Valentine
indeed believed that he was dying, there in the darkness beside his
friend, and, impersonally as it seemed, something of him, his brain
perhaps, seemed to be floating high up, as a bird floats over the sea,
and listening, and noting all that he did in this crisis. This attentive
spirit heard a strange movement of his soul in its bodily prison, heard
his soul stir, as if waking out of sleep, heard it shift, and rise up
slowly, noted its pause of hesitation. Then, as the vitality of the body
ebbed lower, there grew in the soul an excitement that aspired like a
leaping flame. It was as if a madman, prisoned in his narrow cell in a
vast asylum, secluded with his company of phantoms, heard the crackling
of the fire that devoured his habitation, and was stirred into an
ignorant and yet tumultuous passion. As the madman, with a childish,
increasing uneasiness, awed by the sinuous approach of the unseen fire,
might pace to and fro, round and round about his cell, so it seemed to
this poised, watching faculty of Valentine that his soul wandered in
its confined cell of the body, at first with the cushioned softness
of an animal, moving mechanically, driven by an endless and unmeaning
restlessness, then with an increasing energy, a fervour, a crescendo of
endeavour.
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