And—O horror! she was well aware that the black deed of forgery would be indubitably fixed upon her: and the penalty of that deed was—death!
Yes:—death by the hand of the common executioner—an ignominious death upon the scaffold!
She knew that almost her very minutes were now numbered—that, as the clock struck eight on some Monday morning, not very far distant, she must be led forth to die—that after her trial, which was sure to end in her condemnation, she should be consigned to the condemned cell—that from this cell she must proceed through several dark and dismal passages to that door upon whose very threshold would appear the gibbet, black and sinister—that she would have to ascend, or perhaps be carried up, the steps to the platform of the horrible machine—that she should see myriads and myriads of human beings crowding around to behold her dying agonies—that she would be placed upon a drop soon to glide away from beneath her feet and leave her suspended in the air—that the few minutes during which she must stand upon that drop, while the chaplain said the parting prayer, would comprise whole years, aye, centuries of the bitterest, bitterest anguish—that her attentive ear would catch even the sound caused by the finger of the executioner, when he touched the bolt of the drop an instant before he pulled it back—and that her soul would be yielded up in the agonies of strangulation!
Thus—thus, in spite of herself, did the wretched woman's imagination picture in frightful detail the whole of the dreadful ceremony of a violent death: thus—thus did she shadow forth, in imagination, every feature—every minute particular of the appalling ordeal;—and, in imagination also, did she now pass through it all, as vainly she craved for sleep in the silence and the darkness of the prison-ward!
The dread routine of the whole ceremony assumed an historical exactitude, a palpable shape, and a frightful reality in her mind.
Terrible—terrible was it for her to think upon what she now was, and upon what she might have been.
Not a hope was left to her in this world: she must be cut off in the meridian of her years;—she must bid adieu for ever to all the pleasures, the enjoyments, the delights of society and of life!
Oh! for the power—oh! for the means to avert her maddening, harrowing thoughts from the prophetic contemplation of that fatal morning when she must walk forth to the scaffold—when the close air of that prison would suddenly change to the fresh breeze of heaven, as she stepped forth from the low dark door which the passer-by outside ever beholds with a shudder,—and when she should raise her eyes to that black and ominous frame-work, with the chain hanging from the cross-beam, and her own coffin beneath the drop! All this was horrible—horrible,—sufficient to deprive the strongest mind of its reasoning faculties, and to paralyse the boldest with excess of terror!
For, oh! the reward of crime is dispensed in two ways upon earth,—by the law, and by the criminal's own thoughts;—and far—far more dreadful is the punishment inflicted by the guilty conscience than by the vengeance of outraged justice. Even the horrors of the scaffold, immense—tremendous though they must be in the reality, are magnified a hundred-fold by the terror-stricken imagination!
From the examples of the wretched man and the guilty woman of whom we have been speaking, and on whose heads afflictions and miseries fell with such frightful rapidity and crushing weight,—from their examples let the reader judge of the folly—setting aside the wickedness—of crime.