approached it, a structure which possessed few superiors in point of
size and effect; and harmonized so well with the nobly extent of the
park, the ancient woods, and the venerable avenues, that a very slight
effort of imagination might have poured from the massive portals the
pageantries of old days, and the gay galliard of chivalric romance
with which the scene was in such accordance, and which in a former age
it had so often witnessed.

Ah, little could any one who looked upon that gorgeous pile, and the
broad lands which, beyond the boundaries of the park, swelled on the
hills of the distant landscape, studded at frequent intervals with the
spires and villages, which adorned the wide baronies of Mordaunt,--
little could he who thus gazed around have imagined that the owner of
all he surveyed had passed the glory and verdure of his manhood in the
bitterest struggles with gnawing want, rebellious pride, and urgent
passion, without friend or aid but his own haughty and supporting
virtue, sentenced to bear yet in his wasted and barren heart the sign
of the storm he had resisted, and the scathed token of the lightning
he had braved. None but Crauford, who had his own reasons for
taciturnity, and the itinerant broker, easily bribed into silence, had
ever known of the extreme poverty from which Mordaunt had passed to
his rightful possessions. It was whispered, indeed, that he had been
reduced to narrow and straitened circumstances; but the whisper had
been only the breath of rumour, and the imagined poverty far short of
the reality: for the pride of Mordaunt (the great, almost the sole,
failing in his character) could not endure that all he had borne and
baffled should be bared to the vulgar eye; and by a rare anomaly of
mind, indifferent as he was to renown, he was morbidly susceptible of
shame.