Amidst it all, too, the helpless father and mother ran about tearful, incoherent, wringing their hands, believing no one and yet believing the impossible, praying, crying, talking, hindering everything in their supreme parents’ right to be in the way and nearest to what they loved best—­hysterical with joy, both of them, at the end, when the physician said that Gianluca was to live, and was not dead as they had thought him, and wildly, pathetically, insanely grateful to Veronica.

“I saw that he was dying,” she told them simply, when he was out of danger.  “I sent for Don Teodoro, and we were married.”

They fell upon her neck, the old man and the prematurely old woman, kissing her, pressing her in their arms, crying over her, not knowing what they did.

When he saw that she was telling them, Taquisara went away from them to his own room and stayed there some time.  And Don Teodoro also went home, and for the second time on that day he bolted his battered door and made sure that he was alone.  But he did not sit at his table playing with his spectacles, as in the morning.  He knelt in a corner, against one of his rough bookcases, bowed to the ground as though a mountain had come upon him unawares, and now and then he beat his forehead against the parchment bindings of his favourite folio Muratori, as certain wild beasts crouch on their knees and with a swinging of slow despair strike their heads against the bars of their cage many times in succession.

For Taquisara and Don Teodoro knew, each knowing also that the other knew, that what Veronica believed to have been done that day had not been really done, save in the intention, and that what had really been done must by Church law and right be undone before she could be truly married to Gianluca della Spina.  That is to say, if the thing done had any value whatsoever before God and man.

It is easy to say that in other lands and under other practices of faith the four persons concerned in what had happened might have honestly told themselves that such a marriage was no marriage at all.  An unbelieving Italian, and there are many in the cities, though few in the country, would have laughed and said that the important point was the legal union pronounced by the municipal authority, and that since there had been none here, there was nothing to undo.  Yet if by any similar chance—­more difficult to imagine, of course, but conceivable for argument’s sake—­the same mistake had occurred in a legal marriage by a syndic, that same unbelieving Italian would have felt in regard to it precisely what Taquisara and Don Teodoro felt, namely, that the union was well nigh indissoluble.  For Italy, as a nation and a whole, while imitating other nations in many respects, has again and again refused to listen to any suggestion embodying a law of divorce.  To all Italians, high, low, atheists, bigots, monarchists, republicans,—­whatever they may be,—­marriage is an absolutely indissoluble bond.  The most that they will allow, and have always allowed, is that in such cases as Veronica’s, it is in the power of the highest authority, ecclesiastic or legal, according to their persuasion, to annul a marriage altogether and declare that it never took place at all, on the ground that the requirements of the Church or of the law have not been properly fulfilled.