Читать книгу Attila and His Conquerors - Elizabeth Rundle Charles - Страница 6

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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.”