"Then—I will come, for a few minutes," she consented. "But—where?"
"I will take you on the bridge," he said. "You will not be cold, for I know they've had it roofed over with flags for to-night. Mrs. Holbein told me. There will be room only for you and me, for I shall let no one else come."
Perhaps never before had Mary been so torn between two desires, except when she wished to leave the convent, yet longed to stay. Now she did not want to go on the bridge with this sombre-eyed man who spoke as if he were taking her away from the world: and yet she did want to go, far more than she wanted not to go. If anything had happened at this moment to part them, all the rest of her life she would have wondered what she had missed.
Mary knew nothing about the bridge of a vessel, or what it was for; but when she had mounted some steps she found herself on a narrow parapet walled in with canvas up to the height of her waist. Above her head was a tight-drawn canopy made of an enormous flag; and on the white floor, wedged tightly against the canvas wall, were pots containing long rose-vines that made a drapery of leaves and flowers. Here and there folds of the great flag were looped back with wooden shields, gilded and painted with coats of arms—the crest of the Holbeins, no doubt, invented to order at great expense. These loopings were like curtains which left square, open apertures; and as Mary looked toward the shore the balmy night air brushed against her hot cheeks like cool wings.
"I don't know, I don't suppose it's possible—no, it can't be possible that it should be with you as it is with me," Vanno said, in a low voice which sounded to her ears suppressed and strange, as if he kept back some secret passion, perhaps anger. "Ever since the first moment I saw you standing on the platform of the train at Marseilles, looking down like Juliet from her balcony, I have felt as if I'd known you all my life, even before this life began, in some other existence of which you remain the only memory: you, your eyes, your smile."
Her heart bounded as sometimes the heart bounds at night, in that mysterious break between waking and sleeping, which is like a leap, and a fall over an abyss without bottom.
She wished to hold his words in her mind and dwell upon them, as if upon a suddenly opened page of some marvellous illuminated missal of priceless value. Conscious of no answer to give, or need of answer for the moment, her subconscious self nevertheless began at once to speak, and the rest of her listened, startled at first, then with wonder acknowledging the truth of her own admission.
"Why, yes," the undertone in herself answered Vanno. "It was like that with me, too, at Marseilles and afterward—as if I had known you always, as if our souls had been in the same place together before they had bodies. When you looked at me first, I felt you were like what a picture of Romeo ought to be, though I never saw a picture of Romeo, that I can remember. How strange you should have had Juliet in your mind! Yet perhaps not strange, for each may have sent a thought into the brain of the other—if such things can be."
"Such things are," Vanno answered, with passion. "In the desert where I've lived for months together, alone except for one friend, a man of the East, or an Arab servant, a voice used to say when I waked suddenly at night sometimes, that there was a woman waiting for me, whose soul and mine were not strangers, and that I should recognize her when we met."
"It is like a dream!" Mary broke in upon him, when he paused as if following a thought down some path in his mind. "As if we were dreaming now—to the music down there. Maybe we are dreaming. What does it all mean?"