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.