The Hermit and the Wild Woman | Page 4

WOMAN
I

THE Hermit lived in a cave in the hollow of a hill. Below him was a
glen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks and alders, and on the farther
side of the valley, half a day's journey distant, another hill, steep and
bristling, which raised aloft a little walled town with Ghibelline
swallow-tails notched against the sky.
When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations of
the walls had been square-topped, and a Guelf lord had flown his
standard from the keep. Then one day a steel-coloured line of
men-at-arms rode across the valley, wound up the hill and battered in
the gates. Stones and Greek fire rained from the ramparts, shields
clashed in the streets, blade sprang at blade in passages and stairways,
pikes and lances dripped above huddled flesh, and all the still familiar
place was a stew of dying bodies. The boy fled from it in horror. He
had seen his father go forth and not come back, his mother drop dead
from an arquebuse shot as she leaned from the platform of the tower,
his little sister fall with a slit throat across the altar steps of the
chapel--and he ran, ran for his life, through the slippery streets, over
warm twitching bodies, between legs of soldiers carousing, out of the
gates, past burning farmsteads, trampled wheat-fields, orchards stripped
and broken, till the still woods received him and he fell face down on
the unmutilated earth.
He had no wish to go back. His longing was to live hidden from life.
Up the hillside he found a hollow in the rock, and built before it a porch
of boughs bound together with withies. He fed on nuts and roots, and
on trout which he caught with his hands under the stones in the stream.
He had always been a quiet boy, liking to sit at his mother's feet and
watch the flowers grow on her embroidery frame, while the chaplain
read aloud the histories of the Desert Fathers from a great

silver-clasped volume. He would rather have been bred a clerk and
scholar than a knight's son, and his happiest moments were when he
served mass for the chaplain in the early morning, and felt his heart
flutter up and up like a lark, up and up till it was lost in infinite space
and brightness. Almost as happy were the hours when he sat beside the
foreign painter who came over the mountains to paint the chapel, and
under whose brush celestial faces grew out of the rough wall as if he
had sown some magic seed which flowered while you watched it. With
the appearing of every gold-rimmed face the boy felt he had won
another friend, a friend who would come and bend above him at night,
keeping off the ugly visions which haunted his pillow--visions of the
gnawing monsters about the church-porch, evil-faced bats and dragons,
giant worms and winged bristling hogs, a devil's flock who crept down
from the stone-work at night and hunted the souls of sinful children
through the town. With the growth of the picture the bright mailed
angels thronged so close about the boy's bed that between their
interwoven wings not a snout or a claw could force itself; and he would
turn over sighing on his pillow, which felt as soft and warm as if it had
been lined with down from those sheltering pinions.
All these thoughts came back to him now in his cave on the cliff-side.
The stillness seemed to enclose him with wings, to fold him away from
life and evil. He was never restless or discontented. He loved the long
silent empty days, each one as like the other as pearls in a well-matched
string. Above all he liked to have time to save his soul. He had been
greatly troubled about his soul since a band of Flagellants had passed
through the town, exhibiting their gaunt scourged bodies and exhorting
the people to turn from soft raiment and delicate fare, from marriage
and money-getting and dancing and games, and think only how they
might escape the devil's talons and the great red blaze of hell. For days
that red blaze hung on the edge of the boy's thoughts like the light of a
burning city across a plain. There seemed to be so many pitfalls to
avoid--so many things were wicked which one might have supposed to
be harmless. How could a child of his age tell? He dared not for a
moment think of anything else. And the scene of sack and slaughter
from which he had fled gave shape and distinctness to that blood-red
vision. Hell was like that, only a million million times worse. Now he
knew how