CHAPTER VI.
INTRIGUE.
As soon as Lord Albert was alone, and could recall his scattered senses, he reviewed every look and every gesture of Lady Adeline; and notwithstanding all that passed at the drawing-room and subsequently, notwithstanding the marked coldness and disapprobation which her manner had of late implied, he yet thought that her real feelings were not those, at least, of indifference towards him; and he resolved to try the issue of calling in South Audley-street that evening, as he had proposed to her.
For this purpose, he got away early from a ceremonious dinner which he was obliged to attend, and which appeared to him to last longer than any dinner had ever done before: and with his heart and head full of Adeline, and of Adeline alone, he found himself once more in her presence. Lady Delamere and her daughters, and one or two others, were sitting around Lady Dunmelraise's couch, amusing her with accounts of the drawing-room; but Lady Adeline was at the piano-forte, and Mr. Foley sitting by her, with a certain indescribable air of being established in his place by right.
At one glance of his eye, Lord Albert took in the whole room on entering, together with the relative position of its occupants; and his feelings underwent a sudden and painful revulsion. He advanced, however, towards Lady Dunmelraise, who extended her hand to him, but in a way that he could not mistake; and her coldness struck an additional chill to his heart. From Lady Delamere and her daughters he met no kindlier greeting; and he determined at once to try if Adeline's heart was equally shut against him. For this purpose he moved towards her; and although she could not see him, her back being turned to that part of the room from whence he came, yet she heard his approaching footstep, and trembled in every nerve.
Mr. Foley, who had followed Lady Hamlet Vernon's advice respecting his own conduct, and who lost no opportunity in acting in conformity to it, was now determined that he would not resign his seat or quit his station near Lady Adeline. The latter, on her part, had been too much agitated by her own feelings to see things in their true light; and was glad of any person to talk to, in order to conceal her emotion. But no artificial means were sufficiently powerful to still the beatings of her heart; and when Lord Albert inquired after her health, saying, he hoped she had not suffered from the morning's fatigue, she started at the sound of his voice, although she expected to hear it, and made some hurried reply, which he construed into a disdain of his inquiries.
Lord Albert, wretched and astonished, stood mute; questioning within himself if this could really be the same Adeline whom he had a few hours ago seen with such a different expression in her whole countenance and demeanour, as to make him doubt the evidence of his senses. He would at once have broken through the mystery, could he have obtained her ear for a moment; but the presence of Mr. Foley, who pertinaciously, and, as it appeared to Lord Albert, in defiance of him, kept his place, prevented all explanation. And then again returned those false conclusions which arose from jealous doubt; and he conceived that it would be unworthy of himself even to seek an explanation from one whose evident preference of another appeared to him so very decided.
In this dark spirit of jealous indignation, he turned away, and sank into gloomy silence. Could he have known what was passing in Lady Adeline's breast, he would have acknowledged the justice of her feelings; he would have seen that all which seemed coldness and indifference was only the result of a proper sense of what she owed herself; and that under that assumed demeanour lay hid the truest, warmest love. Strange as it may appear on a slight review of the matter (although it is the common infirmity of human nature never to see its own defects), he was not aware of the effect which his constant intercourse with Lady Hamlet Vernon produced on the minds of all those who witnessed his intimacy with her; and, perhaps, as matters now stood, even if he had been at one time inclined to own himself in the wrong, the still greater dereliction from all truth and delicacy, which he thought he discovered both in Lady Adeline and Lady Dunmelraise, respecting their behaviour to him, completely exonerated him in his opinion, and he lost all sense of the evil of his own conduct in blaming theirs.
Little did Lord Albert dream (indeed, in the excitement of greater things, he had totally forgotten it) that the sprig of myrtle which Lady Adeline had given him that morning, and which had been apparently the medium of so much mutual tenderness, had been seen by her in Lady Hamlet Vernon's hand, when their carriages were entangled in coming from the drawing-room. It was this circumstance, combined with Lord Albert's being again in assiduous attendance on one whom she was now compelled to consider in the light of a rival, that had made Lady Adeline draw up the glass at the moment Lord Albert was about to speak to her, in order to escape witnessing so painful a truth. As she threw herself back in the carriage, and reflected on the unworthiness of his conduct, she became the victim of the most agonizing feelings; for what is so painful as the conviction of unworthiness in the object of our love? and it was this conviction which had effected the alteration in her manner towards him, which he could not but observe from the first moment of his entering the room.