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The leaders had held a secret consultation while the debate was drawing on its slow length, and Danton's old expedient of "terror" was resolved on. His emissaries had been sent round Paris to summon all his banditti; and the low cafés, the Faubourg taverns, and every haunt of violence, and the very drunkenness of crime, had poured forth.
There is still to be seen near the river, without the city, in a pleasant spot, the house, half rustic half town built, and the garden on the banks of the Aube, where Danton's infancy was passed. His step-father, M. Ricordin, attended to his education as he would have done that of his own child.
During the rest of the day, they had an Iroquois lesson, and by the end of the afternoon when the sun was low, and Menard headed for the shore of Isle Perrot, the maid was bright again, laughing over Danton's blunders in the new language. They spent the next day on the island, for what with wind and rain the lake was impassable for their canoe.
"Now," said my hostess, as she dished up and began to carve a fat partridge cooked to a turn "this bird that came so apropos, is a present from a great-nephew of Danton. He is the juge de paix here and a good neighbour of mine. We will pay him a visit this afternoon." Of this gentleman, of Danton's home and family, I shall say something later on.
With your permission, my dear, he added, turning untarnishably clear childlike eyes on Sheila, 'I will take all risks even to the foot of the gibbet: accessory, Danton, AFTER the fact. And so direct and cloudless was his gaze that Sheila tried in vain to evade it and to catch a glimpse of Danton's small agate-like eyes, now completely under mastery, and awaiting confidently the meeting with her own.
This last was to a man-servant who had entered, and looked as if he had something to say. "Yes, sir if you are Doctor Danton." "I am Doctor Danton. What is it?" "It's a servant from the Hall, sir. Captain Danton's compliments, and would you go there at once?" Rose gave a little scream, and clutched her companion's arm. "Oh, Doctor Frank, can papa be sick?"
The precisian, they say, disapproved of Danton's lax and heedless courses. Danton said to him one day: 'What do I care? Public opinion is a strumpet, and posterity a piece of nonsense. How should the puritanical lawyer endure such cynicism as this? And Danton delighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again, Danton had given various gross names of contempt to Saint Just.
It casts the shadow of its genius upon Bulwer's "Pompeii" as the wing of the condor shades the crow. Byron's "sound of revelry by night" is the throbbing of a snare drum drowned in Hugo's thunders of Mont St. Jean. Danton's rage sinks to an inaudible whisper, and even Aeschylus shrivels before that cataclysm of Promethean fire; that celestial monsoon.
The only comfort left him in this lower world are these nightly walks with her. She is the bravest, the best, the noblest of girls; she leaves her warm room, her bed, for those cold midnight walks with that unhappy and suffering man." Once again a pause. Reginald Stanford looked at Captain Danton's pale, agitated face. "You have told me a terrible story," he said.
However, everything went merry as a marriage bell, my kind friends filled several boxes, and perhaps one of the most interesting incidents of the evening was the fact that just underneath sat Danton's great-nephew with his clerk, who had come from Arcis-sur-Aube expressly for the occasion.
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