On her arrival, by the Calais steam-packet, at London Bridge, Adeline had left Quentin to clear the baggage at the Custom-House, and had proceeded direct to the Hall. The incidents which immediately followed her arrival are already known to the reader.
It may, however, appear strange that Adeline should come back to a dwelling where she had suffered so much, and which could not fail to recall to her with renewed force the black crime which lay so heavily upon her conscience. But her mind was in that morbid state which is so well calculated to engender idiosyncratic ideas; and she believed that the very fact of her return to the scene of her enormity would prove a penance most salutary to her soul. Such purely Roman Catholic sentiments are frequently found exercising a deep influence over minds which contrition for great crimes has disposed to superstitious tendencies.
There were also considerations of a more worldly nature which to some extent urged Lady Ravensworth to return to the Hall. She loathed the idea of dwelling amidst the noise, the din, and the crowds of the metropolis: she craved for the retirement of the country. Whither, then, could she repair save to the mansion which was her own? what excuse could she offer to those who knew her, for settling in any other part of the suburbs of London?—for near, though not in, the capital had she resolved to dwell, in order to be enabled to see her parents occasionally, and Eliza Sydney frequently.
In addition to all the influences, moral and worldly, now enumerated, there was another which had confirmed Adeline in the idea of returning to the Hall. But this was a secret influence for which she could not account,—an influence that ever interposed amidst her waverings, to settle them in favour of the project,—one of those influences to which even the strongest minds are frequently subject, and for the existence of which they can give no satisfactory reason. Such an influence as this the Turk would denominate the irresistible current of Destiny; but the pious Christian believes it to be the secret and all-powerful will of heaven.
Let us, however, proceed with our narrative.
The intruders had departed; and Lady Ravensworth was as it were alone in that vast mansion which had so many sad and gloomy memorials for her!
She entered the drawing-room where Egerton's party had banqueted; and, seeing the table covered with the bottles and glasses, turned away in disgust. Passing into the adjacent suite of apartments, she opened the shutters, and gazed around the large and lonely rooms in which the silence of death seemed to reign.
She looked at the pictures which hung upon the walls; and then it struck her that some change had taken place in those rooms, each feature of which she remembered well. The more earnestly she gazed about her, the firmer became her conviction that every thing was not as she had left it. At length she perceived that three or four of the most valuable pictures had disappeared: a costly time-piece, too, was missing from the mantel of one apartment: several ornaments were wanting in another.
Thinking that these objects might have been shifted from their usual places, she entered another suite of rooms; and there, instead of finding the things which were lost from the first, she perceived more vacancies amongst the pictures and the ornaments.
The conduct of the old gardener in allowing a party of persons to use the mansion, the care of which had been entrusted to him, recurred more forcibly than at first to her mind: and what had hitherto appeared a comparatively venial fault, now assumed a complexion, when coupled with the disappearance of the pictures and ornaments above-mentioned, which naturally created in her mind alarming suspicions of his honesty.