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 workings 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 was 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.
“Dearest,” she said earnestly, “I know what you think. You think that such happiness as ours will not be allowed to last for long; that something evil will overtake us. Well, it may be so, but if it is, at least we shall have had the happiness, which, having been, will remain for ever, a part of you, a part of me; a temple of our love not built with hands, in which we shall offer thanks eternally, here and beyond,” and she nodded towards the glory of the sunset sky, then turned and kissed him.
As it chanced, that cruel, devouring sea which rages at the feet of all mankind, was destined ere long to take the offering that was most precious to these two. Only this was flung to its waters not by their hands, but by that of Fate, nor did it return to them again.
After their marriage Anthony and Barbara found a charming little Georgian house at Chelsea near to the river. The drawback to the dwelling was that it stood quite close to a place of public entertainment called “The Gardens,” very well known in those days as the nightly haunt of persons who were not always as respectable as they might have been. During their sojourn in London they never entered these Gardens, but often in the summer evenings they passed them when out for the walks which they took together, since Anthony spent most of his days at the Temple studying law in the chambers of a leading barrister. Thus their somewhat fantastic gateway became impressed upon Barbara’s mind, as did the character of the people who frequented them.
As, however, their proximity reduced the rent of their own and neighbouring houses by about one-half, personally they were grateful to these Gardens, since the noise of the bands and the dancing did not trouble them overmuch, and those who danced could always be avoided.
When they had been married nearly a year a little daughter was born to them, a sweet baby with violet eyes like those of Barbara. Now, indeed, their bliss was complete, but it was not fated that it should so remain, since the hungry sea took its sacrifice. The summer was very hot in London, and many children sickened there of some infantile complaint, among them their own. Like hundreds of others it died when only a few months old, and left them desolate.
Perhaps Anthony was the more crushed of the two, since here Barbara’s vivid faith came to her aid. “We have only lost her for a while,” she said, choking back her tears as she laid some flowers on the little grave. “We shall find her again; I know that we shall find her again, and meanwhile she will be happier than she could have been with us in this sad world.”
Then they walked back home, pushing their way through the painted crowds that were gathering at the gates of The Gardens, and listening to the strains of the gay music that jarred upon their ears.
In due course, having been called to the Bar, Anthony entered the chambers of an eminent Common Law leader. Although his prospects were now good, and he was ere long likely to be independent of the profession, he was anxious to follow it, and make a name and fortune for himself. This indeed he would have found little difficulty in doing, since soon he showed that he had studied to good purpose; moreover, his gifts were decidedly forensic. He spoke well and without nervousness; his memory was accurate, and his mind logical. Moreover, he had something of that imaginative and sympathetic power which brings an advocate success with juries.
Already he had been entrusted with a few cases which he held as “devil” for somebody else, when two events happened which between them brought his career as a lawyer to an end. In the November after the death of their baby, his father suddenly died. On receiving the news of his fatal illness Anthony hurried to Eastwich without even returing home to fetch a warm overcoat, and as a result took a severe cold. During the winter following the funeral this cold settled on his lungs. At last towards the spring the crisis came. He was taken seriously ill, and on his partial recovery several doctors held a consultation over him. Their verdict was that he must give up his profession, which fortunately now he was in a position to do, live in the country and as much in the open air as possible, spending the worst months of the winter either in the south of England, or in some warmer land. These grave and learned men told him outright that his lungs were seriously attacked, and that he must choose between following their advice and a speedy departure from the world.
Anthony would have defied them, for that was his nature. He wished to go on with his work and take the risk. But Barbara persuaded him to obedience. She said she agreed with him that the matter of his health was greatly exaggerated. At the same time she pointed out that as they were now very well off, she saw no reason why he should continue to slave at a profession which might or might not bring him an adequate return fifteen or twenty years later. She added that personally she detested London, and would like nothing better than to live at Eastwich, near her own people. Also she showed him that his rather extensive estate needed personal attention, and could be much improved in value if he were there to care for it.
The end may be guessed: Anthony gave up the Bar and the house in Chelsea. After staying for the winter months at Torquay, where his health enormously improved, they moved to Eastwich during the following May. Here their welcome was warm indeed, not only from the Rectory party, who rejoiced to have Barbara back among them, but from the entire neighbourhood, including the tenants and labourers on the property.
The ensuing summer was one of the happiest of their married life. Anthony became so much better that Barbara began to believe he had thrown off his lung weakness. Certain repairs and rearrangements of the old Elizabethan house agreeably occupied their time, and, to crown all, in September Barbara gave birth to a son, an extraordinarily fine and vigorous child, red-haired, blue-eyed, and, so far as could be seen at that early age, entirely unlike either of his parents.
The old doctor who ushered him into the world remarked that he had never seen a more splendid and perfect boy, nor one who appeared to possess a robuster constitution.
