Several old family portraits of armed heroes of the house of
Ravenswood, together with a suit or two of old armour and some military
weapons, had given place to those of King William and Queen Mary, or
Sir Thomas Hope and Lord Stair, two distinguished Scottish lawyers. The
pictures of the Lord Keeper's father and mother were also to be seen;
the latter, sour, shrewish, and solemn, in her black hood and close
pinners, with a book of devotion in her hand; the former, exhibiting
beneath a black silk Geneva cowl, or skull-cap, which sate as close to
the head as if it had been shaven, a pinched, peevish, Puritanical set
of features, terminating in a hungry, reddish, peaked beard, forming on
the whole a countenance in the expression of which the hypocrite seemed
to contend with the miser and the knave. "And it is to make room for
such scarecrows as these," thought Ravenswood, "that my ancestors have
been torn down from the walls which they erected!" he looked at them
again, and, as he looked, the recollection of Lucy Ashton, for she
had not entered the apartment with them, seemed less lively in his
imagination.
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