“No longer a slave,” she murmured, taking his hard, wrinkled, aged hand in hers, “a brother beloved!”
“Thou dost indeed understand!” he replied, in a tremulous voice. “But how couldst thou have known? I also was a runaway slave. I was in one of the stateliest and most wicked households in Rome; myself among the worst there,—only a child in years, but old in degradation and sin,—when one memorable day, at the games in the Coliseum, in the arena suddenly appeared that unknown monk from the Egyptian deserts, and tried to stop the combat, and was listened to for a moment, and then crushed to death beneath the shower of stones. But he saved Rome from that iniquity for ever, and he saved me! The vision of that sacrifice of pity haunted me night and day, until I fled from that den of iniquity—fled hither to the Cross, to the Christ, for ever.”
And without another word he left them, and vanished among the rocks.
“Was it an angel of God?” Ethne said, when he was gone.
“An angel of God to us at all events, my beloved,” Marius replied, as they walked slowly homeward.
Those were, moreover, to Ethne, months of much happy learning of many things. Still in many ways a child of the wilderness, it was a constant joy to her to learn through Marius the secrets of his ancient world. And above all, she delighted, with ever-increasing wonder and joy, in drinking with him of what to her, lover of all fountains, was the new and perennial fountain of “the Testaments of God.”
“Freedom, law, life: order, beauty, truth: everything is there,” she would say. “My own people at home cannot indeed taste of all the riches of your learning. But they can have, they will have, through Patrick they have this, the best of all!”
In another of these walks among the deepest recesses of the hills, they came on a little cluster of dwellings which had a different look from those around. Flocks of sheep were feeding high up on the sweet mountain pastures, and a boy and girl were watching them. At the door of the farm buildings stood a young woman, with a fine expressive face and large dark eyes, and, beside her, her husband, an athletic, soldierly-looking man, apparently some years older than his wife. They greeted Ethne and Marius with a frank equal greeting, very different from the shrinking or sullen look common among the slave labourers. There was something in the young wife’s face which greatly attracted Ethne, and seemed familiar to her in a way she could not account for. When they passed the farm she said to Marius—
“Those people seem more like our own upper clansmen at home than any others I have seen here. Who are they?”
“The man was a centurion,” he replied. “After one of the late Eastern wars, he left the army and retired here to his father’s lands. His mother is said to be of Gothic birth, and his wife comes of some Eastern race. I believe his father was of ancient Sabine descent, as ancient as our own. Would to heaven there were more such! I think then Rome need not fear the Goths!”