A joyful meeting awaited Ethne on her return. Marius himself came to greet her, with their little Paul in his arms.
Fabricius and Damaris were sitting together in the corridor.
After the first rapture of re-union was over, Ethne’s eyes, always quick to perceive any suffering creature, caught sight of the crouching figure of an aged man, propped up against one of the pillars of the house, and of a woman bending over him.
In another moment she recognized that the poor, feeble, bent form was that of Eleazar, with his wife beside him. She went to them at once. Miriam looked up into her face with anguish in her eyes; but in Eleazar’s face there was no sign of recognition. On his wrists were the scars and cuts of tightly-strained cords. He looked at Ethne with a piteous appeal, but no comprehension.
“All gone!” he kept muttering to himself; “all! all! All the treasure! all the treasure I had heaped up for my Rachel! All the treasure the Almighty had preserved so long for my people, and caused the Gentiles to preserve. The golden table, the golden seven-branched candlestick of the Temple, all are gone! We are forsaken! We are trampled into the dust for ever! There is none to care and none to save!”
Fabricius and Marius had but just arrived with the helpless old man. After a time they led him gently away into a chamber apart with his wife, laid him on a couch, set fruit and bread before them, and left them alone.
Ethne did not yet venture to tell them of Rachel. She saw that the old man could not bear any fresh shock, even a shock of joy; and besides, she felt she must first see Miriam alone and give her the tidings.
When she came back into the corridor, she and Damaris listened to the story of the terrible fortnight of the separation. For fourteen days the luxurious city had been given up to the plunder of the most practised and cruel plunderers in the world; Rome had been abandoned to her bitterest enemies.
The palaces, many of them like cities in themselves, each with its amphitheatre, its stadium, its baths, its garrison of slaves, had been rifled of every treasure they contained. Gold, gems, rich silks, costly furniture and raiment, embroideries, tapestries, carpets from every land under the sun; priceless sculptures and paintings, bronzes, marbles, jewelled cups and urns, choice graven work in brass and copper, everything was gone. The temples of the old gods were emptied at last. The statues were taken from all the ancient shrines, and the Temple of Peace was robbed of the sacred plunder found in the Temple of Jerusalem, and sculptured in bas-relief on the Arch of Titus. The pagan statues and the Jewish sacred treasures were placed in two of the Vandal ships, which had different fates. The sacred things of the Jewish temple reached Carthage in safety, but the ship which was laden with the old Roman gods and goddesses foundered and sank, and thus for centuries the beautiful old statues have been lying under the blue waves of the Mediterranean.
But far worse than this, the Vandal fleet had borne away into slavery hundreds of the noblest in Rome—men and matrons, youths and maidens.
“How did you escape?” Ethne and Damaris asked.
“We scarcely know,” Marius said, “unless it was because you were praying, and we were needed here.”
“But they said Leo had saved Rome for the second time,” Ethne said. “How can it be said that Rome is saved?”
“Rome is still there,” Marius replied mournfully, remembering vanished Aquileia, “despoiled indeed, but not destroyed; still a home of the living, still a city, not a heap of ashes and a charnel-house of the dead. And this she owes to Leo. As to us, our lives at least are saved; and if life is still worth anything to him, we have saved the poor old Jew and his noble wife. For he is poor, without pretence, at last, and she is noble.”
“How did you save him? and what from?” Ethne asked.
“His precious hoard was all but his death,” Marius replied; “those ferrets of Vandals wrung out of him where it was hidden. I found him hung up by the wrists in his own upper chamber, the ropes cutting through to his poor old bones; they were threatening other tortures, and his wife was kneeling vainly imploring them to have pity on his grey hairs. At that moment, hearing cries of distress, I happened to come in, and I reminded the brigands of the promise made by their king Genseric to Leo, not to torture their captives or to slaughter the unresisting. ‘But this old fellow is not unresisting,’ they said; ‘he refuses to show us the hoards we know he has here, close at hand.’ ‘What hoards can a hunted, persecuted old exile like me have?’ moaned the Jew. The Vandals laughed, and strained the cords tighter. The old man writhed, but would not give any information as to the coveted hoard. If it had been a sacred trust he was defending he would have been a hero; if a religious faith, a martyr.
