The Men Who Wrought

The two men sat eye to eye for a few moments. It was a rapier-like exchange of glances. It was the Prince who yielded. He stirred. A sweat had broken out upon his forehead. His physical suffering was beyond words. But he rose to his feet and stood firmly confronting his antagonist.

"I will accept – the freedom of the deck," he said.

Frederick von Berger gazed out over the restless waters. He swayed easily to the added motion of the now stationary vessel. Twenty feet away stood the young naval officer lounging against the steel casing of the doorway of the conning-tower. His eyes never left his charge. Nor could he help a faint twinge of regret. He had been brought up in that wonderful school of the British Navy in which physical bravery counts for so much, and he knew that such was not lacking in the man whose movements he was so closely following.

The night was clear and cold. A great wealth of stars shone down upon the phosphorescent waste of water. So intense was their brilliancy that even the distant sky-line, towards which Von Berger's gaze was turned, stood out with remarkable clearness.

Beyond that sky-line lay Germany – the country whose curious fate it had been to breed a race of brave men and brutes, and to mould them into the single form of a splendid manhood. To that country the motionless figure belonged, an epitome of those curious racial characteristics. Birth had given him the place, and opportunity the power. Thus, through a soulless intellect and courage, he had been able to help in the fashioning of the monstrous machine, as yet unbroken, which was still seeking to plough its furrows through a world's spiritual civilization for its own ruthless ends.

Possibly he yearned for the cradle of his aspirations. Possibly now, now that it lay so far away, hidden beyond the watery limits, he felt something of the futility of the cold striving for earthly power. If it were so his expression gave no sign. The eyes remained the same coldly shining windows of an empty soul. The hard mouth was tightly shut, and the muscles of his square jaw were tense. All he left for the shining eyes of the night to witness were the beads of moisture upon his broad forehead. And these were the simple outward signs of the frailty of the human body, its vulnerability, its narrow limitations. The spirit alone, whatever its quality, remained invincible.

He moved a step nearer the steel rail. He leant against it. Then, for some terrible moments, from the manner in which he nursed his injured member, agony seemed to supervene and shut out every other emotion.

The moments passed. The young naval officer shifted his position. The strain was telling upon him.

The man at the rail moved again. His gaze was withdrawn from the horizon. It was turned towards the sailor. The officer averted his gaze. He could not face the eyes which were yet beyond his discernment. He knew their expression without seeing it. He understood the man's object. This was the moment he had awaited. The Teutonic mind was silently hurling all the power of hate and defiant contempt of which the distorted spirit was capable at those who had forced him to his final desperate act.

There was the faintest sound of a splash. The young officer's eyes came back, searching for his charge. But where Frederick von Berger had stood there only remained the unbroken line of the rail.

Then a voice spoke sharply behind him. It was the voice of Ruxton Farlow conveying orders to Captain Ludovic in the turret.

"Dorby without delay," he said. "The pilot will pick us up at the Northbank buoy."

CHAPTER XXX

GAZING UPON A NEW WORLD

The room was very quiet. A wintry sunbeam glanced in through the leaded casement and fell slanting across the floor, lighting up the occupied four-post bed. A uniformed nurse was occupied at a bureau which stood in the window-place, framed in the floral chintz hangings which seemed to suit so well the oaken panelling of the room, and the beams with which the ceiling was so powerfully groined.

The doctor, a benevolent, grey-whiskered, cherub-eyed old man, who had cared for every patient at Dorby Towers since the Farlows came into occupation, was at the bedside talking gently but firmly to his patient.

"It is useless, my dear young lady," he said, with, for him, an almost peevish complaint. "I have done all that a man can do. I have pulled you clear of that wretched brain-fever which threatened you. Your poor, poor arm will soon be out of its plaster, and covered with nothing more disfiguring than a sling, which can at all times be made to match your costume, and yet you will do nothing to help me. It is really distressing. You should have been on that couch two weeks ago. A week ago you should have been moving about getting your bodily strength back. I really can't understand such obstinacy. Eight weeks in this bed, and you will not, simply will not, pull yourself up sufficiently to allow your being moved. You know it's a case of that woman, Mrs. Somebody, in one of Charles Dickens's books. I don't remember the name. All I know is she died, or did something equally silly, because she wouldn't make an effort."

