Chapter XVI: Beleaguered Aquileia

Attila the Hun had been nursing his vengeance and preparing his forces beyond the Danube all through that silent winter which had brought such peace and light to the palace on the Aventine. And early in the spring came the terrible tidings that he was coming with his hundreds of thousands, always, it seemed, to be renewed from the inexhaustible regions of barbarian life in the wilds of the East; and this time he was to be turned back by no diplomacy, nor turned aside by any intervening prey. Attila and his Huns were already at the frontier, besieging the great frontier fortress of Aquileia, on their way to capture and plunder Rome.

There was little time for consideration. It was no moment, they all felt, for a woman to venture into the perils of a journey across Europe. It was therefore decided that Baithene should go back with Dewi to Ireland. It was also a time, Marius felt, for every Roman who was able to devote himself to the defence of the Empire against a force whose triumph would mean the destruction of Christianity and civilization, the laying waste of all Europe into a Tartar wilderness, creation lapsing again into chaos.

And so the four, so recently drawn together, had to part. But the parting brought in some ways a new certainty of their inseparable union, like the ripening of a “sudden frost.”

Baithene said to Lucia—

“I am going to my Ireland, with no doubt in my heart as to the welcome my father and mother would have for thee. Only for thee, sometimes I scarcely dare to ask that thou shouldst come forth to share our rough life, to be exiled from such a home as thine.”

“My father,” was Lucia’s answer, “thinks of that island of thine as a haven of peace and simplicity, and my mother as an isle of saints, compared with our Rome.”

“But thou thyself?”

“I am not sure of any country being a haven, or a heaven,” she said. “Perhaps,” she added with a smile, “neither thou nor I may be ready for either yet. I may have to grow younger, and thou older. But we should be _together_, in the storm or in the calm. And I am well content.”

And Marius said to Ethne—

“How can I leave thee, who hast made earth dear to me and heaven real? who hast given me back faith in God and hope in man?”

“Thou art not leaving me,” Ethne replied. “We are in one path, in the steps of the pitiful, redeeming Lord. Thou wilt not despair of the slaves, however degraded, or of the Huns, however savage, for His sake.”

“For His sake and thine,” he replied, “for the sacred memory of thy captivity, and the dear first vision of thee beside the poor dying boy. Thou feelest then, beloved, that we are beginning our life together now?”

“Have we not begun?” she said. “Our paths may be divided for a little while, but _we_ never.”

And so they parted.

For three long months, throughout the spring, the tidings of the ruin and ravage of the Huns on the northern shores of the Adriatic continued to reach the household on the Aventine. The great hordes were still swarming in the neighbourhood of unconquered Aquileia, whither they knew Marius had gone, and where the Roman garrison were making a stand worthy of old Rome.

One letter reached the mother from her son—

“I am once more in the house of the lady Digna, the young matron who, in her beauty and truth, seems to belong rather to the grand simplicity of the Republic than to any people or any period since. Close to her house is a high tower rising above the river, flowing crystal clear as if fresh from the blue hills which you see from the top. We cannot despair of saving the city, the virgin city, that has kept off so many enemies. The traditions of the ancient heroism seem to inspire its men and its women to-day. There are stories of days not so long gone, when the Emperor Julian floated wooden towers on rafts up the river to penetrate into the place where it had no walls. But the citizens set fire to the towers and baffled the Emperor. Impregnable this city of the north wind has been, as the north wind himself in the fastnesses of those rugged mountains. If we can but keep her impregnable this once more, who knows but the hordes of Attila may turn back again from Italy, as they did from Gaul after our battle on the plains of Châlons? There are rumours of discouragement and division in Attila’s camp. The ancient spell of Rome, some say, is falling on them, the memory of Alaric lying dead beneath the river-bed so soon after that last siege and sack; it is said even to have in some measure benumbed Attila himself. Glorious it would be if this old stronghold should by her heroic stand keep back the tide of devastation from our Italy, perchance even drive back for ever the flood of barbarism from the world; and Jerome’s birthplace become the birthplace of a new order and freedom for all Christendom, a new Vulgate or translation of the great old Scriptures of righteousness and peace into the common tongue of men.

“The trade has indeed for the moment vanished from her port; the fleets of her merchantmen behold her from afar off; the sea is silent, and the busy fields around are dumb and waste. But if this unusual quiet in the camp of Attila does indeed mean that discouragement has fallen on his hosts, this silence may prove the silence of dawn. But whatever the end, the many heroic deeds done here can never be lost.”

After that letter, week after week flowed on, but brought no tidings from Marius. They heard indeed from time to time that Aquileia still held her own, that the great hordes still surrounded the city, apparently checked and baffled there, unable to press on to further destruction while that brave garrison remained unconquered in their rear.

From Baithene no one expected tidings until he brought them himself.

And so the four on the Aventine were drawn closer to each other, through their common suspense, their common love, their common prayers. Happily for them the natural spring was also the Christian Lent, with its prayers and fasts, to be followed by the Passion-tide, and the solemn, immortal joys of Easter which no sorrow ever more could quench.

