Chapter XIV: Rome and Her Saint

While Ethne was thus becoming at home in the Aventine palace, a true daughter of the heart to Damaris, Baithene had become a stay and companion to Fabricius, such as he had scarcely known before. Baithene came to them from a simpler world than theirs, which seemed to bring back to the old Roman the nobleness and simplicity of old Rome. These children came to them both unperplexed by the confused voices of the later civilization, so feeble and so corrupt; and, moreover, without weighing on them with the responsibility which they felt anxiously with regard to their own children. And therefore they could fill up gaps and voids in their own life and thought as none brought up under the same influences could have done. The simpler world of the Sabine farm was also home-like to Baithene.

Of the great empire, so tangled, so chaotic, with the germs of a new world no one could then foresee struggling into life through the decay of the old world crumbling to corruption, he could understand little. The miles of pasture and forest, the lakes and torrents among those Sabine hills, were to him like the hills and valleys of his own land. Every day there were trees to be felled, or fields to be tilled; and there was also the chase, of the beasts of prey, wolves and bears, with Bran in his element as an _aide-de-camp_. There were also men and women to be governed and employed. But here came in a dreary difference. Instead of men and women bound to him and his with the loyalty to chieftainship and the affection of kinship, those who had to be governed here were all slaves, of many races, linked to each other and their owner by no organic tie, but merely as mechanical atoms welded together by frost and fire. The worst evils of slavery were indeed mitigated there. Fabricius and Damaris were Christians; the estate was not too large for the servants of the household to be attached personally to them, and many of the labourers had wives and families held together, as in olden days no slaves could be, by the sanctity of Christian marriage.

The evils of the Latifundia, the enormous farms, with the Ergastula, the workhouses inhabited by great gangs of celibate slaves under a slave-driver, were greatly modified on Fabricius’ land. But nevertheless the relations between employer and employed were those of slavery; and whether worked out mercifully or not, it was from Roman households that forty thousand Gothic slaves had fled forty years before to Alaric, at the first chance of liberation.

Baithene felt, in a dim way, that however rude and undeveloped might be the social life in his own land, it was living and organic, and therefore capable of growth; whereas this was a mere mechanical conglomeration, always inwardly crumbling away, and ready at any blow from without to be shattered in a moment into ruin. Yet, not being responsible for it himself, and being in his small way royal, the largeness of heart and the habit of caring for others remained with him, so that he contrived to diffuse a good deal of life and interest and even gaiety around him, and thus greatly to relieve Fabricius.

When in a few months it was deemed safe for Baithene to return to the Aventine with the dog and Fabricius, the company of slaves who came with them had become eager to render him willing service, knowing that he would demand nothing but what was right, and that he would give all that was possible; they had also become responsive to his gay words and smile, knowing that he had not only that light-heartedness which took troubles lightly, but also the faculty of flashing into lightnings of indignation against injustice and wrong. He found his sister also, in her place, the depositary of the joys and sorrows of the household, old and young; both of them having conquered the hearts around them by their old princely way of considering what every one needed and liked, and by their new Christian way of ruling, not by dividing but by uniting, of reigning by serving.

The return of Fabricius and Baithene brought Ethne and the whole family more into the outer world. The life of Damaris, loving and natural as it was, had become essentially a life of religion; her pleasures were in her works of mercy, visiting the sick, helping the destitute, lifting up the fallen—services in which Ethne delighted to share.

“The world,” in the Rome of those days, was for the most part so undeniably wicked and unlovely, its amusements so ugly, its vices so putrefying, that to come out of it seemed not merely the only safe, but the only cheerful and tolerable road to take. And to Lucia and Ethne, the mere gaiety of their youth, the beauty of flowers, the mere joy of living, singing like birds, dancing like young fawns, especially now that they danced and sang and lived together, were quite pleasure enough.

But when Fabricius came there had to be entertainments, visits, attentions to and from the great houses connected with them; and this necessarily made the position of the Irish captives more complicated and difficult.

It was a great joy to the brother and sister to be together again; and the rapture of Bran (the dog) at finding his young mistress again as he crouched at her feet, and bounded round her, and gravely placed his great paws on her shoulder, expressing his feelings with every possible movement of tail and ears, and every possible variety of bark, and cry, and whine, quite raised him out of the category of dumb beasts.

