CHAPTER X
William Bailey was at this time nearer fifty than forty years of age. Those who saw him for the first time would have imagined him to be an exceptionally vigorous and well-preserved man of maturer years, for while his eyes were energetic and lively the skin of his face had been hardened and lined by travel in very different climates. Moreover, his hair, though not scanty, had turned that peculiar steely grey which men so often preserve well on into old age.
His stature, which was considerable, he owed to a pair of very long thin legs, which looked the longer from the invariably ill-fitting loose trousers that he wore; his boots were of enormous size. These, again, were exaggerated to the ordinary beholder from his habit of purchasing pairs far too large for him; and these, I regret to say, were ready made, with square toes, very flat heels, and those offensive deep creases across the instep which betray the slovenly man.
His face, which was long and good-humoured, was framed by two vast whiskers which seemed to belong to an earlier age. And in general his appearance, while certainly denoting ability, might have led one to expect a sort of reticent good-nature. The impression was heightened by his habit of leaning good-humouredly forward with his hands in his pockets, and a genial half-smile, to listen attentively to whatever words were addressed to him, especially if those words proceeded from an unknown man or from one who seemed proud of his acquaintance.
There were none that met him casually in the world, but expected from him the most kindly judgments and the most reasonable if independent views. They were invariably deceived.
The man had acquired peculiarities of outlook which in any society less tolerant than our own would have doomed him to isolation. As it was, the most part of his equals treated him as a joke they could afford to laugh at; but some few out of the many to whom he had given legitimate offence found themselves unable to forgive, and these were filled in his presence with an ill ease which he, of all men, had the least right to impose: among these—I bitterly regret—was even to be found that gracious, kind old man, the Duke of Battersea, who in all his long and useful life had hardly spoken harshly of a single foe.
In politics none could say whether William Bailey were National or Opposition; his religion it was impossible to discover; even those philosophies which attract in their turn most men of intelligence appeared to leave him indifferent; he was ignorant of Hegel of Nietzsche and of Oppenheim, but his opinions were none the less expressed with a violence and a tenacity which sometimes produced the illusion of a general system, though a collection of his real or affected prejudices would have proved many of them contradictory one of the other. He would rail, for instance, against the practice of drinking champagne with meat, and he would denounce it with the same fervour as he would use against things so remote from him as the Senate of Finland or the Republican party in the United States.