AT THE GARDEN GATE
Londoners are so habituated to hear London abused as an ugly city that
they are disposed too often to accept the accusation humbly. Yet the
accusation is singularly unjust. If much of London is extremely
unlovely, much might fairly be called beautiful. The new Chelsea that
has arisen on the ashes of the old might well arouse the admiration even
of the most exasperated foreigner. There are recently created regions in
that great tract of the earth's surface known as South Kensington which
in their quaintness of architectural form and braveness of red brick can
defy the gloom of a civic March or November. Old London is disappearing
day by day, but bits of it remain, bits dear to those familiar with
them, bits worth the enterprise of the adventurous, which call for frank
admiration and frank praise even of people who hated London as fully as
Heinrich Heine did. But of all parts of the great capital none perhaps
deserve so fully the title to be called beautiful as some portions of
Hampstead Heath.
Some such reflections floated lightly through the mind of a man who
stood, on this May afternoon, on a high point of Hampstead Hill. He had
climbed thither from a certain point just beyond the Regent's Park, to
which he had driven from Knightsbridge. From that point out the way was
a familiar way to him, and he enjoyed walking along it and noting old
spots and the changes that time had wrought. Now, having reached the
highest point of the ascent, he paused, standing on the grass of the
heath, and turning round, with his back to the country, looked down upon
the town.
There is no better place from which to survey London. To impress a
stranger with any sense of the charm of London as a whole, let him be
taken to that vantage-ground and bidden to gaze. The great city seemed
to lie below and around him as in a hollow, tinged and glorified by the
luminous haze of the May day. The countless spires which pointed to
heaven in all directions gave the vast agglomeration of buildings
something of an Italian air; it reminded the beholder agreeably of
Florence. To right and to left the gigantic city spread, its grey wreath
of eternal smoke resting lightly upon its fretted head, the faint roar
of its endless activity coming up distinctly there in the clear windless
air. The beholder surveyed it and sighed slightly, as he traced
meaningless symbols on the turf with the point of his stick.
'What did Cæsar say?' he murmured. 'Better be the first man in a village
than the second man in Rome! Well, there never was any chance of my
being the second man in Rome; but, at least, I have been the first man
in my village, and that is something. I suppose I reckon as about the
last man there now. Well, we shall see.'
He shrugged his shoulders, nodded a farewell to the city below him, and,
turning round, proceeded to walk leisurely across the Heath. The grass
was soft and springy, the earth seemed to answer with agreeable
elasticity to his tread, the air was exquisitely clear, keen, and
exhilarating. He began to move more briskly, feeling quite boyish again.
The years seemed to roll away from him as rifts of sea fog roll away
before a wind.
Even Gloria seemed as if it had never been--aye, and things before
Gloria was, events when he was still really quite a young man.
He cut at the tufted grasses with his stick, swinging it in dexterous
circles as if it had been his sword. He found himself humming a tune
almost unconsciously, but when he paused to consider what the tune was
he found it was the national march of Gloria. Then he stopped humming,
and went on for a while silently and less joyously. But the gladness of
the fine morning, of the clear air, of the familiar place, took
possession of him again. His face once more unclouded and his spirits
mounted.
'The place hasn't changed much,' he said to himself, looking around him
while he walked. Then he corrected himself, for it had changed a good
deal. There were many more red brick houses dotting the landscape than
there had been when he last looked upon it some seven years earlier.
In all directions these red houses were springing up, quaintly gabled,
much verandahed, pointed, fantastic, brilliant. They made the whole
neighbourhood of the Heath look like the Merrie England of a comic
opera. Yet they were pretty in their way; many were designed by able
architects, and pleased with a balanced sense of proportion and an
impression of beauty and fitness. Many, of course, lacked this, were but
cheap and clumsy imitations of a prevailing mode, but, taken all
together, the effect was agreeable, the effect of the varied reds,
russet, and scarlet and warm crimson against the fresh green of the
grass and trees and the pale faint blue of the May sky.
To the observer they seemed to suit very well the place, the climate,
the conditions of life. They were infinitely better than suburban and
rural cottages people used to build when he was a boy. His mind drifted
away to the kind of houses he had been more familiar with of late years,
houses half Spanish, half tropical; with their wide courtyards and gaily
striped awnings and white walls glaring under a glaring sun.
