The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 399: what you’re looking at

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

Bet slowily—slowly did her imagination begin to } a stricken snake ap she sate in her dungeon-cell. people the dungeon with frightful shapes ; ghastly { forms, soch as the disordered mind conjures up began to rise in the midst of the darkness ; and low murmurings, such as the troubled fancy conceives to be the voices of the dead, rustled as it were through the portentous silence of the place. Then, as the wretched woman sate in her dungeon-cell, with eyes wildly glaring and horribly dilating —with cheeks blanched as those of a corpse —with lips white and quivering—with upheaved bosom and suspended breath,—as thus she sate, we say, it appeared as if she actually and posi- tively beheld real substantial shapes of ghostly horror, and heard whispering voices of unearthly sound. Although: a stapendous consternation held her motionless—paralysed her tongue and made her limbs rigid—yet were her feelings as acute and ber sensations as keen as if no one faculty were sus- pended and no single energy held in abeyance. Hell Was raging in her soul—the tortures of the damned large drops upon her brow: she was drenched from head to foot in her own agony. If every sinew, nerve, and fibre were laid bare and torn with pincers —if the scalp were removed and a searing iron applied to the brain thus exposed—if her eyes were torn from their sockets and molten lead or boiling oil dropped into the holes,—in fine, if all the tortures which man could invent or fiends inflict, were now applied to her, they could not have exceeded the agonizing sensations which she experienced as those ghastly shapes began to arise in the midst of the darkness and those voices came like the low rustling of withered leaves upon her ear! The wretched woman could not restrain the play of her imagination, so hideous in its fantastic con- ceptions. She had atterly lost all control over her disordered mind, which thus ran wanton and wild in the realms of horror. She had no power to check the current of her thoughts and look all the objects of her terror in the face. To her, thexefore, did they appear invested with a terrible reality and a ghastly substance. In a word, she laboured under the appal- ling belief that the spectres were no delusion and the voices no dream! What, then, was the nature of her reflections now? Reflections, indeed! No: the ideas that traversed her brain were scarcely reflections—be- cause she had no power to weigh them deliberately or ponder upon their significance. They were im- preasions of a positive nature,—-impressions of a hideous character,—and from which she could not escape! Just heavens! were the graves of New- gate opening in the deep midnight, and sending up their dead to haunt, appa], and scare her?—were the tombs of murderers yawning in the midst of the prison-pavement and yielding up their ghastly tenants to proclaim her doom ?—were the ghosts of the hanged rising from their coffins, their wind- ing-sheets, and their cerements, to hail her with the hideous welceme of the dead? O God! with reeling brain, and bursting heart, and quivering limbs did the wretched woman picture to herself this catalogue of horrors;—and the paralysis which had held her motionless hitherto, now so far relaxed its rigid influence as to enable her to writhe and twist with the spasmodic convulsions of Then im the excruciation of her feelings—in the rending violence of her agony, ber teeth bit through her lips till the blood spirted forth, and her nails dug into the palms of her hands till they were clotted with gore ! For the shapes that were stealing slowly, slowly through the darkness, and crept up as it were from a yawning guif into her presence,—a gulf that was. blacker than the blackness of her own those dreadful shapes gradually appeared to become more distinct, as they ranged themselves in a line along the solid wall. Then she saw-—or fancied she saw—that they had all halters round their necks; and she knew—or at least harboured the harrowing conviction that they were the dead. whose worldly histories were black with crime and: whose earthly names were associated with the gallows! Tall, stark, gaunt corpees were they,— with their features all convulsed by the agonies of strangulation — their glazed eyes half starting from their heads and fixed upon the wretched woman in ghastly recognition—their mouths partly open —and their long, lank, withered, naked. arms extended towards the spot where the milliner- was seated! And then the atmosphere seemed to grow damp, and raw, and clammy as if infected with the breath of those spectral shapes: it was. the mildewed atmosphere of the grave—the chill and musty exhalation of the tomb—the earthy and sickly vapour of the sepulchral vault! . Yes—with extended arms and fingers pointing towards the agonising, horror-stricken woman, stood the corpses of the hanged ones, with the haiters round their necks. And the foremost. addressed her in a voice that sounded like the hollow wind moaning through the wintry forest and mingling with the low murmurs of the withered boughs aud rustling leaves. A chill more intense, more searching, more penetrating than aught she had yet experienced, struck to the very heart's core of the wretched Mrs. Brace,—a chill that crept throughout her form and along every limb, with the cold clammy feeling of a loathsome rep- “We rise from the grave to welcome thee amongst us,” spoke the corpse: and its looks and its breath shot like ice-abafts through the brain and the heart of the milliner. “From those deep and silent solitudes where the worm pursues its noiseless sport, have we risen to give thee the greeting of the dead! Thine hours are told—thy minutes are numbered! and while hell is yawning to engulf thy spirit, the grave is opening to re- ceive thy body. With the world of mortals thos hast little more to do: thou standest on the thres- hold of the sphere inhabited by the eternals. For thee the quenchless fire is already raging—for thee the undying worm is sharpening its sting. A little while—and that form will be rigid—those limbs will be stark—those features fixed in death; and the earth will rattle down upon thy coffin-lid—and the huge stone will be set over thy grave—and thou wilt be added to the number of the doomed that sleep beneath Newgate pavement!” “ And the worm shall prey upon thy flesh,” spoke the second corpse, whose stony looks and chilling breath were sufficient to freeze all in a moment the hottest blood that ever circled in the humaa veins ;—“and even in the very grave shalt thoa GOH GOO (COLUM