mother-tongue. But Patrick’s hymn was the Hymnus Scoticus, the Irish hymn in which every peasant mother could teach her little children “the Practice of the Presence of God,” binding daily round them as a constant “lorica” or breastplate in the daily battle the invocation—
always and for ever.
And, moreover, in every place where he came and founded a colony of Christians, Patrick left, if possible, a copy of the Gospels, or both “the Testaments of God.” These were indeed in Latin, but then, necessarily, Latin was the key to the treasuries of all the ages. And Patrick in bringing Ireland into the kingdom of God brought her also into the inheritance of all the civilized past, lifting in a sacred ark above the floods of Danish barbarism and Moslem fanaticism, so soon to sweep over the nations, not only the revelation of God, but the wisdom of Greece and Rome.
Fifty years afterwards, the queenly Saint Brigit, then a babe in arms, had arisen, and (herself also a captive and a slave) had gathered men and women around her in thousands to the feet of Christ. Before that century had closed, the light and warmth of Christianity had penetrated into the remotest regions of the land, north and south, east and west; to Donegal, Derry, Banchor, and Connaught. Before another century had closed, from the fountains of the Irish monasteries the living waters had poured forth through Scotland and England, Gaul, Switzerland, and Germany; whilst to those fountains themselves, kings, nobles, men of letters from all parts, all who longed for fresher Christian life and deeper human learning, had come to drink. All this Marius could not know, but he felt the glow of the morning, felt that he had indeed found the Fountain of Youth. And all his life afterwards he would say to Ethne, when the days were darkest and the battle fiercest—
“The sun is shining still in thy land, beloved! We may be sure the battle is a victory there.”
Ethne and Marius needed indeed all the brightness of the memory of that dawn in Ireland to sustain them; for the hour of parting had to come, and they were going back into a world of perplexity and peril. The mother and father and the people who loved Ethne so dearly had to be left. One of the clan was to go with Ethne, that the sound of her mother-tongue might not die away from her hearing, and that it might be learned by lisping lips in the home on the Aventine. The nurse who had thrown the plaid around the brother and sister on the night of the capture, had naturally taken little Paul to her inmost heart, and was to sail with them. And also Dewi the Welshman, who had grafted himself into the clan; and Bran the deer-hound. Meanwhile Lucia kept a Roman girl with her, that Latin also might grow up as a mother-tongue in her Irish home.
And so at last Ethne and her husband departed; and then for the first time the weight of exile and separation pressed on her heart. As long as there was any one—father, mother, brother, clansman—to cheer and sustain, every thought that had a gleam of hope in it came to her heart and lips; but when the ship went on her outward way, and the familiar shores were left behind, too possibly for ever, amidst the “perils by the way” of every journey in those unquiet times, she discovered how her heart had always been instinctively turning thither where her steps might be no more. She felt how even their violent capture by the pirates had been no such wrench as this quiet departure by her own will. Then she had still belonged to the land she was leaving, and at every step away from it she had sustained herself and Baithene by the thought, that whichever way the road seemed to lead, it was really only a little way round back to the home. Everything, she had felt, was really working for the good of the fatherland; every treasure of knowledge or good of any kind was in some way to be laid up in that familiar casket. And now it was not her steps only, it was her heart, her life, that was going forth to this great wide Europe, to this far-off new home.
Marius was with her indeed, and her heart was in the truest sense his and their little Paul’s. But Paul also was to be a Roman, to live for Rome, for this southern world, not for Ireland. With an unconquerable instinct her heart at first turned for consolation to Fedelm, her old nurse, and to Bran the dog, who had insisted on coming with her. On the old nurse’s breast and on Bran’s shaggy head fell the tears, the only tears that brought any comfort.
