Hauntings
by
Vernon Lee
Part 2 out of 3
employment is mending nets, collecting olives, carrying bricks, and
other miscellaneous jobs; but her real status is that of village
sorceress. You think our peasants are skeptical? Perhaps they do not
believe in thought-reading, mesmerism, and ghosts, like you, dear Lady
Evelyn. But they believe very firmly in the evil eye, in magic, and in
love-potions. Every one has his little story of this or that which
happened to his brother or cousin or neighbor. My stable-boy and male
factotum's brother-in-law, living some years ago in Corsica, was seized
with a longing for a dance with his beloved at one of those balls which
our peasants give in the winter, when the snow makes leisure in the
mountains. A wizard anointed him for money, and straightway he turned
into a black cat, and in three bounds was over the seas, at the door of
his uncle's cottage, and among the dancers. He caught his beloved by
the skirt to draw her attention; but she replied with a kick which sent
him squealing back to Corsica. When he returned in summer he refused to
marry the lady, and carried his left arm in a sling. "You broke it when
I came to the Veglia!" he said, and all seemed explained. Another lad,
returning from working in the vineyards near Marseilles, was walking up
to his native village, high in our hills, one moonlight night. He heard
sounds of fiddle and fife from a roadside barn, and saw yellow light
from its chinks; and then entering, he found many women dancing, old
and young, and among them his affianced. He tried to snatch her round
the waist for a waltz (they play _Mme. Angot_ at our rustic
balls), but the girl was unclutchable, and whispered, "Go; for these
are witches, who will kill thee; and I am a witch also. Alas! I shall
go to hell when I die."
I could tell your Excellency dozens of such stories. But love-philters
are among the commonest things to sell and buy. Do you remember the sad
little story of Cervantes' Licentiate, who, instead of a love-potion,
drank a philter which made him think he was made of glass, fit emblem
of a poor mad poet? ... It is love-philters that Dionea prepares. No;
do not misunderstand; they do not give love of her, still less her
love.
Your seller of love-charms is as cold as ice, as pure as snow. The
priest has crusaded against her, and stones have flown at her as she
went by from dissatisfied lovers; and the very children, paddling in
the sea and making mud-pies in the sand, have put out forefinger and
little finger and screamed, "Witch, witch! ugly witch!" as she passed
with basket or brick load; but Dionea has only smiled, that snake-like,
amused smile, but more ominous than of yore. The other day I determined
to seek her and argue with her on the subject of her evil trade. Dionea
has a certain regard for me; not, I fancy, a result of gratitude, but
rather the recognition of a certain admiration and awe which she
inspires in your Excellency's foolish old servant. She has taken up her
abode in a deserted hut, built of dried reeds and thatch, such as they
keep cows in, among the olives on the cliffs. She was not there, but
about the hut pecked some white pigeons, and from it, startling me
foolishly with its unexpected sound, came the eerie bleat of her pet
goat.... Among the olives it was twilight already, with streakings of
faded rose in the sky, and faded rose, like long trails of petals, on
the distant sea. I clambered down among the myrtle-bushes and came to a
little semicircle of yellow sand, between two high and jagged rocks,
the place where the sea had deposited Dionea after the wreck. She was
seated there on the sand, her bare foot dabbling in the waves; she had
twisted a wreath of myrtle and wild roses on her black, crisp hair.
Near her was one of our prettiest girls, the Lena of Sor Tullio the
blacksmith, with ashy, terrified face under her flowered kerchief. I
determined to speak to the child, but without startling her now, for
she is a nervous, hysteric little thing. So I sat on the rocks,
screened by the myrtle-bushes, waiting till the girl had gone. Dionea,
seated listless on the sands, leaned over the sea and took some of its
water in the hollow of her hand. "Here," she said to the Lena of Sor
Tullio, "fill your bottle with this and give it to drink to Tommasino
the Rosebud." Then she set to singing:--
"Love is salt, like sea-water--I drink and I die of thirst.... Water!
water! Yet the more I drink, the more I burn. Love! thou art bitter as
the seaweed."
_April 20, 1887._
Your friends are settled here, dear Lady Evelyn. The house is built in
what was once a Genoese fort, growing like a grey spiked aloes out of
the marble rocks of our bay; rock and wall (the walls existed long
before Genoa was ever heard of) grown almost into a homogeneous mass,
delicate grey, stained with black and yellow lichen, and dotted here
and there with myrtle-shoots and crimson snapdragon. In what was once
the highest enclosure of the fort, where your friend Gertrude watches
the maids hanging out the fine white sheets and pillow-cases to dry (a
bit of the North, of Hermann and Dorothea transferred to the South), a
great twisted fig-tree juts out like an eccentric gargoyle over the
sea, and drops its ripe fruit into the deep blue pools. There is but
scant furniture in the house, but a great oleander overhangs it,
presently to burst into pink splendor; and on all the window-sills,
even that of the kitchen (such a background of shining brass saucepans
Waldemar's wife has made of it!) are pipkins and tubs full of trailing
carnations, and tufts of sweet basil and thyme and mignonette. She
pleases me most, your Gertrude, although you foretold I should prefer
the husband; with her thin white face, a Memling Madonna finished by
some Tuscan sculptor, and her long, delicate white hands ever busy,
like those of a mediaeval lady, with some delicate piece of work; and
the strange blue, more limpid than the sky and deeper than the sea, of
her rarely lifted glance.
It is in her company that I like Waldemar best; I prefer to the genius
that infinitely tender and respectful, I would not say _lover_
--yet I have no other word--of his pale wife. He seems to me,
when with her, like some fierce, generous, wild thing from the
woods, like the lion of Una, tame and submissive to this saint.... This
tenderness is really very beautiful on the part of that big lion
Waldemar, with his odd eyes, as of some wild animal--odd, and, your
Excellency remarks, not without a gleam of latent ferocity. I think
that hereby hangs the explanation of his never doing any but male
figures: the female figure, he says (and your Excellency must hold him
responsible, not me, for such profanity), is almost inevitably inferior
in strength and beauty; woman is not form, but expression, and
therefore suits painting, but not sculpture. The point of a woman is
not her body, but (and here his eyes rested very tenderly upon the thin
white profile of his wife) her soul. "Still," I answered, "the
ancients, who understood such matters, did manufacture some tolerable
female statues: the Fates of the Parthenon, the Phidian Pallas, the
Venus of Milo."...
"Ah! yes," exclaimed Waldemar, smiling, with that savage gleam of his
eyes; "but those are not women, and the people who made them have left
as the tales of Endymion, Adonis, Anchises: a goddess might sit for
them."...
_May 5, 1887._
Has it ever struck your Excellency in one of your La Rochefoucauld fits
(in Lent say, after too many balls) that not merely maternal but
conjugal unselfishness may be a very selfish thing? There! you toss
your little head at my words; yet I wager I have heard you say that
_other_ women may think it right to humor their husbands, but as
to you, the Prince must learn that a wife's duty is as much to chasten
her husband's whims as to satisfy them. I really do feel indignant that
such a snow-white saint should wish another woman to part with all
instincts of modesty merely because that other woman would be a good
model for her husband; really it is intolerable. "Leave the girl
alone," Waldemar said, laughing. "What do I want with the unaesthetic
sex, as Schopenhauer calls it?" But Gertrude has set her heart on his
doing a female figure; it seems that folk have twitted him with never
having produced one. She has long been on the look-out for a model for
him. It is odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not the
more earthly for approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of our
village with the eyes of a slave-dealer.
"If you insist on speaking to Dionea," I said, "I shall insist on
speaking to her at the same time, to urge her to refuse your proposal."
But Waldemar's pale wife was indifferent to all my speeches about
modesty being a poor girl's only dowry. "She will do for a Venus," she
merely answered.
We went up to the cliffs together, after some sharp words, Waldemar's
wife hanging on my arm as we slowly clambered up the stony path among
the olives. We found Dionea at the door of her hut, making faggots of
myrtle-branches. She listened sullenly to Gertrude's offer and
explanations; indifferently to my admonitions not to accept. The
thought of stripping for the view of a man, which would send a shudder
through our most brazen village girls, seemed not to startle her,
immaculate and savage as she is accounted. She did not answer, but sat
under the olives, looking vaguely across the sea. At that moment
Waldemar came up to us; he had followed with the intention of putting
an end to these wranglings.
"Gertrude," he said, "do leave her alone. I have found a model--a
fisher-boy, whom I much prefer to any woman."
Dionea raised her head with that serpentine smile. "I will come," she
said.
Waldemar stood silent; his eyes were fixed on her, where she stood
under the olives, her white shift loose about her splendid throat, her
shining feet bare in the grass. Vaguely, as if not knowing what he
said, he asked her name. She answered that her name was Dionea; for the
rest, she was an Innocentina, that is to say, a foundling; then she
began to sing:--
"Flower of the myrtle!
My father is the starry sky,
The mother that made me is the sea."
_June 22, 1887_.
I confess I was an old fool to have grudged Waldemar his model. As I
watch him gradually building up his statue, watch the goddess gradually
emerging from the clay heap, I ask myself--and the case might trouble a
more subtle moralist than me--whether a village girl, an obscure,
useless life within the bounds of what we choose to call right and
wrong, can be weighed against the possession by mankind of a great work
of art, a Venus immortally beautiful? Still, I am glad that the two
alternatives need not be weighed against each other. Nothing can equal
the kindness of Gertrude, now that Dionea has consented to sit to her
husband; the girl is ostensibly merely a servant like any other; and,
lest any report of her real functions should get abroad and discredit
her at San Massimo or Montemirto, she is to be taken to Rome, where no
one will be the wiser, and where, by the way, your Excellency will have
an opportunity of comparing Waldemar's goddess of love with our little
orphan of the Convent of the Stigmata. What reassures me still more is
the curious attitude of Waldemar towards the girl. I could never have
believed that an artist could regard a woman so utterly as a mere
inanimate thing, a form to copy, like a tree or flower. Truly he
carries out his theory that sculpture knows only the body, and the body
scarcely considered as human. The way in which he speaks to Dionea
after hours of the most rapt contemplation of her is almost brutal in
its coldness. And yet to hear him exclaim, "How beautiful she is! Good
God, how beautiful!" No love of mere woman was ever so violent as this
love of woman's mere shape.
_June 27, 1887_.
You asked me once, dearest Excellency, whether there survived among our
people (you had evidently added a volume on folk-lore to that heap of
half-cut, dog's-eared books that litter about among the Chineseries and
mediaeval brocades of your rooms) any trace of Pagan myths. I explained
to you then that all our fairy mythology, classic gods, and demons and
heroes, teemed with fairies, ogres, and princes. Last night I had a
curious proof of this. Going to see the Waldemar, I found Dionea seated
under the oleander at the top of the old Genoese fort, telling stories
to the two little blonde children who were making the falling pink
blossoms into necklaces at her feet; the pigeons, Dionea's white
pigeons, which never leave her, strutting and pecking among the basil
pots, and the white gulls flying round the rocks overhead. This is what
I heard... "And the three fairies said to the youngest son of the King,
to the one who had been brought up as a shepherd, 'Take this apple, and
give it to her among us who is most beautiful.' And the first fairy
said, 'If thou give it to me thou shalt be Emperor of Rome, and have
purple clothes, and have a gold crown and gold armor, and horses and
courtiers;' and the second said, 'If thou give it to me thou shalt be
Pope, and wear a miter, and have the keys of heaven and hell;' and the
third fairy said, 'Give the apple to me, for I will give thee the most
beautiful lady to wife.' And the youngest son of the King sat in the
green meadow and thought about it a little, and then said, 'What use is
there in being Emperor or Pope? Give me the beautiful lady to wife,
since I am young myself.' And he gave the apple to the third of the
three fairies."...
