Atlas Shrugged [647]
He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor-the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.
If it's true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell me their secret, let them claim me, let them-"Come in!" he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door.
The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him in the wind, was Francisco d'Anconia.
It seemed to Rearden that his consciousness shot forward ahead of his body, it was his body that refused to move, stunned by shock, while his mind was laughing, telling him that this was the most natural, the most-to-have-been-expected event in the world.
Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them-
and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.
"You've been torturing yourself for months," said Francisco, approaching him, "wondering what words you'd use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again -but now you see that it isn't necessary, that there's nothing to ask or to forgive."
"Yes," said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, "yes, I know it."
Francisco sat down on the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden's forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.
"There's only one thing I want to tell you," said Rearden. "I want you to hear it from me: you kept your oath, you were my friend."
"I knew that you knew it. You knew it from the first. You knew it, no matter what you thought of my actions. You slapped me because you could not force yourself to doubt it."
"That . . ." whispered Rearden, staring at him, "that was the thing I had no right to tell you . . . no right to claim as my excuse . . ."
"Didn't you suppose I'd understand it?"
"I wanted to find you . . . I had no right to look for you . . . And all that time, you were-" He pointed at Francisco's clothes, then his hand dropped helplessly and he closed his eyes.
"I was your furnace foreman," said Francisco, grinning. "I didn't think you'd mind that. You offered me the job yourself."
"You've been here, as my bodyguard, for two months?"
"Yes."
"You've been here, ever since-" He stopped.
"That's right. On the morning of the day when you were reading my farewell message over the roofs of New York, I was reporting here for my first shift as your furnace foreman."
"Tell me," said Rearden slowly, "that night, at James Taggart's wedding, when you said that you were after your greatest conquest . . .
you meant me, didn't you?"
"Of course."
Francisco drew himself up a little, as if for a solemn task, his face earnest, the smile remaining only in his eyes. "I have a great deal to tell you," he said, "But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I . . .