“Sit down here, boy,” returned the Judge. “I have more to say before I answer that question. You have seen a gnarled, crabbed old oak, haven’t you, with a green, beautiful vine creeping over and around it, putting out a broad leaf here, sending forth a tendril there, and covering up the deformity beneath, until people say of that tree, ‘It’s not so ugly after all?’ But tear the vine away, and the oak is uglier than ever. Well, that sour, crabbed tree is me; and that beautiful vine, bearing the broad leaves and the luxurious fruit, is Mildred, who has crept around and over, and into my very being, until there is not a throb of my heart which does not bear with it a thought of her. She’s all the old man has to love. The other Mildred is dead long years ago, while Richard, Heaven only knows where my boy Richard is,” and leaning on his gold-headed cane, the Judge seemed to be wandering away back in the past, while Lawrence, who thought the comparison between the oak and the vine very fine, very appropriate, and all that, but couldn’t, for the life of him, see what it had to do with his speaking to Mildred that night, ventured again to say:
“And I may tell Mildred of my love,—may I not?”
Then the Judge roused up and answered, “Only on condition that you both stay here with me. The oak withers when the vine is torn away, and I, too, should die if I knew Milly had left me forever. Man alive, you can’t begin to guess how I love the vixen, nor how the sound of her voice makes the little laughing ripples break all over my old heart. There comes the gipsy now,” and the little, laughing ripples, as he called them, broke all over his face, as he saw Mildred galloping to the door, her starry eyes looking archly out from beneath her riding hat, and her lips wreathed with smiles as she kissed her hand to the Judge. “Yes, boy, botheration, yes,” whispered the latter, as Lawrence pulled his sleeve for an answer to his question, ere hastening to help the ladies alight. “Talk to her all night if you want to, I’ll do my best to keep back ‘softening of the brain,’” and he nodded toward Lilian, who was indulging herself in little bits of feminine screams as her horse showed signs of being frightened at a dog lying behind some bushes.
But the judge had promised more than he was capable of performing. All that evening he manœuvred most skilfully to separate Lilian from Mildred, but the thing could not be done, for just so sure as he asked the former to go with him upon the piazza and tell him the names of the stars, just so sure she answered that “she didn’t know as stars had names,” suggesting the while that he take Mildred, who knew everything, and when at last he told her, jokingly as it were, that “it was time children and fools were in bed,” she answered with more than her usual quickness:
“I would advise you to go then.”
“Sharper than I s’posed,” he thought, and turning to Lawrence, he whispered: “No use—no use. She sticks like shoemaker’s wax, but I’ll tell you what, when she is getting ready to go to-morrow I’ll call Milly down, on the pretence of seeing her for something, and then you’ll have a chance,” and with this Lawrence was fain to be satisfied.
He did not need to go to Oliver for an explanation of his words,—he knew now what they meant,—knew that the beautiful Mildred did care for him, and when he at last laid his head upon his pillow, he could see in the future no cloud to darken his pathway, unless it were his father’s anger, and even that did not seem very formidable.
“He will change his mind when he sees how determined I am,” he thought. “Mildred won the crusty Judge’s heart,—she will win his as well. Lilian will shed some tears, I suppose, and Geraldine will scold, but after knowing how Lilian deceived me, I could not marry her, even were there no Mildred ‘with the starry eyes and nut-brown hair.’”
He knew that people had applied these terms to his young step-mother, and it was thus that he loved to think of Mildred, whose eyes were as bright as stars and whose hair was a rich nut-brown. He did not care who her parents were, he said, though his mind upon that point was pretty well established, but should he be mistaken, it was all the same. Mildred, as his wife and the adopted daughter of Judge Howell, would be above all reproach, and thus, building pleasant castles of the future, he fell asleep.
