Anthony, who seemed to be quite well again, also looked extremely handsome, while Aunt Thompson, who by now had put off her mourning, shone in that dim church as the sun shines through a morning mist.
In short, all went as merrily as it should, save that the bride’s mother seemed depressed and wept a little.
This, said her sister to someone in a loud voice, was in her opinion nothing short of wicked. What business, she asked, has a woman with six portionless daughters to cry because one of them is making a good marriage; “though it is true,” she added, dropping her voice to a confidential whisper, “that had Barbara chosen she might have made a better one. Yes, I don’t mind telling you that she might have been a peeress, instead of the wife of a mere country squire.”
In truth, Mrs. Walrond was ill at ease about this marriage, why she did not know. Something in her heart seemed to tell her that her dear daughter’s happiness would not be of long continuance. Bearing in mind his family history, she feared for Anthony’s health; indeed, she feared a hundred things that she was quite unable to define. However, at the little breakfast which followed she seemed quite to recover her spirits and laughed as merrily as anyone at the speech which Lady Thompson insisted upon making, in which she described Barbara as “her darling, beautiful and most accomplished niece, who indeed was almost her daughter.”
CHAPTER VI
PARTED
Hard indeed would it be to find a happier marriage than that of Anthony and Barbara. They adored each other. Never a shadow came between them. Almost might it be said that their thoughts were one thought and their hearts one heart. It is common to hear of twin souls, but how often are they to be met with in the actual experience of life? Here, however, they really might be found, or so it would seem. Had they been one ancient entity divided long ago by the working of Fate and now brought together once more through the power of an overmastering attraction, their union could not have been more complete. To the eye of the observer, and indeed to their own eyes, it showed neither seam nor flaw. They were one and indivisible.
About such happiness as this there is something alarming, something ominous. Mrs. Walrond felt it from the first, and they, the two persons concerned, felt it also.
“Our joy frightens me,” said Anthony to Barbara one day. “I feel like that Persian monarch who threw his most treasured ring into the sea because he was too fortunate; you remember the sea refused the offering, for the royal cook found it in the mouth of a fish.”
“Then, dear, he was doubly fortunate, for he made his sacrifice and kept his ring.”
Anthony, seeing that Barbara had never heard the story and its ending, did not tell it to her, but she read something of what was passing in his mind, as very often she had the power to do.