Читать книгу Fabiola; Or, The Church of the Catacombs - Nicholas Patrick Wiseman - Страница 10

A Slave. From a painting in Herculaneum.

A Slave. From a painting in Pompeii.

“How delighted I should be, most noble mistress,” said the black slave, “if I could only be in the triclinium[16] this evening as you enter in, to observe the brilliant effect of this new stibium[17] on your guests! It has cost me many trials before I could obtain it so perfect: I am sure nothing like it has been ever seen in Rome.”

“As for me,” interrupted the wily Greek, “I should not presume to aspire to so high an honor. I should be satisfied to look from outside the door, and see the magnificent effect of this wonderful silk tunic, which came with the last remittance of gold from Asia. Nothing can equal its beauty; nor, I may add, is its arrangement, the result of my study, unworthy of the materials.”

“And you, Syra,” interposed the mistress, with a contemptuous smile, “what would you desire? and what have you to praise of your own doing?”

“Nothing to desire, noble lady, but that you may be ever happy; nothing to praise of my own doing, for I am not conscious of having done more than my duty,” was the modest and sincere reply.

It did not please the haughty lady, who said, “Methinks, slave, that you are not over given to praise. One seldom hears a soft word from your mouth.”

“And what worth would it be from me,” answered Syra; “from a poor servant to a noble dame, accustomed to hear it all day long from eloquent and polished lips? Do you believe it when you hear it from them? Do you not despise it when you receive it from us?”

A look of spite was darted at her from her two companions. Fabiola, too, was angry at what she thought a reproof. A lofty sentiment in a slave!

“Have you yet to learn, then,” she answered haughtily, “that you are mine, and have been bought by me at a high price, that you might serve me as I please? I have as good a right to the service of your tongue as of your arms; and if it please me to be praised, and flattered, and sung to, by you, do it you shall, whether you like it or not. A new idea, indeed, that a slave has to have any will but that of her mistress, when her very life belongs to her!”

“True,” replied the handmaid, calmly but with dignity, “my life belongs to you, and so does all else that ends with life,—time, health, vigor, body, and breath. All this you have bought with your gold, and it has become your property. But I still hold as my own what no emperor’s wealth can purchase, no chains of slavery fetter, no limit of life contain.”

“And pray what is that?”

“A soul.”

“A soul!” re-echoed the astonished Fabiola, who had never before heard a slave claim ownership of such a property. “And pray, let me ask you, what you mean by the word?”

“I cannot speak philosophical sentences,” answered the servant, “but I mean that inward living consciousness within me, which makes me feel to have an existence with, and among, better things than surround me, which shrinks sensitively from destruction, and instinctively from what is allied to it, as disease is to death. And therefore it abhors all flattery, and it detests a lie. While I possess that unseen gift, and die it cannot, either is impossible to me.”

The other two could understand but little of all this; so they stood in stupid amazement at the presumption of their companion. Fabiola too was startled; but her pride soon rose again, and she spoke with visible impatience.

“Where did you learn all this folly? Who has taught you to prate in this manner? For my part, I have studied for many years, and have come to the conclusion, that all ideas of spiritual existences are the dreams of poets, or sophists; and as such I despise them. Do you, an ignorant, uneducated slave, pretend to know better than your mistress? Or do you really fancy, that when, after death, your corpse will be thrown on the heap of slaves who have drunk themselves, or have been scourged, to death, to be burnt in one ignominious pile, and when the mingled ashes have been buried in a common pit, you will survive as a conscious being, and have still a life of joy and freedom to be lived?”

“‘Non omnis moriar,’[18] as one of your poets says,” replied

“Fabiola grasped the style in her right hand, and made an almost blind thrust at the unflinching handmaid.”

modestly, but with a fervent look that astonished her mistress, the foreign slave; “yes, I hope, nay, I intend to survive all this. And more yet; I believe, and know, that out of that charnel-pit which you have so vividly described, there is a hand that will pick out each charred fragment of my frame. And there is a power that will call to reckoning the four winds of heaven, and make each give back every grain of my dust that it has scattered; and I shall be built up once more in this my body, not as yours, or any one’s, bondwoman, but free, and joyful, and glorious, loving for ever, and beloved. This certain hope is laid up in my bosom.”[19]

“What wild visions of an eastern fancy are these, unfitting you for every duty? You must be cured of them. In what school did you learn all this nonsense? I never read of it in any Greek or Latin author.”

“In one belonging to my own land; a school in which there is no distinction known, or admitted, between Greek or barbarian, freeman or slave.”

“What!” exclaimed, with strong excitement, the haughty lady, “without waiting even for that future ideal existence after death; already, even now, you presume to claim equality with me? Nay, who knows, perhaps superiority over me. Come, tell me at once, and without daring to equivocate or disguise, if you do so or not?” And she sat up in an attitude of eager expectation. At every word of the calm reply her agitation increased; and violent passions seemed to contend within her, as Syra said:

“Most noble mistress, far superior are you to me in place, and power, and learning, and genius, and in all that enriches and embellishes life; and in every grace of form and lineament, and in every charm of act and speech, high are you raised above all rivalry, and far removed from envious thought, from one so lowly and so insignificant as I. But if I must answer simple truth to your authoritative question”—she paused, as faltering; but an imperious gesture from her mistress bade her continue—“then I put it to your own judgment, whether a poor slave, who holds an unquenchable consciousness of possessing within her a spiritual and living intelligence, whose measure of existence is immortality, whose only true place of dwelling is above the skies, whose only rightful prototype is the Deity, can hold herself inferior in moral dignity, or lower in greatness of thought, than one who, however gifted, owns that she claims no higher destiny, recognizes in herself no sublimer end, than what awaits the pretty irrational songsters that beat, without hope of liberty, against the gilded bars of that cage.”[20]

Fabiola’s eyes flashed with fury; she felt herself, for the first time in her life, rebuked, humbled by a slave. She grasped the style in her right hand, and made an almost blind thrust at the unflinching handmaid. Syra instinctively put forward her arm to save her person, and received the point, which, aimed upwards from the couch, inflicted a deeper gash than she had ever before suffered. The tears started into her eyes through the smart of the wound, from which the blood gushed in a stream. Fabiola was in a moment ashamed of her cruel, though unintentional, act, and felt still more humbled before her servants.

“Go, go,” she said to Syra, who was stanching the blood with her handkerchief, “go to Euphrosyne, and have the wound dressed. I did not mean to hurt you so grievously. But stay a moment, I must make you some compensation.” Then, after turning over her trinkets on the table, she continued, “Take this ring; and you need not return here again this evening.”

Fabiola’s conscience was quite satisfied; she had made

“He who watched with beaming eye, the alms-coffers of Jerusalem, and noted the widow’s mite, alone saw dropped into the chest, by the bandaged arm of a foreign female slave, a valuable emerald ring.”

A Lamp, found in the Catacombs.

what she considered ample atonement for the injury she had inflicted, in the shape of a costly present to a menial dependant. And on the following Sunday, in the title[21] of St. Pastor, not far from her house, among the alms collected for the poor was found a valuable emerald ring, which the good priest Polycarp thought must have been the offering of some very rich Roman lady; but which He who watched, with beaming eye, the alms-coffers of Jerusalem, and noted the widow’s mite, alone saw dropped into the chest by the bandaged arm of a foreign female slave.