The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 332: what you’re looking at

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

302 THE COURT OF LONDON Frantic with mingled terror and dismay, despair and horror, the wretched woman rushed across her cell to escape from the spectacle which her imagination had conjured up. But she stumbled over a stool and hurt herself severely. The pain maddened her all the more goadingly; a lava stream was circulating in her veins, sparks flashed before her eyes, her brain was seething. Existence was now a perfect hell, life was an excruciation. No, not life itself; because she would have given her soul to save herself from a premature death, she would have surrendered all her hopes of a here- after to prolong the present. It was not exactly life, that had become intolerable; but it was the prospect of ending this life on the scaffold that was infusing a horrible madness * into her veins, and torturing her whole being into an agoniz- ing frenzy. What could she do? Was there no hope? To this latter query did every conviction of her mind and every circum- stance of her position give back a stern, uncompromising negative. There was no hope. Her doom was fixed; her death was certain. Then to anticipate the penalty which human justice was sure to inflict. Ah! that now became the dominant idea in her brain, and the maddened woman resolved upon self-destruction. | There was such a fearful hurry in her brain, such a wild excitement in her manner, that she did not pause to reflect upon the resolve to which her agonizing, burning, torturing, scorching, searing sensations hurried her. A demon ap- | peared to have taken possession of her mind, — a fiend was ruling her senses. With desperate hand she unfastened her apparel, drew forth the stay-lace, and tore away as many tapes and strings as the female vesture can ordinarily supply; then, refastening her dress as well as she was able, she sat down upon her iron-framed pallet to twist all those tapes and strings into one strong cord. The whole of this proceeding was the work of a very few moments; and though the hands of the wretched woman trembled as nervously as her entire frame quivered, though her pulses were beating with a rapidity beyond all counting, and her veins were running with a lava stream that was as furious as it was burning, though madness was raging in her brain and the demon of despair was tugging at her heart-strings, — nevertheless, she achieved her dread preparations with a marvellous rapidity. CONNIEIOOKS m