A Spectre of Power by Mary Noailles Murfree

THE moment that Laroche was recalled to life was never very accurately defined in his mind, so gradually did a full consciousness return. Nor was he sure how entirely delirium had held him in its delusions. His speculations were of a metaphysical tendency when he afterward dwelt, with a microscopic scrutiny, upon those phenomena of involved cerebral processes manifested in the sudden silencing of the French words upon his dreaming tongue, as it vaguely shaped the confused thoughts of a stupefied brain, -- all upon one coherent impulse, on the sound of an English phrase spoken in an English voice!

That salutary monition abode with him, whether he slept, whether he waked, whether he lay in that dim border world of swoons between sleeping and waking. He was stricken dumb, although he could hardly be said to have heard, for he consciously heard naught. And if, he argued, these perceptions could have been so alert to the mere vocal vibrations of the air, the instinct of danger so keenly receptive, the will so strangely responsive to the demands of those supersubtle, unclassified faculties, although every voluntary function of the muscles lay prostrate, and every recognized process of the brain was paralyzed, did not this imply some curious duality of identity, an absolute independence of the intellectual life, unrelated to the bodily functions, since so complete a solution of continuity had supervened? It might have been that, though he accounted himself a mere blunt soldier and upbraided his mismanagement that had jeopardized the interests of the French mission, he was so complete a diplomat at heart that he could withhold with a nerveless hand, hear with a deaf ear, plot albeit with a swooning brain, and hush the babblings of delirium to keep a secret, of which at the moment he had no consciousness!