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Updated: May 12, 2025
All his questions were about Miss Elmslie and Wincot Abbey, and all his talk referred to the period when his father was yet alive. The doctors augured good rather than ill from this loss of memory of recent incidents, saying that it would turn out to be temporary, and that it answered the first great healing purpose of keeping his mind at ease.
Stephen Monkton had been brought to Wincot, his coffin would have been placed there." A chill came over me, and a sense of dread which I am ashamed of having felt now, but which I could not combat then. The blessed light of day was pouring down gayly at the other end of the vault through the open door. I turned my back on the empty niche, and hurried into the sunlight and the fresh air.
Literally, there was now no companion for him at the Abbey but the old priest the Monktons, I should have mentioned before, were Roman Catholics who had held the office of tutor to Alfred from his earliest years. He came of age, and there was not even so much as a private dinner-party at Wincot to celebrate the event.
THE Monktons of Wincot Abbey bore a sad character for want of sociability in our county. They never went to other people's houses, and, excepting my father, and a lady and her daughter living near them, never received anybody under their own roof. Proud as they all certainly were, it was not pride, but dread, which kept them thus apart from their neighbors.
The one other member of this, the elder branch of the family, who was then alive, was Mr. Monkton's younger brother, Stephen. He was an unmarried man, possessing a fine estate in Scotland; but he lived almost entirely on the Continent, and bore the reputation of being a shameless profligate. The family at Wincot held almost as little communication with him as with their neighbors.
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.
He actually put off his marriage with Miss Elmslie, which was then about to be celebrated, to come out here in search of the burial-place of his wretched scamp of an uncle; and no power on earth will now induce him to return to England and to Miss Elmslie until he has found the body, and can take it back with him, to be buried with all the other dead Monktons in the vault under Wincot Abbey Chapel.
Impatient to return, and resolved not to lose sight of the coffin till he had seen it placed in Wincot vault, Monkton decided immediately on hiring the first ship that could be obtained. The vessel in port which we were informed could soonest be got ready for sea was a Sicilian brig, and this vessel my friend accordingly engaged.
If I argued with him, and he answered me, how could I rejoin? If he said, "The prophecy points at the last of the family: I am the last of the family. The prophecy mentions an empty place in Wincot vault; there is such an empty place there at this moment.
It will console you to know that he never mentioned events at Naples, or the shipwreck that followed them, from the day of his return to the day of his death." Three days after reading the letter I was at Wincot, and heard all the details of Alfred's last moments from the priest.
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