The Queen of Hearts

by Wilkie Collins

  CHAPTER IV.

  "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 ourfamily, which is still preserved among the traditions of Wincot Abbey?"

  "I have heard of such a prophecy," I answered, "but I never knew in whatterms it was expressed. It professed to predict the extinction of yourfamily, or something of that sort, did it not?"

  "No inquiries," he went on, "have traced back that prophecy to the timewhen it was first made; none of our family records tell us anything ofits origin. Old servants and old tenants of ours remember to have heardit from their fathers and grandfathers. The monks, whom we succeeded inthe 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 tohave been preserved from a very remote period, written on a blank leafof one of the Abbey manuscripts. These are the verses, if verses theydeserve 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 anancient oracle," said I, observing that he waited, after repeating theverses, 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 whichthe prediction points; and the corpse of Stephen Monkton is not in thevaults of Wincot Abbey. Wait before you exclaim against me. I have moreto say about this. Long before the Abbey was ours, when we lived in theancient manor-house near it (the very ruins of which have long sincedisappeared), the family burying-place was in the vault under the Abbeychapel. Whether in those remote times the prediction against us wasknown and dreaded or not, this much is certain: every one of theMonktons (whether living at the Abbey or on the smaller estate inScotland) was buried in Wincot vault, no matter at what risk or whatsacrifice. In the fierce fighting days of the olden time, the bodies ofmy ancestors who fell in foreign places were recovered and brought backto Wincot, though it often cost not heavy ransom only, but desperatebloodshed as well, to obtain them. This superstition, if you pleaseto call it so, has never died out of the family from that time to thepresent day; for centuries the succession of the dead in the vault atthe Abbey has been unbroken--absolutely unbroken--until now. The placementioned in the prediction as waiting to be filled is Stephen Monkton'splace; the voice that cries vainly to the earth for shelter is thespirit-voice of the dead. As surely as if I saw it, I know that theyhave left him unburied on the ground where he fell!"

  He stopped me before I could utter a word in remonstrance by slowlyrising to his feet, and pointing in the same direction toward which hiseyes 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 doggerelprophecy uttered in an age of superstition to awe the most ignoranthearers. I answer" (at those words his voice sank suddenly to awhisper), "I answer, because _Stephen Monkton himself stands there atthis moment confirming me in my belief_."

  Whether it was the awe and horror that looked out ghastly from his faceas he confronted me, whether it was that I had never hitherto fairlybelieved in the reports about his madness, and that the conviction oftheir truth now forced itself upon me on a sudden, I know not, but Ifelt my blood curdling as he spoke, and I knew in my own heart, as I satthere speechless, that I dare not turn round and look where he was stillpointing close at my side.

  "I see there," he went on, in the same whispering voice, "the figure ofa dark-complexioned man standing up with his head uncovered. One ofhis hands, still clutching a pistol, has fallen to his side; the otherpresses a bloody handkerchief over his mouth. The spasm of mortal agonyconvulses his features; but I know them for the features of a swarthyman who twice frightened me by taking me up in his arms when I was achild 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 hestood there living, I see him now at your side, with the death-glare inhis great black eyes; and so have I ever seen him, since the moment whenhe was shot; at home and abroad, waking or sleeping, day and night, weare always together, wherever I go!"

  His whispering tones sank into almost inaudible murmuring as hepronounced these last words. From the direction and expression of hiseyes, I suspected that he was speaking to the apparition. If I hadbeheld it myself at that moment, it would have been, I think, a lesshorrible sight to witness than to see him, as I saw him now, mutteringinarticulately at vacancy. My own nerves were more shaken than I couldhave thought possible by what had passed. A vague dread of being nearhim 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 believeme? Do the lights make your eyes ache? I only asked you to sit in theglare of the candles because I could not bear to see the light thatalways shines from the phantom there at dusk shining over you as you satin the shadow. Don't go--don't leave me yet!"

  There was an utter forlornness, an unspeakable misery in his face as hespoke these words, which gave me back my self-possession by the simpleprocess of first moving me to pity. I resumed my chair, and said that Iwould stay with him as long as he wished.

