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"It hurts me that you could think of it. All I want is a little gratitude from you ah, no, I cannot say that is all I want. Only, it is all I ask. What I want more than anything on earth, more than anything which even Heaven could give, is the treasure of your love. For that, I could fight my way, and Maxime Dalahaide's way, through the place of lost spirits, and laugh at the tortures of Hades.
Where had she passed the night? How durst she absent herself from home, and keep him in these tortures of expectation? At a few minutes past one she came. The library door was ajar, and he heard her admit herself with a latch-key; she would see his hat and gloves in the hall. But instead of coming to the library she went straight upstairs; it was Cecily, for he knew her step.
She spoke of her wretchedness to Fraulein Schult, who, perfidiously, day after day, drew from her something to report to Madame de Nailles. That lady was somewhat consoled, while suffering tortures of jealousy, to know that the girl to whom these sufferings were due was paying dearly for her fault and was very unhappy.
Those who did not die under the tortures, but escaped after all, were called confessors people who had confessed with their mouths that Jesus Christ was King and Lord, in spite of their terror and agony. . . . That was what confessing Jesus Christ meant in the old times. And that was what it ought to mean now, even though there is no persecution or torture for Christians in these happier times.
But an examination of contemporary records of the murder throws considerable doubt on the statement that such words were uttered. The nature of the wound was such that the probability is that intelligible speech was impossible. Balthazar Gérard gloried in his deed, and bore the excruciating tortures which were inflicted upon him with almost superhuman patience and courage.
And less from greediness than from ostentation, and the desire to prove to himself that he was in good health, he cut into the forcemeats of cheese and marjoram, the boned fish, gourds, oysters with eggs, horse-radishes, truffles, and brochettes of small birds. As he looked at the prisoners he revelled in the imagination of their tortures.
Towards the morning of the fourth day his fever has ceased; the tortures of hunger and thirst are no longer felt; the complete annihilation of his strength is to him a kind of relief; sleep seizes him, and with sleep he thinks death must come.
If they had but been taught to measure with their pitiful thoughts the tortures of battle-fields the slowly consuming plagues of death in the starving children, and wasted age, of the innumerable desolate those battles left; nay, in our own life of peace, the agony of unnurtured, untaught, unhelped creatures, awaking at the grave's edge to know how they should have lived; and the worse pain of those whose existence, not the ceasing of it, is death; those to whom the cradle was a curse, and for whom the words they cannot hear, "ashes to ashes," are all that they have ever received of benediction.
Protestant fervour rose steadily among Englishmen as "the best captains and soldiers" returned from the campaigns in the Low Countries to tell of Alva's atrocities, or as privateers brought back tales of English seamen who had been seized in Spain and the New World, to linger amidst the tortures of the Inquisition, or to die in its fires.
Well may Francis Newman say: "When we ask by what right a man tortures these innocent creatures, the only reply that can be given is, because we are more intelligent.
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