Chapter 9 - Page 2

his last thought to relinquish.

The early charges impressed on him by his grandmother, had been
instilled into a mind and memory of a character peculiarly tenacious.
Child as he was, he was proud of the confidence reposed in his
discretion, and resolved to show that it had not been rashly intrusted
to him. At the same time, his resolution was no more than that of a
child, and must, necessarily, have gradually faded away under the
operation both of precept and example, during his residence at the
Castle of Avenel, but for the exhortations of Father Ambrose, who, in
his lay estate, had been called Edward Glendinning. This zealous monk
had been apprized, by an unsigned letter placed in his hand by a
pilgrim, that a child educated in the Catholic faith was now in the
Castle of Avenel, perilously situated, (so was the scroll expressed,)
as ever the three children who were cast into the fiery furnace of
persecution. The letter threw upon Father Ambrose the fault, should
this solitary lamb, unwillingly left within the demesnes of the
prowling wolf, become his final prey. There needed no farther
exhortation to the monk than the idea that a soul might be endangered,
and that a Catholic might become an apostate; and he made his visits
more frequent than usual to the castle of Avenel, lest, through want
of the private encouragement and instruction which he always found
some opportunity of dispensing, the church should lose a proselyte,
and, according to the Romish creed, the devil acquire a soul.

Still these interviews were rare; and though they encouraged the
solitary boy to keep his secret and hold fast his religion, they were
neither frequent nor long enough to inspire him with any thing beyond
a blind attachment to the observances which the priest recommended. He
adhered to the forms of his religion rather because he felt it would
be dishonourable to change that of his fathers, than from any rational
conviction or sincere belief of its mysterious doctrines. It was a
principal part of the distinction which, in his own opinion, singled
him out from those with whom he lived, and gave him an additional,
though an internal and concealed reason, for contemning those of the
household who showed an undisguised dislike of him, and for hardening
himself against the instructions of the chaplain, Henry Warden.

"The fanatic preacher," he thought within himself, during some one of
the chaplain's frequent discourses against the Church of Rome, "he
little knows whose ears are receiving his profane doctrine, and with
what contempt and abhorrence they hear his blasphemies against the
holy religion by which kings have been crowned, and for which martyrs
have died!"

But in such proud