Dionea droned out the story in her half-Genoese dialect, her eyes
looking far away across the blue sea, dotted with sails like white
sea-gulls, that strange serpentine smile on her lips.
"Who told thee that fable?" I asked.
She took a handful of oleander-blossoms from the ground, and throwing
them in the air, answered listlessly, as she watched the little shower
of rosy petals descend on her black hair and pale breast--
"Who knows?"
_July 6, 1887_.
How strange is the power of art! Has Waldemar's statue shown me the
real Dionea, or has Dionea really grown more strangely beautiful than
before? Your Excellency will laugh; but when I meet her I cast down my
eyes after the first glimpse of her loveliness; not with the shyness of
a ridiculous old pursuer of the Eternal Feminine, but with a sort of
religious awe--the feeling with which, as a child kneeling by my
mother's side, I looked down on the church flags when the Mass bell
told the elevation of the Host.... Do you remember the story of Zeuxis
and the ladies of Crotona, five of the fairest not being too much for
his Juno? Do you remember--you, who have read everything--all the bosh
of our writers about the Ideal in Art? Why, here is a girl who
disproves all this nonsense in a minute; she is far, far more beautiful
than Waldemar's statue of her. He said so angrily, only yesterday, when
his wife took me into his studio (he has made a studio of the
long-desecrated chapel of the old Genoese fort, itself, they say,
occupying the site of the temple of Venus).
As he spoke that odd spark of ferocity dilated in his eyes, and seizing
the largest of his modeling tools, he obliterated at one swoop the
whole exquisite face. Poor Gertrude turned ashy white, and a convulsion
passed over her face....
_July 15_.
I wish I could make Gertrude understand, and yet I could never, never
bring myself to say a word. As a matter of fact, what is there to be
said? Surely she knows best that her husband will never love any woman
but herself. Yet ill, nervous as she is, I quite understand that she
must loathe this unceasing talk of Dionea, of the superiority of the
model over the statue. Cursed statue! I wish it were finished, or else
that it had never been begun.
_July 20_.
This morning Waldemar came to me. He seemed strangely agitated: I
guessed he had something to tell me, and yet I could never ask. Was it
cowardice on my part? He sat in my shuttered room, the sunshine making
pools on the red bricks and tremulous stars on the ceiling, talking of
many things at random, and mechanically turning over the manuscript,
the heap of notes of my poor, never-finished book on the Exiled Gods.
Then he rose, and walking nervously round my study, talking
disconnectedly about his work, his eye suddenly fell upon a little
altar, one of my few antiquities, a little block of marble with a
carved garland and rams' heads, and a half-effaced inscription
dedicating it to Venus, the mother of Love.
"It was found," I explained, "in the ruins of the temple, somewhere on
the site of your studio: so, at least, the man said from whom I bought
it."
Waldemar looked at it long. "So," he said, "this little cavity was to
burn the incense in; or rather, I suppose, since it has two little
gutters running into it, for collecting the blood of the victim? Well,
well! they were wiser in that day, to wring the neck of a pigeon or
burn a pinch of incense than to eat their own hearts out, as we do, all
along of Dame Venus;" and he laughed, and left me with that odd
ferocious lighting-up of his face. Presently there came a knock at my
door. It was Waldemar. "Doctor," he said very quietly, "will you do
me a favor? Lend me your little Venus altar--only for a few days, only
till the day after tomorrow. I want to copy the design of it for the
pedestal of my statue: it is appropriate." I sent the altar to him: the
lad who carried it told me that Waldemar had set it up in the studio,
and calling for a flask of wine, poured out two glasses. One he had
given to my messenger for his pains; of the other he had drunk a
mouthful, and thrown the rest over the altar, saying some unknown
words. "It must be some German habit," said my servant. What odd
fancies this man has!
_July 25_.
You ask me, dearest Excellency, to send you some sheets of my book: you
want to know what I have discovered. Alas! dear Donna Evelina, I have
discovered, I fear, that there is nothing to discover; that Apollo was
never in Styria; that Chaucer, when he called the Queen of the Fairies
Proserpine, meant nothing more than an eighteenth century poet when he
called Dolly or Betty Cynthia or Amaryllis; that the lady who damned
poor Tannhäuser was not Venus, but a mere little Suabian mountain
sprite; in fact, that poetry is only the invention of poets, and that
that rogue, Heinrich Heine, is entirely responsible for the existence
of _Dieux en Exil_.... My poor manuscript can only tell you what
St. Augustine, Tertullian, and sundry morose old Bishops thought about
the loves of Father Zeus and the miracles of the Lady Isis, none of
which is much worth your attention.... Reality, my dear Lady Evelyn, is
always prosaic: at least when investigated into by bald old gentlemen
like me.
And yet, it does not look so. The world, at times, seems to be playing
at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing,
as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than my
mean little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the
olive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of
frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like the
vague trails of countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred into
mere blue shimmer by the moon, which rides slowly across the highest
heaven. The olive twigs glisten in the rays: the flowers of the
pomegranate and oleander are only veiled as with bluish mist in their
scarlet and rose. In the sea is another sea, of molten, rippled silver,
or a magic causeway leading to the shining vague offing, the luminous
pale sky-line, where the islands of Palmaria and Tino float like
unsubstantial, shadowy dolphins. The roofs of Montemirto glimmer among
the black, pointing cypresses: farther below, at the end of that
half-moon of land, is San Massimo: the Genoese fort inhabited by our
friends is profiled black against the sky. All is dark: our fisher-folk
go to bed early; Gertrude and the little ones are asleep: they at least
are, for I can imagine Gertrude lying awake, the moonbeams on her thin
Madonna face, smiling as she thinks of the little ones around her, of
the other tiny thing that will soon lie on her breast.... There is a
light in the old desecrated chapel, the thing that was once the temple
of Venus, they say, and is now Waldemar's workshop, its broken roof
mended with reeds and thatch. Waldemar has stolen in, no doubt to see
his statue again. But he will return, more peaceful for the
peacefulness of the night, to his sleeping wife and children. God bless
and watch over them! Good-night, dearest Excellency.
_July 26_.
I have your Excellency's telegram in answer to mine. Many thanks for
sending the Prince. I await his coming with feverish longing; it is
still something to look forward to. All does not seem over. And yet
what can he do?
The children are safe: we fetched them out of their bed and brought
them up here. They are still a little shaken by the fire, the bustle,
and by finding themselves in a strange house; also, they want to know
where their mother is; but they have found a tame cat, and I hear them
chirping on the stairs.
It was only the roof of the studio, the reeds and thatch, that burned,
and a few old pieces of timber. Waldemar must have set fire to it with
great care; he had brought armfuls of faggots of dry myrtle and heather
from the bakehouse close by, and thrown into the blaze quantities of
pine-cones, and of some resin, I know not what, that smelt like
incense. When we made our way, early this morning, through the
smoldering studio, we were stifled with a hot church-like perfume: my
brain swam, and I suddenly remembered going into St. Peter's on Easter
Day as a child.
It happened last night, while I was writing to you. Gertrude had gone
to bed, leaving her husband in the studio. About eleven the maids heard
him come out and call to Dionea to get up and come and sit to him. He
had had this craze once before, of seeing her and his statue by an
artificial light: you remember he had theories about the way in which
the ancients lit up the statues in their temples. Gertrude, the
servants say, was heard creeping downstairs a little later.
Do you see it? I have seen nothing else these hours, which have seemed
weeks and months. He had placed Dionea on the big marble block behind
the altar, a great curtain of dull red brocade--you know that Venetian
brocade with the gold pomegranate pattern--behind her, like a Madonna
of Van Eyck's. He showed her to me once before like this, the whiteness
of her neck and breast, the whiteness of the drapery round her flanks,
toned to the color of old marble by the light of the resin burning in
pans all round.... Before Dionea was the altar--the altar of Venus
which he had borrowed from me. He must have collected all the roses
about it, and thrown the incense upon the embers when Gertrude suddenly
entered. And then, and then...
We found her lying across the altar, her pale hair among the ashes of
the incense, her blood--she had but little to give, poor white
ghost!--trickling among the carved garlands and rams' heads, blackening
the heaped-up roses. The body of Waldemar was found at the foot of the
castle cliff. Had he hoped, by setting the place on fire, to bury
himself among its ruins, or had he not rather wished to complete in
this way the sacrifice, to make the whole temple an immense votive
pyre? It looked like one, as we hurried down the hills to San Massimo:
the whole hillside, dry grass, myrtle, and heather, all burning, the
pale short flames waving against the blue moonlit sky, and the old
fortress outlined black against the blaze.
_August 30._
Of Dionea I can tell you nothing certain. We speak of her as little as
we can. Some say they have seen her, on stormy nights, wandering among
the cliffs: but a sailor-boy assures me, by all the holy things, that
the day after the burning of the Castle Chapel--we never call it
anything else--he met at dawn, off the island of Palmaria, beyond the
Strait of Porto Venere, a Greek boat, with eyes painted on the prow,
going full sail to sea, the men singing as she went. And against the
mast, a robe of purple and gold about her, and a myrtle-wreath on her
head, leaned Dionea, singing words in an unknown tongue, the white
pigeons circling around her.
_Oke of Okehurst_
To COUNT PETER BOUTOURLINE,
_AT TAGANTCHA_,
GOVERNMENT OF KIEW, RUSSIA.
MY DEAR BOUTOURLINE,
Do you remember my telling you, one afternoon that you sat upon the
hearthstool at Florence, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst?
You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of fantastic things, and urged
me to write it out at once, although I protested that, in such matters, to
write is to exorcise, to dispel the charm; and that printers' ink chases
away the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as efficaciously as gallons
of holy water.
But if, as I suspect, you will now put down any charm that story may
have possessed to the way in which we had been working ourselves up,
that firelight evening, with all manner of fantastic stuff--if, as I
fear, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst will strike you as stale and
unprofitable--the sight of this little book will serve at least to remind
you, in the middle of your Russian summer, that there is such a season
as winter, such a place as Florence, and such a person as your friend,
VERNON LEE
Kensington, _July_ 1886.
1
That sketch up there with the boy's cap? Yes; that's the same woman. I
wonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not?
The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderful
elegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort of
grace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of head
and neck, and hands and fingers. Here are a lot of pencil sketches I made
while I was preparing to paint her portrait. Yes; there's nothing but her
in the whole sketchbook. Mere scratches, but they may give some idea of her
marvellous, fantastic kind of grace. Here she is leaning over the
staircase, and here sitting in the swing. Here she is walking quickly out
of the room. That's her head. You see she isn't really handsome; her
forehead is too big, and her nose too short. This gives no idea of her. It
was altogether a question of movement. Look at the strange cheeks, hollow
and rather flat; well, when she smiled she had the most marvellous dimples
here. There was something exquisite and uncanny about it. Yes; I began the
picture, but it was never finished. I did the husband first. I wonder who
has his likeness now? Help me to move these pictures away from the wall.
