They heard in the passage the sharp noise of a wooden leg on the boards.
It was Hippolyte bringing back Emma's luggage. In order to put it down
he described painfully a quarter of a circle with his stump.
"He doesn't even remember any more about it," she thought, looking at
the poor devil, whose coarse red hair was wet with perspiration.
Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and
without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him
in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified
reproach to his incurable incapacity.
"Hallo! you've a pretty bouquet," he said, noticing Leon's violets on
the chimney.
"Yes," she replied indifferently; "it's a bouquet I bought just now from
a beggar."
Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears,
against them, smelt them delicately.
She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water.
The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept much.
Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared. The following day
they had a talk over the mourning. They went and sat down with their
workboxes by the waterside under the arbour.
Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much
affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little
about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst
days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the
instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst
she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a
moment. Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since
they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and
not having eyes enough to gaze upon each other. She tried to recall the
slightest details of that past day. But the presence of her husband and
mother-in-law worried her. She would have liked to hear nothing, to see
nothing, so as not to disturb the meditation on her love, that, do what
she would, became lost in external sensations.
She was unpicking the lining of a dress, and the strips were scattered
around her. Madame Bovary senior was plying her scissor without looking
up, and Charles, in his list slippers and his old brown surtout that he
used as a dressing-gown, sat with both hands in his pockets, and did not
speak either; near them Berthe, in a little white pinafore, was raking
sand in the walks with her spade. Suddenly she saw Monsieur Lheureux,
the linendraper, come in through the gate.