'Yes, all this is very restful,' he thought--'restful, peaceful,
wholesome.' He found himself repeating softly the lines of Browning,
beginning, 'Oh to be in England now that April's here,' and the
transitions of thought carried him to that other poem beginning, 'It was
roses, roses, all the way,' with its satire on fallen ambition. Thinking
of it, he first frowned and then laughed.
He walked a little way, cresting the rising ground, till he came to an
open space with an unbroken view over the level country to Barnet. Here,
the last of the houses that could claim to belong to the great London
army stood alone in its own considerable space of ground. It was a very
old-fashioned house; it had been half farmhouse, half hall, in the
latter days of the last century, and the dull red brick of its walls,
and the dull red tiles of its roof showed warm and attractive through
the green of the encircling trees. There was a small garden in front,
planted with pine trees, through which a winding path led up to the low
porch of the dwelling. Behind the house a very large garden extended, a
great garden which he knew so 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 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, they might have shot me out of hand. I think if I
had been in their place I should have shot out of hand, do you know,
aunt?'
'Oh, surely they would never have dared--you an Englishman?'
'I am a citizen of Gloria, aunt.'
'You who were so good to them.'
'Well, as to my being good to them, there are two to tell that tale. The
gentlemen of the Congress don't put a high price upon my goodness, I
fancy.' He laughed a little bitterly. 'I certainly meant to do them some
good, and I even thought I had succeeded. My dear aunt, people don't
always like being done good to. I remember that myself when I was a
small boy. I used to fret and fume at the things which were done for my
good; that was because I was a child. The crowd is always a child.'
They had come to the porch by this time, and had stopped short at the
threshold. The little porch was draped in flowers and foliage, and
looked very pretty.
'You were always a good child,' said the old lady affectionately.
Ericson looked down at her rather wistfully.
'Do you think I was?' he asked, and there was a tender irony in his
voice which made the playful question almost pathetic. 'If I had been a
good child I should have been content and had no roving disposition, and
have found my home and my world at Hampstead, instead of straying off
into another hemisphere, only to be sent back at last like a bad penny.'
'So you would,' said the old lady, very softly, more as if she were
speaking to herself than to him. 'So you would if----'
She did not finish her sentence. But her nephew, who knew and
understood, repeated the last word.
'If,' he said, and he, too, sighed.
The old lady caught the sound, and with a pretty little air of
determination she called up a smile to her face.
'Shall we go into the house, or shall we sit awhile in the garden? It is
almost too fine a day to be indoors.'
'Oh, let us sit out, please,' said Ericson. He had driven the sorrow
from his voice, and its tones were almost joyous. 'Is the old
garden-seat still there?'
'Why, of course it is. I sit there always in fine weather.'
They wandered round to the back by a path that skirted the house, a path
all broidered with rose-bushes. At the back, the garden was very large,
beginning with a spacious stretch of lawn that ran right up to the wide
French windows. There were several noble old trees which stood sentinel
over this part of the garden, and beneath one of these trees, a very
ancient elm, was the sturdy garden-seat which the Dictator remembered so
well.
'How many pleasant fairy tales you have told me under this tree, aunt,'
said the Dictator, as soon as they had sat down. 'I should like to lie
on the grass again and listen to your voice, and dream of Njal, and
Grettir, and Sigurd, as I used to do.'
'It is your turn to tell me stories now,' said the old lady. 'Not fairy
stories, but true ones.'
The Dictator laughed. 'You know all that there is to tell,' he said.
'What my letters didn't say you must have found from the newspapers.'
'But I want to know more than you wrote, more than the newspapers
gave--everything.'
'In fact, you want a full, true, and particular account of the late
remarkable revolution in Gloria, which ended in the deposition and exile
of the alien tyrant. My dear aunt, it would take a couple of weeks at
the least computation to do the theme justice.'
'I am sure that I shouldn't tire of listening,' said Miss Ericson, and
there were tears in her bright old eyes and a tremor in her brave old
voice as she said so.
