5
They say there was once a poor man who had paid what he owed for his ground. You know the way is, that when a man has gathered in his harvest and turned a little money then he pays off what he owes. This man paid for his ground as soon as he had made something by his harvest, but the seller did not give him any receipt. Soon after the owner died, and his son came to ask for the money over again. ‘But I paid your father,’ said the poor man. ‘Then show your receipt,’ said the son. ‘But he didn’t give me one,’ answered the poor man. ‘Then you must pay me,’ insisted the new proprietor.
‘What shall I do! what shall I do!’ exclaimed the poor man in despair. ‘St. Anthony, help me!’ He had hardly said the words when he saw a friar[6] coming towards him.
‘What’s the matter, good man?’ said the friar, ‘that you are so distressed: tell me.’ And the poor man told him all the story of his distress.
‘Shall I tell you how to get the receipt?’ asked the friar.
‘Indeed, indeed!’[7] exclaimed the poor man, ‘that would be the making of me; but it’s more than you can do—the man is dead!’
‘Never mind that. You do what I tell you,’ said the monk. ‘Go straight along that path;’ and the man saw that where he pointed was a path that had never been there before. ‘Follow that path,’ said the monk, ‘and you will come to a casino with great iron gates which shut and open of themselves continually. You must watch the moment when they are open and go boldly in. Inside you will see a big room and a man sitting at a table writing ceaselessly and casting accounts. That is your landlord; ask him for the receipt and he won’t dare withhold it now. But mind one thing. Don’t touch a single article in the room, whatever you do.’
The poor man went along the path, and found all as the monk had told him.
‘How did you get here?’ exclaimed the landlord, as soon as he recognised him; and the poor man told him how he had been sent and why he was come. The landlord sat at his desk writing with the greatest expedition, as if some one was whipping him on, and knitting his brows over his sums as if they were more than his brain could calculate; nevertheless, he took a piece of paper and wrote the receipt, and moreover he wrote two or three lines more on another piece of paper, which he bade him give to his son.
The poor man promised to deliver it, and turned to go; but as he went could not forbear putting his hand over the polished surface of a table he had to pass, unmindful of the charge the monk had given him not to touch anything. His hand was no sooner in contact with the table than the whole skin was burnt off, and he understood that he was in Hell. With all expedition he watched the turn of the door opening, and hastened out.
‘What have you got about your hand?’ asked St. Anthony when the man came back, for the friar was none other than St. Anthony.
‘I touched one of the tables in that house,’ he answered, ‘forgetting what you told me, and burnt my hand so badly I had to dip this cloth in a river as I came by and tie it up. But I have the receipt, thanks to you.’ So St. Anthony touched his hand and healed it, and he saw him no more.
Then the man took the letter to the old lord’s son. ‘Why, this is my father’s writing!’ he exclaimed; ‘and my father is dead. How did you come by it?’ And he told him. And the letter said: ‘Behold, I am in Hell! But you, mend your ways; give money to the poor; compensate this man for the trouble he has had; and be just to all, lest you also come hither.’
Then the old landlord’s son gave the man a large sum of money to compensate him for his anxieties, and sent him away consoled.
[1] ‘Sora’ in this place does not mean ‘sister’; it is an expression in Roman vernacular for which we have no equivalent, and is applied to respectable persons of the lower class who do not aspire to be called ‘Signora,’ ‘Mrs.,’ or ‘Miss,’ as with us. ‘Sor’ or ‘Ser’ is the masculine equivalent; we had it in use at p. 194. [↑]
[2] The word used was ‘candida,’ and not ‘bianca,’ as expressive of purest white. [↑]
[3] ‘Sant’ Antonio ed il Santo Bambino.’ [↑]
[4] I believe St. Anthony was never in Rome; but his genial winning character made him so popular that the people speak of him as one of themselves. [↑]
[5] St. Anthony’s date is 1195–1231; so the idea of making his observer a Protestant, and a smoker to boot, is very quaint, and is an instance of how chronological order gets confused by tradition. [↑]
[6] ‘Fraticello’; ‘good little friar.’ An affectionate way of speaking of Franciscans often used. [↑]
[7] ‘Magàri!’ a very strong form of ‘indeed.’ [↑]
ST. MARGARET OF CORTONA.
St. Margaret wasn’t always a saint, you must know: in her youth she was very much the reverse. She had a very cruel stepmother, who worried her to death,[1] and gave her work she was unequal to do.
One day her stepmother had sent her out to tie up bundles of hay. As she was so engaged a Count came by, and he stopped to look at her, for she was rarely beautiful.[2]
‘What hard work for such pretty little hands,’ he began by saying; and after many tender words had been exchanged he proposed that she should go home with him, where her life would be the reverse of the suffering existence she had now to endure.
