The Dead Secret: A Novel

by Wilkie Collins

Here Uncle Joseph, whose stock of patience and politeness was getting exhausted, put his head into the room again.

"I shall have one last word to address to you, Sir, in a moment," said Mr. Munder, before the old man could speak. "Don't you suppose that your blustering and your bullying has had any effect on me. It may do with foreigners, Sir; but it won't do with Englishmen, I can tell you."

Uncle Joseph shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and rejoined his niece in the passage outside. While the housekeeper and the steward had been conferring together, Sarah had been trying hard to persuade her uncle to profit by her knowledge of the passages that led to the south door, and to slip away unperceived. But the old man steadily refused to be guided by her advice. "I will not go out of a place guiltily," he said, "when I have done no harm. Nothing shall persuade me to put myself, or to put you, in the wrong. I am not a man of much wits; but let my conscience guide me, and so long I shall go right. They let us in here, Sarah, of their own accord; and they shall let us out of their own accord also."

"Mr. Munder! Mr. Munder!" whispered the housekeeper, interfering to stop a fresh explosion of the steward's indignation, which threatened to break out at the contempt implied by the shrugging of Uncle Joseph's shoulders, "while you are speaking to that audacious man, shall I slip into the garden and give Jacob his instructions?"

Mr. Munder paused before answering—tried hard to see a more dignified way out of the dilemma in which he had placed himself than the way suggested by the housekeeper—failed entirely to discern any thing of the sort—swallowed his indignation at one heroic gulp—and replied emphatically in two words: "Go, ma'am."

"What does that mean? what has she gone that way for?" said Sarah to her uncle, in a quick, suspicious whisper, as the housekeeper brushed hastily by them on her way to the west garden.

Before there was time to answer the question, it was followed by another, put by Mr. Munder.

"Now, Sir!" said the steward, standing in the door-way, with his hands under his coat-tails and his head very high in the air. "Now, Sir, and now, ma'am, for my last words. Am I to have a proper explanation of the abstracting and purloining of those keys, or am I not?"

"Certainly, Sir, you are to have the explanation," replied Uncle Joseph. "It is, if you please, the same explanation that I had the honor of giving to you a little while ago. Do you wish to hear it again? It is all the explanation we have got about us."

"Oh! it is, is it?" said Mr. Munder. "Then all I have to say to both of you is—leave the house directly! Directly!" he added, in his most coarsely offensive tones, taking refuge in the insolence of authority, from the dim consciousness of the absurdity of his own position, which would force itself on him even while he spoke. "Yes, Sir!" he continued, growing more and more angry at the composure with which Uncle Joseph listened to him—"Yes, Sir! you may bow and scrape, and jabber your broken English somewhere else. I won't put up with you here. I have reflected with myself, and reasoned with myself, and asked myself calmly—as Englishmen always do—if it is any use making you of importance, and I have come to a conclusion, and that conclusion is—no, it isn't! Don't you go away with a notion that your blusterings and bullyings have had any effect on me. (Show them out, Betsey!) I consider you beneath—aye, and below!—my notice. Language fails, Sir, to express my contempt. Leave the house!"