“When I was a young—a very young diplomatist—an old scoundrel in gold spectacles told me that one of the first rules of the game was to appear content with that which you cannot alter. We must apply that rule to this wine. It is our old friend, Chateau la Pompe. It will not hurt you. It will not loosen your tongue, my friend, you need not fear that.”
He spoke so significantly that Cartoner looked across the table at him.
“What do you mean?”
Deulin laughed and made no answer.
“Do you think that my tongue requires loosening?”
And the Frenchman stroked his mustache as he looked thoughtfully into the steady, meditating eyes.
“It is not,” he said, “that you assume a reserve which one might think unfair. It is merely that there are so many things which you do not think worth saying, or wise to speak of, or necessary to communicate, that—well—there is nothing left but silence. And silence is sometimes dangerous. Not as dangerous as speech, I allow—but dangerous, nevertheless.”
Cartoner looked at him and waited. Across the little table the two schools went out to meet each other—the old school of diplomacy, all words; the new, all silence.
“Listen,” said the Frenchman. “I once knew a man into whose care was given the happiness of a fellow-being. There is a greater responsibility, by-the-way, than the well-being of a whole nation, even of one of the two greatest nations in the world. And that is a care which you and I have had upon our shoulders for a brief hour here and there. It was the old story; for it was the happiness of a woman. God knows the man meant well! But he bungled it. Bon Dieu—how he bungled it! He said too little. Ever since he has talked too much. She was a Polish woman, by-the-way, and that has left a tenderness, nay, a raw place, in my heart, which smarts at the sound of a Polish word. For I was the man.”
“Well,” asked Cartoner, “what do you want to know?”