Baithene and Ethne had much to compare. All kinds of new questions, social and ecclesiastical, had arisen before them; the world divided itself so differently here from the old classifications of their childhood. “City” and “country” were in themselves new words to them, never having before their capture beheld any collection of houses worthy to be called a town. The terms “master” and “slave” were not so altogether new, since in Ireland also captives were held in bondage, and their own Patrick had been once a slave. But that the whole class of owners and employers should be slave-owners, and the whole class of labourers and servants slaves, with no natural human links between them of clan or race, was indeed new. As to the Church, there was less to perplex them, since from the beginning they had been brought face to face with the great perplexity of all times, that so many Christians were not in the least Christ-like. Heretics indeed they heard of, of various degrees and names—Arian, semi-Arian, Pelagian, semi-Pelagian, Nestorian, Eutychian, Manichean; but these seemed to them mostly of foreign growth: the Arians chiefly Gothic; the Eutychians (whatever that might mean) chiefly from the East; the Manicheans chiefly from Africa; the Pelagians from their own West, from the Britanniæ, the land of the pirates who had captured them. Rome had seldom originated the great heretics or the great theologians. And, moreover, of all these confusions the brother and sister had chiefly heard through a voice ringing clear, simple, sonorous above all the tumult like the voice of their own Patrick; and that was the voice of Leo, Bishop Leo, Pope Leo, Leo the Great of Rome. Lupus they knew was called Pope at Troyes, and Anianus at Orleans; but this Leo it seemed was pope and father of a wider world. Rome herself, many years before, they were told, the restless, divided city, had waited in peace for forty days, during his absence after his election, united in the unanimous choice of him as her shepherd and guide. And ever since in all perplexities she had always turned to him, never absent, as her defender and real lord; rock of strength amidst all the tossings of the waves and all the crumblings of the strongholds. Ethne said to Baithene—

“It seems as though God had sent Leo to Rome, as He sent Patrick to Ireland. If ever thou, beloved, were to take Holy Orders in this strange land, surely it would be Leo’s hands that would consecrate thee.”

“Leo’s hands would never consecrate me!” he replied, with a slight touch of bitterness unusual with him. “Have I not been, and am I not still, a slave? And Leo does not admit slaves to the priesthood. They told me amid the Sabine hills that he wrote to the bishops of Campania, that ‘a servile meanness made some slaves seek the honour of the priesthood, seeking that they who found no approval from man might find approval from God; but the sacred ministry,’ he said, ‘would be polluted by the meanness of such association. None who are bound to the service of others’ (_qui originali aut alicui conditione obligati sunt_), he wrote, ‘or in any way not free by birth or station, was fit to serve in the camp of God.’”[2]

“But Patrick was a slave!” she exclaimed.

“Patrick was born free,” he replied.

“But thou also wert born free!” she said, her face brightening. “Leo could never mean to exclude such as thee!”

“I know not, little sister,” he replied. “Many indeed of the slaves of the Romans are captives born free, but the Roman law gives the purchaser indelible rights over the purchased.”

Ethne’s eyes filled with tears.

“Does Christianity itself, even the Heavenly City, which is free, and the mother of us all, turn against us? Is there no refuge at all in this world for the wronged?”

“As thou sayest,” he replied, “the heavenly Jerusalem is free; we shall all be free there. And here we can always be free in soul! Moreover,” he added, “slavery does often indeed degrade the slave, and make him through all his being slavish and unfit for any high office. And on me, beloved, this does not weigh heavily after all. God helping us, we have another calling, the old reigning and serving for our own people.”

“At all events,” said Ethne, “we may add Leo’s prayer to Patrick’s hymn—‘Grant 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.’ It is the great Bishop’s prayer for us, and for himself,” she added; “let us say it together for him as well as for ourselves.”

The entertainments, banquets, and visits of state occasioned by the return of Fabricius to Rome, necessarily made the position of the Irish captives more difficult. Although their being members of the Aventine household was their best protection, Fabricius and Damaris could not bear to have them regarded as in bondage; and yet as guests the world could not receive them.

Christmas was drawing near, with many of the old pagan festivities, as well as those of the Christian Church, gathered around the season. But to the Irish captives it brought no festive home gatherings—this their first Christian Christmas, their first homeless New Year. To them, therefore, all that was festive in the season was concentrated entirely in the great Festival of the Nativity. Their home was in the home of the Holy Childhood of the Child Jesus and the Mother Mary. The great stately basilicas were as a family hearth to these fatherless and motherless exiles, and the words of Bishop Leo on the Incarnation were as a father’s welcome to them.

