“Sister,” he said to Lucia, when they were alone, “your husband takes you out of a crumbling mass, of which you were simply the upper crust, and grafts you into a living tree, of which you and yours will be the fairest branch.”
The chieftain and his wife stood at the door of the hall to welcome them. Their garments were homespun from the wool of their own flocks dyed in native dyes. But they stood there every inch royal in the grace of their reception of the strangers; and also in every pulse mother and father as they pressed the son and daughter to their hearts, and took the babes tenderly in their arms.
Afterwards Lucia said to Ethne—
“I would have expected that thy father and mother and thy close kindred should be like thee, princely and simple, royally regarding the wants and claims of all, and with sympathetic discrimination measuring the differences in place and character of each. But this charm goes through all your people; there is not one clown, one obtrusive, awkward person amongst them. Every one is as respectful to you as if you were their queen, and as much at home with you as if you were their sister. How is it?”
“I know not,” said Ethne, blushing at the tender compliment, “unless it is that I am as a princess and a sister to them, and that we all belong to each other, as the stem to the flower and the flower to the fruit; each content with its own place, and not wanting or deeming it possible to take the place of any one else.”
“But that would be like the Kingdom of Heaven, my sister,” said Lucia.
“I suppose the Kingdom of Heaven is the one Family of the Heavenly Father and the Divine King,” said Ethne meditatively; “and I suppose that is the ideal and the pattern of the clan. And you will find it a help in striving to make it what it should be, to comprehend the highest it can mean. But, my sister,” she added, sighing, “alas! I fear all chiefs and all clans are not what they should be, either to each other or among themselves.”
For only that morning she had heard how one chieftain among Patrick’s converts, King Leoghaire, had commanded his sons to bury him with his face turned towards his foes, on the ramparts of the hill of Tara—“with his face turned southwards towards the men of Leinster, as fighting with them, for he was the enemy of the men of Leinster all his life.”
Baithene had told Ethne and Marius this, on which Marius had mournfully observed—