Grenville's house of Stow. The penal laws never troubled him; for, in
the first place, they never troubled any one who did not make conspiracy
and rebellion an integral doctrine of his religious creed; and next,
they seldom troubled even them, unless, fired with the glory of
martyrdom, they bullied the long-suffering of Elizabeth and her council
into giving them their deserts, and, like poor Father Southwell in
after years, insisted on being hanged, whether Burleigh liked or not.
Moreover, in such a no-man's-land and end-of-all-the-earth was that old
house at Moorwinstow, that a dozen conspiracies might have been hatched
there without any one hearing of it; and Jesuits and seminary priests
skulked in and out all the year round, unquestioned though unblest; and
found a sort of piquant pleasure, like naughty boys who have crept
into the store-closet, in living in mysterious little dens in a lonely
turret, and going up through a trap-door to celebrate mass in a secret
chamber in the roof, where they were allowed by the powers that were to
play as much as they chose at persecuted saints, and preach about hiding
in dens and caves of the earth. For once, when the zealous parson
of Moorwinstow, having discovered (what everybody knew already) the
existence of "mass priests and their idolatry" at Chapel House, made
formal complaint thereof to Sir Richard, and called on him, as the
nearest justice of the peace, to put in force the act of the fourteenth
of Elizabeth, that worthy knight only rated him soundly for a
fantastical Puritan, and bade him mind his own business, if he wished
not to make the place too hot for him; whereon (for the temporal
authorities, happily for the peace of England, kept in those days
a somewhat tight hand upon the spiritual ones) the worthy parson
subsided,--for, after all, Mr. Thomas Leigh paid his tithes regularly
enough,--and was content, as he expressed it, to bow his head in the
house of Rimmon like Naaman of old, by eating Mr. Leigh's dinners
as often as he was invited, and ignoring the vocation of old Father
Francis, who sat opposite to him, dressed as a layman, and calling
himself the young gentleman's pedagogue.

But the said birds of ill-omen had a very considerable lien on the
conscience of poor Mr. Thomas Leigh, the father of Eustace, in the form
of certain lands once belonging to the Abbey of Hartland. He more than
half believed that he should be lost for holding those lands; but he did
no