Then gently, and almost as caressing her, he passed his hand over her stomach. She uttered a sharp cry. He fell back terror-stricken.
Then she began to groan, faintly at first. Her shoulders were shaken by a strong shuddering, and she was growing paler than the sheets in which her clenched fingers buried themselves. Her unequal pulse was now almost imperceptible.
Drops of sweat oozed from her bluish face, that seemed as if rigid in the exhalations of a metallic vapour. Her teeth chattered, her dilated eyes looked vaguely about her, and to all questions she replied only with a shake of the head; she even smiled once or twice. Gradually, her moaning grew louder; a hollow shriek burst from her; she pretended she was better and that she would get up presently. But she was seized with convulsions and cried out – ‘Oh, God! It’s horrible!’
He threw himself on his knees by her bed.
‘What have you been eating? Tell me! Answer, for heaven’s sake!’
And he looked at her with such tenderness in his eyes as she had never seen.
‘Well, there – there!’ she said in a faint voice. He flew to the writing-table, tore open the seal, and read aloud: ‘Accuse no one.’ He stopped, passed his hands across his eyes, and read it over again.
‘What! help – help!’
He could only keep repeating the word: ‘Poisoned! poisoned!’ Félicité ran to Homais, who proclaimed it in the marketplace; Madame Lefrançois heard it at the Lion d’Or; some got up to go and tell their neighbours, and all night the village was on the alert.
Distraught, faltering, reeling, Charles wandered about the room. He knocked against the furniture, tore his hair, and the chemist had never believed that there could be so terrible a sight.
He went home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to Doctor Larivière. He lost his head, and made more than fifteen rough copies. Hippolyte went to Neufchâtel, and Justin so spurred Bovary’s horse that he left it foundered and three parts dead by the hill at Bois-Guillaume.
Charles tried to look up his medical dictionary, but could not read it; the lines were dancing.
‘Be calm,’ said the druggist; ‘we have only to administer a powerful antidote. What is the poison?’
Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic.
‘Very well,’ said Homais, ‘we must make an analysis.’
For he knew that in cases of poisoning an analysis must be made; and the other, who did not understand, answered – ‘Oh, do anything! save her!’
Then going back to her, he sank upon the carpet, and lay there with his head leaning against the edge of her bed; sobbing.
‘Don’t cry,’ she said to him. ‘Soon I shall not trouble you any more.’
‘Why was it? Who drove you to it?’
She replied. ‘It had to be, my dear!’
‘Weren’t you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!’
‘Yes, that is true – you are good – you.’
And she pressed her hand slowly over his hair. The sweetness of this sensation deepened his sadness; he felt his whole being dissolving in despair at the thought that he must lose her, just when she was confessing more love for him than ever. And he could think of nothing; he did not know, he did not dare; the urgent need for some immediate resolution gave the finishing stroke to the turmoil of his mind.
So she had done, she thought, with all the treachery, and meanness, and numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying away.
‘Bring me the child,’ she said, raising herself on her elbow.
‘You are not worse, are you?’ asked Charles.
‘No, no!’
Solemn and still half-asleep, the child was carried in on the servant’s arm in her long white nightgown, her bare feet peeping out. She looked wondering at the disordered room, and screwed up her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning on the table. They reminded her, no doubt, of the morning of New Year’s day and Mid-Lent, when thus awakened early by candlelight she came to her mother’s bed to fetch her presents, for she began saying – ‘But where is it, mamma?’ And as everybody was silent, ‘But I can’t see my little stocking.’
Félicité held her over the bed while she still kept looking towards the mantelpiece.
‘Has nurse taken it?’ she asked.
And at this name, that carried her back to the memory of her adulteries and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned away her head, as at the loathing of another bitterer poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe remained perched on the bed.
‘Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you are! how hot you are!’
Her mother looked at her. ‘I am frightened!’ cried the child, recoiling.
Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled.
‘That will do. Take her away,’ cried Charles, who was sobbing in the alcove.
Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed less agitated; and at every insignificant word, at every respiration a little more easy, he regained hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his arms.
‘Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See! look at her.’
His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he said of himself, ‘never beating about the bush,’ he prescribed an emetic in order to empty the stomach completely.
Before long she was vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string nearly breaking.
Then she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, railed at it, and implored it to be quick, and her stiffened arms thrust away everything that Charles, in a worse agony than herself, tried to make her drink. He stood up, weeping, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling sound in his throat, and choked by sobs that shook his whole body. Félicité was running hither and thither in the room. Homais stood motionless, giving vent to great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, still retaining his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy.
