Fantasy fiction; Near-death experiences -- Fiction; Religious fiction; Spiritual life -- Fiction
I learnt many strange and beautiful secrets of the human heart in those
days: what the dreams of womanhood are--how wholly different from the
dreams of man, in which there is always a combative element. The soul of
Cynthia was like a silent cleft among the hills, which waits, in its own
still content, until the horn of the shepherd winds the notes of a chord
in the valley below; and then the cleft makes answer and returns an airy
echo, blending the notes into a harmony of dulcet utterance. And she
too, I doubt not, learnt something from my soul, which was eager and
inventive enough, but restless and fugitive of purpose. And then there
came a further joy to us. That which is fatherly and motherly in the
world below is not a thing that is lost in heaven; and just as the love
of man and woman can draw down and imprison a soul in a body of flesh,
so in heaven the dear intention of one soul to another brings about a
yearning, which grows day by day in intensity, for some further outlet
of love and care.
It was one quiet misty morning that, as we sat together in tranquil
talk, we heard faltering steps within our garden. We had seen, let me
say, very little of the other inhabitants of our valley. We had
sometimes seen a pair of figures wandering at a distance, and we had
even met neighbours and exchanged a greeting. But the valley had no
social life of its own, and no one ever seemed, so far as we knew, to
enter any other dwelling, though they met in quiet friendliness. Cynthia
went to the door and opened it; then she darted out, and, just when I
was about to follow, she returned, leading by the hand a tiny child, who
looked at us with an air of perfect contentment and simplicity.
"Where on earth has this enchanting baby sprung from?" said Cynthia,
seating the child upon her lap, and beginning to talk to it in a
strangely unintelligible language, which the child appeared to
understand perfectly.
I laughed. "Out of our two hearts, perhaps," I said. At which Cynthia
blushed, and said that I did not understand or care for children. She
added that men's only idea about children was to think how much they
could teach them.
"Yes," I said, "we will begin lessons to-morrow, and go on to the Latin
Grammar very shortly."
At which Cynthia folded the child in her arms, to defend it, and
reassured it in a sentence which is far too silly to set down here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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