The neighbors came to the windows to see their doctor’s
new wife.
The old servant presented herself, curtsied to her,
apologised for not having dinner ready, and suggested
that madame, in the meantime, should look over her
house.
The brick front was just in a line with the street,
or rather the road. Behind the door hung a cloak
with a small collar, a bridle, and a black leather
cap, and on the floor, in a corner, were a pair of
leggings, still covered with dry mud. On the
right was the one apartment, that was both dining
and sitting room. A canary yellow paper, relieved
at the top by a garland of pale flowers, was puckered
everywhere over the badly stretched canvas; white
calico curtains with a red border hung crossways at
the length of the window; and on the narrow mantelpiece
a clock with a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent
between two plate candlesticks under oval shades.
On the other side of the passage was Charles’s
consulting room, a little room about six paces wide,
with a table, three chairs, and an office chair.
Volumes of the “Dictionary of Medical Science,”
uncut, but the binding rather the worse for the successive
sales through which they had gone, occupied almost
along the six shelves of a deal bookcase.
The smell of melted butter penetrated through the
walls when he saw patients, just as in the kitchen
one could hear the people coughing in the consulting
room and recounting their histories.
Then, opening on the yard, where the stable was, came
a large dilapidated room with a stove, now used as
a wood-house, cellar, and pantry, full of old rubbish,
of empty casks, agricultural implements past service,
and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible
to guess.
The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud
walls with espaliered apricots, to a hawthorn hedge
that separated it from the field. In the middle
was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal; four flower
beds with eglantines surrounded symmetrically the
more useful kitchen garden bed. Right at the
bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a cure in plaster
reading his breviary.
Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished,
but in the second, which was their bedroom, was a
mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red drapery.
A shell box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the
secretary near the window a bouquet of orange blossoms
tied with white satin ribbons stood in a bottle.
It was a bride’s bouquet; it was the other one’s.
She looked at it. Charles noticed it; he took
it and carried it up to the attic, while Emma seated
in an arm-chair (they were putting her things down
around her) thought of her bridal flowers packed up
in a bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be
done with them if she were to die.
During the first days she occupied herself in thinking
about changes in the house. She took the shades
off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper put up, the
staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round
the sundial; she even inquired how she could get a
basin with a jet fountain and fishes. Finally
her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out,
picked up a second-hand dogcart, which, with new lamps
and splashboard in striped leather, looked almost
like a tilbury.
