The mighty oak forest, the mighty forest of beech and fir and chestnut, birch and ash, stretched north and south and east and west. Clearings there were, but the clearings soon dipped into forest. The clearings were rifts in a clouded heaven, sunny patches on a shadowed ocean. Fine threads of light, rude roads, tracks, paths, tied clearing to clearing. Timber houses rose from the open spaces. Sometimes there rose only one house, sometimes two or three together, more seldom quite a number grouped in one great clearing. The houses were of great untrimmed logs, the roofs of thatch. They were as rude as the time in the northern forest; a few houses, many huts. Fields there were, irregularly sown, and great meadow stretches by the streams for the numerous cattle. From the air an eagle might see that all these clearings, great and small, made a constellation, and that there were other constellations linked to the first by some type of road driven across leagues of forest. Taken all together, they indicated a tribe or nation of northern folk. Off in the rounding mist where the forest tracks broke, beyond leagues of smooth, succeeding forest, abode other and similar nations. And all the tribes and nations, though they were so similar, spent much of their time in warring against one another. To the southward, beyond the eagle’s horizon, far and far and far beyond, were the provinces of Rome, and the power of Rome, and farther, farther, farther south, Rome{267} itself. And all the constellations, and all the barbarian tribes and nations hungered after the fatness thereof.
The eagle, over-flying an oaken and a beechen world, might look down upon a clearing beside a broad and limpid stream, and upon the house of Terig, chief of a Gothic tribe. The house was large and low, built of fir-wood, heavy-walled, well-roofed, a great place according to the barbarian mind. It had dependent huts in number, it looked forth upon the river where were fish, and upon fields of wheat and rye, and upon pasturage over-roamed by a vast herd of cattle, and upon the forest filled with hunters’ fare. And into its great hall came, every day, to feast with Terig, a hundred Gothic men and women. And when Terig sent forth and called a folk-meet came, from clearings far and near, hundreds to the green field before the house where grew an oak so old no bard could guess when it was born. And when Terig said war came to Terig Oak all of the nation that might walk or be brought in the great ox-wagons.
It was a shield-clashing and a war-like people, tall and strong of body, both men and women. For virtues it had courage and chastity, great personal liberty side by side with a chieftain-loyalty often carried fantastically far, comrade-loyalty, a considerable feeling for truth, and some perception of justice. There held a northern and barbarian reverence for women. It had imagination, and was a worshipper of the powers of nature, vaguely personified. It had iron, but little silver and gold. It had not letters. Its bards made some amends for that. Now and again came contact—antenn? touching—with the Roman provinces to the south. Then was brought news of strange powers and gifts! There were Goths who hungered for these, as there{268} were many Goths who hungered for other wealth of Rome.
Sometimes the forest was dark and heavy with gloom, and sometimes it was wholly an airy gold. Sometimes it stood breathlessly silent, and sometimes it whispered and spoke. Alleda, the young maiden, hostage from a Vandal tribe, brought up since childhood in the house of Terig, liked it silent and liked it speaking. She and Alaran, the son of Terig, old to a day with her, liked it in all its ways. They wandered together in its aisles and caverns, purple and green and brown and gold, and, kneeling, drank from its springs and streams, he for pleasure drinking from her cupped hands, and she from his. They lay in the sunshine, they fled from storms; in the open glades or from the bare hilltop they looked for the rainbow.
Alleda wore a chemise of white linen and a skirt of woollen dyed gentian blue. She had shoes of doeskin and a mantle of the wool. Now her hair hung loose, and now she braided it in two long thick braids that fell to her knees. Alaran had a tunic of soft leather, brown like the wood in autumn, and leather shoes with thongs that crossed and recrossed and were tied at his knee. He had a cloak of red, and a woollen fillet around his head to hold an eagle feather, and in his belt a sheathed knife. Alleda had been given by the Vandal chief her father to Terig when she was little, pledge of quietude on the part of the Vandals. For ten years she and Alaran had roamed the forest in company. It seemed to them that they had been always together. Sometimes they quarrelled, but oftener they were good friends.