Vita gazed back languidly into the fresh, wholesome face of the smiling old man. She was so tired. She was weary with thought. She knew that the doctor was making a just complaint. But she knew something more. She knew, half by instinct, the real cause of the trouble of which he was complaining.

She smiled up at him in a wan fashion.

"I am not as much to blame as you think, doctor dear. You have done, oh, so much for me that I feel I can never be grateful enough. May I sit up?"

The doctor summoned the nurse, and Vita was tenderly propped up against a perfect nest of pillows.

"That's better. Thank you ever so much. Now I can talk, and – I want to talk."

Vita remained silent for some moments in spite of her expressed desire.

The medical man watched her closely. She was a mere shadow of what she ought to be. There was a troubled look in her eyes. He felt, somehow he knew, what was coming. It was a request such as he had been forced to deny her so many times before.

His smile died out. But Vita's eyes, when she finally turned them on him, were bright with an emotion which seemed at first unwarranted.

"Do you know why I can't get well?" she enquired wistfully. "It is not obstinacy. It is not lack of effort. It is because you won't let me. Doctor dear, the time has surely gone by when I may not talk of – that night. You see, you don't understand it – all. My father is dead. I know that. The thought is always with me. But that – that is not all. Everybody here is kindness, kindness itself. Mr. Farlow – Ruxton, all of them. They come here. But they are never allowed to stay. They send me everything which – kindness can dictate. But, under your orders, no one will tell me those things I must know, and I am not permitted to say a word of that which I must tell. Doctor dear, it is you who are to blame. Oh, the worry of it all. It seems to take the very life out of me. I must talk," she went on, with growing excitement. "I must tell him all which he can never learn so long as you keep me silent. Send Ruxton to me, doctor dear, and give us leave to talk as much as we want to, and I promise you you shall not regret it. I – I simply must talk or – or – "

But the growing excitement proved too much for her. In her weak state Vita suddenly fell to weeping hysterically. The nurse and doctor leant their energies to calming her, and, by degrees, their efforts were rewarded.

But the little man's face was troubled. This was what he feared, dreaded.

The moment Vita had calmed again he chided her as he might chide some helpless child, but he registered a mental resolve. Somehow Vita must obtain strength or – Well, he had done all he knew. He must leave medicine and look to the psychological side. Experiment – he hated experiment at his time of life. But there seemed to be nothing else for it. So he reassured her and gave her the promise she asked.

The result was magical. The sick woman's face lit radiantly. Her beautiful grey eyes were filled with such a light as the little man had never seen in them before. He wondered. He was puzzled. It was something which he could not understand.

He left the room, taking the nurse with him, and as he went he shook his head and warned himself that the nervous troubles of modern times were amazing. He felt that he was professionally old – very old.

Nor was it without serious misgivings that he sought Ruxton Farlow.

For an hour Vita endured the efforts of the nurse. She endured them uncomplainingly. She felt like some small child being prepared for a party. There was the pleasant excitement of it, but, unlike the small child, there was also a dread which all the delight could not banish.

Her troubles were very real, and in the long days and nights of illness which had seriously threatened her mental balance, and the dull bodily suffering from her crushed arm, they had become exaggerated, as only acute suffering can distort such things.

With the first return to reason she had hugged to herself the one outstanding fact that the responsibility of her father's death lay at her door. It stood out startlingly from every other thought in the tangle of her poor brain. She had urged him to his death, unwittingly it is true, but due solely to the childish credulity she had displayed. Even now the unforgettable picture of that grey, lean figure falling forward in response to Von Berger's merciless gun-shot haunted her every waking moment. The horror of it, the dreadful cruelty. And all her – her doing.

