I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard to
enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my twenty-third
birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard's Inn more than a year,
and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in Garden-court, down by the
river.
Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original
relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my
inability to settle to anything,--which I hope arose out of the restless
and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,--I had a taste for
reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That matter of
Herbert's was still progressing, and everything with me was as I have
brought it down to the close of the last preceding chapter.
Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone, and
had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long hoping
that to-morrow or next week would clear my way, and long disappointed, I
sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.
It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud,
mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been
driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East
there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts,
that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs;
and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills
carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of
shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages
of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the
worst of all.
Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time,
and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor is it so
exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the
wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges
of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed
against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they
rocked, that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse.
Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could
not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors open and
looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when
I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black windows
(opening them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of
such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out,
and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering, and
that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried away
before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.