The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn: A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot

Evelyn Everett-Green

The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn: A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot

Chapter 1: The Inmates Of The Old Gate House

"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 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 choke him withal! And to think that he has corrupted my son, as if the rearing of his own heretic brood was not enough!"

Cuthbert was unable to speak; his father's hand pressed too tightly on his throat. He did not struggle or resist. Those were days when sons-ay, and daughters too-were used to receiving severe chastisement from the parental hand without murmur: and Nicholas Trevlyn had not been one to spare the rod where his son had been concerned. His wrath seemed to rise as he felt the slight form of the lad sway beneath his strong grasp. Surely that slim stripling could be reduced to obedience; but the lesson must be a sharp one, for plainly the poison was working, and had already produced disastrous results.

"Miserable boy!" cried Nicholas, his eyes blazing in their cavernous hollows, "the time has come when this matter must be settled betwixt us twain. Swear that thou wilt go no more to the churches of the Protestant faction, be the laws what they may; swear that thou wilt hold no more converse on matters of religion with thy cousins at the Chase-swear these things with a solemn and binding oath, and all may yet be well. Refuse, and thou shalt yet learn, as thou hast not learned before, what the wrath of a wronged and outraged father can be!"

Petronella, the dark-eyed girl, who had all this while been crouching back in her high-backed chair in an attitude of shrinking terror, now sprang suddenly towards her brother, crying: "O Cuthbert, Cuthbert! prithee do not anger him more!

"Father, O dear sir, let but him go this once! He does not willingly anger you; he does but-"

"Peace, foolish girl, and begone! This is no time for woman's whining. Thy brother and I can settle this business betwixt us twain. But stay, go thou to my room and fetch thence the strong whip wherewith I chastise the unruly hounds. Those who disobey like dogs must be beaten like dogs.

"But, an thou wilt swear to do my bidding in the future, and avoid all pestilent controversy with those false scions of thy house, thy chastisement shall be light. Defy me, and thou shalt feel the full weight of my arm as thou hast never felt it before."

Petronella had never seen her father so angry in all her life before. True, he had always been a harsh, stern man, an unloving father, a captious tyrant in his own house. But there had been limits to his anger. It had taken more generally the form of sullen brooding than of wild wrath, and the irritation and passion which had lately been increasing visibly in him was something comparatively new.

Of late, however, there had been growing friction between Cuthbert and his father. The youth, who had remained longer a boy in his secluded life than he would have done had his lot been cast in a wider sphere, was awakening at last to the stirrings of manhood within him, and was chafing against the fetters, both physical and spiritual, laid upon him by the life he was forced to lead through the tyrannical will of his father. He was beginning, in a semi-conscious fashion, to pant for freedom, and to rebel against the harsh paternal yoke.

When a struggle of wills commences, the friction continues a long while before the spark is produced; but when some unwonted contest has ignited this, the flame often bursts out in wonderful fury, and the whole scene is thence forward changed.

If the old man's blood was up today, Cuthbert's was no less so. He shook himself free for a moment from his father's grasp and stood before him, tall, upright, indignant, no fear in his face, but a deep anger and pain; and his words were spoken with great emphasis and deliberation.

"I will swear nothing of all that. I claim for myself the right of a man to judge for myself and act for myself. I am a boy no longer; I have reached man's estate. I will be threatened and intimidated no longer by any man, even though he be my father. I am ready and willing to leave your house this very day. I am weary of the life here. I would fain carve out fortune for myself. It is plain that we cannot be agreed; wherefore it plainly behoves us to part. Let me then go, but let me go in peace. It may be when I return to these doors you may have learned to think more kindly of me."

But the very calmness of these words only stung Nicholas to greater fury. He had in full force that inherent belief, so deeply rooted in the minds of many of the sons of Rome, that conviction as well as submission could be compelled-could be driven into the minds and consciences of recalcitrant sons and daughters by sheer force and might. Gnashing his teeth in fury, he sprang once more upon his son, winding his strong arms about him, and fairly lifting him from the ground in his paroxysm of fury.

"Go! ay, we will see about that. Go, and carry your false stories and falser thoughts out into the world, and pollute others as you yourself have been polluted! we will think of that anon. Here thou art safe in thy father's care, and it will be well to think further ere we let so rabid a heretic stray from these walls. Wretched boy! the devil himself must sure have entered into thee. But fiends have been exorcised before now. It shall not be the fault of Nicholas Trevlyn if this one be not quickly forced to take flight!"

All this while the infuriated man had been partly dragging, partly carrying his son to a dreary empty room in the rear of the dilapidated old house inhabited by Nicholas and his children. It was a vault-like apartment, and the roof was upheld in the centre by a stout pillar such as one sees in the crypts of churches, and suspended round this pillar were a pair of manacles and a leather belt. Cuthbert had many times been tied up to this pillar before, his hands secured above his head in the manacles, and his body firmly fastened to the pillar by the leather thong. Sometimes he had been left many hours thus secured, till he had been ready to drop with exhaustion. Sometimes he had been cruelly beaten by his stern sire in punishment for some boyish prank or act of disobedience. Even the gentle and timid Petronella had more than once been fastened to the pillar for a time of penance, though the manacles and the whip had been spared to her. The place was even now full of terrors for her-a gruesome spot, always dim and dark, always full of lurking horrors. Her eyes dilated with agony and fear as she beheld her brother fastened up-not before his stout doublet had been removed-and her knees almost gave way beneath her as her father turned sharply upon her and said: "Where is the whip, girl?"

