THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN AND OTHER STORIES
BY
EDITH WHARTON
NEW YORK
MCMVIII
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 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 flesh looked when devils' pincers tore it, how the
shrieks of the damned sounded, and how roasting bodies smelled. How
could a Christian spare one moment of his days and nights from the
long long struggle to keep safe from the wrath to come?
Gradually the horror faded, leaving only a tranquil pleasure in the
minute performance of his religious duties. His mind was not
naturally given to the contemplation of evil, and in the blessed
solitude of his new life his thoughts dwelt more and more on the
beauty of holiness. His desire was to be perfectly good, and to live
in love and charity with his fellow-men; and how could one do this
without fleeing from them?
At first his life was difficult, for in the winter season he was put
to great straits to feed himself; and there were nights when the sky
was like an iron vault, and a hoarse wind rattled the oakwood in the
valley, and a great fear came on him that was worse than any cold.
But in time it became known to his townsfolk and to the peasants in
the neighbouring valleys that he had withdrawn to the wilderness to
lead a godly life; and after that his worst hardships were over, for
pious persons brought him gifts of oil and dried fruit, one good
woman gave him seeds from her garden, another spun for him a hodden
gown, and others would have brought him all manner of food and
clothing, had he not refused to accept anything but for his bare
needs. The good woman who had given him the seeds showed him also
how to build a little garden on the southern ledge of his cliff, and
all one summer the Hermit carried up soil from the streamside, and
the next he carried up water to keep his garden green. After that
the fear of solitude quite passed from him, for he was so busy all
day long that at night he had much ado to fight off the demon of
sleep, which Saint Arsenius the Abbot has denounced as the chief foe
of the solitary. His memory kept good store of prayers and litanies,
besides long passages from the Mass and other offices, and he marked
the hours of his day by different acts of devotion. On Sundays and
feast days, when the wind was set his way, he could hear the church
bells from his native town, and these helped him to follow the
worship of the faithful, and to bear in mind the seasons of the
liturgical year; and what with carrying up water from the river,
digging in the garden, gathering fagots for his fire, observing his
religious duties, and keeping his thoughts continually upon the
salvation of his soul, the Hermit knew not a moment's idleness.
At first, during his night vigils, he had felt a great fear of the
stars, which seemed to set a cruel watch upon him, as though they
spied out the frailty of his heart and took the measure of his
littleness. But one day a wandering clerk, to whom he chanced to
give a night's shelter, explained to him that, in the opinion of the
most learned doctors of theology, the stars were inhabited by the
spirits of the blessed, and this thought brought great consolation
to the Hermit. Even on winter nights, when the eagle's wings clanged
among the peaks, and he heard the long howl of wolves about the
sheep-cotes in the valley, he no longer felt any fear, but thought
of those sounds as representing the evil voices of the world, and
hugged himself in the solitude of his cave. Sometimes, to keep
himself awake, he composed lauds in honour of Christ and the saints,
and they seemed to him so pleasant that he feared to forget them, so
after much debate with himself he decided to ask a friendly priest
from the valley, who sometimes visited him, to write down the lauds;
and the priest wrote them down on comely sheepskin, which the Hermit
dried and prepared with his own hands. When the Hermit saw them
written down they appeared to him so beautiful that he feared to
commit the sin of vanity if he looked at them too often, so he hid
them between two smooth stones in his cave, and vowed that he would
take them out only once in the year, at Easter, when our Lord has
risen and it is meet that Christians should rejoice. And this vow he
faithfully kept; but, alas, when Easter drew near, he found he was
looking forward to the blessed festival less because of our Lord's
rising than because he should then be able to read his pleasant
lauds written on fair sheepskin; and thereupon he took a vow that he
would not look upon the lauds till he lay dying.
So the Hermit, for many years, lived to the glory of God and in
great peace of mind.
