“I shall write to mother that we have seen you,” said Esther, smiling back at the little man, who still stood bowing with his cap in his hands, and Kate gave him a friendly nod, though her mouth was twitching with amusement.
Aunt Katharine said good-by to them at the front door. “If you ever feel like seeing the old woman again, come down,” she said to the girls. “’Tain’t so very far across the fields, and you can follow the cow-path.” Then, without waiting to see them go, she closed the door.
“Grandfather,” Kate burst out when they were fairly off, “who in the world is that man, and how does he come to be at Aunt Katharine’s?”
“That man,” he repeated, deepening his tone with an accent of disgust, “is a poor half-witted cretur that belongs at the poorhouse. He stays there most of the time, but now ’n’ then he gets a restless spell and they let him out. Then he always comes round to your Aunt Katharine’s, and she takes him in.”
“Well, he’s the queerest acting man I ever came across,” said Kate, “and how he was dressed out, with his fine flowered vest and his jewellery!”
“‘Jewellery!’” grunted her grandfather. “He didn’t have on any compared with what he has sometimes. Why, when he really dresses up, that cretur covers himself all over with it.”
The girls looked so astonished that he apparently felt it incumbent on him to attempt some explanation of the man. “The fact is,” he said, “Solomon Ridgeway is as crazy as a loon on one p’int. He thinks he’s rich, though for aught I know he’s got as much sense about other things as he ever had. He thinks he’s terrible rich, and that the best way to keep his property, as he calls it, is in gold and jewels. He’s got a trunkful of it—wo’thless stuff, of course—that he carries with him everywhere. I s’pose it’s stowed away somewhere at your Aunt Katharine’s now.”
Kate really seemed past speaking for a moment, and Esther exclaimed in a tone of utter bewilderment, “Well, I should have thought Aunt Katharine was the last person in the world who would want such a man at her house. What makes her do it?”
“The Lord only knows,” said the old gentleman solemnly. And then he jerked the reins and urged Dobbin on his way in a tone of uncommon asperity.
The fact was, the question had a special irritation for him. That his sister, who flouted wise men and scorned the opinions of those having authority, should bear with the vagaries of a being like Solomon Ridgeway was a thing that passed his understanding. With the man himself he might have had some patience, though his form of mania was peculiarly exasperating to his own hard common sense, and somehow he could not help resenting it that “Solomon,” of all names, should have lighted on so foolish a creature; but that, such as he was, he should be the object of Katharine Saxon’s pointed and continuous favor was trying beyond measure to her brother. He lapsed into a silence quite unusual with him, and the girls did not disturb it again on the way home.