“Then Miriam, unable to bear any longer seeing him thus tortured, whispered to me, and pointed to a corner of the room, where the hoard had been built in. The old man’s eyes flashed fire, and he denied what she said; but the plunderers knocked at the wall, found that it rang hollow, broke into it, and greeted the shower of gold and silver that rattled down on the floor with peals of mocking laughter. Again I reminded them of the promise of mercy to Leo. The chief agreed.
“‘All fair, the secret is out,’ he said. ‘We have the treasure, and that is torture enough for the old miser.’ And at his command they cut the cords and let the victim down.
“He fell in a helpless heap on the floor, all hope and courage crushed out of him, and wept and sobbed like a child. If it had been wife and child for whom he had suffered any one must have wept with him.”
“It was wife and child and country to him,” Ethne murmured; “it was the double glamour which bewildered him—the hideous curse of Mammon and the fond dream of affection. But what of Miriam?”
“She knelt down beside him,” Marius said, “the noble Jewish woman. She threw her arms around him and sustained him; she took his poor wounded hands and held them to her heart; she sobbed out every tender name she could; I understood them by the tones, though the words were in their own Hebrew. There was tender reverence in her every gesture, even more than affection; and turning to me, she said, in a tone almost of triumph, ‘It is not himself, it is his deadliest enemy they have slain. And now he will be himself again.’ And she added, ‘Thy wife will understand!’”
“I do understand,” Ethne said, with a victorious radiance like a halo on her face; “and I have found him his true gold! I have found his child! The idol is broken, but the dream of love shall prove true.”
The next morning she crept quietly into the chamber where they had left Eleazar and Miriam. The old man had fallen at last into a heavy sleep. Miriam was sitting on the floor beside him, holding one of his hands. Ethne sat down beside her, and for some minutes said nothing.
“The evil spirit has gone out of him,” Miriam said. “You see, he sleeps as sweetly as a child.”
“And the lost child is coming to him,” Ethne answered. “Coming to you both, mother and father! Your Rachel is found.”
Miriam started as if she had seen a spirit, fixing her dark eyes with passionate intensity on the sweet grey eyes of Ethne. Her whole frame quivered.
“Lady! child!” she said. “To thee, I know, it would be impossible to lie, even in the fond hope of binding up a broken heart. You would always know that nothing but truth could heal the wounded spirit, or bind up the broken heart. Nothing but the love which is true—nothing but God.”
“Nothing but God, Who is Truth and Love,” Ethne said, with her infectious smile; “Who has heard thy prayers and seen thy tears all through these weary years; Who gave thee compassion which made thee good as an angel to me. He has led me to thy child.”
And then she told Miriam the story of Rachel.
As early as possible on the morrow Ethne and Marius went to the farm on the mountains, and there they found Rachel amongst her children; the dark-eyed boys, and one fair, golden-haired baby girl. Father, mother, and children at once came down the hills to the villa of Fabricius. There, by many tokens, the mother recognized her child, whilst by an instinctive sympathy their hearts drew together.
When Eleazar awoke, the little group around him, Rachel and her sons, and the golden-haired babe on Miriam the grandmother’s knee, were beside him.
“Who are these?” he said, starting up, with eyes wide open and bewildered, yet with a dawning consciousness in them, like one waking out of a dream.
“It is only thy Rachel, our Rachel, and her children,” Miriam said, in tender, quiet tones, caressing the little one on her knee. “Thou hast always known they would come, and now, see, they are here!”
“Is it Paradise?” he said. “Are we in the garden of God?”
“Nay, beloved,” Miriam replied, very quietly, “except as every true marriage brings us back to Eden.”
Then he began gradually to return to full, quiet consciousness, and rising on the couch, he said—
“My Rachel! And all the dowry, all the treasure I had saved for thee is gone.” Then burying his face in his hands, the old man wept, quiet, natural tears.
But his daughter knelt beside him, and gently drawing down his hands, laid her babe in his arms.
“Father,” she said, “see, the God of our fathers has given us the gift and inheritance that cometh of the Lord.”
And her husband, standing behind her, laid his hand on her head and said—
“See, here is thy hid treasure. Truly thou hast given the best jewel in the world to me.”
