“Yes, say that we shall fail. I will not count
On aught but being faithful. . . .
I will seek nothing but to shun base joy.
The saints were cowards who stood by to see
Christ crucified. They should have thrown themselves
Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain.
The grandest death, to die in vain, for love
Greater than rules the courses of the world.
Such death shall be my bridegroom. . . .
Oh love! you were my crown. No other crown
Is aught but thorns on this poor woman’s brow.”
In this spirit she goes forth to meet her doom, faithfulness thenceforth the one aim and struggle of her life—faithfulness to be maintained under the pressure of such anguish of blighted love and stricken hope as only natures so pure, tender, and deep can know—faithfulness clung to with but the calmer steadfastness when the last glimmer of mere hope is gone.
The successive scenes in the Gypsy camp with Juan, with her father, and with the Gypsy girl Hinda, bring before us at once the intensity of her suffering and the depth of her steadfastness. Trembling beneath the burden laid upon her,—laid on her by
no will of another, but by the earnestness of her own humanity,—we see her seeking through Juan whatever of possible comfort can come through tidings of him she has left; in the strong and noble nature of her father, the consolation of at least hoping that her sacrifice shall not be all in vain; and in Hinda’s untutored, instinctive faithfulness to her name and race, support to her own resolve. But no pressure of her suffering, no despondency as to the result of all, no thought of the lonely life before her, filled evermore with those yearnings toward the past and the vanished, can turn her back from her chosen path.
“Father, my soul is weak,
. . . . . . . .
But if I cannot plant resolve on hope,
It will stand firm on certainty of woe.
. . . Hopes have precarious life;
But faithfulness can feed on suffering,
And knows no disappointment. Trust in me.
If it were needed, this poor trembling hand
Should grasp the torch—strive not to let it fall,
Though it were burning down close to my flesh.
No beacon lighted yet. I still should hear
Through the damp dark the cry of gasping swimmers.
Father, I will be true.”
The scenes which follow, first with her lover, then with her lover and her father together, present the culmination at once of her trial and of her steadfastness. Hitherto she has made her choice, as it were, in the bodily absence of that love, the abnegation of
whose every hope gives its sharpness to her crown of thorns. Now the light and the darkness, the joy and the sorrow, the love whose earthly life she is slaying, and the life of lonely, ceaseless, lingering pain before her, stand, as it were, visibly and tangibly side by side. On the one hand her father, with his noble presence, his calm unquestioning self-devotion, his fervid eloquence, and his withering scorn of everything false and base, represents that deepest in humanity—and in her—which impels to seek and to cling to the highest good. On the other her lover, associated with all the deeply-cherished life, joy, and hope of her past, pleads with his earnest, impassioned, almost despairing eloquence, for her return to happiness. More nobly beautiful by far in her sad steadfastness than when she glowed before us as the “child of light” upon the Plaça,—
“Her choice was made.
. . . . . . .
Slowly she moved to choose sublimer pain,
Yearning, yet shrinking: . . .
. . . firm to slay her joy,
That cut her heart with smiles beneath the knife,
Like a sweet babe foredoomed by prophecy.”
To all the despairing pleadings and appeals of her lover she has but one answer:—
“You must forgive Fedalma all her debt.
She is quite beggared. If she gave herself,
’Twould be a self corrupt with stifled thoughts
Of a forsaken better. . . .
Oh, all my bliss was in our love, but now
I may not taste it; some deep energy
Compels me to choose hunger.”