Tithonus

Mr. Adderley thought he knew French very well, through books, but the language he spoke was
not available, and he soon fell into a state of bewilderment rather
hard on his pupil, who, though a very good boy, and crammed very
full of learning, was still nothing more than a lad of eighteen in
all matters of prudence and discretion.

Lord Walwyn was, as we have seen, one of those whose Church
principles had altered very little and very gradually; and in the
utter diversity of practice that prevailed in the early years of
Queen Elizabeth, his chaplain as well as the rector of the parish
had altered no more than was absolutely enjoined of the old
ceremonial. If the poor Baron de Ribaumont had ever been well
enough to go to church on a Sunday, he would perhaps have thought
himself still in the realms of what he considered as darkness; but
as he had never openly broken with the Gallic Church, Berenger had
gone at once from mass at Leurre to the Combe Walwyn service.
Therefore when he spent a Sunday at Rouen, and attended a Calvinist
service in the building that the Huguenots were permitted outside
the town, he was much disappointed in it; he thought its very
fervour familiar and irreverent, and felt himself much more at home
in the cathedral into which he strayed in the afternoon. And, on
the Sunday he was at Leurre, he went, as a part of his old home-
habits, to mass at the old round-arched church, where he and
Eustacie had played each other so many teasing tricks at his
mother's feet, and had received so many admonitory nips and strokes
of her fan. All he saw there was not congenial to him, but he
liked it vastly better than the Huguenot meeting, and was not
prepared to understand or enter into Mr. Adderley's vexation, when
the tutor assured him that the reverent gestures that came
naturally to him were regarded by the Protestants as idolatry, and
that he would be viewed as a recreants from his faith. All Mr.
Adderley hoped was that no one would hear of it: and in this he
felt himself disappointed, when, in the midst of his lecture, there
walked into the room a little, withered, brown, dark-eyed man, in a
gorgeous dress of green and gold, who doffing a hat with an
umbrageous plume, precipitated himself, as far as he could reach,
towards Berenger's neck, calling him fair cousin and dear baron.