Christian life -- Fiction; Clergy -- England -- Fiction; Paranormal fiction; Short stories, English
“The other incident was as follows. One night I was lying half
dozing against my mother’s breast, my head against her heart, and
not, as I usually lay, with my head on her shoulder. As I lay there
it seemed to me as if I heard a strange sound like the noise of the
sea in a shell, but more melodious. It is difficult to describe it,
but it was like the murmuring of a far-off crowd, overlaid with
musical pulsations. I nestled closer to her and listened; and then I
could distinguish, I thought, innumerable ripples of church bells
pealing, as if from another world. Then I listened more intently to
the other sound; there were words, but I could not distinguish them.
Again and again a voice seemed to rise above the others, but I could
hear no intelligible words. The voices cried in every sort of
tone––passion, content, despair, monotony. And then as I listened I
fell asleep. As I look back now, I have no doubt what voices those
were that I heard.
“And now comes the end of the story. My health began to improve so
remarkably that those about me noticed it. I never gave way, during
the day at any rate, to those old piteous imaginings; and at night,
when, I suppose, the will partly relaxes its control, whenever my
distress reached a certain point, she was there to comfort me. But
her visits grew more and more rare, as I needed her less, and at
last ceased. But it is of her last visit, which took place in the
spring of the following year, that I wish to speak.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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