The Dictator | Page 7

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 restful thing, and I had time to get over the fatigue of the----' he seemed to pause an instant for a word; then he went on, 'the trouble, while I was on board the "Almirante Cochrane." Do you know they were quite kind to me on board the "Almirante Cochrane"?'
The old lady's delicate face flushed angrily. 'The wretches, the wicked wretches!' she said quite fiercely, and the thin fingers closed tightly upon his and shook, agitating the lace ruffles at her wrists.
The Dictator laughed again. It seemed too strange to have all those wild adventures quietly discussed in a Hampstead garden with a silver-haired elderly lady in a cap.
'Oh, come,' he said, 'they weren't so bad; they weren't half bad, really. Why, you know,