And, wheresoe’er this foot of mine doth tread,
He lies before me. Dost thou understand me?
Thou art his keeper’
Shakespeare, King John, iii. 3.
At this time a change came over the fortunes of Onesimus.
Pudens had been dismissed from his post among the excubitors of the Palace, under the semblance of honourable promotion, but in reality because Nero was doubly displeased by his fidelity to Britannicus and by the blow which (as he had accidentally discovered) Pudens had given him during the nocturnal encounter. But, as he had been an excubitor for so long, he had been accustomed to keep some of his armour and a few books in a room in the Palace, and he sent Onesimus to fetch them.
As he went to this room under the guidance of one of Cæsar’s slaves, Onesimus heard a low voice singing the burden of one of the Phrygian songs with which he had been familiar in old days at Thyatira.
He was a creature of impulse, and, without thinking what he was doing, he took up the refrain of the song.
Immediately the door opened, and a beautiful dark-eyed girl asked in an agitated voice, and in the dialect of Phrygia, who had taken up the song.
The sound of his native tongue sent through the heart of Onesimus that indescribable thrill which we feel when past recollections are suddenly brought home to us in long-accumulated arrears. Greek had been spoken in the household of Philemon. He had scarcely heard his native Phrygian since he had been a free-born child, before he had incurred the stain of being sold as a slave. He answered in Phrygian that he had known the song since he was a child at his mother’s knee in Thyatira.