A MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING
In the library, Travis and Mrs. Westmore sat for some time in silence. Travis, as usual, smoked, in his thoughtful way watching the firelight which flickered now and then, half lighting up the room. It was plain that both were thinking of a subject that neither wished to be the first to bring up.
“I have been wanting all day to ask you about the mortgage,” she said to him, finally.
“Oh,” said Travis, indifferently enough—“that's all right. I arranged it at the bank to-day.”
“I am so much obliged to you; it has been so on my mind,” said his companion. “We women are such poor financiers, I wonder how you men ever have patience to bother with us. Did you get Mr. Shipton to carry it at the bank for another year?”
“Why—I—you see, Cousin Alethea—Shipton's a close dog—and the most unaccommodating fellow that ever lived when it comes to money. And so—er—well—the truth is—is—I had to act quickly and for what I thought was your interest.”
Mrs. Westmore looked up quickly, and Travis saw the pained look in her face. “So I bought it in myself,” he went on, carelessly flecking his cigar ashes into the fire. “I just had the judgment and sale transferred to me—to accommodate you—Cousin Alethea—you understand that—entirely for you. I hate to see you bothered this way—I'll carry it as long as you wish.”
She thanked him again, more with her eyes than her voice. Then there crept over her face that look of trouble and sorrow, unlike any Travis had ever seen there. Once seen on any human face it is always remembered, for it is the same, the world over, upon its millions and millions—that deadened look of trouble which carries with it the knowledge that the spot called home is lost forever.
There are many shifting photographs from the camera called sorrow, pictured on the delicate plate of the human soul or focused in the face. There is the crushed look when Death takes the loved one, the hardened look when an ideal is shattered, the look of dismay from wrecked hopes and the cynical look from wrecked happiness—but none of these is the numbed and dumb look of despair which confronts humanity when the home is gone.
It runs not alone through the man family, but every other animal as well, from the broken-hearted bird which sits on the nearby limb, and sees the wreck of her home by the ravages of a night-prowling marauder, to the squalidest of human beings, turning their backs forever on the mud-hut that had once sheltered them.
To Mrs. Westmore it was a keen grief. Here had she come as a bride—here had she lived since—here had been born her two children—here occurred the great sorrow of her life.
And the sacredest memory, at last, of life, lies not in the handclasp of a coming joy, but in the footfall of a vanishing sorrow.
Westmoreland meant everything to Mrs. Westmore—the pride of birth, of social standing, the ties of motherhood, the very altar of her life. And it was her husband's name and her own family. It meant she was not of common clay, nor unknown, nor without influence. It was bound around and woven into her life, and part of her very existence.
Home in the South means more than it does anywhere else on earth; for local self-government—wherever the principle came from—finds its very altar there. States-right is nothing but the home idea, stretched over the state and bounded by certain lines. The peculiar institutions of the South made every home a castle, a town, a government, a kingdom in itself, in which the real ruler is a queen.
Ask the first negro or child met in the road, whose home is this, or that, and one would think the entire Southland was widowed.
From the day she had entered it as a bride, Westmoreland, throughout the County, had been known as the home of Mrs. Westmore.
She was proud of it. She loved it with that love which had come down through a long line of cavaliers loving their castles.
And now she knew it must go, as well as that, sooner or later, Death itself must come.
She knew Richard Travis, and she knew that, if from his life were snatched the chance of making Alice Westmore his wife he would sell the place as cold-bloodedly as Shipton would.
Travis sat smoking, but reading her. He spelled her thoughts as easily as if they had been written on her forehead, for he was a man who spelled. He smoked calmly and indifferently, but the one question of his heart—the winning of Alice,—surged in his breast and it said: “Now is the time—now—buy her—the mother. This is the one thing which is her price.”
He looked at Mrs. Westmore again. He scanned her closely, from her foot to the dainty head of beautiful, half-grey hair. He could read her as an open book—her veneration of all Westmoreland things—her vanity—her pride of home and name and position; the overpowering independence of that vanity which made her hold up her head in company, just as in the former days, tho' to do it she must work, scrub, pinch, ay, even go hungry.
He knew it all and he knew it better than she guessed—that it had actually come to a question of food with them; that her son was a geological dreamer, just out of college, and that Alice's meagre salary at the run-down female college where she taught music was all that stood between them and poverty of the bitterest kind.
For there is no poverty like the tyranny of that which sits on the erstwhile throne of plenty.
He glanced around the room—the hall—the home—in his mind's eye—and wondered how she did it—how she managed that poverty should leave no trace of itself in the home, the well furnished and elegant old home, from its shining, polished furniture and old silver to the oiled floor of oak and ash.
Could he buy her—bribe her, win her to work for him? He started to speak and say: “Cousin Alethea, may not all this be stopped, this debt and poverty and make-believe—this suffering of pride, transfixed by the spears of poverty? Let you and me arrange it, and all so satisfactorily. I have loved Alice all my life.”
There is the fool in every one of us. And that is what the fool in Richard Travis wished him to say. What he did say was:
“Oh, it was nothing but purely business on my part—purely business. I had the money and was looking for a good investment. I was glad to find it. There are a hundred acres and the house left. And by the way, Cousin Alethea, I just added five-hundred dollars more to the principal,—thought, perhaps, you'd need it, you know? You'll find it to your credit at Shipton's bank.”
He smoked on as if he thought it was nothing. As a business fact he knew the place was already mortgaged for all it was worth.
“Oh, how can we ever thank you enough?”
Travis glanced at her when she spoke. He flushed when he heard her place a slight accent on the we. She glanced at him and then looked into the fire. But in their glances which met, they both saw that the other knew and understood.
“And by the way, Cousin Alethea,” said Travis after a while, “of course it is not necessary to let Alice know anything of this business. It will only worry her unnecessarily.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Westmore.