Thanks. This is her portrait; a huge wreck. I don't suppose you can make
much of it; it is merely blocked in, and seems quite mad. You see my idea
was to make her leaning against a wall--there was one hung with yellow that
seemed almost brown--so as to bring out the silhouette.
It was very singular I should have chosen that particular wall. It does
look rather insane in this condition, but I like it; it has something of
her. I would frame it and hang it up, only people would ask questions. Yes;
you have guessed quite right--it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst. I forgot you had
relations in that part of the country; besides, I suppose the newspapers
were full of it at the time. You didn't know that it all took place under
my eyes? I can scarcely believe now that it did: it all seems so distant,
vivid but unreal, like a thing of my own invention. It really was much
stranger than any one guessed. People could no more understand it than they
could understand her. I doubt whether any one ever understood Alice Oke
besides myself. You mustn't think me unfeeling. She was a marvellous,
weird, exquisite creature, but one couldn't feel sorry for her. I felt much
sorrier for the wretched creature of a husband. It seemed such an
appropriate end for her; I fancy she would have liked it could she have
known. Ah! I shall never have another chance of painting such a portrait as
I wanted. She seemed sent me from heaven or the other place. You have never
heard the story in detail? Well, I don't usually mention it, because people
are so brutally stupid or sentimental; but I'll tell it you. Let me see.
It's too dark to paint any more today, so I can tell it you now. Wait; I
must turn her face to the wall. Ah, she was a marvellous creature!
2
You remember, three years ago, my telling you I had let myself in for
painting a couple of Kentish squireen? I really could not understand what
had possessed me to say yes to that man. A friend of mine had brought him
one day to my studio--Mr. Oke of Okehurst, that was the name on his card.
He was a very tall, very well-made, very good-looking young man, with a
beautiful fair complexion, beautiful fair moustache, and beautifully
fitting clothes; absolutely like a hundred other young men you can see any
day in the Park, and absolutely uninteresting from the crown of his head to
the tip of his boots. Mr. Oke, who had been a lieutenant in the Blues
before his marriage, was evidently extremely uncomfortable on finding
himself in a studio. He felt misgivings about a man who could wear a velvet
coat in town, but at the same time he was nervously anxious not to treat me
in the very least like a tradesman. He walked round my place, looked at
everything with the most scrupulous attention, stammered out a few
complimentary phrases, and then, looking at his friend for assistance,
tried to come to the point, but failed. The point, which the friend kindly
explained, was that Mr. Oke was desirous to know whether my engagements
would allow of my painting him and his wife, and what my terms would be.
The poor man blushed perfectly crimson during this explanation, as if he
had come with the most improper proposal; and I noticed--the only
interesting thing about him--a very odd nervous frown between his eyebrows,
a perfect double gash,--a thing which usually means something abnormal: a
mad-doctor of my acquaintance calls it the maniac-frown. When I had
answered, he suddenly burst out into rather confused explanations: his
wife--Mrs. Oke--had seen some of my--pictures--paintings--portraits--at
the--the--what d'you call it?--Academy. She had--in short, they had made a
very great impression upon her. Mrs. Oke had a great taste for art; she
was, in short, extremely desirous of having her portrait and his painted by
me, _etcetera_.
"My wife," he suddenly added, "is a remarkable woman. I don't know whether
you will think her handsome,--she isn't exactly, you know. But she's
awfully strange," and Mr. Oke of Okehurst gave a little sigh and frowned
that curious frown, as if so long a speech and so decided an expression of
opinion had cost him a great deal.
It was a rather unfortunate moment in my career. A very influential sitter
of mine--you remember the fat lady with the crimson curtain behind
her?--had come to the conclusion or been persuaded that I had painted her
old and vulgar, which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique had turned
against me, the newspapers had taken up the matter, and for the moment I
was considered as a painter to whose brushes no woman would trust her
reputation. Things were going badly. So I snapped but too gladly at Mr.
Oke's offer, and settled to go down to Okehurst at the end of a fortnight.
But the door had scarcely closed upon my future sitter when I began to
regret my rashness; and my disgust at the thought of wasting a whole summer
upon the portrait of a totally uninteresting Kentish squire, and his
doubtless equally uninteresting wife, grew greater and greater as the time
for execution approached. I remember so well the frightful temper in which
I got into the train for Kent, and the even more frightful temper in which
I got out of it at the little station nearest to Okehurst. It was pouring
floods. I felt a comfortable fury at the thought that my canvases would get
nicely wetted before Mr. Oke's coachman had packed them on the top of the
waggonette. It was just what served me right for coming to this confounded
place to paint these confounded people. We drove off in the steady
downpour. The roads were a mass of yellow mud; the endless flat
grazing-grounds under the oak-trees, after having been burnt to cinders in
a long drought, were turned into a hideous brown sop; the country seemed
intolerably monotonous.
My spirits sank lower and lower. I began to meditate upon the modern Gothic
country-house, with the usual amount of Morris furniture, Liberty rugs, and
Mudie novels, to which I was doubtless being taken. My fancy pictured very
vividly the five or six little Okes--that man certainly must have at least
five children--the aunts, and sisters-in-law, and cousins; the eternal
routine of afternoon tea and lawn-tennis; above all, it pictured Mrs. Oke,
the bouncing, well-informed, model housekeeper, electioneering,
charity-organising young lady, whom such an individual as Mr. Oke would
regard in the light of a remarkable woman. And my spirit sank within me,
and I cursed my avarice in accepting the commission, my spiritlessness in
not throwing it over while yet there was time. We had meanwhile driven into
a large park, or rather a long succession of grazing-grounds, dotted about
with large oaks, under which the sheep were huddled together for shelter
from the rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a line
of low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill.
It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and there
was none to be seen in the distance--nothing but the undulation of sere
grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose,
from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made a
sudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. It
was not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brick
house, with the rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the time of
James I.,--a forlorn, vast place, set in the midst of the pasture-land,
with no trace of garden before it, and only a few large trees indicating
the possibility of one to the back; no lawn either, but on the other side
of the sandy dip, which suggested a filled-up moat, a huge oak, short,
hollow, with wreathing, blasted, black branches, upon which only a handful
of leaves shook in the rain. It was not at all what I had pictured to
myself the home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst.
My host received me in the hall, a large place, panelled and carved, hung
round with portraits up to its curious ceiling--vaulted and ribbed like the
inside of a ship's hull. He looked even more blond and pink and white, more
absolutely mediocre in his tweed suit; and also, I thought, even more
good-natured and duller. He took me into his study, a room hung round with
whips and fishing-tackle in place of books, while my things were being
carried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire was smouldering. He gave the
embers a nervous kick with his foot, and said, as he offered me a cigar--
"You must excuse my not introducing you at once to Mrs. Oke. My wife--in
short, I believe my wife is asleep."
"Is Mrs. Oke unwell?" I asked, a sudden hope flashing across me that I
might be off the whole matter.
"Oh no! Alice is quite well; at least, quite as well as she usually is. My
wife," he added, after a minute, and in a very decided tone, "does not
enjoy very good health--a nervous constitution. Oh no! not at all ill,
nothing at all serious, you know. Only nervous, the doctors say; mustn't be
worried or excited, the doctors say; requires lots of repose,--that sort
of thing."
There was a dead pause. This man depressed me, I knew not why. He had a
listless, puzzled look, very much out of keeping with his evident admirable
health and strength.
"I suppose you are a great sportsman?" I asked from sheer despair, nodding
in the direction of the whips and guns and fishing-rods.
"Oh no! not now. I was once. I have given up all that," he answered,
standing with his back to the fire, and staring at the polar bear beneath
his feet. "I--I have no time for all that now," he added, as if an
explanation were due. "A married man--you know. Would you like to come up
to your rooms?" he suddenly interrupted himself. "I have had one arranged
for you to paint in. My wife said you would prefer a north light. If that
one doesn't suit, you can have your choice of any other."
I followed him out of the study, through the vast entrance-hall. In less
than a minute I was no longer thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Oke and the boredom
of doing their likeness; I was simply overcome by the beauty of this house,
which I had pictured modern and philistine. It was, without exception, the
most perfect example of an old English manor-house that I had ever seen;
the most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Out
of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and
inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching
from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship's
hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at
intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of
coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded red
and blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with the
tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak
cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. The beautifully damascened
suits of court armour looked, without being at all rusty, as if no modern
hand had ever touched them; the very rugs under foot were of
sixteenth-century Persian make; the only things of to-day were the big
bunches of flowers and ferns, arranged in majolica dishes upon the
landings. Everything was perfectly silent; only from below came the chimes,
silvery like an Italian palace fountain, of an old-fashioned clock.
It seemed to me that I was being led through the palace of the Sleeping
Beauty.
"What a magnificent house!" I exclaimed as I followed my host through a
long corridor, also hung with leather, wainscoted with carvings, and
furnished with big wedding coffers, and chairs that looked as if they came
out of some Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong impression that all
this was natural, spontaneous--that it had about it nothing of the
picturesqueness which swell studios have taught to rich and aesthetic
houses. Mr. Oke misunderstood me.
"It is a nice old place," he said, "but it's too large for us. You see, my
wife's health does not allow of our having many guests; and there are no
children."
I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his voice; and he evidently was
afraid there might have seemed something of the kind, for he added
immediately--
"I don't care for children one jackstraw, you know, myself; can't
understand how any one can, for my part."
If ever a man went out of his way to tell a lie, I said to myself, Mr. Oke
of Okehurst was doing so at the present moment.
When he had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to
me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary
imaginative impression which this house had given me.
I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides the sort of spasm of
imaginative interest sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentric
personalities, I know nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter and
less analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of
house. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of
the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the
great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers
reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework,
a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the
hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every
now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled the
room;--to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complex
and indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, and
which, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a
genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire.
After I had dressed for dinner I resumed my place in the arm-chair, and
resumed also my reverie, letting all these impressions of the past--which
seemed faded like the figures in the arras, but still warm like the embers
in the fireplace, still sweet and subtle like the perfume of the dead
rose-leaves and broken spices in the china bowls--permeate me and go to my
head. Of Oke and Oke's wife I did not think; I seemed quite alone, isolated
from the world, separated from it in this exotic enjoyment.
Gradually the embers grew paler; the figures in the tapestry more shadowy;
the columned and curtained bed loomed out vaguer; the room seemed to fill
with greyness; and my eyes wandered to the mullioned bow-window, beyond
whose panes, between whose heavy stonework, stretched a greyish-brown
expanse of sore and sodden park grass, dotted with big oaks; while far off,
behind a jagged fringe of dark Scotch firs, the wet sky was suffused with
the blood-red of the sunset. Between the falling of the raindrops from the
ivy outside, there came, fainter or sharper, the recurring bleating of the
lambs separated from their mothers, a forlorn, quavering, eerie little cry.
I started up at a sudden rap at my door.
"Haven't you heard the gong for dinner?" asked Mr. Oke's voice.
I had completely forgotten his existence.
3
I feel that I cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest impressions of Mrs.
Oke. My recollection of them would be entirely coloured by my subsequent
knowledge of her; whence I conclude that I could not at first have
experienced the strange interest and admiration which that extraordinary
woman very soon excited in me. Interest and admiration, be it well
understood, of a very unusual kind, as she was herself a very unusual kind
of woman; and I, if you choose, am a rather unusual kind of man. But I can
explain that better anon.
