The Queen of Hearts

by Wilkie Collins

  CHAPTER I.

  THE Monktons of Wincot Abbey bore a sad character for want ofsociability 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, whichkept them thus apart from their neighbors. The family had suffered forgenerations past from the horrible affliction of hereditary insanity,and the members of it shrank from exposing their calamity to others, asthey must have exposed it if they had mingled with the busy little worldaround them. There is a frightful story of a crime committed in pasttimes by two of the Monktons, near relatives, from which the firstappearance of the insanity was always supposed to date, but it isneedless for me to shock any one by repeating it. It is enough to saythat at intervals almost every form of madness appeared in the family,monomania being the most frequent manifestation of the affliction amongthem. I have these particulars, and one or two yet to be related, frommy father.

  At the period of my youth but three of the Monktons were left at theAbbey--Mr. and Mrs. Monkton and their only child Alfred, heir to theproperty. The one other member of this, the elder branch of the family,who was then alive, was Mr. Monkton's younger brother, Stephen. He wasan unmarried man, possessing a fine estate in Scotland; but he livedalmost entirely on the Continent, and bore the reputation of beinga shameless profligate. The family at Wincot held almost as littlecommunication with him as with their neighbors.

  I have already mentioned my father, and a lady and her daughter, as theonly 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 theircontinued intimacy at Wincot was quite intelligible. I am not so wellable to account for the friendly terms on which Mrs. Elmslie (the ladyto whom I have alluded) lived with the Monktons. Her late husband hadbeen distantly related to Mrs. Monkton, and my father was her daughter'sguardian. But even these claims to friendship and regard never seemedto me strong enough to explain the intimacy between Mrs. Elmslie and theinhabitants of the Abbey. Intimate, however, they certainly were,and one result of the constant interchange of visits between thetwo 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 rememberher at that time as a delicate, gentle, lovable girl, the very oppositein appearance, and apparently in character also, to Alfred Monkton. Butperhaps that was one reason why they fell in love with each other. Theattachment was soon discovered, and was far from being disapprovedby the parents on either side. In all essential points except that ofwealth, the Elmslies were nearly the equals of the Monktons, and want ofmoney in a bride was of no consequence to the heir of Wincot. Alfred, itwas well known, would succeed to thirty thousand a year on his father'sdeath.

  Thus, though the parents on both sides thought the young people notold enough to be married at once, they saw no reason why Ada and Alfredshould not be engaged to each other, with the understanding that theyshould be united when young Monkton came of age, in two years' time. Theperson 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 hadshown itself many years ago in Mrs. Monkton, who was her husband'scousin. The _illness,_ as it was significantly called, had beenpalliated by careful treatment, and was reported to have passed away.But my father was not to be deceived. He knew where the hereditarytaint still lurked; he viewed with horror the bare possibility of itsreappearing one day in the children of his friend's only daughter; andhe 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 friendlyintercourse had lasted but a very short time when Mrs. Monkton died.Her husband, who was fondly attached to her, caught a violent cold whileattending 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 wasleft master of the grand old Abbey and the fair lands that spread allaround it.

  At this period Mrs. Elmslie had the indelicacy to endeavor a second timeto procure my father's consent to the marriage engagement. He refusedit again more positively than before. More than a year passed away. Thetime was approaching fast when Alfred would be of age. I returned fromcollege to spend the long vacation at home, and made some advancestoward bettering my acquaintance with young Monkton. They wereevaded--certainly with perfect politeness, but still in such a way as toprevent me from offering my friendship to him again. Any mortificationI might have felt at this petty repulse under ordinary circumstanceswas dismissed from my mind by the occurrence of a real misfortune inour 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 mournthe irreparable calamity of his death.

