These were almost the last coherent words his father spoke; and he uttered them with the veins in his temples throbbing, and as if the most bitter of all emotions, self scorn, wrung his heart, and then he seemed to sink fast. But he lingered for some days after this, and though his words, manner, and injunction, filled Roland with grief and intense curiosity, he resolved to obey him to the letter and not open the cabinet till end came, and the doctor assured him it was near now.
"Under what hallucination can the poor old man be labouring?" thought Roland, as he sat alone in the stately dining-room—a veritable hall—and thought how proud he who was about to pass away to a dark and narrow home, had been of Ardgowrie and all its details and surroundings—its stately park where the deer made their lair among the green ferns, its dark blue loch full of pike, and the pine plantations where the pheasant pea-fowl were thick as the cones that lay around them.
Daily by the sun, nightly by the moon, for many centuries, had the same shadows of the quaint old house been cast on the same places, and it was now an epitome of a proud historic past. It had entertained more than one king of Scotland, and everything in the old mansion was on a grand scale, from the portraits by Jamesone and Vandyck (who married a Ruthven of Gowrie, by the way) to the massive cups won in many a race that glittered on the sideboard. Above the latter, a splendid full-length of the "bonnie Earl" who was wont to flirt with Anne of Denmark in Falkland Woods, and who on the 5th of August, 1600, perished in the famous conspiracy, had its place of honour; and among other portraits of later times, was one by Sir Watson Gordon of the present proprietor, in his uniform as a field officer of the Royal Scots.
The massive mantelpiece of the early Stuart times ascended to the ceiling. It was an exact copy of the famous one in Gowrie House at Perth, and over it in Gothic letters was the same remarkable and apposite legend borne by the former:—
"Truths long concealed at length emerge to light,
And controverted facts are rendered bright."
But Roland now perceived with genuine wonder, that the couplet had been chiselled completely away, and the stone frieze was now smooth and bare.
"By whose orders was this done, Runlet?" he asked with angry surprise.
"Those of the Laird, your father," replied the butler.
"When?"
"Just before his last illness."