The Dictator. McCarthy Justin Huntly

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СКАЧАТЬ palms in it, and out of the palms arising a great bronze reproduction of the Hermes of Praxiteles. Lady Seagraves playfully called this little room her Pagan parlour. Here people who knew the house well found their way when they wanted quiet conversation. There was nobody in it when Miss Langley and the Dictator arrived. Helena sat down on a sofa with a sigh of relief, and Ericson sat down beside her.

      'What a delightful change from all that awful noise and glare!' said Helena. 'I am very fond of this little corner, and I think Lady Seagraves regards it as especially sacred to me.'

      'I am grateful for being permitted to cross the hallowed threshold,' said the Dictator. 'Is this the tutelary divinity?' And he glanced up at the bronze image.

      'Yes,' said Miss Langley; 'that is a copy of the Hermes of Praxiteles which was discovered at Olympia some years ago. It is the right thing to worship.'

      'One so seldom worships the right thing—at least, at the right time,' he said.

      'I worship the right thing, I know,' she rejoined, 'but I don't quite know about the right time.'

      'Your instincts would be sure to guide you right,' he answered, not indeed quite knowing what he was talking about.

      'Why?' she asked, point blank.

      'Well, I suppose I meant to say that you have nobler instincts than most other people.'

      'Come, you are not trying to pay me a compliment? I don't want compliments; I hate and detest them. Leave them to stupid and uninteresting men.'

      'And to stupid and uninteresting women?'

      'Another try at a compliment!'

      'No; I felt that.'

      'Well, anyhow, I did not entice you in here to hear anything about myself; I know all about myself.'

      'Indeed,' he said straightforwardly, 'I do not care to pay compliments, and I should never think of wearying you with them. I believe I hardly quite knew what I was talking about just now.'

      'Very well; it does not matter. I want to hear about you. I want to know all about you. I want you to trust in me and treat me as your friend.'

      'But what do you want me to tell you?'

      'About yourself and your projects and everything. Will you?'

      The Dictator was a little bewildered by the girl's earnestness, her energy, and the perfect simplicity of her evident belief that she was saying nothing unreasonable. She saw reluctance and hesitation in his eyes.

      'You are very young,' he began.

      'Too young to be trusted?'

      'No, I did not say that.'

      'But your look said it.'

      'My look then mistranslated my feeling.'

      'What did you feel?'

      'Surprise, and interest, and gratitude.'

      She tossed her head impatiently.

      'Do you think I can't understand?' she asked, in her impetuous way—her imperial way with most others, but only an impetuous way with him. For most others with whom she was familiar she was able to control and be familiar with, but she could only be impetuous with the Dictator. Indeed, it was the high tide of her emotion which carried her away so far as to fling her in mere impetuousness against him.

      The Dictator was silent for a moment, and then he said: 'You don't seem much more than a child to me.'

      'Oh! Why? Do you not know?—I am twenty-three!'

      'I am twenty-three,' the Dictator murmured, looking at her with a kindly and half-melancholy interest. 'You are twenty-three! Well, there it is—do you not see, Miss Langley?'

      'There what is?'

      'There is all the difference. To be twenty-three seems to you to make you quite a grown-up person.'

      'What else should it make me? I have been of age for two years. What am I but a grown-up person?'

      'Not in my sense,' he said placidly. 'You see, I have gone through so much, and lived so many lives, that I begin to feel quite like an old man already. Why, I might have had a daughter as old as you.'

      'Oh, stuff!' the audacious young woman interposed.

      'Stuff? How do you know?'

      'As if I hadn't read lives of you in all the papers and magazines and I don't know what. I can tell you your birthday if you wish, and the year of your birth. You are quite young—in my eyes.'

      'You are kind to me,' he said, gravely, 'and I am quite sure that I look at my very best in your eyes.'

      'You do indeed,' she said fervently, gratefully.

      'Still, that does not prevent me from being twenty years older than you.'

      'All right; but would you refuse to talk frankly and sensibly about yourself?—sensibly, I mean, as one talks to a friend and not as one talks to a child. Would you refuse to talk in that way to a young man merely because you were twenty years older than he?'

      'I am not much of a talker,' he said, 'and I very much doubt if I should talk to a young man at all about my projects, unless, of course, to my friend Hamilton.'

      Helena turned half away disappointed. It was of no use, then—she was not his friend. He did not care to reveal himself to her; and yet she thought she could do so much to help him. She felt that tears were beginning to gather in her eyes, and she would not for all the world that he should see them.

      'I thought we were friends,' she said, giving out the words very much as a child might give them out—and, indeed, her heart was much more as that of a little child than she herself knew or than he knew then; for she had not the least idea that she was in love or likely to be in love with the Dictator. Her free, energetic, wild-falcon spirit had never as yet troubled itself with thoughts of such kind. She had made a hero for herself out of the Dictator—she almost adored him; but it was with the most genuine hero-worship—or fetish-worship, if that be the better and harsher way of putting it—and she had never thought of being in love with him. Her highest ambition up to this hour was to be his friend and to be admitted to his confidence, and—oh, happy recognition!—to be consulted by him. When she said 'I thought we were friends,' she jumped up and went towards the window to hide the emotion which she knew was only too likely to make itself felt.

      The Dictator got up and followed her. 'We are friends,' he said.

      She looked brightly round at him, but perhaps he saw in her eyes that she had been feeling a keen disappointment.

      'You think my professed friendship mere girlish inquisitiveness—you know you do,' she said, for she was still angry.

      'Indeed I do not,' he said earnestly. 'I have had no friendship since I came back an outcast to England—no friendship like that given to me by you——'

      She turned round delightedly towards СКАЧАТЬ