Chapter 22

Chance will not do the work--Chance sends the breeze;
But if the pilot slumber at the helm,
The very wind that wafts us towards the port
May dash us on the shelves.--The steersman's part is vigilance,
Blow it or rough or smooth.
_Old Play_.

We left Nigel, whose fortunes we are bound to trace by the engagement
contracted in our title-page, sad and solitary in the mansion of
Trapbois the usurer, having just received a letter instead of a visit
from his friend the Templar, stating reasons why he could not at that
time come to see him in Alsatia. So that it appeared that his
intercourse with the better and more respectable class of society,
was, for the present, entirely cut off. This was a melancholy, and, to
a proud mind like that of Nigel, a degrading reflection.

He went to the window of his apartment, and found the street enveloped
in one of those thick, dingy, yellow-coloured fogs, which often invest
the lower part of London and Westminster. Amid the darkness, dense and
palpable, were seen to wander like phantoms a reveller or two, whom
the morning had surprised where the evening left them; and who now,
with tottering steps, and by an instinct which intoxication could not
wholly overcome, were groping the way to their own homes, to convert
day into night, for the purpose of sleeping off the debauch which had
turned night into day. Although it was broad day in the other parts of
the city, it was scarce dawn yet in Alsatia; and none of the sounds of
industry or occupation were there heard, which had long before aroused
the slumberers in any other quarter. The prospect was too tiresome and
disagreeable to detain Lord Glenvarloch at his station, so, turning
from the window, he examined with more interest the furniture and
appearance of the apartment which he tenanted.

Much of it had been in its time rich and curious--there was a huge
four-post bed, with as much carved oak about it as would have made the
head of a man-of-war, and tapestry hangings ample enough to have been
her sails. There was a huge mirror with a massy frame of gilt brass-
work, which was of Venetian manufacture, and must have been worth a
considerable sum before it received the tremendous crack, which,
traversing it from one corner to the other, bore the same proportion
to the surface that the Nile bears to the map of Egypt. The chairs
were of different forms and shapes, some had been carved, some gilded,
some covered with damasked leather, some with embroidered work, but
all were damaged and worm-eaten. There was a picture of Susanna and
the Elders over the chimney-piece, which might have been accounted a
choice piece, had not the rats made free with the chaste fair one's
nose, and with the beard of one of