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.