There was little difficulty in finding an appointment for Marius when his purpose was understood. The difficulty amongst the luxurious court and intriguing officials, whose principle was to do as little and get as much as possible, was to understand how any one who might have had an easy, splendid life at home could wish to rush into peril and toil at the tumultuous frontiers of the Empire. A post was therefore easily obtained in connection with the forces of Aetius, and the day soon arrived when Marius had to set off for Gaul. His last day at home was Sunday. They began it in the early morning in the basilica of Saint Agnes, by the catacombs outside the walls.
Damaris delighted on special occasions to celebrate the Passion near the resting-places of the early martyrs. The subterraneous galleries and chapels among the tombs were familiar to Marius and Lucia from childhood; the frescoes of the Good Shepherd, the Orpheus building up the Holy City by his Divine music, the inscriptions of immortal Peace and Hope were interwoven with every sacred memory of their lives. Among the names of the martyrs were not a few of their own kindred in the past.
The brother and sister walked home among the vineyards and gardens, and the vividness of the sunshine struck them with a sharp contrast as they came out from the subterranean chill and shadow. The pulses of youth beat high in them both, and everything was intensified by the thought of the change and parting so near.
It was one of those moments in life like those which sometimes at sunset deepen every colour, and concentrate the broken lights and shadows into the unity of a picture. A new meaning seemed to come into the most common things, and a new unity and significance into their own lives.
“What an inheritance we have had!” Marius said, as they looked up to the hills, at the temples still standing on the Capitol, at the palaces still complete and splendid on the Palatine, at the quays still full of busy life on the Tiber. “What it is to have the familiar pictures of our childhood, those monuments of the greatness of old Rome, of the beauty of Greece!”
“And our Rome and our Greece!” said Lucia; “to have lisped the language the old Romans spoke, Cicero and Virgil, and the old Greeks, Homer and Plato, in our infancy; to have two such mother-tongues! We ought to be very wise, Marius!”
“To have listened to the very words Paul spoke, and Peter, and John the beloved,” said Marius, “from such a mother’s lips! We ought to be very good, Lucia!”
There was a pause. Then Lucia resumed—
“Brother, I sometimes feel such a hypocrite beside mother. She is always trying to guard me with her dear, delicate hands from the great wickedness of the world; she thinks I know nothing of the wickedness of the world, of this wicked Rome. And,” she continued, hesitating, “sometimes I feel as if she were an innocent babe beside me, whom I ought to guard! I feel so dreadfully wise as to the wickedness of the world, so old beside mother.”