All being made

ready with much labour, and the hour come, the sultan was aroused

in the dead of the night, and the sharpened axe that was to sever

the rope from the great iron ring was put into his hand, and he

struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and the

ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work, near and afar, that

tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the

blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.

Chapter 39

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.

I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at

eleven o'clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul's, and all the many

church-clocks in the City - some leading, some accompanying, some

following - struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the

wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and

tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.

What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the

footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment,

and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.

Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took

up my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head.