And Marius knew it and understood it all, and never felt a grain of distrust or displeasure, and never tormented her with consolations. It was not, however, until they reached Tours that he said a word to her to imply that he knew. She had crept out alone to the cathedral, to the tomb of St. Martin, where she and Baithene had conversed with the old monk who knew the saint. The only words she could remember just then from their interview were the words of Martin which had baffled the devil, “Let me see the print of the nails.”
“The print of the nails,” she sobbed softly to herself, “the print of the nails! It has indeed to be also in us! To follow Thee means this, not only carrying the Cross as a burden and singing as we go, but being transfixed to it, and not being able to sing at all, only to say softly—‘Into Thy hands.’ ‘The print of the nails.’ So let it be.”
And as she turned away, comforted, she saw Marius watching her in the shadow of the font.
“My fountain of youth!” he murmured, tenderly.
“Ah, beloved,” she said, “what freshness of youth or what water of life can there be in me?”
“More than ever perhaps,” he said, “when my fountain of youth has become a fountain of tears. The world is so full of tears, and the only tears to dread are those that cannot be shed.”
“Yet after all,” she said, “the help is not in the tears, but in the life-blood from the print of the nails.”
But after that she did not try to hide the tears from him. In every town where Ethne and Baithene had found succour, it was the joy of Marius to leave rich offerings for the poor. At Tours they found out the old monk, St. Martin’s friend, and left their gifts with him, and laid their babe in his arms for his benediction. At Orleans, dear and sacred for so many reasons to them, they made their offerings at the tomb of Anianus (St. Aignan), the noble old Bishop who had so effectually defended the city, and had gone to his reward and rest the year before.
It was in Troyes that Ethne first began to rise again to her old hopefulness. For there they found the aged “Pope” and “Father,” Bishop Lupus, restored to his repentant children; the whole city gathered again in honour and reverent love around the shepherd who had, as they found and acknowledged at last, been willing to lay down his life for the sheep.
“The people smote on their breasts and returned,” Ethne said; and she was comforted, for the Church and the world; for the multitudes, the toiling, sick, bewildered multitudes, straying and fainting, were always closest to that royal, motherly, Christ-like heart. Nor did they forget to visit the lowly tomb of the Deacon Nemorius, who was slain with the Book of the Gospels on his breast, before Lupus met and conquered Attila. Beside him lay other nameless martyrs similarly slain. And Ethne said—
“Perhaps the noblest, after all, are among these; and glorious it is to think that these, the nameless on earth, are the numberless in heaven.”
One night they paused on their way to Troyes at a village in a little island in the middle of the river Seine, to have a sight of the noble maiden Genofeva (St. Geneviève), and the place which was said to owe its salvation from the Huns to her courage and her prayers. She had been a disciple of Bishop Germanus of Auxerre. On one of his missions through Gaul she had come to him, desiring to consecrate her maiden life to Christ, and he had picked up a common coin from the ground as a token and badge for her to wear. Afterwards, when the Huns were hovering round the neighbourhood, all the inhabitants would have fled and abandoned the place, but the maiden Genofeva exhorted them not to flee from the Huns into the homeless world, but to flee to God in their true home, the church. Night and day, she and the few who shared her faith stayed in the little church and prayed that God would help them. And the Huns did spare the place, and that little village grew to be Paris; and the maiden’s name was honoured on earth long after she had found her home with God for ever.
When they went southward from Troyes they had a hospitable welcome from Marius’ old friend, Sidonius Apollinaris, soon about to relinquish his worldly dignities, and to devote himself to the arduous life of a Bishop of Auvergne. His gracious kindliness touched Ethne, and she was little disturbed by his antique pomp of words and elaborate little plays of decorative wit. They seemed to her the recreation of an old man, belonging to an old and fading world, and she had a tenderness for both which won his heart. He regarded her as a nymph of the fountains, and she scarcely escaped being celebrated in an imitative classical panegyric.
