The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 150: what you’re looking at

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

A FRIGHTFUL TRAGEDY 123 muttered Mrs. Brace to herself, as she resumed her seat by the side of the couch. ‘‘ Thank my stars that this man,’’ she added in her musings, as she glanced toward the sleeper, “‘is about to die. It has perhaps saved me the crime of an- other murder.”’ Then the milliner fell into a deep reverie, during which all the incidents of the last twenty years of her life rose up in her imagination, vivid and clear as if even those which were most remote had occurred but on the yesterday. She looked back to the time when she was in all the glory and splendour of her charms, she saw herself gradually becoming bolder and bolder in the course of vice and immorality, she marked her career deepening into profligacy, until she became as dissolute as a Messalina, and she could trace the process by which her heart grew callous and hardened, until it was completely ossified against all feelings and emotions of a better kind. Then, as she thus gradually followed her own career along the vista of memory, down to the very time when she was now seated by the bedside of the doomed wretch who was shuddering and moaning in his sleep, she could not help thinking — indeed, the conviction was in- sensibly forced upon her mind — that had she in her earlier years chosen the paths of virtue and rectitude, she would have been happy, honoured, and respected now, but that having deviated into the ways of vice and debauchery, she had been gradually yet irresistibly led on to crime, and this crime was already opening a yawning gulf at her feet. While these appalling thoughts were uppermost in her mind, Frederick Dray suddenly awoke; and a fit of delirious anguish and spasmodic poignancy, more terrible than the former ones, seized upon him all in a moment. With eyes that glared like those of a tiger, with the foam upon his mouth, and with his features all livid and swollen like those of the drowned, he writhed, tossed, and raved in a manner that was horrible to witness. “ Let me go — let me go!”’ he cried; ‘ fiends are tearing me with their claws of red-hot iron, serpents are coiling around me and darting forth their fiery tongues in my face. Let me go, I say, let me go. Hell opens to receive me, the eternal gulf sends up its forked flames to enwrap my form. Some demon is thrusting a long sharp wire through my brain — Oh, horror, horror! I cannot endure it! Hell, CONnnicloooks (CO)