pes, which, according to the season, came in it from without. Candida
kept it very clean, and the scorpions and spiders were left so little
peace there by her everactive broom that they betook themselves
elsewhere, dear as the wooden benches and the crannied stones had been
to them for ages.

Since he had come to Marca nothing of any kind had happened in it. There
had been some marriages, a great many births, not a few burials; but
that was all. The people who came to confession at Easter confessed very
common sins: they had stolen this or that, cheated here, there, and
everywhere, got drunk and quarrelled, nothing more: he would give them
clean bills of spiritual health, and bid them go in peace and sin no
more, quite sure, as they were sure themselves, that they would have the
self-same sins to tell off next time they came there.

Everybody in Marca thought a great deal of their religion; that is, they
trusted to it in a helpless but confident kind of way as a fetich which,
being duly and carefully propitiated, would make things all right for
them after death. They would not have missed a mass to save their lives:
that they dozed through it, and cracked nuts or took a suck at their
pipe-stems when they woke, did not affect their awed and unchangeable
belief in its miraculous and saving powers. If they had been asked what
they believed, or why they believed, they would have scratched their
heads and felt puzzled. Their minds dwelt in a twilight in which nothing
had any distinct form. The clearest idea ever presented to them was that
of the Madonna: they thought of her as of some universal mother who
wanted to do them good in present and future if they only observed her
ceremonials: just as in the ages gone by upon these same hill-sides the
Latin peasant had thought of the great Demeter.

Gesualdo himself, despite all the doctrine which had been instilled into
him in his novitiate, did not know much more than they: he repeated the
words of his offices without any distinct notion of all that they meant;
he had a vague feeling that all self-denial and self-sacrifice were
thrice blessed, and he tried his best to save his own soul and the souls
of others; but there he ceased to think: outside that speculation lay,
and speculation was a thrice-damnable offence. Yet he, being imaginative
and intelligent in a humble and dog-like way, was at times infinitely
distressed to see how little effect this religion which he taught and