"We know naught of that, oh king!" replied the attendant; "all we know is, that we are given to this young leader by Attila the King, as true soldiers to their chief. We are commanded and are willing to die in his defence, and will guard him against any one and every one with our lives."
"Have ye no tribe and chieftain of your own?" demanded Ellac, scornfully. "Where is the head of your own race, that ye have the base task of following a stranger?"
"The head of our race died upon the plains of Gaul, with fifty of our brethren," replied the attendant; "and it is not a base task to follow a sword which has drank deep even of the blood of our own nation."
"If it have drank the blood of our nation," replied Ellac, "he that wields it should be slain."
"Such is not the will of the king," replied the attendant; and he then added, "Stop us not, oh king, for we do our duty."
The young chieftain sullenly drew back his horse, and turning with a look of angry comment to his own followers, he suffered those of Theodore to proceed. They accordingly rode on and overtook the young Roman, who had preceded them by a few paces, just as he reached the light screens of woodwork which separated the palace of Attila from the open space around it.
There Theodore dismounted from his horse, and in a moment was surrounded by a number of those who were spending their idleness under the shade of the portico. A mixed and motley group they were, comprising old warriors, unfit any longer to draw the sword, beautiful girls of various ages--from that at which the future loveliness bursts forth from the green film of childhood like the first opening of the rose, to that at which charms that have seen the fulness of the summer day spread out in their last unfaded hours like the same rose when its leaves are first ready to fall. Children, too, were there, and many a slave from every distant land, with mutes and dwarfs, singers, jesters, and buffoons.[[10]]
A number of these, as we have said, now crowded round Theodore with looks of interest and expectation, while others, listless and unheeding, lay quietly in the sun, casting their eyes with idle carelessness upon the stranger, without thinking it worth their while to move. Many was the question that was now asked, and many was the curious trait which struck the sight of Theodore. But we must not pause to paint minutely the life and manners of the Huns. That Attila was on his march homeward was already known at the royal village, and orders had been received regarding the treatment of the young stranger. One of the houses in the same enclosure as that of the monarch had been appointed him for a dwelling; and having taken up his abode therein, he found himself served and supplied as if he had been one of the barbarian king's own children.
Although the scene which now passed daily before his eye was very different from that which he had beheld at the dwelling of Bleda, and he found it more difficult to enter into the kindly intimacy of any of the barbarian families than he had done there, yet the same simple manners were to be seen. Large flocks and herds were daily driven out to pasture; from every dwelling poured forth the drove in the morning, and to every dwelling returned the well-fed cattle in the evening, with him who had been their guardian during the day singing his rude song to cheer the empty hours.
The women, too, whatever their rank or station among the people, were seen sitting before their dwellings, twirling the spindle in the sun, or occupied in other domestic cares which had long since been abandoned by the polished and luxurious dames of Rome.