They turned back through the glorious sights and sounds of the springtime; there was a dagger in Monica's heart. On the threshold she met Patricius. He wanted to speak to her, he said. She slipped her arm into his, smiling through her pain, and they went back again, between the nodding asphodels and the hedges of wisteria, along the path she had just trodden with her son.
There was an unwonted seriousness about Patricius. He had been thinking deeply of late, he told her. He had begun to see things in a new light. It was dim as yet, and he was still weak; but the old life and the old religion had grown hateful to him. Her God was the true God; he wanted to know how to love and serve that God of hers. Was he fit, did she think, to learn? Could he be received as a catechumen?
The new joy fell like balm on the new sorrow. Monica had lost her son, but gained her husband. God was good. He had heard her prayers, He had accepted her sacrifice. Surely He would give her back her boy. She would trust on and hope. "He will withhold no good thing from them that ask Him."
A few days later Patricius knelt beside her at the altar. Her heart overflowed with joy and thankfulness. They were one at last—one in soul, in faith. A few steps distant knelt Augustine. What thoughts were in his heart? Was it the last struggle between good and evil? Was the influence of his mother, the love of Christ she had instilled into him in his childhood, making one last stand against the influences that had swayed him in Madaura—that still swayed him—the influences of the corrupt world in which he lived? We do not know. If it was so, the evil triumphed.
CHAPTER V
HOW AUGUSTINE WENT TO CARTHAGE, AND HOW PATRICIUS DIED A CHRISTIAN DEATH
Augustine's year at home did not do for him what Monica had hoped. His old pagan schoolfellows gathered round him; he was always with them; the happy home-life seemed to have lost its charm. The want of principle and of honour in most of them disgusted him in his better moments; nevertheless he was content to enjoy himself in their company. He was even ashamed, when they boasted of their misdoings, to seem more innocent than they, and would pretend to be worse than he really was, lest his prestige should suffer in their eyes. There were moments when he loathed it all, and longed for the old life, with its innocent pleasures; but it is hard to turn back on the downhill road.
He tells us how he went one night with a band of these wild companions to rob the fruit-tree of a poor neighbour. It was laden with pears, but they were not very good; they did not care to eat them, and threw them to the pigs. It was not schoolboy greed that prompted the theft, but the pure delight of doing evil, of tricking the owner of the garden. There was the wild excitement, too, of the daring; the fear that they might be caught in the act. He was careful to keep such escapades a secret from his mother, but Monica was uneasy, knowing what might be expected from the companions her son had chosen.
Patricius was altogether unable to give Augustine the help that he needed. The Christian ideals of life and conduct were new to him as yet; the old pagan ways seemed only natural. He was scarcely likely to be astonished at the fact that his son's boyhood was rather like what his own had been. He was standing, it is true, on the threshold of the Church, but her teaching was not yet clear to him. His own feet were not firm enough in the ways of Christ to enable him to stretch a steadying hand to another.
His mother was failing fast; the end could not be far off. Monica was devoting herself heart and soul to the old woman, who clung to her with tender affection, and was never happy in her absence.