“What to us were gold and silver?” Rachel pleaded. “God has given us the babes, and also the old riches of our race, the riches of Abraham our father. We are rich in flocks and herds. Wilt thou not come and see?”
And the old man laid his trembling hands on her head, and said—
“The Lord hath taken away, and the Lord hath given; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
History is a great perpetrator of anachronisms. She is
But
All ages in one; all types tossed together pêle-mêle; repetitions, contradictions, violent contrasts, inexplicable inconsistencies no novelist would have dared to invent.
Even in our little group among the Sabine hills, how many races, periods, types were thrown together! In Fabricius, not a lifeless fossil, but a living survival of the grand old Rome of law and order and self-sacrificing patriotism, the traces of which had made it possible for the corrupt new Rome to linger on so long. In Damaris, not the painted artificial Hellenism of her present surroundings, but a genuine afterglow of the noble, simple beauty of early Greece, beauty as natural and inevitable as the beauty of the lines and curves of flowers and waves. In Miriam, the fervent, adoring, exulting, thirsting love for the God of the fathers of the old Hebrew Psalmists; the boundless, helpful pity for men of the old Hebrew prophets. In Eleazar, the old exclusive, passionate patriotism of his people, which in the isolation of exile had so long only seemed to survive in that passion for possession which the old prophets had so continually detected and so unsparingly denounced; and now that this icy spell was broken, the old passion of patriotism had revived in the passionate love of the family, always recognized by the Law and the Prophets as the sacred core of national life, the sacred shrine of what was most heart-stirring in the national Ritual. In the Greek hermit of the cave, a survival of the early Greek Church of the Roman catacombs; and also an outpost of the great army of monks and solitaries, which was to conquer the wildernesses, material and moral, of Western Christendom. In Marius, sunset melting into dawn through his Ethne; his weariness of the faded classicism of an imitative culture, and the unreality of subtle debates about a faith which had no bearing on practice, vanishing in the freshness of her new heavenly life; all that was true and beautiful in the fading old world living anew for him in the morning dew of her new day.
Soon after the Vandals had sailed off for Africa, Fabricius and Marius went again to Rome to look after the desolated palace on the Aventine. The walls were still there, but little else.
The Vandals, said to be the greatest experts at plunder among the barbarians, had done their work effectually. Traces of barbaric feasts were strewn about the deserted rooms; fragments of familiar household treasures, cherished from childhood, were scattered over the broken mosaic pavements as mere refuse of useless and abandoned plunder; the frescoed walls were stained and scarred. In the gardens the thickets of roses were trampled and crushed, the trellised vines torn down and broken. There was a sense of outrage and desecration over all, which for the time made the dear familiar things and places terrible and weird and ghastly. They had to say to themselves again and again—“These trampled flowers, and prostrate vines, and despoiled halls and chambers do not feel their dishonour. And ere long for us also the vulgar associations scrawled over them will be obliterated, and the earlier characters will reappear.”
And Marius said—
“Ethne would see through it all at once. Being a creature of the light, naturally she always looks through to the light, and therefore can always read all the palimpsests, and see through to all the original sacred texts, in Attila, in old Eleazar, or in our Rome.”
Fabricius made some worldly lamentations over the destruction of property for his children.
“I thought to have endowed thee and thy children richly,” he said, “as becomes our ancient house. But between the Vandals and the Huns, and our own tax-gatherers, the beggary of the citizens, and the robberies of the slaves, there will, I fear, be little left for thee and thine to inherit.”
“We inherit you,” Marius said; “thee and all thou art, our mother and all she is. And what inheritance can be worth that to us? What do rich men often leave to their heirs, but the inheritance not of their gold but of their avarice, the inheritance of a paralyzed hand unable to use or to give, but only to close on what it has; the curse of an insatiable hunger for more; the spell of a heap of gold which they have to toil to heap up higher, enchanted into beasts of burden or mere blind earthworms?”
“And yet,” said Fabricius, “they say the earthworms help to build and shape the world. But, however that may be, it is a good thing to see the spell reversed, as in Eleazar the Jew, transformed back from an earthworm into a man; the gold gone, the enchantment broken, and the man himself again. God keep us from all such enchantments.”
