“Are they Christians?” Ethne asked.
“They are,” he replied. “Christians, it is said, from the days of Nero.”
Thus the months passed swiftly on in a deep calm flow of peace and love; whilst meantime Baithene was devoting himself with single-hearted earnestness to learning everything of art or science, of handicraft or state-craft, of law or literature, that would be of use to his people.
Before long a tragic echo from the world outside did indeed break in on this sunny calm.
The year after the retreat of the Huns from Italy and rescued Rome, came the news how, at one more of his numerous nuptials, with a beautiful young maiden called Ildico (a name which seemed a suspicious echo of some Gothic word enfeebled by Latin lips), on the day after the wedding, after waiting until late in the afternoon, at last the attendants ventured in to see what their master might require, and found him stretched on his face on the bed, quite dead, the blood which had streamed from his face staining the ground below; while the bride sat weeping beside him, closely veiled, and speechless.
No explanation was ever made as to how it happened: if by the hands of the young bride, no vengeance seems to have followed; if as the result of the hard drinking at the wedding feast, this did not lessen the lamentations of his people. For them indeed all their long career of victory and plunder ended with the life of their chief. His Tartar horsemen wheeled with wild lamentations around his bier. He was buried in secret, and the captives and slaves who laid him beneath the earth were killed when their work was done, that none might ever violate his grave. No man knoweth of his tomb to this day; and his empire crumbled into dust with its founder.
The death of Attila did indeed remove a great weight of dread from the wretched Imperial court and from the falling Empire. It remained to be seen whether, after all, it would prove to have been only the lifting off of a weight which had crushed the crumbling State for the moment into some semblance of consolidation.
Soon after the tidings reached Marius and Ethne on their mountain heights, he missed her from his side, and found her kneeling in her chamber weeping bitterly.
“I know the relief it is to Rome and the world,” she said. “I did not want thee to see me in tears; but I could not help weeping for that poor heathen king. If only he had met a few more Christians like Lupus and our Leo, who knows but the heart of the beast might have gone out of him, and he might have become a man again. For he was born a human babe of a human mother.”