Mark Hurdlestone | Page 2

was both singular and striking.
His features in youth had been handsome, but of that peculiar Jewish
cast which age renders harsh and prominent. The high narrow wrinkled
forehead, the small deep-set 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