“It seems,” said Marius, “that in these days of sieges and sacks there is a good chance of the spells being broken. Perhaps if days of prosperity and peace ever come again, they may bring back baser idols and more unconquerable spells.”
When they returned to the Sabine hills they found all in full festival: the corridors of the villa festooned and garlanded with flowers and fruits, the labourers on the estate and the children of the mountain farm gathered for the joy of harvest; Eleazar, like one of the patriarchs of his race, with the “heritage and gift” of Rachel and her children clustered round him, Miriam with the last babe on her knee, Damaris guiding the first baby-steps of little Paul, Rachel in her stately Oriental beauty, Ethne fair and radiant as morning serving every one.
While the children pelted or garlanded each other with the lavish wealth of roses, and filled the place with the music of their laughter, Fabricius drew near Eleazar, and the old men sat down together.
“The world is sad enough,” Fabricius said, “for thy people and for mine; but the children are glad!”
And a soft voice near murmured—
“Their angels always behold the face of God.”
“The God of our fathers gave us homes before He gave us a Temple and a priesthood,” Eleazar said meditatively. “Perhaps He is leading us back to these earliest temples, where the father is the priest and the children are the singers.”
“I have just heard a story which reads like a parable,” Fabricius replied. “The ancient treasures of your Jerusalem and of our Rome have fallen alike into the hands of the Vandals; but their fate has been quite opposite. Yours have been borne safely to another shore; but ours lie lost for ever in the depths of the sea.”
Ethne was standing near, and she knelt down and laid her gentle touch on the hand of Fabricius.
“Father,” she said, “shall anything really good perish and be lost for ever in the depths of any sea? Does not your old Rome live on in her great laws, and in our own Leo? Are not all the real treasures carried on and translated into their true use and meaning in the Kingdom of our Christ?”
And Damaris, with little Paul in her arms, added—
“Surely all the true treasures of all the temples shall be saved, to be understood and used better by the babes who shall succeed us here; and,” she concluded in a lower voice, “to be carried safely across the sea to the other shore, whither we are going, to the land of the living, to the City which hath the foundations.”
The families of the Anician villa and the freehold farm on the mountains, the ancient inheritance of its possessors, dating back with a pedigree beyond the beginnings of Rome, were much linked together.
Through Miriam and Eleazar, Rachel and her children, the first Testament of God came to Ethne and her children, as a great national literature and history. Abraham in his tents with his flocks and herds; David, shepherd, hero, and king; Job, the great chieftain, who saw the dark side of the world and ventured to bewail it to God, and was not rejected by Him, but accepted and honoured; Moses, loving his rebellious people more than himself, and leading them through sea and desert; Daniel in the lions’ den; the Three Children who chose the fire rather than falsehood, and walked through the fire unharmed beside One like the Son of God;—all these were living persons of a living story to Ethne’s children. Dear, moreover, to Ethne with an intimate affection, besides these earthly friends, were the heavenly friends of the toiling and the suffering—the angel who came to the forsaken slave-woman, and called her by name, and led her back to her dying child, that God might open her eyes to see the “well,” and the child might live; the angel who came to the despairing prophet, and brought him the little cake, when less sympathetic mortals might have inflicted on him a sermon on despondency. To her the voices of the old Hebrew prophets also, with the magnificent daring of their denunciations of oppression and wrong, came as fresh and inspiring as if she had heard them in the palaces on the Palatine but yesterday, or anywhere in the streets of Orleans and Troyes.
It was much thus to learn those unrivalled old human stories, those unique old Divine messages, not packed up in a lesson-book, nor crumbled down into texts, nor beaten thin into allegories, but real and fresh as the stories of Patrick or of Leo,—whilst always shining through and through with the Divine light, which those who most frankly recognize the human medium feel most vividly.
Delightful also it was to her beyond words, to see the light of the fulfilment of the New Testament of God, of the Christ, slowly penetrating into the soul of Eleazar, as it had into the heart of Miriam long before.
The New Testament, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, epistolary treatises, familiar letters, came to Ethne’s children from the lips of Damaris in the language of Paul and John, in living speech as familiar to Damaris as the words of Shakespeare and the great Elizabethans to us.
