In the opposite cell was lodged a loyalist tailor, who had been ruined by giving credit to the cavaliers and their ladies,--(for at this time, and much later, down to the reign of Anne, tailors were employed by females even to make and fit on their stays),--who had run mad with drink and loyalty on the burning of the Rump, and ever since had made the cells of the madhouse echo with fragments of the ill-fated Colonel Lovelace's song, scraps from Cowley's "Cutter of Coleman street," and some curious specimens from Mrs.Aphra Behn's plays, where the cavaliers are denominated the heroicks, and Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough represented as going to meeting, their large Bibles carried before them by their pages, and falling in love with two banished cavaliers by the way.The voice in which he shrieked out such words was powerfully horrible, but it was like the moan of an infant compared to the voice which took up and reechoed the cry, in a tone that made the building shake.It was the voice of a maniac, who had lost her husband, children, subsistence, and finally her reason, in the dreadful fire of London.The cry of fire never failed to operate with terrible punctuality on her associations.She had been in a disturbed sleep, and now started from it as suddenly as on that dreadful night.It was Saturday night too, and she was always observed to be particularly violent on that night,--it was the terrible weekly festival of insanity with her.She was awake, and busy in a moment escaping from the flames; and she dramatized the whole scene with such hideous fidelity, that Stanton's resolution was far more in danger from her than from the battle between his neighbors Testimony and Hothead.She began exclaiming she was suffocated by the smoke; then she sprung from her bed, calling for a light, and appeared to be struck by the sudden glare that burst through her casement.--"The last day," she shrieked, "The last day! The very heavens are on fire!"--"That will not come till the Man of Sin be first destroyed," cried the weaver; "thou ravest of light and fire, and yet thou art in utter darkness.--I pity thee, poor mad soul, Ipity thee!" The maniac never heeded him; she appeared to be scrambling up a staircase to her children's room.She exclaimed she was scorched, singed, suffocated; her courage appeared to fail, and she retreated."But my children are there!" she cried in a voice of unspeakable agony, as she seemed to make another effort;"here I am--here I am come to save you.--Oh God! They are all blazing!--Take this arm--no, not that, it is scorched and disabled--well, any arm--take hold of my clothes--no, they are blazing too!--Well, take me all on fire as I am!--And their hair, how it hisses!--Water, one drop of water for my youngest--he is but an infant--for my youngest, and let me burn!" She paused in horrid silence, to watch the fall of a blazing rafter that was about to shatter the staircase on which she stood.--"The roof has fallen on my head!" she exclaimed."The earth is weak, and all the inhabitants thereof," chanted the weaver; "I bear up the pillars of it."The maniac marked the destruction of the spot where she thought she stood by one desperate bound, accompanied by a wild shriek, and then calmly gazed on her infants as they rolled over the scorching fragments, and sunk into the abyss of fire below."There they go,--one--two--three--all!" and her voice sunk into low mutterings, and her convulsions into faint, cold shudderings, like the sobbings of a spent storm, as she imagined herself to "stand in safety and despair," amid the thousand houseless wretches assembled in the suburbs of London on the dreadful nights after the fire, without food, roof, or raiment, all gazing on the burning ruins of their dwellings and their property.She seemed to listen to their complaints, and even repeated some of them very affectingly, but invariably answered them with the same words, "But I have lost all my children--all!" It was remarkable, that when this sufferer began to rave, all the others became silent.The cry of nature hushed every other cry,--she was the only patient in the house who was not mad from politics, religion, ebriety, or some perverted passion; and terrifying as the outbreak of her frenzy always was, Stanton used to await it as a kind of relief from the dissonant, melancholy, and ludicrous ravings of the others.
But the utmost efforts of his resolution began to sink under the continued horrors of the place.The impression on his senses began to defy the power of reason to resist them.He could not shut out these frightful cries nightly repeated, nor the frightful sound of the whip employed to still them.Hope began to fail him, as he observed, that the submissive tranquillity (which he had imagined, by obtaining increased indulgence, might contribute to his escape, or perhaps convince the keeper of his sanity) was interpreted by the callous ruffian, who was acquainted only with the varieties of MADNESS, as a more refined species of that cunning which he was well accustomed to watch and baffle.
