There was a long-drawn, shuddering breath, a fluttering of the eyelids, a movement of the limbs, and after that old Malakh lay quite still upon the stones. Once more St. George thrust his hand within the bosom of the loose robe, and the heart was beating rapidly and regularly and with amazing force. In a moment deep breaths succeeded one another, filling the breast of the unconscious man; but the eyelids did not unclose, and St. George took up the taper and bent to scan the quiet face.
St. George looked, and sank to his knees and looked again, holding the light now here, now there, and peering in growing bewilderment. What he saw he was wholly unable to define. It was as if a mask were slowly to dissolve and yet to lie upon the features which it had covered, revealing while it still made mock of concealing. Colour was in the lips, colour was stealing into the changed face. The changed face—changed, St. George could not tell how; and the longer he looked, and though he rubbed his eyes and turned them toward the dark and then looked again, moving the taper, he could neither explain nor define what had happened.
He set the candle on the floor and sprang away from the quiet figure, searching the dark. The great silent place, with its shoulders of sarcophagi jutting from the gloom was black save for the little ring of pallid light about that prostrate form. St. George sent his hand to his forehead, and shook himself a bit, and straightened his shoulders with a smile.
"It must be the stuff you've tasted," he addressed himself solemnly. "Heaven knows what it was. It's the stuff you've tasted."
Though he had barely touched his lips to the rock-crystal vase St. George's blood was pounding through his veins, and a curious exhilaration filled him. He looked about at the rims and corners of the tombs caught by the light, and he laughed a little—though this was not in the least what he intended—because it passed through his mind that if King Abibaal and Queen Mitygen, for example, might be treated with the contents of the mysterious vase they would no doubt come forth, Abibaal with memories of the Queen of Sheba in his eyes, and Queen Mitygen with her casket of Alexander's letters. Then St. George went down on his knees again, and raised the old man's head until it rested upon his own breast, and he passed the candle before his face, his hand trembling so that the light flickered and leaped up.
This time there was no mistaking. The tissues of old Malakh's ashen face and throat and pallid hands were undergoing some subtle transfiguration. It was as if new blood had come encroaching in their veins. It was as if the muscles were become firm and full, as if the wrinkled skin had been made smooth, the lips grown fresh, as if—the word came to St. George as he stared, spell-stricken—as if youth had returned.
St. George slipped down upon the stones and sat motionless. There was a little blue, forked vein on the man's forehead, and upon this he fastened his eyes, mechanically following it downward and back. Lines had crossed it, and there had been a deep cleft between the eyes, but these had disappeared, leaving the brow almost smooth. The cheeks were now tinged with colour, and the throat, where he had pulled aside the robe, showed firm and white. Mechanically St. George passed his hand along the inert arm, and it was no more withered than his own—the arm of no greybeard, but of a man in the prime of life. What did it mean—what did it mean? St. George waited, the blood throbbing in his temples, a mist before his eyes. What did it mean?
The minutes dragged by and still the unconscious man did not stir or unclose his eyes. From time to time St. George pressed his hand to the heart, and found it beating on rhythmically, powerfully. When he found himself sitting with averted head, as if he were afraid to look back at that changing face, a fear seized him that he had lost his reason and that what he imagined himself to see was a phase of madness. So he left the old man's side and sturdily tramped away into the huge dark of the room, resolutely explaining to himself that this was all very natural; the old man had been ill, improperly nourished, and the powerful stimulant of the wine had partly restored him. But even while he went over it St. George knew in his heart that what had happened was nothing that could be so explained, nothing that could be explained at all by anything within his ken.
His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath of the place smote his face as he moved. He stumbled on a displaced tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness. The taper rays struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock. St. George remembered a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries, coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air. It seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this ghost place. Back there, where the light glimmered beside the tomb of King Abibaal, nobody could tell what awaited him. If the man could change like this, might he not take on some shape too hideous to bear in the silence? St. George stood still, suddenly clenching his hands, trying to reach out through the dark and to grasp—himself, the self that seemed slipping away from him. But was he mad already, he wondered angrily, and hurried back to the far flickering light, stumbling, panting, not daring to look at the figure on the floor, not daring not to look.
He resolutely caught up the candle and peered once more at the face. As steadily and swiftly as change in the aspect of the sky the face had gone on changing. St. George had followed to the chamber an old tottering man; the figure before him was a man of not more than fifty years.