Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark
mysterious little 'whipper-snapper' through the woodland glades. We came,
to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey,
pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained
steps, the lonely sepulchre in which I had the morning before seen poor
mamma laid. At the sight the fountains of my grief reopened, and I cried
bitterly, repeating, 'Oh! mamma, mamma, little mamma!' and so went on
weeping and calling wildly on the deaf and the silent. There was a stone
bench some ten steps away from the tomb.
'Sit down beside me, my child,' said the grave man with the black eyes,
very kindly and gently. 'Now, what do you see there?' he asked, pointing
horizontally with his stick towards the centre of the opposite structure.
'Oh, _that_--that place where poor mamma is?'
'Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either you or me to see over.
But----'
Here he mentioned a name which I think must have been Swedenborg, from what
I afterwards learnt of his tenets and revelations; I only know that it
sounded to me like the name of a magician in a fairy tale; I fancied he
lived in the wood which surrounded us, and I began to grow frightened as he
proceeded.
'But Swedenborg sees beyond it, over, and _through_ it, and has told me all
that concerns us to know. He says your mamma is not there.'
'She is taken away!' I cried, starting up, and with streaming eyes, gazing
on the building which, though I stamped my feet in my distraction, I was
afraid to approach. 'Oh, _is_ mamma taken away? Where is she? Where have
they brought her to?'
I was uttering unconsciously very nearly the question with which Mary,
in the grey of that wondrous morning on which she stood by the empty
sepulchre, accosted the figure standing near.
'Your mamma is alive but too far away to see or hear us. Swedenborg,
standing here, can see and hear her, and tells me all he sees, just as I
told you in the garden about the little boys and the cottage, and the trees
and flowers which you could not see, but you believed in when _I_ told you. So
I can tell you now as I did then; and as we are both, I hope, walking on to
the same place just as we did to the trees and cottage. You will surely see
with your own eyes how true the description is which I give you.'
I was very frightened, for I feared that when he had done his narrative we
were to walk on through the wood into that place of wonders and of shadows
where the dead were visible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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