‘You here? You here?’ he repeated. ‘How did you manage to come? Ah! your dress is damp.’

‘I love you,’ she answered, throwing her arms about his neck.

This first piece of daring successful, now every time Charles went out early Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe down the steps that led to the water-side.

But when the plank for the cows was taken up, she had to go by the walls alongside of the river; the bank was slippery; in order not to fall she caught hold of the tufts of faded wallflowers. Then she went across the ploughed fields, in which she sank, stumbling, and clogging her thin shoes. Her scarf, knotted round her head, fluttered to the wind in the meadows. She was afraid of the oxen; she began to run; she arrived out of breath, with rosy cheeks, and breathing out from her whole person a fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. At this hour Rodolphe still slept. It was like a spring morning coming into his room.

The yellow curtains along the windows let a heavy, whitish light enter softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her eyes, while the drops of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him, and pressed her to his breast.

Then she examined the apartment, opened the drawers of the tables, combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself in his shaving-glass. Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that lay on the table by the bed, amongst the lemons and pieces of sugar near a bottle of water.

It took them a good quarter of an hour to say goodbye. Then Emma cried. She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day, seeing her come unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out.

‘What is the matter with you?’ she said. ‘Are you ill? Tell me!’

At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming imprudent – that she was compromising herself.

10

Gradually Rodolphe’s fears took possession of her. At first, love had intoxicated her, and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house, she looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead.

One morning, as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the long barrel of a carbine apparently aimed at her. It stuck out sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes, trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for wild ducks.

‘You ought to have called out long ago!’ he exclaimed. ‘When you see a gun, you should always give warning.’

The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for a prefectorial order had prohibited duck-hunting except in boats, and Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them, and so every moment he expected to see the rural gendarme on the scene. But this anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he congratulated himself on his luck and acuteness.

At sight of Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once entered upon a conversation.

‘It isn’t warm; it’s nipping.’

Emma answered nothing. He went on – ‘And you’re out so early?’

‘Yes,’ she said stammering; ‘I am just coming from the nurse where my child is.’

‘Ah! capital! capital! For myself, I have been here, just as you see me, since break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless you have the bird at the mouth of the gun – ’

‘Good-day, Monsieur Binet,’ she interrupted him, turning on her heel.

‘Your servant, madame,’ he replied drily; and he went back into his tub.

Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he would form unfavourable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the worse possible excuse, everyone at Yonville knowing that the little Bovary had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one was living in this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet, then, would guess whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening racking her brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly before her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag.

Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of distraction, to take her to the chemist’s, and the first person she caught sight of in the shop was the tax-collector again. He was standing in front of the counter, lit up by the gleams of the red bottle, and was saying – ‘Please give me half an ounce of vitriol.’

‘Justin,’ cried the druggist, ‘bring us the sulphuric acid.’ Then to Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais’s room, ‘No, stay here; it isn’t worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor’ (for the chemist much enjoyed pronouncing the word ‘doctor,’ as if addressing another by it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). ‘Now, take care not to upset the mortars! You’d better fetch some chairs from the little room; you know very well that the armchairs are not to be taken out of the drawing-room.’

And to put his armchair back in its place he was darting away from the counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.

‘Sugar acid!’ said the chemist contemptuously, ‘don’t know it; I’m ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid, isn’t it?’

Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some copper-water with which to remove rust from his hunting things.

Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying – ‘Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp.’

‘Nevertheless,’ replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, ‘there are people who like it.’

She was stifling.

‘And give me – ’

‘Will he never go?’ thought she.

‘Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and three half-ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the polished leather of my togs.’

The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared, Irma in her arms, Napoléon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near her papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time to time were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.

‘And how’s the little woman?’ suddenly asked Madame Homais.

‘Silence!’ exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in his waste-book.

‘Why didn’t you bring her?’ she went on in a low voice.

‘Hush! hush!’ said Emma, pointing with her finger to the druggist.

But Binet, absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh.

‘How hard you are breathing!’ said Madame Homais.

‘Well, you see, it’s rather warm,’ she replied.

So the next day they talked over how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.

All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the gate, which Charles thought lost.

To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.

‘Come, now, Emma,’ he said, ‘it is time.’

‘Yes, I am coming,’ she answered.

Then, as the candles dazzled him, he turned to the wall and fell asleep. She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed.

Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden.

It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Léon had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought of him now.

The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations.