“You were born, I believe, in our county,” he said; “perhaps,
therefore, you may have heard at some time of a curious old prophecy
about our family, which is still preserved among the traditions of
Wincot Abbey?”
“I have heard of such a prophecy,” I answered, “but I never knew in
what terms it was expressed. It professed to predict the extinction of
your family, or something of that sort, did it not?”
“No inquiries,” he went on, “have traced back that prophecy to the time
when it was first made; none of our family records tell us anything of
its origin. Old servants and old tenants of ours remember to have heard
it from their fathers and grandfathers. The monks, whom we succeeded in
the Abbey in Henry the Eighth’s time, got knowledge of it in some way,
for I myself discovered the rhymes, in which we know the prophecy to
have been preserved from a very remote period, written on a blank leaf
of one of the Abbey manuscripts. These are the verses, if verses they
deserve to be called:
When in Wincot vault a place
Waits for one of Monkton’s race—
When that one forlorn shall lie
Graveless under open sky,
Beggared of six feet of earth,
Though lord of acres from his birth—
That shall be a certain sign
Of the end of Monkton’s line.
Dwindling ever faster, faster,
Dwindling to the last-left master;
From mortal ken, from light of day,
Monkton’s race shall pass away.”
“The prediction seems almost vague enough to have been uttered by an
ancient oracle,” said I, observing that he waited, after repeating the
verses, as if expecting me to say something.
“Vague or not, it is being accomplished,” he returned. “I am now the
‘last-left master’—the last of that elder line of our family at which
the prediction points; and the corpse of Stephen Monkton is not in the
vaults of Wincot Abbey. Wait before you exclaim against me. I have more
to say about this. Long before the Abbey was ours, when we lived in the
ancient manor-house near it (the very ruins of which have long since
disappeared), the family burying-place was in the vault under the Abbey
chapel. Whether in those remote times the prediction against us was
known and dreaded or not, this much is certain: every one of the
Monktons (whether living at the Abbey or on the smaller estate in
Scotland) was buried in Wincot vault, no matter at what risk or what
sacrifice. In the fierce fighting days of the olden time, the bodies of
my ancestors who fell in foreign places were recovered and brought back
to Wincot, though it often cost not heavy ransom only, but desperate
bloodshed as well, to obtain them. This superstition, if you please to
call it so, has never died out of the family from that time to the
present day; for centuries the succession of the dead in the vault at
the Abbey has been unbroken—absolutely unbroken—until now. The place
mentioned in the prediction as waiting to be filled is Stephen
Monkton’s place; the voice that cries vainly to the earth for shelter
is the spirit-voice of the dead. As surely as if I saw it, I know that
they have left him unburied on the ground where he fell!”
He stopped me before I could utter a word in remonstrance by slowly
rising to his feet, and pointing in the same direction toward which his
eyes had wandered a short time since.
“I can guess what you want to ask me,” he exclaimed, sternly and
loudly; “you want to ask me how I can be mad enough to believe in a
doggerel prophecy uttered in an age of superstition to awe the most
ignorant hearers. I answer” (at those words his voice sank suddenly to
a whisper), “I answer, because _Stephen Monkton himself stands there at
this moment confirming me in my belief_.”
Whether it was the awe and horror that looked out ghastly from his face
as he confronted me, whether it was that I had never hitherto fairly
believed in the reports about his madness, and that the conviction of
their truth now forced itself upon me on a sudden, I know not, but I
felt my blood curdling as he spoke, and I knew in my own heart, as I
sat there speechless, that I dare not turn round and look where he was
still pointing close at my side.
