In thus reverting to the period which immediately succeeded Catherine’s death, and to the predominantly obscure and humble persons who had directly known her well, we bid adieu, indeed, to things massive, fixed, and final: yet we exchange the description of what, after all, was but an authoritative declaration of accomplished facts, for the study of that alone directly soul-stirring thing, the picture and drama of living, energizing human souls; of how these souls were being influenced by a greater one than themselves; and again of how these, thus influenced, lesser minds and hearts transmitted, developed, and coloured the tradition of the life to which they owed so much.

Now the effect, or at least the record of the effect, of the conception of Catherine formed by her two Priest friends and by her domestics back upon her transmitted image and upon the growth of her Legend, is, apart from the indications in the Vita already given or still to be considered, upon the whole, but slight. Still, as we shall eventually find, the few facts as to the subsequent lives of these persons, which shall now be given, are of very distinct use in appraising their respective shares in the gradual constitution of the Vita e Dottrina.

1. Don Carenzio, 1510-1513.

I take Don Jacopo Carenzio first, since he was the Priest in actual attendance upon Catherine at the last, and because he now, no doubt immediately after the funeral or at latest on the day of the removal of her chattels to the market-place, became possessed, as we shall see, of Catherine’s little house. He was thus the one who alone could continue and augment a cultus as strictly local as even Argentina’s had been, during those weeks, perhaps months, of sole night-charge of her dying mistress in these very rooms.

The identification of the building is complete. For as far back as October 6, 1497, not long after Giuliano’s death,—he was still alive on July 14,—the Protectors of the Hospital referred to their “grant to Catherine, during her lifetime, of the enjoyment and use of a house with a greenhouse, forming part of the Hospital.” And in this greenhouse she, on the evening of Sunday, March 18, 1509, had, in the presence of Vernazza and four other witnesses, dictated her Fourth Will to Battista Strata. It was, then, of a size sufficient to render it worth mentioning, and it was evidently closed in. Now there is a legal instrument, dated Saturday, August, 30, 1511, drawn up at a meeting held by the four “Protectors,” “in the chief (sitting-) room of the Residence of the Rector, in which the late Donna Caterinetta was wont to live.” And in this they declare that, “seeing that the Reverend Don Jacopo Carenzio, the Rector, is about to go to his home at Diano, for the purpose of carrying out a matter of the greatest importance to himself, and is shortly to return from thence, and that he wishes to persevere throughout his life in the said office of Rector; and since they desire that he should willingly hasten his return, and should be able to persevere with full confidence, and should not, as long as he lives, be moved from this room together with the whole building contiguous with it, to the room which, with its appurtenant building, is at present in the course of erection as the official residence of the Rector; they have altogether conceded to the above-named Reverend Jacopo, Rector, present and accepting, the said room together with the whole building belonging to this room, for him to hold and inhabit throughout his life, together with the greenhouse.”[307]

Here three points are of interest. Don Carenzio is, then, a native of the little Diano Castello on the Western Riviera hillside, some fifty English miles from Genoa and some twenty short of San Remo; and must have belonged to some humble family in that insignificant little place. His origin is thus in marked contrast to Marabotto’s, and still more to Vernazza’s. And next, it is clear that the house and greenhouse inhabited and used by Don Carenzio till his death are identical with those tenanted by Catherine, ever since at least the death of Giuliano. And thirdly, it is equally clear that this house was in no part identical with the two rooms still shown as the Saint’s. For these latter are high up from the ground; do not now form, and probably never formed, part of a disconnected house; and they no doubt stand on another site. The little house will have been demolished at latest in 1780, when the present great quadrangle was built.[308]

Now here, in these rooms full of the memory of Catherine, Don Carenzio will, not unreasonably, have hoped to live during many years. For it is not likely that he was older than, or indeed as old as, Don Marabotto, since he was now occupying that same office of Rector which Marabotto had held some six years previously. And yet Marabotto did not die till eighteen years later, whereas Carenzio’s death came soon. For his funeral took place on January 7, 1513, for which day there is an entry in the Hospital Cartulary for the cost of twenty-three pounds-weight of wax candles,—less than one-fourth the amount used at Catherine’s obsequies; and for that of the Priest’s vestments in which the body was robed and buried.[309]

It seems unlikely that Carenzio was not buried in the Hospital Church, seeing that he died whilst, apparently, still ex-officio Rector of the Hospital. But, if he was interred there, his monument, like that of Giuliano, was cut off and buried away in and with the Church end in 1537, or was covered up in some restoration; for there is no trace of it either in the Church itself or in any book treating of the sepulchral monuments of Genoa.

It is remarkable also that, though he had been the one priest present at Catherine’s death, and had tenanted Catherine’s own rooms throughout the two years and two or three months since her death, and had, alongside of Marabotto, been appointed by Catherine herself as the person to determine the place of her sepulture: his name nowhere occurs in connection with the plan for the opening of her deposito some eighteen months after her death; nor with the execution of that plan; nor with any of the consequent initiations of a public cultus. It is impossible to doubt that we have here some little counter jealousy and return exclusion, a sort of answer by Marabotto to his, Marabotto’s, own enforced absence from the death-chamber and his twenty-four hours’ ignorance of his Penitent’s death, which we had to note in its proper place. Poor little human frailties which may have appeared less petty and more completely excusable at close quarters than they look at this distance of time! I take it that, if there was a deliberate exclusion of Carenzio, the ceremony of opening the resting-place will have been timed to tally with some absence of the Rector,—say, on another visit to his native Diano.