Margaret consented at once, for her stepmother, besides working her hard, had neglected to form her to proper sentiments of virtue.
The count took her to his villa at a place called Monte Porciana, a good way from Cortona. Here her life was indeed a contrast to what it had been at home at Cortona. Instead of having to work, she had plenty of servants to wait upon her; her dress and her food were all in the greatest luxury, and she was supplied with everything she wished for. Sometimes as she went to the theatre, decked out in her gay attire, and knowing that she was a scandal to all, she would say in mirth and wantonness, ‘Who knows whether one day I may not be stuck up there on high in the churches, like some of those saints? As strange things have happened ere now!’ But she only said it in wantonness. So she went on enjoying life, and when their son was born there was nothing more she desired.
In the midst of this gay existence, word was brought her one evening that the Count, who had gone out that morning full of health and spirits to the hunt, had been overtaken and assassinated, and as all had been afraid to pursue the murderers, they knew not where his body was.
Margaret was thrown into a frenzy[3] at the news; her fine clothing and her rich fare gave her little pleasure now. All amusement and frivolity were put out of sight; and she sat on her sofa and stared before her, for she had no heart to turn to anything that could distract her thoughts from her great loss. Then one day—it might have been three days after—a favourite dog belonging to the count came limping and whining up to her. Margaret rose immediately; she knew that the dog would take her to the count’s body, and she rose up and motioned to him to go: and the dog, all glad to return to his master, ran on before. All the household were too much afraid of the assassins to venture in their way, so Margaret went forth alone. It was a long rough way; but the dog ran on, and Margaret kept on as well as her broken strength would admit. At last they came to a brake where the dog stopped, and now whined no longer but howled piteously.
Margaret knew that they had reached the object of their search, and it was indeed here the assassins had hidden the body. Moving away with her own hands the leaves and branches with which they had covered it over, the fearful sight of her lover’s mangled body lay before her. The condition into which the wounds and the lapse of time had brought it was more than she could bear to look at, and she swooned away on the spot.
When she came to herself all the course of her thoughts was changed. She saw what her life had been; the sense of the scandal she had given was more to her even than her own distracting grief. As the most terrible penance she could think of, she resolved to go back to her stepmother and endure her hard treatment, sharpened by the invectives with which she knew it would now be seasoned.
Taking with her her son, she went to her, therefore, and with the greatest submission of manner entreated to be readmitted. But not even this would the stepmother grant her, but drove her away from the door. She then turned to her father, but he was bound to say the same as his wife. She now saw there was one misery worse than harsh treatment, and that was penury—starvation, not only for herself, but her child.
Little she cared what became of her, but for the child something must be done. What did she do? She went and put on a sackcloth dress,[4] tied about the waist with a rope, and she went to the church at the high mass time; and when mass was over she stood on the altar step, and told all the people she was Margaret of Cortona, who had given so much scandal, and now was come to show her contrition for it.
Her sufferings had gone up before God. As she spoke her confession so humbly before all the people, the count’s mother rose from her seat, and, coming up to her, threw her handkerchief over her head[5]—for she was bareheaded—and led her away to her home.
She would only accept her hospitality on condition of being allowed to live in a little room apart, with no more furniture than a nun’s cell. Here she lived twelve years of penance, till her boy was old enough to choose his state in life. He elected to be a Dominican, and afterwards became a Preacher of the Apostolic Palace; and she entered a Franciscan convent, where she spent ten more years of penance, till God took her to Himself.
She cut off all her long hair when she went to live in her cell at the house of the count’s mother, that she might not again be an occasion of sin to anyone. And after that, when she found she was still a subject of human admiration, she cut off her lips, that no one might admire her again.[6]
[1] ‘La strapazzava,’ a word particularly applied to overworking a horse. [↑]
[2] ‘Di una rara bellezza.’ [↑]
[4] ‘Un sacco crudo,’ a loose garment made of harsh sackcloth that had not been dressed. [↑]
[5] Handkerchiefs are used so habitually for tying up parcels in Rome, that the narrator thought it worth while to specify that this one was a ‘fazzaletto di naso.’ [↑]
[6] The life is thus given in Butler:—‘Margaret was a native of Alviano in Tuscany. The harshness of a stepmother and her own indulged propension to vice cast her headlong into the greatest disorders. The sight of the carcase of a man, half-putrefied, who had been her gallant, struck her with so great a fear of the Divine judgments, and with so deep a sense of the treachery of the world, that she in a moment became a perfect penitent. The first thing she did was to throw herself at her father’s feet, bathed in tears, to beg his pardon for her contempt of his authority and fatherly admonitions. She spent the days and nights in tears; and to repair the scandal she had given by her crimes, she went to the parish church of Alviano with a rope about her neck, and there asked public pardon for them. After this she repaired to Cortona and made her most penitent confession to a father of the Order of S. Francis, who admired the great sentiments of compunction with which she was filled, and prescribed her austerities and practices suitable to her fervour. Her conversion happened in the year 1274, the twenty-fifth of her age.... This model of true penitents, after twenty-three years spent in severe penance, twenty of them in the religious habit, being worn out by austerities and consumed by the fire of divine love, died on the 22nd of February 1297.’ [↑]
ST. THEODORA.