This much is certain, that I must have been immeasurably surprised at
finding my hostess and future sitter so completely unlike everything I had
anticipated. Or no--now I come to think of it, I scarcely felt surprised at
all; or if I did, that shock of surprise could have lasted but an
infinitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that, having once seen Alice
Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have
fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so
completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed
always to have been present in one's consciousness, although present,
perhaps, as an enigma.
Let me try and give you some notion of her: not that first impression,
whatever it may have been, but the absolute reality of her as I gradually
learned to see it. To begin with, I must repeat and reiterate over and over
again, that she was, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and exquisite
woman I have ever seen, but with a grace and an exquisiteness that had
nothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of what
goes by these names: grace and exquisiteness recognised at once as perfect,
but which were seen in her for the first, and probably, I do believe, for
the last time. It is conceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand years
there may arise a combination of lines, a system of movements, an outline,
a gesture, which is new, unprecedented, and yet hits off exactly our
desires for beauty and rareness? She was very tall; and I suppose people
would have called her thin. I don't know, for I never thought about her as
a body--bones, flesh, that sort of thing; but merely as a wonderful series
of lines, and a wonderful strangeness of personality. Tall and slender,
certainly, and with not one item of what makes up our notion of a
well-built woman. She was as straight--I mean she had as little of what
people call figure--as a bamboo; her shoulders were a trifle high, and she
had a decided stoop; her arms and her shoulders she never once wore
uncovered. But this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness and a
stateliness, a play of outline with every step she took, that I can't
compare to anything else; there was in it something of the peacock and
something also of the stag; but, above all, it was her own. I wish I could
describe her. I wish, alas!--I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundred
thousand times--I could paint her, as I see her now, if I shut my
eyes--even if it were only a silhouette. There! I see her so plainly,
walking slowly up and down a room, the slight highness of her shoulders;
just completing the exquisite arrangement of lines made by the straight
supple back, the long exquisite neck, the head, with the hair cropped in
short pale curls, always drooping a little, except when she would suddenly
throw it back, and smile, not at me, nor at any one, nor at anything that
had been said, but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something,
with the strange dimple in her thin, pale cheeks, and the strange whiteness
in her full, wide-opened eyes: the moment when she had something of the
stag in her movement. But where is the use of talking about her? I don't
believe, you know, that even the greatest painter can show what is the real
beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary sense: Titian's and
Tintoretto's women must have been miles handsomer than they have made them.
Something--and that the very essence--always escapes, perhaps because real
beauty is as much a thing in time--a thing like music, a succession, a
series--as in space. Mind you, I am speaking of a woman beautiful in the
conventional sense. Imagine, then, how much more so in the case of a woman
like Alice Oke; and if the pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint,
can't succeed, how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion with mere
wretched words--words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning, an
impotent conventional association? To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke of
Okehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite and
strange,--an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than you
could bring home the perfume of some newly discovered tropical flower by
comparing it with the scent of a cabbage-rose or a lily.
That first dinner was gloomy enough. Mr. Oke--Oke of Okehurst, as the
people down there called him--was horribly shy, consumed with a fear of
making a fool of himself before me and his wife, I then thought. But that
sort of shyness did not wear off; and I soon discovered that, although it
was doubtless increased by the presence of a total stranger, it was
inspired in Oke, not by me, but by his wife. He would look every now and
then as if he were going to make a remark, and then evidently restrain
himself, and remain silent. It was very curious to see this big, handsome,
manly young fellow, who ought to have had any amount of success with women,
suddenly stammer and grow crimson in the presence of his own wife. Nor was
it the consciousness of stupidity; for when you got him alone, Oke,
although always slow and timid, had a certain amount of ideas, and very
defined political and social views, and a certain childlike earnestness and
desire to attain certainty and truth which was rather touching. On the
other hand, Oke's singular shyness was not, so far as I could see, the
result of any kind of bullying on his wife's part. You can always detect,
if you have any observation, the husband or the wife who is accustomed to
be snubbed, to be corrected, by his or her better-half: there is a
self-consciousness in both parties, a habit of watching and fault-finding,
of being watched and found fault with. This was clearly not the case at
Okehurst. Mrs. Oke evidently did not trouble herself about her husband in
the very least; he might say or do any amount of silly things without
rebuke or even notice; and he might have done so, had he chosen, ever since
his wedding-day. You felt that at once. Mrs. Oke simply passed over his
existence. I cannot say she paid much attention to any one's, even to mine.
At first I thought it an affectation on her part--for there was something
far-fetched in her whole appearance, something suggesting study, which
might lead one to tax her with affectation at first; she was dressed in a
strange way, not according to any established aesthetic eccentricity, but
individually, strangely, as if in the clothes of an ancestress of the
seventeenth century. Well, at first I thought it a kind of pose on her
part, this mixture of extreme graciousness and utter indifference which she
manifested towards me. She always seemed to be thinking of something else;
and although she talked quite sufficiently, and with every sign of superior
intelligence, she left the impression of having been as taciturn as her
husband.
In the beginning, in the first few days of my stay at Okehurst, I imagined
that Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort of flirt; and that her absent
manner, her look, while speaking to you, into an invisible distance, her
curious irrelevant smile, were so many means of attracting and baffling
adoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners of certain foreign
women--it is beyond English ones--which mean, to those who can understand,
"pay court to me." But I soon found I was mistaken. Mrs. Oke had not the
faintest desire that I should pay court to her; indeed she did not honour
me with sufficient thought for that; and I, on my part, began to be too
much interested in her from another point of view to dream of such a thing.
I became aware, not merely that I had before me the most marvellously rare
and exquisite and baffling subject for a portrait, but also one of the most
peculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that I look back upon it, I am
tempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might be
summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself--a Narcissus
attitude--curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort of
morbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristic
save a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, to
surprise and shock more particularly her husband, and thus be revenged for
the intense boredom which his want of appreciation inflicted upon her.
I got to understand this much little by little, yet I did not seem to have
really penetrated the something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was a
waywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but could not explain--a something
as difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appearance, and
perhaps very closely connected therewith. I became interested in Mrs. Oke
as if I had been in love with her; and I was not in the least in love. I
neither dreaded parting from her, nor felt any pleasure in her presence. I
had not the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. But I had her on
the brain. I pursued her, her physical image, her psychological
explanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days, and prevented my
ever feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There were
but few neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had a
guest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with a
sense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during our
walks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horribly
dull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also his
wife thought the neighbours a bore. He never questioned his wife's judgment
in these matters. He merely stated the case as if resignation were quite
simple and inevitable; yet it seemed to me, sometimes, that this monotonous
life of solitude, by the side of a woman who took no more heed of him than
of a table or chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation in
this young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. I
often wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, as I had, the
interest of a strange psychological riddle to solve, and of a great
portrait to paint. He was, I found, extremely good,--the type of the
perfectly conscientious young Englishman, the sort of man who ought to have
been the Christian soldier kind of thing; devout, pure-minded, brave,
incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually dense, and puzzled by
all manner of moral scruples. The condition of his tenants and of his
political party--he was a regular Kentish Tory--lay heavy on his mind. He
spent hours every day in his study, doing the work of a land agent and a
political whip, reading piles of reports and newspapers and agricultural
treatises; and emerging for lunch with piles of letters in his hand, and
that odd puzzled look in his good healthy face, that deep gash between his
eyebrows, which my friend the mad-doctor calls the _maniac-frown_. It was
with this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but I
felt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him to
represent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blond
conventionality. I was perhaps rather unconscientious about the likeness of
Mr. Oke; I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean as regards
character, for my whole mind was swallowed up in thinking how I should
paint Mrs. Oke, how I could best transport on to canvas that singular and
enigmatic personality. I began with her husband, and told her frankly that
I must have much longer to study her. Mr. Oke couldn't understand why it
should be necessary to make a hundred and one pencil-sketches of his wife
before even determining in what attitude to paint her; but I think he was
rather pleased to have an opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst; my
presence evidently broke the monotony of his life. Mrs. Oke seemed
perfectly indifferent to my staying, as she was perfectly indifferent to my
presence. Without being rude, I never saw a woman pay so little attention
to a guest; she would talk with me sometimes by the hour, or rather let me
talk to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She would lie back in a
big seventeenth-century armchair while I played the piano, with that
strange smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that strange whiteness
in her eyes; but it seemed a matter of indifference whether my music
stopped or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not take, or
pretend to take, the very faintest interest; but that was nothing to me. I
did not want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely wished to go on
studying her.
The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my presence
as distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay in
the porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who was
occasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there a
week--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular resemblance
that existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that hung in the
hall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in question was a
full length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some stray
Italian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a rather dark corner,
facing the portrait, evidently painted to be its companion, of a dark man,
with a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution and efficiency, in a
black Vandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife; and in the corner
of the woman's portrait were the words, "Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, Esq., and wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst," and the date
1626--"Nicholas Oke" being the name painted in the corner of the small
portrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, at
least so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days of
Charles I, can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There were
the same strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the thin
cheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity of
expression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventional
manner of the time. One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, the
same beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as her
descendant; for I found that Mr. and Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, were
both descended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret. But the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soon
saw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like her
ancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-century look; nay,
that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait.
"You think I am like her," answered Mrs. Oke dreamily to my remark, and her
eyes wandered off to that unseen something, and the faint smile dimpled her
thin cheeks.
"You are like her, and you know it. I may even say you wish to be like her,
Mrs. Oke," I answered, laughing.
"Perhaps I do."
And she looked in the direction of her husband. I noticed that he had an
expression of distinct annoyance besides that frown of his.
"Isn't it true that Mrs. Oke tries to look like that portrait?" I asked,
with a perverse curiosity.
"Oh, fudge!" he exclaimed, rising from his chair and walking nervously to
the window. "It's all nonsense, mere nonsense. I wish you wouldn't, Alice."
"Wouldn't what?" asked Mrs. Oke, with a sort of contemptuous indifference.
"If I am like that Alice Oke, why I am; and I am very pleased any one
should think so. She and her husband are just about the only two members of
our family--our most flat, stale, and unprofitable family--that ever were
in the least degree interesting."
Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain.
"I don't see why you should abuse our family, Alice," he said. "Thank God,
our people have always been honourable and upright men and women!"
"Excepting always Nicholas Oke and Alice his wife, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, Esq.," she answered, laughing, as he strode out into the park.
"How childish he is!" she exclaimed when we were alone. "He really minds,
really feels disgraced by what our ancestors did two centuries and a half
ago. I do believe William would have those two portraits taken down and
burned if he weren't afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. And as it
is, these two people really are the only two members of our family that
ever were in the least interesting. I will tell you the story some day."
As it was, the story was told to me by Oke himself. The next day, as we
were taking our morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, laying
about him all the time at the sere grasses with the hooked stick that he
carried, like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose of
cutting down his and other folk's thistles.
"I fear you must have thought me very ill-mannered towards my wife
yesterday," he said shyly; "and indeed I know I was."
Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom every woman, every wife--and
his own most of all--appeared in the light of something holy. "But--but--I
have a prejudice which my wife does not enter into, about raking up ugly
things in one's own family. I suppose Alice thinks that it is so long ago
that it has really got no connection with us; she thinks of it merely as a
picturesque story. I daresay many people feel like that; in short, I am
sure they do, otherwise there wouldn't be such lots of discreditable family
traditions afloat. But I feel as if it were all one whether it was long ago
or not; when it's a question of one's own people, I would rather have it
forgotten. I can't understand how people can talk about murders in their
families, and ghosts, and so forth."
"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed as
if it required some to complete it.
"I hope not," answered Oke gravely.
His gravity made me smile.
"Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked.
"If there are such things as ghosts," he replied, "I don't think they
should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as a
warning or a punishment."
We walked on some time in silence, I wondering at the strange type of this
commonplace young man, and half wishing I could put something into my
portrait that should be the equivalent of this curious unimaginative
earnestness. Then Oke told me the story of those two pictures--told it me
about as badly and hesitatingly as was possible for mortal man.
He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, and therefore descended from
the same old Kentish stock. The Okes of Okehurst could trace back to
Norman, almost to Saxon times, far longer than any of the titled or
better-known families of the neighbourhood. I saw that William Oke, in his
heart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neighbours. "We have never done
anything particular, or been anything particular--never held any office,"
he said; "but we have always been here, and apparently always done our
duty. An ancestor of ours was killed in the Scotch wars, another at
Agincourt--mere honest captains." Well, early in the seventeenth century,
the family had dwindled to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who had
rebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas appears to have been
somewhat different from the usual run of the family. He had, in his youth,
sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have been
less of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer very
young, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from a
neighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret," my
host informed me, "and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite different
sort of people--restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite of
Henry VIII." It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having any
Pomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an evident family
dislike--the dislike of an Oke, one of the old, honourable, modest stock,
which had quietly done its duty, for a family of fortune-seekers and Court
minions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in a little house
recently inherited from an uncle, a certain Christopher Lovelock, a young
gallant and poet, who was in momentary disgrace at Court for some love
affair. This Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neighbours
of Okehurst--too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either for
her husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one evening as he was riding home
alone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen,
but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wife
dressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition had
remained. "They used to tell it us when we were children," said my host, in
a hoarse voice, "and to frighten my cousin--I mean my wife--and me with
stories about Lovelock. It is merely a tradition, which I hope may die out,
as I sincerely pray to heaven that it may be false." "Alice--Mrs. Oke--you
see," he went on after some time, "doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps I
am morbid. But I do dislike having the old story raked up."
And we said no more on the subject.
4
From that moment I began to assume a certain interest in the eyes of Mrs.
Oke; or rather, I began to perceive that I had a means of securing her
attention. Perhaps it was wrong of me to do so; and I have often reproached
myself very seriously later on. But after all, how was I to guess that I
was making mischief merely by chiming in, for the sake of the portrait I
had undertaken, and of a very harmless psychological mania, with what was
merely the fad, the little romantic affectation or eccentricity, of a
scatter-brained and eccentric young woman? How in the world should I have
dreamed that I was handling explosive substances? A man is surely not
responsible if the people with whom he is forced to deal, and whom he deals
with as with all the rest of the world, are quite different from all other
human creatures.
So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, I really cannot blame
myself. I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique subject for a
portrait-painter of my particular sort, and a most singular, _bizarre_
personality. I could not possibly do my subject justice so long as I was
kept at a distance, prevented from studying the real character of the
woman. I required to put her into play. And I ask you whether any more
innocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a woman, and
letting her talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of ancestors
of hers of the time of Charles I., and a poet whom they had
murdered?--particularly as I studiously respected the prejudices of my
host, and refrained from mentioning the matter, and tried to restrain Mrs.
Oke from doing so, in the presence of William Oke himself.
I had certainly guessed correctly. To resemble the Alice Oke of the year
1626 was the caprice, the mania, the pose, the whatever you may call it, of
the Alice Oke of 1880; and to perceive this resemblance was the sure way of
gaining her good graces. It was the most extraordinary craze, of all the
extraordinary crazes of childless and idle women, that I had ever met; but
it was more than that, it was admirably characteristic. It finished off the
strange figure of Mrs. Oke, as I saw it in my imagination--this _bizarre_
creature of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness--that she should have no
interest in the present, but only an eccentric passion in the past. It
seemed to give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes, to her
irrelevant and far-off smile. It was like the words to a weird piece of
gipsy music, this that she, who was so different, so distant from all women
of her own time, should try and identify herself with a woman of the
past--that she should have a kind of flirtation--But of this anon.
I told Mrs. Oke that I had learnt from her husband the outline of the
tragedy, or mystery, whichever it was, of Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, and the poet Christopher Lovelock. That look of vague contempt, of
a desire to shock, which I had noticed before, came into her beautiful,
pale, diaphanous face.
"I suppose my husband was very shocked at the whole matter," she
said--"told it you with as little detail as possible, and assured you
very solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be a mere dreadful
calumny? Poor Willie! I remember already when we were children, and I
used to come with my mother to spend Christmas at Okehurst, and my cousin
was down here for his holidays, how I used to horrify him by insisting
upon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs, and playing the story of the
wicked Mrs. Oke; and he always piously refused to do the part of Nicholas,
when I wanted to have the scene on Cotes Common. I didn't know then that I
was like the original Alice Oke; I found it out only after our marriage.
You really think that I am?"
She certainly was, particularly at that moment, as she stood in a white
Vandyck dress, with the green of the park-land rising up behind her, and
the low sun catching her short locks and surrounding her head, her
exquisitely bowed head, with a pale-yellow halo. But I confess I thought
the original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though she might be, very
uninteresting compared with this wayward and exquisite creature whom I had
rashly promised myself to send down to posterity in all her unlikely
wayward exquisiteness.
One morning while Mr. Oke was despatching his Saturday heap of Conservative
manifestoes and rural decisions--he was justice of the peace in a most
literal sense, penetrating into cottages and huts, defending the weak and
admonishing the ill-conducted--one morning while I was making one of my
many pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that remain to me now!) of my
future sitter, Mrs. Oke gave me her version of the story of Alice Oke and
Christopher Lovelock.
"Do you suppose there was anything between them?" I asked--"that she was
ever in love with him? How do you explain the part which tradition ascribes
to her in the supposed murder? One has heard of women and their lovers who
have killed the husband; but a woman who combines with her husband to kill
her lover, or at least the man who is in love with her--that is surely very
singular." I was absorbed in my drawing, and really thinking very little of
what I was saying.
"I don't know," she answered pensively, with that distant look in her eyes.
"Alice Oke was very proud, I am sure. She may have loved the poet very
much, and yet been indignant with him, hated having to love him. She may
have felt that she had a right to rid herself of him, and to call upon her
husband to help her to do so."
"Good heavens! what a fearful idea!" I exclaimed, half laughing. "Don't you
think, after all, that Mr. Oke may be right in saying that it is easier and
more comfortable to take the whole story as a pure invention?"
"I cannot take it as an invention," answered Mrs. Oke contemptuously,
"because I happen to know that it is true."
"Indeed!" I answered, working away at my sketch, and enjoying putting this
strange creature, as I said to myself, through her paces; "how is that?"
"How does one know that anything is true in this world?" she replied
evasively; "because one does, because one feels it to be true, I suppose."
And, with that far-off look in her light eyes, she relapsed into silence.
"Have you ever read any of Lovelock's poetry?" she asked me suddenly the
next day.
"Lovelock?" I answered, for I had forgotten the name. "Lovelock,
who"--But I stopped, remembering the prejudices of my host, who was
seated next to me at table.
"Lovelock who was killed by Mr. Oke's and my ancestors."
And she looked full at her husband, as if in perverse enjoyment of the
evident annoyance which it caused him.
"Alice," he entreated in a low voice, his whole face crimson, "for mercy's
sake, don't talk about such things before the servants."
Mrs. Oke burst into a high, light, rather hysterical laugh, the laugh of a
naughty child.
"The servants! Gracious heavens! do you suppose they haven't heard the
story? Why, it's as well known as Okehurst itself in the neighbourhood.
Don't they believe that Lovelock has been seen about the house? Haven't
they all heard his footsteps in the big corridor? Haven't they, my dear
Willie, noticed a thousand times that you never will stay a minute alone in
the yellow drawing-room--that you run out of it, like a child, if I happen
to leave you there for a minute?"
True! How was it I had not noticed that? or rather, that I only now
remembered having noticed it? The yellow drawing-room was one of the most
charming rooms in the house: a large, bright room, hung with yellow damask
and panelled with carvings, that opened straight out on to the lawn, far
superior to the room in which we habitually sat, which was comparatively
gloomy. This time Mr. Oke struck me as really too childish. I felt an
intense desire to badger him.
"The yellow drawing-room!" I exclaimed. "Does this interesting literary
character haunt the yellow drawing-room? Do tell me about it. What happened
there?"
Mr. Oke made a painful effort to laugh.
"Nothing ever happened there, so far as I know," he said, and rose from the
table.
"Really?" I asked incredulously.
"Nothing did happen there," answered Mrs. Oke slowly, playing mechanically
with a fork, and picking out the pattern of the tablecloth. "That is just
the extraordinary circumstance, that, so far as any one knows, nothing ever
did happen there; and yet that room has an evil reputation. No member of
our family, they say, can bear to sit there alone for more than a minute.
You see, William evidently cannot."
"Have you ever seen or heard anything strange there?" I asked of my host.
He shook his head. "Nothing," he answered curtly, and lit his cigar.
"I presume you have not," I asked, half laughing, of Mrs. Oke, "since you
don't mind sitting in that room for hours alone? How do you explain this
uncanny reputation, since nothing ever happened there?"
"Perhaps something is destined to happen there in the future," she
answered, in her absent voice. And then she suddenly added, "Suppose you
paint my portrait in that room?"
Mr. Oke suddenly turned round. He was very white, and looked as if he were
going to say something, but desisted.
"Why do you worry Mr. Oke like that?" I asked, when he had gone into his
smoking-room with his usual bundle of papers. "It is very cruel of you,
Mrs. Oke. You ought to have more consideration for people who believe in
such things, although you may not be able to put yourself in their frame of
mind."
"Who tells you that I don't believe in _such things_, as you call them?"
she answered abruptly.
"Come," she said, after a minute, "I want to show you why I believe in
Christopher Lovelock. Come with me into the yellow room."
5
What Mrs. Oke showed me in the yellow room was a large bundle of papers,
some printed and some manuscript, but all of them brown with age, which she
took out of an old Italian ebony inlaid cabinet. It took her some time to
get them, as a complicated arrangement of double locks and false drawers
had to be put in play; and while she was doing so, I looked round the room,
in which I had been only three or four times before. It was certainly the
most beautiful room in this beautiful house, and, as it seemed to me now,
the most strange. It was long and low, with something that made you think
of the cabin of a ship, with a great mullioned window that let in, as it
were, a perspective of the brownish green park-land, dotted with oaks, and
sloping upwards to the distant line of bluish firs against the horizon. The
walls were hung with flowered damask, whose yellow, faded to brown, united
with the reddish colour of the carved wainscoting and the carved oaken
beams. For the rest, it reminded me more of an Italian room than an English
one. The furniture was Tuscan of the early seventeenth century, inlaid and
carved; there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures, by some
Bolognese master, on the walls; and in a corner, among a stack of dwarf
orange-trees, a little Italian harpsichord of exquisite curve and
slenderness, with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In a
recess was a shelf of old books, mainly English and Italian poets of the
Elizabethan time; and close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, a
large and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The panes of the mullioned window
were open, and yet the air seemed heavy, with an indescribable heady
perfume, not that of any growing flower, but like that of old stuff that
should have lain for years among spices.
