Fifty years afterwards, the queenly Saint Brigit, then a babe in arms, had arisen, and (herself also a captive and a slave) had gathered men and women around her in thousands to the feet of Christ. Before that century had closed, the light and warmth of Christianity had penetrated into the remotest regions of the land, north and south, east and west; to Donegal, Derry, Banchor, and Connaught. Before another century had closed, from the fountains of the Irish monasteries the living waters had poured forth through Scotland and England, Gaul, Switzerland, and Germany; whilst to those fountains themselves, kings, nobles, men of letters from all parts, all who longed for fresher Christian life and deeper human learning, had come to drink. All this Marius could not know, but he felt the glow of the morning, felt that he had indeed found the Fountain of Youth. And all his life afterwards he would say to Ethne, when the days were darkest and the battle fiercest—
“The sun is shining still in thy land, beloved! We may be sure the battle is a victory there.”
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAOS AND CREATION IN CHRISTENDOM.
Ethne and Marius needed indeed all the brightness of the memory of that dawn in Ireland to sustain them; for the hour of parting had to come, and they were going back into a world of perplexity and peril. The mother and father and the people who loved Ethne so dearly had to be left. One of the clan was to go with Ethne, that the sound of her mother-tongue might not die away from her hearing, and that it might be learned by lisping lips in the home on the Aventine. The nurse who had thrown the plaid around the brother and sister on the night of the capture, had naturally taken little Paul to her inmost heart, and was to sail with them. And also Dewi the Welshman, who had grafted himself into the clan; and Bran the deer-hound. Meanwhile Lucia kept a Roman girl with her, that Latin also might grow up as a mother-tongue in her Irish home.
And so at last Ethne and her husband departed; and then for the first time the weight of exile and separation pressed on her heart. As long as there was any one—father, mother, brother, clansman—to cheer and sustain, every thought that had a gleam of hope in it came to her heart and lips; but when the ship went on her outward way, and the familiar shores were left behind, too possibly for ever, amidst the “perils by the way” of every journey in those unquiet times, she discovered how her heart had always been instinctively turning thither where her steps might be no more. She felt how even their violent capture by the pirates had been no such wrench as this quiet departure by her own will. Then she had still belonged to the land she was leaving, and at every step away from it she had sustained herself and Baithene by the thought, that whichever way the road seemed to lead, it was really only a little way round back to the home. Everything, she had felt, was really working for the good of the fatherland; every treasure of knowledge or good of any kind was in some way to be laid up in that familiar casket. And now it was not her steps only, it was her heart, her life, that was going forth to this great wide Europe, to this far-off new home.