“Darling,” she said, “I think it will be all right for us all. We will learn Latin together, and come back together to the home.” She tried to add, “to our father and mother,” but the dear names seemed to choke her, and were lost in tears.
CHAPTER II.
THE HOUSE ON THE AVENTINE.
That same night in Rome, the great city of wonders of which Baithene, the young Irish chieftain, had dreamt, and to which he was being swept in the irresistible tide which still swayed the world thitherward, the same moon which had shone on the brother and sister on the Irish shore and lighted the pirates to their capture, looked down in all her southern lustre on a mother and daughter watching in one of the palaces on the Aventine for the return of the father and son from a great banquet.
They were in an open colonnade looking on the garden, the perfume of violets and roses breathing around them. The mother was reclining on a couch cushioned and draped with Oriental silks. At her feet, her head resting against her mother’s hand, sat the young daughter Lucia. The mother was a Sicilian Greek, tracing her descent in a double line from the early Spartan and Athenian colonists. In both faces could be seen the fine curves and lines of the early Greek art. But while the mother’s face was calm as a statue, touched with a sweet gravity and sadness, the girl’s was full of brilliant life, dark eyes flashing, pearly teeth glistening, bright colour coming and going—the whole countenance continually changing with every shade of thought and feeling. The mother would have had her called after a saint, and her father, Fabricius, a patrician of the ancient Anician house, would have had her named after one of the ancient heroines of his people; so by way of compromise they had given her the name of Lucia, combining the memory of the Sicilian saint with the perilous eyes, and all images and visions of illumined and luminous creatures in earth and heaven.
“When will this banquet at our old kinsman’s be over?” said the girl. “Mother, some of the maidens, my young cousins, younger than I, have seen so many things, I feel like an infant beside them. When will you take me to some of these great festivities? Our kinsman Petronius Maximus is such a great and virtuous man, they say, as well as a patrician and a senator, and to-night the Imperial Court are to be there, and perhaps the beautiful Empress Eudoxia.”