'No, uncle. Do not ask that of me, not that!'
'Edmund, be reasonable. You cannot remain shut up in your rooms for ever.'
'I shall leave them to-day. In a couple of hours I shall start on a journey.'
'On a journey? Where do you mean to go?'
'To town, to Oswald.'
'To Oswald!' cried Heideck, bounding from his seat, and staring at his nephew as though he had not heard aright. 'Are you out of your senses?'
'Did you imagine that I should be the accomplice of this fraud?' burst forth Edmund, his unnatural calm suddenly merging into a fierce blaze of anger. 'Did you really think it possible that I should be silent and continue to play the master here, when the rightful heir is driven out, leading a life of privation and almost of poverty? If you two can do it, I cannot. How I am to bear the terrible existence before me, whether I shall be able to bear it at all, I know not. But this I do know. I must go to Oswald, must tell him that he has been cheated, defrauded, that Ettersberg is his of right. He shall hear it all; then ... then it will matter little what becomes of me.'
Heideck had listened in mortal alarm. Whatever he may have feared, for this turn of affairs he certainly was not prepared. Were Edmund to learn that his cousin knew, or at least divined, the secret, an explanation between the two could no longer be prevented, and so the whole edifice would crash to pieces.
The uncle understood all the incalculable consequences of such a catastrophe better than his impetuous nephew, and he was resolved to prevent it at any price.
'You forget that you are not the only person concerned in this,' he said emphatically. 'Have you not thought whom the confession you propose making would disgrace and dishonour?'