"Nothing—a little nervous, that's all."
"Oh! you are not well," she went on, shaking her head. "Where do you feel ill?"
"Nowhere, mother. I am naturally a little upset."
But the unnatural and convulsive look in her son's face did not escape the maternal eye.
"How sorry I am that I sent you there! How wrong it was of me to send you."
"No, mother. Why? It was necessary, sooner or later."
And all at once, without the slightest confusion henceforth, he relived the frightful hour; he saw once more his father's gestures, heard once more his voice; he heard again his own voice, that voice so changed, which, contrary to all expectation, had uttered such grave words. It seemed to him he was a stranger to that action and these uttered words; and nevertheless, at the bottom of his soul, he felt a sort of obscure remorse; he felt something akin to an instinctive consciousness of having passed beyond bounds, of having committed an irreparable transgression, of having trampled under foot something human and sacred. Why had he departed with such violence from the great, calm resignation with which the funereal image of Demetrius had inspired him, when it had appeared to him in the midst of the silent country? Why had he not persisted in considering with the same painful and clairvoyant pity the baseness and ignominy of that man upon whom, as upon all other men, weighed an invincible destiny? And he himself, he who carried that blood in his veins, did he not also bear, perhaps, at the bottom of his substance, all the latent germs of those abominable vices? If he continued to live, did not he, too, risk falling into a similar abjection? And then, all the cholers, all the hates, all the violences, all the punishments, appeared to him to be unjust and useless. Life was a heavy fermentation of impure matters. He believed he felt that in his substance he had a thousand forces, occult, unrecognizable, and indestructible, whose progressive and fatal evolution had made up his existence up to then, and would make up his future existence, if it had not happened precisely that his will had to obey one of these forces that now imposed on him the supreme action. "In short, why regret what I did yesterday? Could I have prevented myself from doing it?"
"It was necessary," he repeated, with a new signification, as if speaking to himself.
And he sat a spectator, lucid and attentive, at the unrolling of the little of the life that remained for him to live.
CHAPTER IX.