The archbishop began a long discourse, but Nicolas impatiently shook himself free from his guards, and without waiting for the end of it, bounded out of the hall to the head of the steps leading into the street, crying, “Kyrie eleison!” which was responded to by a shout from the boys eagerly awaiting him without.

At the head of a swarm of children he rushed madly through and round the city, making the streets resound with his monotonous appeal, and bringing the wondering citizens to their doors and windows.

But the blows he had received at Tarentum had done him some serious internal injury, and he now fell sick at Trani. There was hardly an inhabitant of the city who did not visit his sickbed, that he might hear the poor madman howl, “Kyrie eleison!” with his fevered lips, and depart marvelling at his sanctity.

The boys who had run after him and partaken of his apples came to see him, and the dying man gave them his cross, and bade them march about the dormitory of the hospital where he lay, bearing the cross, and vociferating, “Kyrie eleison!” Night and day the dormitory was crowded, and the excitement of the fevered man kept constantly stimulated. He died on 2nd June 1094, and till his burial his body attracted ever-increasing crowds.

He was buried at Trani with considerable ceremony, for already the notion had spread that the crazy Greek was a great saint, and the infatuated Brother Bartholomew did his utmost to fan the growing popular enthusiasm into a flame. Almost immediately after the burial highly imaginative individuals began to believe they had been miraculously healed of diseases at his tomb. He appeared in visions, cured cripples, uttered forebodings. The Archbishop of Trani made formal investigation into the miracles, after the manner of ecclesiastical investigations, and pronounced them genuine. Trani was without a patron; no blood of martyrs had reddened its soil, no saint had occupied its episcopal throne. It was discreditable to be without a patron, and the good people of Trani were not nice as to whom they had as patron so long as they had one whom they could claim as peculiarly their own.

A statement of the virtues, acts, and miracles of Nicolas was forwarded with gravity by the Archbishop of Trani to the Pope and Council at Rome in 1099. Urban II. with equal gravity, by special bull, canonised this pitiable fool, and hoaxed Christendom into worshipping a man in whose career no single spark of godliness appears; a man driven, to all appearance, from his own country for having led astray an innocent girl, whom he persuaded to elope with him from her home, and join him in his vagabond life.

III

ST. CHRISTINA THE WONDERFUL

The life of this extraordinary saint, so extraordinary that even those who canonised her—the vulgar and ignorant—called her “The Wonderful,” comes to us on the best possible authority. Her life was written by Thomas de Chantpré, or Catimpré, born at Leuve in the Low Countries in 1201; he was canon in the abbey of Catimpré, and then entered the Dominican Order in a convent at Louvain, in 1232, and there taught theology. He was a contemporary and fellow-countryman of Christina; he had all the particulars necessary from those who had seen and conversed with Christina, whom he survived by many years. Indeed, she died when he was aged twenty-three. Christina the Wonderful was born at the village of Brustheim, near St. Trond in Hesbain, in the year 1150. When aged fifteen she was left an orphan, the youngest of three sisters, and spent her childhood in the fields tending sheep and cows. As now, so then, there were no hedges, and cattle sent into pasture had to be subjected to supervision lest they transgressed into the land of neighbours. Christina was employed as thousands of little girls have been employed since in Germany and Belgium. It was a solitary occupation for a child, and she was thrown much in on herself, on her own thoughts, her own imaginations.

Nothing remarkable about her was observed till she began to pass from childhood into womanhood, a critical period, and then it was that her malady first manifested itself. She fell down one day in a cataleptic fit, and was taken up as dead. Her sisters, with whom she lived, had her washed, laid out, placed on a bier, and conveyed to church, where the funeral mass was ordered to be said.