'You are a _poète manqué_. What a misfortune!' his wife had said to him very often with good-humoured derision. But he himself knew that if he had had the poet's faculty of rhythmical expression there would have been no force of circumstances which could have killed it in him. Why he loved music with so strong a passion was, that in it all he would fain have said was said for him.
'If I were going home now,' he thought, 'to some dark old garret in some crowded _cité des pauvres_, and yet could write a ballad of the Seine on a summer night, so that all the world should listen----'
It seemed to him that it would be infinitely more like happiness than to lend to kings, and baffle ministers, and strengthen cabinets, and give the sinews of war to nations, as he was able to do in that great white pile over in the town on the right, which was known to all Paris as the Maison d'Othmar. And yet what beautiful poems the world already possessed, and how seldom it cared to think of one of them!
Some bright-eyed scholar, some dreaming maiden, some sighing lover: was not this the sole public of the great singers, whose songs, bound in pomp and pride, lay unopened on the shelves of so many libraries?
'And a second-rate singer,' thought Othmar. 'No, I would never have been that. The world, as it is, is cursed and suffocated with teeming mediocrity. If one cannot do greatly, let one do nothing.'
He turned with a sigh from the spectacle of the cloudless shining skies and of the windless shining waters, and went on his way over the bridge to return to his house in the Faubourg St. Germain. The clocks of Paris were striking the half-hour after twelve.
As he took out his cigar-case and lighted a fusee, a woman, held by the same guard who had lately passed him, was dragged by. She was silent and white with terror, but as she went she put out her hand to him in supplication. It seemed to him that he heard some faint bewildered words of appeal too low to be distinct. He threw his cigar aside, and followed and overtook them in three steps.
'What are you doing?' he asked the guardian of the streets. 'What is she guilty of? Touch her more gently at the least.'
To a man of his habits and temperaments, roughness to any woman seemed a horrible unmanliness and offence. At the sound of his voice the face of the captive was turned to him quickly, and the light of one of the bridge lamps fell full upon it. Her lips parted to speak, but her breathing was fast and oppressed, and her voice failed her. Yet he recognised her in unspeakable amaze.