Fear was relative in her: she had neither the fear of men nor of shame,
and only of death as it involved a hereafter. Whether that hereafter was
a latent conviction in her mind, or the vivid admonition of guilt and
dead men's eyes peering over her dreams and into the silent, lonely
watches of haunted midnights, who shall tell? There is no analysis of a
native and ancient depravity: it was sown in the marrow, it strengthens
in the bone, and, with a cunning, daring self-assertion, gambles upon
the faith of living and of dying not. Its very fears push it onward in
crime, and make it cruelly tantalize its own fate, as cowards lean over
graveyard walls, and shout, with an inner trembling, "Come forth--I dare
you!"
So had this woman, conscious of her deserts, bullied eternal justice
through its long postponements, never doubting, while ever vexing, the
Spirit of God, until the number of her crimes crowded the tablet of her
memory, and out of the hideous gulf of her past life gazed faces without
names and deeds without memoranda; a procession the longer that
strangers were in it, and, shrinking from her, yet pressing on,
exclaimed her name or only shrieked "'Tis she!" as if her name was
nothing to her curse.
Sleeping in her chains, there were children's eyes watching her from
far-off corners, as if to say, "Give us the whole life we would have
lived but for you!"
As her swollen limbs festered to the irons, there were babies' cries
floating in the air, that seemed to draw near her breasts, as if for
food, and suddenly convulse there in screams of pain, and move away with
the sounds of suffocation she had heard as they expired.
Pages:
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637