At the bottom of it all lay her cowardice, her miserable cowardice. Her life – her wretched life had been threatened, and to escape death she had dragged him forth and left him at the mercy of their enemies. To her dying day the memory of it would haunt her. She knew it could never be otherwise.

But later, as slowly some strength had begun to return, an added trouble came to her. It was the natural result of convalescence. The legitimate selfish interest in life inspired it. It came at the moment when Ruxton had been permitted to pay his first brief visit. It was the sight of him which had filled her with dismay. She had suddenly remembered that to save her own life she had not only dragged her father to his death, but she had sacrificed this man's love and promised to become the wife of the detestable Von Salzinger. From that moment the little troubled doctor had noted the check against which he had been fighting ever since.

All these things were in Vita's mind now as she submitted to the attentions of her nurse. The blending of excitement and dread had been with her at first, but quickly all excitement had given way to the single emotion which grew almost to a panic, when, finally, the nurse withdrew, leaving her ready to receive the man she loved.

Vita leant against her cushions waiting breathlessly. Her courage was drawn up to an almost breaking point. She longed to re-summon the nurse, and once even her uninjured arm was outstretched towards the electric bell. But she did not ring. She had asked, nay begged for Ruxton's visit. She resolutely determined to face him and tell him all the miserable truth. He would despise her. He would turn from her. She closed her eyes to escape the picture she had conjured up of the cold look she knew his handsome dark eyes were so capable of. But he must know – he must know. She told herself this, and she told herself that she must accept her fate at his hands without murmur. It was a just punishment for her —

The sound of the door-catch moving startled her. Her eager, frightened eyes turned swiftly in the direction. In a moment Ruxton was standing in the room, his deep eyes smiling down at her from his great height.

"Vita! My Vita!"

Just for one moment the woman's head swam. Her eyes closed and it seemed that she was about to faint. But the sensation passed, and when the beautiful grey depths gazed out once more the man was seated on the edge of the bed, holding her hand clasped under the tender pressure of both his.

"My poor little Vita! My poor darling!"

The tones of his voice were tenderly caressing. They were full of a deep, passionate sympathy and love. Vita thrilled under their echo in her own soul. But there was no return of pressure in her hand. Her eyes gazed back into his full of yearning, but they seemed to have lost their power of smiling.

"Ruxton, dear – " she began. Then she broke off as though powerless to bring herself to tell him all that lay ready marshalled for him to hear.

"Don't distress yourself, dear. Don't bother to talk. It's enough for me to be here, with you, and know you are getting well."

It was his final words which spurred her courage. She began to speak rapidly, and almost it was as if complaint were in her tone.

"But I am not getting well – yet. That is what Doctor Mellish says, and that is why I must talk. Oh, Ruxton, can't you understand? I can never get well until I have told you – told you all that is on my mind. Dearest, dearest, I have wronged you, oh, how I have wronged you, and all because I am a coward, a miserable wretched coward who dared not face the death which they had marked out for me. It is that – that which brought about poor father's death. It is that which made me throw aside the love which was all the world to me, and promise to marry the man who pretended that he was about to save my wretched life."

"Von Salzinger?"

The question came with unerring instinct, but the coldness for herself Vita had dreaded was lacking.

"Yes," she said, in a childlike, frightened way.

"Tell it me. Tell it me all. I have been waiting all these weeks to learn the truth of all that happened to you – of all you have been made to suffer by those devils. Tell me everything, from the moment I left you to come up here to await your father's arrival."

His manner was so gentle, yet so firm. His eyes still held the warm smile with which he had greeted her. Vita's courage stole back into her veins, and her poor, hammering heart slackened its beatings, and her thoughts became less chaotic.

Ruxton waited with infinite patience. Time was for them alone just now. He had no desire to lose one moment of it.

Presently in a low hurried voice Vita began her story. She made no attempt to convey to him the terror through which she had passed. Yet it was all there. It lay under every word she uttered. It found expression in the brilliancy of her eyes, and the heated color which leapt to her thin cheeks. Ruxton read it all as if he were witnessing the whole action of the scenes she was describing. He not only read it, but something of a sympathetic dread swept through him, and his heart set him wondering how his poor troubled love had managed to survive the horror of all she must have endured.