In the villa of the religious layman near Arles, to whom Marius had paid a visit years before, they stayed a night, and heard again of the venerated Metropolitan Hilary, and of the resentment felt against Leo of Rome for his severe treatment of him. This controversy Ethne was not advanced enough to understand, so that, when Marius turned uneasily to her for consolation and explanation about Leo, she only said—
“You know I cannot understand your politics in Church or Empire; they are too difficult for me. My world is too young. It seems to me so much like the old disputes among the disciples which should be the greatest. We know Leo never wants to be greatest for himself. If he wants it for his city and his Church, I suppose it is because he thinks it best for all the rest. These tribes you call barbarian seem to change and migrate about so much, whilst your Rome seems to stay; and in their languages there seem so many different dialects, it is difficult to know whether they are languages at all, or only words put together from many languages, as a means of communication between travellers meeting for a few days by the way; whilst your Latin is always there, and always the same, and is the key to everything one wants to learn.”
And Marius took comfort, and replied—
“I suppose, as Lucia said, we have to live our lives here and now, and must build the best we can for our here and now. And Christ, Who never leaves His flock, will decide, as the ages go on, what part of the building is only ours, and has to pass away, and what is His to endure for ever.”
But with Salvian, the venerable presbyter at Marseilles, whom Marius had so reverenced of old, “Magister Episcoporum,” teacher of bishops, though never himself more than a presbyter, Ethne felt at home at once. His dark views of the Church and the world did not at all depress her.
“It is as good as living in the house or tent of the old chieftain Job,” she said, “to be here. Of course we know the world is not right, nor, it seems, even the Church here on earth. And yet it is better than being with Job, because the venerable Salvian knows the Gospels, and is always sure of the victory of good.”
“He sees how the battle is lost,” Marius said, “and that is a great part of the lesson how it is to be won. ‘Our own vices are killing us,’ Salvian says; and there is always hope if we can learn that the fault is our own.”
They returned from Gaul by the eastern coast of Italy. Marius had a desire to show Ethne where the city of Aquileia had been. The Roman roads along the Adriatic, which had led to the ruined cities of Altinum, Concordia, and Aquileia, still remained, though the cities to which they led had vanished for ever, under the devastations of the Huns. They stood among the charred ruins of Aquileia by the clear stream of the Natiso; and from the abandoned quays of the great commercial port they chartered a vessel from Ravenna to take them thither by the coast. As they sailed along the low shores, they saw a few poor huts on a cluster of islands, with shallow channels between, peopled by fugitives from the ruined cities. They knew not that this cluster of huts would grow into Venice, any more than they could foresee the fiery flood of Moslem invasion from Arabia which Venice was to help to stem. But as they landed and spent a few hours among the refugees in those huts, and listened to their tales of wrong and ruin, and saw their brave battle of resistance with the seas and sands, Ethne, always in sympathy with suffering and toil, felt there a breath of life and hope which she missed afterwards amidst the empty pomp of Imperial Ravenna.
It was in the glow of an autumn evening that Ethne and Marius, with their little Paul, the Irish nurse, Dewi and the dog, reached the Aventine, in the autumn of the year of our Lord 454.
The welcome of Damaris and Fabricius, especially the mother’s wistful welcome, with an instinctive longing look for some one yet to come who was not there, brought to Ethne’s heart again the warmth of familiar affection and the sense of home. If Damaris had seemed satisfied, as if all were restored by her own return with Marius, Ethne’s own heart would have been less satisfied. It was the mother’s first eager question, “And Lucia, my daughter, my child?” that altogether woke up her heart to life. Her own mother’s heart, Ethne knew, was always asking that question about herself, and in filling as far as possible a daughter’s place to Damaris, she felt as if in some way strengthening Lucia to sustain her own mother in Ireland.
One day before long she met Miriam, straying sadly into the Temple of Peace.
“You wonder to see a Hebrew woman in this Temple of the Idol,” she said; “but I came to see once more the sacred treasures of our race, and of the Temple of our God, the golden table of the shewbread, the seven-branched candlestick, that once lit up our Holy Place.”
