The Dictator | Page 7

well, with its lengths of undulating russet
orchard wall, and its divisions into flower garden and fruit garden and
vegetable garden, and the field beyond, where successive generations
of ponies fed, and where he had loved to play in boyhood.
He rested his hand on the upper rim of the garden gate, and looked with
curious affection at the inscription in faded gold letters that ran along it.

The inscription read, 'Blarulfsgarth,' and he remembered ever so far
back asking what that inscription meant, and being told that it was
Icelandic, and that it meant the Garth, or Farm, of the Blue Wolf. And
he remembered, too, being told the tale from which the name came, a
tale that was related of an ancestor of his, real or imaginary, who had
lived and died centuries ago in a grey northern land. It was curious that,
as he stood there, so many recollections of his childhood should come
back to him. He was a man, and not a very young man, when he last
laid his hand upon that gate, and yet it seemed to him now as if he had
left it when he was quite a little child, and was returning now for the
first time with the feelings of a man to the place where he had passed
his infancy.
His hand slipped down to the latch, but he did not yet lift it. He still
lingered while he turned for a moment and looked over the wide extent
of level smiling country that stretched out and away before him. The
last time he had looked on that sweep of earth he was going off to seek
adventure in a far land, in a new world. He had thought himself a
broken man; he was sick of England; his thoughts in their desperation
had turned to the country which was only a name to him, the country
where he was born. Now the day came vividly back to him on which he
had said good-bye to that place, and looked with a melancholy disdain
upon the soft English fields. It was an earlier season of the year, a day
towards the end of March, when the skies were still but faintly blue,
and there was little green abroad. Ten years ago: how many things had
passed in those ten years, what struggles and successes, what struggles
again, all ending in that three days' fight and the last stand in the Plaza
Nacional of Valdorado! He turned away from the scene and pressed his
hand upon the latch.
As he touched the latch someone appeared in the porch. It was an old
lady dressed in black. She had soft grey hair, and on that grey hair she
wore an old-fashioned cap that was almost coquettish by very reason of
its old fashion. She had a very sweet, kind face, all cockled with
wrinkles like a sheet of crumpled tissue paper, but very beautiful in its
age. It was a face that a modern French painter would have loved to
paint--a face that a sculptor of the Renaissance would have delighted to

reproduce in faithful, faultless bronze or marble.
At sight of the sweet old lady the Dictator's heart gave a great leap, and
he pressed down the latch hurriedly and swung the gate wide open. The
sound of the clicking latch and the swinging gate slightly grinding on
the path aroused the old lady's attention. She saw the Dictator, and,
with a little cry of joy, running with an almost girlish activity to meet
the bearded man who was coming rapidly along the pathway, in
another moment she had caught him in her arms and was clasping him
and kissing him enthusiastically. The Dictator returned her caresses
warmly. He was smiling, but there were tears in his eyes. It was so odd
being welcomed back like this in the old place after all that had passed.
'I knew you would come to-day, my dear,' the old lady said half
sobbing, half laughing. 'You said you would, and I knew you would.
You would come to your old aunt first of all.'
'Why, of course, of course I would, my dear,' the Dictator answered,
softly touching the grey hair on the forehead below the frilled cap.
'But I didn't expect you so early,' the old lady went on. 'I didn't think
you would get up so soon on your first morning. You must be so tired,
my dear, so very tired.'
She was holding his left hand in her right now, and they were walking
slowly side by side up by the little path through the fir trees to the
house.
'Oh, I'm not so very tired as all that comes to,' he said with a laugh. 'A
long voyage is a