Читать книгу Fabiola; Or, The Church of the Catacombs онлайн

34 страница из 93

“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.”