“Your Holiest Place was dark and empty, was it not, all the year?” asked Ethne; and then very tenderly she added, “But I believe if you and I could look into the Holy of Holies now in the heavens, we should see it not dark or empty; for One of your race has entered there and abides there always.”
“Ah, lady! ah, my child!” said Miriam, passionately, “pray thou for the husband of my youth, if thou canst indeed pray to One Who sees and hears; pray for him, that the glamour and enchantment may pass away. The clutch of Mammon is around him closer and closer, crushing out his heart, his life, entwined so fearfully with what is dearest and best, his love for our child. He seems only to care for one thing besides—these sacred relics of our ancient glory. He also steals in here from time to time, and I have seen the tears on his wrinkled old face, making it look for the moment young again, as if the old days and the old life might come back yet.”
The family stayed all that winter on the Aventine, and more and more Ethne’s heart was drawn to Fabricius and Damaris, with a deep and tender reverence for the old age which seemed creeping on them too soon, as if the dissolution and decay of the falling world around them were gathering them into its shadow.
For this corrupt city, this Rome, over which Augustine had mourned, after the siege of Alaric, forty years before, as the fallen Babylon, had fallen deeper than ever, had indeed become “a habitation of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean bird, with her merchandise of bodies and souls of men.” Again and again “her sins had reached unto heaven,” and God had remembered her iniquities; but she, as her faithful Leo had told her again and again, remembered not her sins, nor her chastenings, nor her deliverances, but still said in her heart, “I sit a Queen, and shall see no sorrow.”
Even as they had entered the streets on their return from Ireland, full of the din of wild revelry, Ethne’s nurse had said—“Is this the city which has been plundered and burnt so often, which we heard was saved so lately from destruction by the prayers of the great Bishop?” And Ethne could only say, “God did save the city once more through Leo—once more!” knowing what depths of misery and iniquity lay seething underneath all this foam and noise.
The Imperial court had for a time transferred itself from Ravenna to the Palatine, and seemed to have grown more wicked than ever, with the base wickedness of weakness, deeming itself emancipated from fear. Attila, the dread of Europe, Roman and Gothic, Imperial and barbarian, was dead. The Huns were scattered into a helpless herd of disconnected tribes. Ercan, Attila’s darling boy, was tranquilly and meekly reigning over a little portion of his father’s conquests, under the protection of the Eastern Empire, in the country around the mouth of the Danube. There was nothing more to fear from the Huns. It was true that their ancient allies, the Vandals, who had slaughtered more Romans than any other of the barbarians, had taken possession of the province of North Africa. But the Vandals would, it was hoped, be content with Africa; and although they were becoming skilful seamen, with great fleets like Carthage of old, and although they had a powerful king, Genseric, of a most savage temper, who might, some thought, prove another Hannibal to Rome, Africa was across the sea and a long way off, and the worst evil inflicted on Rome at present by the Vandal conquests, was the loss of the great granary of her hungry population.
It was also true that the Vandals were Arians, and hated the Romans, not merely as Romans, but as Catholics. The stories of persecution from Vandal Africa were very fearful; but the stories of the iniquities of Roman Carthage before the Vandals captured it had been more fearful still.
Augustine had died twenty-five years before, at besieged Hippo, repeating the penitential psalms and weeping for his people, yet saying—“Righteous art Thou, O Lord, and Thy judgment is just.”
Augustine’s Hippo had fallen, Carthage had fallen, and had been sacked by the Vandals, experts, it was said, in plundering beyond all the barbarians; and with the greed of plunder was blended the cruelty of persecution. Nobles and ladies of gentle birth were sold in the slave-market; priests were slain in the churches as they read the Gospels and celebrated the Eucharist. Tortures unutterable were inflicted on the obstinate. And all the time the piratical raids were drawing nearer and nearer to Rome; yet Valentinian and his court went on revelling in careless indifference, disregarding every tie of honour and justice, betraying hospitality, dishonouring the noblest blood, rewarding with treachery the most faithful service. The great General Aetius was there at the court, his son betrothed to the Emperor’s daughter; but the Emperor had begun to feel Aetius no longer necessary, and his doom was sealed.