“I see there,” he went on, in the same whispering voice, “the figure of
a dark-complexioned man standing up with his head uncovered. One of his
hands, still clutching a pistol, has fallen to his side; the other
presses a bloody handkerchief over his mouth. The spasm of mortal agony
convulses his features; but I know them for the features of a swarthy
man who twice frightened me by taking me up in his arms when I was a
child at Wincot Abbey. I asked the nurses at the time who that man was,
and they told me it was my uncle, Stephen Monkton. Plainly, as if he
stood there living, I see him now at your side, with the death-glare in
his great black eyes; and so have I ever seen him, since the moment
when he was shot; at home and abroad, waking or sleeping, day and
night, we are always together, wherever I go!”
His whispering tones sank into almost inaudible murmuring as he
pronounced these last words. From the direction and expression of his
eyes, I suspected that he was speaking to the apparition. If I had
beheld it myself at that moment, it would have been, I think, a less
horrible sight to witness than to see him, as I saw him now, muttering
inarticulately at vacancy. My own nerves were more shaken than I could
have thought possible by what had passed. A vague dread of being near
him in his present mood came over me, and I moved back a step or two.
He noticed the action instantly.
“Don’t go! pray—pray don’t go! Have I alarmed you? Don’t you believe
me? Do the lights make your eyes ache? I only asked you to sit in the
glare of the candles because I could not bear to see the light that
always shines from the phantom there at dusk shining over you as you
sat in the shadow. Don’t go—don’t leave me yet!”
There was an utter forlornness, an unspeakable misery in his face as he
spoke these words, which gave me back my self-possession by the simple
process of first moving me to pity. I resumed my chair, and said that I
would stay with him as long as he wished.
“Thank you a thousand times. You are patience and kindness itself,” he
said, going back to his former place and resuming his former gentleness
of manner. “Now that I have got over my first confession of the misery
that follows me in secret wherever I go, I think I can tell you calmly
all that remains to be told. You see, as I said, my Uncle Stephen” he
turned away his head quickly, and looked down at the table as the name
passed his lips—“my Uncle Stephen came twice to Wincot while I was a
child, and on both occasions frightened me dreadfully. He only took me
up in his arms and spoke to me—very kindly, as I afterward heard, for
_him_—but he terrified me, nevertheless. Perhaps I was frightened at
his great stature, his swarthy complexion, and his thick black hair and
mustache, as other children might have been; perhaps the mere sight of
him had some strange influence on me which I could not then understand
and cannot now explain. However it was, I used to dream of him long
after he had gone away, and to fancy that he was stealing on me to
catch me up in his arms whenever I was left in the dark. The servants
who took care of me found this out, and used to threaten me with my
Uncle Stephen whenever I was perverse and difficult to manage. As I
grew up, I still retained my vague dread and abhorrence of our absent
relative. I always listened intently, yet without knowing why, whenever
his name was mentioned by my father or my mother—listened with an
unaccountable presentiment that something terrible had happened to him,
or was about to happen to me. This feeling only changed when I was left
alone in the Abbey; and then it seemed to merge into the eager
curiosity which had begun to grow on me, rather before that time, about
the origin of the ancient prophecy predicting the extinction of our
race. Are you following me?”
“I follow every word with the closest attention.”
“You must know, then, that I had first found out some fragments of the
old rhyme in which the prophecy occurs quoted as a curiosity in an
antiquarian book in the library. On the page opposite this quotation
had been pasted a rude old wood-cut, representing a dark-haired man,
whose face was so strangely like what I remembered of my Uncle Stephen
that the portrait absolutely startled me. When I asked my father about
this—it was then just before his death—he either knew, or pretended to
know, nothing of it; and when I afterward mentioned the prediction he
fretfully changed the subject. It was just the same with our chaplain
when I spoke to him. He said the portrait had been done centuries
before my uncle was born, and called the prophecy doggerel and
nonsense. I used to argue with him on the latter point, asking why we
Catholics, who believed that the gift of working miracles had never
departed from certain favored persons, might not just as well believe
that the gift of prophecy had never departed, either? He would not
dispute with me; he would only say that I must not waste time in
thinking of such trifles; that I had more imagination than was good for
me, and must suppress instead of exciting it. Such advice as this only
irritated my curiosity. I determined secretly to search throughout the
oldest uninhabited part of the Abbey, and to try if I could not find
out from forgotten family records what the portrait was, and when the
prophecy had been first written or uttered. Did you ever pass a day
alone in the long-deserted chambers of an ancient house?”
