His hands lay
before him, white and helpless on the white coverlet of his bed. He
raised his eyes and saw de Crucis at his side. Then he began to
remember. There had been preceding intervals of consciousness, and in
one of them, in answer perhaps to some vaguely-uttered wish for light
and air, he had been carried out of the palace and the city to the
Benedictine monastery on its wooded knoll beyond the Piana. Then the
veil had dropped again, and his spirit had wandered in a dim place of
shades. There was a faint sweetness in coming back at last to familiar
sights and sounds. They no longer hurt like pressure on an aching nerve:
they seemed rather, now, the touch of a reassuring hand.
As the contact with life became closer and more sustained he began to
watch himself curiously, wondering what instincts and habits of thought
would survive his long mental death. It was with a bitter, almost
pitiable disappointment that he found the old man growing again in him.
Life, with a mocking hand, brought him the cast-off vesture of his past,
and he felt himself gradually compressed again into the old passions and
prejudices. Yet he wore them with a difference--they were a cramping
garment rather than a living sheath. He had brought back from his lonely
voyagings a sense of estrangement deeper than any surface-affinity with
things.
As his physical strength returned, and he was able to leave his room and
walk through the long corridors to the outer air, he felt the old spell
which the life of Monte Cassino had cast on him.
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