ON THE SABINE HILLS.
It was not many days after the rescue of Rome from the Huns by Leo that
Baithene came back from Ireland. He found the city full of noise and
stir, the people crowding to the Circensian games; the Coliseum echoing
to the shouts of the spectators of the chariot races, athletic games, and
dramatic performances.
Rome had not indeed received her deliverer as for a time misguided Troyes
had received the Bishop who had risked his life for her. But her response
to the great gift of her rescue was far from satisfactory to Leo.
When Baithene reached the Aventine, he found the family absent in the
basilica, at the Festival of St. Peter and St. Paul. He followed them
thither, and through the betrothal veils recognized Ethne and Lucia,
with Damaris, Fabricius, and Marius. And resounding through the lofty
pillared spaces, once more he heard the voice of Leo in grave warning and
remonstrance.
“The religious devotion, beloved,” he said, in deep and mournful tones,
“with which, at the time of our chastening and our liberation, all the
people of the faithful flowed together to render thanks to God in acts
of praise was soon neglected by almost all. This has given sore pain to
my heart, and has also smitten it with fear. For the peril is great when
men are ungrateful to God, and by their forgetfulness of His benefits
show that they neither feel compunction at reproof, nor rejoice in their
remission and pardon. Therefore, beloved, I dread lest this voice of the
prophet should be applicable to us—‘I have scourged them and they have
not mourned, they would not accept correction’; for how can correction
have been accepted by hearts so turned away? It shames me to say it, but
it is necessary not to be silent; more is rendered to demons than to
apostles, and insane spectacles are more frequented than the shrines of
the martyrs. Who has restored this city to safety? Who has rescued her
from captivity? Who has defended her from slaughter? Is it the games of
the circus? or is it the care of the saints, through which the sentence
of Divine condemnation was softened, so that we who had deserved wrath
might be preserved for pardon?
“I beseech you, let this saying of the Saviour touch your hearts, Who,
when by His might and His compassion He had cleansed ten lepers, observed
that only one of them came back to give thanks; signifying that those
ungrateful ones, although by an act of pity they had obtained health of
body, retained, through their impiety, disease in their souls. Lest
such a sentence should be pronounced, beloved, on you, turn ye back
and consider, and understand the wonderful things that He has deigned
to accomplish for us; that, no longer attributing our liberation (as
some impious ones have done) to the operation of the stars, but to the
unspeakable mercy of Almighty God, Who deigned to soften the hearts of
the furious barbarians, we may unite together in full vigour of faith in
the commemoration of such a benefit. Grave negligence must be remedied by
testimonies of gratitude all the greater.” Then tenderly reminding them
of the sufferings of the saints and martyrs, Peter and Paul, whom they
were commemorating, he commended them to the mercy of God through Jesus
Christ our Lord.
It was in the porch of the basilica, as the congregation dispersed,
that the family of the Aventine first met again. When they reached the
gardens of the palace, and sat in the shade of the ilexes, there was
much to hear and tell. From Ireland the tidings were full of joy. The
Irish chieftain, on hearing of the welcome of his son and daughter in the
Christian household at Rome, had laid aside his last faint hesitation
as to embracing Christianity, and had been baptized by Patrick at the
great Easter Baptism. He and his wife welcomed Lucia to their hearts and
kingdom; they trusted to receive her as a daughter in the place of the
daughter they were willing to give as a bride to Marius, however sore the
parting might be to them. They only stipulated that, as soon as might be
in those perilous days, the four might come back to Ireland; Baithene
and Lucia to remain as the joy of their home, and the stay and strength
of the clan; and Ethne and Marius to sojourn there as long as they could
be spared from their Roman home. Also they desired that Baithene should
for a time take a fair dwelling of his own in Rome, to receive his sister
there, that she might be led thence, as became a lady of free and noble
birth, to the house of her bridegroom. And they consented, they even
generously wished, for the sake of their own country and people, that
Baithene and Lucia should remain a year or two in Rome, that he might
bring home to their far-off Ireland the learning and training of that
great city, which they understood to have been so long the centre of the
world’s greatness and wisdom, and the channel of Divine wisdom and order
to the Christian Church.
Thus in the midst of that tumultuous, tormented age, began one of those
quiet melodies of love and rest which are always flowing on in soft
musical tones through the din of storms and wars, scarcely heard at all
in the great orchestral chorus of history, yet without which the world
itself, and therefore its history, would soon fall back into chaos and
cease to be.
First came the betrothal. Fabricius and Damaris kept to ancient
customs as far as might be, Damaris leaning to the rites of her Greek
forefathers, and both of them to the customs of those early Greek
Christians of Rome, to whom the Greek inscriptions of more than two
centuries in the catacombs bore witness. The ceremonies of the veiling
and the ring were therefore celebrated at the betrothal, which took
place in the Oratory of the Ecclesia Domestica on the Aventine. There
also were given the dowry by the fathers of the brides, the Irish
chieftain and Fabricius, with the “_Arrhae_,” or pledge in money; there
also the hands of the betrothed were joined, the sacred kiss given, and
the ring placed on the hand of the bride, a signet ring, in token that
she should henceforth seal and have charge of her husband’s property;
and there, finally, they received the solemn benediction of the priest.
