The welcome of Damaris and Fabricius, especially the mother’s wistful welcome, with an instinctive longing look for some one yet to come who was not there, brought to Ethne’s heart again the warmth of familiar affection and the sense of home. If Damaris had seemed satisfied, as if all were restored by her own return with Marius, Ethne’s own heart would have been less satisfied. It was the mother’s first eager question, “And Lucia, my daughter, my child?” that altogether woke up her heart to life. Her own mother’s heart, Ethne knew, was always asking that question about herself, and in filling as far as possible a daughter’s place to Damaris, she felt as if in some way strengthening Lucia to sustain her own mother in Ireland.
One day before long she met Miriam, straying sadly into the Temple of Peace.
“You wonder to see a Hebrew woman in this Temple of the Idol,” she said; “but I came to see once more the sacred treasures of our race, and of the Temple of our God, the golden table of the shewbread, the seven-branched candlestick, that once lit up our Holy Place.”
“Your Holiest Place was dark and empty, was it not, all the year?” asked Ethne; and then very tenderly she added, “But I believe if you and I could look into the Holy of Holies now in the heavens, we should see it not dark or empty; for One of your race has entered there and abides there always.”
“Ah, lady! ah, my child!” said Miriam, passionately, “pray thou for the husband of my youth, if thou canst indeed pray to One Who sees and hears; pray for him, that the glamour and enchantment may pass away. The clutch of Mammon is around him closer and closer, crushing out his heart, his life, entwined so fearfully with what is dearest and best, his love for our child. He seems only to care for one thing besides—these sacred relics of our ancient glory. He also steals in here from time to time, and I have seen the tears on his wrinkled old face, making it look for the moment young again, as if the old days and the old life might come back yet.”
The family stayed all that winter on the Aventine, and more and more Ethne’s heart was drawn to Fabricius and Damaris, with a deep and tender reverence for the old age which seemed creeping on them too soon, as if the dissolution and decay of the falling world around them were gathering them into its shadow.
For this corrupt city, this Rome, over which Augustine had mourned, after the siege of Alaric, forty years before, as the fallen Babylon, had fallen deeper than ever, had indeed become “a habitation of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean bird, with her merchandise of bodies and souls of men.” Again and again “her sins had reached unto heaven,” and God had remembered her iniquities; but she, as her faithful Leo had told her again and again, remembered not her sins, nor her chastenings, nor her deliverances, but still said in her heart, “I sit a Queen, and shall see no sorrow.”
Even as they had entered the streets on their return from Ireland, full of the din of wild revelry, Ethne’s nurse had said—“Is this the city which has been plundered and burnt so often, which we heard was saved so lately from destruction by the prayers of the great Bishop?” And Ethne could only say, “God did save the city once more through Leo—once more!” knowing what depths of misery and iniquity lay seething underneath all this foam and noise.
The Imperial court had for a time transferred itself from Ravenna to the Palatine, and seemed to have grown more wicked than ever, with the base wickedness of weakness, deeming itself emancipated from fear. Attila, the dread of Europe, Roman and Gothic, Imperial and barbarian, was dead. The Huns were scattered into a helpless herd of disconnected tribes. Ercan, Attila’s darling boy, was tranquilly and meekly reigning over a little portion of his father’s conquests, under the protection of the Eastern Empire, in the country around the mouth of the Danube. There was nothing more to fear from the Huns. It was true that their ancient allies, the Vandals, who had slaughtered more Romans than any other of the barbarians, had taken possession of the province of North Africa. But the Vandals would, it was hoped, be content with Africa; and although they were becoming skilful seamen, with great fleets like Carthage of old, and although they had a powerful king, Genseric, of a most savage temper, who might, some thought, prove another Hannibal to Rome, Africa was across the sea and a long way off, and the worst evil inflicted on Rome at present by the Vandal conquests, was the loss of the great granary of her hungry population.
It was also true that the Vandals were Arians, and hated the Romans, not merely as Romans, but as Catholics. The stories of persecution from Vandal Africa were very fearful; but the stories of the iniquities of Roman Carthage before the Vandals captured it had been more fearful still.