“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.