Urban had previously empowered her to invite to Rome in his name whoever she considered would be useful to the divided Church in its hour of need. Among those Catherine wrote to William of England and Anthony of Nice, two friends, who lived in a pleasant convent at Lecceto, a few miles from Siena. A quaint correspondence resulted, for the two old men were sadly shaken in their comfortable habits by Catherine’s letter. Yet the letter itself was a singularly good one. She states in it plainly that the Church was in such dire necessity that the time had come to give up all questions of peace and solitude in order to succour her.
There were few characters that Catherine could not understand; certainly she understood her two friars perfectly. For the peace and quiet of their country retreat, where they sat and talked in the shady woods, had made them absolutely flabby of spirit. The thought of change and bustle flustered them from head to foot. Catherine had to write again, and this time she wrote with some directness that this was a crisis when character became visibly tested, and when there was no mistaking who really were the true servants of God, and who were merely seekers of a way of life personally congenial to them. These latter, she said, seemed to think that God dwelt in one particular place, and could not be found in any other. This letter must have harried the two old gentlemen sadly. Friar Anthony came to Rome at last, and though it is not clear whether Friar William accompanied him or not, it is probable that, when one gave in, both did.
Catherine endured great fatigue in Rome; it drained the remnant of strength left in her. Nevertheless she sent a letter from there to Stephen that was still almost playful. It is in this letter that occurred the winning petulance concerning the rumours of Stephen’s conversion. How little she could do without him issued again in a still later epistle, when she wrote to him, “Have patience with me.” At this time she was ill, in pain, tired to breaking-point with the Roman risings against the Pope. The schism had spread rapidly. Queen Joanna of Naples, to whom Catherine wrote regrettably stern letters, had flung her influence upon the side of Clement. Urban grew so uncertain that there was talk of sending Catherine—nearly dead through the strain already—to Paris, as the only ambassador likely to draw the French king over to the true Pontiff. She wrote instead, and while her letter was on its way, Charles V. joined the Anti-pope party.
When Rome, at least, had grown comparatively reconciled to Urban, Catherine returned to Siena. She was thirty-three, and the radiance that had magnetized men into contemplating even death with tranquillity, if she was only with them, had to a great extent gone out of her. Nevertheless, her correspondence shows that she never lost her fine discernment of character. Some of her letters are still masterpieces of practical understanding.
For a short time still she lived quietly with the men and women who loved and made much of her, though had she for a second realized how subtly indulged she was, a panic of dismay would have shaken her strenuous spirit. Physical strength, however, was almost exhausted. She suffered greatly, and with a touching foolishness—touching because of its presence in so much wisdom—she repeated again and again that God permitted demons to distress her, and, in consequence, bent her failing strength to wrestle with their torments. That a natural disease was killing her did not seem credible to imagination. Nevertheless, except during intolerable pain, her expression continued pathetically joyous. When she was well enough they carried her out into a neighbouring garden, lent for her use. Catherine never, after the first excesses of her childhood, repudiated out-of-door pleasures. She died in 1380, surrounded by a very passion of regret and tenderness. On her death-bed she confessed quaintly that in the early days of her spiritual career she had yearned for solitude, but that God would have none of it. Each creature possessed a cell in their own souls, where the spirit could live as solitarily and as enclosed in the world as out of it.
Stephen Marconi was with her when she died, and just before the end she entreated him to enter the Order of the Carthusians. Neri she begged to become a hermit. The injunction for a moment appears to lack her usual intuition. Yet it was probably the result of a very deep understanding. Neri’s nerves may have been more tranquil when not played upon by other people.
To the last she prayed, dying peacefully towards the “hour of Sext,” one Sunday evening, according to Stephen, the body until her burial retained a wonderful beauty and fragrance.
Her last request to the latter was reverently complied with, and for the future he carried on, with the grace of nature that made him so lovable, the most endearing of his dead friend’s labours—he became famous as a healer of feuds. The cult of Catherine’s memory gave a sentimental happiness to his days. He remembered her with the painful delight of a faithful lover. Nothing in their companionship had been too trivial for a living recollection. Being elected Father Superior to his monastery, he “invariably added the delicacy of beans to the fare of his religious on Easter Day.” He did this because one Easter Day he had dined with Catherine on beans, there having been nothing else in the house, and as Friar Bartholomew puts it, “the remembrance of that dinner stuck fast to the marrow of his spine.” As an old man, Stephen still cherished the smallest details of her life, and on one occasion, at the sudden recall of some little incident illustrative of her loving-kindness, he burst abruptly into tears, seeming as if his heart would break. The brothers were obliged to lead him gently to a seat out-of-doors, where a freshening wind restored him.
Neri also did as she wished. But his life as a hermit did not interfere with his literary labours, nor did it by any means leave him without society. Once he seems to have gone out of his mind for a time. Stephen mentions in one letter that he was told that he had been alienato, but that it is evident, since he had now heard from him, that he had recovered.
An account of his death, written by a monk to a certain friend of the dead man, Ser Jacomo, and given in the English version in Miss Drane’s life of Catherine, is sufficiently unusual to quote. It falls to the lot of few people to have their deaths recorded in quite such a superfluity of phrases.