At the same moment there came a sound resembling the quick opening,
and as rapid closing of a door overhead, while a faint gleam of
light flashed suddenly through the gloom, and as suddenly faded away.
I saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me, and
congratulated myself upon the timely accident by which I had
escaped. Another step before my fall, and the world had seen me no
more. And the death just avoided, was of that very character which I
had regarded as fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting the
Inquisition. To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of
death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous
moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering
my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own
voice, and had become in every respect a fitting subject for the
species of torture which awaited me.
Shaking in every limb, I groped my way back to the wall; resolving
there to perish rather than risk the terrors of the wells, of which my
imagination now pictured many in various positions about the
dungeon. In other conditions of mind I might have had courage to end
my misery at once by a plunge into one of these abysses; but now I was
the veriest of cowards.
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