Terig, looking at them upon a time, said to himself, “If the Goths and Vandals marry there may be a son who,{269} one day, shall rule them both!” The idea pleased him, and he turned it over and over, drinking mead out of a great silver cup that, passing from hand to hand, had come to him from Rome, sitting beneath his oak tree of whose age no bard had record. That was when Alleda and Alaran were very young. Terig, hunting and fighting and judging, sleeping and eating and drinking, let several years go by. Terig’s wife was dead, but his sister, Fritha, headed the women and gave him, when he asked it, good advice. Terig, a good giant two thirds of the time, and the other third a monstrous, ravening wild boar, went his ways and let Alleda and Alaran play another while. When they were children no longer, but boy and girl, Terig sent an embassy to the Vandal chief. His wisest warrior went and the bard who ate at Terig’s table, and with them a band of shield-clashing young men. When they returned, bringing with them certain great ones from among the assenting Vandals, Terig summoned a folk-meet. Alleda and Alaran were betrothed, under the Terig Oak, in the presence of Goths and Vandals. When they were eighteen they should be wed.
Alleda and Alaran, now youth and maiden, roamed the forest or sat beside the river and bending over saw two fair creatures in the glassy flood. They had a boat named Black Swan, and they rowed in this where they would. They fished together, they found the honey hives in rocks and ancient trees, they told each other all their adventures of body or spirit. At sunrise they might be heard singing: when evening came, or on weather days when men and women crowded into the hall and the fire was heaped with wood, they sat as near each other as they might. Emberic the bard sang loudly of Gothic glory, Gothic heroes and{270} heroines. Alleda and Alaran, listening, kindling, sought eyes with eyes, soul with soul.
Terig, chancing to observe them one day, said to himself: “He is too much with her, too little with the young men. That is not as it should be. I cannot live forever, and he must learn to be king in his turn.”
Terig turned it over before he slept that night. In the morning he summoned Alleda and Alaran and gave his Gothic commands. Henceforth they were less and less alone together.
Alaran hunted with the young men, played at games of war with the young men, went with chief men on Terig’s errands to neighbouring constellations. He grew in stature and breadth of shoulder and strength of arm. His voice deepened, his mind changed. Terig Oak saw in him leader, saw in him king, when Time should beckon Terig.
Alleda sat beside Fritha and span, or walked beside the river with young women, or roamed with them the forest, or roamed alone. More and more she went alone. Thrown back upon herself she found within herself companions. But she loved Alaran and missed him. And once they met unawares by a forest stream, and all the woods were full of light, and a thrush was singing like a freed spirit. Moved they knew not how, they fled each to the other’s arms. “Alleda!”—“Alaran!” Then came Terig, hunting with his son, and they sprang apart. And, presently, sitting alone, she heard, deep in the wood, Alaran’s horn.
In the autumn of that year Terig, hunting afar in savage woods, had a boar’s tusk driven through his thigh. His men brought him to Terig Oak on a litter of boughs. There he must lie abed, the wound doing ill. It continued{271} unthriving, though Fritha had healing wisdom, and though the priests came from the sacred grove and made incantations above it. Terig lay upon bear-skins, swearing and fevered and growing weak, and the wise women tried and the wise men, but none could heal the wound. Terig saw an ox-death before him, and shut his eyes in a sick distaste.
At this moment came Victorinus to the Goths.
Valentinian II was emperor, Syricius pope. Victorinus had held a bishopric, but zeal for the conversion of the heathen ate sleep from his eyes and flesh from his bones and from his heart willingness to rest in the cushioned places of the Church. He resigned his bishop’s crook, took a staff of oak, tied to it a cross, drew about him ten of his spiritual sons, and with them fared from the Gallic city, till then the scene of his labours. He fared northward, crossed after many days the Rhine, fared onward, northward, and eastward. He was not for tribes and nations who might hear daily of Christ and Paul; he was for barbarians who had never heard or heard but the faintest rumour. He was told of a Gothic people that had not moved with other Goths into Dacia. Victorinus turned his face in that direction. At last he and his following came to islands in the forest ocean, came to Goths, came to Terig Oak.
He stood in his Roman dress, with the oak staff and the bound cross advanced, and ranged behind him the ten Christian men and three barbarian converts, who served him for interpreters. Not tall, in his sixtieth year, he was dark and spare and filled with fire, had eyes that glowed and a voice of gold and honey. He would speak with the king of these home-staying Goths.
“Terig is sore wounded and ill in his bed.{272}”
“O heathen folk, so much the more should we speak with your king! Else he may die unsalved.”
Alaran cried, “O Roman, are you one-who-heals? A boar tusked him.”
“I have healing, young man,” answered Victorinus, “for direr wounds. Let me see him.”
“Come, then,” said Alaran. “Who heals Terig, what care I if he be stranger or home man?”
Terig lay on bear-skins, very grim, looking silently at his ox-fate. Staff in hand, Victorinus stood and regarded him, while in at the ample doorway crowded the bishop’s own following and the household of Terig.
