Sitting like this with her eyes fixed before her she was looking directly at Fate.
It was not only Richard Pinckney that she was about to lose but Vernons and the Past— Just as Juliet Mascarene had lost everything so was it to happen to her. Or rather so had it happened, for she felt that the game was lost—some vague, mysterious, extraordinary game played by unknown powers had begun on that evening in Ireland when standing by the window of the library she had heard Pinckney’s voice for the first time.
The sense of Fatality came to her from the case of Juliet. Consciously and unconsciously she had linked herself to Juliet. The extravagant idea that she herself was Juliet returned and that Richard Pinckney was Rupert had come to her more than once since that dream or vision in which the guns had sounded in her ears. The idea had frightened her at first, then pleased her vaguely. Then she had dismissed it, her ego refusing any one else a share in her love for Richard, any one—even herself masquerading under the guise of Juliet.
The idea came back to her now leaving her utterly cold, and yet stirring her mind anew with the sense of Fate.
When she fell asleep that night she passed into the dreamless condition which is the nearest thing we know to oblivion, yet her sub-conscious mind must have carried on its work, for when she awoke just as dawn was showing at the window it was with the sense of having passed through a long season of trouble, of having fought with—without conquering—all sorts of difficulties.
She rose and dressed herself, put on her hat and came down into the garden.
Vernons was just wakening for the day, and in the garden alive with birds, she could hear the early morning sounds of the city, and from the servants’ quarters of the house, voices, the sound of a mat being beaten and now and then the angry screech of a parrot. General Grant slept in the kitchen and his cage was put out in the yard every morning at this hour. Later it would be brought round to the piazza. He resented the kitchen yard as beneath his dignity and he let people know it.
Phyl tried the garden gate, it was locked and Seth appearing at that moment on the lower piazza, she called to him to fetch the key. He let her out and she stood for a moment undecided as to whether she would walk towards the Battery or in the opposite direction. Meeting Street never looked more charming than now in the very early morning sunlight; under the haze-blue sky, almost deserted, it seemed for a moment to have recaptured its youth. A negro crab vendor was wheeling his barrow along, crying his wares. His voice came lazily on the warm scented air.
She turned in the direction of the station. The voice of the crab seller had completed in some uncanny way the charm of the deserted street and the early sunlight. She was going to lose all this. Vernons and the city she loved, Juliet, Miss Pinckney, the past and the present, she was going to lose them all, they were all in some miraculous way part of the man she loved, her love of them was part of her love for him. She could no longer stay in Charleston; she must go—where? She could think of nowhere to go but Ireland.