She gasped a little, realizing why he had not come to the valley on time.
He laughed. “Don’t look like that. Don’t look at me as if I were a wound that you’re afraid to touch.”
“Francisco, I’ve hurt you in so many different ways—”
“No! No, you haven’t hurt me—and he hasn’t either, don’t say anything about it, it’s he who’s hurt, but we’ll save him and he’ll come here, too, where he belongs, and he’ll know, and then he, too, will be able to laugh about it. Dagny, I didn’t expect you to wait, I didn’t hope, I knew the chance I’d taken, and if it had to be anyone, I’m glad it’s he.”
She closed her eyes, pressing her lips together not to moan.
“Darling, don’t! Don’t you see that I’ve accepted it?”
But it isn’t—she thought—it isn’t he, and I can’t tell you the truth, because it’s a man who might never hear it from me and whom I might never have.
“Francisco, I did love you—” she said, and caught her breath, shocked, realizing that she had not intended to say it and, simultaneously, that this was not the tense she had wanted to use.
“But you do,” he said calmly, smiling. “You still love me—even if there’s one expression of it that you’ll always feel and want, but will not give me any longer. I’m still what I was, and you’ll always see it, and you’ll always grant me the same response, even if there’s a greater one that you grant to another man. No matter what you feel for him, it will not change what you feel for me, and it won’t be treason to either, because it comes from the same root, it’s the same payment in answer to the same values. No matter what happens in the future, we’ll always be what we were to each other, you and I, because you’ll always love me.”
“Francisco,” she whispered, “do you know that?”
“Of course. Don’t you understand it now? Dagny, every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor—by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence—and every achievement is an expression of it. Look around you. Do you see how much is open to us here, on an unobstructed earth? Do you see how much I am free to do, to experience, to achieve? Do you see that all of it is part of what you are to me—as I am part of it for you? And if I’ll see you smile with admiration at a new copper smelter that I built, it will be another form of what I felt when I lay in bed beside you. Will I want to sleep with you? Desperately. Will I envy the man who does? Sure. But what does that matter? It’s so much—just to have you here, to love you and to be alive.”
Her eyes lowered, her face stern, holding her head bowed as in an act of reverence, she said slowly, as if fulfilling a solemn promise, “Will you forgive me?”
He looked astonished, then chuckled gaily, remembering, and answered, “Not yet. There’s nothing to forgive, but I’ll forgive it when you join us.”
He rose, he drew her to her feet—and when his arms closed about her, their kiss was the summation of their past, its end and their seal of acceptance.
Galt turned to them from across the living room, when they came out. He had been standing at a window, looking at the valley—and she felt certain that he had stood there all that time. She saw his eyes studying their faces, his glance moving slowly from one to the other.
His face relaxed a little at the sight of the change in Francisco’s.
Francisco smiled, asking him, “Why do you stare at me?”
“Do you know what you looked like when you came in?”
“Oh, did I? That’s because I hadn’t slept for three nights. John, will you invite me to dinner? I want to know how this scab of yours got here, but I think that I might collapse sound asleep in the middle of a sentence—even though right now I feel as if I’ll never need any sleep at all—so I think I’d better go home and stay there till evening.”
Galt was watching him with a faint smile. “But aren’t you going to leave the valley in an hour?”
“What? No . . .” he said mildly, in momentary astonishment. “No!” he laughed exultantly. “I don’t have to! That’s right, I haven’t told you what it was, have I? I was searching for Dagny. For . . . for the wreck of her plane. She’d been reported lost in a crash in the Rockies.”
“I see,” said Galt quietly.
“I could have thought of anything, except that she would choose to crash in Galt’s Gulch,” Francisco said happily; he had the tone of that joyous relief which almost relishes the horror of the past, defying it by means of the present. “I kept flying over the district between Afton, Utah, and Winston, Colorado, over every peak and crevice of it, over every remnant of a car in any gully below, and whenever I saw one, I—” He stopped; it looked like a shudder. “Then at night, we went out on foot—the searching parties of railroad men from Winston—we went climbing at random, with no clues, no plan, on and on, until it was daylight again, and—” He shrugged, trying to dismiss it and to smile. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst—”
He stopped short; his smile vanished and a dim reflection of the look he had worn for three days came back to his face, as if at the sudden presence of an image he had forgotten.
After a long moment, he turned to Galt. “John,” his voice sounded peculiarly solemn, “could we notify those outside that Dagny is alive . . . in case there’s somebody who . . . who’d feel as I did?”
Galt was looking straight at him. “Do you wish to give any outsider any relief from the consequences of remaining outside?”
Francisco dropped his eyes, but answered firmly, “No.”
“Pity, Francisco?”
“Yes. Forget it. You’re right.”
Galt turned away with a movement that seemed oddly out of character: it had the unrhythmical abruptness of the involuntary.
He did not turn back; Francisco watched him in astonishment, then asked softly, “What’s the matter?”
Galt turned and looked at him for a moment, not answering. She could not identify the emotion that softened the lines of Galt’s face: it had the quality of a smile, of gentleness, of pain, and of something greater that seemed to make these concepts superfluous.
“Whatever any of us has paid for this battle,” said Galt, “you’re the one who’s taken the hardest beating, aren’t you?”
“Who? I?” Francisco grinned with shocked, incredulous amusement.
“Certainly not! What’s the matter with you?” He chuckled and added, “Pity, John?”
“No,” said Galt firmly.
She saw Francisco watching him with a faint, puzzled frown—because Galt had said it, looking, not at him, but at her.
The emotional sum that struck her as an immediate impression of Francisco’s house, when she entered it for the first time, was not the sum she had once drawn from the sight of its silent, locked exterior. She felt, not a sense of tragic loneliness, but of invigorating brightness. The rooms were bare and crudely simple, the house seemed built with the skill, the decisiveness and the impatience typical of Francisco; it looked like a frontiersman’s shanty thrown together to serve as a mere springboard for a long flight into the future—a future where so great a field of activity lay waiting that no time could be wasted on the comfort of its start. The place had the brightness, not of a home, but of a fresh wooden scaffolding erected to shelter the birth of a skyscraper.
Francisco, in shirt sleeves, stood in the middle of his twelve-foot square living room, with the look of a host in a palace. Of all the places where she had ever seen him, this was the background that seemed most properly his. Just as the simplicity of his clothes, added to his bearing, gave him the air of a superlative aristocrat, so the crudeness of the room gave it the appearance of the most patrician retreat; a single royal touch was added to the crudeness: two ancient silver goblets stood in a small niche cut in a wall of bare logs; their ornate design had required the luxury of some craftsman’s long and costly labor, more labor than had gone to build the shanty, a design dimmed by the polish of more centuries than had gone to grow the log wall’s pines. In the midst of that room, Francisco’s easy, natural manner had a touch of quiet pride, as if his smile were silently saying to her: This is what I am and what I have been all these years.