The Dictator laughed, but he stooped and kissed the old lady again very
affectionately.
'Why, you would be as bad as I used to be,' he said. 'I never was tired
of your _sagas_, and when one came to an end I wanted a new one at once,
or at least the old one over again.'
He looked away from her and all around the garden as he spoke. The winds
and rains and suns of all those years had altered it but little.
'We talk of the shortness of life,' he said; 'but sometimes life seems
quite long. Think of the years and years since I was a little fellow,
and sat here where I sit now, then, as now, by your side, and cried at
the deeds of my forbears and sighed for the gods of the North. Do you
remember?'
'Oh, yes; oh, yes. How could I forget? You, my dear, in your bustling
life might forget; but I, day after day in this great old garden, may be
forgiven for an old woman's fancy that time has stood still, and that
you are still the little boy I love so well.'
She held out her hand to him, and he clasped it tenderly, full of an
affectionate emotion that did not call for speech.
There were somewhat similar thoughts in both their minds. He was asking
himself if, after all, it would not have been just as well to remain in
that tranquil nook, so sheltered from the storms of life, so consecrated
by tender affection. What had he done that was worth rising up to cross
the street for, after all? He had dreamed a dream, and had been harshly
awakened. What was the good of it all? A melancholy seemed to settle
upon him in that place, so filled with the memories of his childhood. As
for his companion, she was asking herself if it would not have been
better for him to stay at home and live a quiet English life, and be her
help and solace.
Both looked up from their reverie, met each other's melancholy glances,
and smiled.
'Why,' said Miss Ericson, 'what nonsense this is! Here are we who have
not met for ages, and we can find nothing better to do than to sit and
brood! We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.'
'We ought,' said the Dictator, 'and for my poor part I am. So you want
to hear my adventures?'
Miss Ericson nodded, but the narrative was interrupted. The wide French
windows at the back of the house opened and a man entered the garden.
His smooth voice was heard explaining to the maid that he would join
Miss Ericson in the garden.
The new-comer made his way along the garden, with extended hand, and
blinking amiably. The Dictator, turning at his approach, surveyed him
with some surprise. He was a large, loosely made man, with a large white
face, and his somewhat ungainly body was clothed in loose light material
that was almost white in hue. His large and slightly surprised eyes were
of a kindly blue; his hair was a vague yellow; his large mouth was weak;
his pointed chin was undecided. He dimly suggested some association to
the Dictator; after a few seconds he found that the association was with
the Knave of Hearts in an ordinary pack of playing-cards.
'This is a friend of mine, a neighbour who often pays me a visit,' said
the old lady hurriedly, as the white figure loomed along towards them.
'He is a most agreeable man, very companionable indeed, and learned,
too--extremely learned.'
This was all that she had time to say before the white gentleman came
too close to them to permit of further conversation concerning his
merits or defects.
The new-comer raised his hat, a huge, white, loose, shapeless felt, in
keeping with his ill-defined attire, and made an awkward bow which at
once included the old lady and the Dictator, on whom the blue eyes
beamed for a moment in good-natured wonder.
'Good morning, Miss Ericson,' said the new-comer. He spoke to Miss
Ericson; but it was evident that his thoughts were distracted. His vague
blue eyes were fixed in benign bewilderment upon the Dictator's face.
Miss Ericson rose; so did her nephew. Miss Ericson spoke.
'Good morning, Mr. Sarrasin. Let me present you to my nephew, of whom
you have heard so much. Nephew, this is Mr. Gilbert Sarrasin.'
The new-comer extended both hands; they were very large hands, and very
soft and very white. He enfolded the Dictator's extended right hand in
one of his, and beamed upon him in unaffected joy.
'Not your nephew, Miss Ericson--not the hero of the hour? Is it
possible; is it possible? My dear sir, my very dear and honoured sir, I
cannot tell you how rejoiced I am, how proud I am, to have the privilege
of meeting you.'
The Dictator returned his friendly clasp with a warm pressure. He was
somewhat amused by this unexpected enthusiasm.
'You are very good indeed, Mr. Sarrasin.' Then, repeating the name to
himself, he added, 'Your name seems to be familiar to me.'