Vita told him of Von Berger's coming, silently, secretly to Redwithy, and the way in which he had forced her to embark on that journey over the wild moorlands into the heart of Somersetshire. Then she told him of the imprisonment in the dreadful valley. She hurried on to the scene when Von Berger had warned her of her condemnation to death. After that she paused, gathering her courage for what was next to come. Her eyes gazed yearningly into her lover's now serious face. Her courage was ebbing fast. Then came the heartening tones of his voice.

"Tell it all, dearest. You have nothing to fear. Perhaps I can guess it."

Instantly her courage rose, and she poured out the story of her renunciation of his love, that she might be permitted to live. And in her renunciation she warned him that she had been resolved to carry it out to the hideous completion of marriage with Von Salzinger.

And while she leant back on her cushions pouring out her passionate story, Ruxton's thoughts were less on her words than on the wonder at the loyalty and honesty which made it necessary for her to lay bare her very soul to him now, revealing every weakness which she believed to be hers. Its effect upon him was deep and lasting. Blame? Where could there be blame? The thought became the maddest thing in the world to him. His whole soul went out to her in her suffering. All he felt he longed to do was to place his strong arms about her and defend her from all the world; to drive off even the vaguest shadow of memory which might disturb her.

But he did nothing. Her hand lay passive in his, and he waited while she recounted the details of the night journey from Somersetshire to the North. Then, when she came to the final scene of her father's death, passion surged through his veins, and he rose from his seat on the bed and paced the limits of the room.

"The treacherous devils!" he muttered. "The hounds! Gad! they could not beat him, so they played upon a woman, a defenseless woman. It was German. But they have paid – both of them. But the old man! The pity – the pity of it. If I could only have saved him."

Ruxton was not addressing her, but Vita was following his every word. Now she caught at his final sentence.

"No one could," she said, with a deep sigh. "I led him to that place of death, as surely as – "

"No, no, Vita! You must not say that. You are no more responsible for his death than I am. Those devils would have got him. If not in one way, then in another. He knew it. He was prepared for it. He told me himself. No, no, you did right. If there were shortcomings they were mine. I did not see far enough. Thank God, at least I contrived to save you from the fate they had prepared for you."

Vita's eyes had followed his restless movement. Now they rested upon his flushed face and hot eyes as he returned to his seat on the bed and took possession of her hand again.

"Thank God for your life and safety, dearest," he cried, raising her hand to his lips and pressing it to them passionately. "It was the nearest thing. It turns me cold now when I think how near. Listen and I'll tell you my side of it all. It's not a very brainy side, dear. There's not much in it that's particularly creditable to any thinking man. Most of it was luck, a sort of miraculous good fortune added to an inspiration for which I mustn't take any credit. I'll just take up the tale where you left it, but from the other side – the side whence you might well have expected succor, and from which, very nearly, there was none forthcoming."

He paused. He leant over on the bed, supporting himself on one arm. His dark eyes were shining as they dwelt upon the well-loved beauty of the woman who was, perhaps, at that moment, more than ever the centre of his life.

"I can't tell how I arrived at the certainty that you were in the power of these devils, and were being forced unwittingly to further their schemes. It was instinct, it was – well, whatever you like to call it. There's no need to worry you with the manner in which I persuaded your father to let me watch over him in his going from these shores. Nor does it matter the small things I prepared for that watch. I'll just tell you what happened.

"I owe a good deal to a small section of the Navy, including Sir Joseph Caistor and Sir Reginald Steele, who were both spending the week-end here. Also Commander Sparling, and some of his men, who are in charge of the new constructions at the yards. Captain Ludovic I owe something to for his shrewdness and loyalty and tolerance. These are the elements which contributed so largely in your salvation.

