"I have gazed into the darkness—
Seeking in the busy crowd
For a form once—"
"Perhaps I have done him wrong after all," she interrupted herself; and aloud she said, cheerfully: "The name of this place will be changed before we leave it, I know. But down there is Mr. Muldweber; I mean to ask him about Lone Linden, and his singular fancy for that tree." She knew Clara would be happier left alone to dream over the vision of the morning, and her heart really went out in sympathy to this lonely old man, who had such a longing, hungry look in his eyes as he stood with his arm thrown around the lone linden, his other hand shading his eyes while he peered down the road toward the town.
"No one hastens home at twilight,
Waiting for my hand to wave."
Christine's dreary singing would hardly have enlivened Mr. Muldweber's spirits if he had heard it; but it ceased ere she came close up to him. With his usual gallantry the old man spread his handkerchief on the grass covering the broken mound for Christine to rest on, and before darkness had spread over the plain and crept up to the mountain-tops, she knew more of the old man's history—which was the history of the linden tree—than she had ever expected to learn. He had learned to love the girl during the few days that the fitting-up of the house had thrown them together; and he could speak his mother tongue to her—he never would have said so much in English.
When he had left the mining-school at Freiberg in the Fatherland to come to the great America, he had brought with him from the old Edelhof, where he was born and raised, a handful of seed from the linden trees that formed his favorite avenue. He meant to build up just such a place in America, and he carried the linden seed with him through the United States and then into Mexico, where his knowledge of scientific mining was of more use at that time. Into Mexico he carried his bride, a young German girl, whose parents had died on their way out from the Fatherland, and who died herself of Heimweh, in the strange, wild land to which her husband brought her. But she left him a son, to whom he gave a new mother, a dark-eyed señorita from Durango. Then he drifted on toward California, before it was California to us, and settled finally in the Pueblo of San Jose, near the mission of Santa Clara, after it had ceased to be a mission. Here he built the old adobe—a house quite pretentious for those times, and he threw up the mound, smooth and round, and discernible at some distance, and planted the linden seed he had so carefully hoarded. But he did not sow the seed broadcast; it was a tree for every member of the family—no more. As the señorita from Durango had presented him with quite a little herd of Muldwebers, however, he had begun to entertain hopes of growing something of a forest in the valley, when the dark eyes of the señorita were closed one dread night, and never opened again to the light of this world.
The wealth she had brought him had weighed but little in her husband's estimation; he had learned to admire her goodness of heart and nobility of character. It was a heavy blow; but, strange to say, his heart almost turned from her children at that time and clung again to the child of his first love, the German girl who had died of being homesick. He grew intolerant of Spanish, would not even speak English, but shut himself up with his oldest son to teach him the language he had neglected for so long. Then died the two sons of his Spanish wife, and, though he mourned their loss, he drew still closer to his first-born.