He knew she was not gone to Trelawny; and dreading every thing from her determined sorrow, he passed his whole time between painful and fruitless conjectures, and the tormenting apprehension of hearing of some fatal event. Incessantly reproaching himself for being the betrayer of his trust, and the ruin of a lovely and amiable woman, he gave himself up to regret and despondence. The gay Fitz-Edward, so lately the envy and admiration of the fashionable world, was lost to society, his friends, and himself.
He passed much of his time at Tylehurst; because he could there indulge, without interruption, his melancholy reflections, and only saw Mrs. Stafford and Emmeline, in whose soft and sensible conversation he found a transient alleviation of his sorrow—sorrow which now grew too severe to be longer concealed, and which he resolved to take the earliest opportunity of acknowledging, in hopes of engaging the pity of his fair friends—perhaps their assistance in discovering the unhappy fugitive who caused it.
From Lady Adelina, they had most carefully concealed, that his residence was so near the obscure abode she had chosen. Fatal as he had been to her peace, and conscientiously as she had abstained from naming him after their first conversation, they knew that she still fondly loved him, and that her fears for his safety had assisted her sense of rectitude when she determined to tear herself from him. But were she again to meet him, they feared she would either relapse into her former fatal affection, or conquer it by an effort, which in her precarious state of health might prove immediately fatal.
The request which Fitz-Edward had made to Emmeline, that he might be allowed to see her and Mrs. Stafford together, without any other person being present, they both wished to evade; dreading least they should by their countenances betray the knowledge they had of his unhappy story, and the interest they took in it's catastrophe.
They hoped, therefore, to escape hearing his confession till Lady Adelina should be removed—and to remove her became indispensibly necessary, as Emmeline was convinced she was watched in her visits to the cottage.
Twice she had met James Crofts within half a quarter of a mile of the cottage; and at another time discovered, just as she was about to enter it, that the Miss Ashwoods had followed her almost to the door; which she therefore forbore to enter. These circumstances made both her and Mrs. Stafford solicitous to have Lady Adelina placed in greater security; and, added to Emmeline's uneasiness for her, was the unpleasant situation in which she found herself.
Observed with malicious vigilance by Mrs. Ashwood, James Crofts, Miss Galton, and the two Misses, she felt as awkward as if she really had some secret of her own to hide; and with all the purity and even heroism of virtue, learned the uneasy sensation which ever attends mystery and concealment. The hours which used to pass tranquilly and rationally with Mrs. Stafford, were now dedicated to people whose conversation made her no amends; and if she retired to her own room, it failed not to excite sneers and suspicions. She saw Mrs. Stafford struggling with dejection which she had no power to dissipate or relieve, and obliged to enter into frequent parties of what is called pleasure, tho' to her it gave only fatigue and disgust, to gratify Mrs. Ashwood, who hated all society but a crowd. James Crofts, indeed, helped to keep her in good humour by his excessive adulation; and chiefly by assuring her, that by any man of the least taste, the baby face of Emmeline could be considered only as a foil to her more mature charms, and that her fine dark eyes eclipsed all the eyes in the world. He protested too against Emmeline for affecting knowledge—'It is,' said he, 'a maxim of my father's—and my father is no bad judge—that for a woman to affect literature is the most horrid of all absurdities; and for a woman to know any thing of business, is detestable!'
Mrs. Ashwood laid by her dictionary, determined for the future to spell her own way without it.
Besides the powerful intervention of flattery, James Crofts had another not less successful method of winning the lady's favour. He told her that his brother, who had long cherished a passion in which he was at length likely to be disappointed, was in that case determined never to marry; that he was in an ill state of health; and if he died without posterity, the estate and title of his father would descend to himself.
The elder Crofts, very desirous of seeing a brother established who might otherwise be burthensome or inconvenient to him, suggested this finesse; and secured it's belief by writing frequent and melancholy accounts of his own ill health—an artifice by which he promoted at once his brother's views and his own. He affected the valetudinarian so happily, and complained so much of the ill effect that constant application to business had on his constitution, that nobody doubted of the reality of his sickness. He took care that Miss Delamere should receive an account of it, which he knew she would consider as the consequence of his despairing love; and when he had interested her vanity and of course her compassion, he contrived to obtain leave of absence for three months from the duties of his office, in order to go abroad for the recovery of his health. He hastened to Barege; and soon found means to re-establish himself in the favour of Miss Delamere; from which, absence, and large draughts of flattery dispensed with French adroitness, had a little displaced him. This stratagem put his brother James on so fair a footing with the widow, that he thought her fortune would be secured before she could discover it to be only a stratagem, and that her lover was still likely to continue a younger brother.