He was blind to the villages,
clambering over cliffs to a casino, a _plage_, and a Hotel des Bains, or
nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque
wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had
once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was
blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a
still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties
only when the chauffeur turned and said:
"Voila, monsieur--voila le chateau de madame la marquise."
If it was possible for Davenant's heart to leap and sink in the same
instant, it did it then. It leaped at the sight of this white and rose
castle, with its towers and donjon and keep; it sank at the thought that
he, poor old unpretentious Peter Davenant, with no social or personal
passports of any kind, must force his way over drawbridge and beneath
portcullis--or whatever else might be the method of entering a feudal
pile--into the presence of the chatelaine whose abode here must be that
of some legendary princess, and bend her to his will. Stray memories
came to him of Siegfrieds and Prince Charmings, with a natural gift for
this sort of thing, but only to make his own appearance in the role the
more absurd.
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