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.
BOOK I. MISS BROOKE.
CHAPTER I.
"Since I
can do no good
because a woman,
Reach constantly at something
that is near it.
--The Maid's Tragedy:
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
Miss Brooke had
that kind of beauty
which seems
to be
thrown into relief
by poor dress.
Her hand and wrist
were so finely formed
that she
could wear sleeves
not less bare of style