In due course Mr. Walrond christened him by the name of Anthony, after his father, and a dinner was given to the tenants and labourers in honour of the event.
That same month, there being a dearth of suitable men with an adequate knowledge of the law, Anthony, who already was a magistrate, though so young, was elected a deputy-chairman of Quarter Sessions for his county. This local honour pleased him very much, since now he knew that his legal education would not be wasted, and that he would have an opportunity of turning it to use as a judge of minor cases.
Yet this grateful and consolatory appointment in the end brought him evil and not good. The first Quarter Sessions at which he was called upon to preside in one of the Courts fell in February, when he ought to have been out of the east of England. The calendar was heavy, and Anthony acquitted himself very well in the trial of some difficult cases, earning the compliments of all concerned. But on leaving the hot Court after a long day he caught a heavy cold, which awoke his latent complaint, and from that time forward he began to go downhill.
Still, watched, fought against by Barbara, its progress was slow. The winter months they spent in warmer climates, only residing in Eastwich from May to November. During the summer Anthony occupied himself on matters connected with the estate and principally with the cultivation of the home farm. Indeed, as time went on and increasing weakness forced him to withdraw himself more and more from the world and its affairs, the interests of this farm loomed ever larger in his eyes, as largely indeed as though he depended upon it alone for his daily bread. Moreover, it brought him into touch with Nature, and now that they were so near to parting, his friendship with her grew very close. This was one of his troubles, that when he died and he knew that before very long he must die—even if he continued to live in some other form, he must bid farewell to the Nature that he knew.
Of course there was much of her, her cruel side, that he would rejoice to lose. He could scarcely conceive a future existence framed upon those lines of struggle which in its working involves pain and cruelty and death. Putting aside sport and its pleasures, which he had abandoned because of the suffering and extinction entailed upon the shot or hunted creatures, to him it seemed inexpressibly sad that even his honest farming operations, at least where the beasts were concerned, should always culminate in death. Why should the faithful horse be knocked on the head when it grew old, or the poor cow, as a reward for its long career of usefulness and profit? What relentless power had thus decreed? In any higher life surely this decree would be rescinded, and of that side of Nature he had seen more than enough upon the earth. It was her gentler and harmless aspects from which he did not wish to part—from the flower and the fruit, from the springing blade and the ripened corn; from the beauty that brooded over sea and land; from the glory of the spreading firmament alive with light, and the winds which blew beneath it and the rain that washed the face of earth; from the majestic passage of the glittering stars shedding their sweet influences through the night. To bid farewell to such things as these would, to his mind, indeed be terrible.
Once he said as much to Barbara, who thought a while and answered him: “Why should we be taken beyond all such things? It seems scarcely reasonable. I know we have not much to go on, but did not the Christ speak of drinking the fruit of the vine new with you in my Father’s kingdom?” Therefore surely there must be a growing plant that produces the fruit and a process directed by intelligence which turns it into wine. There must be husbandmen or farmers. There must be mansions or abiding-places also, for they are spoken of, and flowers and all things that are beautiful and useful; a new earth indeed, but not one so different from the old as to be utterly unfamiliar.”
Anthony said no more of the matter at this time, but it must have remained in his mind. At any rate, a month or two later when he woke up one morning he said to Barbara, “Will you laugh very much if I tell you of a dream that came to me last night—if it was a dream, for I seemed to be still awake?”
“Why should I laugh at your dream?” she asked, kissing him. “I often think that there is as much truth in dreams as in anything else. Tell it to me.”
“I dreamed that I saw a mighty landscape which I knew was not of the earth. It came to me like a picture, and a great stillness brooded over it. At the back of this landscape stood a towering cliff of stern rock thousands of feet high. Set at intervals along the edge of the cliff were golden figures, mighty and immovable. Whether they were living guards or only statues I do not know, for I never came near to them. Here and there, miles apart, streams from the lands beyond poured over the edge of the cliff in cascades of foam that became raging torrents when they reached its lower slopes. One of these fed a lake which lay in a chasm on the slopes, and from either end of this lake flowed two rivers which seemed to be about twenty miles apart, as we should judge. They ran through groves of cedars and great groups of forest trees not unlike enormous oaks and pines, and yet not the same. One river, that to the right if I looked towards the lake, was very broad, so broad that after it reached the plain and flowed slowly, great ships could have sailed upon it. The other, that to the left, was smaller and more rapid, but it also wandered away across the plain till my sight could follow it no farther. I observed that the broad, right-hand river evidently inundated its banks in seasons of flood, much as the Nile does, and that all along those banks were fields filled with rich crops, of what sort I do not know. The plain itself, which I take it was a kind of delta, the gift of the great river, was limitless. It stretched on and on, broken only by forests, along the edges of which moved many animals.
