"This place smoulders. Words are apt to prove oil on the embers. There are 900 prisoners, and constant talk of massacre. Chalier is a firebrand, the Mayor one of those moderate persons who provoke immoderate irritation in others. We are doing our best."
Danton frowned heavily over the curt sentences, drawing those black brows of his into a wrathful line. He turned to other letters from other Deputies, all telling the same weary tale of jangle and discord, strife and clamour of parties unappeased and unappeasable. Soon he would be at death-grips with the Gironde—force opposed to philosophy, action to eloquence, and philosophic eloquence would go to the guillotine shouting the Marseillaise.
His feet were set upon a bloody path, and one from which there was no returning. All Fate's force was in him and behind him, and he drove before it to his doom.
CHAPTER XIV
A DANGEROUS ACQUAINTANCE
It was in April that Fate began to concern herself with Mlle de Rochambeau once more. It was a day of spring's first exquisite sweetness—air like new-born life sparkling with wayward smiles, as the hurrying sunbeams glanced between one white cloud and the next; scent of all budding blossoms, and that good smell of young leafage and the wet, fecund earth.
On such a day, any heart, not crushed quite dumb and dry, must needs sparkle a little too, tremble a little with the renewal of youth, and sing a little because earth's myriad voices call for an echo.
Aline put on her worn print gown with a smile, and twisted her hair with a little more care than usual. After all, she was young, time passed, and life held sunshine, and the spring. She sang a little country air as she passed to and fro in the narrow room.
Outside it was delicious. Even in the dull street where she took her place in the queue the air smelled of young flowering things, and touched her cheeks with a soft, kissing breath, that brought the tender colour into them. Under the bright cerulean sky her eyes took the shade of dark forget-me-nots.
It was thus that Hébert saw her for the first time—one of Fate's tricks—for had he passed on a dull, rainy, day, he would have seen nothing but a pale, weary girl, and would have gone his way unnoticing, and unremembered, but to-day that spring bloom in the girl's heart seemed to have overflowed, and to sweeten all the air around her. The sparkle of the deep, sweet, Irish eyes met his cold, roving glance, and of a sudden changed it to an ugly, intent glitter. He passed slowly by, then paused, turned, and passed again.