Page 456 - madame-bovary

throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at last a moment
when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on Rodol-
phe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon
the same look of weary lassitude came back to his face.
‘I don’t blame you,’ he said.
Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands,
went on in a broken voice, and with the resigned accent of
infinite sorrow—
‘No, I don’t blame you now.’
He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever
made—
‘It is the fault of fatality!’
Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the re-
mark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even,
and a little mean.
The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the
arbour. Rays of light were straying through the trellis, the
vine leaves threw their shadows on the sand, the jasmines
perfumed the air, the heavens were blue, Spanish flies
buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was suffocat-
ing like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled
his aching heart.
At seven o’clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all
the afternoon, went to fetch him to dinner.
His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes
closed, his mouth open, and in his hand was a long tress of
black hair.
‘Come along, papa,’ she said.
And thinking he wanted to play; she pushed him gently.