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Could fire or faggot, sword or halter, stinking dungeons, whips, bears, bulls, lions, cruel rackings, stoning, starving, nakedness, &c. I have married a wife, I have a farm, I shall offend my landlord, I shall offend my master, I shall lose my trading, I shall lose my pride, my pleasures, I shall be mocked and scoffed, therefore I dare not come.
Why not peace and the oblivion of retirement for her, if her child's future is assured in any way? Why not? Looking forward hopefully to a conference with Colonel Joe, she fears only the clear eyes of old Padre Francisco. "Shall she tell him all?" In these misgivings and vain rackings of the mind, she passes the afternoon.
They slipped from drift to mire with awful perils and rackings of the wagon and painful struggles of the team. Sometimes the snow softened and let the horses in up to their necks when Thatcher plied whip and tongue with necessary cruelty. At last there came disaster. They were making one of those heart-stopping turns.
Whatever be our afflictions, not one human creature who has endured misfortune will hesitate to aver, that of all the tortures incident to mortality, there are none like the rackings of suspense. It is the hell which Milton describes with such horrible accuracy; in its hot and cold regions, the anxious soul is alternately tossed from the ardors of hope to the petrifying rigors of doubt and dread.
The survivors weltering in filth, fever, and famine, and so completely maddened by despair, delirium, and the rackings of intolerable pain, in its severest shapes aggravated by thirst and hunger that all the impulses of nature and affection were not merely banished from the heart, but superseded by the most frightful peals of insane mirth, cruelty, and the horrible appetite of the ghoul and vampire.
No more gloom, no more bans and damnings of Holy Church, no more groaning and snivelling in damp cloister and mildewed chapel, no more burnings and hangings and rackings " "Yet," said Beltane, shaking his head, "yet would kings and dukes remain, Christian knights and godly lords to burn and hang and rack the defenceless."
And when growing strength gave her power to endure them, and she was racked with those pains which are inevitable to being born back again in this fashion to life, I too felt the reflex of her agony, and writhed in loving sympathy. Still further, too, was I wrung by a torment of doubt as to whether life or these rackings would in the end be conqueror.
Dark imaginings clouded upon George's brow. "Yes," he said. "Yes; well ?" "Last night " And then she gave him the history of events. This simple George of mine writhed beneath it. It was a poison torturing his system, twisting his brow, knotting his hands. Her presence, when she finished, did not stay his cry beneath his rackings: he was upon his feet.
I remember one narrow, gloomy alley, of boxwood, or yew, called "Queen Mary's Walk," after bloody Mary, who used to take her evening exercise here alone, marching slowly up and down in the waning twilight, meditating, I fear, those frightful persecutions, rackings, and burnings of the poor Protestants, and trying to steel her heart against the womanly pity that would creep into it sometimes, in spite of all the admonitions of Cardinal Pole and Bishop Gardiner, and the counsels of her cruel husband.
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