It was in Troyes that Ethne first began to rise again to her old hopefulness. For there they found the aged “Pope” and “Father,” Bishop Lupus, restored to his repentant children; the whole city gathered again in honour and reverent love around the shepherd who had, as they found and acknowledged at last, been willing to lay down his life for the sheep.
“The people smote on their breasts and returned,” Ethne said; and she was comforted, for the Church and the world; for the multitudes, the toiling, sick, bewildered multitudes, straying and fainting, were always closest to that royal, motherly, Christ-like heart. Nor did they forget to visit the lowly tomb of the Deacon Nemorius, who was slain with the Book of the Gospels on his breast, before Lupus met and conquered Attila. Beside him lay other nameless martyrs similarly slain. And Ethne said—
“Perhaps the noblest, after all, are among these; and glorious it is to think that these, the nameless on earth, are the numberless in heaven.”
One night they paused on their way to Troyes at a village in a little island in the middle of the river Seine, to have a sight of the noble maiden Genofeva (St. Geneviève), and the place which was said to owe its salvation from the Huns to her courage and her prayers. She had been a disciple of Bishop Germanus of Auxerre. On one of his missions through Gaul she had come to him, desiring to consecrate her maiden life to Christ, and he had picked up a common coin from the ground as a token and badge for her to wear. Afterwards, when the Huns were hovering round the neighbourhood, all the inhabitants would have fled and abandoned the place, but the maiden Genofeva exhorted them not to flee from the Huns into the homeless world, but to flee to God in their true home, the church. Night and day, she and the few who shared her faith stayed in the little church and prayed that God would help them. And the Huns did spare the place, and that little village grew to be Paris; and the maiden’s name was honoured on earth long after she had found her home with God for ever.
When they went southward from Troyes they had a hospitable welcome from Marius’ old friend, Sidonius Apollinaris, soon about to relinquish his worldly dignities, and to devote himself to the arduous life of a Bishop of Auvergne. His gracious kindliness touched Ethne, and she was little disturbed by his antique pomp of words and elaborate little plays of decorative wit. They seemed to her the recreation of an old man, belonging to an old and fading world, and she had a tenderness for both which won his heart. He regarded her as a nymph of the fountains, and she scarcely escaped being celebrated in an imitative classical panegyric.
In the villa of the religious layman near Arles, to whom Marius had paid a visit years before, they stayed a night, and heard again of the venerated Metropolitan Hilary, and of the resentment felt against Leo of Rome for his severe treatment of him. This controversy Ethne was not advanced enough to understand, so that, when Marius turned uneasily to her for consolation and explanation about Leo, she only said—
“You know I cannot understand your politics in Church or Empire; they are too difficult for me. My world is too young. It seems to me so much like the old disputes among the disciples which should be the greatest. We know Leo never wants to be greatest for himself. If he wants it for his city and his Church, I suppose it is because he thinks it best for all the rest. These tribes you call barbarian seem to change and migrate about so much, whilst your Rome seems to stay; and in their languages there seem so many different dialects, it is difficult to know whether they are languages at all, or only words put together from many languages, as a means of communication between travellers meeting for a few days by the way; whilst your Latin is always there, and always the same, and is the key to everything one wants to learn.”
And Marius took comfort, and replied—
“I suppose, as Lucia said, we have to live our lives here and now, and must build the best we can for our here and now. And Christ, Who never leaves His flock, will decide, as the ages go on, what part of the building is only ours, and has to pass away, and what is His to endure for ever.”
But with Salvian, the venerable presbyter at Marseilles, whom Marius had so reverenced of old, “Magister Episcoporum,” teacher of bishops, though never himself more than a presbyter, Ethne felt at home at once. His dark views of the Church and the world did not at all depress her.