“What the fools, my Father, whether in this neighbourhood or any other, may have heard or seen, I, who profess not ostensibly to belong to so goodly an order, cannot pretend to know; but be assured that the Holy Well of St. Francis is as unfamiliar to me as the Pagoda of China—Heaven bless him—is to you.”
Upon this the learned monk, after expressing due astonishment, offered to show it to me; and as I thought I might by acquiescence get rid of him the sooner, and as, moreover, I wished to see the Abbot, to whom some books for me had been lately sent, I agreed to the offer.
The well, said the monk, lay not above a mile out of the customary way to the monastery; and after we had finished the flask of wine, we sallied out on our excursion,—the monk upon a stately and strong ass, myself on foot.
The Abbot, on granting me his friendship and protection, had observed that I was not the only stranger and recluse on whom his favour was bestowed. He had then mentioned the Hermit of the Well, as an eccentric and strange being, who lived an existence of rigid penance, harmless to others, painful only to himself. This story had been confirmed in the few conversations I had ever interchanged with my host and hostess, who seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in talking of the Solitary; and from them I had heard also many anecdotes of his charity towards the poor and his attention to the sick. All these circumstances came into my mind as the good monk indulged his loquacity upon the subject, and my curiosity became at last somewhat excited respecting my fellow recluse.
I now learned from the monk that the post of Hermit of the Well was an office of which the present anchorite was by no means the first tenant. The well was one of those springs, frequent in Catholic countries, to which a legend and a sanctity are attached; and twice a year—once in the spring, once in the autumn—the neighbouring peasants flocked together, on a stated day, to drink, and lose their diseases. As the spring most probably did possess some medicinal qualities, a few extraordinary cures had occurred, especially among those pious persons who took not biennial, but constant draughts; and to doubt its holiness was downright heresy.
Now, hard by this well was a cavern, which, whether first formed by nature or art, was now, upon the whole, constructed into a very commodious abode; and here, for years beyond the memory of man, some solitary person had fixed his abode to dispense and to bless the water, to be exceedingly well fed by the surrounding peasants, to wear a long gown of serge or sackcloth, and to be called the Hermit of the Well. So fast as each succeeding anchorite died there were enough candidates eager to supply his place; for it was no bad metier to some penniless imposter to become the quack and patentee of a holy specific. The choice of these candidates always rested with the superior of the neighbouring monastery; and it is not impossible that he made an indifferently good percentage upon the annual advantages of his protection and choice.
At the time the traveller appeared, the former hermit had just departed this life, and it was, therefore, to the vacancy thus occasioned that he had procured himself to be elected. The incumbent appeared quite of a different mould from the former occupants of the hermitage. He accepted, it is true, the gifts laid at regular periods upon a huge stone between the hermitage and the well, but he distributed among the donors alms far more profitable than their gifts. He entered no village, borne upon an ass laden with twin sacks, for the purpose of sanctimoniously robbing the inhabitants; no profane songs were ever heard resounding from his dwelling by the peasant incautiously lingering at a late hour too near its vicinity; my guide, the monk, complained bitterly of his unsociability, and no scandalous legend of nymph-like comforters and damsel visitants haunting the sacred dwelling escaped from the garrulous friar’s well-loaded budget.
“Does he study much?” said I, with the interest of a student.
“I fear me not,” quoth the monk. “I have had occasion often to enter his abode, and I have examined all things with a close eye,—for, praised be the Lord, I have faculties more than ordinarily clear and observant,—but I have seen no books therein, excepting a missal, and a Latin or Greek Testament, I know not well which; nay, so incurious or unlearned is the holy man that he rejected even a loan of the ‘Life of Saint Francis,’ notwithstanding it has many and rare pictures, to say nothing of its most interesting and amazing tales.”
More might the monk have said, had we not now suddenly entered a thick and sombre wood. A path cut through it was narrow, and only capable of admitting a traveller on foot or horseback; and the boughs overhead were so darkly interlaced that the light scarcely, and only in broken and erratic glimmerings, pierced the canopy.