"It is in vain, Anthony. Avarice owns no heart, has no natural affections. You may go, but it is only to mortify your pride, agonize your feelings, and harden your kind nature against the whole world, without producing any ultimate benefit to me."
"It is a trial, uncle, but I will not spare myself. Duty demands the attempt, and successful or unsuccessful, it shall be made."
He strode towards the door. Algernon called him back. "Do not stay long, Tony. I feel ill and low spirited. Godfrey surely does not know that I am in this accursed place. Perhaps he is ashamed to visit me here. Poor lad, poor lad! I have ruined his prospects in life by my extravagance, but I never thought that it would come to this. If you see him on your way, Anthony, tell him (here his voice faltered), tell him, that his poor old father pines to see him, that his absence is worse than imprisonment—than death itself. I have many faults, but I love him only too well."
This was more than Anthony could bear, and he sprang out of the room.
With a heart overflowing with generous emotions, and deeply sympathising in his uncle's misfortunes, he mounted a horse which he had borrowed of a friend in the neighborhood, and took the road that led to his father's mansion; that father who had abandoned him, while yet a tender boy, to the care of another, and whom he had never met since the memorable hour in which they parted.
Oak Hall was situated about thirty miles from Norgood Park, and it was near sunset when Anthony caught the first glimpse of the picturesque church of Ashton among the trees. With mingled feelings of pride, shame, and bitterness he rode past the venerable mansion of his ancestors, and alighted at the door of the sordid hovel that its miserable possessor had chosen for a home.
The cottage in many places had fallen into decay, and admitted through countless crevices the wind and rain. A broken chair, a three-legged stool, and the shattered remains of an oak table, deficient of one of its supporters, but propped up with bricks, comprised the whole furniture of the wretched apartment.
The door was a-jar that led into an interior room that served for a dormitory. Two old soiled mattresses, in which the straw had not been changed for years, thrown carelessly upon the floor, were the sole garniture of this execrable chamber. Anthony glanced around with feelings of an uncontrollable disgust, and all his boyish antipathy to the place returned. The lapse of nearly twenty years had not improved the aspect of his old prison-house, and he was now more capable of appreciating its revolting features. The harsh words, and still harsher blows and curses, which he had been wont to receive from the miser and his sordid associate, Grenard Pike, came up in his heart, and, in spite of his better nature, steeled that heart against his ungracious parent.
The entrance of Mark Hurdlestone, whose high stern features, once seen, could never be forgotten, roused Anthony from his train of gloomy recollections, and called back his thoughts to the unpleasant business that brought him there.
Mark did not at the first glance recognise his son in the tall elegantly-dressed young man before him; and he growled out, "Who are you, sir, and what do you want?"