The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 258: what you’re looking at

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

eee ee eee A th a ee a ene a yee SUSU SSEEESTESnsmnreseatnammne ee OD = utterance to the most awful ravings, and had acted in a manner compelling the surgeon to have him put under restraint. He was therefore lodged in one of the mad-cells; and hence it was that when he awoke to conscicusness he found himself held in the bondage of a tight-fitting vesture, the legs of the trousers being fastened to the matiress, and the sleeves of the jachet sewn to the sides of that garment it- self: After long communing with himself, Melmoth was enabled to look his position clearly in the face. He saw that so long as he wasconsidered to be amad- man, there was no danger of his being handed over to the grasp of criminal justice for the violation of the churchyard—a horror from which his mind, in its calm and lucid moments, recoiled with inex- pressible loathing. But if, on the other hand, his conduct afforded proof of a recovered sanity, he would assuredly be transferred from the mad- cell of the workhouse to the dungeon of a felon’s gaol. It was therefore necessary that he should at least simulate a mental alienation which had in reality ceased to exist. But then there was the considera- tion—how was he to get released from the bondage in which his limbs were confined? The task was a difficult one : for in order to accomplish his aims, he must affect just so much madness as would save him from being handed over to the criminal law, and yet he must exhibit a sufficient degreo of tracta- bility to induce the surgeon to emancipate him from the strait-jacket. This was the astute policy upon which James Melmoth resolved :—and it succeeded so far that the medical attendant ordered him to be released from the bondage in which his limbs were confined. But still he remained a captive in that dreadful cell; and it was evident from the questions put to him by the keeper, the master of the workhouse, and the surgeon himself, that they more than half suspected his gloomy manner and eccentric obser- vations to be the assumed semblance of madness. Moreover, Melmoth, who was ever on the alert to catch anything that feli from the lips of those authorities who visited him, overheard certain re- marks between the surgeon and the keeper which convinced him that his duplicity was rapidly be- coming more and more transparent; — and he shuddered every time a step approached his cell, for fear that the officers of justice were coming to bear him away to prison. His state of mind was horrible in the extreme. In the neighbouring cells there were real maniacs,— men whose brain adversity had touched in the first instance, and whom the tyranny of the workhouse goaded to insanity altogether. The fiend-like yells —the demoniac cries—the appalling lamentations —the bitter weeping—the piteous moaning—and the frightful language, which exhibited the different phases of mental alienation on the part of those unhappy beings, rendered the day torturing to a degree and the night positively hideous. Melmotb, in fact, felt that if he were to remain long in such a shocking vicinage, he should really end by going mad himself. And thus a week had passed ;—and at the expi- ration of this time, the miserable man perceived that there were moments when his own brain was reeling—not under the influence of that appalling will, to the desecration of the churchyard,—but | with another and different species of mental per. | turbation. His own wretched thoughts were poig- | nant, and tense, and harrowing enough to drive | him crazy: and when to their bitternesg@ and anguish, and despair, were superadded all the horrors of the maniac revels on his right and his left, the wonder was no¢ that he should have felt | his own brain gradually affected, but that the equilibrium of his reason should have survived even - for a single day the awful shock of such tremend.- | ous influences ! Nevertheless, as we have stated, a week passed , —and during this interval the poor wretch retained | his reason so well that he was even enabled and compelled to affect madness in order to save him- self from a doom more dreaded than his present condition. But he began to feel that this state of things could not pussibly last: his assumed insanity was suspected, even while it was verging into the dire reality of the terrible affliction. What could he do?—to remain there was to court the condition of the raving lunatics who were writhing, yelling, roaring, weeping, and lamenting in the other cells: and to give up playing the pact of an insane person, was to rush headlong into all the infamy and into- lerable disgrace attendant upon a trial at the Old Bailey as a desecrator of the resting-places of the dead! | It was in the evening of the seventh day—the sun had set—and, as no lamp barnt in the stone passage, the mad-cells were all as dark as pitch. Melmoth was seated upon his bed, thinking of his dead wife whose corpse he had torn up from the grave—thinking of the care with which he had re-consigned it to the grave,—thinking also of his poor children whom he had last seen in the infir- mary, but concerning whom he had not dared ask a single question since he had become an inmate of that barred den,—of all these subjects was he thinking, while the train of his ideas was interwoven with other threads of harrowing reminiscences, and while the yells and cries of the neighbouring maniacs were ringing like a thousand bells through his wildering brain. Presently a light flashed in at the end of the passage—footsteps advanced—and Melmoth, anxious to escape those searching questions which the authorities of the place were wont to put to him in order to probe the real state of his mind, threw himself softly back upon the bed and pre- tended to be wrapped in a profound slamber. “Now, then, hold your cussed tongues, you waggabones !” thundered the voice of the keeper, as he entered the passage, carrying a lantern in his hand. Some of the maniacs became stupified with con- sternation all in a moment; and the voices of the rest fell to a lower key—yells and cries sinking into subdued moanings and half-stified la- ments. “This new order of the magistrates that I should visit the lunatics three times a-day, doesn’t suit my book at all,” growled the master of the workhouse who, it appeared, was accompanying the keeper, and whose voice Melmoth had no difficulty in recognising. “It seems that there's going to be a regular clear-out of these mad fellowa—and that they’re all to go to the county asylum in the course monomania which had driven him, even against his | of a few days.” a tei a GOH GOO 248 | SS