“When first I saw this landscape it was suffused with a sweet and pearly light that came not from sun or moon or stars, but from a luminous body in shape like a folded fan, of which the handle rested on the earth. By degrees this fan began to open; I suppose that it was the hour of dawn. Its ribs of gorgeous light spread themselves from one side of heaven to the other and were joined together by webs of a thousand colours, of such stuff as the rainbow, only a hundred times more beautiful. The reflection from these rainbow webs lay upon the earth, divided by and sometimes mingled with those from the bars of light, and made it glorious.
“All these things I saw from an eminence on which I stood, that rose between the rivers at the head of the plain. At length, overcome by the splendour, drunk as it were with beauty, I turned to look behind me, and there, quite close, in the midst of stately gardens with terraces and trees and fountains and bands of flowers, I saw a house, and—now indeed you will laugh—for so far as I can recollect it, in general style it was not unlike our own; that is to say, its architecture seemed to be more or less Elizabethan. If one who was acquainted with Elizabethan buildings had gone to that land and built a house from memory, but with more beautiful materials, he might have produced such a one as I imagined in my dream.
“Presently from the door of the house emerged two figures. One of these was my brother George, and the other, Barbara, was our baby grown to a little fair-haired child. The child perceived me first and ran to me through the flowers. It leapt into my arms and kissed me. Then my brother came and said—I do not mean that he spoke, but his meaning was conveyed to me—'You see, we are making your home ready. We hope that you will like it when you come, but if not you can change it as you wish.'
“Then I woke up, or went to sleep—I do not know which.”
Barbara made light of Anthony’s dream, which seemed to her to be after all but a reflection or an echo of earthly things tricked out with some bizarre imagination. Was not this obvious? The house, a vague replica of his own house. The river, something copied from the Nile, delta and all. The waterfalls, Niagara on a larger scale. The great trees, doubtless their counterparts grew in America. The brother and the babe, would he not naturally be thinking of his brother and his babe? The thing stood self-convicted. Echo, echo, echo, flung back in mockery of our agonised pleadings from the cliffs of the Beyond!
And yet this dream haunted her, especially as it returned to him more than once, always with a few added details. They often talked of this supernatural landscape and of the great radiant fan which closed at night and opened itself by day, wherewith it was illuminated. Barbara thought it strange that Anthony should have imagined so splendid a thing. And yet why should he not have done so? If she could picture it in her own mind, why should he not be able to fashion it in his?
She told him all this, only avoiding allusions to the child, the baby Barbara whom they had lost. For of this child, although she longed to ask him details as to her supposed appearance, she could not bring herself to speak. Supposing that he was right, supposing that their infant was really growing up yonder towards some celestial womanhood and waiting for him and waiting for her, the mother upon whose breast she had lain, the poor, bereaved mother. Oh! then would not all be worth while?
Anthony listened, and said that he agreed with her; as a lawyer he had analysed the dream and found in it nothing at all. Nothing more, for instance, than on analysis is to be found in any and every religion. “And yet,” he added, with that pleasant smile of his which was beginning to grow so painfully sweet and plaintive in its character, “and yet, it is very odd how real that landscape and that house are becoming to me. Do you know, Barbara, that the other night I seemed to be sitting in it in a great cool room, looking out at the river and the vast fertile plain. Then you came in, my dear, clad in a beautiful robe embroidered with violets. Yes, you came in, glancing round you timidly like one who had lost her way, and saw me and cried aloud.”
Towards the end Anthony grew worse with dreadful swiftness. He was to have gone abroad as usual that winter, but when the time came his state was such that the doctors shrugged their shoulders and said that he might as well stop at home in comfort.
Up to the middle of October he managed to get out upon the farm on fine days and see to the drilling of the wheat and so forth. One rather rough afternoon he went out thus, not because he wished to, but for the sake of the spaniel dog, Nell, which bothered him to come into the fresh air. Not finding what he sought, he was drawn far afield and caught in a tempest of rain and wind, through which he must struggle home. Barbara, who, growing anxious, had gone to seek him, found him leaning against an oak unable to speak, with a little stream of blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Indeed, it was the dog, which seemed distressed, that discovered her and led her to him.
This was his last outing, but he lived till Christmas Eve, his son’s eighth birthday. That morning the boy was brought into his room to receive some present that his father had procured for him, and warned that he must be very quiet. Quiet, however, he would not be; his tumultuous health and strength seemed to forbid it. He racketed about the room, teasing the spaniel which lay by the side of the bed, until the patient beast growled at him and even bit, or pretended to bite, him. Thereon he set up such a yell of pain, or anger, or both, that his father struggled from the bed to see what was the matter, and so brought on the hemorrhage which caused his death.
“I am afraid you will have trouble with that child, Barbara,” he gasped shortly before the end. “He seems different from either of us, but he is our son, and I know that you will do your best for him. Good night, dearest; I want to go to sleep.”
Then he went to sleep, and Barbara’s heart broke.