  "Thank you a thousand times. You are patience and kindness itself," hesaid, going back to his former place and resuming his former gentlenessof manner. "Now that I have got over my first confession of the miserythat follows me in secret wherever I go, I think I can tell you calmlyall that remains to be told. You see, as I said, my Uncle Stephen" heturned away his head quickly, and looked down at the table as the namepassed his lips--"my Uncle Stephen came twice to Wincot while I was achild, and on both occasions frightened me dreadfully. He only took meup in his arms and spoke to me--very kindly, as I afterward heard, for_him_--but he terrified me, nevertheless. Perhaps I was frightened athis great stature, his swarthy complexion, and his thick black hair andmustache, as other children might have been; perhaps the mere sight ofhim had some strange influence on me which I could not then understandand cannot now explain. However it was, I used to dream of him longafter he had gone away, and to fancy that he was stealing on me to catchme up in his arms whenever I was left in the dark. The servants who tookcare of me found this out, and used to threaten me with my Uncle Stephenwhenever I was perverse and difficult to manage. As I grew up, I stillretained my vague dread and abhorrence of our absent relative. I alwayslistened intently, yet without knowing why, whenever his name wasmentioned by my father or my mother--listened with an unaccountablepresentiment that something terrible had happened to him, or was aboutto happen to me. This feeling only changed when I was left alone in theAbbey; and then it seemed to merge into the eager curiosity which hadbegun to grow on me, rather before that time, about the origin ofthe ancient prophecy predicting the extinction of our race. Are youfollowing me?"

  "I follow every word with the closest attention."

  "You must know, then, that I had first found out some fragments ofthe old rhyme in which the prophecy occurs quoted as a curiosity in anantiquarian book in the library. On the page opposite this quotation hadbeen pasted a rude old wood-cut, representing a dark-haired man, whoseface was so strangely like what I remembered of my Uncle Stephen thatthe portrait absolutely startled me. When I asked my father aboutthis--it was then just before his death--he either knew, or pretendedto know, nothing of it; and when I afterward mentioned the predictionhe fretfully changed the subject. It was just the same with our chaplainwhen I spoke to him. He said the portrait had been done centuries beforemy uncle was born,
and called the prophecy doggerel and nonsense. Iused to argue with him on the latter point, asking why we Catholics,who believed that the gift of working miracles had never departed fromcertain favored persons, might not just as well believe that the giftof prophecy had never departed, either? He would not dispute with me; hewould 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 suppressinstead of exciting it. Such advice as this only irritated my curiosity.I determined secretly to search throughout the oldest uninhabited partof the Abbey, and to try if I could not find out from forgotten familyrecords what the portrait was, and when the prophecy had been firstwritten or uttered. Did you ever pass a day alone in the long-desertedchambers 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 itover again. Such tempting suspense, such strange discoveries, such wildfancies, such inthralling terrors, all belonged to that life. Only thinkof breaking open the door of a room which no living soul had enteredbefore you for nearly a hundred years; think of the first step forwardinto a region of airless, awful stillness, where the light falls faintand sickly through closed windows and rotting curtains; think of theghostly creaking of the old floor that cries out on you for treading onit, step as softly as you will; think of arms, helmets, weird tapestriesof by-gone days, that seem to be moving out on you from the walls asyou first walk up to them in the dim light; think of prying into greatcabinets and iron-clasped chests, not knowing what horrors may appearwhen you tear them open; of poring over their contents till twilightstole on you and darkness grew terrible in the lonely place; of tryingto leave it, and not being able to go, as if something held you; of windwailing at you outside; of shadows darkening round you, and closing youup in obscurity within--only think of these things, and you may imaginethe fascination of suspense and terror in such a life as mine was inthose past days."

  (I shrank from imagining that life: it was bad enough to see itsresults, as I saw them before me now.)

