Oddsfish!, Robert Hugh Benson [best books to read for women .txt] 📗

Novice Master three times; but I shall never be more than that; for governmental affairs and I have said farewell to one another a long while ago. It was through my telling of my adventures to my Novices at recreation-time that the writing of them down came about; for my Lord Abbot heard of them, and put me under obedience to write them down. He did this when he heard one of my Novices name me to another as Father Viscount! I have written them, then, down all in full, leaving nothing out except the French affairs on which I was put under oath by His Majesty never to reveal anything: I have left out not even the tale of my Cousin Dolly; for I hold that in such a love as was ours there is nothing that a monk need be ashamed of. I will venture even further than that, and will say that I am a better monk than I should have been without it; and as one last piece of rashness I will say that amongst "those good things which God hath prepared for them that love Him" in that world which is beyond this (if I ever come at it by His Grace), will be, I think, the look on my Cousin Dolly's face when I see her again.

Of other personages whose acquaintance I made in England--excepting always His Majesty, and my master, Charles the Second--I neither speak nor think very much now. My Cousin Tom died of an apoplexy three years after I left England, and God knows who hath Hare Street House to-day! His Majesty James the Second, as all the world knows, made a most excellent end of it in France, dying as he had never lived till after his coming to France, a very humble and Christian soul. In regard to Mr. Chiffinch, I think of him sometimes and wonder what kind of an end he made. He was very reprobate while I knew him; yet he had the gift of fidelity, and that, I think, must count for something before God who gave it him. Of the ladies of the Court I know nothing at all, nor how they fared nor how they ended, nor even if they are all dead yet--I mean such ladies as was Her Grace of Portsmouth.

But all of them I commend to God every day in my mass living or dead; and trust that all may have found the mercy of God, or may yet find it. But most of all I remember at the altar the names of two persons, than between whom there could be no greater difference in this world--the names of Dorothy Mary Jermyn, the least of all sinners; and of Charles Stuart, King of England, the greatest of all sinners, yet a penitent one. For these are the two whom I have loved as I can never love any others.
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Publication Date: 08-25-2010

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