The man was Alexander Leacraft, the auditors were Mr. Archibald Edward Thomsen and Jim Skaith, both familiar to the reader as rescued and rescuing, in that awful day of November 28th, when the last little band of citizens, led by the provost-marshal, had slipped away in the storm from Edinburgh. Strange things had happened since then: much stranger were in store. The train in which Sir John C— and his companions escaped, had made its way with painful slowness, and before the English line was reached had stopped repeatedly until it was necessary to desert it. And then the weary crowd of refugees had staggered on their way to a distant station, along a country side emptied of its inhabitants, with the low houses of the country people evident only as mounds of snow. And, with many struggles, with mutual assistance, with prayers and suffering, the men pushed on in the closest companionship, brought by the terrors and dangers of the journey into the usual unhesitating intimacy of peril. They took each other’s places in the work of excavation, helped all to flounder and press through the drifts, divided their company into the weak and strong, and so allotted tasks that the co-operation of all helped their common progress. Camps were made in which shelters were clumsily provided, with tents brought from Edinburgh, and which only the industry of the watchers saved also from burial in the tossing drifts.
The frugal meals snatched by chance or at the favorable moments where inequalities of the ground permitted a more regular distribution and preparation of food served well enough. Now and then they espied a deserted house, and into this they crowded, enjoying the heat of fires made of the wood-work, the floors and windows of the house itself, while they dried their clothing, changed their shoes, and, gaining a respite and new strength, salleyed out again into the desolate landscape with its blue gray skies flaming with crimson, when the day set, and the snow cleared, and a sharpened icy edge of cold vibrated like an unseen but intensely realized cord stretched nippingly through the air. The leaders expected to reach a place called Tway stone, where a train was in waiting, which would carry them south of this immediate zone of the greatest snow falls. Grewsome sights were encountered, and the blanched faces of men turned away from the uncovered sepulchre of a horse and rider, now a child and mother, and sometimes in the wet morasses still unfrozen, beneath the towering ridges, the forlorn, immured body of a young woman with blanketed face and streaming hair.
Leacraft and Thomsen, with Jim, worked unremittingly with the young Scotch woman. They patched up a rude litter and they carried her on this, trudging toilsomely along, and watching her needs. Their care was affectionate and touching, and soon other strong men offered their help, for gradually the sensation gained place—so quickly does the human fancy cling to the vaporous skirts of superstition—that the girl’s safety meant the rescue of all, that her security carried with it the common weal. She became a fetich, and they rejoiced in caring for her, as if contribution to her welfare conveyed its unseen benefits to all who engaged in the kind ministry. Nor did she fail, with the living hopefulness of youth, and with her fresh winning loveliness, to establish a return. Her smile, the lingering gratitude she showed to all, her own usefulness and ready help at the stop and waiting places when her eager intelligence watched and directed the provisioning and cooking, rewarded the toilers. She was quick and resourceful, cheerful in exhortation and advice, and certainly—to Leacraft—always lovely. Thomsen had forgotten his first resentment at Leacraft’s apparent admiration for his cousin. The two men had become very intimate. Both felt themselves on the edge of new events, which were in part to be shaped by the blind forces of the earth, and in larger part as they affected England, by the sagacity and steadfastness of men. They talked much over these things together. Both were sombre and frightened. The invincible powers of nature, the unconquerable ferocity of nature which is deaf to reason, blind to suffering, made them shrink and quail. To meet its urgency with make shifts was impossible, to resist it madness; the line of retreat was the only line of escape. They felt this; the thought became oppressively dominant. They began at first to hint at it, they ended, quite quickly too, in predicting it with mutual confessions of dismay.
Both loved Miss Tobit, yet, as far as appearances went, only the guardian spirit of her dreams could have told the direction of her inclinations. Perhaps both seemed to her too dear, too much involved in the one peril with herself, to stand apart from each other in any guise or place of preference. Thomsen was the younger man, and he had the advantage of a handsome face, a fine form and a particularly deferential tenderness. Cupid and his mother are not slow to give such gifts their heartiest commendation. But Thomsen was generous to his somewhat reticent, and, probably not greatly feared rival, the prowess of beauty is generally undaunted and oftentimes magnanimous.
When the worst hardships of their journey were over, and in the less afflicted regions of England, where at the time the snow falls were not as deep, or the winds as tempestuous, Leacraft had many chances to talk with Miss Tobit, and he found her extremely affable, well informed and sympathetic, certainly not endowed with the mischievous drollery and the roguish merriment of Miss Garrett, and therefore not so piquant, tantalizing, and desirable, but very kindly and soothing.