“Thy Jerome’s Vulgate is as good and grand as our Claudian aqueduct,” Ethne would say to Damaris; “but thy Greek is as the Fons Ceruleus, the Aqua Claudia, the fountains bursting fresh from the depths of these hills.”
It was the last lingering sound of living Greek (the first language of the early Church) in the Western world. For centuries afterwards the living waters flowed to Western Christendom through Jerome’s aqueduct. The great Leo did not write or speak Greek.
Many a time also Ethne found the old Greek hermit in his cave, near Monte Cassino, and laid her little Paul in his arms for his blessing. Once she told him of her dream after the birth of the child—of the church crowning the mountains in place of the temple of the old gods; of the company of mountain-folk, instead of leading the lambs garlanded for sacrifice, bringing their children for baptism; of the white-robed band pouring forth thence hither and thither throughout the mountains, throughout the world, like streams making the land fair and green wherever their footsteps came, like angels bringing to men the glad tidings of great joy. And the old man as he embraced the child said—
“And may this thy babe, lady, be one of those thy white-robed angels and messengers of peace.”
One bright Sunday it happened that, as long before Lucia had discovered Ethne diving deep into the old Hebrew poem of Job, Marius found her greatly absorbed in a fresh manuscript. She was in ecstasies of delight.
“You never told me of this,” she said. “This is a book of the Prophets of the New Testament of God. I shall never need to dream any more, for here is a Divine dream, a Vision of God! The disciple beloved of the Lord was in the Spirit on this His Lord’s Day; saw Him; saw the riddle of this earth and its solution; saw heaven open from within; saw also the earth as it is, and was no more satisfied with it than the chieftain of old; saw how it is a battle-field to the end. But he also saw what the old chieftain could not see—that the victory is sure, has been won for ever, is being won day by day. Through all the din and wailing and tumult he heard the Hallelujahs of those in heaven who see the meaning and the end; felt the soft flow of the living fountains through all the blood and fire and smoke. On earth he saw the multitudes struggling, toiling, enslaved, oppressed, hungering and thirsting, and sick as of old in Galilee. In heaven he saw another great multitude innumerable, white-robed, with palms in their hands, yet longing and interceding for those who battle and suffer below. On earth, storm and battle to the end; but heaven shining through the rifts in the clouds all through to the end. And at last not only a ‘multitude,’ but the City, the City which hath the foundations coming down out of heaven from God. Earth also right at last!—not only the hunger and thirst, but the sins, the wrongs, and the curse and death itself gone for ever; His servants serving Him for ever, His name shining in their foreheads,—His name, which that beloved disciple always tells us is love, the Lamb slain for love, the King conquering through love. You see there is no need to dream any more! All we could dream of, beautiful, and good, and holy, is unveiled here, and infinitely more than we could dream. The beloved disciple saw it—saw it for us all.”
Before long another little son was given to Marius and Ethne, and she said—
“His name must be called John, after that beloved one who saw. I need no dream for him. We have the Divine dream and its interpretation, the riddle and the solution, the Book of the unveiling. We will go into the thick of the battle, thou and I and our children. We must not grudge them their share of the glorious wounds, or the hard victories. We must go back to the poor, plundered, wrecked city, to our Rome, for victory is sure if we endure to the end.”
At Whitsuntide the family returned to the plundered palace on the Aventine. The pain at the despoiling of the palace was swallowed up in the threefold joy that Whitsuntide brought. In Constantine’s baptistery, by the Church of St. John Lateran, in the porphyry font filled from the fountains on the Sabine hills, Ethne’s second son was baptized by the name of the beloved disciple, the great Apostle of love, the Divine of the battles and the fountains.
And with this little John were received into the Church of Christ an aged man and woman of the race of which He was born—Miriam and Eleazar.
As in this great Whitsuntide baptism the large company of the newly-baptized were gathered together in their white baptismal robes, with the chrism on their foreheads, the voice of Leo rang through the silence in the vast spaces of the great basilica, and penetrated every heart, as he proclaimed—
“This day’s solemnity, beloved, is to be accounted among our foremost festivals. For as to the Hebrew people of old, fifty days after the immolation of the paschal lamb, the law was given from Mount Sinai; so after the Passion of Christ, whereby the true Lamb of God was slain, on the fiftieth day after His Resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles, and on the people of the faithful, so that the diligent Christian may recognize how the preparation (initia) of the Old Testament ministered to the beginnings (principiis) of the New, and the second was founded by the same Spirit who instituted the first.”
