CHAPTER VI
JUST A DISAGREEABLE OLD MAN
The luncheons at Grosvenor Square were always rather dull and formal, but Louisa did not mind that very much. She was used to dull and formal affairs: they were part and parcel of her daily life. London society is full of it. The dull and formal dominate; the others—vulgar if more lively—were not worth cultivating.
Then, she almost liked Lord Radclyffe, because he was so fond of Luke. And even then "almost" was a big word. No one—except Luke—could really like the old man. He was very bad tempered, very dictatorial, a perfect tyrant in his own household. His opinions no one dared contradict, no one cared to argue with him, and his advanced Tory views were so rabid that he almost made perverts from the cause, of all those whom he desired to convince.
And even these were few, for Lord Radclyffe had no friends and very few acquaintances. He had a strange and absolute dislike for his fellow men. He did not like seeing people, he hated to exchange greetings, to talk or to mingle with any crowd that was purely on pleasure bent. He went up to the House and made speeches—political, philanthropic, economic speeches—which Luke prepared for him, and which he spoke without enthusiasm or any desire to please. This he did, not because he liked it or took any interest in things political, philanthropic or economic, but only because he considered that a man in his position owed certain duties to the State—duties which it would be cowardly to shirk.
But he really cared nothing for the thoughts of others, for their opinions, their joys, or their sorrows. He had schooled himself not to care, to call philanthropy empty sentiment, politics senseless ambition, economics grasping avarice.
His was a life entirely wrapped up in itself. In youth he had been very shy: a shyness caused at first by a serious defect of speech which, though cured in later years, always left an unconquerable diffidence, an almost morbid fear of ridicule in its train.
Because of this, I think, he had never been a sportsman—or, rather, had never been an athlete, for he was splendid with a gun and the finest revolver shot in England, so I've been told, and an acknowledged master of fence, but with bat, ball, or racquet he was invariably clumsy.
He had always hated to be laughed at, and therefore had never gone through the rough mill of a tyro in athletics or in games. Arthur, one of his brothers, had been a blue at Oxford; the other one, James—you remember James de Mountford? was the celebrated cricketer; but he, the eldest, always seemed to remain outside that magic circle of sport, the great ring of many links which unites Englishmen one to another in a way that no other conformity of tastes, of breeding, or of religion can ever do.
Because of this diffidence too, no doubt, he had never married. I was told once by an intimate friend of his, that old Rad—as he was universally called—had never mustered up sufficient courage to propose to any woman. And as he saw one by one the coveted matrimonial prizes—the pretty girls whom at different times he had admired sufficiently to desire for wife—snapped up by more enterprising wooers, his dour moroseness grew into positive chronic ill-humour.