He went up to the largest fireplace of all, where logs were hissing in the hot enveloping flame. He turned his back upon it and surveyed the vast expanse before him. The books in the room were probably worth three hundred thousand pounds. There were the first four folios of Shakespeare, there was a great case which held the Vinegar Bible, the Breeches Bible, and the very earliest black-letter copy of the Scriptures, printed by Schwartz and Pannheim upon the heights of the Apennines in fear of their death should it become known.... It was simply beyond statement, thirty or forty great collections were comprised in this one room. The young scholar's love of books and appreciation of their history thrilled at the sight of all this wealth, thrilled to know that fortune had given him the temporary control of it all.
Upon a great red leather-covered writing-table, set by the principal fireside, lay his papers and the calf-bound volumes in which, with scrupulous care and accurate knowledge, he was completing the work of cataloguing which the death of his predecessor had left unfinished. He went towards the table, looked at the records of his first fortnight's work for a moment or two, sighed a little, and then sat down and concentrated his mind upon what he had to do.
For several hours he worked steadily—it had been through his great capacity for steady, uninterrupted and concentrated work that this young man had risen from the ordinary Board school to the higher-grade school, and had won the most difficult and brilliant scholarship that the aristocratic college of St. Paul's at Oxford had in its gift.
Here was a young man determined to get on; nothing could stop him, nothing could stand in his way. In temperament he was like a steel drill that, driven by tireless energy, goes lower and lower through the granite rock, and through the quartz, until at last the desired strata is reached and won.
He worked the whole morning with hardly a pause. At one o'clock he took a paper of sandwiches from his pocket and made his simple meal. Then he worked onwards till three. At that time, feeling that he had done his duty, or rather more, by his employer the duke, whom, by the way, he had never seen since his appointment as librarian nor subsequently during the extraordinary ferment that his Grace's disappearance, reappearance, and return to health had occasioned in the Press, he put away the catalogue upon which he was engaged.
Then he opened a drawer in the great writing-table, a locked drawer, and pulled out a pile of manuscript. He turned it over until the last few pages were displayed. Then, with a puckered forehead and a mouth which was undecided only because it was critical, the shabby young man in the black clothes, surrounded by evidence of incalculable wealth read steadily at what he designed to be a key which should open modern political life to him.
He read on and on, now and again making an annotation with his fountain pen, sometimes waiting for two or three minutes before he scored through a passage or added a few words. Then at last a clock, a great clock which had been brought from Versailles, beat out the hour of four with deep sonorous notes like the voice of an old man.
Burnside pulled his nickel watch from his pocket, saw that it synchronised with the stately time given by the guardian of the library, and hurried away.
He crossed the hall, went down the passage which led to the side door, put on his hat and coat, and disappeared into Piccadilly, quite forgetting that he had left the last pages of his manuscript upon the writing-table.