“Never! such solitude as that is not at all to my taste.”
“Ah! what a life it was when I began my search. I should like to live
it over again. Such tempting suspense, such strange discoveries, such
wild fancies, such inthralling terrors, all belonged to that life. Only
think of breaking open the door of a room which no living soul had
entered before you for nearly a hundred years; think of the first step
forward into a region of airless, awful stillness, where the light
falls faint and sickly through closed windows and rotting curtains;
think of the ghostly creaking of the old floor that cries out on you
for treading on it, step as softly as you will; think of arms, helmets,
weird tapestries of by-gone days, that seem to be moving out on you
from the walls as you first walk up to them in the dim light; think of
prying into great cabinets and iron-clasped chests, not knowing what
horrors may appear when you tear them open; of poring over their
contents till twilight stole on you and darkness grew terrible in the
lonely place; of trying to leave it, and not being able to go, as if
something held you; of wind wailing at you outside; of shadows
darkening round you, and closing you up in obscurity within—only think
of these things, and you may imagine the fascination of suspense and
terror in such a life as mine was in those past days.”
(I shrank from imagining that life: it was bad enough to see its
results, as I saw them before me now.)
“Well, my search lasted months and months; then it was suspended a
little; then resumed. In whatever direction I pursued it I always found
something to lure me on. Terrible confessions of past crimes, shocking
proofs of secret wickedness that had been hidden securely from all eyes
but mine, came to light. Sometimes these discoveries were associated
with particular parts of the Abbey, which have had a horrible interest
of their own for me ever since; sometimes with certain old portraits in
the picture-gallery, which I actually dreaded to look at after what I
had found out. There were periods when the results of this search of
mine so horrified me that I determined to give it up entirely; but I
never could persevere in my resolution; the temptation to go on seemed
at certain intervals to get too strong for me, and then I yielded to it
again and again. At last I found the book that had belonged to the
monks with the whole of the prophecy written in the blank leaf. This
first success encouraged me to get back further yet in the family
records. I had discovered nothing hitherto of the identity of the
mysterious portrait; but the same intuitive conviction which had
assured me of its extraordinary resemblance to my Uncle Stephen seemed
also to assure me that he must be more closely connected with the
prophecy, and must know more of it than any one else. I had no means of
holding any communication with him, no means of satisfying myself
whether this strange idea of mine were right or wrong, until the day
when my doubts were settled forever by the same terrible proof which is
now present to me in this very room.”
He paused for a moment, and looked at me intently and suspiciously;
then asked if I believed all he had said to me so far. My instant reply
in the affirmative seemed to satisfy his doubts, and he went on.
“On a fine evening in February I was standing alone in one of the
deserted rooms of the western turret at the Abbey, looking at the
sunset. Just before the sun went down I felt a sensation stealing over
me which it is impossible to explain. I saw nothing, heard nothing,
knew nothing. This utter self-oblivion came suddenly; it was not
fainting, for I did not fall to the ground, did not move an inch from
my place. If such a thing could be, I should say it was the temporary
separation of soul and body without death; but all description of my
situation at that time is impossible. Call my state what you will,
trance or catalepsy, I know that I remained standing by the window
utterly unconscious—dead, mind and body—until the sun had set. Then I
came to my senses again; and then, when I opened my eyes, there was the
apparition of Stephen Monkton standing opposite to me, faintly
luminous, just as it stands opposite me at this very moment by your
side.”
“Was this before the news of the duel reached England?” I asked.
