CHAPTER XXVI: CHATEAU VILLEBECQ
There came into view a shining white mansion, massive, square-looking, three-storied, pierced with high windows and covered like a mosaic with newly-painted white Venetian shutters. A dream-house, gleaming against a background of fresh greensward and dark yew-trees. "It is not real," I said half-aloud, and mystery banished disappointment. For I had pictured battlements, towers, drawbridges: had thought that "château" meant "castle."
Nothing that day had been quite real. Perhaps it was the hot spring weather. Or the over-wideawakeness that followed a sleepless night—ah, Channel steamboat, stirrings of body and soul, desperate illness creating more desperate resolves to be good, prayers of "Not this time, God, and I'll be pure, holy!" renewed with each sickening lurch. Or the inevitable first-day mystery of the foreign land.
I had been met at Havre quay-side by a silent crafty little man in black, with a face like Punch and a head (when with un-English gesture he removed his hat) as smooth and bald as an egg.
"I am François," was all he vouchsafed.
I addressed him in French; he did not seem to understand, shook his head vaguely and made no reply. A ridiculous fear seized me that I did not know French at all, that Miss le Mesurier's lessons had been one mighty sham, false lessons in some goblin tongue.
Or was I dreaming? All the way along the busy quay, amid clamouring porters, gesticulating cabmen, and marionette-like crowds, through unfamiliar streets, and in an unbelievable railway train, a sense of dreaming had persisted.
The carriage drew up in front of the great doorway. François, by signs, explained that he was entrusted with my luggage. A little woman came out on to the steps of the porch to greet me, smiling ingratiatingly. She was a tiny, shrivelled thing, with bulgy eyes and a high receding forehead ridged with careworn lines, the whole dominated by an enormous nose: a human dormouse dressed in black. Despite its harassed air, the face was kind; her age might be fifty. The housekeeper, I surmised. She shook hands effusively.