CHAPTER LXXXVI.

FINALE.

PRELUDE.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious

mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt,

at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with

some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one

morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek

martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged

Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human

hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met

them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great

resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s

passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed

romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to

her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within,

soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would

never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the

rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the

reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not

the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for

themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of

far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of

a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of

opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and

sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance

they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but

after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and

formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent

social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge

for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague

ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was

disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient

indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures

of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as

the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might

be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness

remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one

would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite

love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared

uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the

living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and

there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving

heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are

dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some

long-recognizable deed.