A Question of Diplomacy

The Foreign Minister was down with the gout. For
a week he had been confined to the house, and he had
missed two Cabinet Councils at a time when the
pressure upon his department was severe. It is true
that he had an excellent undersecretary and an
admirable staff, but the Minister was a man of such
ripe experience and of such proven sagacity that
things halted in his absence. When his firm hand was
at the wheel the great ship of State rode easily and
smoothly upon her way; when it was removed she yawed
and staggered until twelve British editors rose up in
their omniscience and traced out twelve several
courses, each of which was the sole and only path to
safety. Then it was that the Opposition said vain
things, and that the harassed Prime Minister prayed
for his absent colleague.

The Foreign Minister sat in his dressing-room in
the great house in Cavendish Square. It was May, and
the square garden shot up like a veil of green in
front of his window, but, in spite of the
sunshine, a fire crackled and sputtered in the grate
of the sick-room. In a deep-red plush armchair sat
the great statesman, his head leaning back upon a
silken pillow, one foot stretched forward and
supported upon a padded rest. His deeply-lined,
finely-chiselled face and slow-moving, heavily-
pouched eyes were turned upwards towards the carved
and painted ceiling, with that inscrutable expression
which had been the despair and the admiration of his
Continental colleagues upon the occasion of the
famous Congress when he had made his first appearance
in the arena of European diplomacy. Yet at the
present moment his capacity for hiding his emotions
had for the instant failed him, for about the lines
of his strong, straight mouth and the puckers of his
broad, overhanging forehead, there were sufficient
indications of the restlessness and impatience which
consumed him.

And indeed there was enough to make a man chafe,
for he had much to think of and yet was bereft of the
power of thought. There was, for example, that
question of the Dobrutscha and the navigation of the
mouths of the Danube which was ripe for settlement.
The Russian Chancellor had sent a masterly statement
upon the subject, and it was the pet ambition of our
Minister to answer it in a worthy fashion. Then
there was the blockade of Crete, and the British
fleet lying off Cape Matapan, waiting for
instructions which might change the course of
European history. And there were those three
unfortunate Macedonian tourists, whose friends were
momentarily expecting to receive their ears or their
fingers in default of the exorbitant ransom which had
been demanded. They must be plucked out of those