The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn | Page 3

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 frenzy of rage.
"So!" he cried, "so! Now we get at the whole heart of the matter. You
have been learning heresy from those false Trevlyns at the
Chase--those renegade, treacherous, time-serving Trevlyns, who are a
disgrace to their name and their station! Wretched boy! have I not
warned you times and again to have no dealings with those evil
relatives? Kinsmen they may be, but kinsmen who have disgraced the
name they bear. I would I had Richard Trevlyn here beneath my hand
now, that I might stuff his false doctrine down his false throat to