Veronica made a slight effort of instinct, to loose his hold and to take
the hand that had fallen from hers. But it was only instinctive and
hardly conscious at all. Her eyes were on Gianluca's face, and the
blackness of a vast grief already darkened her soul.
There was but an instant. The tall old priest, with eyes lifted
heavenwards, neither saw nor heard.
"Ego conjungo vos--" He said all the words, and then, high in air, he
made the great sign of the cross. "Benedictas vos omnipotens Deus--" and
he spoke all the benediction.
He closed his eyes a moment in instant prayer. When he opened them and
looked down, his face turned whiter still. On each side, before him,
knelt the living, Veronica and Taquisara, their hands clasped and
wedded, as they had been when he had spoken the high sacramental words,
and between them, white, motionless, the halo of his fair hair about
his marble brow, lay Gianluca della Spina, like an angel dead on earth.
"Merciful Lord! What have I done!" cried the priest.
At the sound of his voice Taquisara turned quickly. But Veronica did not
hear. The Sicilian saw where Don Teodoro's starting eyes were fixed, and
he understood, and his own blood shrieked in his ears, for he was
married to Veronica Serra. Married--half married, wholly married,
married truly or falsely, by the sudden leap of violent chance--but a
marriage it was, of some sort. Both he and the priest knew that, and
that it must be a voice of more authority than Don Teodoro's which could
say that it was no marriage.
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