Veronica turned upon him instantly, with wide and gleaming eyes, amazed at the slightest sign of opposition, criticism, or advice.
"Rash!" she exclaimed. "Why? Have I not the right to ask whom I please, and will, to stay under my own roof? Who has authority over me, to say that I shall have this one for a friend, or that one, old or young? Am I a free woman, or a schoolgirl, or a puppet doll, to which the world can tie strings to make me dance to its silly music? Rash! What rashness is there in asking my friend and his father and mother here? My dear Don Teodoro, you will be telling me before long that I should take some broken-down old lady for a companion!"
"I have sometimes wondered that you do not send for one of your relations," said the priest, who, mild as he was, could not easily be daunted when he believed himself right.
"I will make my house a refuge, or a hospital if need be, for our poor people," answered Veronica, "but not for my relations, whom I have never seen. I send them money sometimes, but they shall not come here to beg. That would be too much. I had enough of those I knew. I am willing to feed anything that needs food except vultures. I have chosen to live alone, and alone I will live. The world may scream itself mad and crack with horror at my doings, if it is so sensitive. It cannot hurt me, and if I choose to shut my gates, it cannot get in. Besides, they are coming, the Duca, the Duchessa, and Don Gianluca, and that ends the matter."
"Nevertheless—" began Don Teodoro, still obstinately unwilling to retract his word.
"Dear friend," interrupted Veronica, with sudden gentleness, for she was fond of him, "I like you very much. I respect you immensely. I could not do half I am doing without you. But you do not quite understand me. I am sorry that you should think me rash, if the idea of rashness is unpleasant to you—I will make any other concession in reason rather than quarrel with you. But please do not argue with me when I have made up my mind. I am quite sure that I shall have my own way in the end, and when the end comes, you will be very glad that you could not hinder me, because I am altogether right. Now we understand each other, do we not?"
Don Teodoro could not help smiling in a hopeless sort of way, and he lifted his hands a moment, spreading out the palms as though to express that he cleared his conscience of all possible responsibility. So they parted good friends, without further words.
But when Veronica was alone, she began to realize that Don Teodoro was not so altogether in the wrong as she believed herself to be in the right. People might certainly be found whom she could not class with the world she so frankly despised, and who would say that if Gianluca recovered she should marry him, after extending such an invitation to him and his people, and that, if she did not, she would deserve to be called a heartless flirt—from their point of view. Gianluca's father and mother might say so.
He himself, at least, must know her better than that, she thought. And then, there was the terrible earnestness of Taquisara's letter, the sober statement of his best friend, next to herself, and a statement which it must have cost the man something to make, since it was necessarily accompanied by an apology. After all, though he had insulted her, she liked Taquisara for the whole-hearted way in which he took Gianluca's part in everything. There was that statement, and she felt that it was a true one. Gianluca was more to her than any one she knew, in a way which no one could understand, and she had a right to see him before he died. If, by any happy chance, he should live, people might perhaps talk. She should not care, for she should have done right. That was the way in which she accounted to herself for her action; but the consciousness that Don Teodoro was not quite wrong was there. She remembered it afterwards, when the fatality that was quietly lying in wait for her raised its head from ambush and stared her in the face. But then, at the first beginning, she was angry with the old priest for trying to oppose her.
There was not more than time to finish the preparations, after all, for she received a note from the Duchessa, written from Eboli, saying that they would arrive a day earlier than they had expected, as the heat in the plain was intense, and they were anxious to get Gianluca to a cooler region of the mountains as soon as possible. Veronica had written, too, placing the castle at Laviano at their disposal, as a resting-place, so as to break the journey more easily for the invalid, and she sent men over to see that all was in order and to take a few necessary things for the guests.