“As you treat the ground ill or well, so will your ground treat you,” she said to him.

She always wore the costume of the province, which was similar to that of the Abruzzo villages, and suited her cast of features and her strong and haughty carriage.  On feast-days she wore three strings of fine pearls round her throat, and bracelets of massive gold and of fine workmanship, so many in number that her arms were stiff with them; they had been her mother’s and grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s, and had been in her dower.  To sell or pawn them under stress of need, had such occurred, would never have seemed to any of her race to be possible.  It would have seemed as sacrilegious as to take the chalice off the church altar, and melt its silver and jewels in the fire.  When she should go to her grave these ornaments would pass to Adone as heirlooms; none of her family were living.

“Never talk of death, mother,” he said, whenever she spoke of these things.  “Death is always listening; and if he hear his name he taps the talker on the shoulder, just to show that he is there and must be reckoned with.”

“Not so, my son!” replied Clelia Alba, with a sigh.  “He has every soul of us written down in his books from the time we are born; we all have our hour to go and none of us can alter it.”

“I do not believe that,” said Adone.  “We kill ourselves oftentimes; or we hasten our end, as drunkards do.”

“Did your father hasten his end?” said his mother.  “Did not some one break that olive branch?  It was not the tree itself, though the Ruscino folks would have it cut down because they called it a felon.”

“Was it not the devil?” said Adone.

He believed in the devil, of course, as he had been taught to do; and had he not as a child met the infernal effigy everywhere—­in marble, in stone, in wood, in colour, in the church and outside it, on water-spout and lamp-iron, and even on the leaves of his primer?  But it seemed to him that the devil had “troppo braccia” given him, was allowed too long a tether, too free a hand; if indeed he it were that made everything go wrong, and Adone did not see who else it could be.  Here, in the vale of Edera, all the world believed in Satan as in holy water, or in daily bread.

Clelia Alba crossed herself hastily, for she was a pious woman.

“We are talking blasphemy, my son,” she said gravely.  “Of course there is the good God who orders the number of our days for each of us, and is over us all.”

Adone was silent.  To him it seemed doubtful.  Did the good God kill the pretty little children as the butcher in a city killed his lambs?  But he never contradicted or vexed his mother; he loved her with a great and tender affection.  He was less ignorant than she was, and saw many things she could not see; he was, as it were, on a hilltop and she down in a valley, but he had a profound respect for her; he obeyed her implicitly, as if he were still a child, and he thought the world held no woman equal to her.