A youth came riding towards a palace gate,

And from the palace came a child of sin

And took him by the curls and led him in!

Where sat a company with heated eyes.

Tennyson, A VISION OF SIN

It was in the month of June that Berenger de Ribaumont first came

in sight of Paris. His grandfather had himself begun by taking him

to London and presenting him to Queen Elizabeth, from whom the

lad's good mien procured him a most favourable reception.

She willingly promised that on which Lord Walwyn's heart was set,

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namely, that his title and rank should be continued to his

grandson; and an ample store of letter of recommendation to Sir

Francis Walsingham, the Ambassador, and all others who could be of

service in the French court, were to do their utmost to provide him

with a favourable reception there.

Then, with Mr. Adderley and four or five servants, he had crossed

the Channel, and had gone first to Chateau Leurre, where he was

rapturously welcomed by the old steward Osbert. The old man had

trained up his son Landry, Berenger's foster-brother, to become his

valet, and had him taught all the arts of hair-dressing and surgery

that were part of the profession of a gentleman's body-servant; and

the youth, a smart, acuter young Norman, became a valuable addition

to the suite, the guidance of which, through a foreign country,

their young master did not find very easy.

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.




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