Smith and the Pharaohs, and other Tales

by H. Rider Haggard

From heart to heart flashed their swift thoughts, like lightnings from cloud to cloud, till all her being was a very sea of joy. Now the great room was full of presences, and now the curtains were gone and all space beyond was full of presences, and from that glorious company of a sudden there arose a song of welcome and beneath the burden of its sweetness she swooned to sleep.

Barbara dwelt in joy with those she loved and learned many things. She learned that this sweet new life of hers was what she had fashioned on the earth with her prayers and strivings; that the seeds of love and suffering sown down in the world’s rank soil had here blossomed to this perfect flower. Now she knew what was meant by the saying that the kingdom of Heaven is within you, and by the other saying that as man sows so shall he reap. She learned that in this world beyond the world, and that yet itself was but a rung in the ladder of many universes, up which ladder all souls must climb to the ultimate judgment, there was sorrow as well as bliss, there were both suffering and delight.

Here the sinful were brought face to face with the naked horror of their sins, and from it fled wailing and aghast. Here the cruel, the covetous, the lustful and the liar were as creatures dragged from black caverns of darkness into the burning light of day. These yearned back to their darkness and attained sometimes to other coverings of a mortal flesh, or to some land of which she had no knowledge. For such was their fate if in them there was no spark of repentant spirit that in this new world could be fanned to flame.

Upwards or downwards, such is the law of the universe in which nothing can stand still. Up from the earth which Barbara had left came the spirit shape of all that lived and could die, even to that of the flower. But down to the earth it seemed that much of it was whirled again, to ascend once more in an age to come, since though the stream of life pulses continually forward, it has its backwash and its eddies.

Barbara learned that though it is blessed to die young and sinless, like to that glorious child of hers with whom she walked in this heavenly creation, and whose task it was to instruct her in its simpler mysteries, to live and to repent is yet more blessed. In this life or in that all have sinned, but not all have repented, and therefore, it appeared to Barbara, again and again such must know the burden of the flesh.

Also she saw many wonders and learned many secrets of that vast, spiritual universe into which this world of ours pours itself day by day. But if she remembers anything of these she cannot tell them.

Oh! happy was her life with Anthony, for there, though now sex as we know it had ceased to be, spirit grew ever closer to spirit, and as below they dreamed and hoped, their union had indeed become an altar on which Love’s perfect fire flamed an offering to Heaven. Happy, too, was her communion with those other souls that had been mingled in her lot, and with many more whom she had known aforetime and elsewhere and long forgotten. For Barbara learned that life is an ancient story of which we spell out the chapters one by one.

Yet amidst all this joy and all the blessed labours of a hallowed world in which idleness was not known, nor any weariness in well-doing, a certain shadow met Barbara whichever way she turned.

“What is it?” asked Anthony, who felt her trouble.

“Our son,” she answered, and showed him all the tale, or so much of it as he did not know, ending, “And I chose to leave him that I might take my chance of finding you. I died when I might have lived on if I had so willed. That is my sin and it haunts me.”