The hidden treasure

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

At home, she was only little Anne Lucas, petted, indeed, by her father and Cicely (who came to rule the house after Dame Lucas' death), and indulged in all reasonable matters; but not considered as of any great weight in the family, and now and then set down very gently indeed, but decidedly, by her father, when she transgressed the rules considered proper for the guidance of young women at home. It was no great wonder that with her disposition, she liked the convent best, and quite decided to make a profession when she was old enough.

Then came the death of the old confessor, who loved ease and comfort himself and had no disposition to deny it to other people, and the advent of Father Barnaby, who never spared himself, nor anybody else. The old nuns grumbled, and the prioress now and then rebelled, and successfully too, for she was a woman of spirit and ability and had no notion of being made a cipher in her own house; but the younger sisters, with only few exceptions, were enthusiastic partisans of Father Barnaby, and none more so than Anne. No service was too long for her, no penance too severe. She was bent upon becoming a saint on Father Barnaby's pattern, and the confessor encouraged her in the idea. All this helped to keep alive in her mind the idea of her own superiority. She was a good deal shaken indeed by the incident of her friend's disgrace and disappearance, and for a little time she was thoroughly humbled in her own eyes; but the penances she enjoined upon herself with a view of expiating her own offence and that of her friend, seemed to build her up once more in her own self-esteem. These penances she continued, as we have seen, in her father's house when she was sent home to remain for a year before taking the veil.

Her father with his bustling business habits, his love of moderate good cheer, and his perhaps too outspoken contempt and dislike for the monks and the religious houses generally, was a mere worldly-minded scoffer in her eyes; Cousin Cicely, whose whole life had been one long self-abnegation, but who could hardly read, and write not at all, was a mere housewife fit for nothing but her kitchen and her store-rooms; and Jack was but an insignificant chit of a boy, to be patronized and brought into the right way by his sister's influence. Jack was to become a priest, and perhaps be a bishop, while she was abbess of some great religious house (for already her ambitions soared far beyond the little sisterhood at Nunwood), and he was to owe all to her influence and direction.

It was a great shock to this fine castle in the air, when Jack utterly refused to leave Sir William Leavett's church and teachings for the spiritual guide she had selected for him. Jack declared that Sir William was a good man and kind to him; that he loved him dearly, and would not leave him for any of the fathers at the convent; and his father sustained him in his refusal, adding that in his opinion, Anne would do well to consult Sir William herself.

Anne had performed many "humbling" penances to perfect her in humility, but, strange to say, when it came to a real contradiction, these penances did not seem to help her in the least. She was as angry at Jack for presuming to have an opinion of his own, as if she had never kissed the feet of the sisters or knelt on the floor while they were at dinner.

But the vexation she had felt at Jack for refusing to be governed by her in the matter of a confessor was nothing to the anger which she felt against him at present. Jack presuming to read and decide for himself; pretending to have a higher standard than her own, and above all attempting to instruct her; Jack telling her that all her penances, her enforced works of charity, her bed of boards and ashes, her fasts and vigils, were all worthless and worse than worthless, and that he—he, a schoolboy, and three years younger than herself—had discovered a better and safer way! Anne had always found it hard to have any charity or toleration for those who differed from her, but this was the worst of all.

But this was not all. There was a deeper cause for her disquiet than wounded self-love. Anne had told the truth when she said that she had found it hard to forget the words she had heard from Agnes Harland. They had indeed rung in her ears for days, and a voice in her heart constantly made answer to them, "These things are true! They are no delusion—no modern invention. They are true, and if so all my belief hitherto has been false, all my sanctity wherein I have trusted and for which I have received honor of men is built on a false foundation."

For days and weeks these and such like thoughts tormented her. She confessed them to Father Barnaby; she performed with punctilious accuracy the penances he laid upon her; she tried with all her might to overcome her affection for poor Agnes, and to believe what Father Barnaby told her, that her betrayal of her friend's confidence to him had been a virtue and not a piece of base treachery. She did in some measure quiet her conscience and mind, and recover her self-complacency, by such means; but there yet lingered in the depths of her heart, an uneasy feeling that all was not right with her; that Agnes might after all have been a martyr for truth instead of a stubborn heretic.

She had not intended to tell Father Barnaby of what Jack had said about wanting to read the Bible; but, as Thomas Sprat had once said, she was as wax in the hands of her confessor. The clergy had begun to be exceedingly jealous on the subject of the Scriptures, already spreading among the common people, and to watch on all sides for the least indication of heretical opinions. Anne came away from her confession trying to think that she had done her duty to her brother, though she well knew to what her confession might lead. She felt that she had betrayed her brother's confidence, and it was this which made her so shy of him when he came home from Holford. Still, she said to herself she had done her duty, she had disregarded the ties of the flesh, as she had been told she was bound to do; and if she was made wretched thereby, why, there was only so much the more merit in the action, and that was some comfort.

Just as she had succeeded in attaining some degree of quietness, came Jack, determined to arrive at an explanation, full of the earnestness of a thorough religious conviction, and roused in her heart again all the old rebellious misgivings. In vain, did she strive to forget what he had said. It rung in her ears by night and day. The ghost, which had never been quite laid, came back to haunt her more constantly than ever, with the old whisper, "It is true. It is all true; and with all your efforts you have not made one step toward true holiness; because you have been walking in the wrong direction. You are a miserable sinner, not one whit better, not so good as these people you have been looking down upon all your life."