THE Hermit lived in a cave in the hollow of a hill. Below him was aglen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks and alders, and on the fartherside of the valley, half a day's journey distant, another hill, steepand bristling, which raised aloft a little walled town with Ghibellineswallow-tails notched against the sky.
When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations ofthe walls had been square-topped, and a Guelf lord had flown hisstandard from the keep. Then one day a steel-coloured line ofmen-at-arms rode across the valley, wound up the hill and battered inthe gates. Stones and Greek fire rained from the ramparts, shieldsclashed in the streets, blade sprang at blade in passages andstairways, pikes and lances dripped above huddled flesh, and all thestill familiar place was a stew of dying bodies. The boy fled from itin horror. He had seen his father go forth and not come back, hismother drop dead from an arquebuse shot as she leaned from the platformof the tower, his little sister fall with a slit throat across thealtar steps of the chapel—and he ran, ran for his life, through theslippery streets, over warm twitching bodies, between legs of soldierscarousing, out of the gates, past burning farmsteads, trampledwheat-fields, orchards stripped and broken, till the still woodsreceived 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. Upthe hillside he found a hollow in the rock, and built before it a porchof boughs bound together with withies. He fed on nuts and roots, and ontrout which he caught with his hands under the stones in the stream. Hehad always been a quiet boy, liking to sit at his mother's feet andwatch the flowers grow on her embroidery frame, while the chaplain readaloud the histories of the Desert Fathers from a great silver-claspedvolume. He would rather have been bred a clerk and scholar than aknight's son, and his happiest moments were when he served mass for thechaplain in the early morning, and felt his heart flutter up and uplike a lark, up and up till it was lost in infinite space andbrightness. Almost as happy were the hours when he sat beside theforeign painter who came over the mountains to paint the chapel, andunder whose brush celestial faces grew out of the rough wall as if hehad sown some magic seed which flowered while you watched it. With theappearing of every gold-rimmed face the boy felt he had won anotherfriend, a friend who would come and bend above him at night, keepingoff the ugly visions which haunted his pillow—visio