Victorinus beckoned from the ten Probus, the Milanese physician. “Heal the flesh if you can, Probus. So we may sooner come to his soul.”
Probus the physician healed Terig the Goth, whereby Victorinus got permission to dwell in the forest hard-by Terig Oak, to fell trees and build for himself and his followers a house, and for his god a church. For the time being that was all he won. Terig said that he was well contented with his own gods, and yawned whether Victorinus spoke persuasively, or with a solemn and threatening air. But the newcomers might use the forest. Did not the deer and the bear do that? Moreover, Terig would send men to help in the hewing and building. And Terig would not let interfere the priests of the sacred grove.
Victorinus and the ten Christians and those who would aid them cut down great trees and trimmed logs and built a chapel in the forest and beside it a lodge for themselves. By the time it was done came the winter, with snow and ice upon the river, and with howling storms. Terig sent the men from the south skins of beasts to keep them warm,{273} and they made a fire in the middle of their great hut, and the smoke went up through a hole in the roof. Sometimes barbarians came and sat with them about their fire, and sometimes they went into Terig’s hall. Victorinus worked with his hands and his brains. He learned that winter the tongue of the Goths, for he saw that interpreters knew not how to give gold and honey, fire and light. He closely watched the barbarian life, seeking doors into their fortress. Meeting one day Emberic the bard, he asked instruction. At first Emberic scorned him and would not give it, then came the thought of imposing Gothic glory upon the Roman mind. Emberic nodded, sat beneath a fir tree and chanted the tribal praise. Warming to the task, he threw aside the bear-skin from his shoulders. The snow was coming down, and Victorinus, shivering strongly, looked with longing upon the discarded covering, but presently repented that weakness, tore himself from base desires, braced himself to endure hardness for the gospel’s sake. He sat in the snow and listened to Emberic. All in all, that winter, Victorinus did much, learned much. But all to whom he would speak, through his interpreter, or haltingly now with his own tongue, of Christ and his Bride the Church, broke away with the saying that Terig’s gods were their gods.... The priests of the grove came to see the lodge and the chapel. They were not many. He gathered that there had been a quarrel between Terig and them, and that they held their grove on sufferance. “O God, my God!” breathed Victorinus. “This is the time—this is the time! If the barbarian king were won, all were won! And though they be blindly won, thou wouldst, little by little, enlighten their blindness!”
The priests of the grove looked darkly upon him and{274} his ten, and upon their fair chapel and house, and spoke with contempt and with gestures of scorn. If they might they would have driven him and his men forth, burning what they had built; doubtless, if they might, would have seized and bound and slain them upon the grey stone in the middle of their twilight wood. But they might not do any of that for fear of Terig. Speak evil of foreigners and foreign gods they might and did. But Terig’s word stopped the ears of Terig’s men, drew the venom from the priests’ whispering.
The winter climbed toward spring. Suddenly flared war between Goths and a tribe of the Heruli. Terig and all his fighting men and Alaran his son quitted Terig Oak, marched, shouting and singing, through the forest. The women and the home men went with them a long way, but at last, parting, poured back to Terig Oak. Here Fritha ruled till Terig should return.
Now there were flowers in the forest, and unfolding leaves and the first singing of birds, the humming of bees, the passing of butterflies, and throughout the days sunshine and balm. Alleda roamed where she would, and now she dreamed of Alaran, and now she held converse with those late-found companions within herself. She did not name these, but they might be named “Love-of-Beauty,” “Longing-for-Wisdom.”
The timber lodge was built, the timber church was built. The altar was there, the space for worshippers, the table for communicants, the benches for listeners to the sermon. But save for Victorinus and the ten and the three converted whom they had brought with them from the Rhine, there were no worshippers, no communicants, no listeners. To Victorinus the chapel ached like his heart{275} for converts, for even one—one! “One, Lord, one!—for ofttimes one bringeth many!”
Victorinus walked in the forest, praying as he walked. Growing impassioned, he no longer prayed aloud, and after awhile no longer moved about, but kneeled where he found himself, at the hemlock edge of a brown dell in the wood. With clasped hands, with moveless limbs, he struggled, he wrought for that blessing. “One, Lord, one—!”
“Roman—Roman! Roman—Roman!”
Victorinus raised his eyes. There was a woman seated beneath the hemlocks upon the other side of the dell. He rose to his feet. She made no movement to come to him; she called him across to her. The bishop in Victorinus felt injury, recoiled, whereupon the saint, likewise there, laid hands upon that arrogance. “A barbarian and a woman, Lord!... Am I not come to barbarians, and didst not Thou Thyself, signal in Thy lowliness, ofttimes speak first with women?”
