'The nameless horror that is the sure precursor of coming evil took possession of her, and then it was that she executed in your favour the will referred to, instigated thereto not a little by Hawkey's incessant and annoying references to her secret ailment—disease of the heart.
'To me she seemed to have changed very much latterly. Her tall, thin figure had lost somewhat of its erectness, and her cold, steel-like eyes (you remember them?) were sunken and dimmed.
'Her illness took a sudden and fatal turn at the time that rascal Hawkey was arrested; and she was found that evening by Mrs. Drugget, the housekeeper, and old Funnell, the butler, dead in the Red Drawing-room. Thus her strange faintnesses and continued pallor were fully accounted for by the faculty then.
'When she was dead Mr. Hawkey was disposed to snap his fingers, believing himself the lord of everything; but the will prepared by me precluded that, and he was forthwith lodged by order of the Procurator-Fiscal in the Tolbooth of Cupar, where he can hear, but not see, the flow of the Eden.
'His wife, the late Miss Annot Drummond, on seeing him depart with a pair of handcuffs on, displayed but small emotions of regard or sorrow, but a great deal of indignation, despair, and shame. She trod to and fro upon the floor of her room during the long watches of the entire succeeding night, tore her golden hair, and beat her little hands against the wall in the fury and agony of her passion and disappointment to find herself mated to a criminal; and now she has betaken herself to her somewhat faded maternal home in South Belgravia, where I do not suppose we shall care to follow her.'
'So, I am Earlshaugh again!' thought Roland with pardonable exultation. His old ancestral home was his once more. But a battle was to be fought on the morrow. Should he survive it—escape? He hoped so now; life was certainly more valuable than it seemed to him before that mail-bag came up the Nile.
Roland could not feel much regret for the extinguisher which Fate had put upon the usurpers of his patrimony, but he was by nature too generous not to recall, with some emotions of a gentle kind, how Mrs. Lindsay had once said to him in a broken voice, when he bade her farewell, of something she meant to do, 'If it was not too late—too late!'
And when he had asked her what she referred to, her answer was that 'Time would show.'
And now time had shown. She had certainly, after all, liked the handsome and debonnair young fellow who had treated her with that chivalrous deference so pleasant to all women, old or young.
Roland, as he looked up at the luminous Nubian sky, felt for a time a solemn emotion of awe and thankfulness, curiously blended with exultant pride; that if he fell in the battle of to-morrow he would fall, as many of his forefathers had done, a Lindsay of Earlshaugh, but alas! the last of his race.