The thought which caused Bennington de Lane so suddenly look grave was
suggested by the sentence in his mother's letter. For the first time he
realized that these people, up to now so amusing, were possibly
destined to come into intimate relations with himself. Old Bill Lawton
was Mary's father; while Mrs. Lawton was Mary's mother; Maude was
Mary's sister.
The next instant a great rush of love into his heart drove this feeling
from it. What matter anything, provided she loved him and he loved her?
Generous sentiment so filled him that there was room for nothing else.
He even experienced dimly in the depths of his consciousness, a faint
pale joy that in thus accepting what was disagreeable to his finer
sensibilities, he was proving more truly to his own self the
boundlessness of his love. For the moment he was exalted by this
instant revulsion against anything calculating in his passion. And
then slowly, one by one, the objections stole back, like a flock of
noisome sombre creatures put to flight by a sudden movement, but now
returning to their old nesting places. The very unassuming method of
their recurrence lent them an added influence. Almost before Bennington
knew it they had established a case, and he found himself face to face
with a very ugly problem.
Perhaps it will be a little difficult for the average and democratic
reader to realize fully the terrible proportions of this problem. We
whose lives assume little, require little of them. Intangible
objections to the desires of our hearts do not count for much against
their realization; there needs the rough attrition of reality to turn
back our calm, complacent acquisition of that which we see to be for
our best interest in the emotional world. Claims of ancestry mean
nothing.
Claims of society mean not much more. Claims of wealth are
considered as evanescent among a class of men who, by their efforts and
genius, are able to render absolute wealth itself an evanescent
quality. When one of us loves, he questions the worth of the object of
his passion. That established, nothing else is of great importance.
There is a grand and noble quality in this, but it misses much. About
the other state of affairs--wherein the woman's appurtenances of all
kinds, as well as the woman herself, are significant--is a delicate and
subtle aura of the higher refinement--the long refinement of the spirit
through many generations--which, to an eye accustomed to look for
gradations of moral beauty, possesses a peach-blow iridescence of its
own. From one point of view, the old-fashioned forms of thought and
courtesy are stilted and useless. From another they retain still the
lofty dignity of noblesse oblige.
So we would have none set down Bennington de Laney as a prig or a snob
because he did not at once decide for his heart as against his
aristocratic instincts. Not only all his early education, but the life
lessons of many generations of ancestors had taught him to set a
fictitious value on social position. He was a de Laney on both sides.
He had never been allowed to forget it. A long line of forefathers,
proud-eyed in their gilded frames, mutely gazed their sense of the
obligations they had bequeathed to this last representative of their
race. When one belongs to a great family he can not live entirely for
himself. His disgrace or failure reflects not alone on his own
reputation, but it sullies the fair fame of men long dead and buried;
and this is a dreadful thing. For all these old Puritans and Cavaliers,
these knights and barons, these king's councillors and scholars, have
perchance lived out the long years of their lives with all good intent
and purpose and with all earnestness of execution, merely that they
might build and send down to posterity this same fair fame. It is a
bold man, or a wicked man, who will dare lightly to bring the efforts
of so many lives to naught! In the thought of these centuries of
endeavour, the sacrifice of mere personal happiness does not seem so
great an affair after all. The Family Name has taken to itself a soul.
It is a living thing. It may be worked for, it may be nourished by
affection, it may even be worshipped. Men may give their lives to it
with as great a devotion, with as exalted a sense of renunciation, and
as lofty a joy in that renunciation, as those who vow allegiance to St.
Francis or St. Dominic. The tearing of the heart from the bosom often
proves to be a mortal hurt when there is nothing to put in the gap of
its emptiness. Not so when a tradition like this may partly take its
place.