“Your friends, I hope you mean,” said Fabiola, smiling; “otherwise I fear your whole life would go, in works of unrequited benevolence.”
“And so let it go; it could not be better spent.”
“Surely, you are not in earnest, Sebastian. If you saw one who had ever hated you, and sought your destruction, threatened with a calamity, which would make him harmless, would you stretch out your hand to save, or succor, him?”
“Certainly I would. While God sends His sunshine and His rain equally upon His enemies, as upon His friends, shall weak man frame another rule of justice?”
At these words Fabiola wondered; they were so like those of her mysterious parchment, identical with the moral theories of her slave.
“You have been in the East, I believe, Sebastian,” she asked him, rather abruptly; “was it there that you learnt these principles? For I have one near me, who is yet, by her own choice, a servant, a woman of rare moral perceptions, who has propounded to me the same ideas; and she is an Asiatic.”
“It is not in any distant country that I learnt them; for here I sucked them in with my mother’s milk; though, originally, they doubtless came from the East.”
“They are certainly beautiful in the abstract,” remarked Fabiola; “but death would overtake us before we could half carry them out, were we to make them our principles of conduct.”
“And how better could death find us, though not surprise us, than in thus doing our duty, even if not to its completion?”
“For my part,” resumed the lady, “I am of the old Epicurean poet’s mind. This world is a banquet, from which I shall be ready to depart when I have had my fill—ut conviva satur[113]—and not till then. I wish to read life’s book through, and close it calmly, only when I have finished its last page.”