  "Well, my search lasted months and months; then it was suspended alittle; then resumed. In whatever direction I pursued it I always foundsomething to lure me on. Terrible confessions of past crimes, shockingproofs of secret wickedness that had been hidden securely from all eyesbut mine, came to light. Sometimes these discoveries were associatedwith particular parts of the Abbey, which have had a horrible interestof their own for me ever since; sometimes with certain old portraits inthe picture-gallery, which I actually dreaded to look at after what Ihad found out. There were periods when the results of this search ofmine so horrified me that I determined to give it up entirely; but Inever could persevere in my resolution; the temptation to go on seemedat certain intervals to get too strong for me, and then I yielded to itagain and again. At last I found the book that had belonged to the monkswith the whole of the prophecy written in the blank leaf. This firstsuccess encouraged me to get back further yet in the family records.I had discovered nothing hitherto of the identity of the mysteriousportrait; but the same intuitive conviction which had assured me of itsextraordinary resemblance to my Uncle Stephen seemed also to assure methat he must be more closely connected with the prophecy, and mustknow more of it than any one else. I had no means of holding anycommunication with him, no means of satisfying myself whether thisstrange idea of mine were right or wrong, until the day when my doubtswere settled forever by the same terrible proof which is now present tome in this very room."

  He paused for a moment, and looked at me intently and suspiciously; thenasked if I believed all he had said to me so far. My instant reply inthe affirmative seemed to satisfy his doubts, and he went on.

  "On a fine evening in February I was standing alone in one of thedeserted rooms of the western turret at the Abbey, looking at thesunset. Just before the sun went down I felt a sensation stealing overme which it is impossible to explain. I saw nothing, heard nothing, knewnothing. 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. Ifsuch a thing could be, I should say it was the temporary separation ofsoul and body without death; but all description of my situation at thattime is impossible. Call my state what you will, trance or catalepsy, Iknow 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 StephenMonkton standing opposite to me, faintly luminous, just as it standsopposite 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 whenwe heard of the duel, we did not hear of the day on which it wasfought. I only found that out when the document which you have read waspublished in the French newspaper. The date of that document, you willremember, is February 22d, and it is stated that the duel was fought twodays afterward. I wrote down in my pocketbook, on the evening when I sawthe phantom, the day of the month on which it first appeared to me. Thatday was the 24th of February."

  He paused again, as if expecting me to say something. After the words hehad just spoken, what could I say? what could I think?

  "Even in the first horror of first seeing the apparition," he wenton, "the prophecy against our house came to my mind, and with it theconviction that I beheld before me, in that spectral presence, thewarning 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 whetherI was the dupe of my own diseased fancy or not. I left the turret; thephantom left it with me. I made an excuse to have the drawing-room atthe Abbey brilliantly lighted up; the figure was still opposite me. Iwalked out into the park; it was there in the clear starlight. I wentaway from home, and traveled many miles to the sea-side; still the talldark man in his death agony was with me. After this I strove against thefatality no more. I returned to the Abbey, and tried to resign myselfto my misery. But this was not to be. I had a hope that was dearer to methan my own life; I had one treasure belonging to me that I shudderedat the prospect of losing; and when the phantom presence stood a warningobstacle between me and this one treasure, this dearest hope, then mymisery grew heavier than I could bear. You must know what I am alludingto; 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 canimagine 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 speakof that; the thought of the old happy days in the Abbey almost breaks myheart now. Let me get back to the other subject. I must tell you thatI kept the frightful vision which pursued me, at all times and in allplaces, a secret from everybody, knowing the vile reports about myhaving inherited madness from my family, and fearing that an unfairadvantage would be taken of any confession that I might make. Thoughthe phantom always stood opposite to me, and therefore always appearedeither before or by the side of any person to whom I spoke, I soonschooled myself to hide from others that I was looking at it excepton rare occasions, when I have perhaps betrayed myself to you. But myself-possession availed me nothing with Ada. The day of our marriage wasapproaching."

  He stopped and shuddered. I waited in silence till he had controlledhimself.