It was seldom that the maiden had the courage to resist her, stern father; but today, love for her brother overcoming every other feeling, she suddenly sank on her knees before him, clasping her hands in piteous supplication, as she cried, with tears streaming down her face: "O father, sweet father, spare him this time! for the love of heaven visit not his misdoings upon him! Let me but talk to him; let me but persuade him! Oh, do not treat him so harshly! Indeed he may better be won by love than driven by blows!"

But Nicholas roughly repulsed the girl, so that she almost fell as he brushed past her.

"Tush, girl! thou knowest not what thou sayest. Disobedience must be flogged out of the heretic spawn. I will have no son of mine sell himself to the devil unchecked. A truce to such tears and vain words! I will none of them. And take heed that thine own turn comes not next. I will spare neither son nor daughter that I find tampering with the pestilent doctrines of heretics!"

So saying, the angry man strode away himself in search of the weapon of chastisement, and whilst Petronella sobbed aloud in her agony of pity, Cuthbert looked round with a strange smile to say: "Do not weep so bitterly, my sister; it will soon be over, and it is the last beating I will ever receive at his hands. This settles it-this decides me. I leave this house this very night, and I return no more until I have won my right to be treated no longer as a slave and a dog."

"Alas, my brother! wilt thou really go?"

"Ay, that will I, and this very night to boot."

"This night! But I fear me he will lock thee in this chamber here."

"I trust he may; so may I the better effect my purpose. Listen, sister, for he will return right soon, and I must be brief. I have been shut up here before, and dreaming of some such day as this, I have worked my way through one of yon stout bars to the window; and it will fall out now with a touch. Night falls early in these dark November days. When the great clock in the tower of the Chase tolls eight strokes, then steal thou from the house bearing some victuals in a wallet, and my good sword and dagger and belt. Meet me by the ruined chantry where we have sat so oft. I will then tell thee all that is in my heart-for which time lacks me to speak now.

"Hist! there is his returning step. Leave me now, and weep not. I care naught for hard blows; I have received too many in my time. But these shall be the last!"

Petronella, trembling in every limb, shrank silently away in the shadows as her father approached, the sight of his grim, stern face and the cruel-looking weapon in his hands bringing quick thrills of pain and pity to her gentle heart. Petronella was a very tender floweret to have been reared amidst so much hardness and sorrow. It was wonderful that she had lived through the helpless years of infancy (her mother had died ere she had completed her second year) with such a father over her, or that having so lived she had preserved the sweetness and clinging softness of temperament which gave to her such a strange charm-at least in the opinion of one. Doubtless she owed much of her well being to the kindly care of an old deaf and dumb woman, the only servant in that lonely old house, who had entered it to nurse the children's mother through her last illness, and had stayed on almost as a matter of course, receiving no wage for her untiring service, but only the coarse victuals that all shared alike, and such scanty clothing as was absolutely indispensable.

To this old crone Petronella fled with white face and tearful eyes, as the sound of those terrible blows smote upon her ears with the whistling noise that well betrayed the force with which they were dealt. She quickly made the faithful old creature aware of what was going on, and her sympathy was readily aroused on behalf of the sufferer. The dumb request for food was also understood and complied with. No doubt there had been times before when the girl had crept with bread and meat in her apron to the solitary captive, who was shut up alone without food till he should come to a better mind.

Of Cuthbert's intended flight she made no attempted revelation. She must act now, and explain later, if she could ever make the old woman understand, that her brother had fled, and had not been done to death by his hard-hearted father.

Supper was over. It had been at the close of that meal that the explosion had taken place. She would not be called upon to meet her father again that day. Fleeing up the broken stone staircase just as his feet were heard returning from the vaulted room, she heard him bang to the door of the living room before she dared to steal into the little bare chamber where her brother slept, and where all his worldly possessions were stored.

The old Gate House was a strange habitation. Formerly merely the gateway to the Castle, which had once reared its proud head upon the crest of the hill to the westward, it had but scant accommodation for a family-one living room below, flanked on one side by the kitchen, and on the other by the vaulted chamber, once possibly a guardroom, but so bitterly cold and damp now that it was never used save for such purposes as had been witnessed there that evening. A winding, broken stone stairway led upwards to a few very narrow chambers above of irregular shape, and all lighted by loophole windows deeply splayed. The lowest of these was the place where Nicholas slept, and there was a slight attempt at furniture and comfort; but the upper chambers, where Petronella and Cuthbert retired out of the way of their father's sullen and morose temper, were bare of all but actual necessities, and lacked many things which would be numbered amongst essentials in later days. The stone floors had not even a carpeting of rushes, the pallet beds lay on the hard stone floor, and only the girl possessed a basin and ewer for washing. Cuthbert was supposed to perform his ablutions in the water of the moat without, or at the pump in the yard.

But Petronella had small notion of the hardness of her life. She had known no other, and only of late had she begun to realize that other girls were more gently reared and tended. Since the family had come to live at the Chase-which had only happened within the past year-her ideas had begun to enlarge; but so far this had not taught her discontent with her surroundings.

She knew that her father had fled to the Gate House as a place of retirement in the hour of his danger and need, and that nobody had denied his right to remain there, though the whole property was in the possession of Sir Richard Trevlyn, the nephew of her morose parent. Nicholas, however, as may have been already gathered, bore no goodwill towards his nephew, and would fain have hindered his children from so much as exchanging a word with their kinsfolks. But blood is thicker than water, and the young naturally consort together. Nicholas had married so late in life that his children were much about the same age as those of his nephew-indeed the Trevlyns of the Chase were all older than Petronella. Sir Richard had striven to establish friendly relations with his uncle when he had first brought his family to the Chase, and had only given up the attempt after many rebuffs. He encouraged his children to show kindness to their cousins, as they called each other, and since that day a ray of sunshine had stolen into Petronella's life, though she was almost afraid to cherish it, lest it should only be withdrawn again.