Few men were, and perhaps no marquis was so unpopular as the Marquis of Restalrig, Logan’s maternal Scotch cousin, widely removed.  He was the last of his family, in the direct line, and on his death almost all his vast wealth would go to nobody knew where.  To be sure Logan himself would succeed to the title of Fastcastle, which descends to heirs general, but nothing worth having went with the title.  Logan had only the most distant memory of seeing the marquis when he himself was a little boy, and the marquis gave him two sixpences.  His relationship to his opulent though remote kinsman had been of no service to him in the struggle for social existence.  It carried no ‘expectations,’ and did not afford the most shadowy basis for a post obit.  There was no entail, the marquis could do as he liked with his own.

‘The Jews may have been credulous in the time of Horace,’ Logan said, ’but now they insist on the most drastic evidence of prospective wealth.  No, they won’t lend me a shekel.’

Events were to prove that other financial operators were better informed than the chosen people, though to be sure their belief was displayed in a manner at once grotesque and painfully embarrassing.

Why the marquis was generally disliked we might explain, historically, if we were acquainted with the tale of his infancy, early youth, and adolescence.  Perhaps he had been betrayed in his affections, and was ‘taking it out’ of mankind in general.  But this notion implies that the marquis once had some affections, a point not hitherto substantiated by any evidence.  Perhaps heredity was to blame, some unhappy blend of parentage.  An ancestor at an unknown period may have bequeathed to the marquis the elements of his unalluring character.  But the only ancestor of marked temperament was the festive Logan of Restalrig, who conspired over his cups to kidnap a king, laid out his plot on the lines of an Italian novel, and died without being detected.  This heroic ancestor admitted that he hated ‘arguments derived from religion,’ and, so far, the Marquis of Restalrig was quite with him, if the arguments bore on giving to the poor, or, indeed, to any one.

In fact the marquis was that unpopular character, a miser.  Your miser may be looked up to, in a way, as an ideal votary of Mammon, but he is never loved.  On his vast possessions, mainly in coal-fields, he was even more detested than the ordinary run of capitalists.  The cottages and farmhouses on his estates were dilapidated and insanitary beyond what is endurable.  Of his many mansions, some were kept in decent repair, because he drew many shillings from tourists admitted to view them.  But his favourite abode was almost as ruinous as his cottages, and an artist in search of a model for the domestic interior of the Master of Ravenswood might have found what he wanted at Kirkburn, the usual lair of this avaricious nobleman.  It was a keep of the sixteenth