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.