Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/48

 Benedictines of Paris executed at the expense of their own conventual funds.

'I perceive,' said the ex-Benedictine, smiling, 'that your heretical prejudices are too strong to allow us poor brethren any merit, whether literary or spiritual.'

'Far from it, sir,' said I; 'I assure you I have been much obliged to monks in my time. When I was quartered in a monastery in Flanders, in the campaign of 1793, I never lived more comfortably in my life. They were jolly fellows, the Flemish canons, and right sorry was I to leave my good quarters, and to know that my honest hosts were to be at the mercy of the sansculottes. But fortune de la guerre!'

The poor Benedictine looked down and was silent. I had unwittingly awakened a train of bitter reflections, or rather I had touched somewhat rudely upon a chord which seldom ceased to vibrate of itself. But he was too much accustomed to this sorrowful train of ideas to suffer it to overcome him. On my part, I hastened to atone for my blunder. 'If there was any object of his journey to this country in which I could; with propriety, assist him, I begged to offer him my best services.' I own I laid some little emphasis on the words 'with propriety', as I felt it would ill become me, a sound Protestant and a servant of government so far as my half-pay was concerned, to implicate myself in any recruiting which my companion might have undertaken in behalf of foreign seminaries, or in any similar design for the advancement of Popery, which, whether the Pope be actually the old lady of Babylon or no, it did not become me in any manner to advance or countenance.

My new friend hastened to relieve my indecision. 'I was about to request your assistance, sir,' he said, 'in a matter which cannot but interest you as an antiquary and a person of research. But I assure you it relates entirely to events and persons removed to the distance of two centuries and a half. I have experienced too much evil from the violent unsettlement of the country in which I was born, to be a rash labourer in the work of innovation in that of my ancestors.'

I again assured him of my willingness to assist him in anything that was not contrary to my allegiance or religion.