"It is a beautiful room!" I exclaimed. "I should awfully like to paint you
in it"; but I had scarcely spoken the words when I felt I had done wrong.
This woman's husband could not bear the room, and it seemed to me vaguely
as if he were right in detesting it.
Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the table
where she was standing sorting the papers.
"Look!" she said, "these are all poems by Christopher Lovelock"; and
touching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent fingers, she
commenced reading some of them out loud in a slow, half-audible voice. They
were songs in the style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton,
complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady called Dryope, in
whose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of the mistress of
Okehurst. The songs were graceful, and not without a certain faded passion:
but I was thinking not of them, but of the woman who was reading them to
me.
Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish yellow wall as a background to her
white brocade dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make, seemed
but to bring out more clearly the slightness, the exquisite suppleness, of
her tall figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the other, as
if for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. Her voice, which was
delicate, shadowy, like her person, had a curious throbbing cadence, as if
she were reading the words of a melody, and restraining herself with
difficulty from singing it; and as she read, her long slender throat
throbbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin face. She
evidently knew the verses by heart, and her eyes were mostly fixed with
that distant smile in them, with which harmonised a constant tremulous
little smile in her lips.
"That is how I would wish to paint her!" I exclaimed within myself; and
scarcely noticed, what struck me on thinking over the scene, that this
strange being read these verses as one might fancy a woman would read
love-verses addressed to herself.
"Those are all written for Alice Oke--Alice the daughter of Virgil
Pomfret," she said slowly, folding up the papers. "I found them at the
bottom of this cabinet. Can you doubt of the reality of Christopher
Lovelock now?"
The question was an illogical one, for to doubt of the existence of
Christopher Lovelock was one thing, and to doubt of the mode of his death
was another; but somehow I did feel convinced.
"Look!" she said, when she had replaced the poems, "I will show you
something else." Among the flowers that stood on the upper storey of her
writing-table--for I found that Mrs. Oke had a writing-table in the yellow
room--stood, as on an altar, a small black carved frame, with a silk
curtain drawn over it: the sort of thing behind which you would have
expected to find a head of Christ or of the Virgin Mary. She drew the
curtain and displayed a large-sized miniature, representing a young man,
with auburn curls and a peaked auburn beard, dressed in black, but with
lace about his neck, and large pear-shaped pearls in his ears: a wistful,
melancholy face. Mrs. Oke took the miniature religiously off its stand, and
showed me, written in faded characters upon the back, the name "Christopher
Lovelock," and the date 1626.
"I found this in the secret drawer of that cabinet, together with the heap
of poems," she said, taking the miniature out of my hand.
I was silent for a minute.
"Does--does Mr. Oke know that you have got it here?" I asked; and then
wondered what in the world had impelled me to put such a question.
Mrs. Oke smiled that smile of contemptuous indifference. "I have never
hidden it from any one. If my husband disliked my having it, he might have
taken it away, I suppose. It belongs to him, since it was found in his
house."
I did not answer, but walked mechanically towards the door. There was
something heady and oppressive in this beautiful room; something, I
thought, almost repulsive in this exquisite woman. She seemed to me,
suddenly, perverse and dangerous.
I scarcely know why, but I neglected Mrs. Oke that afternoon. I went to Mr.
Oke's study, and sat opposite to him smoking while he was engrossed in his
accounts, his reports, and electioneering papers. On the table, above the
heap of paper-bound volumes and pigeon-holed documents, was, as sole
ornament of his den, a little photograph of his wife, done some years
before. I don't know why, but as I sat and watched him, with his florid,
honest, manly beauty, working away conscientiously, with that little
perplexed frown of his, I felt intensely sorry for this man.
But this feeling did not last. There was no help for it: Oke was not as
interesting as Mrs. Oke; and it required too great an effort to pump up
sympathy for this normal, excellent, exemplary young squire, in the
presence of so wonderful a creature as his wife. So I let myself go to the
habit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk over her strange craze, or rather
of drawing her out about it. I confess that I derived a morbid and
exquisite pleasure in doing so: it was so characteristic in her, so
appropriate to the house! It completed her personality so perfectly, and
made it so much easier to conceive a way of painting her. I made up my mind
little by little, while working at William Oke's portrait (he proved a less
easy subject than I had anticipated, and, despite his conscientious
efforts, was a nervous, uncomfortable sitter, silent and brooding)--I made
up my mind that I would paint Mrs. Oke standing by the cabinet in the
yellow room, in the white Vandyck dress copied from the portrait of her
ancestress. Mr. Oke might resent it, Mrs. Oke even might resent it; they
might refuse to take the picture, to pay for it, to allow me to exhibit;
they might force me to run my umbrella through the picture. No matter. That
picture should be painted, if merely for the sake of having painted it; for
I felt it was the only thing I could do, and that it would be far away my
best work. I told neither of my resolution, but prepared sketch after
sketch of Mrs. Oke, while continuing to paint her husband.
Mrs. Oke was a silent person, more silent even than her husband, for she
did not feel bound, as he did, to attempt to entertain a guest or to show
any interest in him. She seemed to spend her life--a curious, inactive,
half-invalidish life, broken by sudden fits of childish cheerfulness--in an
eternal daydream, strolling about the house and grounds, arranging the
quantities of flowers that always filled all the rooms, beginning to read
and then throwing aside novels and books of poetry, of which she always had
a large number; and, I believe, lying for hours, doing nothing, on a couch
in that yellow drawing-room, which, with her sole exception, no member of
the Oke family had ever been known to stay in alone. Little by little I
began to suspect and to verify another eccentricity of this eccentric
being, and to understand why there were stringent orders never to disturb
her in that yellow room.
It had been a habit at Okehurst, as at one or two other English
manor-houses, to keep a certain amount of the clothes of each generation,
more particularly wedding dresses. A certain carved oaken press, of which
Mr. Oke once displayed the contents to me, was a perfect museum of
costumes, male and female, from the early years of the seventeenth to the
end of the eighteenth century--a thing to take away the breath of a
_bric-a-brac_ collector, an antiquary, or a _genre_ painter. Mr. Oke was
none of these, and therefore took but little interest in the collection,
save in so far as it interested his family feeling. Still he seemed well
acquainted with the contents of that press.
He was turning over the clothes for my benefit, when suddenly I noticed
that he frowned. I know not what impelled me to say, "By the way, have you
any dresses of that Mrs. Oke whom your wife resembles so much? Have you got
that particular white dress she was painted in, perhaps?"
Oke of Okehurst flushed very red.
"We have it," he answered hesitatingly, "but--it isn't here at present--I
can't find it. I suppose," he blurted out with an effort, "that Alice has
got it. Mrs. Oke sometimes has the fancy of having some of these old things
down. I suppose she takes ideas from them."
A sudden light dawned in my mind. The white dress in which I had seen Mrs.
Oke in the yellow room, the day that she showed me Lovelock's verses, was
not, as I had thought, a modern copy; it was the original dress of Alice
Oke, the daughter of Virgil Pomfret--the dress in which, perhaps,
Christopher Lovelock had seen her in that very room.
The idea gave me a delightful picturesque shudder. I said nothing. But I
pictured to myself Mrs. Oke sitting in that yellow room--that room which no
Oke of Okehurst save herself ventured to remain in alone, in the dress of
her ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, haunting something
that seemed to fill the place--that vague presence, it seemed to me, of the
murdered cavalier poet.
Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, as a result of being
extremely indifferent. She really did not care in the least about anything
except her own ideas and day-dreams, except when, every now and then, she
was seized with a sudden desire to shock the prejudices or superstitions of
her husband. Very soon she got into the way of never talking to me at all,
save about Alice and Nicholas Oke and Christopher Lovelock; and then, when
the fit seized her, she would go on by the hour, never asking herself
whether I was or was not equally interested in the strange craze that
fascinated her. It so happened that I was. I loved to listen to her, going
on discussing by the hour the merits of Lovelock's poems, and analysing her
feelings and those of her two ancestors. It was quite wonderful to watch
the exquisite, exotic creature in one of these moods, with the distant look
in her grey eyes and the absent-looking smile in her thin cheeks, talking
as if she had intimately known these people of the seventeenth century,
discussing every minute mood of theirs, detailing every scene between them
and their victim, talking of Alice, and Nicholas, and Lovelock as she might
of her most intimate friends. Of Alice particularly, and of Lovelock. She
seemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that had
crossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me,
speaking of herself in the third person, of her own feelings--as if I were
listening to a woman's confidences, the recital of her doubts, scruples,
and agonies about a living lover. For Mrs. Oke, who seemed the most
self-absorbed of creatures in all other matters, and utterly incapable of
understanding or sympathising with the feelings of other persons, entered
completely and passionately into the feelings of this woman, this Alice,
who, at some moments, seemed to be not another woman, but herself.
"But how could she do it--how could she kill the man she cared for?" I once
asked her.
"Because she loved him more than the whole world!" she exclaimed, and
rising suddenly from her chair, walked towards the window, covering her
face with her hands.
I could see, from the movement of her neck, that she was sobbing. She did
not turn round, but motioned me to go away.
"Don't let us talk any more about it," she said. "I am ill to-day, and
silly."
I closed the door gently behind me. What mystery was there in this woman's
life? This listlessness, this strange self-engrossment and stranger mania
about people long dead, this indifference and desire to annoy towards her
husband--did it all mean that Alice Oke had loved or still loved some one
who was not the master of Okehurst? And his melancholy, his preoccupation,
the something about him that told of a broken youth--did it mean that he
knew it?
6
The following days Mrs. Oke was in a condition of quite unusual good
spirits. Some visitors--distant relatives--were expected, and although she
had expressed the utmost annoyance at the idea of their coming, she was now
seized with a fit of housekeeping activity, and was perpetually about
arranging things and giving orders, although all arrangements, as usual,
had been made, and all orders given, by her husband.
William Oke was quite radiant.
"If only Alice were always well like this!" he exclaimed; "if only she
would take, or could take, an interest in life, how different things would
be! But," he added, as if fearful lest he should be supposed to accuse her
in any way, "how can she, usually, with her wretched health? Still, it does
make me awfully happy to see her like this."
I nodded. But I cannot say that I really acquiesced in his views. It seemed
to me, particularly with the recollection of yesterday's extraordinary
scene, that Mrs. Oke's high spirits were anything but normal. There was
something in her unusual activity and still more unusual cheerfulness that
was merely nervous and feverish; and I had, the whole day, the impression
of dealing with a woman who was ill and who would very speedily collapse.
Mrs. Oke spent her day wandering from one room to another, and from the
garden to the greenhouse, seeing whether all was in order, when, as a
matter of fact, all was always in order at Okehurst. She did not give
me any sitting, and not a word was spoken about Alice Oke or Christopher
Lovelock. Indeed, to a casual observer, it might have seemed as if all
that craze about Lovelock had completely departed, or never existed.
