The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 291: what you’re looking at

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

THE GLASS OF LIQUEUR 257 tenement? Or was it the voice of some unearthly being responding in mockery or in sympathy to that tremendous eloquence of silent anguish and noiseless despair which filled the heart of the murderess? She listened, all was still, a profound tranquillity reigned throughout the house; and in her own chamber it was indeed the stupendous silence of death. Her imagination, then, had deceived her, and no sound had in reality reached her ears. But this stillness, this silence, oh, it was now becoming intolerable. It was something which began to weigh upon her heart like lead, it was not a mere absence of sound, it was the presence of an influence too mysterious to describe and too tremendous to endure. Oh, it seemed as if everything were now sepulchral that met her eyes in the yellow lustre of the night-lamp. She looked toward the bed; its snowy whiteness appalled her, for it appeared as if she were gazing on her own winding-sheet. She turned her eyes toward the windows; the drapery seemed to have a dark, funereal gloom. Her looks dwelt for an instant on a tall, narrow clothes-press of dark mahogany, and her fevered fancy represented it as an upright case containing skeletons. Once more her eyes turned wildly toward the casement, and there were they riveted with dread horror; for it appeared to the appalled imagination of the unhappy woman that between the opening of the window-curtains she beheld the marble countenance of a corpse looking in upon her. For nearly a minute did Mrs. Brace maintain her eyes fixed, in awful consternation, upon that phantom of her brain’s creation; and all the while her tongue was locked as if by paralysis, and her limbs were deprived of motion, and she was like a statue that could feel! But at length her terror reached that point when she must either scream out or avert her eyes, and it was this latter species of relief which she was enabled to grant unto her own agonizing soul. And then, oh, horror! as she sud- denly and shudderingly withdrew her looks from the ideal face of the dead at the window, they fell upon the real one which seemed to gaze up at her with its fixed and stony eyes as the corpse lay stretched upon the carpet. A moan of indescribable anguish now burst from the lips of the wretched woman; and once more did she cover her countenance with her hands, to shut out the appalling object CORNUC JOO