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Updated: May 12, 2025
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.
I have already mentioned my father, and a lady and her daughter, as the only privileged people who were admitted into Wincot Abbey. My father had been an old school and college friend of Mr. Monkton, and accident had brought them so much together in later life that their continued intimacy at Wincot was quite intelligible. I am not so well able to account for the friendly terms on which Mrs.
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.
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.
Saying this, he leaned his head on his hand, sighed, and began repeating softly to himself the lines of the old prophecy: 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 Monktons line.
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.
The fatality hangs over my head no longer. I shall bury the unburied dead; I shall fill the vacant place in Wincot vault; and then then the new life, the life with Ada!" That name seemed to recall him to himself. He drew his traveling desk toward him, placed the packet of letters in it, and then took out a sheet of paper.
"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.
He looked down on it steadfastly when he next spoke to me. "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.
"I do know a little of him," I answered; "he was engaged to Miss Elmslie when I was last in the neighborhood of Wincot. Is he married to her yet?" "No, and he never ought to be. He has gone the way of the rest of the family or, in plainer words, he has gone mad." "Mad! But I ought not to be surprised at hearing that, after the reports about him in England."
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