About five o'clock, as I was strolling among the red-brick round-gabled
outhouses--each with its armorial oak--and the old-fashioned spalliered
kitchen and fruit garden, I saw Mrs. Oke standing, her hands full of York
and Lancaster roses, upon the steps facing the stables. A groom was
currycombing a horse, and outside the coach-house was Mr. Oke's little
high-wheeled cart.
"Let us have a drive!" suddenly exclaimed Mrs. Oke, on seeing me. "Look
what a beautiful evening--and look at that dear little cart! It is so long
since I have driven, and I feel as if I must drive again. Come with me. And
you, harness Jim at once and come round to the door."
I was quite amazed; and still more so when the cart drove up before the
door, and Mrs. Oke called to me to accompany her. She sent away the groom,
and in a minute we were rolling along, at a tremendous pace, along the
yellow-sand road, with the sere pasture-lands, the big oaks, on either
side.
I could scarcely believe my senses. This woman, in her mannish little coat
and hat, driving a powerful young horse with the utmost skill, and
chattering like a school-girl of sixteen, could not be the delicate,
morbid, exotic, hot-house creature, unable to walk or to do anything, who
spent her days lying about on couches in the heavy atmosphere, redolent
with strange scents and associations, of the yellow drawing-room. The
movement of the light carriage, the cool draught, the very grind of the
wheels upon the gravel, seemed to go to her head like wine.
"It is so long since I have done this sort of thing," she kept repeating;
"so long, so long. Oh, don't you think it delightful, going at this pace,
with the idea that any moment the horse may come down and we two be
killed?" and she laughed her childish laugh, and turned her face, no longer
pale, but flushed with the movement and the excitement, towards me.
The cart rolled on quicker and quicker, one gate after another swinging to
behind us, as we flew up and down the little hills, across the pasture
lands, through the little red-brick gabled villages, where the people came
out to see us pass, past the rows of willows along the streams, and the
dark-green compact hop-fields, with the blue and hazy tree-tops of the
horizon getting bluer and more hazy as the yellow light began to graze the
ground. At last we got to an open space, a high-lying piece of common-land,
such as is rare in that ruthlessly utilised country of grazing-grounds and
hop-gardens. Among the low hills of the Weald, it seemed quite
preternaturally high up, giving a sense that its extent of flat heather and
gorse, bound by distant firs, was really on the top of the world. The sun
was setting just opposite, and its lights lay flat on the ground, staining
it with the red and black of the heather, or rather turning it into the
surface of a purple sea, canopied over by a bank of dark-purple clouds--the
jet-like sparkle of the dry ling and gorse tipping the purple like sunlit
wavelets. A cold wind swept in our faces.
"What is the name of this place?" I asked. It was the only bit of
impressive scenery that I had met in the neighbourhood of Okehurst.
"It is called Cotes Common," answered Mrs. Oke, who had slackened the pace
of the horse, and let the reins hang loose about his neck. "It was here
that Christopher Lovelock was killed."
There was a moment's pause; and then she proceeded, tickling the flies from
the horse's ears with the end of her whip, and looking straight into the
sunset, which now rolled, a deep purple stream, across the heath to our
feet--
"Lovelock was riding home one summer evening from Appledore, when, as he
had got half-way across Cotes Common, somewhere about here--for I have
always heard them mention the pond in the old gravel-pits as about the
place--he saw two men riding towards him, in whom he presently recognised
Nicholas Oke of Okehurst accompanied by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailed
him; and Lovelock rode up to meet him. 'I am glad to have met you, Mr.
Lovelock,' said Nicholas, 'because I have some important news for you'; and
so saying, he brought his horse close to the one that Lovelock was riding,
and suddenly turning round, fired off a pistol at his head. Lovelock had
time to move, and the bullet, instead of striking him, went straight into
the head of his horse, which fell beneath him. Lovelock, however, had
fallen in such a way as to be able to extricate himself easily from his
horse; and drawing his sword, he rushed upon Oke, and seized his horse by
the bridle. Oke quickly jumped off and drew his sword; and in a minute,
Lovelock, who was much the better swordsman of the two, was having the
better of him. Lovelock had completely disarmed him, and got his sword at
Oke's throat, crying out to him that if he would ask forgiveness he should
be spared for the sake of their old friendship, when the groom suddenly
rode up from behind and shot Lovelock through the back. Lovelock fell, and
Oke immediately tried to finish him with his sword, while the groom drew up
and held the bridle of Oke's horse. At that moment the sunlight fell upon
the groom's face, and Lovelock recognised Mrs. Oke. He cried out, 'Alice,
Alice! it is you who have murdered me!' and died. Then Nicholas Oke sprang
into his saddle and rode off with his wife, leaving Lovelock dead by the
side of his fallen horse. Nicholas Oke had taken the precaution of removing
Lovelock's purse and throwing it into the pond, so the murder was put down
to certain highwaymen who were about in that part of the country. Alice Oke
died many years afterwards, quite an old woman, in the reign of Charles
II.; but Nicholas did not live very long, and shortly before his death got
into a very strange condition, always brooding, and sometimes threatening
to kill his wife. They say that in one of these fits, just shortly before
his death, he told the whole story of the murder, and made a prophecy that
when the head of his house and master of Okehurst should marry another
Alice Oke descended from himself and his wife, there should be an end
of the Okes of Okehurst. You see, it seems to be coming true. We have no
children, and I don't suppose we shall ever have any. I, at least, have
never wished for them."
Mrs. Oke paused, and turned her face towards me with the absent smile in
her thin cheeks: her eyes no longer had that distant look; they were
strangely eager and fixed. I did not know what to answer; this woman
positively frightened me. We remained for a moment in that same place, with
the sunlight dying away in crimson ripples on the heather, gilding the
yellow banks, the black waters of the pond, surrounded by thin rushes, and
the yellow gravel-pits; while the wind blew in our faces and bent the
ragged warped bluish tops of the firs. Then Mrs. Oke touched the horse, and
off we went at a furious pace. We did not exchange a single word, I think,
on the way home. Mrs. Oke sat with her eyes fixed on the reins, breaking
the silence now and then only by a word to the horse, urging him to an even
more furious pace. The people we met along the roads must have thought that
the horse was running away, unless they noticed Mrs. Oke's calm manner and
the look of excited enjoyment in her face. To me it seemed that I was in
the hands of a madwoman, and I quietly prepared myself for being upset or
dashed against a cart. It had turned cold, and the draught was icy in our
faces when we got within sight of the red gables and high chimney-stacks of
Okehurst. Mr. Oke was standing before the door. On our approach I saw a
look of relieved suspense, of keen pleasure come into his face.
He lifted his wife out of the cart in his strong arms with a kind of
chivalrous tenderness.
"I am so glad to have you back, darling," he exclaimed--"so glad! I was
delighted to hear you had gone out with the cart, but as you have not
driven for so long, I was beginning to be frightfully anxious, dearest.
Where have you been all this time?"
Mrs. Oke had quickly extricated herself from her husband, who had remained
holding her, as one might hold a delicate child who has been causing
anxiety. The gentleness and affection of the poor fellow had evidently not
touched her--she seemed almost to recoil from it.
"I have taken him to Cotes Common," she said, with that perverse look which
I had noticed before, as she pulled off her driving-gloves. "It is such a
splendid old place."
Mr. Oke flushed as if he had bitten upon a sore tooth, and the double gash
painted itself scarlet between his eyebrows.
Outside, the mists were beginning to rise, veiling the park-land dotted
with big black oaks, and from which, in the watery moonlight, rose on all
sides the eerie little cry of the lambs separated from their mothers. It
was damp and cold, and I shivered.
7
The next day Okehurst was full of people, and Mrs. Oke, to my amazement,
was doing the honours of it as if a house full of commonplace, noisy young
creatures, bent upon flirting and tennis, were her usual idea of felicity.
The afternoon of the third day--they had come for an electioneering ball,
and stayed three nights--the weather changed; it turned suddenly very cold
and began to pour. Every one was sent indoors, and there was a general
gloom suddenly over the company. Mrs. Oke seemed to have got sick of her
guests, and was listlessly lying back on a couch, paying not the slightest
attention to the chattering and piano-strumming in the room, when one of
the guests suddenly proposed that they should play charades. He was a
distant cousin of the Okes, a sort of fashionable artistic Bohemian,
swelled out to intolerable conceit by the amateur-actor vogue of a season.
"It would be lovely in this marvellous old place," he cried, "just to dress
up, and parade about, and feel as if we belonged to the past. I have heard
you have a marvellous collection of old costumes, more or less ever since
the days of Noah, somewhere, Cousin Bill."
The whole party exclaimed in joy at this proposal. William Oke looked
puzzled for a moment, and glanced at his wife, who continued to lie
listless on her sofa.
"There is a press full of clothes belonging to the family," he answered
dubiously, apparently overwhelmed by the desire to please his guests;
"but--but--I don't know whether it's quite respectful to dress up in the
clothes of dead people."
"Oh, fiddlestick!" cried the cousin. "What do the dead people know about
it? Besides," he added, with mock seriousness, "I assure you we shall
behave in the most reverent way and feel quite solemn about it all, if only
you will give us the key, old man."
Again Mr. Oke looked towards his wife, and again met only her vague, absent
glance.
"Very well," he said, and led his guests upstairs.
An hour later the house was filled with the strangest crew and the
strangest noises. I had entered, to a certain extent, into William Oke's
feeling of unwillingness to let his ancestors' clothes and personality be
taken in vain; but when the masquerade was complete, I must say that the
effect was quite magnificent. A dozen youngish men and women--those who
were staying in the house and some neighbours who had come for lawn-tennis
and dinner--were rigged out, under the direction of the theatrical cousin,
in the contents of that oaken press: and I have never seen a more beautiful
sight than the panelled corridors, the carved and escutcheoned staircase,
the dim drawing-rooms with their faded tapestries, the great hall with its
vaulted and ribbed ceiling, dotted about with groups or single figures that
seemed to have come straight from the past. Even William Oke, who, besides
myself and a few elderly people, was the only man not masqueraded, seemed
delighted and fired by the sight. A certain schoolboy character suddenly
came out in him; and finding that there was no costume left for him, he
rushed upstairs and presently returned in the uniform he had worn before
his marriage. I thought I had really never seen so magnificent a specimen
of the handsome Englishman; he looked, despite all the modern associations
of his costume, more genuinely old-world than all the rest, a knight for
the Black Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular features and
beautiful fair hair and complexion. After a minute, even the elderly people
had got costumes of some sort--dominoes arranged at the moment, and hoods
and all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery and
Oriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become,
so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement--with the
childishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlying
the majority even of well-bred English men and women--Mr. Oke himself doing
the mountebank like a schoolboy at Christmas.
"Where is Mrs. Oke? Where is Alice?" some one suddenly asked.
Mrs. Oke had vanished. I could fully understand that to this eccentric
being, with her fantastic, imaginative, morbid passion for the past, such a
carnival as this must be positively revolting; and, absolutely indifferent
as she was to giving offence, I could imagine how she would have retired,
disgusted and outraged, to dream her strange day-dreams in the yellow room.
