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"Dost defy me to my face, sirrah?"
"I have no desire to defy you, father, but--"
"But me no 'buts,' and father me no 'fathers,'" stormed the angry old man, probably quite unconscious of the Shakespearian smack of his phrase; "I am no father to heretic spawn--a plague and a curse be on all such! Go to, thou wicked and deceitful boy; thou wilt one day bitterly rue thy evil practices. Thinkest thou that I will harbour beneath my roof one who sets me at open defiance; one who is a traitor to his house and to his faith?"
A dark flush had risen in the face of the tall, slight youth, with the thoughtful brow and resolute mouth, as his father's first words fell upon his ears, and throwing back his head with a haughty gesture, he said: "I am not deceitful. You have no call to taunt me with that vice which I despise above all others. I have never used deceit towards you. How could you have known I had this day attended the service of the Established Church had I not told you so myself?"
The veins on the old man's forehead stood out with anger; he brought his fist heavily down on the table, with a bang that caused every vessel thereon to ring. A dark-eyed girl, who was listening in mute terror to the stormy scene, shrank yet more into herself at this, and cast an imploring look upon the tall stripling whose face her own so much resembled; but his fiery eyes were on his father's face, and he neither saw nor heeded the look.
"And have I not forbid--ay, and that under the heaviest penalties--any child of mine from so much as putting the head inside one of those vile heretic buildings? Would God they were every one of them destroyed! Heaven send some speedy judgment upon those who build and those who dare to worship therein! What wonder that a son turns in defiance upon his father, when he stuffs his ears with the pestilent heresies with which the wicked are making vile this earth!"
Nicholas Trevlyn's anger became so great at this point as well nigh to choke him. He paused, not from lack of words, but from inability to utter them; and his son, boldly taking advantage of the pause, struck in once more in his own defence.
"Father, you talk of pestilent heresies, but what know you of the doctrines taught within walls you never enter? Is it a pestilent heresy that Christ died to save the world; that He rose again for our justification; that He sent the Holy Spirit into the world to sanctify and gather together a Church called after His name? That is the doctrine I heard preached today, and methinks it were hard to fall foul of it. If you had heard it yourself from one of our priests, sure you would have found it nothing amiss."
"Silence, boy!" thundered the old man, his fury suddenly changing to a white heat of passion, which was more terrible than the bluster that had gone before. "Silence, lest I strike thee to the ground where thou standest, and plunge this dagger in thine heart sooner than hear thee blaspheme the Holy Church in which thou wast reared! How darest thou talk thus to me? as though yon accursed heretic of a Protestant was a member of the Church of Christ. Thou knowest that there is but one fold under one shepherd, and he the Pope of Rome. A plague upon those accursed ones who have perverted the true faith and led a whole nation astray! But they shall not lead my son after them; Nicholas Trevlyn will look well to that!"
Father and son stood with the table between them, gazing fixedly at one another like combatants who, having tested somewhat the strength each of the other, feel a certain doubt as to the termination of the contest, but are both ready and almost eager for the final struggle which shall leave the victory unequivocally on one side or the other.
"I had thought that the Shepherd was Christ," said Cuthbert, in a low, firm tone, "and that the fold was wide enough to embrace all those baptized into His name."
"Then thou only thinkest what is one more of those damnable heresies which are ruining this land and corrupting the whole world," cried Nicholas between his shut teeth. "Thou hast learned none such vile doctrine from me."
"I have learned no doctrine from you save that the Pope is lord of all----of things temporal and things spiritual--and that all who deny this are in peril of hell fire," answered the young man, with no small bitterness and scorn. "And here, in this realm, those who hold this to be so are in danger of prison and death. Truly this is a happy state of things for one such as I. At home a father who rails upon me night and day for a heretic--albeit I vow I hold not one single doctrine which I cannot stand to and prove from the Word of God."
"Which thou hast no call to have in thine hands!" shouted his father; "a book which, if given to the people, stirs up everywhere the vilest heresies and most loathsome errors. The Bible is God's gift to the Church. It is not of private interpretation. It is for the priests to give of its treasures to the people as they are able to bear them."
