“No,” he replied, very gravely. “Attila does seem to recognize a saint; and, alas! he has seen so many apostate or unworthy Christians. Think of Chrysaphius, the minister of the Emperor of the East, trying to bribe Attila’s own ambassadors and friends, and to assassinate him treacherously; and think of Attila finding it out, yet, when the embassy charged with the base project came to him in his camp beyond the Danube, being magnanimous enough to distinguish between the villains who planned the treachery, and the envoys who were sent to carry it out without knowing what they were doing. It was not like an ordinary savage to let one of that embassy escape.”
Ethne sighed.
“How indeed was Attila to know that to be a Christian means to love good and hate evil? The Huns are not devils; for the devils did wrong when they knew what they were doing. And how were the Huns to know? And even if they were devils,” she added, “Patrick has taught us the Name before which the devils fly.”
“In the Creed?” he said.
“In the Creed,” she replied, “and in Patrick’s own hymn.”
“What is Patrick’s hymn?” he asked.
“I thought all Christians knew Patrick’s hymn,” she said, with some surprise, and she began to chant softly some of her beloved Irish lorica and “breastplate.”
“But I do not know your language,” he said.
Ethne translated—“‘Christ at my right hand, at my left; Christ in the fort, in the battle, on the sea; by the way, at the end.’ Is it not sure to be so with all Christians? Is it not sure to be so with the holy Bishop Lupus?”
He hesitated a moment, and then said—