As the great Bishop spake these words, Ethne’s heart turned sympathetically to her Hebrew friends. And then came a bit especially for her own Ireland.
“Oh, how swift,” Leo said, “is the speech of wisdom! And when God is the Teacher, how quickly what is taught is learned! The Spirit of Truth bloweth where He listeth. The peculiar (propriæ) voices of every nation are made one common tongue in the mouth of the Church. From this day the trumpet of evangelic preaching has pealed forth. From this day showers of gifts and rivers of blessing have watered every desert. The Spirit of God has been on the waters, renewing the face of the earth; and on the departing darkness flashes the new dawn, sparkling in the many colours of the various tongues, indwelling in each heart as a fiery force to consume sin, to create intelligent perception, to illumine every faculty. Let us with one heart incite one another to the veneration of this Holy Spirit, by Whom the whole Catholic Church is sanctified, by Whom every soul is imbued with reason, Who is the Inspirer of faith, the Teacher of science, the Fount of love, the Seal of chastity, the cause of all virtue. From Him is the calling on the Father, from Him are the tears of penitents, from Him the groans of suppliants; and ‘none can call Jesus Lord except by Him.’ For the Spirit of Truth Himself makes the house of His glory shine with the splendour of His own light, and in His temple He will suffer nothing dark nor anything lukewarm.”
It was always Ethne’s delight to bring Eleazar and Miriam to everything that linked the old with the new. She rejoiced therefore when, at the Festival of the Seven Maccabæan martyrs, Leo did honour to that noble mother of their race, the mother of the seven Maccabæan martyr brothers.
“Blessed mother! blessed progeny!” he said. “The palms of these seven martyrs are multiplied sevenfold—the first suffering without the help of an example; the last tortured in all the tortures of the others; whilst each conquers in all, all have won the sevenfold crown of each.”
And then—“The battle indeed,” he said, “never ceases for the Christian. Thou who dreamest that the days of persecution are past, that for thee there is no combat with the enemy, search into the recesses of thine own heart, and see if no tyrant seeks to rule in the citadel there. Make thou no truce with avarice; despise thou the increase of unjust gain; refuse thou any compact with pride; chase away enervating luxury; repel thou injustice; contend with falsehood. And when thou findest thy combats multiplied, do thou also, a follower of these martyrs, seek with them a multiplied victory. We die to sin when sins die in us; and men become dead to the world, not by the perishing of the senses, but by the death of vices. Let each of you be mindful that the Temple of God is founded in Himself.”
Thus day by day and year by year Ethne and Marius, and all that little company of the Aventine, sought to keep their post in the great battle, contending in Rome against her tyrannies and miseries and sins, and making the plundered palace rich and beautiful again by gathering thither the orphans, the cripples, and the aged left destitute and forsaken by the sack of the Vandals; whilst among the Sabine hills they sought to bring freedom of soul to the slave, and the light of Christ to the lingering paganism of the peasants.
And all the time they were upheld by the holy example, and inspired by the trumpet-calls of Leo, rebuking the careless, encouraging the desponding, reviving the faint, enkindling the foremost to press on further.
Old Rome lived on, they felt, in Leo. His far-seeing eye reached from end to end of Christendom. His strong hand held the dissolving world and the distracted Church together.
His great life-battle was indeed drawing to a close. Underneath the vague Pantheisms from the East, brought into the West, into Rome and Spain, through Manicheans and Priscillians, he had detected the corruption of moral life, the relaxing of all the ties of duty and loyalty, and had fought against them to the death, not indeed gently either in word or deed.
