For Womans Love | Page 8

out of the drawing room.
When he reached the hall, however, he found that the officials had gone to pursue their search for the missing man elsewhere. The men of his own party were nowhere to be seen. The porter, Jasper, was the only occupant of the hall, and Aaron Rockharrt opened the hall door and walked out. The military and civil escort were still on parade before the house, waiting for the governor-elect.
Mr. Rockharrt's carriage was standing before the door. He entered it and ordered the coachman to drive to police headquarters.
The hour for the inauguration of the new governor was approaching. The procession to the State house should have been in motion by this time. The people on the sidewalks, at the doors and windows, on the balconies, and on the roofs, all along the line of march, were beginning to be weary of waiting.
The officials who had the ceremonies of the occasion in hand waited until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then, as the governor-elect was nowhere to be found, as the necessity was imminent, the inaugural procession was ordered to begin its march.
"Where is he? Where is Rothsay?" demanded the spectators one of the other.
No one knew. No one had seen him. No one could, therefore, answer.
When the procession reached the State house, the lieutenant-governor, Kennelm Kennedy, was sworn in, and the military companies and the civic societies and the spectators all dispersed.
But where was the governor? That was the question of the hour. Why had he not been inaugurated? was asked by everybody of everybody else. The secret of his total and unexplained disappearance had not, indeed, been closely kept. His intimate friends, his household servants and the public officials knew it, but the general public did not.
The next morning the news came out, and the papers had sensational head-lines and long accounts of the sudden and mysterious disappearance of the governor-elect on the eve of his inauguration and of a bridegroom on the evening of his wedding day.
Also there were rewards offered for any intelligence of Regulas Rothsay, living or dead, and for the identification of the unknown visitor who was supposed to have been the last to have seen him on the night of his disappearance.
Days passed, and nothing came in answer to the advertisements. The public at length reached in theory this conclusion: that the governor-elect had been decoyed from the house by his latest visitor, and had been secretly murdered in some remote quarter.
The Rockharrts did not return to Rockhold, but remained in town through all the heat of that hot summer, because Aaron Rockharrt thought he could best pursue his investigations on the scene of the mystery. But he sent his sons to North End to look after the works.
Corona would see no one save the members of her own family. She kept her room, and grieved without ceasing. On the ninth day after the disappearance of her lover-husband she made an effort and came down into the drawing room, to please the gentle old grandmother.
She sat there with the old lady, reading to her, until Mrs. Rockharrt was called out by her tyrant to get something, it might be a book or a paper, a cigar or a pipe, that he himself or a servant might have got just as well, except that Aaron Rockharrt liked to have the ladies of his family wait upon him.
What happened during the hour of the old lady's absence from the drawing room no one knew, but when she returned she found her granddaughter in a swoon on the carpet. In great alarm she called the servants to her assistance. The unconscious girl was laid upon a sofa, and all means were taken to restore her to her senses. Corona recovered her faculties only to fall into the most violent paroxysms of anguish and despair.
From her ravings and self-reproaches Mrs. Rockharrt gathered that the unfortunate girl had heard, or in some way learned, some fatal news.
She sent all the servants out of the room, locked the door, administered a sedative to her child, and then, when the latter was somewhat calmer, questioned her as to the cause of her distress.
"I have nothing to tell--nothing, nothing to tell! But take me away from this place! Take me home to Rockhold, where I may be alone!"
"I will do all I can to comfort you, my dear," said Mrs. Rockharrt. "I will speak to Mr. Rockharrt when he comes in."
No one but the snubbed, brow-beaten and humiliated wife knew all that she engaged to suffer when she promised to speak to her lord and master.
Corona, soothed by the sedative that had been given her, and consoled by the love and sympathy that had been lavished upon her, grew more composed, and finally fell into a deep