Edith Wharton

The Hermit and the Wild Woman Edith Wharton

When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations of the wallshad 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, woundup the hill and battered in the gates. Stones and Greek fire rained from theramparts, shields clashed in the streets, blade sprang at blade in passages andstairways, pikes and lances dripped above huddled flesh, and all the still familiarplace was a stew of dying bodies. The boy fled from it in horror. He had seen hisfather go forth and not come back, his mother drop dead from an arquebuse shot asshe leaned from the platform of the tower, his little sister fall with a slit throatacross the altar steps of the chapel-and he ran, ran for his life, through the slipperystreets, over warm twitching bodies, between legs of soldiers carousing, out of thegates, past burning farmsteads, trampled wheat-fields, orchards stripped andbroken, till the still woods received him and he fell face down on the unmutilatedearth.