The things had been always under his mother's pillow at night; it had seemed to him that they ought to go with her down to the grave. He had had a secret fear of them, and he had thought that their occult powers would be nullified once thrust in sacred soil. He had been afraid to burn them.
The churchyard in which his mother lay was on the topmost slope of Genistrello, where the brown brick tower of the massive medieval church of St. Fulvo rose amongst the highest pines, upon a wind-swept and storm-scarred scarp.
Few were the dead who were taken there; meagre and miserable were the lot and the pittance of its poor Vicar, and weather-beaten and worn by toil were the score of peasants who made up its congregation, coming thence from the scattered huts and farmhouses of the hillside.
It was seven miles off from the chestnut wood where he dwelt, and twice seven from the four roads; a lonely and not over-safe tramp across the hills and the water-courses and the brushwood.
But it was not the distance which troubled him, nor any possible danger. He knew his way through all that country, and the full round moon was by now showing her broad disc over the edge of the farther mountains on the south-east. But the thought of what he would have to do at the end of his pilgrimage made him sick with fear not altogether unmanly.
He knew that what he would do would be sacrilege and punishable by law, but it was not of that he thought: his mind was filled with those terrors of the nether world, of the unknown, of the unseen, which a lonely life and a latent imagination made at once so indistinct and so powerful to him.
'Had she but asked me anything else! 'he thought piteously. 'Anything!—to cut off my right hand or to take the life of any man!'
But she had set him this task; inexorably as women of old set their lovers to search for the Grail or beard the Saracen in his mosque, and he knew that he must do what she willed or never again feel those warm red lips breathe on his own.
He tightened the canvas belt round his loins, and went home to his cabin to fetch a pickaxe and a spade, and, bidding his dog stay to guard the empty hut, he set out to walk across the vast steep breadth of woodland darkness which separated him from the church and churchyard which were his goal.
A labourer on those hills all his life, and accustomed also to the more perilous and murderous thickets of Maremma, where escaped galley-slaves hid amongst the boxwood and the bearberry, and lived in caves and hollow trees, no physical alarm moved him as he strode on across the uneven ground with the familiar scents and sounds of a woodland night around him on every side.