The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other
Stories, by Edith Wharton

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Title: The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories

Author: Edith Wharton

Posting Date: August 11, 2009 [EBook #4533]
Release Date: October, 2003
First Posted: February 4, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERMIT AND WILD WOMAN ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo. HTML version by Al Haines.

THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN AND OTHER STORIES

BY

EDITH WHARTON

NEW YORK

MCMVIII

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I _The Hermit and the Wild Woman_

II _The Last Asset_

III _In Trust_

IV _The Pretext_

V _The Verdict_

VI _The Pot-Boiler_

VII _The Best Man_

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 unmutil