THE HOUSE ON THE AVENTINE.
That same night in Rome, the great city of wonders of which Baithene, the
young Irish chieftain, had dreamt, and to which he was being swept in the
irresistible tide which still swayed the world thitherward, the same moon
which had shone on the brother and sister on the Irish shore and lighted
the pirates to their capture, looked down in all her southern lustre on
a mother and daughter watching in one of the palaces on the Aventine for
the return of the father and son from a great banquet.
They were in an open colonnade looking on the garden, the perfume of
violets and roses breathing around them. The mother was reclining on a
couch cushioned and draped with Oriental silks. At her feet, her head
resting against her mother’s hand, sat the young daughter Lucia. The
mother was a Sicilian Greek, tracing her descent in a double line from
the early Spartan and Athenian colonists. In both faces could be seen the
fine curves and lines of the early Greek art. But while the mother’s
face was calm as a statue, touched with a sweet gravity and sadness,
the girl’s was full of brilliant life, dark eyes flashing, pearly
teeth glistening, bright colour coming and going—the whole countenance
continually changing with every shade of thought and feeling. The mother
would have had her called after a saint, and her father, Fabricius, a
patrician of the ancient Anician house, would have had her named after
one of the ancient heroines of his people; so by way of compromise they
had given her the name of Lucia, combining the memory of the Sicilian
saint with the perilous eyes, and all images and visions of illumined and
luminous creatures in earth and heaven.
“When will this banquet at our old kinsman’s be over?” said the girl.
“Mother, some of the maidens, my young cousins, younger than I, have seen
so many things, I feel like an infant beside them. When will you take
me to some of these great festivities? Our kinsman Petronius Maximus is
such a great and virtuous man, they say, as well as a patrician and a
senator, and to-night the Imperial Court are to be there, and perhaps the
beautiful Empress Eudoxia.”
“My child would not leave me?” said Damaris, the mother.
“No, that thou knowest well; but I would go with you, if it were only
once, if not to the Circensian games, or the theatre, at least to this
house of our kinsman. His wife, moreover, is so grave and sweet; we
love her. And he is such an upholder of everything orderly and proper.
They say he rules his time by his clypsedra, the water-clock, and lets
nothing overstep its right moment—pleasure, and study, and work, and
sleep, and banquets. Father says he is like an ancient Roman cut in
miniature on a gem, and you would not think it dangerous to dine with
an ancient Roman, like Scipio Africanus, or Fabius Maximus, or Numa
Pompilius, however dull it might be!” she added, laughing.
“They were heathens, the ancient Romans,” replied the mother, driven to
bay.
“I know,” replied Lucia; “and that is another reason for its being
preferable to going to dine with our cousin Petronius Maximus. He is
_not_ a heathen; and, moreover, Marius said the Emperor Valentinian would
probably be there.”
The mother shuddered visibly.
“That is no reason for any good maiden or matron being there,” she said.
“God forbid that we should risk our pearl amidst the wickedness of the
court of Ravenna.”
“They would not be wicked to us,” replied the girl, with a scornful curl
of the beautiful lips. “We are of the Anician house, no new family like
these Byzantines!”
“We have seen too many of the ancient Roman names on the roll of the
slaves,” replied Damaris. “It is scarcely forty years since from the
ruins of this palace, where our noble kinswoman Marcella lived, and where
the holy women of the Ecclesia Domestica came and listened to Jerome, she
was borne, bruised and beggared, to die in one of the basilicas, during
the siege and sack of Alaric the Goth.”
“But, mother, all that is ancient history now. Alaric has been lying
forty years in the bed of the river they turned aside to make his tomb.
And this old Rome of ours, which he sacked and tried to ruin, lives on.”
“Lives?—yes!” was the mournful answer. “Rome is still living, still
dying.”
“But, mother,” resumed the maiden, after a pause, “the world is always
dying, the sermons say; yet the children are always being born into it,
and we are the children now, and have to live.”
