Ghosts -- Fiction; Invalids -- Fiction; Women authors -- Fiction
What am I to answer to your next sentence? You say you ask of me a
love that has nothing in common with the love ordinary men and women
have for each other, that physical love makes you sick and ill.
Beloved, everything shall be as you wish between us. I would not so
much as kiss the hem of your dress if you forbade it by a look, nor
your delicate white hands. I love your hands. You let me hold them,
you must let me hold them sometimes. Dear generous one, I will never
trouble you. I am for you to use as you will, that you use me at all
is gift enough. This time will pass this trying dreadful time. Until
then, and afterwards if you wish it, I will be only your
comrade—your very faithful knight. I love your delicacy and reserve,
all you withhold from me. I yearn to be your lover, your husband;
all and everything to you. Don’t hate and despise me. You say when
radiant love came to you, your eyes were on the stars, and you
blundered into a morass. But, sweetheart, darling, if I had been
your lover—husband, do you think this would have happened? Think,
_think_. I cannot bear that you should confuse any love with mine. I
want to hold you in my arms, teach you. I can’t write any more, not
now. Thank you for your letter, for my sleepless nights, for my
dreams, for everything. You are my whole world.
GABRIEL.
Greyfriars’.
I fear I wrote you a stupid letter last night. I had had a long
evening with my sister. She insisted on reading to me from a
wonderful book she has just bought. It was on some new craze with
the high-sounding name of Christian Science. The book was called
“Science and Health.” More utter piffle and balderdash I have never
heard. There were whole sentences without meaning, and many calling
themselves sentences were without verbs. I swallowed yawn after
yawn. Then she left off reading and asked my opinion. I suggested
the stuff might have emanated from Earlswood. She made me a dreadful
scene. It seemed she had already consulted a prophetess of this new
religion and had been promised she should be made whole if only she
had sufficient faith! Now I was trying to “shake her faith and so
retard her cure”; she sobbed. Poor woman! I tried reasoning with
her, went over a few passages and asked her to note inconsistency
after inconsistency, stupidity after stupidity, blasphemy and
irrelevance. She cried more. Then my own unkindness struck me. She
too had had a vision, seen the marvellous sun rise. To be made
whole! She who had been thirty years a cripple and in pain always. I
tried to withdraw all I had said, to find a strange and mystic sense
and meaning in the stuff. I think I comforted her a little. I
insisted she should go on with her induction, or initiation, or
whatever they call it. There are paid healers; the prophets play the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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