Through the subtle speculations of Greek thought he had felt the entangling embrace of a parasite, eating out the life of Christianity, and had kept and unfolded for the Church the great primitive faith in the Divine and human Christ. Around him was a broken, bewildered Christendom; on the shores of Africa, a Church with magnificent traditions of martyrs and fathers, Perpetua, Felicitas, Cyprian, Augustine, long torn to pieces by schisms, now lying helpless under the tyranny of the Arian Vandals, ready to become the prey of the Moslem invasion so soon to come and crush both Catholic and Arian under one weight of death. In the East, heresies innumerable, originating in the subtle thinkers of Alexandria and Antioch, fought out by the fierce monks of the desert; Syria, Greece, Egypt, Carthage biting and devouring one another until the common enemy came and destroyed them all. Spain was in the hands of Arians; Gaul torn between contending races and beliefs; Britain had relapsed into heathenism. The one thing needful at the moment seemed to be Unity, and for this unity Leo sacrificed, strove, and toiled. And his own soul being a city at unity within itself, with primitive simplicity of character, Roman strength of will, Christian singleness of heart, this unity he succeeded in preserving through that distracted age. But always with him unity was a means and not an end, the essential condition of life, valued for the sake of the life it guarded; and always he worked with the sense that he, a mortal man, was working under an Immortal King for an immortal kingdom; always with the sense that he, “the successor of Peter,” could do nothing but by standing on the rock of Peter’s confession, always translating the old Roman order and law, the old simple apostolic confession of Christ, into the languages of the new world.
So the great Bishop battled on, until at last, six years after he had saved the city for the second time by his mediation with the Vandals, the faithful voice was silenced on earth for ever.
It was in the corridor of the villa on the Sabine hills that Marius brought home the news of the death of Leo. He had just gained one more victory for the faith, over the subtle heresies of the East. “The glory of the day is everywhere arisen,” he wrote, “the Divine Mystery, the Incarnation, is restored to the age. It is the world’s second Festival since the Advent of the Lord.”
The battle for him was over. The great commander could say at last his “Nunc Dimittis,” “Let me depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.”
And he had been “liberated in peace.”
“No more shall we hear his clear strong words of hope and love,” Marius said. “No more in any new peril that may come on her will Rome have Leo to save her by throwing himself into the chasm.”
A hush of awe and tender gratitude fell on them all. Fabricius said—
“The last of the great Romans has departed.”
And Damaris—
“The latest of the great saints has entered into life.”
As always, death completed life. And they first saw the noble life in its true meanings and proportions in the silent sculpture of death. They felt he was indeed Leo the Great; and only at the altar, as Monica had said to Augustine, could be his highest commemoration: “With the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven” rendering thanks for all he had done, and been, and become.
When they returned to the Aventine from the solemn obsequies of the Shepherd and Father of Rome, Marius said to Ethne—
“Thou hast never been perplexed by anything that seemed doubtful in the great Bishop’s life; not about his contest with Hilary of Arles, nor even about his forbidding the ordination of slaves.”
“Why should I?” she said; “Leo never claimed to be anything in himself. Has he not taught us all to say day by day in our prayers, that ‘we can do nothing good without God’? Has he not taught us never to be satisfied with ourselves, but always to pray on and on continually for ‘the increase of faith and hope and charity’? Has he not taught us that the ‘world is ordered by the governance,’ not of emperors or generals, or the greatest in the world, or the holiest in the Church, but ‘by God’? Has he not taught us that the destiny and mission of the Catholic Church, from the lowest to the highest, is not to rule, but to ‘serve Him in all godly quietness’?”
“Many think he is building up a new tyranny,” Marius said, “in the kingdom of God.”
And Ethne replied, with her far-away look as of second sight—
“As far as what Leo builds is only Rome, will it not perish like the other Rome? As far as it is chiefly Peter’s, did not the blessed Peter himself sink beneath the waves, only to be saved by the outstretched hand of Peter’s Lord? But as far as it is Christ’s kingdom and Peter’s rock, which is Christ, it cannot fail to stand. We make aqueducts; God only opens the fountains. We build our little houses of clay, which if the life dies out of them become prisons or tombs; the living God creates living worlds. We make empires; God gives us a little child, His Eternal Son, the manger and the cross. Did not Leo tell us that ‘Peter is saying still every day throughout the Catholic Church, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”’? And is not our Leo also saying that for ever now, here below, and above?”
“To thee and such as thee indeed he is!” Marius said.
