For a minute she tried to persuade herself that it was a dream, then she gave up the attempt. That was no dream. Everything in it was four square. She could still see the shadows of the two gentlemen who had been walking on the other side of the street, shadows cast clearly before them by the sun.
The first part of her experience had been a dream, all that about Miss Pinckney and Juliet. But right from the sound of the guns all had been reality. She had seen, touched, heard.
Glancing back into the room she saw the book lying on the floor, the sight of it was like a crystallising thread for thought.
She had seen the past, she had heard the guns of the war.
She went back into the room and took her seat on the couch and held her head between her hands. She recalled the terror that told her that everything she loved was in danger. When the man had cried out that young Pinckney was killed, it was the thought of the death of Richard Pinckney that struck her into unconsciousness. Yet she knew that what she had seen was the day of the death of Rupert Pinckney, that one of those figures carried on the stretchers was his figure, that her grief was for him.
Had she then experienced what Juliet once experienced, seen what she saw, suffered what she suffered?
Was she Juliet?
The thought had approached her vaguely before this, so vaguely and so stealthily that she had not really perceived it. It stood before her now frankly in the full light of her mind.
Was she Juliet, and was Richard Rupert Pinckney? She recalled that evening in Ireland when she had heard his voice for the first time, and the thrill of recognition that had passed through her, how, at the Druids’ Altar that night she had heard her name called by his voice, the feeling in Dublin that something was drawing her towards America. Her feelings when she had first entered Meeting Street and the garden of Vernons, Miss Pinckney’s surprise at her likeness to Juliet. Prue’s recognition of her, the finding of those letters, the finding of the little arbour—any one of these things meant little in itself, taken all together they meant a great deal—and then this last experience.
Her mind like a bird caught in a trap made frantic efforts to escape from the bars placed around it by conclusion; the idea seemed hateful, monstrous, viewed as reality. Fateful too, for that feeling of terror in the vision had all the significance of a warning.