The Men Who Wrought

by Ridgwell Cullum

The chill penetrated to the snug interior of the car. Vita was forced to draw the heavy overcoat more closely about her. She shivered, but it was not with the actual cold. Her thoughts were a-riot. They were full of an intense and painful dread.

She had made the journey north in the company of the man whom she knew she was now condemned to marry—condemned beyond reprieve. The only gleam of light which had struggled through the darkness of her despair was that he had spared her his company in the car. He had dismissed the driver of the car at Bath, and taken upon himself that duty. Thus Vita had been spared an added torture to the desperate feelings assailing her.

She had no thought of revolt. She felt that destiny loomed before her in overwhelming force. Escape had no place in her thought. She had entered into a contract. A sordid contract, she felt. A contract which had perhaps been forced upon her, but which had been accepted by her through an invincible desire to be permitted to drag out the weary years of life, rather than face bravely the harsh consequences and penalties of truth and loyalty to the demands of honor. She admitted the dreadful cowardice which had driven her, and a wave of loathing for herself left her crushed under a burden of bitter contempt.

But during the journey, in communion with her own wretched thoughts, she had searched the future as only vivid imagination permitted, and the picture she had discovered was perhaps a thousandfold more dreadful than her earlier anticipations. Panic had urged her in the first place. But now the original panic which had driven her into her contract had passed, leaving her only the skeleton, which, in the first place, had been clothed in the brilliant flesh and raiment inspired by the yearning for life. To think of the right she had given that square, fleshy figure sitting before her beyond the glass partition of the car! The right to control her destiny; to be always near her, to—caress her. And all the while another image lay treasured in her heart, another voice was always in her ears, another hand lay in hers, and other lips—— It was beyond endurance—the thought. To think that way lay madness. Her eyes grew haggard with dry tears. She was left beyond ordinary emotion. She could only stir restlessly, with brain heated almost to fever by the pressure of dreadful thought.

So the miles had been devoured by the senseless, softly droning wheels. Merciless wheels they became. Nothing could stop them, nothing could deter the progress towards that maelstrom of horror in the direction of which she was gliding.

Then came the familiar breath of the Yorkshire moorlands. She remembered it. She remembered every aspect of the scene about her. It was not possible for it to be otherwise. She writhed under the lash of memory. Was it not here she had first looked down upon the prone figure and upward-glancing dark eyes of Ruxton Farlow? Was it not here she had poured out to him the vaunting story of her desires to serve humanity? Had she not witnessed the light of sympathy leap into his eyes here—here, at the passionate profession she had made to him? And now—oh, the pity of it!—the miserable, cowardly sequel to all her protestations.

The grey of evening filled the car, and somehow Vita was glad of it. She felt she could hide her worthless self beneath it. The moorland scene faded, and the great dark gorse banks merged into one blackening world. Then, directly ahead, the aged landmark of the skeleton mill rose sharply out of the dusk.

Her pulses quickened. The journey was at its end. Her father would be there awaiting her, and she must face those wide, understanding eyes as she told him the story of her cowardly yielding. She shrank further into the corner. She knew the fearless spirit of the man, and she dreaded his contempt. The secret of her contract with the man driving the car was still her own, but, in a few minutes, it must be revealed to one whose contempt would deal the final crushing blow.

She nerved herself as the car drew up. Then, with ashen lips and frightened eyes, she became aware of a tall, lean figure standing out against the sky-line.

She waited for no assistance. She flung the door wide, and, in a moment, she was enfolded in her father's embrace.