The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 266: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

236 THE COURT OF LONDON to have arisen from apoplexy; and the remains of the last lord of Bellenden were removed with grand funereal pomp into Warwickshire, to be interred in the family vault at the old church where all his ancestors had been laid in due succession. The death of the Marquis of Bellenden without male issue instantaneously revived the lawsuits respecting the heritage of the estates. The marchioness, however, kept possession; and her opponents were the male members of the Mont- gomery family from which she herself was sprung. Vainly did her aunt, the dowager-countess, endeavour to induce her niece to come to an amicable settlement: the young widow was resolute in her refusal, for she felt that she had been basely sacrificed in the most important event of a woman’s life, and she would therefore show no favour to those who had thus made her the victim of a selfishness which did not, however, obtain its ends. Time passed on, years rolled by, and the lawsuit dragged its slow length along in that tremendous tribunal of modern inquisition, the Court of Chancery. The Dowager-Countess Montgomery soon grew wearied of making overtures to her niece, or else was too proud to reiterate them; and thus at the period when we introduce the Marchioness of Bellenden to our readers, she had been a widow twenty years, she was still in possession of the priory and the Warwickshire estates, the old dowager was still alive, and the lawsuit appeared as far off from a settlement as ever. Yes, the Marchioness of Bellenden was now thirty-seven; and never once during her long widowhood of twenty years had she laid aside her mourning apparel. The tenacity with which she clung to it was most singular, most remark- able, most unaccountable. That she thus permanently regretted the sexagenarian who had been her husband for a few months, she herself did not for a moment pretend; in fact, as she had never loved him, and had been chained to him against her inclination and despite of her most fervent prayers to the contrary, she could not possibly have ever regretted him at all. Nor did any measure of respect for his memory furnish a hypothesis to solve the mystery of this perseverance in maintaining the weeds of a widow; and therefore was the circumstance evidently a secret belonging to herself, and to herself alone. COMIC OOO (C(O)