“Oh, I don’t care for that,” said Esther, and she added quickly: “but please don’t feel that you must go too. I know the way.”
Perhaps she was not really anxious that Stella should accompany her, nor sorry that Kate was already far ahead with Tom, when she turned down the old road a few minutes later with her face toward Aunt Katharine’s. “I shall only stay a little while,” she called back. “You won’t be home very long before me.”
But she was wrong as to this. Supper was over and the sunset fading when she appeared at her grandfather’s.
“She insisted on my staying, though I had no thought of her asking me,” she explained to Aunt Elsie. “She was delighted with the huckleberries.”
Sitting in the south doorway afterward with Stella, she said very earnestly: “You never saw anybody pleasanter than Aunt Katharine was all the time I was there. I’m sure she’s a great deal kinder than you think she is. Do you know we got talking of Solomon Ridgeway, and she told me some real interesting things about him. She says he was married when he was young, but his wife only lived a few months. Evidently Aunt Katharine didn’t think much of her, for she said she was a silly little thing, who cared more about finery than anything else. But he was all bound up in her, and when she died it almost killed him. He had a terrible sickness, and when he got over it his mind had this queer kink in it, and never came right afterward.” She paused a moment, then added, “Somehow I couldn’t help thinking that there might be a clew in that story to the reason why she is so good to him.”
“She’s just as queer in her way as he is in his. I guess it’s an affinity of queerness,” said Stella, carelessly. And then she called her cousin’s attention to the color of the clouds, which were fading in airy fringes over Gray’s Hill.
[CHAPTER VIII—A PAIR OF CALLS]
Among the honors which came to Ruel Saxon with advancing years there was probably none which he valued more than his position, well recognized in the community, as keeper of the best fund of stories of the olden time, and referee-in-chief on all debated points of local history. There were plenty of old people in Esterly, some even who had reached the patriarchal age in which he himself so gloried, but there was no other with a memory like his, none with so unique a gift for setting out the past event in warmth and color. The gift was his own, but the memory was in part at least that of some who had gone before.
It had been the old man’s fortune in his youth to be the constant companion of a grandfather who, like himself, was a local authority; a deaf man, who relied much on the boy’s clear voice and quick attention for intercourse with his fellows. Perhaps the service had been irksome sometimes to the boy, but it had its reward for him now; for his grandfather’s experiences and his own blended in his thought as one continuous whole, and covered a space of time no other memory in the town could match.
The time was not yet when every rural village of New England had its historical society, but the recovery of the past was becoming a fad in the cities, and families who valued themselves on their standing were waking up to the importance of making sure of their ancestors. A letter from some gatherer of ancient facts, making requisition on Ruel Saxon’s knowledge, was not uncommon now, and more than once a caller had stopped at the farmhouse hoping to gain help from him in tracing some obscure branch of a family tree.