But a moment later, as we were all noisily preparing to go in to dinner,
the door opened and a strange figure entered, stranger than any of these
others who were profaning the clothes of the dead: a boy, slight and tall,
in a brown riding-coat, leathern belt, and big buff boots, a little grey
cloak over one shoulder, a large grey hat slouched over the eyes, a dagger
and pistol at the waist. It was Mrs. Oke, her eyes preternaturally bright,
and her whole face lit up with a bold, perverse smile.
Every one exclaimed, and stood aside. Then there was a moment's silence,
broken by faint applause. Even to a crew of noisy boys and girls playing
the fool in the garments of men and women long dead and buried, there is
something questionable in the sudden appearance of a young married woman,
the mistress of the house, in a riding-coat and jackboots; and Mrs. Oke's
expression did not make the jest seem any the less questionable.
"What is that costume?" asked the theatrical cousin, who, after a second,
had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Oke was merely a woman of marvellous
talent whom he must try and secure for his amateur troop next season.
"It is the dress in which an ancestress of ours, my namesake Alice Oke,
used to go out riding with her husband in the days of Charles I.," she
answered, and took her seat at the head of the table. Involuntarily my eyes
sought those of Oke of Okehurst. He, who blushed as easily as a girl of
sixteen, was now as white as ashes, and I noticed that he pressed his hand
almost convulsively to his mouth.
"Don't you recognise my dress, William?" asked Mrs. Oke, fixing her eyes
upon him with a cruel smile.
He did not answer, and there was a moment's silence, which the theatrical
cousin had the happy thought of breaking by jumping upon his seat and
emptying off his glass with the exclamation--
"To the health of the two Alice Okes, of the past and the present!"
Mrs. Oke nodded, and with an expression I had never seen in her face
before, answered in a loud and aggressive tone--
"To the health of the poet, Mr. Christopher Lovelock, if his ghost be
honouring this house with its presence!"
I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midst
of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and
parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, and
clowns, with faces painted and corked and floured over, I seemed to see
that sanguine sunset, washing like a sea of blood over the heather, to
where, by the black pond and the wind-warped firs, there lay the body of
Christopher Lovelock, with his dead horse near him, the yellow gravel and
lilac ling soaked crimson all around; and above emerged, as out of the
redness, the pale blond head covered with the grey hat, the absent eyes,
and strange smile of Mrs. Oke. It seemed to me horrible, vulgar,
abominable, as if I had got inside a madhouse.
8
From that moment I noticed a change in William Oke; or rather, a change
that had probably been coming on for some time got to the stage of being
noticeable.
I don't know whether he had any words with his wife about her masquerade of
that unlucky evening. On the whole I decidedly think not. Oke was with
every one a diffident and reserved man, and most of all so with his wife;
besides, I can fancy that he would experience a positive impossibility of
putting into words any strong feeling of disapprobation towards her, that
his disgust would necessarily be silent. But be this as it may, I perceived
very soon that the relations between my host and hostess had become
exceedingly strained. Mrs. Oke, indeed, had never paid much attention to
her husband, and seemed merely a trifle more indifferent to his presence
than she had been before. But Oke himself, although he affected to address
her at meals from a desire to conceal his feeling, and a fear of making the
position disagreeable to me, very clearly could scarcely bear to speak to
or even see his wife. The poor fellow's honest soul was quite brimful of
pain, which he was determined not to allow to overflow, and which seemed to
filter into his whole nature and poison it. This woman had shocked and
pained him more than was possible to say, and yet it was evident that he
could neither cease loving her nor commence comprehending her real nature.
I sometimes felt, as we took our long walks through the monotonous country,
across the oak-dotted grazing-grounds, and by the brink of the dull-green,
serried hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops,
the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, and
the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down
every tall thistle that caught his eye--I sometimes felt, I say, an intense
and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. I
seemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to imply
such a comfortable acquiescence; and it seemed so unfair that just he
should be condemned to puzzle for ever over this enigma, and wear out his
soul trying to comprehend what now seemed so plain to me. But how would it
ever be possible to get this serious, conscientious, slow-brained
representative of English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness to
understand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, of poetic
vision, of love of morbid excitement, that walked this earth under the name
of Alice Oke?
So Oke of Okehurst was condemned never to understand; but he was condemned
also to suffer from his inability to do so. The poor fellow was constantly
straining after an explanation of his wife's peculiarities; and although
the effort was probably unconscious, it caused him a great deal of pain.
The gash--the maniac-frown, as my friend calls it--between his eyebrows,
seemed to have grown a permanent feature of his face.
Mrs. Oke, on her side, was making the very worst of the situation. Perhaps
she resented her husband's tacit reproval of that masquerade night's freak,
and determined to make him swallow more of the same stuff, for she clearly
thought that one of William's peculiarities, and one for which she despised
him, was that he could never be goaded into an outspoken expression of
disapprobation; that from her he would swallow any amount of bitterness
without complaining. At any rate she now adopted a perfect policy of
teasing and shocking her husband about the murder of Lovelock. She was
perpetually alluding to it in her conversation, discussing in his presence
what had or had not been the feelings of the various actors in the tragedy
of 1626, and insisting upon her resemblance and almost identity with the
original Alice Oke. Something had suggested to her eccentric mind that it
would be delightful to perform in the garden at Okehurst, under the huge
ilexes and elms, a little masque which she had discovered among Christopher
Lovelock's works; and she began to scour the country and enter into vast
correspondence for the purpose of effectuating this scheme. Letters arrived
every other day from the theatrical cousin, whose only objection was that
Okehurst was too remote a locality for an entertainment in which he foresaw
great glory to himself. And every now and then there would arrive some
young gentleman or lady, whom Alice Oke had sent for to see whether they
would do.
I saw very plainly that the performance would never take place, and that
Mrs. Oke herself had no intention that it ever should. She was one of those
creatures to whom realisation of a project is nothing, and who enjoy
plan-making almost the more for knowing that all will stop short at the
plan. Meanwhile, this perpetual talk about the pastoral, about Lovelock,
this continual attitudinising as the wife of Nicholas Oke, had the further
attraction to Mrs. Oke of putting her husband into a condition of frightful
though suppressed irritation, which she enjoyed with the enjoyment of a
perverse child. You must not think that I looked on indifferent, although I
admit that this was a perfect treat to an amateur student of character like
myself. I really did feel most sorry for poor Oke, and frequently quite
indignant with his wife. I was several times on the point of begging her to
have more consideration for him, even of suggesting that this kind of
behavior, particularly before a comparative stranger like me, was very poor
taste. But there was something elusive about Mrs. Oke, which made it next
to impossible to speak seriously with her; and besides, I was by no means
sure that any interference on my part would not merely animate her
perversity.
One evening a curious incident took place. We had just sat down to dinner,
the Okes, the theatrical cousin, who was down for a couple of days, and
three or four neighbours. It was dusk, and the yellow light of the candles
mingled charmingly with the greyness of the evening. Mrs. Oke was not well,
and had been remarkably quiet all day, more diaphanous, strange, and
far-away than ever; and her husband seemed to have felt a sudden return of
tenderness, almost of compassion, for this delicate, fragile creature. We
had been talking of quite indifferent matters, when I saw Mr. Oke suddenly
turn very white, and look fixedly for a moment at the window opposite to
his seat.
"Who's that fellow looking in at the window, and making signs to you,
Alice? Damn his impudence!" he cried, and jumping up, ran to the window,
opened it, and passed out into the twilight. We all looked at each other in
surprise; some of the party remarked upon the carelessness of servants in
letting nasty-looking fellows hang about the kitchen, others told stories
of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke did not speak; but I noticed the curious,
distant-looking smile in her thin cheeks.
After a minute William Oke came in, his napkin in his hand. He shut the
window behind him and silently resumed his place.
"Well, who was it?" we all asked.
"Nobody. I--I must have made a mistake," he answered, and turned crimson,
while he busily peeled a pear.
"It was probably Lovelock," remarked Mrs. Oke, just as she might have said,
"It was probably the gardener," but with that faint smile of pleasure still
in her face. Except the theatrical cousin, who burst into a loud laugh,
none of the company had ever heard Lovelock's name, and, doubtless
imagining him to be some natural appanage of the Oke family, groom or
farmer, said nothing, so the subject dropped.
From that evening onwards things began to assume a different aspect. That
incident was the beginning of a perfect system--a system of what? I
scarcely know how to call it. A system of grim jokes on the part of Mrs.
Oke, of superstitious fancies on the part of her husband--a system of
mysterious persecutions on the part of some less earthly tenant of
Okehurst. Well, yes, after all, why not? We have all heard of ghosts, had
uncles, cousins, grandmothers, nurses, who have seen them; we are all a bit
afraid of them at the bottom of our soul; so why shouldn't they be? I am
too sceptical to believe in the impossibility of anything, for my part!
Besides, when a man has lived throughout a summer in the same house with a
woman like Mrs. Oke of Okehurst, he gets to believe in the possibility of a
great many improbable things, I assure you, as a mere result of believing
in her. And when you come to think of it, why not? That a weird creature,
visibly not of this earth, a reincarnation of a woman who murdered her
lover two centuries and a half ago, that such a creature should have the
power of attracting about her (being altogether superior to earthly lovers)
the man who loved her in that previous existence, whose love for her was
his death--what is there astonishing in that? Mrs. Oke herself, I feel
quite persuaded, believed or half believed it; indeed she very seriously
admitted the possibility thereof, one day that I made the suggestion half
in jest. At all events, it rather pleased me to think so; it fitted in so
well with the woman's whole personality; it explained those hours and hours
spent all alone in the yellow room, where the very air, with its scent of
heady flowers and old perfumed stuffs, seemed redolent of ghosts. It
explained that strange smile which was not for any of us, and yet was not
merely for herself--that strange, far-off look in the wide pale eyes. I
liked the idea, and I liked to tease, or rather to delight her with it. How
should I know that the wretched husband would take such matters seriously?
He became day by day more silent and perplexed-looking; and, as a result,
worked harder, and probably with less effect, at his land-improving schemes
and political canvassing. It seemed to me that he was perpetually
listening, watching, waiting for something to happen: a word spoken
suddenly, the sharp opening of a door, would make him start, turn crimson,
and almost tremble; the mention of Lovelock brought a helpless look, half a
convulsion, like that of a man overcome by great heat, into his face. And
his wife, so far from taking any interest in his altered looks, went on
irritating him more and more. Every time that the poor fellow gave one of
those starts of his, or turned crimson at the sudden sound of a footstep,
Mrs. Oke would ask him, with her contemptuous indifference, whether he had
seen Lovelock. I soon began to perceive that my host was getting perfectly
ill. He would sit at meals never saying a word, with his eyes fixed
scrutinisingly on his wife, as if vainly trying to solve some dreadful
mystery; while his wife, ethereal, exquisite, went on talking in her
listless way about the masque, about Lovelock, always about Lovelock.
During our walks and rides, which we continued pretty regularly, he would
start whenever in the roads or lanes surrounding Okehurst, or in its
grounds, we perceived a figure in the distance. I have seen him tremble at
what, on nearer approach, I could scarcely restrain my laughter on
discovering to be some well-known farmer or neighbour or servant. Once, as
we were returning home at dusk, he suddenly caught my arm and pointed
across the oak-dotted pastures in the direction of the garden, then started
off almost at a run, with his dog behind him, as if in pursuit of some
intruder.
"Who was it?" I asked. And Mr. Oke merely shook his head mournfully.
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