“Lives?—yes!” was the mournful answer. “Rome is still living, still dying.”
“But, mother,” resumed the maiden, after a pause, “the world is always dying, the sermons say; yet the children are always being born into it, and we are the children now, and have to live.”
“There is another city,” said the mother, tenderly stroking the dark tresses as they fell unbound on her arm, “the City of God, always dying from earth, but ever living.”
“You are thinking of Saint Augustine’s great book,” said Lucia; “you have heard Augustine’s own voice?”
“Once at Hippo, once at Ostia, where his mother, the blessed Monica, died in such joy. Augustine died, you know, at Hippo, ten years since, amongst his flock, during the siege of the Vandals.”
“Augustine could not save his Hippo from the Vandals,” said Lucia; “then he could scarcely have died with great joy, when he had so many of his flock to leave in misery.”
“He died in faith,” said Damaris gravely, “finding comfort in taking his place among the lowest, repeating the penitential psalms.”
“They must be very terrible, those Vandals,” resumed Lucia. “I am glad it was the Goths and not the Vandals that sacked our Rome; they would have left little behind. And, moreover, the Vandals are Arians, which makes them know how to distinguish and persecute the Catholic Christians better than the heathen can. Mother, is the Emperor Valentinian, who is so far from being good, a Catholic?”
“He supports the Catholics. He listens to our Bishop Leo, like his Aunt Pulcheria, Empress of the East.”
“It seems almost a pity a wicked emperor should be a Catholic,” said Lucia meditatively. “It seems so much easier to understand when the people who do wrong think wrong too.”