At length the story of crime reached its climax. The Emperor invited the great general who had saved his empire into his palace; and then, professing to be indignant with him at urging too vehemently his son’s suit for his Imperial bride, suddenly plunged his sword into the heart of his guest and deliverer; the only occasion, it was bitterly said, on which he had the courage to use a sword. The wretched courtiers followed his example; Aetius fell, pierced and mangled with many wounds. His friends were then allured into the palace, and murdered in cold blood one by one. The courtly Sidonius Apollinaris was startled from his smooth Latinity into the vigour of old Roman speech by his indignation at this crime, and called the miserable Emperor a “crazy half-man,” scarcely possessing an individual name, a mere appanage to his mother Placidia. Aetium Placidus mactavit semivir amens. And it was reported that when, immediately after the murder, the Imperial murderer, probably doubting the prudence of his act, asked one of his courtiers if it was a good deed, he was answered with an epigram which made its author famous—“Whether it was a good deed, most noble Emperor, or something quite other than a good deed, I am scarcely able to say. One thing, however, I do know, that you have cut off your right hand with your left!”
The feeble Emperor had not long to wait to prove whether his crime was a political success. Christmas came once more to Rome, with its message of peace; Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, with its boundless revelation of love, its boundless promise of redemption; and Leo’s noble voice rang through the great Christian basilica its trumpet-peals of victory, of warning, of summons to holy life, its sentences of just judgment on the unjust. And in March that sentence fell on Valentinian. He was riding out of the city to the Campus Martius, and halting amongst some laurel bushes in a pleasant grove, surrounded by his court and his guards, watching the games of the athletes, when suddenly two soldiers of the guard (whose names Optila and Traustila have a Gothic flavour) rushed upon him and stabbed him to death; and beside him also the minister Chrysaphius, who with him had planned the death of Aetius. No other blood was shed. In all that servile court, in all that dissolute city, no hand was raised to avenge the death of the Imperial murderer.
After that events rushed rapidly after each other, as at the close of some sensational melodrama. Petronius Maximus of the great Anician house was elected Emperor in place of Valentinian. The placid, virtuous senator, a man of the latest culture, who regulated his days by his clypsedra, or water-clock, whose exceptionally magnificent and exceptionally respectable festivities were the admiration of respectable Rome, was installed in the Imperial palace. His own wife had died—many said broken-hearted—from the wrongs of Valentinian; and there were suspicions that Petronius Maximus was an accomplice in the murder of his wife’s betrayer. Whether from the doting affection of an old man, or the base vengeance of an injured man on an innocent woman, Petronius Maximus, very shortly after the Emperor’s death, insisted on the beautiful widowed Empress Eudoxia becoming his wife. Eudoxia, a niece of the great Emperor Theodosius, had loved her worthless husband in spite of his crimes, and naturally detested Petronius Maximus. In the madness of her humiliation and revenge, she sent an appeal to Genseric to come with his Vandals and deliver her by attacking Rome.
Genseric’s pirate fleet was always ready for any expedition of plunder, most ready for the most profitable, most of all ready to combine vengeance and gain in the plunder of the queen-city of the world, the metropolitan see of Catholic Christendom.
It was soon rumoured that his ships were on their way across the Mediterranean. But Petronius Maximus sat helpless in his palace beside the Imperial wife who detested him. He could think of no remedy but to issue the Imperial proclamation—“The Emperor grants to all who desire it liberty to depart from the city.”
Fabricius, unable to defend his family, sent Damaris and Ethne with the child and an escort of faithful slaves to the villa among the Sabine hills, whilst he and Marius resolutely remained, to be of what service they could to Rome.
