Chapter XXV: Chaos and Creation in Christendom

Ethne and Marius needed indeed all the brightness of the memory of that dawn in Ireland to sustain them; for the hour of parting had to come, and they were going back into a world of perplexity and peril. The mother and father and the people who loved Ethne so dearly had to be left. One of the clan was to go with Ethne, that the sound of her mother-tongue might not die away from her hearing, and that it might be learned by lisping lips in the home on the Aventine. The nurse who had thrown the plaid around the brother and sister on the night of the capture, had naturally taken little Paul to her inmost heart, and was to sail with them. And also Dewi the Welshman, who had grafted himself into the clan; and Bran the deer-hound. Meanwhile Lucia kept a Roman girl with her, that Latin also might grow up as a mother-tongue in her Irish home.

And so at last Ethne and her husband departed; and then for the first time the weight of exile and separation pressed on her heart. As long as there was any one—father, mother, brother, clansman—to cheer and sustain, every thought that had a gleam of hope in it came to her heart and lips; but when the ship went on her outward way, and the familiar shores were left behind, too possibly for ever, amidst the “perils by the way” of every journey in those unquiet times, she discovered how her heart had always been instinctively turning thither where her steps might be no more. She felt how even their violent capture by the pirates had been no such wrench as this quiet departure by her own will. Then she had still belonged to the land she was leaving, and at every step away from it she had sustained herself and Baithene by the thought, that whichever way the road seemed to lead, it was really only a little way round back to the home. Everything, she had felt, was really working for the good of the fatherland; every treasure of knowledge or good of any kind was in some way to be laid up in that familiar casket. And now it was not her steps only, it was her heart, her life, that was going forth to this great wide Europe, to this far-off new home.

Marius was with her indeed, and her heart was in the truest sense his and their little Paul’s. But Paul also was to be a Roman, to live for Rome, for this southern world, not for Ireland. With an unconquerable instinct her heart at first turned for consolation to Fedelm, her old nurse, and to Bran the dog, who had insisted on coming with her. On the old nurse’s breast and on Bran’s shaggy head fell the tears, the only tears that brought any comfort.

And Marius knew it and understood it all, and never felt a grain of distrust or displeasure, and never tormented her with consolations. It was not, however, until they reached Tours that he said a word to her to imply that he knew. She had crept out alone to the cathedral, to the tomb of St. Martin, where she and Baithene had conversed with the old monk who knew the saint. The only words she could remember just then from their interview were the words of Martin which had baffled the devil, “_Let me see the print of the nails_.”

“The print of the nails,” she sobbed softly to herself, “the print of the nails! It has indeed to be also in us! To follow Thee means this, not only carrying the Cross as a burden and singing as we go, but being transfixed to it, and not being able to sing at all, only to say softly—‘Into Thy hands.’ ‘_The print of the nails._’ So let it be.”

And as she turned away, comforted, she saw Marius watching her in the shadow of the font.

“My fountain of youth!” he murmured, tenderly.

“Ah, beloved,” she said, “what freshness of youth or what water of life can there be in me?”

“More than ever perhaps,” he said, “when my fountain of youth has become a fountain of tears. The world is so full of tears, and the only tears to dread are those that cannot be shed.”

“Yet after all,” she said, “the help is not in the tears, but in the life-blood from the print of the nails.”

But after that she did not try to hide the tears from him. In every town where Ethne and Baithene had found succour, it was the joy of Marius to leave rich offerings for the poor. At Tours they found out the old monk, St. Martin’s friend, and left their gifts with him, and laid their babe in his arms for his benediction. At Orleans, dear and sacred for so many reasons to them, they made their offerings at the tomb of Anianus (St. Aignan), the noble old Bishop who had so effectually defended the city, and had gone to his reward and rest the year before.

It was in Troyes that Ethne first began to rise again to her old hopefulness. For there they found the aged “Pope” and “Father,” Bishop Lupus, restored to his repentant children; the whole city gathered again in honour and reverent love around the shepherd who had, as they found and acknowledged at last, been willing to lay down his life for the sheep.

“_The people smote on their breasts and returned_,” Ethne said; and she was comforted, for the Church and the world; for the multitudes, the toiling, sick, bewildered multitudes, straying and fainting, were always closest to that royal, motherly, Christ-like heart. Nor did they forget to visit the lowly tomb of the Deacon Nemorius, who was slain with the Book of the Gospels on his breast, before Lupus met and conquered Attila. Beside him lay other nameless martyrs similarly slain. And Ethne said—

“Perhaps the noblest, after all, are among these; and glorious it is to think that these, the nameless on earth, are the numberless in heaven.”

