Revelry has need of a certain co-operation. Sebastian drew heavily on his memory for entertainment, told of the combination that had “cleaned him out,” and how he might get in again in the Spring, only he felt a bit tired in mind now, and things seemed dead. He explained the mysteries of “short prices, selling allowances, past choices, hurdles and handicaps,” and told of the great October races, where Decatur won from Clifford and Lady Mary, and Lady Mary ran through the fence and destroyed the features of the jockey. But the quiet, smooth-haired woman maintained her calm, and offered neither question nor comment, only smiled and flushed faintly now and then. She seemed as little stirred by new tumultuous things as the white curtains at the windows, that moved slightly when the storm, which danced and shouted on Edom Hill, managed to force a whistling breath through a chink.
Sebastian decided she was frozen up with loneliness and the like. “She's got no conversation, let alone revelry.” He thought he knew what her life was like. “She's sort of empty. Nothing doing any time. It's the off season all the year. No troubles. Sort of like a fish, as being chilly and calm, that lives in cold water till you have to put pepper on to taste it. I know how it goes on this old hill.”
She left him soon. He heard her moving about in the kitchen, and sometimes the clink of a dish. He sat by the stove and mused and muttered. She came and told him his room was on the left of the stair; it had a stove; would he not carry up wood and have his fire there? She seemed to imply a preference that he should. But the burden and oppression of his musings kept him from wondering when she had compromised her scruples and fears, or why she kept any of them. He mounted the stair with his wood. She followed with a lamp and left him. He stared at the closed door and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then went to work with his fire. The house became silent, except for the outer tumult. She did not mount the stair again; it followed that she slept below.
Sebastian took a daguerreotype from the mantel and stared at it. It was the likeness of a shaven, grim-faced man in early middle life. He examined it long with a quizzical frown; finally went to the washstand, opened the drawer and took out a razor with a handle of yellow bone, carried the washstand to the stove, balanced the mirror against the pitcher, stropped the razor on his hand, heated water in a cup, slowly dismantled his face of beard and mustache, cast them in the stove, put the daguerreotype beside the mirror, and compared critically. Except that the face in the daguerreotype had a straight, set mouth, and the face in the mirror was one full-lipped and humorous and differently lined, they were nearly the same.
“I wouldn't have believed it”
He put it aside and looked around, whistling in meditation. Then he went back again to wondering who the pale-haired woman was. Probably the farm had changed hands. A man whose father had been dead going on twenty years couldn't have that kind of widowed stepmother. He was disqualified.
A cold, unchanging place, Edom Hill, lifted out of the warm, sapping currents of life. It might be a woman could keep indefinitely there, looking much the same. If her pulse beat once to an ordinary twice, she ought to last twice as long. The house seemed unchanged. The old things were in their old familiar places, David Sebastian's books on their shelves in the room below, on the side table there his great Bible, in which he used to write all family records, with those of his reforming activity. Sebastian wondered what record stood of his own flight.
He sat a few moments longer, then took his lamp and crept softly out of the room and down the stairs. The sitting-room was icily cold now; the white curtains stirred noiselessly. He sat down before the little side table and opened the great book.
There were some thirty leaves between the Old and New Testaments, most of them stitched in. A few at the end were blank. Some of the records were obscure.
“March 5th, 1840. Saw light on this subject.”