Lord Vanity by Samuel Shellabarger

Author:Samuel Shellabarger [Shellabarger, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Venice, England, galley slave, opera, France, historical fiction, prison, love, war, mid eighteenth century
Publisher: eNet Press Inc.
Published: 2013-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

“Nice-looking,” breathed Amélie. “He reminds me of Père Thibaut, my confessor at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a dear man.”

“How are you going to explain this to Père Thibaut?” Richard murmured. “Attending a Protestant meeting! You’re a good Catholic, aren’t you?”

“I’m a Catholic,” she shrugged. “And you?”

“Vaguely. But I haven’t been to confession for a long time. Maybe I’m a Protestant now. Anyway, you’re guilty of a mortal sin.”

“Don’t,” she pouted. “You aren’t Lady Huntingdon. Consider Monsieur Wesley. Have you noticed his eyes?”

Increasingly Richard had felt the power of them. They were unusually penetrating, though at the same time with the clear directness of a child’s. One could not meet them easily.

A precentor consulted his tuning fork, gave the tone, and some young men and women launched out on a hymn set to the melody of a popular Scottish ballad. It was catchy and sentimental, but the voices flatted a good deal. Glancing to the left, Richard observed that his father, who sat on the other side of Lady Marny, covered a smile with his handkerchief as he blew his nose.

The singing stopped. Wesley, after a brief invocation, opened the Bible. And at that point, as far as Richard was concerned, the mood of the evening began to change. It was not so much the speaker’s compelling voice as an emanation of his personality that wrought the change and sobered trifling. Levity at once seemed feeble and forlorn in the presence of a dedication like Wesley’s, in the presence, too, of the values he represented.

Choosing his text from the Sermon on the Mount, he read a few verses. To Richard, who knew them only in Latin, it seemed that he was hearing them for the first time.

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal . . . The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light: but if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”

“The eye is the intention,” Wesley continued: “What the eye is to the body, the intention is to the soul . . . This eye of the soul is then said to be single, when it looks at one thing only; when we have no other design, but to ‘know God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent’ . . . ‘If thine eye be’ thus ‘single’, thus fixed on God, ‘thy whole body shall be full of light’ . . . all thou art; all thou doest; thy desires, tempers, affections; thy thoughts and words and actions. The whole of these shall be ‘full of light’; full of true, divine knowledge . . .”

In the churches of Venice

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