Victorinus and the ten Christians and those who would aid them cut down great trees and trimmed logs and built a chapel in the forest and beside it a lodge for themselves. By the time it was done came the winter, with snow and ice upon the river, and with howling storms. Terig sent the men from the south skins of beasts to keep them warm, and they made a fire in the middle of their great hut, and the smoke went up through a hole in the roof. Sometimes barbarians came and sat with them about their fire, and sometimes they went into Terig’s hall. Victorinus worked with his hands and his brains. He learned that winter the tongue of the Goths, for he saw that interpreters knew not how to give gold and honey, fire and light. He closely watched the barbarian life, seeking doors into their fortress. Meeting one day Emberic the bard, he asked instruction. At first Emberic scorned him and would not give it, then came the thought of imposing Gothic glory upon the Roman mind. Emberic nodded, sat beneath a fir tree and chanted the tribal praise. Warming to the task, he threw aside the bear-skin from his shoulders. The snow was coming down, and Victorinus, shivering strongly, looked with longing upon the discarded covering, but presently repented that weakness, tore himself from base desires, braced himself to endure hardness for the gospel’s sake. He sat in the snow and listened to Emberic. All in all, that winter, Victorinus did much, learned much. But all to whom he would speak, through his interpreter, or haltingly now with his own tongue, of Christ and his Bride the Church, broke away with the saying that Terig’s gods were their gods.... The priests of the grove came to see the lodge and the chapel. They were not many. He gathered that there had been a quarrel between Terig and them, and that they held their grove on sufferance. “O God, my God!” breathed Victorinus. “This is the time—this is the time! If the barbarian king were won, all were won! And though they be blindly won, thou wouldst, little by little, enlighten their blindness!”
The priests of the grove looked darkly upon him and his ten, and upon their fair chapel and house, and spoke with contempt and with gestures of scorn. If they might they would have driven him and his men forth, burning what they had built; doubtless, if they might, would have seized and bound and slain them upon the grey stone in the middle of their twilight wood. But they might not do any of that for fear of Terig. Speak evil of foreigners and foreign gods they might and did. But Terig’s word stopped the ears of Terig’s men, drew the venom from the priests’ whispering.
The winter climbed toward spring. Suddenly flared war between Goths and a tribe of the Heruli. Terig and all his fighting men and Alaran his son quitted Terig Oak, marched, shouting and singing, through the forest. The women and the home men went with them a long way, but at last, parting, poured back to Terig Oak. Here Fritha ruled till Terig should return.
Now there were flowers in the forest, and unfolding leaves and the first singing of birds, the humming of bees, the passing of butterflies, and throughout the days sunshine and balm. Alleda roamed where she would, and now she dreamed of Alaran, and now she held converse with those late-found companions within herself. She did not name these, but they might be named “Love-of-Beauty,” “Longing-for-Wisdom.”
The timber lodge was built, the timber church was built. The altar was there, the space for worshippers, the table for communicants, the benches for listeners to the sermon. But save for Victorinus and the ten and the three converted whom they had brought with them from the Rhine, there were no worshippers, no communicants, no listeners. To Victorinus the chapel ached like his heart for converts, for even one—one! “One, Lord, one!—for ofttimes one bringeth many!”
Victorinus walked in the forest, praying as he walked. Growing impassioned, he no longer prayed aloud, and after awhile no longer moved about, but kneeled where he found himself, at the hemlock edge of a brown dell in the wood. With clasped hands, with moveless limbs, he struggled, he wrought for that blessing. “One, Lord, one—!”
“Roman—Roman! Roman—Roman!”
Victorinus raised his eyes. There was a woman seated beneath the hemlocks upon the other side of the dell. He rose to his feet. She made no movement to come to him; she called him across to her. The bishop in Victorinus felt injury, recoiled, whereupon the saint, likewise there, laid hands upon that arrogance. “A barbarian and a woman, Lord!... Am I not come to barbarians, and didst not Thou Thyself, signal in Thy lowliness, ofttimes speak first with women?”
Victorinus descended the brown bank upon which he had kneeled, crossed the dell, and mounted by huge roots of trees to where sat the woman who had called. Halfway over the distance he saw who it was—Alleda, the Vandal maiden, who was to be wed to Alaran, the son of Terig.
Victorinus’s heart leaped. His eye was quick, his wit was swift. “Lord, Lord, if I win her to Thee, may she not win her husband who shall be king of this people? Was that not what Patricius said, advising us who went to the barbarians to gain their queens? Lord, Lord, Thou who wishest the world to come to Thee dost not disdain to make Thy nest in women’s hearts!”