“On your solemn word, Amos.”
“If I was standing before my Maker, face to face, as I believe I soon shall,” he said rising, and lifting his hand reverently above his head, “I am not guilty in deed of the black villain’s death. I do not go so far as to say,” he went on, dropping his hand and resuming his seat, like one too weak to remain long standing, “I never wished him dead. I have often; and even now I can hardly feel sorry that he has been struck down. I have been a murderer in my heart, Miss Grace; I don’t deny it. Many and many a night when I have been tramping home through the wet and the mud—empty of food and sick with sorrow,—I have thought if I could just hear he had taken the fever, or broken his neck, or been upset and drowned, I could have made myself content to leave the old place—and Ireland,—and go away to the country I said I never could thole to be banished to. But now,” he added after an expressive pause, “I shall never have the chance; I shall never go anywhere but from here to the Court, and from the Court back here; and from here to—”
He covered his face. A man may be brave enough, and yet weak as a child when he tries to speak of an ordeal such as this.
For a minute Grace did not speak; she could not for the tears she was trying to restrain. Then she said, “Amos!” and he lifted his head.
“Yes, Miss Grace.”
“Before God you are innocent?”
“I have said so once, Miss; there is no need in my saying so twice; for if you don’t believe me at my first telling, you won’t believe me at my second.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said gently, “I did believe you the first time. I ought not to have tried to make assurance doubly sure. More than that, before I ever came here I felt you were innocent, and if it is possible for me to save you, I will do it.”
“Miss Grace,” he answered, “you mean kindly, but you may be doing me a deadly hurt. I have been facing certain death since I came here, and its bitterness is almost past. If you drag me back, even for a bit, I must go through it all again.”
It was a homely way of expressing the cruelty of raising false hopes; but Grace understood his meaning perfectly.