The verses came back to his memory as he went away from her chamber to his lonely couch; and he found in them that curious solace which poetry gives to pain when it echoes pain closely; that consolation of sympathy, which makes of poets the ministers and the angels of life. The dull, resigned abandonment which was in these lines was in his own soul. It was no more fierce grief or wild despair, or the delirious rebellion of the lover against his mistress's indifference; it was the apathetic acquiescence of a nature powerless to awake and sway another, the weary and resigned acceptance of a thing unchangeable.
Nay, and though all men living had pity on me,
She would not see!
CHAPTER XX.
It was a warm and beautiful night a year later, in full midsummer in Paris.
Othmar was alone there, being detained there by the illness of his uncle, who had been stricken three weeks before with hemiplegia, as he had sat at dinner in his own house in the Rue du Traktir, and had ever since lain insensible and paralysed, in a semblance of that death which in all its verity and tyranny of annihilation might come to him at any hour.
It was a dreary and melancholy waiting for an end which was inevitable, which no science or effort could avert. He had come out in the coolness of the night, glad, after the closeness of a sick-room, of a little air, a little exercise. His wife was making a series of visits at various great houses throughout the north-east of Europe; the children were on the shores of the Norman coast with their separate household; Paris was a desert, though both men and women were found there who seized the occasion to press on him their presence and their friendship with that assiduity which the world always shows to its very rich men. But he had felt no taste at such a moment for the society of either, and had repulsed both with impatience and scant courtesy.
The world of pleasure never found Othmar pliant to it; he disliked and despised it; he was intolerant alike of its frivolity and of its coarseness; its enormous expenditure seemed to him grotesquely disproportioned to its poor results in amusement; and the mere jargon of its habitual speech was unpleasant to him. He was rarely seen at a club, never at a racecourse, and the laughter of a supper-table left him unmoved to mirth, as the limbs of a dancer left him untouched by admiration.
Crossing the bridge of Solferino now, he paused to look at the river in the moonlight. There was neither wind nor cloud, and the sky was brilliant with stars; the Seine seemed a sheet of silver. It was past midnight; the city on the rive gauche was dusky and silent, the other city was studded with a million points of artificial light; the ceaseless hum of movement had not ceased there. The air was warm; the water looked cool and full of repose; the rays of the full moon, which shone down from the zenith, played in the ripples of it, and its mute highway seemed for the moment a silver path into some magic land.
He leaned against the parapet, and looked down its westward course: he knew every inch of its way; he knew all the quiet poplar-shadowed hamlets, all the flowering-grass meadows, all the sleepy quiet ancient little towns which were on either side of the historic stream; he knew how the apple and the cherry orchards sloped to the water, how the lilies and flags grew about the washing-places and the landing-stairs, how the white-capped children, knee-deep in cowslips, stood still to see the boats go by, how the water flowed through the plaisant pays de France until it grew black and sullied in the smoke of Rouen, and washed itself white again plunging joyously into the snow-flecked sea by Honfleur.
It was all hidden now, nothing of any of it seen except a broad band of silver spreading away into the darkness; but the eyes of his mind followed it and illumined its way, and in fancy his nostrils smelt the fragrance of the sweet dew-wet fields, and the breath of the sleeping cows, and the scent of the wild flowers growing where Corneille and Flaubert had died. By day it was but a busy water highway, crowded with sail and dulled with steam, serving to bind city and seaport together; but by night it was transfigured, and all the sighing sounds which came up from it seemed only like the peaceful breathing of the slumbering children in the many little wooded hamlets down its shores.