She remained standing, leaning with her shoulder against the wainscot.
“The doctor is not here?” he went on.
“He is out.” She repeated, “He is out.”
Then there was silence.
They looked at one another and their thoughts, confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two throbbing breasts.
“I should like to kiss Berthe,” said Leon.
Emma went down a few steps and called Felicite.
He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the decorations, the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away everything.
But she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was swinging a windmill roof downwards at the end of a string.
Leon kissed her several times on the neck.
“Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear little one! good-bye!”
And he gave her back to her mother.
“Take her away,” she said.
They remained alone—Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed against a window-pane; Leon held his cap in his hand, knocking it softly against his thigh.
“It is going to rain,” said Emma.
“I have a cloak,” he answered.
“Ah!”
She turned around, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward. The light fell on it as on a piece of marble, to the curve of the eyebrows, without one’s being able to guess what Emma was seeing on the horizon or what she was thinking within herself.
“Well, good-bye,” he sighed.
She raised her head with a quick movement.
“Yes, good-bye—go!”
They advanced towards each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated.
“In the English fashion, then,” she said, giving her own hand wholly to him, and forcing a laugh.
Leon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being seemed to pass down into that moist palm.
Then he opened his hand; their eyes met again, and he disappeared.
When he reached the market-place, he stopped and hid behind a pillar to look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds.
He thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it, slowly opened its long oblique folds that spread out with a single movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall.
Leon set off running.
From afar he saw his employer’s gig in the road, and by it a man in a coarse apron holding the horse.
Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were talking.
They were waiting for him.
“Embrace me,” said the druggist with tears in his eyes. “Here is your coat, my good friend.
Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after yourself.”
“Come, Leon, jump in,” said the notary.
Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs uttered these three sad words—
“A pleasant journey!”
“Good-night,” said Monsieur Guillaumin. “Give him his head.”
They set out, and Homais went back.
Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and watched the clouds.
They gathered around the sunset on the side of Rouen and then swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great rays of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy, while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain.
But a gust of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered against the green leaves.
Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows shook their wings in the damp thickets, and the pools of water on the gravel as they flowed away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia.
“Ah! how far off he must be already!” she thought.
Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner.
“Well,” said he, “so we’ve sent off our young friend!”
“So it seems,” replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair; “Any news at home?”
“Nothing much.
Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon.
You know women—a nothing upsets them, especially my wife.
And we should be wrong to object to that, since their nervous organization is much more malleable than ours.”