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.