perfect peace as a favoured province of the Empire. This guest was a man of less personal beauty than the Senator, and more bowed and aged, but with care and ill-health more than years, for the two had been comrades in school, fellow-soldiers and magistrates, working simultaneously, and with firm, mutual trust all their days.
The dress of the visitor was shaped like that of the senator, but of somewhat richer and finer texture. He too wore the toga prætextata, but he had a large gold cross hanging on his breast and an episcopal ring on his finger; and instead of the wreath of bay he might have worn, and which encircled his bust in the Capitol, the scanty hair on his finely-moulded head showed the marks of the tonsure. His brow was a grand and expansive one; his gray eyes were full of varied expression, keen humour, and sagacity; a lofty devotion sometimes changing his countenance in a wonderful manner, even in the present wreck of his former self, when the cheeks showed furrows worn by care and suffering, and the once flexible and resolute mouth had fallen in from loss of teeth. For this was the scholar, soldier, poet, gentleman, letter-writer, statesman, Sidonius Apollinaris, who had stood on the steps of the Imperial throne of the West, had been crowned as an orator in the Capitol, and then had been called by the exigences of his country to give up his learned ease and become the protector of the Arvernii as a patriot Bishop, where he had well and nobly served his God and his country, and had won the respect, not only of the Catholic Gauls but of the Arian Goths. Jealousy and evil tongues had, however, prevailed to cause his banishment from his beloved hills, and when he repaired to the court of King Euric to solicit permission to return, he was long detained there, and had only just obtained license to go back to his See. He had arrived only a day or two previously at the villa, exhausted by his journey, and though declaring that his dear mountain breezes must needs restore him, and that it was a joy to inhale them, yet, as he heard of the oppressions that were coming on his people, the mountain gales could only ‘a momentary bliss bestow,’ and Æmilius justly feared that the decay of his health had gone too far for even the breezes and baths of Arvernia to reinvigorate him.
His own mountain estate, where dwelt his son, was of difficult access early in the year, and Æmilius hoped to persuade him to rest in the villa till after Pentecost, and then to bless the nuptials of Columba Æmilia, the last unwedded daughter of the house, with Titus Julius Verronax, a young Arvernian chief of the lineage of Vercingetorix, highly educated in all Latin and Greek culture, and a Roman citizen much as a Highland chieftain is an Englishman. His home was on an almost inaccessible peak, or puy, which the Senator pointed out to the Bishop, saying—
“I would fain secure such a refuge for my family in case the tyranny of the barbarians should increase.”
“Are there any within the city?” asked the Bishop. “I rejoice to see that thou art free from the indignity of having any quartered upon thee.”
“For which I thank Heaven,” responded the Senator. “The nearest are on the farm of Deodatus, in the valley. There is a stout old warrior named Meinhard who calls himself of the King’s Trust; not a bad old fellow in himself to deal with, but with endless sons, followers, and guests, whom poor Deodatus and Julitta have to keep supplied with whatever they choose to call for, being forced to witness their riotous orgies night after night.”
“Even so, we are far better off than our countrymen who have the heathen Franks for their lords.”
“That Heaven forbid!” said Æmilius. “These Goths are at least Christians, though heretics, yet I shall be heartily glad when the circuit of Deodatus’s fields is over. The good man would not have them left unblest, but the heretical barbarians make it a point of honour not to hear the Blessed Name invoked without mockery, such as our youths may hardly brook.”
“They are unarmed,” said the Bishop.
“True; but, as none knows better than thou dost, dear father and friend, the Arvernian blood has not cooled since the days of Caius Julius Caesar, and offences are frequent among the young men. So often has our community had to pay ‘wehrgeld,’ as the barbarians call the price they lay upon blood, that I swore at last that I would never pay it again, were my own son the culprit.”
“Such oaths are perilous,” said Sidonius. “Hast thou never had cause to regret this?”
“My father, thou wouldst have thought it time to take strong measures to check the swaggering of our young men and the foolish provocations that cost more than one life. One would stick a peacock’s feather in his cap and go strutting along with folded arms and swelling breast, and when the Goths scowled at him and called him by well-deserved names, a challenge would lead to a deadly combat. Another such fight was caused by no greater offence than the treading on a dog’s tail; but in that it was the Roman, or more truly the Gaul, who was slain, and I must say the ‘wehrgeld’ was honourably paid. It is time, however, that such groundless conflicts should cease; and, in truth, only a barbarian could be satisfied to let gold atone for life.”
“It is certainly neither Divine law nor human equity,” said the Bishop. “Yet where no distinction can be made between the deliberate murder and the hasty blow, I have seen cause to be thankful for the means of escaping the utmost penalty. Has this oath had the desired effect?”
“There has been only one case since it was taken,” replied Æmilius. “That was a veritable murder. A vicious, dissolute lad stabbed a wounded Goth in a lonely place, out of vengeful spite. I readily delivered him up to the kinsfolk for justice, and as this proved me to be in earnest, these wanton outrages have become much more rare. Unfortunately, however, the fellow was son to one of the widows of the Church—a holy woman, and a favourite of my little Columba, who daily feeds and tends the poor thing, and thinks her old father very cruel.”
“Alas! from the beginning the doom of the guilty has struck the innocent,” said the Bishop.
“In due retribution, as even the heathen knew.” Perfect familiarity with the great Greek tragedians was still the mark of a gentleman, and then Sidonius quoted from Sophocles—
Compass’d with dazzling light,
Throned on Olympus’s height,
His front the Eternal God uprears
By toils unwearied, and unaged by years;
Far back, through ages past,
Far on, through time to come,
Hath been, and still must last,
Sin’s never-changing doom.
Æmilius capped it from Æschylus—
But Justice holds her equal scales
With ever-waking eye;
O’er some her vengeful might prevails
When their life’s sun is high;
On some her vigorous judgments light
In that dread pause ’twixt day and night,
Life’s closing, twilight hour.
But soon as once the genial plain
Has drunk the life-blood of the slain,
Indelible the spots remain,
And aye for vengeance call.
“Yea,” said the Bishop, “such was the universal law given to Noah ere the parting of the nations—blood for blood! And yet, where should we be did not Mercy rejoice against Justice, and
