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Only one warning he must take: "Let it not grieve him to ask peace even for the least of men." The friendship which had thus begun between the barbarian king and the cultivated saint was carried on by his son Feva: but his "deadly and noxious wife" Gisa, who appears to have been a fierce Arian, always, says his biographer, kept him back from clemency.
One story of Gisa's misdeeds is so characteristic both of the manners of the time and of the style in which the original biography is written, that I shall take leave to insert it at length. His deadly and noxious wife, named Gisa, always kept him back from the remedies of clemency.
Frederic, impenitent, swept away all in the monastery, leaving nought but the bare walls, "which he could not carry over the Danube." But on him, too, vengeance fell. Within a month he was slain by his own nephew. Then Odoacer attacked the Rugii, and carried off Feva and Gisa captive to Rome. And then the long-promised emigration came.
Only, when the Lord willed that people to deliver them, they must carry away his bones with them, as the children of Israel carried the bones of Joseph. Then Severinus sent for Feva, the Rugian king, and Gisa, his cruel wife; and when he had warned them how they must render an account to God for the people committed to their charge, he stretched his hand out to the bosom of the king.
"Gisa," he asked, "dost thou love most the soul within that breast, or gold and silver?" She answered that she loved her husband above all. "Cease then," he said, "to oppress the innocent: lest their affliction be the ruin of your power." Severinus' presage was strangely fulfilled. Feva had handed over the city of Vienna to his brother Frederic, "poor and impious," says Eugippius.
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