Ethne and Damaris were alone together in the familiar rooms of the quiet home among the streams of the wooded hills, when the tidings of the tragic end of Maximus reached them. When it was quite sure that the Vandals were on the sea, on their way to Rome, the citizens went mad with terror and despair, and seized on the wretched old enthroned official, as the nearest object on which to wreak their rage. He had perhaps been harsh as well as weak; to be just requires courage as well as good-nature. But whatever he had been, it was through him, as the cause of the appeal of the Empress, insulted by her unwilling nuptials, that the Vandals were coming. The nobles, and all who could take refuge in flight, fled. The panic was universal. The cause of it, a feeble doting old man, was at hand. The soldiers mutinied, the rabble rose, the slaves of the Imperial household, probably clinging to the young Empress of the ancient Imperial house, whose vices had only made the more revelry for them, and detesting the intruder, whose respectable virtues brought them no profit, abandoned the old man to the rioters. The smooth, orderly life ended in a ghastly tragedy. The Imperial household tore him limb from limb, dragged the fragments of the mangled body through the city, and then threw them into the Tiber, that no reparation of Christian rites of burial might be his. And the messenger who brought the terrible tidings to Damaris and Ethne added—“And the Vandals are here; their ships have been seen in the offing close to the port of Ostia.”
For three days no news from Rome reached the villa on the Sabine hills. To Damaris and Ethne they were days of solitude spent in prayer for their beloved and for Rome. They prayed the “Our Father,” the great prayer of Christendom, over and over, engraving the unfathomable meanings of its simplicity deeper and deeper into their hearts. And “after that manner they prayed always,” every petition pervaded by the “Our Father.” And so the childlike asking for the daily bread and daily forgiveness became possible and real; the solitude of the prayer to “My Father Who seeth in secret,” ordained in the Divine ritual, expanded into Our Father’s all-embracing heaven, into the boundlessness of the One Family, into the Our of the most solitary Christian prayer. Also, they prayed the collects of Leo, humble, grand, and simple, the “Grant us the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful;” the prayer to the Pilot of the Church and of each faithful soul, sure to be at the helm through every storm—“Grant that the course of this world may be so peacefully ordered by Thy governance, that Thy Church may serve Thee in all godly quietness.”
These especially for this earth, and then looking beyond to the results in heaven—“Almighty and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that Thy faithful people do unto Thee true and laudable service, grant, we beseech Thee, that we may so faithfully serve Thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain Thy heavenly promises, through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord.”
And perhaps oftenest of all they offered up that prayer of Leo’s which, intertwining commands and promises, unfolds the depths of both command and promise for earth and heaven—“Almighty and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and that we may obtain that which Thou dost promise, make us to love that which Thou dost command.”
Thus, often resting their hearts on the staff of Leo’s faithful words, the two women lived through those days of terrible suspense. And on the fourth came the good tidings, that once more, as far as possible, Leo had saved Rome. The messenger told how the peaceful procession of the clergy, the great Bishop leading them, had gone forth from the gates of the defenceless city, along the Ostian Way, and had met the Vandal king.
Less merciful than the Huns, Genseric had yet been moved as never before by that stately, saintly presence, and although he would not relinquish the plunder of the city, he gave orders to his soldiers that there should be no torture of the captives, no slaughter of the unresisting, nor any setting of the buildings on fire.
Marius and Fabricius were still determined that they must not leave as long as they had any chance of helping the miserable, plundered citizens, or were able in any way to mediate, counsel, or sustain.
Ethne could scarcely wish them to do otherwise, and the anguish of suspense had to be borne. It was reported that the nobles were to be taken captive, and sold into slavery in Africa; and who could say that Marius and Fabricius would escape?