"Well, all day long on that Sunday a light cruiser was standing off the coast. It had definite instructions. Yes, Sir Joseph had ordered it there to help me. It was scouting for a submarine. You see, I had made up my mind that there would be a German submarine in the matter. That is to say, if my fears were to prove well founded. Sure enough one turned up late in the afternoon, and the cruiser picked her up while she was running awash. We got the signal that she'd found her. Then was played a wonderful game of cat and mouse. The cruiser never for a moment let it out of her sight. When darkness closed she just ran up closer and played about with a searchlight. There was no question of interfering with or even 'speaking' her. She was outside the three miles. Then about six o'clock there came the development. The submarine launched a boat for shore. It was well manned, and she drove away in the direction of the cove. Then the cruiser settled to her work. She turned her searchlight right on to the vessel lying awash, and never left it. The men on the submarine could do nothing which could not be seen from the cruiser, and, to make matters more exasperating, the cruiser closed right in upon her."

Ruxton paused as though reviewing and criticizing the scene, to observe the completeness of the operation.

"You must understand, dear, what was in my mind to make this necessary," he went on, seeing the need for explanation. "You see, I knew what your father's submersible meant to Germany. They had lost the plans of the U-rays lamp. Nor had they any models. The only installation of the U-rays was on the submersible. I had made up my mind that if there was to be any interference with your father they meant capturing his vessel too. Besides, it would be simple from their view-point. Your father's vessel was wholly unarmed.

"Very well. What were the intentions with a submarine probably full of German naval men? It seemed to me natural that while their boat went ashore, in pitch darkness, to take off your father, the men on the submarine would set about securing possession of the submersible the moment it hove in sight. How right I was you will see. However, the submarine never had a chance. She could not escape that light. She dived again and again to avoid it, but each time she came up the light picked her up and held her. Had they attempted to launch a boat the cruiser would have done the same, and then followed it up whithersoever it went; and, had there been an attempt to board the submersible, our boat would have been there first. The skipper of that submarine was out-manœuvred, beaten – peaceably, but – beaten. Nor had he means of communicating his trouble to those in the boat which had gone ashore."

Now Ruxton's manner become less exultant as he went on after a brief pause.

"What went on at the cove you know better than I. That was the chief weakness of my plans. I stationed a number of the confidential Government agents ready to lend help if it were needed. But I had been driven to concentrating on the ultimate 'get away.' That, to me, stood out as imperative. I had to chance the other. Therein lay my blame for the sacrifice of your father. The sound of shots fired told its tale, but I still hoped."

He drew a deep sigh of regret. His eyes were troubled. Now he went on, without a sign of elation.

"The crucial moment came when it was seen that the pinnace, loaded well down, was racing towards the submersible from the shore. It was more than ticklish. However, things were carefully planned. They hailed the submersible, which was lying awash. They found only two men on the deck – your father's men, and Captain Ludovic in the conning-tower doorway. Von Berger led the way aboard, and Von Salzinger followed. The former glanced at the men, and spoke to Ludovic. In his words he justified my whole supposition. He asked for a Lieutenant Rutter, and Ludovic, in assumed sullen submission, told him he was below in the saloon. Von Berger was satisfied. He only waited till the crew was aboard, and you, lying unconscious in the arms of one of his men, and your father's body supported by two others, had been conveyed down below. Then he gave Ludovic orders to head at full speed for Cuxhaven, and, if followed, to submerge. He said that the man Rutter would be sent up to see he played no tricks. Then he and Von Salzinger went below, and the steel door of the conning-tower was made fast.

"The rest – do you need it? It was a bloody affair. You and your dead father were taken into the saloon. Von Berger and Von Salzinger followed. Then Von Berger dismissed the men, who went out while he looked round for Rutter. But in a moment he understood what was happening. As the men left the saloon they were set upon. They fought like demons, but were either overpowered or shot down. Von Berger slammed the saloon door closed, and strove to hold it. But as well try to hold a rabbit-hutch against a tornado. They were caught. Caught, as I heard Von Salzinger say, like rats in a trap."