His eyes were blazing with joy
and with emotion. And Valentine seemed still to be informed with a
curious, serpentine lassitude. The life seemed to be only very gently
running again over his body, creeping from the centre, from the heart, to
the extremities, gradually growing in the eyes, stronger and stronger, a
dawn of life in a full-grown man. Dr. Levillier had never seen anything
quite like it before. There was something violently unnatural about it,
he thought, yet he could not say what. He could only stand by the broad
couch, fascinated by the spectacle under his gaze. Once he had read a
tale of the revivifying of a mummy in a museum. That might have been like
this; or the raising of Lazarus. The streams of strength almost visibly
trickled through Valentine's veins. And this new life was so vigorous,
so alert. It was as if during his strange sleep Valentine had been
carpentering his energies, polishing his powers, setting the temple
of his soul in order, gaining almost a ruthlessness from rest. He
stretched his limbs now as an athlete might stretch them to win the full
consciousness of their muscular force. When the doctor took hold of his
hand to feel his pulse the hand was hard and tense like iron, the fingers
gripped for a moment like thin bands of steel, and the life in the blue
eyes bounded, raced, swirled as water swirls in a mill-stream.
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