The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 35: what you’re looking at

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

THE POND 19 short, we say, and then staggered back a pace or two. A faintness came over him; he passed his hand over his eyes, he looked again: the form was no longer there, but he fancied that he caught a last glimpse of it as it moved farther around the pond, where it either melted into thin air, or was else lost in the deep black shade of the hedge and of the huge trunks of the trees. “Tt was nothing, — mere imagination,” said Marchmont to himself, now with an almost superhuman effort recover- ing his self-possession, but he nevertheless hurried along, throwing quick, furtive looks over his shoulder, and he felt not so strong in the conviction that it was really nothing as he endeavoured to persuade himself that it was. Indeed, for a few minutes he was almost staggered in his guilty design with regard to his wife. But when once he entered upon the grounds of Oaklands, he felt more courageous, more strong in his purposes of evil. The influence of the occurrence at the pond had worn off, for his mind was nat- urally of an iron hardihood, and even if a veritable shape from the dead had confronted him face to face, and laid its cold hand upon him, he was not the man to be deterred from any object which he had taken so much trouble to accomplish. And he endeavoured to confirm himself in his treacherous intents by reflecting that if a divorce were procured in respect to Lavinia, he might in due time con- duct another bride to the altar, issue might spring from such new alliance, and the proud title which he bore would not either perish with him, or descend upon some claimant who might rise up from a lower grade of society. And then, too, he hated his wife; her modest virtues and unassuming ex- cellences were in reality gall and wormwood to his evil- disposed heart. In short, he had many motives for ridding himself of her. “Yes, it was all imagination,” he said to himself, “ and I was a fool for hesitating in my purpose even for a single moment,” with which reflection he reéntered the mansion. Lettice set off from the farmhouse at about eleven o’clock, and though the night was so dark and tempestuous, she ex- perienced no circumstance to renew the alarm which she had felt on the previous occasion. She reached the private door of the mansion at half-past eleven, and was admitted by the duke in the same way as before. A glass of cham- COMMUC DOO) (E() im