41 Paid in Full

There was behind the presidential house a walled garden, bright with summer fruit and flowers, and I stepped into it, my heart filled with thankfulness for all the great repayment that was being made to me, and yet I was oppressed too by a sense of diffidence. She seemed for the moment further away from me than ever, too good for any man of whom I had ever heard.

I saw her there on a stone seat beneath a great rosebush that curved over her head, and from which petals of pink or white fell one by one upon her or at her feet. And her face was alternately the colour of the petals.

I stood for a little while gazing at her, and the feeling of my own unworthiness grew upon me. I remembered now that in all our troubles and dangers it was she who never uttered a word of despair; it was she who bade me hope that I might yet win back my name, and at last it was she and none other to whom I owed the success of my effort. In those old days in the wilderness I had believed that she was in my debt, but now she had repaid me and more, and I felt the need of humility.

“Are you so soon tired of all your honours?” she asked.

“No, I am not tired,” I replied. “It would be false to say that I do not enjoy them, but a magnet even greater has drawn me away.”

She did not speak, but bent her head a little lower. The roses still fell at her feet, and the colour in her cheeks yet matched them.

“A man was condemned once by the world and condemned unjustly,” I said. “Then he fled into the wilderness and grew hard and bitter. He thought that the old wrong done him would never be undone. He began to believe that the wild men were better than those whom he left behind. He even felt a certain pride in his condemnation, false though it was, because he was strong enough to bear it. But a woman came into the wilderness, and she showed him, but not by words, how wrong were his pride and stubbornness. He loved her, and, though she was above him and far from him, he told her so, not because he believed that his love would be returned, but because he was proud to love her, and proud, too, to avow it.”

She was yet silent, and now did not look at me.

“He was glad to serve her,” I continued, “and he felt much secret joy to have done so. He was glad to have her under obligation to him, and when she went back to the city and he to the woods he still rejoiced, because he thought her in his debt, and that he would keep her there. But he did not know her full nobility. While he was nourishing such a foolish pride she was toiling and planning for him, and now his debt to her is so great that he can never pay it.”

“You estimate her too highly,” she said at last.

“I do not. It is you, and you alone, to whom I owe this reparation,” I said.

“I knew from the first that you were innocent, and it would have been poor repayment for all that you saved me from had I not proved you so,” she relied. Then she continued, “I suppose now that your good name is restored, you will go back to the West.”

“I do not know,” I replied. “There is yet something lacking, and if I do not win it I shall. But it may be that there is another way.”

A sudden deep colour suffused her face, and she looked down.

“I search my heart,” I said, “to find if there is not another way, but I know that the answer is only in yours. I told you once, back there in the forest, Rose, that I loved you, but I told you then without hope. I tell you again that I love you, and shall love you always. It is only this that keeps me waiting. I do not want now to go back to the West.”

“It may be that there is another way,” she said, flushing rosily, and dropping her eyes.

“Can it be,” I cried, seizing her hands, “that you love me enough to keep me here?”

The red was still in her cheeks as she whispered:

“You have found the other way.”

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