And Ethne—“How could it be a battle still if we did?”
Then there was the story of Prometheus, the bound Titan, with its mighty entangled reverberations of the great revolt and the great redemption. So Ethne’s world of thought grew into order to the music of the great voices. Of the feeble, imitative echoes of the present happily she heard little.
Also in that memorable winter Ethne accomplished the great elementary step of learning to read. And the gentle strains of Virgil went deep into her heart, as afterwards into the hearts of so many of the saints of her own race. Fortunately for her there was only one literary language then to learn, and it was something to learn Latin as a household speech from those to whom it was the natural language of their infancy.
But dearest of all to Ethne was the translation of “the Testaments of God” into the vulgar tongue by Jerome, the Jerome who had written letters to the kindred of Damaris, and had prayed and preached in the oratory on the Aventine, where they worshipped every day.
One day Lucia entering Ethne’s chamber found her kneeling by a table entirely absorbed in a manuscript.
“What new treasure have you found?” Lucia asked.
“Another of the great poems,” said Ethne, with a smile in her luminous eyes. “Miriam told me something of it. It is about a great chieftain who was good to every one, and honoured by his clan and all the clans around, and beloved by God; and yet he lost everything, and every one he loved, because the devil hated him, and God listened to the devil, and seemed to forsake him.”
“You mean Job,” said Lucia, rather drearily. “We have all heard of the patience of Job.”
“But that is the interest of it,” Ethne said. “He must have been patient really, for God said so at the end. But there was no dullness in his patience. He said terrible things about the world and even about God in his anguish—just the things that come into every one’s heart in great anguish.”