“_Two weeks before_ the news of it reached us at Wincot. And even when
we heard of the duel, we did not hear of the day on which it was
fought. I only found that out when the document which you have read was
published in the French newspaper. The date of that document, you will
remember, is February 22d, and it is stated that the duel was fought
two days afterward. I wrote down in my pocketbook, on the evening when
I saw the phantom, the day of the month on which it first appeared to
me. That day was the 24th of February.”
He paused again, as if expecting me to say something. After the words
he had just spoken, what could I say? what could I think?
“Even in the first horror of first seeing the apparition,” he went on,
“the prophecy against our house came to my mind, and with it the
conviction that I beheld before me, in that spectral presence, the
warning of my own doom. As soon as I recovered a little, I determined,
nevertheless, to test the reality of what I saw; to find out whether I
was the dupe of my own diseased fancy or not. I left the turret; the
phantom left it with me. I made an excuse to have the drawing-room at
the Abbey brilliantly lighted up; the figure was still opposite me. I
walked out into the park; it was there in the clear starlight. I went
away from home, and traveled many miles to the sea-side; still the tall
dark man in his death agony was with me. After this I strove against
the fatality no more. I returned to the Abbey, and tried to resign
myself to my misery. But this was not to be. I had a hope that was
dearer to me than my own life; I had one treasure belonging to me that
I shuddered at the prospect of losing; and when the phantom presence
stood a warning obstacle between me and this one treasure, this dearest
hope, then my misery grew heavier than I could bear. You must know what
I am alluding to; you must have heard often that I was engaged to be
married?”
“Yes, often. I have some acquaintance myself with Miss Elmslie.”
“You never can know all that she has sacrificed for me—never can
imagine what I have felt for years and years past”—his voice trembled,
and the tears came into his eyes—“but I dare not trust myself to speak
of that; the thought of the old happy days in the Abbey almost breaks
my heart now. Let me get back to the other subject. I must tell you
that I kept the frightful vision which pursued me, at all times and in
all places, a secret from everybody, knowing the vile reports about my
having inherited madness from my family, and fearing that an unfair
advantage would be taken of any confession that I might make. Though
the phantom always stood opposite to me, and therefore always appeared
either before or by the side of any person to whom I spoke, I soon
schooled myself to hide from others that I was looking at it except on
rare occasions, when I have perhaps betrayed myself to you. But my
self-possession availed me nothing with Ada. The day of our marriage
was approaching.”
He stopped and shuddered. I waited in silence till he had controlled
himself.
“Think,” he went on, “think of what I must have suffered at looking
always on that hideous vision whenever I looked on my betrothed wife!
Think of my taking her hand, and seeming to take it through the figure
of the apparition! Think of the calm angel-face and the tortured
specter-face being always together whenever my eyes met hers! Think of
this, and you will not wonder that I betrayed my secret to her. She
eagerly entreated to know the worst—nay, more, she insisted on knowing
it. At her bidding I told all, and then left her free to break our
engagement. The thought of death was in my heart as I spoke the parting
words—death by my own act, if life still held out after our separation.
She suspected that thought; she knew it, and never left me till her
good influence had destroyed it forever. But for her I should not have
been alive now; but for her I should never have attempted the project
which has brought me here.”
“Do you mean that it was at Miss Elmslie’s suggestion that you came to
Naples?” I asked, in amazement.
“I mean that what she said suggested the design which has brought me to
Naples,” he answered. “While I believed that the phantom had appeared
to me as the fatal messenger of death, there was no comfort—there was
misery, rather, in hearing her say that no power on earth should make
her desert me, and that she would live for me, and for me only, through
every trial. But it was far different when we afterward reasoned
together about the purpose which the apparition had come to fulfill—far
different when she showed me that its mission might be for good instead
of for evil, and that the warning it was sent to give might be to my
profit instead of to my loss. At those words, the new idea which gave
the new hope of life came to me in an instant. I believed then, what I
believe now, that I have a supernatural warrant for my errand here. In
that faith I live; without it I should die. _She_ never ridiculed it,
never scorned it as insanity. Mark what I say! The spirit that appeared
to me in the Abbey—that has never left me since—that stands there now
by your side, warns me to escape from the fatality which hangs over our
race, and commands me, if I would avoid it, to bury the unburied dead.
