CHAPTER XXIV.
THE LAND OF THE MORNING.
Soon after the baptism the longing of Ethne’s heart was granted. She and Marius, with Baithene and Lucia and the babes, set off on their long journey to the old Irish home.
They started from Ostia, the port of Rome, from the quays on the Tiber (near the house where St. Monica had died), and coasted to Marseilles, where they landed. Thence they crossed the Visigothic kingdom to the mouth of the Loire, where they chartered an armed vessel for Ireland. Britain it was not possible to cross, torn as it then was by the successive irruptions from the north, Saxon, Jute, and Angle, which for the time made it heathen, but in the end, as we know, made it England. They touched at the cove (Perran Porth) on the western coast, still in the hands of the Britons, where Ethne and Baithene had listened to the epistle of Patrick and to the bell in the little church.
To all of them that little bay was a shrine of sacred memories and a spring of inexhaustible hope. They brought the babes across the sandy cove into the little church, with offerings of gold and silver, and laid them in the arms of the priest for benediction. And then they set sail again across the Irish Channel.
At the mouth of the river Boyne they drew the large flat-bottomed sea-galley up on the sands, and they made their way across the country to the house of the chieftain, the father of Ethne and Baithene. But for Dewi they would hardly have found it. The old chieftain and his wife could not endure the house on the cliff after it had been robbed of the treasures of their hearts by the pirates. For a time the very sight of the sea was terrible to the mother’s heart, like the sight of a blood-stained dagger that had been plunged into the hearts of her children; and they had gone to live on other lands belonging to the clan, near the river Blackwater.
There Ethne and Baithene, with the babes, were welcomed home. That welcome brought a new revelation of what love and loyalty can mean to the hearts of Marius and Lucia. Every man and woman in the regions round rejoiced over them with great joy, as at the return of a son or daughter of their own; and also of something unutterably more important than any son or daughter of theirs could ever be, born chief and lady, yet flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, the glory of their clan, the pride of their hearts, for whom every drop of their own hearts’ blood was due, and would have been freely given.
Marius and Lucia, subjects of a corrupt court, whose Imperial families had often no past and therefore no future, to whom the throne was a mere front seat at a revel or a theatre, and the crown a mere decoration, felt here for the first time the overwhelming tide of the passion of loyalty. Citizens of a city which had no genuine common life of its own, which had flourished too long by draining out all the national and patriotic life in others, they learned for the first time what could be meant by the words Patria, Fatherland, Mother-tongue. Masters of a household of slaves, they had for the first time a glimpse of the honour there could be in loyal homage, to those who received and those who rendered it, of the faithfulness there could be in service based on kinship and affection. And simple as the dwelling was, with halls and chambers of clay and timber, to Marius and Lucia there was an inner grandeur in it higher than all the marble palaces of Ravenna or Rome.