4. Ettore in the Genoese prisons.
And, about this time, Vernazza introduced into Genoa the practice and Society which he had first founded in Naples. It was carried out, here also, in the profoundest secrecy. His “Company of St. John the Baptist Beheaded” consisted of himself and three companions: Salvage, Lomellino, and Grimaldo. The Lomellini now owned Giuliano’s former Palace in the Via S. Agnese, and the Grimaldi were one of the great Guelph families of Genoa. These four “took a house with a garden, in an out-of-the-way position; and there they started their association. And ever after, when the members met, they always prayed for these their four founders; and always, my Father being dead, began with his name: ‘Dominus Hector de Vernatia requiescat in pace.’” “I once,” adds Battista, “asked the priest who was their Confessor: ‘What matters do they discuss, when they are thus assembled?’ But he answered: ‘I may not tell’; and put on a particular expression and said: ‘The Hospital for Incurables has only ten thousand lire, and it spends twenty-six thousand. And the Giuseppine and the Convertite’ (two other favourite good works of Vernazza) ‘have also to be provided for!’”[322] Evidently the subject-matter of all this elaborate secrecy consisted in plans and means for aiding the condemned (often enough innocent or but politically guilty persons) and benefiting the poor; and the privacy was an imperious necessity in those harsh, turbulent and suspicious times. It was Vernazza’s own Roman patron and collaborator, the Neapolitan Cardinal Caraffa, who later on, as Pope, imprisoned for two years (1557-1559), in the Castle of St. Angelo, the great and saintly Cardinal Morone, on ungrounded suspicion of heresy; and it was his other patron and most intimate fellow-worker, the Genoese Cardinal Sauli, who, later on, was himself tortured and put to death, the victim of political hatred and suspicion, in his own native city.
And now, (conversely from 1461, when a Fregoso Doge had driven out an Adorno,) an Adorno Doge had just driven out and exiled a Fregoso, and had executed Paolo da Novi. And Vernazza “knew well a close friend of this Doge Adorno, one who indeed had helped him to his dignity. And yet afterwards they became mortal enemies, and the Doge condemned his former close friend to death. Now this man having been,” continues Battista, “attended by some one all night, who tried to comfort him and bring him to patience, the poor prisoner somehow derived no consolation from his attendant’s endeavours, but went on repeating: ‘When I remember all that I have done for him…!’ And it was impossible to quiet him. Then he who was spending the wakeful night with him, having noted that all his words had been hitherto of no avail, inspired by God, took another way and said: ‘Indeed and indeed you are right,’ and made himself infirm with the infirm, and echoed all that the prisoner said, making it appear as though he himself, in a similar case, would be likely to act identically. And then, and only then, the condemned man began to feel relief, and started the telling of his own trouble. And when his companion had agreed to all his points, and at last noticed that the prisoner had thoroughly ventilated all his grievance, he said: ‘Indeed, my dear brother, you do not merit this death; but reflect whether, before these occurrences, you did not perform some action which merited it.’ Then the latter reconsidered his case, and said at last: ‘Yes,—I killed a man.’ And his companion replied: ‘Behold, my brother, the true cause of your death’; and added other most appropriate words with such good effect that the man became profoundly contrite and died in the very best dispositions of soul.” “Now I think,” comments Battista, “that the companion was a member of the Society of St. John Baptist, and was, indeed, my Father himself; since my Father told me the story too much in vivid detail (troppo per sottile) for him to have been only a reporter. I believe that, to this hour, this society is carrying on the same kind of work.”[323]
Here again we have the same irrepressible, humorously resourceful, tenderly shrewd and world-experienced service of God, in and through His image, in any and every fellow-man; the same breadth in thoroughness; the same universality working itself out, and achieving its substance and self-consciousness, in the particular, as we saw at work in Naples. And this activity, all but its humour, recalls the soaring, world-embracing spirit of Catherine absorbed in self-identification with the pestiferous woman’s dying aspirations and with the cancer-disfigured navvy’s preoccupations for his little wife.
VIII. Ettore again in Naples; his Death in Genoa; Peculiarities of his Posthumous Fame.
1. Naples and the Signora Lunga.
It must have been before this prison experience, for Ottaviano Fregoso was still Doge, that Vernazza was again in Naples, and that a thoroughly characteristic, romantic little episode occurred, which not all her seventy-one years of convent life, and the sixty years that had elapsed since its happening, prevent Battista from recounting with a delightfully entire sympathy.
Here in Naples, then, “he joined hands with a certain rich lady, called the Signora Lunga, for the purpose of procuring as many things as possible” for the institutions which he himself had founded or occasioned. This lady, a Spaniard, had been the wife (she was now the widow) of Giovanni Lungo or Longo, President of the Sacred Council.[324] “They went together from house to house, begging for mattresses” for the Hospital. “And this lady now withdrew from the world at large, and lived in that Hospital, and governed and ruled it; and combined with this the execution of other works of mercy. And she had so great a devotion for my Father, that she was wont to say to him: ‘If you were to tell me to cut and wound my own person, indeed I would straightway do it.’ But on Fregoso writing and pressing him to return to Genoa, Vernazza wrote back, that if he, the Doge, promised to be favourable to him, and to help him in a good work which he had in his mind, he, Vernazza, would come at once. And the Doge wrote back that he would do all that Vernazza wished. And then, one morning early” (no doubt at dawn), “not wishing that the Signora Lunga should see him depart, he got into the saddle. And she, by good chance, saw him, and asked him: ‘Where are you going?’ And he struck his spurs into his mule: ‘To Genoa,’ he cried; and flew away; and never saw the Signora Lunga any more.”[325]
Something fresh and bracing breathes and beats here still. We have here the same man who, devoted in every good and filial way to Catherine, had yet left her, no doubt then also on an errand of large-hearted mercy, even in those last days of her life; who now, once again, breaks suddenly away; and who does so again at the call of souls entirely without conventional claims upon him, and who are quite unable to repay him with anything that merely drifting nature ever can hold dear. But here the relation is evidently not that of a man towards a woman much older than himself, and of the spiritual discipleship of a relatively inexperienced soul towards one already far advanced in sanctity: it is clearly one of at least parity of age,—perhaps, indeed, the woman was the younger of the two,—and of largely equal companionship, which would presumably, unchecked, have easily led on to an entirely honourable and happy marriage. And thus, once again, his devotedness had to live and thrive on concrete, untransferable renouncements and sacrifices claimed by his true self in that unique moment and situation: and this too although he will have been at least tempted wistfully to try and delude himself with the monstrous superstition of an automatic sanctity, a merely theoretic and yet somehow real heroism.