“To thee and such as thee indeed he is!” Marius said.
“And you know we have always our twin fountains,” she added, “our Aqua Claudia and our Fons Ceruleus, ‘the Testaments of God.’ We have our one Book, our two literatures, never dead, always spoken to us by the living voice; ‘breathed into us,’ as Leo told us, ‘by the living Spirit.’”
And so the days and years passed on. And the children grew into youth, and the aged passed into the new youth above.
The first to pass away from them was Fabricius. The dishonour and humiliation of Rome had lowered the already ebbing tide of life. His gaze had always been one of wistful yearning towards the past; but towards the close he learned to see that the past lives on in the heavenly future.
After his death the palace on the Aventine became simply a group of homes for the suffering and the destitute. And so by a natural Divine classification, not of like with like, but with unlike, Damaris gathered around her all kinds of suffering and need, the various needs supplying and helping each other: the aged watching the tottering steps of the young; the little ones gladdening the sick and aged; each learning to feel that they had some gift to spare as well as some need to be supplied. And thus with Damaris old age was not a fading, but a ripening into the fuller life. One day she said to Ethne, when some fresh sign of weakness had grieved the daughter’s heart, as with a foresight of the close—
“Thou who lovest to dwell among thy fountains surely wilt not grudge me to the land of the fountains of living waters! For what are thy fountains after all, thy ‘fountain of heavenly blue’ and thy Aqua Claudia, but aqueducts, though indeed aqueducts chiselled by Divine hands? Whence do they come, the ever-flowing, exhaustless springs of thy hills?”
And Ethne said, with the far-off look in her eyes—
“Truly the clouds, mother, are ever feeding the springs, and the clouds drink of the seas; the smallest spring which is perennial must indeed have its source in the infinite and the eternal.”
Damaris took her hands and laid them on her own heart.