The Dead Secret: A Novel

by Wilkie Collins

"As for the ghost story," resumed Mrs. Pentreath, while she opened the breakfast-room door, "you must apply to the ignorant people who believe in it, if you want to hear it all told. Whether the ghost is an old ghost or a new ghost, and why she is supposed to walk, is more than I can tell you." In spite of the housekeeper's affectation of indifference toward the popular superstition, she had heard enough of the ghost-story to frighten her, though she would not confess it. Inside the house, or outside the house, nobody much less willing to venture into the north rooms alone could in real truth have been found than Mrs. Pentreath herself.

While the housekeeper was drawing up the blinds in the breakfast-parlor, and while Mr. Munder was opening the door that led out of it into the library, Uncle Joseph stole to his niece's side, and spoke a few words of encouragement to her in his quaint, kindly way.

"Courage!" he whispered. "Keep your wits about you, Sarah, and catch your little opportunity whenever you can."

"My thoughts! My thoughts!" she answered in the same low key. "This house rouses them all against me. Oh, why did I ever venture into it again!"

"You had better look at the view from the window now," said Mrs. Pentreath, after she had drawn up the blind. "It is very much admired."

While affairs were in this stage of progress on the first floor of the house, Betsey, who had been hitherto stealing up by a stair at a time from the hall, and listening with all her ears in the intervals of the ascent, finding that no sound of voices now reached her, bethought herself of returning to the kitchen again, and of looking after the housekeeper's dinner, which was being kept warm by the fire. She descended to the lower regions, wondering what part of the house the strangers would want to see next, and puzzling her brains to find out some excuse for attaching herself to the exploring party.

After the view from the breakfast-room window had been duly contemplated, the library was next entered. In this room, Mrs. Pentreath, having some leisure to look about her, and employing that leisure in observing the conduct of the steward, arrived at the unpleasant conviction that Mr. Munder was by no means to be depended on to assist her in the important business of watching the proceedings of the two strangers. Doubly stimulated to assert his own dignity by the disrespectfully easy manner in which he had been treated by Uncle Joseph, the sole object of Mr. Munder's ambition seemed to be to divest himself as completely as possible of the character of guide, which the unscrupulous foreigner sought to confer on him. He sauntered heavily about the rooms, with the air of a casual visitor, staring out of window, peeping into books on tables, frowning at himself in the chimney-glasses—looking, in short, any where but where he ought to look. The housekeeper, exasperated by this affectation of indifference, whispered to him irritably to keep his eye on the foreigner, as it was quite as much as she could do to look after the lady in the quiet dress.

"Very good; very good," said Mr. Munder, with sulky carelessness. "And where are you going to next, ma'am, after we have been into the drawing-room? Back again, through the library, into the breakfast-room? or out at once into the passage? Be good enough to settle which, as you seem to be in the way of settling every thing."

"Into the passage, to be sure," answered Mrs. Pentreath, "to show the next three rooms beyond these."

Mr. Munder sauntered out of the library, through the door-way of communication, into the drawing-room, unlocked the door leading into the passage—then, to the great disgust of the housekeeper, strolled to the fire-place, and looked at himself in the glass over it, just as attentively as he had looked at himself in the library mirror hardly a minute before.