The white gentleman shook his head with something like playful
repudiation.
'Not my name, I think; no, not my name, I feel sure.' He accentuated the
possessive pronoun strongly, and then proceeded to explain the
accentuation, smiling more and more amiably as he did so. 'No, not my
name; my brother's--my brother's, I fancy.'
'Your brother's?' the Dictator said inquiringly. There was some
association in his mind with the name of Sarrasin, but he could not
reduce it to precise knowledge.
'Yes, my brother,' said the white gentleman. 'My brother, Oisin Stewart
Sarrasin, whose name, I am proud to think, is familiar in many parts of
the world.'
The recollection he was seeking came to the Dictator. It was the name
that Hamilton had given to him that morning, the name of the man who had
written to him, and who had signed himself 'a soldier of fortune.' He
smiled back at the white gentleman.
'Yes,' he said truthfully, 'I have heard your brother's name. It is a
striking name.'
The white gentleman was delighted. He rubbed his large white hands
together, and almost seemed as if he might purr in the excess of his
gratification. He glanced enthusiastically at Miss Ericson.
'Ah!' he went on. 'My brother is a remarkable man. I may even say so in
your illustrious presence; he is a remarkable man. There are degrees, of
course,' and he bowed apologetically to the Dictator; 'but he is
remarkable.'
'I have not the least doubt of that,' said the Dictator politely.
The white gentleman seemed much pleased. At a sign from Miss Ericson he
sat down upon a garden-chair, still slowly and contentedly rubbing his
white hands together. Miss Ericson and her nephew resumed their seats.
'Captain Sarrasin is a great traveller,' Miss Ericson said explanatorily
to the Dictator. The Dictator bowed his head. He did not quite know what
to say, and so, for the moment, said nothing. The white gentleman took
advantage of the pause.
'Yes,' he said, 'yes, my brother is a great traveller. A wonderful man,
sir; all parts of the wide world are as familiar as home to him. The
deserts of the nomad Arabs, the Prairies of the great West, the Steppes
of the frozen North, the Pampas of South America; why, he knows them all
better than most people know Piccadilly.'
'South America?' questioned the Dictator; 'your brother is acquainted
with South America?'
'Intimately acquainted,' replied Mr. Sarrasin. 'I hope you will meet
him. You and he might have much to talk about. He knew Gloria in the old
days.'
The Dictator expressed courteously his desire to have the pleasure of
meeting Captain Sarrasin. 'And you, are you a traveller as well?' he
asked.
Mr. Sarrasin shook his head, and when he spoke there was a certain
accent of plaintiveness in his reply.
'No,' he said, 'not at all, not at all. My brother and I resemble each
other very slightly. He has the wanderer's spirit; I am a confirmed
stay-at-home. While he thinks nothing of starting off at any moment for
the other ends of the earth, I have never been outside our island, have
never been much away from London.'
'Isn't that curious?' asked Miss Ericson, who evidently took much
pleasure in the conversation of the white gentleman. The Dictator
assented. It was very curious.
'Yet I am fond of travel, too, in my way,' Mr. Sarrasin went on,
delighted to have found an appreciative audience. 'I read about it
largely. I read all the old books of travel, and all the new ones, too,
for the matter of that. I have quite a little library of voyages,
travels, and explorations in my little home. I should like you to see it
some time if you should so far honour me.'
The Dictator declared that he should be delighted. Mr. Sarrasin, much
encouraged, went on again.
'There is nothing I like better than to sit by my fire of a winter's
evening, or in my garden of a summer afternoon, and read of the
adventures of great travellers. It makes me feel as if I had travelled
myself.'
'And Mr. Sarrasin tells me what he has read, and makes me, too, feel
travelled,' said Miss Ericson.
'Perhaps you get all the pleasure in that way with none of the fatigue,'
the Dictator suggested.
Mr. Sarrasin nodded. 'Very likely we do. I think it was à Kempis who
protested against the vanity of wandering. But I fear it was not à
Kempis's reasons that deterred me; but an invincible laziness and
unconquerable desire to be doing nothing.'
'Travelling is generally uncomfortable,' the Dictator admitted. He was
beginning to feel an interest in his curious, whimsical interlocutor.