  This event, through some informality or error in the late Mr. Elmslie'swill, left the future of Ada's life entirely at her mother's disposal.The consequence was the immediate ratification of the marriageengagement to which my father had so steadily refused his consent. Assoon as the fact was publicly announced, some of Mrs. Elmslie's moreintimate friends, who were acquainted with the reports affecting theMonkton family, ventured to mingle with their formal congratulationsone or two significant references to the late Mrs. Monkton and somesearching 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 Monktonswhich her friends were unwilling to specify distinctly, and thendeclared that they were infamous calumnies. The hereditary taint haddied out of the family generations back. Alfred was the best, thekindest, the sanest of human beings. He loved study and retirement; Adasympathized with his tastes, and had made her choice unbiased; if anymore hints were dropped about sacrificing her by her marriage, thosehints would be viewed as so many insults to her mother, whose affectionfor her it was monstrous to call in question. This way of talkingsilenced people, but did not convince them. They began to suspect, whatwas indeed the actual truth, that Mrs. Elmslie was a selfish, worldly,grasping woman, who wanted to get her daughter well married, and carednothing for consequences as long as she saw Ada mistress of the greatestestablishment in the whole county.

  It seemed, however, as if there was some fatality at work to preventthe attainment of Mrs. Elmslie's great object in life. Hardly was oneobstacle to the ill-omened marriage removed by my father's death beforeanother succeeded it in the shape of anxieties and difficulties causedby the delicate state of Ada's health. Doctors were consulted in alldirections, and the result of their advice was that the marriage must bedeferred, and that Miss Elmslie must leave England for a certain time,to reside in a warmer climate--the south of France, if I rememberrightly. Thus it happened that just before Alfred came of age Ada andher mother departed for the Continent, and the union of the two youngpeople was understood to be indefinitely postponed. Some curiosity wasfelt in the neighborhood as to what Alfred Monkton would do under thesecircumstances. Would he follow his lady-love? would he go yachting?would he throw open the doors of the old Abbey at last, and endeavorto forget the absence of Ada and the postponement of his marriage in around of gayeties? He did none of these things. He simply remained atWincot, living as suspiciously strange and solitary a life as his fatherhad lived before him. Literally, there was now no companion for himat the Abbey but the old priest--the Monktons, I should have mentionedbefore, were Roman Catholics--who had held the office of tutor to Alfredfrom his earliest years. He came of age, and there was not even so muchas a private dinner-party at Wincot to celebrate the event. Familiesin the neighborhood determined to forget the offense which his father'sreserve had given them, and invited him to their houses. The invitationswere politely declined. Civil visitors called
resolutely at the Abbey,and were as resolutely bowed away from the doors as soon as they hadleft their cards. Under this combination of sinister and aggravatingcircumstances people in all directions took to shaking their headsmysteriously when the name of Mr. Alfred Monkton was mentioned, hintingat the family calamity, and wondering peevishly or sadly, as theirtempers inclined them, what he could possibly do to occupy himself monthafter month in the lonely old house.

  The right answer to this question was not easy to find. It was quiteuseless, for example, to apply to the priest for it. He was a veryquiet, polite old gentleman; his replies were always excessively readyand civil, and appeared at the time to convey an immense quantity ofinformation; but when they came to be reflected on, it was universallyobserved that nothing tangible could ever be got out of them. Thehousekeeper, a weird old woman, with a very abrupt and repelling manner,was too fierce and taciturn to be safely approached. The few indoorservants had all been long enough in the family to have learned tohold their tongues in public as a regular habit. It was only from thefarm-servants who supplied the table at the Abbey that any informationcould be obtained, and vague enough it was when they came to communicateit.

  Some of them had observed the "young master" walking about the librarywith heaps of dusty papers in his hands. Others had heard odd noisesin the uninhabited parts of the Abbey, had looked up, and had seen himforcing open the old windows, as if to let light and air into the roomssupposed to have been shut close for years and years, or had discoveredhim standing on the perilous summit of one of the crumbling turrets,never ascended before within their memories, and popularly consideredto be inhabited by the ghosts of the monks who had once possessed thebuilding. The result of these observations and discoveries, when theywere communicated to others, was of course to impress every one with afirm belief that "poor young Monkton was going the way that the restof the family had gone before him," which opinion always appeared to beimmensely strengthened in the popular mind by a conviction--founded onno particle of evidence--that the priest was at the bottom of all themischief.

  Thus far I have spoken from hearsay evidence mostly. What I have next totell will be the result of my own personal experience.