The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 299: what you’re looking at

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

A NIGHT WITH A MURDERED MAN _ 265 were; but this faculty was denied her, so strong, so insuper- able was the magic spell thrown upon her by the tetanus. And now came the awful moment, a moment more fully fraught with undiluted horror than even that when the culprit upon the gallows feels the trap-door slipping away beneath his feet, or when the sailor who has fallen overboard in the southern seas hears the gush of the shark through the water close behind him. Such a moment was it, nay, a more harrowing one still, we affirm, that had now arrived in the existence of Mrs. Brace, — the moment when she felt the first marble-cold touch of the hand of the corpse. And her own hand was it that thus experienced the initiative contact, her own right hand, which lay by her side as powerless and as completely petrified, so far as motion was concerned, as all the rest of her body. Slowly, slowly did the corpse pass its cold, cold hand over that of the milliner, who shuddered inwardly, but without contracting her form in any way or to the slightest degree. That shudder was a sensation, and not a movement; a feeling, and not a real tremor. | From her own hand the hand of the corpse passed slowly up her arm, which was naked to a little above the elbow; and as the touch of the dead traced its way by very slow degrees over her own plump flesh, she could feel the animal heat in herself gradually retiring beneath the appalling contact which she was thus doomed to experience. Was it not, oh, was it not hell upon earth, and had not her punish- ment already begun in this world with a foretaste of the horrors of Satan’s kingdom? Though she recoiled, as it were, within herself from this atrocious penance, though she revolted with a rending anguish against so diabolical a torture, yet did she remain in a condition of utter inability to make any real or effectual movement. Not to a hair’s breadth could she shift her position; a living statue was she. And now over the upper portion of her dress passed the heavy cold hand of the corpse, and on to her bosom was continued the loathsome, terrible contact. At the same ~ time that the presence of the dead was thus upon the ample, firm, and exuberant contours which had so often heaved in amorous sport and so frequently pillowed the head of some favoured lover, at the same moment, we say, that the (GX ®) mG 6)(0)©)