Then I received a strange communication. I heard through a business agent of my family in Italy, with whom I had remained in touch, that my mother had died and had left her fortune to my children; and that my daughter Emilia, having attained her majority, was determined not to accept the money but to give it to me. My children were all married or independent, and the whole family was scattered. Lucia was an abbess in a religious institution.
Then I could no longer resist the secret craving which did not cease night or day and so distinctly appeared to me like a warning from my dead wife, and I went back to this little town, where I bought my present house and the small nursery garden, which still furnishes me daily occupation.
What I received from my daughter was not much, but sufficient for maintaining my simple, provincial life here. Gradually I succeeded in accustoming the petty provincials to my strange ways, and now my life is as endurable as any that I could still have hoped to find on earth.
Only by this strange communication and Emilia's friendly act was I aroused from the dark stupor into which Elsje's death had plunged me. I would not perhaps have had the power to rouse myself to an interest in life and in my work, would perhaps have fallen ill and died without once seeing Elsje in my dreams. For my despair and my homesickness had also dimmed the clarity of my dreamlife. I slept little and badly, the tortured soul could not separate itself sufficiently from the restless body to attain to reintegration and transcendental perception.
Emilia's act saved me. And then I made the comforting observation, that with the recovery from a period of deep affliction the power of enjoyment is extraordinarily heightened. I saw my daughter again in Paris, where we had agreed to meet before I should go to Holland, and the one single day there was marked by a wondrous indescribable joy.
It overcame me quite suddenly - during the journey from America - that I felt the dark melancholy giving way. And then too came the clear perception during the night, brief but intense, in which I for the first time summoned the beloved dead, heard her soft, loving voice, and saw her eyes.
In Paris the reunion with the only one of my children who had remained true to me - the gentle devoted girl who wanted to continue to understand and to help her father - was an exquisite joy.
It is impossible to put into words what takes place in the soul at such a time, and the effect is so strange that, even while experiencing it, I was filled with continual devout wonder.
The connection between the spiritual body and waking body must then suddenly be supplied and firmly restored again, and the weakness of this spiritual joint that was caused by melancholy all at once relieved.
All that I saw that day was joy, was well-nigh bliss. And above all - it signified so much! With everything I saw, I felt the existence of infinite prospects of joy and beauty that were indicated by it, only just briefly indicated -but unmistakable.