The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 295: what you’re looking at

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

264 THE COURT OF LONDON On the other hand, if with the Countess of Desborough there were not the same fervid love to be crushed, the same enthusiastic affections to be blighted, and the same worship to be overthrown, there was at all events an equal amount of sensibility to be shocked and a similar delicacy to be hurt; and when Eleanor thought of her husband or beheld him approach her, she could only regard him as her accomplice in a murder. The very circumstance that he possessed all the grandest mental qualities which could inspire admiration, that his principles were the most noble and the most exalted which could possibly ensure respect, and that his public character as a man was the most elevated and the most en- viable that could exist, — the knowledge of all this, we say, only increased the horror and augmented the disgust where- | with the countess now regarded him. For to her contem- plation the mask was torn from his countenance: she saw him as he was, her accomplice in a murder, and not as he seemed to the world, a stainless man. Although it was her hand which had perpetrated the deed, and he was merely an accessory before and after the fact, yet was not his share of the deed absorbed in the consciousness of her own tran- scendently superior iniquity; nor did that very chivalrous nature on his part which had led him thus to become her accomplice, nor did an appreciation of such boundless love, we say, have any effect in neutralizing or diminishing the disgust and horror which she felt toward the partner in her crime after that crime was accomplished. Thus was it that the noble couple experienced a mutual loathing and abhorrence; and inasmuch as they could not possibly conquer or eee these feelings, so neither could they conceal them from each other. Restraint and embar- rassment, coldness and reserve, rapidly infused themselves into their manners, their looks, their language; so that they became afraid to exchange a glance, afraid to be left alone together, afraid to allow their very hands to come in contact. On the present occasion they had met by accident in the garden, neither being previously aware that the other was walking in the charming enclosure at the time. And on thus meeting they had started as if each one had come suddenly face to face with a horrible spectre. Then, instan- taneously dropping their looks, they had proceeded together side by side along the gravel-walk, exchanging a few com- CORNIELIOOLKS (E(O)