"Then," said Mr. Calvert, "I am ready to do my part."
"No, no, 'tis impossible that this thing should be," broke out Mr. Morris, looking at the young man's pale, gloomy face. "I had hoped that it would be the greatest happiness; was I, then, mistaken?"
Calvert laid his hand on the elder man's shoulder.
"Hush, she must not hear. 'Tis an agreement we have entered into," he says, hurriedly. "Will you call a priest and send for the Duchess and d'Azay?"
"The Bishop of Autun has just come in," said Mr. Morris, after a moment's silence, and pressing the young man's hand, "and there is no time to send for anyone. I will go myself and ask him to come up."
They came in together in a very few moments, His Grace of Autun grave and asking no questions (from which Calvert rightly argued that Mr. Morris had confided in him), but with a concerned and kindly air toward the young man, for whom he had always entertained an especial liking. In a simple and impressive manner he repeated the marriage service in the presence of Mr. Morris and some of the servants of the household, called in to be witnesses, Adrienne kneeling beside the couch on which Calvert lay, for he was too weak and ill to stand longer.
The strange scene was quickly over, the two parted almost without a word, Adrienne being led away by Mr. Morris to the Hotel de Ville, and Mr. Calvert remanded to bed by the surgeon, who was just arrived to dress his wound.
CHAPTER XX
MR. CALVERT SEES A SHORT CAMPAIGN UNDER LAFAYETTE
The project which Calvert had formed for joining the army he was able to put into execution within a couple of weeks. The fever which had attacked him having entirely subsided and his wound healing rapidly, he was soon well enough to feel a consuming restlessness and craving for action. The painful experience through which he had just passed, the still more painful future to which he had to look forward, aroused an irresistible longing for some immediate and violent change of scene and thought. His vague plan for joining the army was suddenly crystallized by the situation in which he found himself, and though this resolution was strongly opposed by Mr. Morris, who, with keen foresight, prophesied the speedy overthrow of the constitution and the downfall of Lafayette with the King, he adhered to it. D'Azay being safely out of the country—he had retreated to Brussels and joined a small detachment of the emigrant army still there—and Adrienne protected by his name, his one desire was to forget in action his misfortunes and to remove himself from the scene of them. It was this desire, rather than any enthusiasm for the cause in which he was engaged, which impelled him to offer his services to Lafayette. Indeed, it was with no very sanguine belief in that cause or hope of its success that he prepared to go to Metz. Although he believed, with Mr. Morris, that the only hope of France lay in the suppression of internal disorder and the union of interests which a foreign war would bring about, yet he could not regard with much horror the threatenings of the proscribed émigrés and the military preparations making by the allies to prevent the spread of the revolution into their own territories. Indeed, so great was his contempt for the ministers of Louis and for their mad and selfish policy that he confessed to himself, but for his desire to serve under his old commander, he would almost as soon have joined d'Azay at Brussels, or taken a commission with the Austrians under Marshal Bender, who commanded in the Low Countries. This division of sympathies felt by Calvert animated thousands of other breasts, so that whole regiments of cavalry went over to the enemy, and officers and men deserted daily. Berwick, Mirabeau, Bussy, de la Châtre, with their commands, crossed over the Rhine and joined the Prince de Condé at Worms. The highest in command were suspected of intriguing with the enemy; men distrusted their superiors, and officers could place no reliance on their men. Of the widespread and profound character of this feeling of distrust Mr. Calvert had no adequate idea until he joined the army of the centre at Metz in the middle of April. Although Lafayette had, since January, been endeavoring to discipline his troops, to animate them with confidence, courage, and endurance, they had defied his every effort. Indeed, what wonder that an army composed of the scum of a revolutionary populace, without knowledge of arms, suspicious, violent, unused to every form of military restraint, should defy organization in three months? Perhaps no sovereign ever entered upon a great conflict less prepared than did Louis when he declared war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia—for Francis was not yet crowned Emperor of Austria. But that unhappy monarch found himself in a situation from which the only issue was a recourse to arms. Confronted on the one hand by a republican party of daily increasing power and on the other by an aristocratical one openly allied with sovereigns who were suspected of a desire to partition his dominion among themselves as Poland had been, his one hope lay in warring his way out between the two.