Mistrust by Matthew Gregory Lewis — Read

"Horror and doubt distract / His troubled thoughts, and in his bosom stir / The hell within him--Now conscience wakes despair / Which slumbered; wakes the better memory / Of what he was, what is, and what must be. / Worse; of worse deeds, worse sufferings must ensue." / --MILTON.

Anger had satiated itself with blood; the tempest was past; the voice of conscience now could be heard again, and dreadful was its sound in the ears of the guilty Rudiger. Blinded by passion, he had persuaded himself that in putting Ottokar to death he had exercised a just retaliation for the murder of his herald; but now that the illusion was dissipated, he shuddered at perceiving that the two actions wore a very different complexion. Gustavus at least had given no positive orders for the one; but no such excuse could be alleged for the other: the one at least was sudden, and might have occurred through accident; the other was premeditated, and could only have happened through design; again, the herald was the partisan of a foe, and was indeed a foe himself; but Ottokar was a friend, was a kinsman, was a guest who had trusted to the laws of knightly hospitality and knightly honor-- laws which had been found insufficient to preserve his life Conscience and his wife's reproaches had awakened Rudiger to a full sense of his guilt; but instead of being beneficial, fatally dreadful were the effect which this conviction produced upon his character. He was not a villain; on the contrary, crimes filled his soul with horror and indignation; nay, he possessed a thousand noble, generous, and heroic feelings; but he was the slave of tempestuous passions, and even in the most laudable movements of his nature, he might rather be said to detest vice than to love virtue.