“And you know we have always our twin fountains,” she added, “our Aqua Claudia and our Fons Ceruleus, ‘the Testaments of God.’ We have our one Book, our two literatures, never dead, always spoken to us by the living voice; ‘breathed into us,’ as Leo told us, ‘by the living Spirit.’”
And so the days and years passed on. And the children grew into youth, and the aged passed into the new youth above.
The first to pass away from them was Fabricius. The dishonour and humiliation of Rome had lowered the already ebbing tide of life. His gaze had always been one of wistful yearning towards the past; but towards the close he learned to see that the past lives on in the heavenly future.
After his death the palace on the Aventine became simply a group of homes for the suffering and the destitute. And so by a natural Divine classification, not of like with like, but with unlike, Damaris gathered around her all kinds of suffering and need, the various needs supplying and helping each other: the aged watching the tottering steps of the young; the little ones gladdening the sick and aged; each learning to feel that they had some gift to spare as well as some need to be supplied. And thus with Damaris old age was not a fading, but a ripening into the fuller life. One day she said to Ethne, when some fresh sign of weakness had grieved the daughter’s heart, as with a foresight of the close—
“Thou who lovest to dwell among thy fountains surely wilt not grudge me to the land of the fountains of living waters! For what are thy fountains after all, thy ‘fountain of heavenly blue’ and thy Aqua Claudia, but aqueducts, though indeed aqueducts chiselled by Divine hands? Whence do they come, the ever-flowing, exhaustless springs of thy hills?”
And Ethne said, with the far-off look in her eyes—
“Truly the clouds, mother, are ever feeding the springs, and the clouds drink of the seas; the smallest spring which is perennial must indeed have its source in the infinite and the eternal.”
Damaris took her hands and laid them on her own heart.
“Higher than our highest hills,” she said, “we must go for our fountains.”
“But,” said Ethne, “does not the Christ, did not our Leo, speak of a well of living water springing up within us, here and now?”
“Surely He does,” Damaris replied. “And if He leads me by His fountains above, I shall know that He, the Source of all the fountains, is with thee here. I am leaving thee in no parched desert land. How else could there be ‘no hunger nor thirst’ for me, there?”
“But the City of God,” Ethne resumed, with tearful pleading, “is building also on earth; thou wilt not leave us too soon for the one above? Hast thou not said that our Rome is a city not only of the fountains, but of the steps? Stay with us! stay with us yet a little while, and help our feebler feet to climb.”
And Damaris did stay yet a little while. But at last the last step for her was reached, the step over the invisible threshold—and she entered into light; but she did not leave them in darkness, for as she entered, the light shone through on them.
“Death,” she had been wont to say, “does not close the door of the unseen for us. Death is always keeping it open, both for those he takes and for those he leaves behind.” And when she died they found it true.
As the years went on, glad tidings came from Ireland of more ground conquered, more souls won for Christ.
A beautiful story came of another captive and slave, the maiden Brigit, set free to liberate the hearts of thousands; and from Brigit’s large Irish heart came another hymn, to take its place on Ethne’s heart with Patrick’s breastplate—
“The fountain indeed rises and rises in thy Ireland,” Marius would say; “it is becoming a lake, a sea, the source of how many fountains who can say?”
And Ethne—“How can we ever foresee where the new fountains will spring up?”
“No more,” he replied, “than I could foresee thee.”
They did not indeed live to see how high the fountains would rise, or how far they would flow. They did not live to hear the great proclamation of freedom go forth from the lips of the great Leo’s successor, the great Gregory, at the manumission of his own slaves, basing the freedom of all men on the creation of man in the image of God, and the Incarnation of the Son in the form of man. They did not indeed live to see the living waters from the two fountains flow forth throughout Western Christendom till they met in our English land, from the great missions of the Benedictines and of the monks of Iona; the era of the great monks and abbots succeeding the era of the great bishops. But they saw their Paul enter the white-robed company of their young kinsman Benedict on Monte Cassino; and they gave their John to join the first-born of Baithene in the great Irish monastery, which nurtured and sent forth Columba. And day by day they and their children pressed onward, in the city, in the solitude, in the home, armed with the breastplate of Patrick’s hymn—