The Doctor appeared to have a pleasure, or a purpose, in keeping his
legend forcibly in their memories; he often recurred to the subject of
the old English family, and was continually giving new details about
its history, the scenery in its neighborhood, the aspect of the
mansion-house; indicating a very intense interest in the subject on his
own part, of which this much talk seemed the involuntary overflowing.

There was, however, an affection mingled with this sentiment. It
appeared to be his unfortunate necessity to let his thoughts dwell very
constantly upon a subject that was hateful to him, with which this old
English estate and manor-house and family were somehow connected; and,
moreover, had he spoken thus to older and more experienced auditors,
they might have detected in the manner and matter of his talk, a
certain hereditary reverence and awe, the growth of ages, mixed up with
a newer hatred, impelling him to deface and destroy what, at the same
time, it was his deepest impulse to bow before. The love belonged to
his race; the hatred, to himself individually. It was the feeling of a
man lowly born, when he contracts a hostility to his hereditary
superior. In one way, being of a powerful, passionate nature, gifted
with force and ability far superior to that of the aristocrat, he might
scorn him and feel able to trample on him; in another, he had the same
awe that a country boy feels of the magistrate who flings him a
sixpence and shakes his horsewhip at him.

Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast
antipathy to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more
malignant: it required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together.
What made the hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural
course of things, would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted
self-sacrifice to a superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times