When Santa Teodora was young she was married, and lived very happily with her husband, for they were both very fond of each other.
But there was a count who saw her and fell in love with her, and tried his utmost to get an opportunity of telling her his affection, but she was so prudent that he could not approach her. So what did he do? he went to a bad old woman[1] and told her that he would give her ever so much money if she would get him the opportunity of meeting her. The old wretch accepted the commission willingly, and put all her bad arts in requisition to make Theodora forget her duty. For a long time Theodora refused to listen to her and sent her away, but she went on finding excuses to come to her, and again and again urged her persuasions and excited her curiosity so that finally she consented that he might just come and see her, and the witch woman assured her that was all he asked. But what he wanted was the opportunity of speaking his own story into her ear, and when that was given him he pushed his suit so successfully that it wasn’t only once he came, but many times.
Yet it was not a very long time before a day came when Theodora saw how wrong she had been, and then, seized with compunction, she determined to go away and hide herself where she would never be heard of more. Before her husband came home she cut off all her hair, and putting on a coarse dress she went to a Capuchin monastery and asked admission.
‘What is your name?’ asked the Superior.
‘Theodore,’ she replied.
‘You seem too young for our severe rule,’ he continued; ‘you seem a mere boy;’ but she expressed such sincere sentiments of contrition as showed him she was worthy to embrace their life of penance.
The Devil was very much vexed to see what a perfect penitent she made, and he stirred up the other monks to suspect her of all manner of things; but they could find no fault against her, nor did they ever suspect that she was a woman.
One day when she was sent with another brother to beg for the convent a storm overtook them in a wood, and they were obliged to seek the shelter of a cottage there was on the borders of the wood where they were belated. ‘There is room in the stable for one of you,’ said the peasant who lived there; ‘but that other one who looks so young and so delicate’ (he meant Theodora) ‘must sleep indoors, and the only place is the loft where my daughter sleeps; but it can’t be helped.’ Theodora, therefore, slept in the loft and the monk in the stable, and in the morning when the weather was fair they went back to their convent. Months passed away, and the incident was almost forgotten, when one day the peasant came to the monastery and rang the bell in a great fury, and he laid down at the entrance a bundle in which was a baby. ‘That young monk of yours is the father of this child,’ he said, ‘and you ought to turn him out of the convent.’ Then the Superior sent for ‘Theodore,’ and repeated what the peasant had said.
‘Surely God has sent me this new penance because the life I lead here is not severe enough,’ she said. ‘He has sent me this further punishment that all the community should think me guilty.’ Therefore she would not justify herself, but accepted the accusation and took the baby and went away. Her only way of living now was to get a night’s lodging how she could, and come every day to the convent gate with the child and live on the dole that was distributed there to the poor. What a life for her who had been brought up delicately in her own palace!
She was not allowed to rest, however, even so, for people took offence because she was permitted to remain so near the monastery, and the monks had to send her away. So she went to seek the shelter of a wood, and to labour to find the means of living for herself and the child in the roots and herbs she could pick up. But one of the monks one day found her there, and saw her so emaciated that he told the Superior, and he let her come back to receive the dole.
At last she died, and when they came to bury her they found she had in one hand a written paper so tightly clasped that no one had the strength to unclose it; and there she lay on her bier in the church looking so sad and worn, yet as sweetly fair as she had looked in life, and with the written paper tightly grasped in her closed hand.
Now when her husband found that she had left his palace the night she went away he left no means untried to discover where she was; and when he had made inquiries and sent everywhere, and could learn no tidings whatever, he put on pilgrim’s weeds and went out to seek for her everywhere himself.
It so happened that he came into the city where she died just as she was thus laid on her bier in the church. In spite of her male attire he knew her; in the midst of his grief he noticed the written paper she held. To his touch her hand opened instantly, and in the scroll was found recorded all she had done and all she had suffered.
[1] ‘Vecchiaccia’; the addition accia implies that she was bad: probably a witch was intended. [↑]
NUN BEATRICE.[1]
Nun Beatrice had not altogether the true spirit of a religious: she was somewhat given to vanity;[2] though but for this she was a good nun, and full of excellent dispositions. She held the office of portress;[3] and, as she determined to go away out of her convent and return into the world, this seemed to afford her a favourable opportunity for carrying out her design. Accordingly, one day when the house was very quiet, and there seemed no danger of being observed, having previously contrived to secrete some secular clothes such as passed through her hands to keep in store for giving to the poor, she let herself out and went away.