* * * * *

One night they paused on their way to Troyes at a village in a little island in the middle of the river Seine, to have a sight of the noble maiden Genofeva (St. Geneviève), and the place which was said to owe its salvation from the Huns to her courage and her prayers. She had been a disciple of Bishop Germanus of Auxerre. On one of his missions through Gaul she had come to him, desiring to consecrate her maiden life to Christ, and he had picked up a common coin from the ground as a token and badge for her to wear. Afterwards, when the Huns were hovering round the neighbourhood, all the inhabitants would have fled and abandoned the place, but the maiden Genofeva exhorted them not to flee from the Huns into the homeless world, but to flee to God in their true home, the church. Night and day, she and the few who shared her faith stayed in the little church and prayed that God would help them. And the Huns did spare the place, and that little village grew to be Paris; and the maiden’s name was honoured on earth long after she had found her home with God for ever.

When they went southward from Troyes they had a hospitable welcome from Marius’ old friend, Sidonius Apollinaris, soon about to relinquish his worldly dignities, and to devote himself to the arduous life of a Bishop of Auvergne. His gracious kindliness touched Ethne, and she was little disturbed by his antique pomp of words and elaborate little plays of decorative wit. They seemed to her the recreation of an old man, belonging to an old and fading world, and she had a tenderness for both which won his heart. He regarded her as a nymph of the fountains, and she scarcely escaped being celebrated in an imitative classical panegyric.

In the villa of the religious layman near Arles, to whom Marius had paid a visit years before, they stayed a night, and heard again of the venerated Metropolitan Hilary, and of the resentment felt against Leo of Rome for his severe treatment of him. This controversy Ethne was not advanced enough to understand, so that, when Marius turned uneasily to her for consolation and explanation about Leo, she only said—

“You know I cannot understand your politics in Church or Empire; they are too difficult for me. My world is too young. It seems to me so much like the old disputes among the disciples which should be the greatest. We know Leo never wants to be greatest for himself. If he wants it for his city and his Church, I suppose it is because he thinks it best for all the rest. These tribes you call barbarian seem to change and migrate about so much, whilst your Rome seems to stay; and in their languages there seem so many different dialects, it is difficult to know whether they are languages at all, or only words put together from many languages, as a means of communication between travellers meeting for a few days by the way; whilst your Latin is always there, and always the same, and is the key to everything one wants to learn.”

And Marius took comfort, and replied—

“I suppose, as Lucia said, we have to live our lives _here_ and _now_, and must build the best we can for our here and now. And Christ, Who never leaves His flock, will decide, as the ages go on, what part of the building is only ours, and has to pass away, and what is His to endure for ever.”

But with Salvian, the venerable presbyter at Marseilles, whom Marius had so reverenced of old, “Magister Episcoporum,” teacher of bishops, though never himself more than a presbyter, Ethne felt at home at once. His dark views of the Church and the world did not at all depress her.

“It is as good as living in the house or tent of the old chieftain Job,” she said, “to be here. Of course we know the world is not right, nor, it seems, even the Church here on earth. And yet it is better than being with Job, because the venerable Salvian knows the Gospels, and is always sure of the victory of good.”

“He sees how the battle is _lost_,” Marius said, “and that is a great part of the lesson how it is to be won. ‘Our own vices are killing us,’ Salvian says; and there is always hope if we can learn that the fault is our own.”

They returned from Gaul by the eastern coast of Italy. Marius had a desire to show Ethne where the city of Aquileia _had been_. The Roman roads along the Adriatic, which had led to the ruined cities of Altinum, Concordia, and Aquileia, still remained, though the cities to which they led had vanished for ever, under the devastations of the Huns. They stood among the charred ruins of Aquileia by the clear stream of the Natiso; and from the abandoned quays of the great commercial port they chartered a vessel from Ravenna to take them thither by the coast. As they sailed along the low shores, they saw a few poor huts on a cluster of islands, with shallow channels between, peopled by fugitives from the ruined cities. They knew not that this cluster of huts would grow into Venice, any more than they could foresee the fiery flood of Moslem invasion from Arabia which Venice was to help to stem. But as they landed and spent a few hours among the refugees in those huts, and listened to their tales of wrong and ruin, and saw their brave battle of resistance with the seas and sands, Ethne, always in sympathy with suffering and toil, felt there a breath of life and hope which she missed afterwards amidst the empty pomp of Imperial Ravenna.