He looked up at the portrait of the lost and disinherited Philip—the outcast son of a patrician race, as limned by the President of the Scottish Academy.
It represented a handsome young man, in a red hunting coat and cap, with regular but rather pale features, dark blue eyes and well defined eyebrows, with a pleasant smile that actually, to Roland's then distempered fancy, seemed to light up, as he looked on the portrait.
Roland wiped the beady perspiration from his brow, and a moan as if of pain escaped him, but again and again he muttered—
"Justice shall be done—justice if it be not too late—oh Heaven—too late!"
He stepped to the sideboard, filled a silver hunting cup with sherry, drained it at a draught, and taking up the two fatal documents, locked the Indian cabinet, and prepared to join Messrs. Hook and Crook, who were busy with certain accounts and papers in the library.
Of lawyers, Roland, as a soldier, had ever a wholesome dread, and he shrank from the horror of disclosing this trickery on the part of his father even to them, whose lives were too probably but one long and tangled yarn of trickery and deceit; but again, he muttered that justice must be done.
His assumed coolness deserted him, his face became livid, and his eyes sparkled with a strange light, when he spoke to them of the papers he had found, and laid them before their legal eyes.
Then his proud pale face flushed scarlet, his dark eyebrows were knitted nearly into one, and his nether lip quivered with suppressed emotion and intense mortification, and in some degree the lawyers were also excited, but amazement was what they chiefly felt.
"What did Mr. Ruthven intend to do?"
"Justice," said he hoarsely.