When the excitement had somewhat subsided, Ben returned to his first intention, behaving so civilly that the fears of the negroes gave way, and Dinah was so well pleased with purchasing a brass pin at half price that Ben ventured, at last to say:
“That little gal, Alice, has been tellin’ me about Mr. Raymond’s marriage. Unlucky, wasn’t he? Shouldn’t wonder though, if he had a kind of hankerin’ after that black-eyed miss. She’s han’some as a picter.”
Dinah needed but this to loosen her tongue. She had long before made up her mind that “Isabel was no kind o’ ’count;” and once the two had come to open hostilities, Isabel accusing Dinah of being a “lazy, gossiping nigger,” while Dinah, in return, had told her “she warn’t no better ’n she should be stickin’ ’round after Mars. Frederic, when nobody knew whether Miss Marian was dead, or not.”
This indignity was reported to Frederic, who reproved old Dinah, sharply; whereupon, she turned toward him, and, to use her favorite expression, “gin him a piece of her mind.”
After this it was generally understood that between Dinah and Isabel here existed no very amicable state of feeling, and when Ben spoke of the latter, the former exploded at once.
“’Twas a burnin’ shame,” she said, “and it mortified her een-a-most to death to see the trollop a tryin’ to set to marster, when nobody know’d for sartin if his fust wife was dead.”
“Marster’s jest as fast as she,” interposed Hetty, who seldom agreed with Dinah.
A contemptuous sneer curled Dinah’s lip as she said to Ben, in a whisper:
“Don’t b’lieve none o’ her trash. Them Higginses allus would lie. I hain’t never seen Marster Frederic do a single thing out o’ the way, ’cept to look at her, jest as Phil used to look at me when he was sparkin’. I don’t think that was very ’spectable in him, to be sure, but looks don’t signify. He dassen’t marry her till he knows for sartin t’other one is dead. He done told Alice so, and she told me;” and then Dinah launched out into praises of the lost Marian, exalting her so highly that Ben tossed into her lap a pair of ear-rings which she had greatly admired.
“Take them,” said he, “for standin’ up for that poor runaway. I like to hear one woman stick to another.”