A necessity for fresh air and movement came over Ethne; child of the hills and woods, for her the companionship of the mountains and the streams was as that of familiar friends. At first she hesitated to leave Damaris alone, until persuaded by her entreaties.
“Go forth, my daughter,” she said, “among the hills and brooks; thine eyes are always opened to see the well-springs, as thou liftest up the thirsting.”
And Ethne went, usually accompanied by the two people of her own race in the household, Nurse Fedelm and Dewi, and by the great deer-hound. The first day she sought and found no companionship save the streams and the rivers rushing down the crags; the very sound of the water seemed to refresh her like a draught from the cup of life. But the next day she ventured to the ruins of Nero’s villa, to the place whence they had seen the pagan temple crowning the heights and the rude cross of torture planted on the little hill.
It was evening again, as when she went there before with her husband. The temple shone golden in the evening glow, and the cross was reddened with the rays of the dying sun. Ethne was half hoping to see the hermit again once more, when to her delight she perceived the kneeling form in the dark robe with the sheepskin capote, the arms clasped around the cross. She went forward and knelt beside him, whilst Fedelm and Dewi stood at some distance behind. After a time the hermit rose. His face lit up as he recognized Ethne.
“But where is thy husband, my daughter?” he asked.
“In Rome, father!” she said.
“But they say those savages, the Arian Vandals, are plundering and sacking Rome, my child, and that the city lies a defenceless prey in their hands.”
“He stays because Rome is defenceless. Pray for him!” she implored.
“I will pray for him night and day,” was the reply.
“You are a priest?” she said.
“A deacon and servant of Christ and His Christians, as far as may be,” he replied. “Bishop Leo wrote to the Bishops of Campagna, that the priesthood should not be degraded by the ordination of slaves, and I, as thou knowest, was a slave and a fugitive.”
“Bishop Leo has once more saved Rome,” Ethne said, “as far as Rome can be saved.”
“I know,” the hermit said; “I pray for the Bishop constantly, often in his own words. It is not because he despises the slave, but because he honours the ministry of the Lord, that he refuses a slave the priesthood. For, alas! often slavery does degrade the slave unutterably; and also,” he added, in a low, deep voice, “the master.”
“Our Master took the form of a slave,” she said, “and He knows the heart of a slave. I also, father, was once a captive and in bondage. I think nothing teaches like suffering; and that kind of suffering I suppose Leo does not know.”
The hermit was silent a few moments, and then once more, as on that other evening, looking up at the rude weather-beaten cross, he said, with tears in his eyes—
“Lady, thou hast understood.” Then, seeing her worn, wearied look, he added, “Wilt thou come with thy people into my cave? I have bread and raisins, if thou wilt deign to partake of them; the peasants around are good to me and bring me food; and close beside is a spring of pure water.”
She went with him. An abundant fountain gushed out of the rock just outside the cave, afterwards plashing in a waterfall over the rocks.
“It is one of the springs which feed the Aqua Claudia,” he said.
She smiled.
“Then it has baptized my little Paul,” she said. “Thou hast sent forth thy contribution to the sacred font of the Lateran.”
“Thou hast a little Paul?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “a little Paul, who is, I trust, to tread in the steps of the great Paul, who wrote the letter about the fugitive slave, ‘his own son in the faith, his brother beloved.’”
His voice quivered as he replied—
“I shall pray every evening and morning for that little Paul.”
“As we pray night and morning for the slaves,” she said, “that they may be gathered into the Church as brothers beloved by Christ and by us.”
Then he told her that his cave was supposed to be a haunted cave.
“The peasants think it is the oracle of a faun,” he said, “one of their old forest gods. And still sometimes they come to consult the old deities here. They seek to know the future, if perchance there is any escape for them out of their miseries, which are many. They think they are seeking the old dethroned gods whom their fathers worshipped, in what they think were happier times. But their poor hearts are really thirsting, not for the dead heroes, but for the living God; not for the unhuman fauns, but for the human Saviour. And often they will listen to me when I speak to them of the Christ Who died and is not dead. And I tell them His words, ‘Come unto Me, all that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’ And they, being often wearied sore, and overladen, come, and coming, they find rest, for they find Him.”
