DEAD SEA APPLES
ease and rest; and now it is forty years that I have been occupied in not sleeping, in eating ill, and sometimes neither well nor ill, in bearing armour, in placing my person in danger, in spending my estate and my life all in the service of God and for my king.... I see myself old, poor, and indebted, and I foresee labour and trouble until my death. Please God that the mischief may not go beyond death, since, whosoever has such toil in defending his bodily estate cannot avoid injuring his soul."
After seven years of the law's delays the Marquess decided to return to Mexico, that he might make his account clear with God, "since it is a large one that I have . . . and it will be better for me to lose my property than my soul." But on the way to the coast he was seized at Seville by a fatal illness. He was carried to a little village inn without the city, and there, tended by his devoted son, Don Martin, now fifteen years old, he "arranged his affairs for this and the next world."
"It was the Lord's will," says Diaz, "to take him from this troublesome state on the second day of December 1547 . . . and he was at the time of his death sixty-two years old."
As the stern conqueror lay dying, did the thought of a nation enslaved by his act assail his harassed soul?
We do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
Had the mercy which he now sought so earnestly been shown to Guatemozin and his people? Did he
277