“There is another city,” said the mother, tenderly stroking the dark
tresses as they fell unbound on her arm, “the City of God, always dying
from earth, but ever living.”
“You are thinking of Saint Augustine’s great book,” said Lucia; “you have
heard Augustine’s own voice?”
“Once at Hippo, once at Ostia, where his mother, the blessed Monica, died
in such joy. Augustine died, you know, at Hippo, ten years since, amongst
his flock, during the siege of the Vandals.”
“Augustine could not save his Hippo from the Vandals,” said Lucia; “then
_he_ could scarcely have died with great joy, when he had so many of his
flock to leave in misery.”
“He died in faith,” said Damaris gravely, “finding comfort in taking his
place among the lowest, repeating the penitential psalms.”
“They must be very terrible, those Vandals,” resumed Lucia. “I am glad it
was the Goths and not the Vandals that sacked our Rome; they would have
left little behind. And, moreover, the Vandals are Arians, which makes
them know how to distinguish and persecute the Catholic Christians better
than the heathen can. Mother, is the Emperor Valentinian, who is so far
from being good, a Catholic?”
“He supports the Catholics. He listens to our Bishop Leo, like his Aunt
Pulcheria, Empress of the East.”
“It seems almost a pity a wicked emperor should be a Catholic,” said
Lucia meditatively. “It seems so much easier to understand when the
people who do wrong think wrong too.”
There was a pause, then the mother said—
“There have been great voices in the Church, not so long ago:
Athanasius of Alexandria, firm against the world; John of Antioch and
Constantinople, the Golden-mouthed; and our old lion Jerome, so rude to
feminine affectations, so suspicious of feminine wiles, so reverent and
tender to true womanhood—Jerome, who spoke in this our palace, who gave
us the Bible in the vulgar tongue—in Latin every one can read. But they
are all silent now—Athanasius for seventy years, Chrysostom more than
forty, Jerome thirty, Augustine only ten—great voices. And three of them,
Athanasius, Augustine, and Jerome, were heard in the streets, in the
palaces, in the basilicas of our Rome.”
“It must have been easier and better to live forty or fifty years ago,”
said the maiden; “but we cannot help having to live now,” she added,
looking up suddenly into her mother’s eyes. “Mother, did Athanasius,
and Chrysostom, and Augustine, and Jerome think their own times so very
good to live in? Were they pleased with the men and women around them? It
scarcely seems so from the bits I have heard father read from Augustine’s
_City of God_, or Jerome’s letters to our relations, the good women of
the Aventine of old. But are there no great voices now?”
Damaris thought a little, and then she said humbly and softly—
“There is our own Leo, thank God. God forbid we should be among those who
only recognize the saints when we have to build their sepulchres.”
Lucia knelt down beside her mother’s couch.
“Father says Bishop Leo is a real Roman, not in miniature,” she said;
“and Marius says, though a priest, he is worth all the generals and
consuls and prefects together. Oh, mother, it is good to hear of some one
strong and good in these days.”
“Let us say our Leo’s prayer,” said Damaris softly: “‘Give us the spirit
to think and do always such things as be rightful, that we who cannot
do anything that is good without Thee, may by Thee be enabled to live
according to Thy Will.’”
As they sat together silent afterwards, sounds came from the neighbouring
hill, the Cœlian, and along the quays by the Tiber below, of
chariot-wheels, and broken strains of songs and laughter, with tumultuous
voices, as of a crowd of revellers dispersing hither and thither. In a
few minutes one of those waves of sound broke against their own palace.
Dogs barked welcomes from within; there was a rush of slaves to meet the
coming cavalcade, and soon the father and brother came into the porch,
and greeted the mother and Lucia.
“A magnificent banquet,” said Fabricius, “our cousin Petronius Maximus
excelled himself. Gold and silver and gems, wines from every coast,
viands from every land, troops of slaves robed like Oriental satraps;
songs in every language, mimes, actors, dancing-girls; and yet everything
irreproachably virtuous and respectable.”
