“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.