  "Think," he went on, "think of what I must have suffered at lookingalways on that hideous vision whenever I looked on my betrothed wife!Think of my taking her hand, and seeming to take it through the figureof the apparition! Think of the calm angel-face and the torturedspecter-face being always together whenever my eyes met hers! Thinkof this, and you will not wonder that I betrayed my secret to her. Sheeagerly entreated to know the worst--nay, more, she insisted on knowingit. At her bidding I told all, and then left her free to break ourengagement. The thought of death was in my heart as I spoke the parti
ngwords--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 goodinfluence had destroyed it forever. But for her I should not have beenalive now; but for her I should never have attempted the project whichhas brought me here."

  "Do you mean that it was at Miss Elmslie's suggestion that you came toNaples?" I asked, in amazement.

  "I mean that what she said suggested the design which has brought me toNaples," he answered. "While I believed that the phantom had appearedto me as the fatal messenger of death, there was no comfort--there wasmisery, rather, in hearing her say that no power on earth should makeher desert me, and that she would live for me, and for me only, throughevery trial. But it was far different when we afterward reasonedtogether about the purpose which the apparition had come to fulfill--fardifferent when she showed me that its mission might be for good insteadof for evil, and that the warning it was sent to give might be to myprofit instead of to my loss. At those words, the new idea which gavethe new hope of life came to me in an instant. I believed then, what Ibelieve now, that I have a supernatural warrant for my errand here. Inthat faith I live; without it I should die. _She_ never ridiculed it,never scorned it as insanity. Mark what I say! The spirit that appearedto me in the Abbey--that has never left me since--that stands there nowby your side, warns me to escape from the fatality which hangs over ourrace, and commands me, if I would avoid it, to bury the unburied dead.Mortal loves and mortal interests must bow to that awful bidding. Thespecter-presence will never leave me till I have sheltered the corpsethat cries to the earth to cover it! I dare not return--I dare not marrytill I have filled the place that is empty in Wincot vault."

  His eyes flashed and dilated--his voice deepened--a fanatic ecstasyshone in his expression as he uttered these words. Shocked and grievedas 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 usualcommonplaces about optical delusions or diseased imaginations--worsethan useless to have attempted to account by natural causes for anyof the extraordinary coincidences and events of which he had spoken.Briefly as he had referred to Miss Elmslie, he had said enough to showme that the only hope of the poor girl who loved him best and had knownhim longest of any one was in humoring his delusions to the last. Howfaithfully she still clung to the belief that she could restore him!How resolutely was she sacrificing herself to his morbid fancies, in thehope of a happy future that might never come! Little as I knew of MissElmslie, 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 silencebetween us during the last few minutes, "Here and in England everybodybelieves I am out of my senses except Ada and you. She has been mysalvation, and you will be my salvation too. Something told me thatwhen I first met you walking in the Villa Peale. I struggled againstthe strong desire that was in me to trust my secret to you, but I couldresist it no longer when I saw you to-night at the ball; the phantomseemed to draw me on to you as you stood alone in the quiet room. Tellme more of that idea of yours about finding the place where the duel wasfought. If I set out to-morrow to seek for it myself, where must I goto first? where?" He stopped; his strength was evidently becomingexhausted, and his mind was growing confused. "What am I to do? I can'tremember. You know everything--will you not help me? My misery has mademe unable to help myself."

  He stopped, murmured something about failing if he went to the frontieralone, and spoke confusedly of delays that might be fatal, then tried toutter the name of "Ada"; but, in pronouncing the first letter, his voicefaltered, and, turning abruptly from me, he burst into tears.