“You know well, dilectissimi,” Leo said, “and have frequently heard the things which belong to the sacred observance of this day’s solemnity. But as this visible light affords pleasure to uninjured eyes, so do sound hearts receive perpetual joy from the Nativity of the Saviour. Wherefore we must never be silent, though we cannot set it forth as it deserves.”[3]

Then he spoke of “the general Confession common to all, whereby the whole body of the faithful say they believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, Who was born of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary; by which three clauses,” he said, “the engines of attack of all the heretics are shattered.”[4]

And Ethne and Baithene, who knew the Confession well, although they knew little of the heretics, felt warm and safe as birds in their own nest within the sacred walls, which kept them safe from all these battering-rams.

Again Leo said—

“Lowliness was taken up by Majesty, weakness by Power, mortality by Eternity; and in order to pay the debt of our corruption, the inviolable nature was united to that which could suffer.

“In the entire and perfect nature of very man was born the very God; whole, in what was His; whole, in what was ours. By _ours_ we mean what the Creator formed in us at the beginning, and what He assumed in order to restore. For of that which the demon brought, which man, by him deceived, admitted, there was not a trace in the Saviour; and the fact that He took on Himself our infirmities did not make Him partaker of our transgressions. He took on Him the form of a servant, of a slave” (at these words Ethne gently touched her brother’s arm), “without the defilement of sin, enlarging the human and not diminishing the Divine; for that emptying of Himself whereby the Invisible made Himself visible, and the Creator of all things willed to be one among mortals, was the stooping of compassion, not the failure of power.

“The infancy of the Babe is exhibited by the swaddling clothes; the greatness of the Highest is declared by the voices of angels. To hunger, to thirst, to be weary, is evidently human; but to supply five thousand men with five loaves, and to give to the Samaritan woman that living water of which to drink is never to thirst again,—to walk on the back of the sea with feet that sink not, and to allay the liftings up of the waves tossed by the storm, is unquestionably Divine. To weep over a dead friend is human; by a voice of command to raise him to life again is Divine. It belongs to our nature to hang on the wood of the Cross; and to another to make all the elements tremble when day had been darkened into night. It belongs to humanity to be transfixed with nails; it belongs to Deity to open the gates of Paradise to the faith of the robber.[5]

“Our Lord, the true Shepherd, Who laid down His life for the sheep, and Who came not to destroy men’s lives but to save them, wills us to imitate His own loving-kindness.”

Such words as these made that season indeed a festival to the captives, rich with the joy the world could not give nor take away, a joy in which they and Damaris and Lucia, and every slave among the hundreds in that great patrician household, could rejoice alike.

Then came the great Festival of the Epiphany, which these children from the Isles of the Gentiles felt to be especially their own. And again the clear, strong words of Leo rang through the crowded basilica.

“The last holy day which we celebrated was that on which a pure Virgin brought forth the Saviour of mankind. And now, beloved, the venerable Festival of the Epiphany gives us a continuation of joys.

“For the salvation of all men is interested in the fact, that the infancy of the Mediator between God and man was clearly manifested to the whole world whilst it was still detained in an insignificant little town.

“For although He had chosen out the Israelitish nation, and one family of that nation, from which to take on Him the nature of universal humanity, yet it was not His will that the beginnings of His life should be concealed within the narrow limits of his mother’s abode; but as He was pleased to be born for all, He willed to be speedily recognized by all, and accordingly the star appeared to the Magi.

“Lift up, dearly beloved, your faithful minds to the faithful grace of the everlasting light. Follow after that humility, clothe yourself with the strength of patience, that in it you may be able to make your souls your own; for He Who is the redemption of all is Himself the courage of all.”

“Brother,” said Ethne that evening, as they sat alone together, while Fabricius held a great banquet for his kinsmen, “I think I understand about Leo and the slaves. It is only because he has never had the _gift_ of being himself a slave. Thank God, our Patrick had been a captive, and so learnt the heart of a captive and a slave. And you see even the All-Merciful had to become one of us, that He might be touched with the feeling of our infirmities.”

Baithene was silent a few minutes, and then he said in a low, deep voice, taking his sister’s hands in his own—

“If ever we are lifted back to our place among the _few_, little sister, God grant we may never lose the lessons learnt by living down among the _many_!”