The Dead Secret, Wilkie Collins [best historical biographies .TXT] 📗

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 anything 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 doorway, with his hands under his coattails 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!”

“And I, Sir,” returned the object of all this withering derision, with the most exasperating politeness, “I shall say, for having your contempt, what I could by no means have said for having your respect, which is, briefly⁠—thank you. I, the small foreigner, take the contempt of you, the big Englishman, as the greatest compliment that can be paid from a man of your composition to a man of mine.” With that, Uncle Joseph made a last fantastic bow, took his niece’s arm, and followed Betsey along the passages that led to the south door, leaving Mr. Munder to compose a fit retort at his leisure.

Ten minutes later the housekeeper returned breathless to her room, and found the steward walking backward and forward in a high state of irritation.

“Pray make your mind easy, Mr. Munder,” she said. “They are both clear of the house at last, and Jacob has got them well in view on the path over the moor.”

V Mozart Plays Farewell

Excepting that he took leave of Betsey, the servant-maid, with great cordiality, Uncle Joseph spoke not another word, after his parting reply to Mr. Munder, until he and his niece were alone again under the east wall of Porthgenna Tower. There he paused, looked up at the house, then at his companion, then back at the house once more, and at last opened his lips to speak.

“I am sorry, my child,” he said⁠—“I am sorry from my heart. This has been what you call in England a bad job.”

Thinking that he referred to the scene which had just passed in the housekeeper’s room, Sarah asked his pardon for having been the innocent means of bringing him into angry collision with such a person as Mr. Munder.

“No! no! no!” he cried. “I was not thinking of the man of the big body and the big words. He made me angry, it is not to be denied; but that is all over and gone now. I put him and his big words away from me, as I kick this stone, here, from the pathway into the road. It is not of your Munders, or your housekeepers, or your Betzees, that I now speak⁠—it is of something that is nearer to you and nearer to me also, because I make of your interest my own interest too. I shall tell you what it is while we walk on⁠—for I see in your face, Sarah, that you are restless and in fear so long as we stop in the neighborhood of this dungeon-house. Come! I am ready for the march. There is the path. Let us go back by it, and pick up our little baggages at the inn where we left them, on the other side of this windy wilderness of a place.”

“Yes, yes, uncle! Let us lose no time; let us walk fast. Don’t be afraid of tiring me; I am much stronger now.”

They turned into the same path by which they had approached Porthgenna Tower in the afternoon. By the time they had walked over a little more than the first hundred yards of their journey, Jacob, the gardener’s boy, stole out from behind the ruinous inclosure at the north side of the house with his hoe in