An insatiable desire immediately seized me to behold her face. Forgetting my painful experience in the imaginary heaven of the Greeks, I thought only of Helena.
“It is she,” said I, to myself. “She is a pagan. She is surrounded by evil spheres. She is unregenerate. Her regeneration will be painful and difficult. The good angels are assisting her. The foundations of our house are laid; the structure will rise; the joint work of our secretly united souls. I always knew it and felt it. It cannot be otherwise!”
In this ecstasy of thought I watched the bowed figure in the black robe.
“Oh that Helena could see and know that I am with her and she with me, laying the invisible foundations of our eternal home! What felicity that would be! Let me speak to her! Let me see her face!”
The intense desire of a strong will is at once granted in the spiritual world. The woman in the black robe slowly raised her eyes to heaven and turned her face toward me.
It was the pale, sorrowing face of Mary Magdalen!
Mary Magdalen!
The blood all seemed to rush back upon my heart, and [pg 248]I stood with a chilling, suffocating sense of disappointment hard to describe. But the loss of Helena, grievous as it was, was not the only ingredient in my cup. There was vexation as well as disappointment. A deep sense of mortification overpowered me at the substitution of Mary Magdalen, a woman without character or friends, recently possessed of seven devils—a creature miserable, outcast, forlorn.
Secret feelings of social superiority, self-righteousness, and offended dignity, embodied themselves in my exclamation of contempt:
“Mary Magdalen!”