“Do all the great wrongs die in that way,” asked Ethne, “by some one dying under them?”
“The Cross is on our Christian banners!” said Damaris. “Of what wrongs were you thinking?”
“I was thinking of Troyes,” Ethne replied, “of the young deacon falling under the spears of the Huns, of the aged Bishop Lupus giving himself up to Attila, and of the city being saved. And,” she added, softly, “I was thinking also of the great wrong of slavery, and of Patrick, who brought the freedom of Christ to our country, having been himself once a slave.”
Damaris looked at the girl very tenderly, but as if a new light had suddenly dawned on her. Slavery was so essential a part of that old civilization, Greek and Roman, that even to her it had scarcely occurred that it was anything but an inevitable natural evil, like earthquakes and storms; but she said nothing.
A very close sympathy bound these two to each other; they seemed so often to read each other’s thoughts, and in doing so to find their own grow clearer. Many were the galleries of the past through which Damaris led Ethne. The great poems of the ancient world were unlocked at her touch, one palace chamber after another; especially the great poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the poems of the Battle and the Wandering. Ethne would say they explained so much, since the battles and the wanderings seem always there.
And Lucia would answer—
“Does not that make you sad?”
And Ethne would say—
“Why should it? We have the key, now! We know that the wanderings are pilgrimages to the home, and the battles may always be victories.”
“But we cannot always see the victory,” Lucia said.