It was the voice of his mother, who was knocking at the door.
"Is it you, mother? Come in."
She entered, approached the bed with affectionate eagerness, leaned over him, placed a hand on his forehead, and asked:
"How do you feel? Any better?"
"A little. I'm still dizzy—I have a bitter taste in my mouth. I should like a drink."
"Camille is going to bring you up a cup of milk. Shall I open the windows more?"
"Just as you like, mother."
His voice was changed. His mother's presence aroused in him that sentiment of pity for himself which had given birth to the imaginary picture of funereal regrets, the time for which he believed was close at hand. In his mind, the actuality of his mother opening the windows became identified with the imaginary action which would bring about the terrible discovery; and his eyes grew moist with commiseration for himself and for the poor woman whom he destined to receive such a cruel blow; and the tragic scene appeared before him with all the distinctness of a thing actually seen: his mother, a little frightened, turns round in the light, calls him again by name; trembling, she approaches the bed, touches him, shakes him, finds his body inert, cold, rigid; and then she falls, fainting, prostrate over his corpse. "Perhaps dead. Such a shock might kill her." And his anxiety increased; and the moment seemed solemn to him, like all that is final; and his mother's appearance, actions, and words assumed in his eyes such an unusual signification and value that he followed them with almost anxious attention. Drawn suddenly from his spiritual torpor, he had just recovered an extraordinarily active consciousness of life. There reappeared in him a well-known phenomenon, the singularity of which had often attracted his attention. It was an instantaneous passage from one state of consciousness to another; between the new state and the anterior state there was the same difference as exists between waking and slumber, and that recalled to his mind the sudden change produced in the theatre when the footlights are unexpectedly turned up and project their strongest light.
So, as on the day of the funeral, the son gazed on his mother with eyes that were no longer the same, and saw her as he had seen her then, with strange lucidity. He felt that this woman's life was brought closer to, became connected with as if adherent to, his own life; he felt the mysterious relation of the blood, and the affliction of the fate which menaced them both. And when his mother came close to him again and sat down by his bedside, he raised himself a little on his pillow, took one of her hands, tried to dissimulate his agitation by a smile. Under the pretext of looking at the cameo of a ring, he examined the long and thin hand, to which each particularity imparted an extraordinary expression of life and whose contact caused him a sensation resembling no other. His soul still enveloped in the gloomy images recently evoked, he thought: "When I am dead, when she touches me, when she feels the icy—" And he shuddered as he remembered his own aversion to touching a corpse.
"What's the matter?" asked his mother.