And through all they had the great sermons of Leo, strong against all despondency, firm against all yielding to the enemy as Aquileia herself, with the bracing force as of the north wind through them. Their Roman reticence and brevity made them a rock of strength amidst the floods of dread and suspense surging through every heart; they seemed not so much words as the sympathetic sustaining grasp of a strong hand. And from Damaris Ethne learned how those powerful words were the tried weapons of a warrior who had proved them on many battle-fields with many foes, of a commander who by them had many a time rallied the wavering forces of the Church. On two great campaigns Damaris dwelt, especially the first—the warfare which had ended in the victory of Chalcedon. Damaris told the story how the great letter of Leo, called the “Tome,” was planted as a battering-ram against the heresies of the Latrocinium, the “robber-council” of Ephesus; the letter addressed to the Council through the good Bishop Flavian of Constantinople, which he was never suffered to read, the letter being drowned in the furious cries of the heretics, who with fierce blows and buffetings actually did Bishop Flavian himself to death. But that defeat, she said, had been repaired by the victory of the ancient Catholic faith at Chalcedon, on the Asiatic shore opposite Constantinople. The great Council assembled there enthusiastically welcomed Leo’s letter, and cried with one voice—“This we all believe! Peter has spoken by Leo! This is the true faith! This is the faith of the Fathers.” And with the story of that battle was linked a touch of tender feeling, the only record left of Leo’s having shed tears. The Empress Placidia wrote from Rome to her niece the Empress Pulcheria at Constantinople, that when Leo was imploring her to bring about the assembling of the great Council of Chalcedon to reverse the fatal decision of Ephesus, so full was his heart of the truth he was defending, that “he could scarcely speak for tears.”

The second campaign of which Damaris told the story was that with the Manicheans, in their two divisions of false asceticism and false freedom. These battles he fought in Rome, upholding against the ascetics, who crept about with sad countenances and sordid garments, the truth that “every creature of God is good, and to be enjoyed with thanksgiving;” on the other hand, contending against the licentious, who, declaring the body to be essentially evil, regarded whatever evil was done by it as indifferent, and thus fell into frightful depths of cruelty and impurity, and repressing them with resolute severity, or driving them from the city they polluted, as those smitten with a malignant or infectious disease.

It was with no shadows that Leo fought, but for the foundations of Christian faith and human morality; to preserve for the Church her Divine and human Christ, His Divine omnipotent love, His suffering human sympathy; to preserve for the world the sacredness of family life, the pure love of husband and wife, of father, mother, and child, the Divine creation of the body as well as the soul. For in those days paganism was scarcely dead, or, at all events, scarcely crumbled into harmless dust, with powerless poetic shades, noiselessly gliding around their former haunts; but still retaining in death a deadly malaria of corruption and disease.

Leo’s fervent words Ethne found, more and more, were no mere holiday strains of soothing or exciting music, but a clarion call making no uncertain sound, summoning for the perpetual battle with sloth and selfishness, with the paralysis of hopelessness or of lazy content, with sin and wrong within and without.

In the sonorous, sententious Latin, Leo’s strong words rang out, in the grand language of law and war which held its own so long in the Church, which at that time had been softened into none of its daughter-tongues, but stood, amidst the countless, shifting dialects of the barbarians, the one great language of law and literature, and of the Christian worship of the West. Leo himself knew no other; of Greek he was ignorant, or, at least, did not speak or write it. His letters had to be translated for the Eastern Church.

From Damaris Ethne began indeed to learn something of her native Greek, but as yet only as a beautiful foreign language. Latin was becoming to her familiar as a mother-tongue, and she listened enrapt as Leo spoke in the great basilicas words such as these: “Templum Dei sumus, si Spiritus Dei habitat in nobis. Plus est quod fidelis suo habet animo quam quod miratur cœlo”—words which gained a double significance and force, because, like so many of Leo’s utterances, they were watchwords, they were weapons used against a lingering paganism which made many turn in idolatrous worship towards the sun, on the very steps of the Christian basilica.

And again—“Oh, man, recognize the dignity of thy nature! Remember that thou art made in the image of God; once corrupted in Adam, now moulded anew in Christ.”

She listened with eager delight to Leo’s “seven steps” of the Beatitudes: the first, Poverty of Spirit. “He commends the humility of souls, rather than the indigency of faculties.” Humility, he admitted, might be easier for the poor than for the rich, “nevertheless,” he said, “in many of the rich a mind is found which uses riches not to swell the tumour of pride, but to do works of loving-kindness, that is, counts it the greatest gain to relieve the miseries of others.”

Again, of another of those “steps” of the Beatitudes, of the “hungering and thirsting after righteousness,” Leo said, “It is with God Himself man would be filled.” To love righteousness is nothing else than to love God. “Nihil aliud est diligere justitiam quam amare Deum.” And when he reached the last of those seven upward steps, fervently he spoke of the purity of heart which cleanses the mirror (of the heart) to see and to reflect God, “whose reward is to see Him not in a mirror darkly, but face to face.” The fine balance of his words throbbed on the heart like the vibrations of a church bell.

“In Christ,” he proclaimed, “we are all one. All the regenerate in Christ the sign of the Cross constitutes kings, the unction of the Holy Spirit consecrates priests, in order that, besides that special service of our ministry, all the whole body of spiritual and rational Christians should recognize themselves to be partakers of royal race, and of sacerdotal office. For what is so royal as a soul subject to God and ruler of the body? And what is so sacerdotal as to dedicate to God a pure conscience, and the sacrifices (_hostias_) of a spotless piety from the altar of the heart?”