“You will learn there is enough cleverness here to comprehend why you came to this plantation a willing prisoner,” he said, threateningly. Monroe resumed his “Rally Once Again,” and raised his brows inquiringly, “and also why you ignored a former acquaintance with Madame Caron and had to be introduced. Before you are through with this business, Captain Monroe, you’ll whistle a different tune.”
“Oh, no, I shan’t; I don’t know any other,” said Monroe, amiably, and sauntered away as some of the guests, with gay good nights, came down the steps. The evening, delightful 332 as it had been, fraught with emotion as it had been, was passing. The late hour reminded Monroe that he must no longer delay seeing Pluto if he was to see him at all. They had exchanged glances several times, but the black man’s duties had kept him occupied every minute, and they had found no opportunity to speak unobserved.
Judithe stood beside Mrs. McVeigh on the veranda exchanging good nights with some of the people, who expected to be her neighbors in the near future, and who were delighted with the prospect. She had been a decided success with the warm-hearted Southerners, and had entered the rooms a short time after her interview with her host, so gay, so bright, that he could scarcely believe those brilliant eyes were the ones he had seen tear-wet in the dusk. She had not avoided him, but she had made a tete-a-tete impossible; for all that he could only remember the moment when she had leaned upon his breast and confessed that the love was not all on his side; no after attempt at indifference could erase an iota of that!
Monroe stopped to look at her, himself unseen, and as she stood there smiling, gracious, the very star of the evening, he thought he had never before seen her so absolutely sparkling. He had always known her beautiful; tonight she was regal beyond comparison. Always in the years to follow he thought of her as she stood there that night, radiant, dominant, at the very pinnacle of success in all things. He never again saw her like that.
As he passed on he relit the cigar, forgotten during his meeting with Masterson, and Pluto, who had been on nettles of anxiety to get away from his duties all the evening, seized the opportunity when no one was looking, and followed closely the light of the cigar as it moved along the hedge past the dining room windows.
He carried the treasured bag holding the dead Rosa’s belongings.
“Couldn’t get away a mite sooner, not to save me, Mahsa Captain,” he said, breathlessly; “had to run now to get ’way from them niggahs in the kitchen, who wanted to know what I was toten. I had this here hid in the pantry whah I had no chance to look through it, so if you’ll s’cuse me I jest gwine dump em out right heah; the picture case, it’s plum down in the bottom; I felt it.”
Monroe smoked in silence while the darky was making the search. He no longer needed the picture in order to convince Madame Caron of the truth of Pluto’s story, yet concluded it best that she have possession of so compromising a portrait until her clever maid was out of the country.
He could hear Colonel McVeigh asking for Pluto, and Caroline offering information that “Pluto jest gone out through the pantry.”