“Also,” interposed Marius, “an oration in clever imitation of classical
Latin, from a young man from the provinces, Sidonius Apollinaris;” and
with a little of the superciliousness of the Imperial Metropolis he
added, “This young noble told me he numbered among his intimates poets
equal to Homer, Plato, and Euripides, to say nothing of Virgil and
Horace.”
“What did he speak about in his oration?” asked Lucia.
“What did he _not_ speak about?” was the reply. “Gods and goddesses,
nymphs and heroes, sun-gods, earth-gods, gods under the earth, all
bringing wreaths, gems, stars, anything, everything, to the feet of the
greatest of all, Valentinian the Third, Emperor of the West, lord of all
hearts and hearths.”
“Is he then a pagan?”
“A pagan!—by no means. Pagans, genuine pagans, bring offerings to their
gods and goddesses—don’t bring their gods and goddesses to pay tribute to
Cæsar.”
“Aetius was there also,” said Fabricius, “the Count of Italy, the great
general who has been defending the Empire.”
“What did he say?” asked Damaris.
Fabricius replied—
“He said to me softly as we came away, that it was just as well Attila
the Hun should not be present at such a banquet.”
“What has Attila to do with it?” asked Lucia.
“He has hundreds of thousands of savages at his command,” replied her
father. “And Honoria, the Emperor’s sister, has sent him a betrothal
ring, requesting him to come and marry her, to set her free from the
tyranny of her imperial relations, and to accept as her dowry half the
Empire. And Attila accepts the proposal, and promises to come with his
hundreds of thousands of savages as a bridal train, to lay Italy waste on
his way, and probably throw the plunder of Rome in as a bridal gift.”
“It is some farce Petronius Maximus got up for your amusement you are
telling us of, not a fact!” said Damaris.
“The Emperor may think it all a farce,” said Fabricius, “but scarcely the
General Aetius, the Count of Italy.”
“What is the General Aetius proposing to do?”
“To go back to Gaul, and keep Attila there if he can,” replied Fabricius,
“and to play his old game of setting the barbarians against each other.
But the barbarians seem to have learnt the game, and not to enjoy it,
so that it becomes more and more difficult to win. It almost seems as
if the Romans would have to learn to fight their own battles again
themselves.”
“Father,” said Marius, “let me be one such Roman. Let me go to the
provinces and fight these savages back! The Goths, they say, were
civilized citizens compared with these Huns.”
“With whom would you go?” said Fabricius. “With your young friend
Sidonius Apollinaris, his Platos and Homers, his classical Latin and his
elegant villas?”
“No; with Aetius, to the battle-field, wherever that may be.”
“The battle-field is everywhere, perhaps at its hardest here at the heart
of the corruption,” Fabricius said, laying his hand on the young man’s
shoulder, yet with evident pride in his proposal. “Did we not see a
portion of it as we came home to-night?”
“Where? What?” said Lucia.
“We were delayed in passing one of the basilicas,” said Fabricius; “there
was a midnight service—we are still, you remember, in the octave of
Easter. A procession of priests was coming out, and some of the troops of
revellers around us were excited with wine, and there were rough jests,
when the Bishop Leo himself appeared, and the noisiest revellers shrank
away ashamed, and all was quiet.”
“Indeed, every one bows before Bishop Leo,” Marius said.
“Yes,” said Fabricius; “since the time of his election, when, during his
absence on a mission of peace-making in Gaul, our impatient, restless
Rome waited forty days tranquilly for his return, every one knows who is
the true shepherd and ruler of Rome.”
“His battle-field is the oratory and the basilica,” said Damaris softly,
“and therefore his presence brings peace to the world and to the city.”
Marius’ face lighted up, and he exclaimed—
“Then if Bishop Leo counselled that the post on the battle-field for me
was on the frontier, face to face with the Huns, you would be content
that I should go?”
“I must go to Bishop Leo’s own secret battle-field myself,” she said,
“before I can answer thee.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]