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.