Mortal loves and mortal interests must bow to that awful bidding. The
specter-presence will never leave me till I have sheltered the corpse
that cries to the earth to cover it! I dare not return—I dare not marry
till I have filled the place that is empty in Wincot vault.”
His eyes flashed and dilated—his voice deepened—a fanatic ecstasy shone
in his expression as he uttered these words. Shocked and grieved as I
was, I made no attempt to remonstrate or to reason with him. It would
have been useless to have referred to any of the usual commonplaces
about optical delusions or diseased imaginations—worse than useless to
have attempted to account by natural causes for any of the
extraordinary coincidences and events of which he had spoken. Briefly
as he had referred to Miss Elmslie, he had said enough to show me that
the only hope of the poor girl who loved him best and had known him
longest of any one was in humoring his delusions to the last. How
faithfully she still clung to the belief that she could restore him!
How resolutely was she sacrificing herself to his morbid fancies, in
the hope of a happy future that might never come! Little as I knew of
Miss Elmslie, the mere thought of her situation, as I now reflected on
it, made me feel sick at heart.
“They call me Mad Monkton!” he exclaimed, suddenly breaking the silence
between us during the last few minutes, “Here and in England everybody
believes I am out of my senses except Ada and you. She has been my
salvation, and you will be my salvation too. Something told me that
when I first met you walking in the Villa Peale. I struggled against
the strong desire that was in me to trust my secret to you, but I could
resist it no longer when I saw you to-night at the ball; the phantom
seemed to draw me on to you as you stood alone in the quiet room. Tell
me more of that idea of yours about finding the place where the duel
was fought. If I set out to-morrow to seek for it myself, where must I
go to first? where?” He stopped; his strength was evidently becoming
exhausted, and his mind was growing confused. “What am I to do? I can’t
remember. You know everything—will you not help me? My misery has made
me unable to help myself.”
He stopped, murmured something about failing if he went to the frontier
alone, and spoke confusedly of delays that might be fatal, then tried
to utter the name of “Ada”; but, in pronouncing the first letter, his
voice faltered, and, turning abruptly from me, he burst into tears.
My pity for him got the better of my prudence at that moment, and
without thinking of responsibilities, I promised at once to do for him
whatever he asked. The wild triumph in his expression as he started up
and seized my hand showed me that I had better have been more cautious;
but it was too late now to retract what I had said. The next best thing
to do was to try if I could not induce him to compose himself a little,
and then to go away and think coolly over the whole affair by myself.
“Yes, yes,” he rejoined, in answer to the few words I now spoke to try
and calm him, “don’t be afraid about me. After what you have said, I’ll
answer for my own coolness and composure under all emergencies. I have
been so long used to the apparition that I hardly feel its presence at
all except on rare occasions. Besides, I have here in this little
packet of letters the medicine for every malady of the sick heart. They
are Ada’s letters; I read them to calm me whenever my misfortune seems
to get the better of my endurance. I wanted that half hour to read them
in to-night before you came, to make myself fit to see you, and I shall
go through them again after you are gone; so, once more, don’t be
afraid about me. I know I shall succeed with your help, and Ada shall
thank you as you deserve to be thanked when we get back to England. If
you hear the fools at Naples talk about my being mad, don’t trouble
yourself to contradict them; the scandal is so contemptible that it
must end by contradicting itself.”
I left him, promising to return early the next day.
