Welcome to Sleep Stories with Steph.
Your go-to romantic podcast that guarantees you a calm and entertaining transition.
Into a great night's sleep.
Come with me as we immerse ourselves in a romantic journey.
To a time long since forgotten.
But before we begin.
.
.
Let's take a moment.
To focus on where we are now.
Take a deep breath in through your nose.
And let it out.
With a long sigh.
That's it!
Now close your eyes.
And feel yourself sink deeper into the support beneath you.
It is time to relax and fully let go.
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Happy listening Chapter 52 Fagin's Last Night Alive.
The court was paved from floor to roof with human faces.
Inquisitive and eager eyes peered out from every inch of space.
From the rail before the dock,
Away into the sharpest angle of the smallest corner in the galleries,
All looks were fixed upon one man,
Fagin.
Before him and behind,
Above,
Below,
On the right and on the left.
He seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament of bright and gleaming eyes.
He stood there,
In all this glare of living light,
With one hand resting on the wooden slab before him,
The other held to his ear,
And his head thrust forward to enable him to catch,
With greater distinctness,
Every word that fell from the presiding judge,
Who was delivering his charge to the jury.
At times he turned his eyes sharply upon them to observe the effect of the slightest featherweight in his fever.
And when the points against him were stated with terrible distinctness,
Looked towards his counsel in mute appeal that he would even then urge something in his behalf.
Beyond these manifestations of anxiety,
He stirred not hand nor foot.
He had scarcely moved since the trial began,
And now the judge ceased to speak,
He still remained in the same strained attitude of close attention,
With his gaze bent on him,
As though he listened still.
A slight bustle in the court recalled him to himself.
Looking round,
He saw the jurymen had turned together to consider their verdict.
As his eyes wandered to the gallery,
He could see the people rising above each other to see his face.
Some hastily applying their glasses to their eyes,
And others whispering their neighbours with looks expressive of abhorrence.
A few there were who seemed unmindful of him and looked only to the jury in impatient wonder how they could delay.
But in no one face,
Not even among the women,
Of whom there were many,
Could he read the faintest sympathy with himself,
Or any feeling but one of all-absorbing interest,
That he should be condemned.
As he saw all this in one bewildered glance,
The death-like stillness came again,
And looking back he saw the jurymen had turned towards the judge.
They only sought permission to retire.
He looked wistfully into their faces,
One by one when they passed out as though to see which way the greater number leant.
But that was fruitless.
The jailer touched him on the shoulder.
He followed mechanically to the end of the dock and sat down on a chair.
The man pointed it out or he would not have seen it.
He looked into the gallery again.
Some of the people were eating and some fanning themselves with handkerchiefs,
But the crowded place was very hot.
Then there was one man sketching his face in a little notebook.
He wondered whether it was like,
And looked on when the artist broke his pencil point and made another with his knife,
As any idle spectator might have done.
In the same way,
When he turned his eyes towards the judge,
His mind began to busy himself with the fashion of his dress and what cost it was and how he put it on.
There was an old fat gentleman on the bench too who had gone out some half an hour before.
Now he was back.
Fagin wondered within himself whether this man had been to get his dinner.
What he had had and where he had had it.
And pursued this train of thought until some new object caught his eye and roused another.
Not that all this time Fagin's mind was for an instant free from one oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet.
It was ever-present to him.
But in a vague and general way he could not fix his thoughts upon it.
Even when he trembled and turned burning hot at the idea of speedy death,
He fell to counting the iron spikes before him and wondering how the head of one had been broken off and whether they would mend it or leave it as it was.
Then he thought of the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold and stopped to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it.
And went on to think again.
At length there was a cry of silence and a breathless look from all towards the door.
The jury returned and passed him close.
He could glean nothing from their faces.
They might as well have been of stone.
Perfect stillness ensued,
Not a rustle or a breath.
Guilty.
The building ran with a tremendous shout,
And another and another.
Then it echoed loud groans that gathered strength as they swelled out like angry thunder.
It was a peal of joy from the populace outside,
Greeting the news that he would die on Monday.
The noise subsided and he was asked if he had anything to say,
Why the sentence of death should not be passed upon him.
Fagin had resumed his listening attitude and looked intently at his questioner while the demand was made,
But it was twice repeated before he seemed to hear it.
And then he only muttered he was an old man.
And also dropping into a whisper.
He was silent again.
The judge assumed the black cat.
And the prisoner still stood with the same air and gesture.
A woman in the gallery uttered some exclamation called forth by this dread solemnity.
He looked hastily up as if angry at the interruption.
And bent forward yet more attentively.
The address was solemn and impressive,
The sentence fearful to hear,
But he stood like a marble figure without the motion of a nerve.
His haggard face was still thrust forward,
His under jaw hanging down and his eyes staring out before him,
When the jailer.
.
.
Put his hand upon his arm and beckoned him away.
He gazed stupidly about him for an instant and obeyed.
They led him through a paved room under the court,
Where some prisoners were waiting till their turns came,
And others were talking to their friends,
Who crowded round a grate which looked into the open yard.
There was nobody there to speak to him.
But as he passed,
The prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were clinging to the bars,
And they assailed him with appropriate names and screeched and hissed.
He shook his fist and would have spat upon them,
But his conductors hurried him on through a gloomy passage lighted by a few dim lamps into the interior of the prison.
Here he was searched that he might not have about him the means of anticipating the law This ceremony performed,
They led him to one of the condemned cells and left him there alone.
He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door,
Which served for seat and bedstead.
And casting his bloodshot eyes upon the ground,
Tried to collect his thoughts.
After a while he began to remember a few disjointed fragments of what the judge had said.
Though it seemed to him at the time he could not hear a word.
Then gradually he fell into his proper place.
And understood by degrees.
So that in a little time he had the whole almost as though it were just being delivered.
To be hanged by the neck.
Until he was dead.
That was the end.
To be hanged by the neck until he was dead.
As it came on very dark,
Fagin began to think of all the men he'd known who had died upon the scaffold.
Some of them through his means.
They rose up in such quick succession that he could hardly count them.
He had seen some of them die and had joked too because they died with prayers upon their lips.
With what rattling noise the drop went down and how suddenly they changed!
Some of them might have inhabited that very cell,
Sat upon that very spot.
It was very dark in here.
Why didn't they bring a light?
This cell had been built for many years.
Scores of men must have passed their last hours there.
It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead bodies.
At length,
When his hands were raw with beating against the heavy door and walls,
Two men appeared,
One bearing a candle,
Which he thrust into an iron candlestick fixed against the wall.
The other dragging in a mattress on which to pass the night.
For the prisoner was to be left alone no more.
Then in came the night,
The dark,
Dismal,
Silent night.
Then came the next day.
And it was gone as soon as the night,
And the night came on again,
So long and yet so short.
Short in its fleeting hours.
At one time he raved and blasphemed and at another he howled and tore his hair.
Then Saturday night,
He had only one more night to live.
And as he thought of this,
The day broke and it was Sunday.
It was not until the night of this last awful day a withering sense of his helpless,
Desperate state came in its full intensity upon Fagin's blighted soul.
He cowered down upon his stone bed and thought of the past.
He'd been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth.
Eight,
Nine,
Ten.
It was not a trick to frighten him,
Those were the real hours treading on each other's heels.
11 another struck before the voice of the previous hour had ceased to vibrate.
And at 8 o'clock.
He would be the only mourner.
In his own funeral train.
