The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 283: what you’re looking at

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

248 THE COURT OF LONDON to foot with new and undefined alarms, and experiencing a boundless sympathy for the young lady whom she sup- posed to be in the agonies of maternity, but whom to her knowledge she had never seen, Caroline Walters began to feel her Spanish blood boiling with the excitement of an intense loathing in regard to that house of terrible mystery whither shame repaired to hide its head, where children were born Heaven only knew how to be disposed of, and where a vile woman throve upon the dark and sinister practice which, as she herself had boasted to Mrs. Brace, never left her chambers untenanted. For nearly half an hour did the moans, varied by occasional subdued screams, continue in the next room; and all that time Miss Walters remained still and motionless in her own chamber, but with a fearful excitement rapidly increas- ing upon her. At length, so heated grew her brain, that she felt she must either have fresh air or be suffocated. The room seemed to have become a coffin; the atmosphere was to her senses as sultry as the torrid glow of the tropics. Nevertheless, it was— as the reader remembers — in the depth of winter; and the blast was blowing without as if it had come laden with the ice-chill of far-off Labrador. Approaching the window, Caroline opened it as noiselessly as she could; and the cutting wind’s intensity of cold was lost upon her. It seemed but a gentle breeze that fanned her feverish cheeks and blew back the hair from her counte- nance. Dark as pitch was the night without; black as a funereal pall did that darkness seem to hang upon the river and against the house. Not a star peeped forth from above, not even an outline of the tempestuous clouds that were piled one upon another could be seen; for it was the very air itself that seemed to be a flood of jet but impalpable ink. The young girl could hear the rush of the river and its constant plashings against the piles below; but there was not a gleam upon its surface, not a mitigated shade to show that it was water running there. All was black, densely, profoundly black, like the interior of a vast cavern whither the light of day penetrated not, and where no lamp illumed the scene. Yes, it was a night which crime would revel in for its own vile purposes, a night from which conscience would GoOmicbooksneo