When I got back to my hotel, I felt that any idea of sleeping after all
that I had seen and heard was out of the question; so I lit my pipe,
and, sitting by the window—how it refreshed my mind just then to look
at the calm moonlight!—tried to think what it would be best to do. In
the first place, any appeal to doctors or to Alfred’s friends in
England was out of the question. I could not persuade myself that his
intellect was sufficiently disordered to justify me, under existing
circumstances, in disclosing the secret which he had intrusted to my
keeping. In the second place, all attempts on my part to induce him to
abandon the idea of searching out his uncle’s remains would be utterly
useless after what I had incautiously said to him. Having settled these
two conclusions, the only really great difficulty which remained to
perplex me was whether I was justified in aiding him to execute his
extraordinary purpose.
Supposing that, with my help, he found Mr. Monkton’s body, and took it
back with him to England, was it right in me thus to lend myself to
promoting the marriage which would most likely follow these events—a
marriage which it might be the duty of every one to prevent at all
hazards? This set me thinking about the extent of his madness, or to
speak more mildly and more correctly, of his delusion. Sane he
certainly was on all ordinary subjects; nay, in all the narrative parts
of what he had said to me on this very evening he had spoken clearly
and connectedly. As for the story of the apparition, other men, with
intellects as clear as the intellects of their neighbors had fancied
themselves pursued by a phantom, and had even written about it in a
high strain of philosophical speculation. It was plain that the real
hallucination in the case now before me lay in Monkton’s conviction of
the truth of the old prophecy, and in his idea that the fancied
apparition was a supernatural warning to him to evade its
denunciations; and it was equally clear that both delusions had been
produced, in the first instance, by the lonely life he had led acting
on a naturally excitable temperament, which was rendered further liable
to moral disease by an hereditary taint of insanity.
Was this curable? Miss Elmslie, who knew him far better than I did,
seemed by her conduct to think so. Had I any reason or right to
determine offhand that she was mistaken? Supposing I refused to go to
the frontier with him, he would then most certainly depart by himself,
to commit all sorts of errors, and perhaps to meet with all sorts of
accidents; while I, an idle man, with my time entirely at my own
disposal, was stopping at Naples, and leaving him to his fate after I
had suggested the plan of his expedition, and had encouraged him to
confide in me. In this way I kept turning the subject over and over
again in my mind, being quite free, let me add, from looking at it in
any other than a practical point of view. I firmly believed, as a
derider of all ghost stories, that Alfred was deceiving himself in
fancying that he had seen the apparition of his uncle before the news
of Mr. Monkton’s death reached England, and I was on this account,
therefore, uninfluenced by the slightest infection of my unhappy
friend’s delusions when I at last fairly decided to accompany him in
his extraordinary search. Possibly my harum-scarum fondness for
excitement at that time biased me a little in forming my resolution;
but I must add, in common justice to myself, that I also acted from
motives of real sympathy for Monkton, and from a sincere wish to allay,
if I could, the anxiety of the poor girl who was still so faithfully
waiting and hoping for him far away in England.
Certain arrangements preliminary to our departure, which I found myself
obliged to make after a second interview with Alfred, betrayed the
object of our journey to most of our Neapolitan friends. The
astonishment of everybody was of course unbounded, and the nearly
universal suspicion that I must be as mad in my way as Monkton himself
showed itself pretty plainly in my presence. Some people actually tried
to combat my resolution by telling me what a shameless profligate
Stephen Monkton had been—as if I had a strong personal interest in
hunting out his remains! Ridicule moved me as little as any arguments
of this sort; my mind was made up, and I was as obstinate then as I am
now.
In two days’ time I had got everything ready, and had ordered the
traveling carriage to the door some hours earlier than we had
originally settled. We were jovially threatened with “a parting cheer”
by all our English acquaintances, and I thought it desirable to avoid
this on my friend’s account; for he had been more excited, as it was,
by the preparations for the journey than I at all liked. Accordingly,
soon after sunrise, without a soul in the street to stare at us, we
privately left Naples.
Nobody will wonder, I think, that I experienced some difficulty in
realizing my own position, and shrank instinctively from looking
forward a single day into the future, when I now found myself starting,
in company with “Mad Monkton,” to hunt for the body of a dead duelist
all along the frontier line of the Roman States!