“Know you its value, Master?” repeated the seaman. “Will it buy my freedom and my daughter’s, too? She is a slave girl in the Temples of Crete and is wasting of a consumption. I would take her back to a good woman in the hills off the Roman Road—a Grecian woman called Thecla. Know you her?”
Onesimus came awake to pressing duties, like a dreamer out of selfish trance.
“Yes, its value is three times the value of a slave; and I will now give you six times its value in Roman coin to countervail my sin of this very morning.” He had opened the leather wallet in his sash and was counting six coins out for the seaman’s one, when a thought arrested him.
“Who mutilated the infant on your beggar-boy’s back? Is this girl child also yours?”
“Nay, my Master,” the Greek seaman’s countenance saddened. “I sink not so low. The little child is daughter of the Roman guard at Patmos; but I am slave seaman for debt; and the witch, the fortune teller, at the Temple steps, who keeps my son and forces him to beg, she it was who maimed the infant. She feeds the children who are leased, and forces them to earn bread. The infant was only a female and will be knocked on the head; so the witch blinded her and broke her arm—”
Gone were the Bishop’s dreams of a world of Light and Life and Love! Gone were his memories of Diana and her hunting horn winding divine music through the caves and grottoes of the Isles of Greece. He was down to earth with his feet on the ground, a warrior again for righteousness in a world of crime. What mattered the coward fear of Death? His duty as a soldier of His Lord was to fight for right in Life, and let Death take care of itself, as the nymph insect that morning had discarded its coat of skin to the winds.
He added another coin to the six he was counting out to the seaman.
“See you redeem the infant as well, and take them all to the hospice of the woman Thecla in the mountains,” he commanded. “I will stand bail for your good citizenship when you get your pass of freedom from the Roman Governor.”
When the cusps of the mountains of Crete were sighted, and the great canvas came clattering down, and the ship warped up to the quay, the burly seaman—no longer slave but free—came to Onesimus with a capstan bar over his shoulder.
“You will need me, Master,” he said. “There are riots in Crete. One Apollos proclaims the downfall of the old Temples. They threaten to kill him to-night if he break in on the service. For me, I see not why they should kill him. He is old—they say he is a hundred years—he will die anyway; and he preaches— ‘There is no Death.’ ” The big seaman exploded in a bluff laugh through his beard that was like the burst of a squall through a mountain pass; and the two went shouldering up through the dock rabble towards the temple.