  My pity for him got the better of my prudence at that moment, andwithout thinking of responsibilities, I promised at once to do for himwhatever he asked. The wild triumph in his expression as he started upand 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 thingto 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 tryand calm him, "don't be afraid about me. After what you have said, I'llanswer for my own coolness and composure under all emergencies. I havebeen so long used to the apparition that I hardly feel its presence atall except on rare occasions. Besides, I have here in this little packetof letters the medicine for every malady of the sick heart. They areAda's letters; I read them to calm me whenever my misfortune seems toget the better of my endurance. I wanted that half hour to read them into-night before you came, to make myself fit to see you, and I shall gothrough them again after you are gone; so, once more, don't be afraidabout me. I know I shall succeed with your help, and Ada shall thank youas you deserve to be thanked when we get back to England. If you hearthe fools at Naples talk about my being mad, don't trouble yourselfto contradict them; the scandal is so contemptible that it must end bycontradicting 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 allthat 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 lookat the calm moonlight!--tried to think what it would be best to do. Inthe first place, any appeal to doctors or to Alfred's friends in Englandwas out of the question. I could not persuade myself that his intellectwas sufficiently disordered to justify me, under existing circumstances,in disclosing the secret which he had intrusted to my keeping. In thesecond place, all attempts on my part to induce him to abandon the ideaof searching out his uncle's remains would be utterly useless after whatI had incautiously said to him. Having settled these two conclusions,the only really great difficulty which remained to perplex me waswhether I was justified in aiding him to execute his extraordinarypurpose.

  Supposing that, with my help, he found Mr. Monkton's body, and tookit back with him to England, was it right in me thus to lend myself topromoting the marriage which would most likely follow these events--amarriage which it might be the duty of every one to prevent at allhazards? This set me thinking about the extent of his madness, or tospeak more mildly and more correctly, of his delusion. Sane he certainlywas on all ordinary subjects; nay, in all the narrative parts of whathe had said to me on this very evening he had spoken clearly andconnectedly. As for the story of the apparition, other men, withintellects as clear as the intellects of their neighbors had fanciedthemselves pursued by a phantom, and had even written about it in ahigh strain of philosophical speculation. It was plain that the realhallucination in the case now before me lay in Monkton's convictionof the truth of the old prophecy, and in his idea that the fanciedapparition was a supernatural warning to him to evade its denunciations;and it was equally clear that both delusions had been produced, in thefirst instance, by the lonely life he had led acting on a naturallyexcitable temperament, which was rendered further liable to moraldisease 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 todetermine offhand that she was mistaken? Supposing I refused to go tothe frontier with him, he would then most certainly depart by himself,to commit all sorts of errors, and perhaps to meet with all sortsof accidents; while I, an idle man, with my time entirely at my owndisposal, was stopping at Naples, and leaving him to his fate afterI had suggested the plan of his expedition, and had encouraged him toconfide in me. In this way I kept turning the subject over and overagain in my mind, being quite free, let me add, from looking at itin any other than a practical point of view. I firmly believed, asa derider of all ghost stories, that Alfred was deceiving himself infancying that he had seen the apparition of his uncle before the newsof Mr. Monkton's death reached England, and I was on this account,therefore, uninfluenced by the slightest infection of my unhappyfriend's delu
sions when I at last fairly decided to accompany him in hisextraordinary search. Possibly my harum-scarum fondness for excitementat that time biased me a little in forming my resolution; but I mustadd, in common justice to myself, that I also acted from motives of realsympathy for Monkton, and from a sincere wish to allay, if I could, theanxiety of the poor girl who was still so faithfully waiting and hopingfor him far away in England.

  Certain arrangements preliminary to our departure, which I found myselfobliged to make after a second interview with Alfred, betrayedthe object of our journey to most of our Neapolitan friends. Theastonishment of everybody was of course unbounded, and the nearlyuniversal suspicion that I must be as mad in my way as Monkton himselfshowed itself pretty plainly in my presence. Some people actuallytried to combat my resolution by telling me what a shameless profligateStephen Monkton had been--as if I had a strong personal interest inhunting out his remains! Ridicule moved me as little as any arguments ofthis 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 thetraveling carriage to the door some hours earlier than we had originallysettled. We were jovially threatened with "a parting cheer" by all ourEnglish acquaintances, and I thought it desirable to avoid this onmy friend's account; for he had been more excited, as it was, by thepreparations for the journey than I at all liked. Accordingly, soonafter sunrise, without a soul in the street to stare at us, we privatelyleft Naples.

  Nobody will wonder, I think, that I experienced some difficulty inrealizing my own position, and shrank instinctively from looking forwarda single day into the future, when I now found myself starting, incompany with "Mad Monkton," to hunt for the body of a dead duelist allalong the frontier line of the Roman States!