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BROTHER GRIFFITH'S STORY
of
MAD MONKTON
CHAPTER I.
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 family had
suffered for generations past from the horrible affliction of
hereditary insanity, and the members of it shrank from exposing
their calamity to others, as they must have exposed it if they
had mingled with the busy little world around them. There is a
frightful story of a crime committed in past times by two of the
Monktons, near relatives, from which the first appearance of the
insanity was always supposed to date, but it is needless for me
to shock any one by repeating it. It is enough to say that at
intervals almost every form of madness appeared in the family,
monomania being the most frequent manifestation of the affliction
among them. I have these particulars, and one or two yet to be
related, from my father.
At the period of my youth but three of the Monktons were left at
the Abbey--Mr. and Mrs. Monkton and their only child Alfred, heir
to the prope rty. 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.
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. Elmslie (the lady to whom I have alluded)
lived with the Monktons. Her late husband had been distantly
related to Mrs. Monkton, and my father was her daughter's
guardian. But even these claims to friendship and regard never
seemed to me strong enough to explain the intimacy between Mrs.
Elmslie and the inhabitants of the Abbey. Intimate, however, they
certainly were, and one result of the constant interchange of
visits between the two families in due time declared itself: Mr.
Monkton's son and Mrs. Elmslie's daughter became attached to each
other.
I had no opportunities of seeing much of the young lady; I only
remember her at that time as a delicate, gentle, lovable girl,
the very opposite in appearance, and apparently in character
also, to Alfred Monkton. But perhaps that was one reason why they
fell in love with each other. The attachment was soon discovered,
and was far from being disapproved by the parents on either side.
In all essential points except that of wealth, the Elmslies were
nearly the equals of the Monktons, and want of money in a bride
was of no consequence to the heir of Wincot. Alfred, it was well
known, would succeed to thirty thousand a year on his father's
death.
Thus, though the parents on both sides thought the young people
not old enough to be married at once, they saw no reason why Ada
and Alfred should not be engaged to each other, with the
understanding that they should be united when young Monkton came
of age, in two years' time. The person to be consulted in the
matter, after the parents, was my father, in his capacity of
Ada's guardian. He knew that the family misery had shown itself
many years ago in Mrs. Monkton, who was her husband's cousin. The
illness, as it was significantly called, had been palliated by
careful treatment, and was reported to have passed away. But my
father was not to be deceived. He knew where the hereditary taint
still lurked; he viewed with horror the bare possibility of its
reappearing one day in the children of his friend's only
daughter; and he positively refused his consent to the marriage
engagement.
The result was that the doors of the Abbey and the doors of Mrs.
Elmslie's house were closed to him. This suspension of friendly
intercourse had lasted but a very short time when Mrs. Monkton
died. Her husband, who was fondly attached to her, caught a
violent cold while attending her funeral. The cold was neglected,
and settled on his lungs. In a few months' time he followed his
wife to the grave, and Alfred was left master of the grand old
Abbey and the fair lands that spread all around it.
At this period Mrs. Elmslie had the indelicacy to endeavor a
second time to procure my father's consent to the marriage
engagement. He refused it again more positively than before. More
than a year passed away. The time was approaching fast when
Alfred would be of age. I returned from college to spend the long
vacation at home, and made some advances toward bettering my
acquaintance with young Monkton. They were evaded--certainly with
perfect politeness, but still in such a way as to prevent me from
offering my friendship to him again. Any mortification I might
have felt at this petty repulse under ordinary circumstances was
dismissed from my mind by the occurrence of a real misfortune in
our household. For some months past my father's health had been
failing, and, just at the time of which I am now writing, his
sons had to mourn the irreparable calamity of his death.
This event, through some informality or error in the late Mr.
Elmslie's will, left the future of Ada's life entirely at her
mother's disposal. The consequence was the immediate ratification
of the marriage engagement to which my father had so steadily
refused his consent. As soon as the fact was publicly announced,
some of Mrs. Elmslie's more intimate friends, who were acquainted
with the reports affecting the Monkton family, ventured to mingle
with their formal congratulations one or two significant
references to the late Mrs. Monkton and some searching inquiries
as to the disposition of her son.