“I also came here to-day weary and heavy-laden,” she said, “and I go away comforted and at rest.”
“Thou hast not only come to Him, my daughter,” he said, “but thou hast taken His yoke upon thee, which is ‘not my will but Thine!’ His yoke,” he added, “is not indeed always easy, but it is always good. It is the yoke of the plough which shall make thy fields fruitful; the yoke of the water-carrier who brings refreshment wherever he goes. His burdens are not always light, as we understand lightness; but they are burdens which do not hinder, but help. They make the feet ‘swifter,’ not slower, on His ways.”
He spoke with a Greek accent that reminded her of Damaris.
“Thou, like myself, art not of this land,” she said.
“I was from Athens,” he replied. “My mother-tongue was the language in which the great Paul wrote.”
“Thou speakest the words of the gospels as in a mother-tongue,” she said. “From thy lips they seem to drop into my heart fresh from the fountain, with no aqueduct between.”
And as she rose to go away, he said—
“I shall pray constantly for thy little Paul, and for thy husband, and for thee.”
When she returned, Damaris rejoiced at the light in her face.
“Thou hast been among thy fountains!” she said with a smile.
“I have been among thy fountains,” Ethne replied. “I have had water given me to drink from the fountain of thy mother-tongue.”
Another day Ethne resolved to visit once more the farm among the hills, where she had seen the ruddy, happy children, the free, frank, soldierly man with the graceful, dark-eyed young wife, whose face seemed to her familiar, as a strain of music heard long ago. She found the young mother drawing water with a pitcher from the well near the house, her children laughing around her, and helping her to pour the water into a trough for the sheep which were clustering near. Her dark eyes brightened in kindly recognition, and all at once the likeness in her face flashed upon Ethne.
“Rachel!” she exclaimed, “Rachel at the well!”
“Rachel is my name,” the stranger said; “but how couldst thou know me?”
“I did not know thee,” Ethne said, “but I knew thy mother, Miriam, the wife of Eleazar.”
The young mother laid her pitcher on the brim of the well, and knelt down by its side, and clasping her hands in adoration, she looked up to heaven.
“God of our fathers—Father of our Christ,” she said, “Thou hast heard me at last.”
“He has heard thee all the time,” said Ethne, “thee, and thy father and mother, who have sought thee from land to land, and prayed for thee day and night.”
“Where are they?” Rachel asked.
“Alas! they are in wretched, captive, plundered Rome,” Ethne said; “but pray on. The God of thy fathers, the Father of thy Christ and ours, is hearing still.”
Rachel insisted on Ethne’s coming into the cottage with the nurse and Dewi and the dog, and nothing could satisfy her till they had all partaken of her goat’s-milk cheeses, and the flat, Oriental loaves which she baked on the wood fire.
As they were eating, the soldierly husband came in from the fields, and then all their story unfolded itself.
There had been a rising of the people in the city in Asia Minor where Rachel was born, in consequence of some wild calumny about the massacre of a Christian child, and a Roman force had come to restore order. All the Jews in the place had been banished, and some of them had been sold into captivity. Among the captives, Rachel, then a child of twelve, had fallen to the share of a Roman centurion, a brave, simple man, whose mother was of Gothic race.
“He had compassion on me,” Rachel said; “he is the gentlest and bravest of men. He had a little sister about my age. He brought me home to his father’s house and lands among these hills. They were Christians, and welcomed me as one of the people of their Christ, and I also became a Christian, and was baptized. In a few years I became the wife of their son, my deliverer.”
Then Ethne told her all she knew of Miriam and Eleazar; and with the promise that Rachel would come to see her in her own home, she returned to Damaris and her little Paul.