Читать книгу Attila and His Conquerors - Elizabeth Rundle Charles - Страница 7

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There was little sleep for Damaris that night. The sun was just beginning to gild the palaces on the Aventine, and the sounds of labour had scarcely begun to stir on the busy quays of the Tiber below, when the mother rose and went to what she had called the battle-field of Leo, the secret place of prayer, which for her was usually the half-ruined oratory in the palace, where once had arisen the prayers and praises of Jerome and Marcella, and the Ecclesia Domestica.

“Thou knowest,” she prayed, “O All-seeing, how I have asked that he might be kept from temptation, the temptations of this corrupt city. If this is Thy way of escape, from the seductions of the city to the battle-field of the nations, among the perils of the frontier, let him go! Better the spears and arrows of the barbarians than the fangs of the serpents around us here, the malaria of the seven hills, the festering cancer of this wicked court, at the heart of the Empire, poisoning the very springs of life! If this is Thy way of escape for him, O Father of all the fathers and mothers of the world, not for a moment would I hold him back. Take him for Thy hard warfare! Only show him when and how!”

As she came back through the wilderness of roses which led to the house, there was a wonderful lightness in her step, and brightness in her eyes.

Lucia was watching her from the porch, and ran to meet her.

“Hast thou been taking counsel of the bishop already?” she said.

“No, not of Leo,” replied Damaris; “why should I trouble Leo, who has the care on him of all the Churches? Thou rememberest the words of Leo himself—‘The whole people of His adoption is royal and sacerdotal; we have the ceaseless propitiation of the omnipotent and perfect Priest; and although He has committed the care of His sheep to many pastors, He Himself, nevertheless, has not abandoned the custody of His beloved flock.’ So, by the counsel of our own wise shepherd, I went as one of the countless flock to the Chief Shepherd of all.”

“The Shepherd who cares even for the little wilful kid,” whispered Lucia, “as thou hast so often shown us in the picture in the catacombs; and He has heard thee and made thee glad, and has given thee what thou hast asked?”

“Heard me and made me glad indeed,” said the mother; “but scarcely given me what I could have dared to ask or to wish, though with all my soul I will it if He wills it.”

“About our Marius, mother?”

The mother bowed in acquiescence, and said in a low voice—

“I think, dearest, we may have to let him go.”

“To the frontiers, among the barbarians, the Huns! But they say all the other barbarians were angels compared with these, who seem half wild beast and half witch.”

“There are no half beasts in our Christian creed,” said the mother; “only creatures once ‘very good,’ made in the image of God, now fallen angels and fallen men, and none fallen below the depths of the Redeeming Cross. The roots of the Tree of Life are deeper than the roots of any poison tree.”

“But, mother, Marius would be going not to redeem the Huns, but to hunt and slay them; not as a shepherd or a priest, but as a soldier, would he not?”

“That is true,” Damaris replied; “but even the shepherd has sometimes to slay the lion and the bear.”

“But it is our own Marius,” exclaimed Lucia, passionately escaping from allegory; “he will go to lead our Roman soldiers, some of them, father says, so feebly armed, so effeminate, that they have thrown off the old armour, the heavy helmets and shields, preferring to run the risk on the battle-field rather than to bear the weight on the march, and therefore when the battle comes, often taking refuge in cowardly flight. And against him will be those fierce, nimble Huns, or the tall athletic Goths, who don’t mind being killed, father says, if they can only kill enough of the enemy first. And the enemy will be our Marius, who will never run away, and will be among those ill-armed cowards who will take to flight and let him stay and die!”

Damaris’ eyes flashed.

“Who knows,” she said, “but that our Marius will inspire his Romans with the old Roman courage, so that they will stay by him, and not die, but conquer; or, if they die, die conquering at their post?”

Lucia embraced her mother amidst her tears.

“Ah, mother,” she said, “did not some of your old Greek forefathers descend from the three hundred who died at Thermopylæ?”

“It was said so amongst us,” Damaris replied. “And certainly your father’s house belonged to those old Romans who drove Hannibal back to Carthage.”

“Ah, mother,” said Lucia, “perhaps after all it is best our Marius should go to fight the Huns.”

They had reached the porch, and as Lucia spoke the last words, Marius, who had come silently up to them and heard what she said, looked with a radiant smile into his mother’s eyes.

“Then, mother,” he said, “I shall not have to fight for this purpose of my life with thee? And, with thy blessing, the Huns are easy foes.”

She laid her hand on his, and the compact between them was sealed.