Victorinus descended the brown bank upon which he had kneeled, crossed the dell, and mounted by huge roots of trees to where sat the woman who had called. Halfway over the distance he saw who it was—Alleda, the Vandal maiden, who was to be wed to Alaran, the son of Terig.
Victorinus’s heart leaped. His eye was quick, his wit was swift. “Lord, Lord, if I win her to Thee, may she not win her husband who shall be king of this people? Was that not what Patricius said, advising us who went to the barbarians to gain their queens? Lord, Lord, Thou who wishest the world to come to Thee dost not disdain to make Thy nest in women’s hearts!{276}”
He mounted to the huge root, coiled upon itself like a serpent, making a seat for the Vandal girl.
“Roman—Roman!” she said. “To whom were you kneeling over there?”
Victorinus had now, in some sufficiency, the language of the questioner. And he had his voice of gold and honey, and his eloquence of the mind, and the fire that burned in him, and the light behind the fire. Alleda listened, and her eyes were wistful, for within, and that before Victorinus’s arrival, she had become the seeker. She listened, and when she rose to retrace her steps to Terig’s house she said, “I will come again and listen.”
“To-morrow?”
“Yes, to-morrow.”
Day after day she turned her steps where she might meet the stranger with his message from a world out of this world. They met oftenest in the glade before the church, under trees where sang all the birds. The little timber building stood before them while Victorinus the bishop painted the Church, the spiritual Bride and Mother. He drew with strength and beauty, he painted with lovely colours; enthusiast, he was skilful to lift the soul into that fragrant air, to press to its lips the cup of sober inebriation. The chapel stood before them, the lodge and the garden that the ten brethren were making. Over all played the sunshine, sailed the white clouds.
“Where do you go?” asked Fritha of Alleda.
“I go to hear that Roman talk of his god. His god speaks to my heart more than do our gods.”
“Our gods are good enough for Terig and me.”
“I say naught against them,” said Alleda, “but I climb past.{277}”
Victorinus preached Christ, leading her guardedly from height to height. With all his soul he would have her soul for his Lord. He saw that it was a deep soul and in need. He wished its individual salvation, and always, behind it, he saw looming tribes and nations, captured for Christ....
He preached Christ, and she listened with parted lips and deep eyes. She heard of a god who cared, and that she did not perish when she died. It came hauntingly, as though she remembered that, but had forgotten and now remembered again, vividly and eternally. He preached of sin, and she acquiesced. She knew that she sinned. He preached salvation, through the love of God, and because he thought fit not to dwell here upon the terrors of his doctrine, she read it to be through her love of God as well as through God’s love for her. She acquiesced; when she loved and practised good she had joy; not else. That joy was salvation. She was somewhat silent, not quickly and easily moved as were many converts of his acquaintance. Because of that seeming coldness, and because he found mind in her questions, Victorinus put his own mind fully and strongly to the work. From things she said of the gods of her people—to the Christian, d?mons—from processes of her thought that now and then she let him see—he found an undue expansiveness in her idea of good. He must prune away that wildness, bring into bounds that barbarian tolerance of ideas without kinship, show her the narrow way, the one lighted way. His will, his imagination, his genius worked; on all sides he laid siege to her soul to take it solely for Christ and the growth of His Church.
He took her in the spring-time, in her ductile youth, in the void and loneliness made by Alaran’s going. He took{278} her in a longing of her nature for what she knew not, save that it was higher than she had climbed, in an inward trying of the wings and straining of the vision toward some cloud-banded eyrie. He preached a subtile Stair, an unseen Wing. He preached Christ, and he saw the fire slowly kindle in her eyes, and her frame begin to tremble.
One day it came to him to speak of the women in the Church of his God. He told of holy women, pure in the faith, standing fast in good works, dividers of bread to the poor, nurses and consolers of the sick, visiting the captive. He told of maidens who would not wed, but, putting by the sweetness of the flesh, remained virgin, dearer so to their heavenly Lord. He told of women who were wed, who were mothers, who turning to Christ had, some the sooner, some after years of strivings unutterable, the joy of bringing husband or son to His fold Who was only safety, only joy. He told of martyr women, told at length their suffering and triumph, told of Blandina, Felicitas, Perpetua, and many another. He told of the women of Jerusalem, of the sisters of Lazarus, of the Magdalen, of the Mother of Christ. He found, drawn into this barque, that there was much that he must say of women. The Vandal maiden stood with her eyes upon the little church set in th............