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.