"I will consider nothing! I know them as well as you do. Morbid sensitiveness about your peculiar position; morbid dread of facing the world; morbid love of indulging in melancholy. And I will have none of it! None of it! I will be obeyed, and you shall go out into society, or else--"
""Or else" what will be the alternative, sir?"
"You leave my house! I will have no rebel in my family!"
Had Cora followed the impulse of her proud and outraged spirit, she would have walked out of the library, gone to her room, put on her bonnet and cloak, and left the house, leaving all her goods to be sent after her; but the girl thought of her poor, gentle, suffering grandmother, and bore the insult.
"Sir," she said, with patient dignity, "do you think that it would have been decorous, under the peculiar circ.u.mstances, for me to appear in public, and especially at a state dinner at the executive mansion?"
"Madam, I instructed you to accept that invitation and to attend that dinner! Do you dare to hint that I would counsel you to any indecorous act?"
"No, sir; certainly not, if you had stopped to think of it; but weightier matters occupied your mind, no doubt."
"Let that go. But in the question of this ball? Do you mean to obey me?"
"Grandfather, please consider! How can I mix with gay scenes while the fate of my husband is still an awful mystery?"
"You must conquer your feelings, and go, or--take the consequences!"
"Even if I could forget the tragedy of my wedding day, and mix with the gay world again, what would people say?"
"What would people say, indeed? What would they dare to say of my granddaughter?"
"But, sir, it would be contrary to all the laws of etiquette and conventionality."
"My granddaughter, madam, should give the law to fashion and society, not receive it from them!" said the Iron King, throwing himself back in his arm chair as if it had been his throne.
Cora smiled faintly at this egotism, but made no reply in words.
"To come to the point!" he suddenly exclaimed--"Will you obey me and attend this ball, or will you take the other alternative?"
Cora"s heart swelled; her eyes flashed; she longed to defy the despot, but she thought of her meek, patient, long-suffering grandmother, and answered coldly:
"I will go to the ball, sir, since you wish it."
"Very well. That will do. Now leave the room. I wish to read the morning papers."
Cora went out to find her grandmother and to relieve the lady"s anxiety; old Aaron Rockharrt threw himself back in his arm chair with grim satisfaction at having conquered Cora and set his iron heel upon her neck. Yes; he had conquered Cora through her love for her poor, timid, abused grandmother. But now Fate was to conquer him.
But Fate had decided that Cora should not attend that ball, or any other place of amus.e.m.e.nt, for a long time. And he was just on the brink of discovering the impertinent interference of Fate in human affairs, and especially those of the Iron King.
He took up a Washington paper--a government organ--and read, opening his eyes to their widest extent as he read the following head-lines:
A MYSTERY CLEARED UP.
_THE FATE OF GOVERNOR REGULAS ROTHSAY_.
Killed by the Comanches on November 1st.
A dispatch from Fort Security to the Indian Bureau, received this morning, announces another inroad of the Comanches upon the new settlement of Terrepeur, in which the inhabitants were ma.s.sacred and their dwellings burned. Among the victims who perished in the flames in their own huts was Regulas Rothsay, late Governor-elect of ----, and at the time of his death a volunteer missionary to this treacherous and bloodthirsty tribe.
Another man, under the circ.u.mstances, might have been unnerved by such sudden and awful news, and let fall the paper, but not the Iron King.
He grasped it only with a firmer hand, and read it again with keener eyes.
"What under the heavens took that man out there? Had he gone suddenly mad? That seems to be the only possible explanation of his conduct. To abandon his bride on the day of his marriage--to abandon his high official position as governor of this State on the day of his inauguration, and without giving any living creature a hint of his intention, to fly off at a tangent and go to the Indian country and become a missionary to those red devils, and be ma.s.sacred for his pains--it was the work of a raving maniac. But what drove him mad?
Surely it was not his high elevation that turned his head, for if it had been, his madness would never have taken this particular direction of flying from his honors. No! it is as I have always suspected. He heard, in some way, of the girl"s English lover, and he, with his besotted devotion to her, was just the man to be morbidly, madly jealous, and to do some such idiotic thing as he has done, and get himself murdered and burned to ashes for his pains! Yes; and it serves him right!--it serves him--right!"
He sat glowering at the paragraph, and growling over his news for some time longer, but at length he took it up and walked over to the back parlor, where he felt sure he should find his two women.
Mrs. Rockharrt and Cora, who sat at a table before the gloomy coal fire, and were engaged in some fancy needlework, looked up uneasily as he entered; not that they expected bad news, but that they feared bad temper.
"Cora," he began, "I shall not insist on your going to the ball to-morrow."
She looked up in surprise, and a grateful exclamation was on her lips, but he forestalled it by saying:
"I suppose the news is all over the city by this time. I am going out to hear what the people are saying about it, and to see if the government house and the public offices are to be hung in mourning.
There--there it is told in the first column of this paper."
And with cruel abruptness he laid the newspaper on the table between the two women, and pointed out the fatal paragraph.
Then he stalked out of the room, and called his man-servant to help him on with his heavy overcoat.
That house, on the previous night, had been one blaze of light in honor of the State dinner. Now, as well as he could see dimly through the falling snow, it was all closed up, and men on ladders were festooning every row of windows with black goods.
"Yes, of course. It is as I expected. The news has gone all over the town already," said old Aaron Rockharrt, as he strode through the snowstorm to the business center of the city.
Every acquaintance whom he met stopped him with the same question in slightly different words.
"Have you heard?" and so forth.
Every intimate friend he encountered asked:
"How does Mrs. Rothsay bear it?" or--
"What on earth ever took the governor out there?"
To all questions the Iron King gave curt answers that discouraged discussion of the subject. He walked on, noticing that the stores and offices of the city were being festooned with mourning, and that notwithstanding the severity of the storm the street corners were occupied by groups talking excitedly of the fatal news.
He went into the editorial rooms of all the city newspapers and wished and attempted to dictate to the proprietors the manner in which they should write of the tragic event which was then in the minds and on the tongues of all persons.
As he spent an hour on the average at each office, it was late in the winter afternoon when he got home. It was not yet dark, however, and he was surprised to see a man servant engaged in closing the shutters.
He entered and demanded severely why the servant shut the windows before night.
The old man looked nervous and distressed, and answered vaguely:
"It is the missus, sah."