第54章

"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 Iknow 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, Ithink, 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.