AT Grandther Donner’s house, Garde had passed the day with her heart so fluttering between hope and fear that she was all unstrung by the time the evening arrived. She could bear it no longer, then, and with a shawl on her head she started out to go to the Soams’ to learn what she might of the many events of the hour.
In the garden she paused. The stillness, the calm, the redolence of Spring, burgeoning into maidenly summer, brought back to her mind that similar time, six long years before, when she and Adam had met here among the flowers, for that brief time of joy.
The fire of love, kept so sacred by the vestal virgin spirit of her nature, burned upward in her cheeks, as warm, as ardent as ever, after these years of her lonely vigil.
But would he ever stand there again, in the garden? Would he ever more clasp her hands on the pickets of the gate? Or would he now prove disdainful, proud of his friendship with the new Governor, aloof and silent, as he had been since she sent him her letter?
No matter what might be, she so hungered to hear some word of his coming, some meager description of how he looked, some mere hearsay of how he bore himself, that it seemed as if she must consume herself with impatience on her way to her uncle’s.
In the dusk which was swiftly descending on the face of the world, she closed the gate behind her and started along the road, her face so pale and yet so eager, in her yearning, that it was almost luminous. She was presently conscious that some one, dimly visible, ahead, was rapidly approaching. She drew her shawl a little more closely about her face and quickened her footsteps, the sooner to pass this pedestrian.
A metallic tinkle came to her ears and made her heart give an extra bound, she knew not why. It had simply sounded like a scabbard, beating its small accompaniment to sturdy strides. She looked up, timidly, to see who it was that carried a sword into such a quiet part of Boston. Then she halted and suddenly placed her hand out, to the near-by fence, for a moment’s support.
The man was almost passing her by, where she stood. He halted. He made some odd little sound, and then he remained there, looking upon her, his hand coming involuntarily up to his heart.
Garde looked up in his face, without fear, but not without sadness, wistfully—with the inquiry of six long years in her steadfast eyes.
“Garde,” said Adam, in a voice she barely heard, “Garde—I have—come home. I never got your letter till to-night.”
She could not answer, for a moment.
“I—have been waiting,” she then said, and striving to hold her lips from trembling, she let two great tears trickle slowly across her face as she still looked up in his eyes.
There was nothing he could say. He read her whole story of faithfulness and of suffering, her epic of a love that could not die, in that one long look. Slowly he went up to her and taking her face in his hands he kissed away the tears from her cheeks. He put her head gently against his breast and let her cry.
She still held to the fence, as if she dared not too suddenly lean on his love, without which she had learned to live so long. But gradually, as he held her there, saying nothing, but softly kissing her hair and the one little hand he had taken in his own, her arms crept upward about his shoulders and her heart beat against his, in a peace surpassing anything of earth.
“My Garde,” he finally began to whisper, over and over again, “my own Garde—my darling, precious Garde.”
“Oh, this may all be wrong, Adam,” she answered him, after a time. “I don’t understand it. We don’t know what has happened, in all these years. Oh, how did you happen to come?”
“You drew me, sweetheart,” he said, in a voice made tremulous with emotion. “I have had no peace till now. I have loved you so! I have dreamed of you so! But I never knew—till to-night, when I got your letter.”
“You—never got it till to-night? Oh Adam,” she said. “Oh, Adam, I have been so punished for the wrong I did. Oh, you can never, never forgive me!”
“There, there, sweetheart,” he said to her soothingly, letting her cry out the sobs she had stifled so vainly. “Forgive you, dear? You had no need to ask for forgiveness—you who came to me there in that jail—you, whose sweet little motherly spirit so provided for my poor old beef-eaters, when they were hungry and fleeing for their lives. Dearest, I don’t see how you did it, when I was a hunted renegade, a fugitive, with doubled infamies piled upon my head. Oh, forgive me, dear, that ever I doubted my own little mate.”
“No, I should never have believed them—not all the world!” she protested. “My Adam. My Adam.”
With his strong arm about her, and her head leaned in confidence and love on his shoulder, he led her back to the garden, at once the scene of their joys and tragedies.
He enthroned her on the steps of the porch, where as a child she had been enthroned, when he as her boy-lover had sat, as now, at her feet and listened to the dainty caresses of her voice. Only now he held her hand in his and placed it on his cheek and kissed it fondly, as he listened and told her of how he had come at last to receive the letter.
At this she was frightened. She wanted to cradle his head upon her bosom, now, and hold forth a hand to shield him from danger. She felt that the perils for them both were clustered about his fearless head and that hers was the right to protect.
“Oh, please be careful, Adam, dear,” she implored. “That man is a terrible man. Oh, I wish you had let him go. You will be careful, dear. You must be careful, and watchful, every moment.”
His reply was a kiss and a boyish laugh. Now that he had her once more, he said, and now that nothing should ever part them again, his world was complete, and there were no dangers, nor evils, nor sorrows.
Then he begged her to tell him of the years that had passed. He petted her fondly, as she spoke of her long, long wait. She seemed to him thrice more beautiful, in the calm and dignity of her womanhood, which had laid not so much as a faded petal on her beauty and her endless youth.
He exchanged a history of heart-aches, matching with one of his own every pang she had ever endured. There was something ecstatic, now, in the light of their new-found rapture, in recounting those long days of sadness and despair. Every pain thus rehearsed drew them the closer, till their love took on a sacredness, as if suffering and constancy had wedded them long before. Like parents who have buried the children they loved, they were made subdued and yet more truly fervent, more absolute in the divine passion which held them heart to heart.
And so, at last, when Garde was sure that Adam ought to go, they walked hand in hand to the gate together.
“Sweetheart, let me go outside, for a moment,” said Adam, quickly shutting the barrier between them. “Now, with your two dear hands in mine, it is just as it was six years ago. The night is the same, your beauty is the same, our hearts and love are the same as before, and nothing has ever come between us—except this gate.”
He kissed her hands and her sweet face, as he had done on that other happy night.
“And we can open the gate,” said Garde, in a little croon of delight.
Adam laughed, like the boy he was. He flung open the gate and went inside and took her in his arms, kissing her upon the lips, rapturously, time after time.
“Oh Garde, I love you so!” he said. “I love you! I adore you, my own little mate!”
“I could have waited fifty years,” she answered him, nestling close and patting his hand as she held it, in excess of joy, to her heart. “Oh Adam! My Adam!”