"Ay, verily, and what are the people to do when the priests deny them their rightful food?" cried Cuthbert, as hotly as his father. "Listen to me, sir. Yes, this once I wilt speak! In years gone by, when, however quietly, secretly, and privately, we were visited by a priest and heard the mass, and received at his hands the Blessed Sacrament, did I revolt against your wish in matters spiritual? Was I not ever willing to please you? Did I not love the Church? Was not I approved of the Father, and taught many things by him, including those arts of reading and penmanship which many in my condition of life never attain unto? Did I ever anger you by disobedience or revolt?"
"What of that, since you are doing so now?" questioned Nicholas in a quieter tone, yet one full of suspicion and resentment. "What use to talk of what is past and gone? Thou knowest well of late years how thou hast been hankering after every vile and villainous heresy that has come in thy way. It is thy mother's blood within thee belike. I did grievous wrong ever to wed with one reared a Protestant, however she might abjure the errors in which she was brought up. False son of a false mother--"
"Hold, sir! You shall not miscall my mother! No son will stand by and hear that!"
"I will say what I will in mine own house, thou evil, malapert boy!" roared the old man. "I tell thee that thy mother was a false woman, that she deceived me bitterly. After solemnly abjuring the errors in which she had been reared, and being received into the true fold, she, as years went by, lapsed more and more into her foul heretical ways of thought and speech; and though she went to her last reckoning (unshriven and unassoiled, for she would have no priest at her dying bed) before ye twain were old enough to have been corrupted by her precept and example, ye must have sucked in heresy with your mother's milk, else how could son of mine act in the vile fashion that thou art acting?"
"I am acting in no vile fashion. I am no heretic. I am a true son of the true Church."
Cuthbert spoke with a forced calmness which gave his words weight, and for a moment even the angry man paused to listen to them, eying the youth keenly all the while, as though measuring his own strength against him. Physically he was far more than a match for the slightly-built stripling of one-and-twenty, being a man of great height and muscular power--power that had in no wise diminished with advancing years, though time had turned his black locks to iron gray, and seamed his face with a multitude of wrinkles. Pride, passion, gloomy defiance, and bitter hatred of his kind seemed written on that face, which in its youth must have been handsome enough. Nicholas Trevlyn was a disappointed, embittered man, who added to all other faults of temperament that of a hopeless bigot of the worst kind. He was the sort of man of whom Inquisitors must surely have been made--without pity, without remorse, without any kind of natural feeling when once their religious convictions were at stake.
As a young man he had watched heretics burning in Smithfield with a fierce joy and delight; and when with the accession of Elizabeth the tide had turned, he had submitted without a murmur to the fines which had ruined him and driven him, a poverty-stricken dependent, to the old Gate House. He would have died a martyr with the grim constancy that he had seen in others, and never lamented what he suffered for conscience' sake. But he had grown to be a thoroughly soured and embittered man, and had spent the past twenty or more years of his life in a ceaseless savage brooding which had made his abode anything but a happy place for his two children, the offspring of a late and rather peculiar marriage with a woman by birth considerably his inferior.
The firmness without the bitterness of his father's face was reflected in that of the son as Cuthbert fearlessly finished his speech.
"I am a true son of the Church. I am no outcast--no heretic. But I will not suffer my soul to be starved. It is the law of this land that whatever creed men hold in their hearts--whether the tenets of Rome or those of the Puritans of Scotland--that they shall outwardly conform themselves to the forms prescribed by the Establishment, and shall attend the churches of the land; and you know as well as I do that there be many priests of our faith who bid their flocks obey this law, and submit themselves to the powers that be. And yet even with all this I would have restrained myself from such attendance, knowing that it is an abhorrence unto you, had there been any other way open to me of hearing the Word of God or receiving the Blessed Sacrament. But since King James has come to the throne, the penal laws have been more stringently enforced against our priests than in the latter days of the Queen. What has been the result for us? Verily that the priest who did from time to time minister to us is fled. We are left without help, without guidance, without teaching, and this when the clouds of peril and trouble are like to darken more and more about our path."
"And what of that, rash boy? Would you think to lessen the peril by tampering with the things of the Evil One; by casting aside those rules and doctrines in which you both have been reared, and consorting with the subverters of the true faith?"
"But I cannot see that they are subverters of the faith," answered the youth hotly. "That is where the kernel of the matter lies. I have heard their preachings. I have talked with my cousins at the Chase, who know what their doctrine is."
But at these words the old man fairly gnashed his teeth in fury; he made a rush at his son and took him by the collar of his doublet, shaking him in a
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