‘Ah! my father,’ said Philammon, glad in his heart of any excuse to turn the conversation, and yet half uneasy and suspicious at Arsenius’s evident determination to avoid the very object of his visit. ‘It must have been you, then, whom I saw stop and speak to Pelagia at the farther end of the street. What words could you possibly have had wherewith to honour such a creature?’
‘God knows. Some secret sympathy touched my heart.... Alas! poor child! But how came you to know her?’
‘All Alexandria knows the shameless abomination,’ interrupted a voice at their elbow—none other than that of the little porter, who had been dodging and watching the pair the whole way, and could no longer restrain his longing to meddle. ‘And well it had been for many a rich young man had odd Miriam never brought her over, in an evil day, from Athens hither.’
‘Miriam?’
‘Yes, monk; a name not unknown, I am told, in palaces as well as in slave-markets.’
‘An evil-eyed old Jewess?’
‘A Jewess she is, as her name might have informed you; and as for her eyes, I consider them, or used to do so, of course—for her injured nation have been long expelled from Alexandria by your fanatic tribe—as altogether divine and demoniac, let the base imagination of monks call them what it likes.’
‘But how did you know this Pelagia, my son? She is no fit company for such as you.’
Philammon told, honestly enough, the story of his Nile journey, and Pelagia’s invitation to him.
‘You did not surely accept it?’