He was himself hemmed in by the broken clods, and stood in the hole he had dug, half imprisoned by it. But he could move enough to strike a few remaining matches on the iron of the spade, and let their light fall on what he had unearthed.
Then it seemed to him that a miracle had been wrought.
Before him lay a silver image of the Child Christ. His knees shook, his whole frame trembled, his lips gasped for breath; the flame of the matches died out; he was left in the dark with the image.
'It is the Gesu! It is the Gesu!' he muttered, sure that his dead mother, or the saints, or both, had wrought this miracle to show him the evil of his ways.
In truth, the statue had lain there many centuries, buried against the wall by pious hands in times when the torch of war had been carried flaming over all the wasted villages and ravaged fields in the plain below.
But no such explanation dawned on the mind of Caris.
To him it was a miracle wrought by the saints or by the dead. In the dark he could feel its round shoulders, its small hands folded as in prayer, its smooth cheek and brow, its little breast; and he touched them reverently, trembling in every nerve.
He had heard of holy images shown thus to reward belief or to confound disbelief.
His faith was vague, dull, foolish, but it was deep-rooted in him. He was a miserable sinner; and the dead and the saints turned him thus backward on his road to hell; so he thought, standing waist-deep in the rugged clay and clutching his spade to keep himself from falling in a swoon.