In this state of mind he rose from his library table and his lists of voters, and stalked out with his hands clasped under his coat tails, to look at the great registering thermometer which hung outside on the shady corner at the west wing. When he came into the hall, Lord Eskside saw Harding in the distance, poring over a paper which he held in his hand,--a large white broadsheet, very much like Val’s address, of which there were some copies about the house. Harding’s obtusity was a joke with the old lord. “Has he not got the sense of it into his old noddle yet?” he said to himself, half laughing, and watched with quiet amusement the butler’s absorption. Lord Eskside’s patience, however, was none of the longest, and he called Harding before many seconds had passed. The man was too much occupied to hear him, and did not stir. Then the old lord, half irritated, half laughing, called again. “If that’s Mr Ross’s address you are reading, bring it here, you haverel, and I’ll explain it to you,” he said. Harding turned round with a scared look, and, crushing up the paper in his hand, he thrust it into his pocket with hurried and almost ostentatious panic.
“It’s not Mr Ross’s address, my lord,” he said.
“Hey! what is it then?--let me see. Lord bless us, man!” said his irascible master, “why do you put on that look? What is it? Let me see!”
“I assure you, my lord, it’s nothing--nothing of the least consequence,” said Harding. “Your lordship would not look twice at it; it’s nothing, my lord.” And he put his hand upon his pocket, as if to defend that receptacle of treason, and stood with the air of the hero in the poem--
“Come one, come all, this rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I.”
Harding, for the first time in his life, was melodramatic in his determination to give his blood sooner than the objectionable paper. While the old lord stood looking at him half alarmed, and becoming more and more impatient, Mrs Harding strayed from her room, which was within reach of the voices, as it was her habit to do when her husband was audible in too prolonged colloquy with my lord.
“Marg’ret,” said Lord Eskside, “what has that haverel of a man of yours got in his pocket? I never can get a word of sense out of him, as you well know.”