The Dictator | Page 2

yes; one must get into no bad habits in London. All right; I'll get
up now, and be with you in twenty minutes.'
'Very well, Excellency.' Hamilton bowed as he spoke in his most
official manner, and withdrew. The Dictator looked after him, laughing
softly to himself.
'L'excellence malgré lui,' he thought. 'An excellency in spite of myself.
Well, I dare say Hamilton is right; it may serve to fill my sails when I
have any sails to fill. In the meantime let us get up and salute London.
Thank goodness it isn't raining, at all events.'
He did his dressing unaided. 'The best master is his own man' was an
axiom with him. In the most splendid days of Gloria he had always
valeted himself; and in Gloria, where assassination was always a
possibility, it was certainly safer. His body-servant filled his bath and
brought him his brushed clothes; for the rest he waited upon himself.
He did not take long in dressing. All his movements were quick, clean,
and decisive; the movements of a man to whom moments are precious,
of a man who has learnt by long experience how to do everything as
shortly and as well as possible. As soon as he was finished he stood for

an instant before the long looking-glass and surveyed himself. A man
of rather more than medium height, strongly built, of soldierly carriage,
wearing his dark frock-coat like a uniform. His left hand seemed to
miss its familiar sword-hilt. The face was bronzed by Southern suns;
the brown eyes were large, and bright, and keen; the hair was a fair
brown, faintly touched here and there with grey. His full moustache and
beard were trimmed to a point, almost in the Elizabethan fashion. Any
serious student of humanity would at once have been attracted by the
face. Habitually it wore an expression of gentle gravity, and it could
smile very sweetly, but it was the face of a strong man, nevertheless, of
a stubborn man, of a man ambitious, a man with clear resolve, personal
or otherwise, and prompt to back his resolve with all he had in life, and
with life itself.
He put into his buttonhole the green-and-yellow button which
represented the order of the Sword and Myrtle, the great Order of La
Gloria, which in Gloria was invested with all the splendour of the
Golden Fleece; the order which could only be worn by those who had
actually ruled in the republic. That, according to satirists, did not
greatly limit the number of persons who had the right to wear it. Then
he formally saluted himself in the looking-glass. 'Excellency,' he said
again, and laughed again. Then he opened his double windows and
stepped out upon the balcony.
London was looking at its best just then, and his spirits stirred in
grateful response to the sunlight. How dismal everything would have
seemed, he was thinking, if the streets had been soaking under a leaden
sky, if the trees had been dripping dismally, if his glance directed to the
street below had rested only upon distended umbrellas glistening like
the backs of gigantic crabs! Now everything was bright, and London
looked as it can look sometimes, positively beautiful. Paulo's Hotel
stands, as everybody knows, in the pleasantest part of Knightsbridge,
facing Kensington Gardens. The sky was brilliantly blue, the trees were
deliciously green; Knightsbridge below him lay steeped in a pure gold
of sunlight. The animation of the scene cheered him sensibly. May is
seldom summery in England, but this might have been a royal day of
June.

Opposite to him he could see the green-grey roofs of Kensington Palace.
At his left he could see a public-house which bore the name and stood
upon the site of the hostelry where the Pretender's friends gathered on
the morning when they expected to see Queen Anne succeeded by the
heir to the House of Stuart. Looking from the one place to the other, he
reflected upon the events of that morning when those gentlemen waited
in vain for the expected tidings, when Bolingbroke, seated in the
council chamber at yonder palace, was so harshly interrupted. It
pleased the stranger for a moment to trace a resemblance between the
fallen fortunes of the Stuart Prince and his own fallen fortunes, as
dethroned Dictator of the South American Republic of Gloria. 'London
is my St. Germain's,' he said to himself with a laugh, and he drummed
the national hymn of Gloria upon the balcony-rail with his fingers.
His gaze, wandering over the green bravery of the Park, lost itself in the
blue sky. He had forgotten London; his thoughts were with another
place under a sky of stronger blue, in the White House of a white
square in a white town. He seemed