In the parlour was a kneeling-desk with a picture of Our Lady hanging over it, where she had been wont to kneel and hold converse with Our Lady in prayer whenever she had a moment to spare. On this desk she laid the keys before she went, thinking it was a safe place for the Superior to find them; and she commended them to the care of Our Lady, whose picture hung above, and said, ‘Keep thou the keys, and let no harm come to this good house and my dear sisters.’
As she said the words Our Lady looked at her with a glance of reproach, enough to have melted her heart and made her return to a better mood had she seen it; but she was too full of her own thoughts and the excitement of her undertaking to notice anything. No sooner was she gone out, however, than Our Lady, walking out of the canvas, assumed the dress that she had laid aside, and, tying the keys to her girdle, assumed the office of portress.
With the habit of the portress Our Lady also assumed her semblance; so that no one noticed the exchange, except that all remarked how humble, how modest, how edifying Beatrice had become.
After a time the nuns began to say it was a pity so perfect a nun should be left in so subordinate a position, and they made her therefore Mistress of the Novices. This office she exercised with as great perfection, according to its requirements, as she had the other; and so sweetly did she train the young nuns entrusted to her direction that all the novices became saints.
Beatrice meantime had gone to live in the world as a secular; and though she often repented of what she had done, she had not the courage to go back and tell all. She prayed for courage, but she went on delaying. While she was in this mind it so happened one day that the factor[4] of the convent came to the house where she was living. What strange and moving memories of her peaceful home filled her mind as she saw his well-known form, though he did not recognise her in her secular dress! What an opportunity too, she thought, to learn what was the feeling of the community towards her, and what had been said of her escape!
‘I hope all your nuns are well,’ she said. ‘I used to live in their neighbourhood once, and there was one of them I used to know, Suora[5] Beatrice. How is she now?’
‘Sister Beatrice!’ said the factor. ‘She is the model of perfection, the example of the whole house. Everybody is ready to worship her. With all respect to the Church, which never canonizes the living, no one doubts she is a saint indeed.’
‘It cannot be the same,’ answered Beatrice. ‘The one I knew was anything but a saint, though I loved her well, and should like to have news of her.’ And she hardly knew how to conceal the astonishment with which she was seized at hearing him speak thus; for the event on which she expected him to enlarge at once was the extraordinary fact of her escape. But he pursued in the same quiet way as before. ‘Oh yes, it must be the same. There has never been but one of the name since I have known the convent. She was portress some time ago; but latterly she has been made Mistress of the Novices.’
There was nothing more to be learnt from him; so she pursued her inquiries no further. But he had no sooner had start enough to put him at a safe distance, than she set out to go to the convent and see this Sister Beatrice who so strangely represented her.
Arrived at the convent door, she asked to see Sister Beatrice, and in a very few minutes the Mistress of the Novices entered the parlour.
The presence of the new Mistress of the Novices filled Beatrice with an awe she could not account for; and, without waiting to ask herself why, she fell on her knees before her.
‘It is well you have come back, my child,’ said Our Lady; ‘resume your dress, which I have worn for you; go in to the convent again, and do penance, and keep up the good name I have earned for you.’
With that Our Lady returned to the canvas; Beatrice resumed her habit, and strove so earnestly to form herself by the model of perfection Our Lady had set while wearing it, that in a few months she became a saint.
[Mr. Ralston gives a Russian story (pp. 249–50), in which St. Nicholas comes in person and serves a man who has been devout to his picture.]
[1] ‘La Monica Beatrice.’ ‘Monica,’ provincialism or vulgarism for ‘monaca,’ a nun. [↑]
[2] ‘Albagia,’ self-esteem, vanity. [↑]
[3] ‘Rotara,’ equivalent to portress; it alludes to her having charge of the ‘ruota,’ or ‘turniquet,’ through which things are passed in and out and messages conveyed through a convent-wall, without the nun having to present herself at the door. [↑]
[4] ‘Fattore,’ an agent employed by most convents to attend to their secular affairs. [↑]
[5] ‘Suora’ is the received word for a ‘Sister’ in a convent. ‘Sister,’ the natural relationship, is ‘Sorella.’ [↑]
PADRE FILIPPO.
[St. Philip Neri is a giant indeed in the household memories of the Roman poor. His acts have become travestied and magnified among them in the most portentous way, and they always talk of him with the most patriotic enthusiasm. ‘He was a Roman!—a Roman indeed!’ they will say. And yet he was not a born Roman, but was made ‘Protector of Rome’ by the Church.
‘Padre Filippo’ is their favourite way of naming him, and sometimes ‘il buon Filippo’ and ‘Pippo buono.’]