The Hermit and the Wild 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