'Yes,' Mr. Sarrasin went on dreamily. 'But there are times when I regret
the absence of experience. I have tramped in fancy through tropical
forests with Stanley or Cameron, dwelt in the desert with Burton,
battled in Nicaragua with Walker, but all only as it were in dreams.'
'We are such stuff as dreams are made of,' the Dictator observed
sententiously.
'And our little lives are rounded by a sleep,' Miss Ericson said softly,
completing the quotation.
'Yes, yes,' said Mr. Sarrasin; 'but mine are dreams within a dream.' He
was beginning to grow quite communicative as he sat there with his big
stick between his knees, and his amorphous felt hat pushed back from his
broad white forehead.
'Sometimes my travels seem very real to me. If I have been reading Ford
or Kinglake, or Warburton or Lane, I have but to lay the volume down and
close my eyes, and all that I have been reading about seems to take
shape and sound, and colour and life. I hear the tinkling of the
mule-bells and the guttural cries of the muleteers, and I see the
Spanish market-place, with its arcades and its ancient cathedral; or the
delicate pillars of the Parthenon, yellow in the clear Athenian air; or
Stamboul, where the East and West join hands; or Egypt and the desert,
and the Nile and the pyramids; or the Holy Land and the walls of
Jerusalem--ah! it is all very wonderful, and then I open my eyes and
blink at my dying fire, and look at my slippered feet, and remember that
I am a stout old gentleman who has never left his native land, and I
yawn and take my candle and go to my bed.'
There was something so curiously pathetic and yet comic about the white
gentleman's case, about his odd blend of bookish knowledge and personal
inexperience, that the Dictator could scarcely forbear smiling. But he
did forbear, and he spoke with all gravity.
'I am not sure that you haven't the better part after all,' he said. 'I
find that the chief pleasure of travel lies in recollection. _You_ seem
to get the recollection without the trouble.'
'Perhaps so,' said Mr. Sarrasin; 'perhaps so. But I think I would rather
have had the trouble as well. Believe me, my dear sir, believe a
dreamer, that action is better than dreams. Ah! how much better it is
for you, sir, to sit here, a disappointed man for the moment it may be,
but a man with a glowing past behind him, than, like me, to have nothing
to look back upon! My adventures are but compounded out of the essences
of many books. I have never really lived a day; you have lived every day
of your life. Believe me, you are much to be envied.'
There was genuine conviction in the white gentleman's voice as he spoke
these words, and the note of genuine conviction troubled the Dictator in
his uncertainty whether to laugh or cry. He chose a medium course and
smiled slightly.
'I should think, Mr. Sarrasin, that you are the only one in London
to-day who looks upon me as a man much to be envied. London, if it
thinks of me at all, thinks of me only as a disastrous failure, as an
unsuccessful exile--a man of no account, in a word.'
Mr. Sarrasin shook his head vehemently. 'It is not so,' he protested,
'not so at all. Nobody really thinks like that, but if everybody else
did, my brother Oisin Stewart Sarrasin certainly does not think like
that, and his opinion is better worth having than that of most other
men. You have no warmer admirer in the world than my brother, Mr.
Ericson.'
The Dictator expressed much satisfaction at having earned the good
opinion of Mr. Sarrasin's brother.
'You would like him, I am sure,' said Mr. Sarrasin. 'You would find him
a kindred spirit.'
The Dictator graciously expressed his confidence that he should find a
kindred spirit in Mr. Sarrasin's brother. Then Mr. Sarrasin, apparently
much delighted with his interview, rose to his feet and declared that it
was time for him to depart. He shook hands very warmly with Miss
Ericson, but he held the Dictator's hands with a grasp that was devoted
in its enthusiasm. Then, expressing repeatedly the hope that he might
soon meet the Dictator again, and once more assuring him of the kinship
between the Dictator and Captain Oisin Stewart Sarrasin, the white
gentleman took himself off, a pale bulky figure looming heavily across
the grassy lawn and through the French window into the darkness of the
sitting-room.
When he was quite out of sight the Dictator, who had followed his
retreating figure with his eyes, turned to Miss Ericson with a look of
inquiry. Miss Ericson smiled.
