“Then we shall soon set that matter right. I can give witness to the contrary. Tell her I will come presently; and take this for your trouble.”
The soldier retired, and Fabiola was left alone. When there was something to do her mind was at once energetic and concentrated, though afterwards the tenderness of womanhood might display itself the more painfully. She wrapped herself close up, proceeded alone to the prison, and was at once conducted to the separate cell, which Agnes had obtained in consideration of her rank, backed by her parents’ handsome largitions.
“What is the meaning of this, Agnes?” eagerly inquired Fabiola, after a warm embrace.
“I was arrested a few hours ago, and brought hither.”
“And is Fulvius fool enough, as well as scoundrel, to trump up an accusation against you, which five minutes will confute? I will go to Tertullus myself, and contradict his absurd charge at once.”
“What charge, dearest?”
“Why, that you are a Christian.”
“And so I am, thank God!” replied Agnes, making on herself the sign of the cross.
The announcement did not strike Fabiola like a thunderbolt, nor rouse her, nor stagger her, nor perplex her. Sebastian’s death had taken all edge or heaviness from it. She had found that faith existing in what she had considered the type of every manly virtue; she was not surprised to find it in her, whom she had loved as the very model of womanly perfection. The simple grandeur of that child’s excellence, her guileless innocence, and unexcepting kindness, she had almost worshipped. It made Fabiola’s difficulties less, it brought her problem nearer to a solution, to find two such peerless beings to be not mere chance-grown plants, but springing from the same seed. She bowed her head in a kind of reverence for the child, and asked her, “How long have you been so?”
“All my life, dear Fabiola; I sucked the faith, as we say, with my mother’s milk.”