Leacraft was a little nettled over his seriousness with Miss Tobit, because it revealed again to himself that prosaic stiffness of language which he consciously recognized as having formed an element of failure with Miss Garrett, whose plastic wit found in it a source of amusement. He walked towards the door, wondering bitterly why women placed so much value on a turn of speech, or the accent of a compliment, when his musing discontent was interrupted by a hand laid on his arm. He turned around and saw a member of the Common Council of the city, associated with Sir John C— in the last days of the city’s government. The stranger accosted him. “Mr. Leacraft, the Provost Marshal wishes you to share his compartment. He has a great desire to speak with you on the affairs of the city, and the dreadful things which seem to be before us. This way, sir,” and he motioned to a large parlor coach in the centre of the train.
Leacraft retained him. Placing his hand on Jim’s shoulder, he said, “This man goes with me.” The councilman for a moment looked puzzled, but almost instantly rejoined, “Certainly, sir; your personal attendants are welcome.”
Leacraft laughed and exclaimed, “No, sir, this is no personal attendant of mine. This is only a brave man, whom I am proud to call my friend,” and as he turned to Jim the latter gave him a glance of the sincerest gratitude and pride.
The councilman waived the privilege of questions and nodding vigorously his assent, led Leacraft and Jim to the car of Sir John.
It was a car of an American type, and comfortably provided with couches and seats, tables and easy chairs. A number of men were already in it, and some refreshments, with the circulation of bottles of Scotch whiskey, showed Leacraft the unappeasible claims of man’s appetite, even in the ruins of his own fortune.
Sir John occupied a chair at a round table in a further corner of the compartment, and as Leacraft made his way towards him, the eyes of the city’s chief gazed at him in return with inexpressible weariness and sadness. Leacraft motioned Jim to a seat, and took the proffered hand of Sir John, who let his arm fall heavily on the table, and still kept his eyes fixed on Leacraft, motionless and silent. It was Leacraft who first spoke:
“I think, Sir John, that it was a few years ago that I secured your intervention for a poor fellow who was condemned offhand, and you were willing to help me turn the law back in its course, that it might have an opportunity to find out what it was made for—murder or justice.”
“Yes, I do recall it, and, Mr. Leacraft, do you know,” replied Sir John, “that that day seems unmercifully far away. It seems as if you and I lived then in another world, and as if we perhaps had died, and were living in quite a different one now, and one very much worse, however bad the old one was. I am too dazed with all this. I feel as if I must wake up and find it all a horrible nightmare. But there can be no excuse for self-deception with me. I have studied this question. I am one of the most convinced that Scotland is doomed. Yes,” and the speaker straightened himself with a movement of exhaustion, “that England is doomed, too, that we are about to see primal conditions returning which are normal physiographic states, but which will destroy our civilization. Listen,” and as Leacraft sank into a chair near him, he leaned again upon the table and spoke with a sort of eager impatience at his own logic, as if he invited and expected and hoped for contradiction. “Listen. The isothermals as they existed before this calamity were a travesty on the map; they were an outrage upon meteorological symmetry. See here,” and Sir John drew out a portfolio which he opened on the table before him; he opened it and displayed a Mercator projection of the world.
He was about to continue when a shout, which had mingled with it a throb of grief, like a loud wail, entered their ears—Leacraft noticed at the moment that the train was moving; it had been moving for some time. He looked out of the compartment window. “We are leaving Edinburgh,” his voice sank to a sympathetic whisper, as Sir C— suddenly turned to gaze, too, along with all the rest, upon the shrouded city.
The snow was falling from a leaden sky, and the mantled city, with its higher buildings, here a spire, there a monument, like an irregular mound hiding a burial, was indistinctly, very partially, seen. The men and one woman—the Scotch girl saved that afternoon from the tomb of snow—were standing in the coaches, leaning out of the open windows, to fathom the dull, mottling obscurity of the air, to catch—to be forever remembered—some recognized feature of the great, beautiful habitation now left in the on-coming night time, to be buried in the whirling wreaths. Hidden between its hills, imperishable but unseen, and waiting for its resurrection again into the joy of life and usefulness—a dead city, save for those brigands who, like wolves or ghouls, dared death to fatten on abandoned riches, amid its solemn, terrifying loneliness! Strange vicissitude! and as Leacraft descried, in a blurred exaggeration of its natural size, the dome of St. George’s Church, opposite the Albert Memorial, a voice somewhere among the tearful and dumb gazers repeated this verse from Burns’ invocation to the honored and historic site: