“Den Mr. Bainrofe he say, ’Oh, sartinly—your man, McDermot, am welcome to his bite an’ sup, an’ all he kin fine out’—an’ he laughed, an’ dey parted, mighty pleasant-like, and den he called Mrs. Raymun’ and Mass’ Gregory, an’ I listened again. Dat’s our colored way for reformation, child. An’ I heerd ’em—”
“Dinah! Dinah! what are you muttering about—don’t you hear Mrs. Raymond knocking? Miss Monfort must be tired out of your nonsense. What keeps you there so long?”
“I’se spounding another speritual to Miss Miramy, an’, wen I gits ’gaged in dat way, I disregards airthly knockin’. I’se listenin’ to de angels hammerin’ overhead, an’ Mrs. Raymun’ will hab to wait a spell—he! he! he!”
“Oh, go at once, Dinah, and open the door for Mrs. Raymond. I can write your song down just as well another time,” I remonstrated, taking up and laying down my note-book as I spoke, so as to display my ostensible occupation to the peering eyes of Mrs. Clayton (now sitting bolt upright in her bed, looking like a Chinese bonze), for the purpose of sweeping in my position definitively.
“That will do, Dinah. Now go and get Miss Monfort’s bath ready,” I heard my dragoness say, after a short whispered communication from her early visitor. It was the idea, probably, to remove me, as well as Dinah, while the plot was being unfolded, and my bath-room, with its closed door, promised security from quick ears and eyes to the brace of conspirators now plotting their final blow.
Once in that belfry, and truly might the sense of Dante’s famous inscription become my motto for life: “Here hope is left behind.”
I covered my eyes as I recalled that dreary, dreadful prison-house of clock and bell, into which I had clambered once by means of a movable step-ladder, rarely left there by the attendant, in order to rescue my famished cat, shut up there by accident. I recollected the maddened look of the creature, as it flew by me like a flash, frightened out of its wits, Mrs. Austin had said, by the clicking of the machinery of the huge clock, and the chiming of the responsive bell. Both were silent now, and there was room enough for a prisoner’s cot in that lonely and dismantled turret as there once had been for a telescope and its rest, used for astronomical purposes at long intervals by my father and a few of his scientific friends, but finally dismantled and put aside forever.