The servants who took care of me found this out, and used to
threaten me with my Uncle Stephen whenever I was perverse and
difficult to manage. As I grew up, I still retained my vague
dread and abhorrence of our absent relative. I always listened
intently, yet without knowing why, whenever his name was
mentioned by my father or my mother--listened with an
unaccountable presentiment that something terrible had happened
to him, or was about to happen to me. This feeling only changed
when I was left alone in the Abbey; and then it seemed to merge
into the eager curiosity which had begun to grow on me, rather
before that time, about the origin of the ancient prophecy
predicting the extinction of our race. Are you following me?"
"I follow every word with the closest attention."
"You must know, then, that I had first found out some fragments
of the old rhyme in which the prophecy occurs quoted as a
curiosity in an antiquarian book in the library. On the page
opposite this quotation had been pasted a rude old wood-cut,
representing a dark-haired man, whose face was so strangely like
what I remembered of my Uncle Stephen that the portrait
absolutely startled me. When I asked my father about this--it was
then just before his death--he either knew, or pretended to know,
nothing of it; and when I afterward mentioned the prediction he
fretfully changed the subject.
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