The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 297: 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 263 audible noise produced by a human being slowly turning upon a carpet. And that sound came from within a few feet of the horror-stricken woman, ay, from the very direction in which the corpse lay. | To say that she listened with breathless attention were to inspire the idea that she had power over her respiration; whereas, this faculty had remained miraculously suspended from the instant that the tetanus commenced, her bosom never rising or sinking once the whole time, but resting stationary and pulseless like the bust of a marble statue. Had not the breath, however, been thus suspended under the influence of the miraculous trance, it would assuredly have become so, and the blood would have turned to ice in the milliner’s veins as that rustling sound stole gradually, gradually, gradually upon her ears. Conceive that woman chained, as it were, to the ground by the invisible and impalpable but not less adamantine bonds of a tremendous torpor which locked up the physical powers only, and left the moral perceptions to acquire a more poignant keenness from this total release of their allegiance to the substantial being; conceive her, we say, thus lying stretched upon her back as powerless and as helpless as if she were made of stone, and yet alive, oh, God knows how painfully, acutely alive to every circum- stance and every influence in any way affecting her; con- ceive her in this appalling position, with the harrowing conviction slowly, steadily, and surely stealing into her soul that the corpse of the murdered man was not only moving, but was actually creeping toward her. Talk of the horrors of churchyards by night, talk of the hideous spectres which throng over the grave of the suicide in the cross-road, talk of the ghastly shapes which crowd around the gibbet to which the bleaching bones of the murderer hang, talk of the overwhelming terrors of the nightmare, and all these, even when combined together, would fall far short in furnishing an adequate idea of the harrowing nature of those feelings which now took possession of the miserable murderess. Was it possible that the man had only been in a fit and had come back to life? No, this hypothesis was absurd, for the dose of poison was sufficient to kill a dozen men as powerful and as full of vigorous health as he; and, more- CORNUC } KS \