The provost-marshal and most of the party went to Liverpool, whither, before, many of the inhabitants of Edinburgh had fled, but Leacraft and Thomsen kept on to London. They found conditions in London full of fright and trepidation, and the business interests floundering and collapsed. Leacraft took up his headquarters at the Bothwell Club, and Thomsen and his cousin found a home at a maiden aunt’s, in Claverhouse place.
But much as Leacraft would have craved an indulgence of sympathy and response, the audience of sense and appreciation, and the agreeable picture before his eyes of acquiescent if not admiring beauty, the fatal progress of events in the world of England kept him away from Miss Tobit more than he wished. These events were far from reassuring; they were directly and successively catastrophic. Their logic seemed inexorable; and Europe became rigid with attention as it watched with most varying feelings of commiseration the tightening grasp of frost and snow, wind and tempest, upon the destiny of England. Not that an actual submergence beneath snowdrifts was threatened, a hyperboreal sepulchre under which every Englishman lay, like the Excelsior youth, “lifeless but beautiful.”
No such shocking and shattering misery as had befallen Scotland had as yet engulfed England, especially its southern counties, but the darkening days brought more clearly to the observation of the most recalcitrant and obtuse, the most reluctant and temporizing, the fact that England’s climate was approaching that of Labrador, that the restraints of trade would soon become enormous, that its products would be unmitigatedly diminished and restricted, and that it could no longer raise wheat; that its railroads, for half the year, would endure a dangerous embargo; that its population would perish; that its industries would undergo the most serious curtailment; that foreign ports would absorb its commerce, steal its prestige, insinuate themselves, by its crippled resources, into the markets of the earth in its place; that the ramifications of disaster would penetrate its social, intellectual and political life, and cloud its mental horizon with the gaunt and stupid spectres of Torpor and Helplessness. This monstrous dilemma submerged all minor passions, and plunged England into the noisiest outbreak of argument, suggestion and panic-stricken questionings.
Leacraft buried himself in the questions that now with the more forward and statesmanly thinkers were coming to the front with relentless insistence. Amongst these, conspicuously outstrode and outshone the rest, H. G. Wells, the brilliant author and prophet of the New Republicanism, whose book had five years before roused an intense and frightened protest from the servitors of antiquity, and the selfish lackies of a superannuated and mythical class system. Mr. Wells, with his trained skill in scientific deduction and the exercised powers of imagination, with a reckless and defiant desire to unravel the future, with the slenderest regard for the prejudices of religion or old-fogey political conservatism, was now half-deluded himself with the sudden dream of starting the English nation on new grounds. Released from the impedimenta of ceremonies and ruins, names and titles, furnished with a tabula rasa where the new ideals of which he set himself up as a sort of avatar and preacher might most keenly set and develop themselves, he believed—as in a measure Leacraft did himself—that the English cultus would put on those insignia of the coming eras which meant intellectual emancipation, and a social and civil regime where the greatest happiness and the widest material prosperity would unite, in which, too, would not be wanting a radical rearrangement of the relations of the sexes, hinted at in the same author’s later books, but which again, naturally, by many who followed Mr. Wells a certain way, was indignantly repudiated. A more dignified and august group of men—among whom the names of Churchill, Chamberlain, Rosebery, Balfour, Prof. Stubbs, and Bryce led—had assembled themselves in a council of deeply concerned and profoundly patriotic advisers. These men secured a very noble elevation above the wild and unclassified miscellany of men and women who, with cries, denunciations, nostrums, whims, hallucinations, guesses and queries, deluged the pages of the Times, stood at the corners of the streets, where such standing was possible in the hard weather, and preached their fantastic mental wares. A still more obvious and ear-assailing group were the religious zealots, who thrive at moments of peril, filling the brains of their listeners with adjurations, exhortations, prayers, pictures and prophecies, for one moment doleful with wailing execrations of past wickedness, and the next piteously shrieking eloquent appeals for repentance and confession.
The singular and amazing thing in all this was the convinced assent given to the prediction of Science. Whereas at first the geologists and the meteorologists belittled and ridiculed the warnings of the President, they now enlarged, extended and enforced them with a greater authority, and more illuminated reasoning. Hardly believing that the people of England would realize this approaching disaster, what it meant, what steps should be contemplated to escape its worst effects, how permanent and deep-seated were its causes, the British Association for the Advancement of Science had resolved itself into a body of educators. Lectures were given where practicable, leaflets circulated, letters published in the leading dailies, and a comprehensive educational crusade started—and with one object—to instill a deeper dread of the future, a distrust of the possibility of the longer occupancy of the British Islands, and yet a firm reliance that under changed auspices of place, the same civilization, with unchanged features, would still continue to rule the world.