“The truth is,” continued Juba, with the air of a teacher—“the truth is, that religion was a fashion with me, which is now gone by. It was the complexion of a particular stage of my life. I was neither the better nor the worse for it. It was an accident, like the bloom on my face, which soon,” he said, spreading his fingers over his dirty-coloured cheeks, and stroking them, “which soon will disappear. I acted according to the feeling, while it lasted; but I can no more recall it than my first teeth, or the down on my chin. It’s among the things that were.”
Agellius still keeping silence from weariness and disgust, he looked at him in a significant way, and said, slowly, “I see how it is; I have penetration enough to perceive that you don’t believe a bit more about religion than I do.”
“You must not say that under my roof,” cried Agellius, feeling he must not let his brother’s charge pass without a protest. “Many are my sins, but unbelief is not one of them.”
Juba tossed his head. “I think I can see through a stone slab as well as any one,” he said. “It is [pg 37]as I have said; but you’re too proud to confess it. It’s part of your hypocrisy.”
“Well,” said Agellius coldly, “let’s have done. It’s getting late, Juba; you’ll be missed at home. Jucundus will be inquiring for you, and some of those revelling friends of yours may do you a mischief by the way. Why, my good fellow,” he continued, in surprise, “you have no leggings. The scorpions will catch hold of you to a certainty in the dark. Come, let me tie some straw wisps about you.”
“No fear of scorpions for me,” answered Juba; “I have some real good amulets for the occasion, which even boola-kog and uffah will respect.”
Saying this, he passed out of the room as unceremoniously as he had entered it, and took the direction of the city, talking to himself, and singing snatches of wild airs as he went along, throwing back and shaking his head, and now and then uttering a sharp internal laugh. Disdaining to follow the ordinary path, he dived down into the thick and wet grass, and scrambled through the ravine, which the public road crossed before it ascended the hill. Meanwhile he accompanied his quickened pace with a louder strain, and it ran as follows:—
“The little black Moor is the mate for me,
When the night is dark, and the earth is free,
Under the limbs of the broad yew-tree.