'Who is Mr. Sarrasin?' the Dictator asked. 'He has come up since my
time.'
'Oh, yes; he first came to live here about six years ago. He is one of
the best souls in the world; simple, good-hearted, an eternal child.'
'What is he?' The Dictator asked.
'Well, he is nothing in particular now. He was in the City, his father
was the head of a very wealthy firm of tea merchants, Sarrasin, Jermyn,
& Co. When the father died a few years ago he left all his property to
Mr. Gilbert, and then Mr. Gilbert went out of business and came here.'
'He does not look as if he would make a very good business man,' said
the Dictator.
'No; but he was very patient and devoted to it for his father's sake.
Now, since he has been free to do as he likes, he has devoted himself to
folk-lore.'
'To folk-lore?'
'Yes, to the study of fairy tales, of comparative mythology. I am quite
learned in it now since I have had Mr. Sarrasin for a neighbour, and
know more about "Puss in Boots" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" than I ever
did when I was a girl.'
'Really,' said the Dictator, with a kind of sigh. 'Does he devote
himself to fairy tales?' It crossed his mind that a few moments before
he had been thinking of himself as a small child in that garden, with a
taste for fairy tales, and regretting that he had not stayed in that
garden. Now, with the dust of battle and the ashes of defeat upon him,
he came back to find a man much older than himself, who seemed still to
remain a child, and to be entranced with fairy tales. 'I wish I were
like that,' the Dictator said to himself, and then the veil seemed to
lift, and he saw again the Plaza Nacional of Gloria, and the Government
Palace, where he had laboured at laws for a free people. 'No,' he
thought, 'no; action, action.'
'What are you thinking of?' asked Miss Ericson softly. 'You seem to be
quite lost in thought.'
'I was thinking of Mr. Sarrasin,' answered the Dictator. 'Forgive me for
letting my thoughts drift. And the brother, what sort of man is this
wonderful brother?'
'I have only seen the brother a very few times,' said Miss Ericson
dubiously. 'I can hardly form an opinion. I do not think he is as nice
as his brother, or, indeed, as nice as his brother believes him to be.'
'What is his record?'
'He didn't get on with his father. He was sent against his will to China
to work in the firm's offices in Shanghai. But he hated the business,
and broke away and entered the Chinese army, I believe, and his father
was furious and cut him off. Since then he has been all over the world,
and served all sorts of causes. I believe he is a kind of soldier of
fortune.'
The Dictator smiled, remembering Captain Sarrasin's own words.
'And has he made his fortune?'
'Oh, no; I believe not. But Gilbert behaved so well. When he came into
the property he wanted to share it all with his disinherited brother,
for whom he has the greatest affection.'
'A good fellow, your Gilbert Sarrasin.'
'The best. But the brother wouldn't take it, and it was with difficulty
that Gilbert induced him to accept so much as would allow him a small
certainty of income.'
'So. A good fellow, too, your Oisin Stewart Sarrasin, it would seem; at
least in that particular.'
'Yes; of course. The brothers don't meet very often, for Captain
Sarrasin----'
'Where does he take his title from?'
'He was captain in some Turkish irregular cavalry.'
'Turkish irregular cavalry? That must be a delightful corps,' the
Dictator said with a smile.
'At least he was captain in several services,' Miss Ericson went on;
'but I believe that is the one he prefers and still holds. As I was
going to say, Captain Sarrasin is almost always abroad.'
'Well, I feel curious to meet him. They are a strange pair of brothers.'
'They are, but we ought to talk of nothing but you to-day. Ah, my dear,
it is so good to have you with me again.'
'Dear old aunt!'
'Let me see much of you now that you have come back. Would it be any use
asking you to stop here?'
'Later, every use. Just at this moment I mustn't. Till I see how things
are going to turn out I must live down there in London. But my heart is
here with you in this green old garden, and where my heart is I hope to
bring my battered old body very often. I will stop to luncheon with you
if you will let me.'
'Let you? My dear, I wish you were always stopping here.' And the grey
old lady put her arms round the neck of the Dictator and kissed him
again.