jet-black eyes, gleaming like living coals from beneath straight shaggy eyebrows, the thin aquiline nose, the long upper lip, the small fleshless mouth and projecting chin, the expression of habitual cunning and mental reservation, mingled with sullen pride and morose ill-humor, gave to his marked countenance a repulsive and sinister character. Those who looked upon him once involuntarily turned to look upon him again, and marvelled and speculated upon the disposition and calling of the stranger.
His dress, composed of the coarsest materials, generally hung in tatters about his tall spare figure, and he had been known to wear the cast-off shoes of a beggar; yet, in spite of such absurd acts, he maintained a proud and upright carriage, and never, by his speech or manners, seemed to forget for one moment that he held the rank of a gentleman. His hands and face were always scrupulously clean, for water costs nothing, and time, to him, was an object of little value. The frequency of these ablutions he considered conducive to health. Cold water was his only beverage—the only medicine he ever condescended to use.
The stranger who encountered Mark Hurdlestone, wandering barefooted on the heath or along the dusty road, marvelled that a creature so wretched did not stop him to solicit charity; and, struck with the haughty bearing which his squalid dress could not wholly disguise, naturally imagined that he had seen better days, and was too proud to beg; influenced by this supposition, he had offered the lord of many manors the relief which his miserable condition seemed to demand; and such was the powerful effect of the ruling passion, that the man of gold, the possessor of millions, the sordid wretch who, in after years, wept at having to pay four thousand a year to the property tax, calmly pocketed the affront.
The history of Mark Hurdlestone, up to the present period, had been marked by few, but they were striking incidents. Those bright links, interwoven in the rusty chain of his existence, which might have rendered him a wiser and a better man, had conduced very little to his own happiness, but they had influenced, in a remarkable degree, the happiness and misery of others, and form another melancholy proof of the mysterious manner in which the crimes of some men act, like fate, upon the destinies of others.
Avarice palsies mental exertion. The tide of generous feeling, the holy sympathies, still common to our fallen nature, freeze beneath its torpid influence. The heart becomes stone—the eyes blinded to all that once awakened the soul to admiration and delight. He that has placed the idol of gold upon the pure altar of nature has debased his own, and sinks below the brute, whose actions are guided by a higher instinct, the simple law of necessity.
The love of accumulating had been a prominent feature of Mark's character from his earliest years; but there was a time when it had not been his ruling passion. Love, hatred, and revenge, had alternately swayed his breast, and formed the main-spring of his actions. He had loved and mistrusted, had betrayed and destroyed the victim of his jealous regard; yet his hatred remained unextinguished—his revenge ungratified. The malice of envy and the gnawings of disappointed vanity were now concealed beneath the sullen apathy of age; but the spark slumbered in the grey ashes, although the heart had out-lived its fires. To make his character more intelligible it will be necessary to trace his history from the first page of his life.
Born heir to a vast inheritance, Mark Hurdlestone had not a solitary excuse to offer for his avarice. His father had improved the old paternal estate, and trebled its original value; and shared, in no common degree, the parsimonious disposition of his son. From the time of the Norman Conquest his ancestors had inherited this tract of country; and as they were not famous for any particular talents or virtues, had passed into dust and oblivion in the vault of the old gothic church, which lifted its ivy-covered tower above the venerable oaks and yews that were coeval with its existence.
In proportion to their valueless existence was the pride of the Hurdlestone family. Their wealth gained for them the respect of the world; their ancient name the respect of those who place an undue importance on such things; and their own vanity and self-importance maintained the rank and consequence which they derived from these adventitious claims.
Squire Hurdlestone the elder was a shrewd worldly minded man, whose natural hauteur concealed from common observers the paucity of his intellect. His good qualities were confined to his love of Church and State; and to do him justice, in this respect he was a loyal man and true—the dread of every hapless Jacobite in the country. In his early days he had fought under the banners of the Duke of Cumberland as a gentleman volunteer; and had received the public thanks of that worthy for the courage he displayed at the memorable battle of Culloden, and for the activity and zeal with which he afterwards assisted in apprehending certain gentlemen in his own neighborhood, who were suspected of secretly befriending the unfortunate cause. At every public meeting the Squire was eloquent in his own praise.
"Who can doubt my patriotism, my loyalty?" he would exclaim. "I did not confine my sentiments upon the subject to mere words. I showed by my deeds, gentlemen, what those sentiments were. I took an active part in suppressing the rebellion, and restoring peace to these realms. And what did I obtain, gentlemen?—the thanks—yes, gentlemen, the public thanks of the noble Duke!" He would then resume his seat, amidst the plaudits of his time-serving friends, who, judging the rich man by his own standard of excellence, declared that there was not his equal in the county.
Not content with an income far beyond his sordid powers of enjoyment, Squire Hurdlestone the elder married, without any particular preference, the daughter of a rich London merchant, whose fortune nearly doubled his own. The fruits of this union were two sons, who happened in the economy of nature to be twins. This double blessing rather alarmed the parsimonious Squire; but as the act of maternal extravagance was never again repeated on the part of Mrs. Hurdlestone, he used to rub his hands and tell as a good joke, whenever his heart was warmed by an extra glass of wine, that his wife was the best manager in the world, as the same trouble and expense did for both.
A greater difference did not exist between the celebrated sons of Isaac than was discernible in these modern twins. Unlike in person, talents, heart, and disposition, from their very birth, they formed a striking contrast to each other. Mark, the elder by half-an-hour, was an exaggeration of his father, inheriting in a stronger degree all his narrow notions and chilling parsimony; but, unlike his progenitor in one respect, he was a young man of excellent natural capacity. He possessed strong passions, linked to a dogged obstinacy of purpose, which rendered him at all times a dangerous and implacable enemy; while the stern unyielding nature of his temper, and the habitual selfishness which characterised all his dealings with others, excluded him from the friendship and companionship of his kind.
Tall and slightly made, with a proud and gentlemanly carriage, he looked well though dressed in the most homely and unfashionable garb. Beyond scrupulous cleanliness he paid little attention to the mysteries of the toilet, for even in the bloom of youth, "Gallio cared for none of those things." In spite of the disadvantages of dress, his bright brown complexion, straight features, dark glancing eyes, and rich curling hair, gave him a striking appearance. By many he was considered eminently handsome; to those accustomed to read the mind in the face, Mark Hurdlestone's countenance was everything but prepossessing.
The sunshine of a smiling heart never illumined the dark depth of those deep-seated cunning eyes; and those of his own kin, who most wished to entertain a favorable opinion of the young heir of Oak Hall, agreed in pronouncing him a very disagreeable selfish young man.
He hated society, was shy and reserved in his manners, and never spoke on any subject without his opinion was solicited. This extraordinary taciturnity, in one who possessed no ordinary powers of mind, gave double weight to all that he advanced, till what he said became a law in the family. Even his mother, with whom he was no favorite, listened with profound attention to his shrewd biting remarks. From his father, Mark early imbibed a love of hoarding; and his favorite studies, those in which he most excelled, and which appeared almost intuitive to him, were those connected with figures. The old Squire, who idolised his handsome sullen boy, was never weary of boasting of his abilities, and his
