"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.
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