“True,” replied the handmaid, calmly but with dignity, “my life belongs to you, and so does all else that ends with life,—time, health, vigor, body, and breath. All this you have bought with your gold, and it has become your property. But I still hold as my own what no emperor’s wealth can purchase, no chains of slavery fetter, no limit of life contain.”
“And pray what is that?”
“A soul.”
“A soul!” re-echoed the astonished Fabiola, who had never before heard a slave claim ownership of such a property. “And pray, let me ask you, what you mean by the word?”
“I cannot speak philosophical sentences,” answered the servant, “but I mean that inward living consciousness within me, which makes me feel to have an existence with, and among, better things than surround me, which shrinks sensitively from destruction, and instinctively from what is allied to it, as disease is to death. And therefore it abhors all flattery, and it detests a lie. While I possess that unseen gift, and die it cannot, either is impossible to me.”
The other two could understand but little of all this; so they stood in stupid amazement at the presumption of their companion. Fabiola too was startled; but her pride soon rose again, and she spoke with visible impatience.
“Where did you learn all this folly? Who has taught you to prate in this manner? For my part, I have studied for many years, and have come to the conclusion, that all ideas of spiritual existences are the dreams of poets, or sophists; and as such I despise them. Do you, an ignorant, uneducated slave, pretend to know better than your mistress? Or do you really fancy, that when, after death, your corpse will be thrown on the heap of slaves who have drunk themselves, or have been scourged, to death, to be burnt in one ignominious pile, and when the mingled ashes have been buried in a common pit, you will survive as a conscious being, and have still a life of joy and freedom to be lived?”
“‘Non omnis moriar,’[18] as one of your poets says,” replied
“Fabiola grasped the style in her right hand, and made an almost blind thrust at the unflinching handmaid.”