The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 34: what you’re looking at

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

THE DUKE OF MARCHMONT 15 deliberately upon this fearful loss; days passed ere she could awaken herself to a sense of the necessity of a pious and holy resignation to the will of Heaven. And during these days, it appeared to her as if it were all a dream, and that her brain was only morbidly reeling beneath the weight of some imagined calamity. In the night she would start up from a feverish and troubled sleep, — wakened as if by the an- guished voice of a drowning one thrilling on her ears, and pressing her hands violently to her throbbing temples, she would ask herself if it could possibly be true. At length this dreamlike state of being passed away, and left her to the astounding sense of the awful reality. She prayed to Heaven for strength to bear up against it, but there were times when she felt as if she were going mad. Then, passionately, oh, how passionately, would she press Bertram’s ring to her lips, and in this memento of his love in other and happier days was her only consolation. Alas, how poor a one! and yet it was a solace, though feeble as the last thread which retains the invalid to existence in the depth of a malady when the crisis for best or worst is come. Misfortunes never arrive alone. But a few weeks after the receipt of the intelligence from the United States, a fire broke out in Captain Lacey’s house, and so rapid was the spread of the devastating element that all three dwellings were reduced in a few brief hours to blackened ruins. Scarcely an article of furniture was saved: the inmates considered themselves fortunate in escaping with life alone. But this was not the full extent of the terrible calamity. Fire insur- ance was not so generally practised in 1827 as it is nowadays, and unfortunately Captain Lacey’s property was not insured. The principal source of his income was thus cut off irre- trievably, irreparably, and he found himself in his old age, with ill-health and infirmities growing rapidly upon him, reduced to his half-pay,—a mere scanty pittance. And this too would die with him. What was to become of his daughter at his death, oh, what? There was yet another misfortune in store for the poor captain and Eliza, for their faithful domestic, who had been with them so many years, was thrown upon a sick-bed through the shock occasioned by the fire, and in a few days she breathed her last. There was a widow lady in London named Mrs. Bailey, who was very distantly related to Captain Lacey, and with GoM (@) IDoOOks (E(O)