Afterwards the betrothed separated, Lucia returning to her father’s
house, and Ethne going with Baithene to a country house belonging to
Fabricius, among the Sabine hills, high amidst the wooded mountains above
the town of Subiaco.
This separation was considered as especially important in their case,
in order to efface all traces of captivity and bondage; that the
marriage might be recognized as between those who always had been and
were for ever free men and free women. For so deep and enduring was the
degradation stamped legally and socially on the slave, that there had
been a prolonged contest, scarcely yet decided, whether marriage between
slaves was to be treated as legal marriage at all; whilst marriage
between a free woman and a slave was regarded as in a sense a crime; and
marriage between a free man and a slave woman was liable to be annulled
at any moment. It was therefore arranged that the forty days between the
betrothal and the marriage festival, customarily spent together by the
betrothed apart from each other, should be spent together by the brother
and sister in the villa on the Sabine hills.
To Ethne, and indeed to both of them, those days were like a fresh
baptism into childhood. The long year of humiliation and terrible
suspense was over; to their unspeakable joy their father had become a
Christian; and their parents in Ireland were content. Bright visions of
re-union with his people were before Baithene; and before Ethne hope of
a life of noble service with him to whom her heart was given. But she
was to devote these weeks to the dear companion of all her past life, in
an island of rest between the past and the future, in the midst of the
voyage of life.
As the great Roman thoroughfare, the Via Valeria, branched off into the
narrower road along the banks of the Anio, and climbed up the mountains
by Sublaqueum and the Roman villa of Nero, her spirits rose at every
step. As they passed picturesque village after village perched for
safety on the crests of the hills, or plunged deeper and deeper into
the mountains and among the luxuriant forests, her whole spirit seemed
to rise and breathe the bracing air of the heights. The country house
was comparatively simple; the decorations and conveniences of the villa
of the Roman noble, hot and cold baths, halls and corridors with mosaic
floors, and quiet inner chambers, were there; but the corridor in front
was like a trellised rustic pergola, with the vines clustering around
the pillars. It opened on a terrace from which there was immediate
access to the free wild hills. Baithene, from his long residence there
with Fabricius, was familiar with it all, at home with the place and
the people; his many acts of care and kindness had won for them both
an enthusiastic welcome, which almost made the brother and sister feel
as if they were amongst the men and women of their own clan; they were
understood, beloved, and honoured there, and free to do what they would,
and go whither they would, without restraint.
Baithene knew all the mountain paths, and it was their delight to climb
crag after crag with feet nimble as the wild goat’s, to gaze from the
heights across fold after fold of the great range of the Apennines, or
over the lower hills to the far-off plains and the sea. But most of all,
Ethne’s delight was in the fountains and streams, the springs bubbling up
on the hill-sides, and pouring out their crystal waters from under the
crags.
“We have come once more from the aqueducts to the fountains,” she said;
“the waters are no more imprisoned and enslaved in rigid stone channels,
they are free. And we are free,” she added, “free to go forth like them,
and make the world glad, and to minister freely to its humblest needs.”
For they were indeed in a land of fountains and brooks, which run among
valleys and hills; the Aqua Marcia, and the Aqua Claudia, and the Fons
Ceruleus of heavenly blue, the crystal springs which fed the waters
of the great Claudian aqueduct, kept perennially full the magnificent
fountains of Rome, and sparkled in Constantine’s porphyry basins in the
great baptistery of the Lateran.
Many a gracious kindness they found means and opportunities of doing
to the peasantry, and the dull, cowed expression on many of the faces
was for them transfigured into a trusting smile of welcome. The heavy,
universal shadow of slavery weighed indeed on all the toilers; yet a hope
dawned on Ethne of penetrating it with the light of Christian redemption
and human brotherhood. Thus for the most part those happy days were for
both of them a bathing of body, soul, and spirit in the fountain of
youth, in the beauty and strength and freedom of nature.
“I was a glad and sunny child,
And in the Fount of Life,
Which, gushing from its hidden cave,
In many a clear and sparkling wave,
Each with sweet music rife,
Wells in the morning sunlight up
E’en to its stony brim,
Dropping into each flowery cup
That trembles on the rim;
Each joyous chime and merry burst,
As fresh and glad as ’twere the first,
I bathed and quenched my healthy thirst
Until my heart grew wild.
And in the still and sultry hours,
When nature drooped and was sad,
Weary with thirst and heat,
The tread of my light feet,
Was cool and musical,
As when at evening fall
Drop by drop in lonely pools the summer showers,
And the desert looked up and was glad.
I strove with the maddened storm,
I leapt the crag with the water-fall;
For the blood in my veins was warm,
And storms and streams and gleams and all
The mighty creatures of the wild,
In their wild, exulting play
They welcomed me to their company,
And they laughed to see a human child
As strong and as glad as they.”
[Illustration]