As Egerton thus mused, and passed on to the bridge, a bugle-horn rang merrily from the box of a gay four-in-hand. A drag-coach with superb blood-horses rattled over the causeway, and in the driver Egerton recognised his nephew—Frank Hazeldean.
The young Guardsman was returning, with a lively party of men, from dining at Greenwich; and the careless laughter of these children of pleasure floated far over the still river.
It vexed the ear of the careworn statesman—sad, perhaps, with all his greatness, lonely amidst all his crowd of friends. It reminded him, perhaps, of his own youth, when such parties and companionships were familiar to him, though through them all he bore an ambitious aspiring soul—"Le jeu vaut-il la chandelle?" said he, shrugging his shoulders.
The coach rolled rapidly past Leonard, as he stood leaning against the corner of the bridge, and the mire of the kennel splashed over him from the hoofs of the fiery horses. The laughter smote on his ear more discordantly than on the minister's, but it begot no envy.
"Life is a dark riddle," said he, smiting his breast.
And he walked slowly on, gained the recess where he had stood several nights before with Helen; and dizzy with want of food, and worn out for want of sleep, he sank down into the dark corner; while the river that rolled under the arch of stone muttered dirge-like in his ear;—as under the social key-stone wails and rolls on for ever the mystery of Human Discontent. Take comfort, O Thinker by the stream! 'Tis the river that founded and gave pomp to the city; and without the discontent, where were progress—what were Man? Take comfort, O Thinker! wherever the stream over which thou bendest, or beside which thou sinkest, weary and desolate, frets the arch that supports thee;—never dream that, by destroying the bridge, thou canst silence the moan of the wave!
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Continued from page 259.
[19] Fact. In a work by M. Gibert, a celebrated French physician, on diseases of the skin, he states that that minute troublesome kind of rash, known by the name of prurigo, though not dangerous in itself, has often driven the individual afflicted by it to—suicide. I believe that our more varying climate, and our more heating drinks and ailments, render the skin complaint more common in England than in France, yet I doubt if any English physician could state that it had ever driven one of his English patients to suicide.