“Why, don’t you know,” he observed quietly, “that I am the fool of the family?”

“It must be a clever family,” said Harold March, with a smile.

“Very gracefully expressed,” replied Fisher; “that is the best of having a literary training.  Well, perhaps it is an exaggeration to say I am the fool of the family.  It’s enough to say I am the failure of the family.”

“It seems queer to me that you should fail especially,” remarked the journalist.  “As they say in the examinations, what did you fail in?”

“Politics,” replied his friend.  “I stood for Parliament when I was quite a young man and got in by an enormous majority, with loud cheers and chairing round the town.  Since then, of course, I’ve been rather under a cloud.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the ‘of course,’” answered March, laughing.

“That part of it isn’t worth understanding,” said Fisher.  “But as a matter of fact, old chap, the other part of it was rather odd and interesting.  Quite a detective story in its way, as well as the first lesson I had in what modern politics are made of.  If you like, I’ll tell you all about it.”  And the following, recast in a less allusive and conversational manner, is the story that he told.

Nobody privileged of late years to meet Sir Henry Harland Fisher would believe that he had ever been called Harry.  But, indeed, he had been boyish enough when a boy, and that serenity which shone on him through life, and which now took the form of gravity, had once taken the form of gayety.  His friends would have said that he was all the more ripe in his maturity for having been young in his youth.  His enemies would have said that he was still light minded, but no longer light hearted.  But in any case, the whole of the story Horne Fisher had to tell arose out of the accident which had made young Harry Fisher private secretary to Lord Saltoun.  Hence his later connection with the Foreign Office, which had, indeed, come to him as a sort of legacy from his lordship when that great man was the power behind the throne.  This is not the place to say much about Saltoun, little as was known of him and much as there was worth knowing.  England has had at least three or four such secret statesmen.  An aristocratic polity produces every now and then an aristocrat who is also an accident, a man of intellectual independence and insight, a Napoleon born in the purple.  His vast work was mostly invisible, and very little could be got out of him in private life except a crusty and rather cynical sense of humor.  But it was certainly the accident of his presence at a family dinner of the Fishers, and the unexpected opinion he expressed, which turned what might have been a dinner-table joke into a sort of small sensational novel.