Lucia glided away, and left the mother and son together. There was never need of many words between these two. Her faith in God, her unquenchable hope for mankind through the Incarnate Lord and Son of Man, had always been the atmosphere around his inmost life. To her, Christianity was the revelation of beauty as well as of truth; the law of life by which all things grow fair as well as strong; and of all beauty, beauty of character and soul the fairest of all. And a word from her to him, her son and heir in character and soul, was always a glimpse into the world of light within her soul, which he knew so well. Nevertheless he knew and she knew, that for him the disorders and miseries and sins of the world around had sometimes eaten deep into his power of believing in the presence of the Omnipotent Love above and beneath all. He had often felt dimly, and now she recognized consciously for him, that to realize the Love which conquers he needed to be in the army of the Conqueror, to be fighting not merely with the doubts within or the countless subtle heresies around, but with the concrete sin and misery, wrong and disorder of this visible, tangible world. The blood of the old Roman rulers of themselves and of the world, conquerors and law-givers, was in him, as well as the subtle perception of the old Greeks. She felt she had to let him go forth to the great world-battle; and knowing this, she would have him go forth, not weakened by her tears, but crowned by her smile and her blessing. And so he went.

There was little difficulty in finding an appointment for Marius when his purpose was understood. The difficulty amongst the luxurious court and intriguing officials, whose principle was to do as little and get as much as possible, was to understand how any one who might have had an easy, splendid life at home could wish to rush into peril and toil at the tumultuous frontiers of the Empire. A post was therefore easily obtained in connection with the forces of Aetius, and the day soon arrived when Marius had to set off for Gaul. His last day at home was Sunday. They began it in the early morning in the basilica of Saint Agnes, by the catacombs outside the walls.

Damaris delighted on special occasions to celebrate the Passion near the resting-places of the early martyrs. The subterraneous galleries and chapels among the tombs were familiar to Marius and Lucia from childhood; the frescoes of the Good Shepherd, the Orpheus building up the Holy City by his Divine music, the inscriptions of immortal Peace and Hope were interwoven with every sacred memory of their lives. Among the names of the martyrs were not a few of their own kindred in the past.

The brother and sister walked home among the vineyards and gardens, and the vividness of the sunshine struck them with a sharp contrast as they came out from the subterranean chill and shadow. The pulses of youth beat high in them both, and everything was intensified by the thought of the change and parting so near.

It was one of those moments in life like those which sometimes at sunset deepen every colour, and concentrate the broken lights and shadows into the unity of a picture. A new meaning seemed to come into the most common things, and a new unity and significance into their own lives.

“What an inheritance we have had!” Marius said, as they looked up to the hills, at the temples still standing on the Capitol, at the palaces still complete and splendid on the Palatine, at the quays still full of busy life on the Tiber. “What it is to have the familiar pictures of our childhood, those monuments of the greatness of old Rome, of the beauty of Greece!”

“And our Rome and our Greece!” said Lucia; “to have lisped the language the old Romans spoke, Cicero and Virgil, and the old Greeks, Homer and Plato, in our infancy; to have two such mother-tongues! We ought to be very wise, Marius!”

“To have listened to the very words Paul spoke, and Peter, and John the beloved,” said Marius, “from such a mother’s lips! We ought to be very good, Lucia!”

There was a pause. Then Lucia resumed—

“Brother, I sometimes feel such a hypocrite beside mother. She is always trying to guard me with her dear, delicate hands from the great wickedness of the world; she thinks I know nothing of the wickedness of the world, of this wicked Rome. And,” she continued, hesitating, “sometimes I feel as if she were an innocent babe beside me, whom I ought to guard! I feel so dreadfully wise as to the wickedness of the world, so old beside mother.”

He looked down admiringly and protectively on the pure sweet face, the downcast eyelids, the long lashes shading the round, rosy cheeks.

“You are certainly terribly experienced in the ways of the world!” he said. “I suppose our mother will always be as young as the angels. But I think the world itself is so very old just now, that we who belong to this generation are born old, and the older people who belonged to nobler and better times are young with the youth of that younger world.”

“How can we help it?” she said. “This miserable world of slaves from every race that lives close to us, and cheats and lies and talks wicked talk! No dull, ignorant boors, but clever, keen-witted Greeks and Syrians! How can we help learning evil from them? what can we do to become young again?”

“I am going among the young nations, my beloved,” he replied, “who are pouring in on our old Rome.”

“To fight them back!” she said.

“Perhaps also to learn from them,” he replied. “When I come back, if I come back, I will tell you what I have learned. Perhaps I shall find the Fountain of Youth, and drink of it, and come back young! And if I do, I will be sure to bring a cup of its precious waters for thee.”