IAm searching for a short story I read many years ago?

The wise man, a short story by Donal Ryan

He left the seminary in a temper and struck out walking for home. His anger had swallowed his reason. He was wearing tight shoes with hard soles that were worn down unevenly because he had a funny way of walking, a bit bandy-legged. He walked for a whole day and night until he came to the last of his strength and he used that to climb over a gate into a field and across to the bank of a narrow river and he lay down there beneath a willow tree.

He was stretched snoring when she found him, the flesh around his ankles swollen out over the tops of his shoes, his socks matted with blood and pus, his trouser-legs ribboned and caked. His upper half looked more respectable; his jacket and hat were well-worn but of fine quality. He roared when she woke him. She jumped back in fear, then saw that he was barely a man, and that he was frightened.

She walked him slowly along the river bank and over a small wooden bridge and along a path of packed dirt to the back gate of her house. She sat him at a broad table in the kitchen on a high-backed chair and she worked his shoes off his feet slowly, but for all her gentleness he almost passed out from the pain. Tears fell from his eyes; he wiped them quickly away. There was darkness at the sides of his vision, drawing in.

She was kneeling, tutting, cutting his socks away with scissors. Her hair was tied up but the pin was coming loose. Time was moving slowly forward, liquidly it seemed to him. She was wearing men’s trousers and boots and a tweed jacket. She had a pan of water and a glass bottle of some kind of ointment, set on the edge of the hearthstone before the open fire. He tried to straighten himself but he fell forward.

When he woke he was lying on his back on the floor, a coarse blanket over him, a thin cushion beneath his head. She was sitting on the high-backed chair where he had been. She was wearing a blue dress now, dark, nearly the colour of her eyes. The fire had burned low. “You’re awake,” she said. “I couldn’t move you from the floor. I couldn’t wake you. Otherwise I’d have put you up to bed. I have some food for you, and milk. Sit up now at the table.”

She watched him while he ate, quickly, trying to remember his manners. He was embarrassed to be barefoot, save for the bandages she’d put across his blisters.

“Where are my shoes?” he asked her.

“Outside in the yard,” she said. “They’re no good to you any more. I’ll give you a pair of my father’s.”

“Will he not mind?”

“He’s dead.”

“I’m not wearing a dead man’s shoes.”

“Fine,” she said, “go barefoot.” She wasn’t much older than him, two years or three at most, he thought. And yet she seemed possessed of a kind of wisdom, an ancientness, like she was a shape-shifter, a witch in disguise.

She sat with her fingers laced together, examining him, smiling slightly, her head tilted a little, away from the window light. “Tell me who you are,” she said when he had finished his food “And what you were doing in my field?”

“My name is Michael Ryan,” he said. “I’m a seminarian. I was on the way home to my parents’ house. I was tired so I lay down. I’m sorry for troubling you.”

She made no reply, only sat smiling at him, and he noticed how her eyes changed colour with the shifting light as broken clouds passed across the sun. He held her gaze until she lowered her eyes to his hands, and his wild notions about her dissolved, and he knew she was only a girl playing a woman, and he felt bolder.

“Aren’t you taking a terrible chance, allowing me to be in your house? Couldn’t I be any kind of a man?”

She stayed still and didn’t answer him, and the ticking clock grew louder in his ears, and he felt his cheeks burning again. His eyes dropped to the swell of her chest and rested there until he realised where he was looking and so he raised his eyes again and saw a mocking expression on her face and so he closed his eyes altogether in panic, and covered them with his hands.

She had defeated him, without speaking or moving, she had bested him. Maybe she was a witch after all, a piseog, or a fairy queen. Slowly, he lowered his hands.

“Why would it worry me what kind of a man you are? I know enough about you. That you got into some kind of trouble. That you have wounded feet. That you lie down in fields. That you call out for your mother in your sleep.

“I thought you were dead when I saw you first. Until I heard you snoring. It mattered not one bit to me which or whether. In fact it would have been easier had you been dead. I’d have called for someone to take your body away and I wouldn’t have had to prise your shoes off and cut your socks from your stinking feet, or had you land in a faint on top of me.” Her words were clipped and curtly spoken but her voice had a melody to it, a strange foreignness, not English or Irish, or French, even – he had met a Frenchman once at a horse auction with his father – but an otherworldly quality, as though she wasn’t fully present but flitted between this plane and some other, and he found it hard to follow the meaning of her words because the sound of them was so beautiful.

He noticed then a notebook on the table, open to a blank page, and a pen beside it nibbed and inked. He felt as he had when the rector of the college called him to his office. As though he was being studied, like he was a new species, something to be taken apart and looked at from the inside out.

He felt his temper rising, from his stomach to his chest to his head, a sick and burning feeling, and he tried to damp it, to clamp himself shut. He looked past her and up at the mahogany cupboards with their glass fronts, and he noticed for the first time the height of the ceiling, the size of the kitchen, the depth of the bay of the window and the thickness of the curtains. He saw no sign of a Sacred Heart or a Blessed Virgin. It was a Protestant house, he suddenly knew.

He rose to leave. “If you’ll direct me to the resting place of my shoes I’ll be grateful to you, miss. I have to be away now. I thank you for your hospitality and for attending to my feet.”

She seemed taken aback by the abruptness of this, and her eyebrows moved upwards, and something flashed in her eyes, and her mouth opened as though she was about to speak, and her lips, he noticed, were red and full, and her eyes now were the colour of the farthest part of the sea, the blue just below the horizon, and her hair was coming loose again and a strand of it was curled against her cheek, and something happened in his chest, some kind of tightening, and his head felt woolly and his lips were dry, and he wanted to sit back down but now that he had stood he could see no way back to his previous position and his two feet burned beneath him and neither of them would move for him.

“Sit down,” she said. “You can’t go anywhere a while. You’ll have to wait until your feet are healed. What kind of a person sets off walking from Wexford to Tipperary? What sort of an impulse overtook you?”

And he felt his eyes filling with tears, at the thought of home, and his dear parents, and how he’d be the ruination of their joy, because he couldn’t hold his temper, because he couldn’t submit to the canons of prescriptions and proscriptions and leave his self behind and be a vessel for Christ and it occurred to him then that maybe it was the devil had put this woman in his path, that she had some kind of a siren song to sing, to lure him from the course that God had charted. But hadn’t he already knocked the rector on his **** and told him he’d kill him and roared at the top of his lungs that they could all go to hell? There was no going back.

“Sit down,” she said, and her voice was softer now, and she stood and smoothed herself, and walked a step away from the table and stood looking at him and her face was all of a sudden kind, and she said she’d make a cup of tea and as she turned for the stove she was gathering her hair back into a twisted mass and skewering it again with the wayward pin.

And so he stayed. And she told him what her notebook was for. She was writing a play and had all the tools to do so except for one: an idea. She was going to Paris to live on the left bank of the Seine, to be among bohemian people, who had a different sensibility to the people she lived among now. She’d lease the house and land she’d inherited from her parents and she’d live on that income until her plays were staged and she was rich and then she’d instruct her lawyer to realise her assets over here.