The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 120: what you’re looking at

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

102 THE COURT OF LONDON of her fall from virtue. Ah! and she remembers likewise that lone churchyard in which there is a humble grave, unadorned with marble monument and marked by no stone, but where the grass grows over the heaped-up clay, and above which in winter-time the cold winds moan and sigh and roar and rave in the alternating voices of sorrow and of fury. Yes, nor less does she review every detail and feature of her own vile career. For the faculty of thought is not laggard now. Such a vivid keenness is imparted to her mental perceptions that in a few moments her memory can run its eye over the incidents of years, and in an incredibly short space of time, the space of two or three minutes, can she embrace every incident, from the earliest scene in the cottage garden of a distant county down to this present chapter of her life which is about to close with the guillotine that stands there, in the market-place of Geneva. Still amidst a profound silence, so far as the voices of the crowd are concerned, does the cart move on. Oh, is there nought to be done whereby she can be saved? Does man know not of any atonement which she can make? Has the law left no loophole through which she can creep? Will not justice relent at the last moment? This Protestant minister, who is a Genevese, and much respected in the city, could he do nothing for her? She is about to ask him, when a voice whispers in her soul that she has already done so a hundred times over, and that the holy man has no more power to save her than the carter who is driving her to the scaffold, or any one of the gendarmes who are guarding her progress thither. She must die, then? O heavens, she must die! What, when the sun is shining in such gorgeous splendour, and the heavens are cloudless, and all nature seems smiling and glad? Is it possible she can be doomed to die on such a day as this? No, no; it were an outrage offered to Heaven to shed human blood on such a day. They must bear her back to prison and wait till the weather changes, and be- comes congenial for the taking of human life, when the sky shall be overcast with black clouds and the sun be veiled, and the buildings shall gleam not in his glorious light, and when, too, the ax of the guillotine shall seem a dull mass like lead, and not bright and shining as silver. Such was the train of frenzied thoughts which swept through the wretched womari’s mind as the cart moved COMmmicloo C@