He knew it was the custom. He had been present once when the awful anathema was hurled at a traitor to the faith, withdrawing every right from the outlaw, living or dead. He knew that his grave would be dug in the Jewish cemetery in Baltimore; that the rabbi would read the rites of burial over his empty coffin, and that henceforth his only part in the family life would be the blot of his disgraceful memory.
He spread the pictures and the letters on the desk before him. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead, as he realized the hopelessness of the alternative offered him. One by one he took up the photographs of his brothers and sisters, looked at them long and fondly, and laid them aside; then his father's, with its strong, proud face. He put that away, too.
At last he picked up his mother's picture. She looked straight out at him, with such a world of loving tenderness in the smiling eyes, with such trustful devotion, as if she knew he could not resist the appeal, that he turned away his head. The trial seemed greater than he could bear. He was trembling with the force of it. Then he looked again into the dear, patient face, till his eyes grew too dim to see. It was the same old mother who had nursed him, who had loved him, who had borne with his waywardness and forgiven him always. He seemed to feel the soft touch of her lips on his forehead as she bent over to give him a goodnight kiss. All that she had ever done for him came rushing through his memory so overwhelmingly that he broke down utterly, and began to sob like a child. "O, I can't give her up," he groaned. "My dear old mother! I can't grieve her so!"
All that morning he clung to her picture, sometimes walking the floor in his agony, sometimes falling on his knees to pray. "God in heaven have pity," he cried. "That a man should have to choose between his mother and his Christ!" At last he rose, and, with one more long look at the picture, laid it reverently away with shaking hands. He had surrendered everything.
He did not tell all this to his sympathizing listeners. They could read part of the pathos of that struggle in his face, part in the voice that trembled occasionally, despite his strong effort to control it.
Frank Marion's thoughts went back to his own gentle mother in the old homestead among the green hills of Kentucky. As he thought of the great pillar of strength her unfaltering faith had been to him, of how from boyhood it had upheld and comforted and encouraged him, of how much he had always depended upon her love and her prayers, his sympathies were stirred to their depths. He reached out and took Lessing's hand in his strong grasp.
"God help you, brother!" he said, fervently.
Bethany turned her head aside, and looked away into the hazy distances. She knew what it meant to feel the breaking of every tie that bound her best beloved to her. She knew what it was to have only pictured faces to look into, and lay away with the pain of passionate longing. The question flashed into her mind, could she have made the voluntary surrender that he had made? She put it from her with a throb of shame that she was glad that she had not been so tested.