“The supper bell has just sounded.”
Retiring for one moment to wipe off the sweat and dust of the road, our youth entered the “refectory,” as they called it at that house.
It was indeed to all appearance a monastic house—within a room, wainscotted with dark oak, nine or ten grave old men sat on each side of the board, and at the head sat Sir Walter Trevannion; all present wore the dress of the Benedictine order, which, banished from the stately abbeys founded for the exercise of its splendid worship, lingered on by the charity of a few worthy knights or nobles in many a similar asylum, where, until death the poor brethren still kept up the exercise of their self-discipline.
To this, Henry had no objection, now that he had their money; for had not the statute of the six articles just declared that vows of celibacy were binding until death; a piece of cruel sarcasm, when everything which could render them tolerable, had been taken away, so far as the power of the crown extended.
During the supper, all were silent, while one of the brethren read a homily of S. Augustine; but the meal ended, Sir Walter beckoned to his son to follow him into the study.
But it is time that we drop the mask, and explain ourselves.
Cuthbert Trevannion, now so called, was our Cuthbert; Sir Walter was that Ambrose, the bearer of the ring, who had received him into his care, as related at the conclusion of the former part of this tale; where he had passed six eventful years: years which had witnessed the dastardly end of the life of the “malleus monachorum,” Cromwell;[28] the divorce of one queen, the execution of another, and had seen the tyrant pass into the last stage of his sanguinary reign—burning the Reformers, and butchering the Romanists who would not acknowledge his supremacy; the only tyrant upon record, who had the privilege of persecuting both sides at once.
The inn-keeper’s account of Sir Walter was true so far as it went; we will supply the necessary details.
He was the second son of Sir Arthur Trevannion, the head of an old Devonian family, but against the will of his father he had assumed the Benedictine habit, and become the Prior of the famous Abbey of Furness, in the far north, under the name of Ambrose, so that his father and he did not meet for many many years.
Under that name he became implicated in the rising called the Pilgrimage of Grace, and when his Abbey was dissolved found refuge abroad, where the news of his elder brother’s death reached him. It was then thought expedient that he should return home in the guise of a layman, where owing to the fact that he had taken the monastic vows under an assumed name, his identity with the Father Ambrose of Furness, proscribed by the government, was not suspected, and he was received by his father as a returned prodigal, fresh from abroad.