Mrs. Elmslie always met these polite hints with one bold form of
answer. She first admitted the existence of these reports about
the Monktons which her friends were unwilling to specify
distinctly, and then declared that they were infamous calumnies.
The hereditary taint had died out of the family generations back.
Alfred was the best, the kindest, the sanest of human beings. He
loved study and retirement; Ada sympathized with his tastes, and
had made her choice unbiased; if any more hints were dropped
about sacrificing her by her marriage, those hints would be
viewed as so many insults to her mother, whose affection for her
it was monstrous to call in question. This way of talking
silenced people, but did not convince them. They began to
suspect, what was indeed the actual truth, that Mrs. Elmslie was
a selfish, worldly, grasping woman, who wanted to get her
daughter well married, and cared nothing for consequences as long
as she saw Ada mistress of the greatest establishment in the
whole county.
It seemed, however, as if there was some fatality at work to
prevent the attainment of Mrs. Elmslie's great object in life.
Hardly was one obstacle to the ill-omened marriage removed by my
father's death before another succeeded it in the shape of
anxieties and difficulties caused by the delicate state of Ada's
health. Doctors were consulted in all directions, and the result
of their advice was that the marriage must be deferred, and that
Miss Elmslie must leave England for a certain time, to reside in
a warmer climate--the south of France, if I remember rightly.
Thus it happened that just before Alfred came of age Ada and her
mother departed for the Continent, and the union of the two young
people was understood to be indefinitely postponed. Some
curiosity was felt in the neighborhood as to what Alfred Monkton
would do under these circumstances. Would he follow his
lady-love? would he go yachting? would he throw open the doors of
the old Abbey at last, and endeavor to forget the absence of Ada
and the postponement of his marriage in a round of gayeties? He
did none of these things. He simply remained at Wincot, living as
suspiciously strange and solitary a life as his father had lived
before him. 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. Families in the neighborhood determined to forget the
offense which his father's reserve had given them, and invited
him to their houses. The invitations were politely declined.
Civil visitors called resolutely at the Abbey, and were as
resolutely bowed away from the doors as soon as they had left
their cards. Under this combination of sinister and aggravating
circumstances people in all directions took to shaking their
heads mysteriously when the name of Mr. Alfred Monkton was
mentioned, hinting at the family calamity, and wondering
peevishly or sadly, as their tempers inclined them, what he could
possibly do to occupy himself month after month in the lonely old
house.
The right answer to this question was not easy to find. It was
quite useless, for ex ample, to apply to the priest for it. He
was a very quiet, polite old gentleman; his replies were always
excessively ready and civil, and appeared at the time to convey
an immense quantity of information; but when they came to be
reflected on, it was universally observed that nothing tangible
could ever be got out of them. The housekeeper, a weird old
woman, with a very abrupt and repelling manner, was too fierce
and taciturn to be safely approached. The few indoor servants had
all been long enough in the family to have learned to hold their
tongues in public as a regular habit. It was only from the
farm-servants who supplied the table at the Abbey that any
information could be obtained, and vague enough it was when they
came to communicate it.
Some of them had observed the "young master" walking about the
library with heaps of dusty papers in his hands. Others had heard
odd noises in the uninhabited parts of the Abbey, had looked up,
and had seen him forcing open the old windows, as if to let light
and air into the rooms supposed to have been shut close for years
and years, or had discovered him standing on the perilous summit
of one of the crumbling turrets, never ascended before within
their memories, and popularly considered to be inhabited by the
ghosts of the monks who had once possessed the building. The
result of these observations and discoveries, when they were
communicated to others, was of course to impress every one with a
firm belief that "poor young Monkton was going the way that the
rest of the family had gone before him," which opinion always
appeared to be immensely strengthened in the popular mind by a
conviction--founded on no particle of evidence--that the priest
was at the bottom of all the mischief.
Thus far I have spoken from hearsay evidence mostly. What I have
next to tell will be the result of my own personal experience.
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