'Oh, mother, poor mother!' he cried aloud.
She had been a hard mother to him, and had had ways which he had feared and disliked, and a cruel tongue and a bad name on the hillside, but she had been his mother, and when she had lain dying she had been sorrowful to think that she would leave him alone.
She had been his mother, and he came to rifle her grave.
What a crime! What a foul, black crime, such as men and women would scarce speak of with bated breath by their hearths in the full blaze of day! What a crime! He abhorred himself for doing it, as he would have abhorred a poisoner or a parricide seeing them pass to the gallows.
'Oh, mother, mother, forgive me! She will have it so!' he sobbed with a piteous prayer.
He thought that, being dead, his mother would understand and forgive, as she would never have understood or forgiven when living.
Then he struck his spade down into the heavy clay on which no bird-sown seed of blade or blossom had yet had any time to spring.
He dug and dug and dug, till the sweat rolled off his limbs and his shoulders ached and his arms quivered.
He threw spadefuls of clay one after another out on the ground around, his eyes growing used to the darkness, and his hands gripping the spade handle harder and harder in desperation. The very horror of his action nerved him to feverish force.
'Oh, Santina, Santina, you give my soul to hell fires everlasting!' he cried aloud once, as he jammed the iron spade down deeper and deeper into the ground, tearing the stiff soil asunder and crushing the stones.