Chapter Five

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 w