“I meant to kill you. I was mad because you struck me before the lady, and because I had betrayed my trust. An you had not caught my hand, I should be your murderer.” He spoke with long intervals between the words, and the death dew was on his forehead.
“Remember it not, Diccon,” I entreated. “I too was to blame. And I see not that night for other nights,—for other nights and days, Diccon.”
He smiled, but there was still in his face a shadowy eagerness. “You said you would never strike me again,” he went on, “and that I was man of yours no more for ever—and you gave me my freedom in the paper which I tore.” He spoke in gasps, with his eyes upon mine. “I’ll be gone in a few minutes now. If I might go as your man still, and could tell the Lord Jesus Christ that my master on earth forgave, and took back, it would be a hand in the dark. I have spent my life in gathering darkness for myself at the last.”
I bent lower over him, and took his hand in mine. “Diccon, my man,” I said.
A brightness came into his face, and he faintly pressed my hand. I slipped my arm beneath him and raised him a little higher to meet his death. He was smiling now, and his mind was not quite clear. “Do you mind, sir,” he asked, “how green and strong and sweet smelled the pines that May day, when we found Virginia, so many years ago?”
“Ay, Diccon,” I answered. “Before we saw the land, the fragrance told us we were near it.”
“I smell it now,” he went on, “and the bloom of the grape, and the May-time flowers. And can you not hear, sir, the whistling and the laughter and the sound of the falling trees, that merry time when Smith made axemen of all our fine gentlemen?”
“Ay, Diccon,” I said. “And the sound of the water that was dashed down the sleeve of any that were caught in an oath.”
He laughed like a little child. “It is well that I wasn’t a gentleman, and had not those trees to fell, or I should have been as wet as any merman.... And Pocahontas, the little maid ... and how blue the sky was, and how glad we were what time the Patience and Deliverance came in!”
His voice failed, and for a minute I thought he was gone; but he had been a strong man, and life slipped not easily from him. When his eyes opened again he knew me not, but thought he was in some tavern, and struck with his hand upon the ground as upon a table, and called for the drawer.