“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.
Sometimes in the early autumn twilights, when the white mists rose from
the park-land, and the rooks formed long black lines on the palings,
I almost fancied I saw him start at the very trees and bushes, the
outlines of the distant oast-houses, with their conical roofs and
projecting vanes, like gibing fingers in the half light.
“Your husband is ill,” I once ventured to remark to Mrs. Oke, as she
sat for the hundred-and-thirtieth of my preparatory sketches (I somehow
could never get beyond preparatory sketches with her). She raised her
beautiful, wide, pale eyes, making as she did so that exquisite curve
of shoulders and neck and delicate pale head that I so vainly longed to
reproduce.
“I don’t see it,” she answered quietly. “If he is, why doesn’t he go up
to town and see the doctor? It’s merely one of his glum fits.”
“You should not tease him about Lovelock,” I added, very seriously. “He
will get to believe in him.”
“Why not? If he sees him, why he sees him. He would not be the only
person that has done so”; and she smiled faintly and half perversely,
as her eyes sought that usual distant indefinable something.
But Oke got worse. He was growing perfectly unstrung, like a hysterical
woman. One evening that we were sitting alone in the smoking-room, he
began unexpectedly a rambling discourse about his wife; how he had
first known her when they were children, and they had gone to the same
dancing-school near Portland Place; how her mother, his aunt-in-law,
had brought her for Christmas to Okehurst while he was on his holidays;
how finally, thirteen years ago, when he was twenty-three and she was
eighteen, they had been married; how terribly he had suffered when they
had been disappointed of their baby, and she had nearly died of the
illness.
“I did not mind about the child, you know,” he said in an excited
voice; “although there will be an end of us now, and Okehurst will
go to the Curtises. I minded only about Alice.” It was next to
inconceivable that this poor excited creature, speaking almost with
tears in his voice and in his eyes, was the quiet, well-got-up,
irreproachable young ex-Guardsman who had walked into my studio a
couple of months before.
Oke was silent for a moment, looking fixedly at the rug at his feet,
when he suddenly burst out in a scarce audible voice—
“If you knew how I cared for Alice—how I still care for her. I could
kiss the ground she walks upon. I would give anything—my life any
day—if only she would look for two minutes as if she liked me a
little—as if she didn’t utterly despise me”; and the poor fellow burst
into a hysterical laugh, which was almost a sob. Then he suddenly began
to laugh outright, exclaiming, with a sort of vulgarity of intonation
which was extremely foreign to him—
“Damn it, old fellow, this is a queer world we live in!” and rang for
more brandy and soda, which he was beginning, I noticed, to take pretty
freely now, although he had been almost a blue-ribbon man—as much so as
is possible for a hospitable country gentleman—when I first arrived.
9
It became clear to me now that, incredible as it might seem, the thing
that ailed William Oke was jealousy. He was simply madly in love with
his wife, and madly jealous of her. Jealous—but of whom? He himself
would probably have been quite unable to say. In the first place—to
clear off any possible suspicion—certainly not of me. Besides the fact
that Mrs. Oke took only just a very little more interest in me than in
the butler or the upper-housemaid, I think that Oke himself was the
sort of man whose imagination would recoil from realising any definite
object of jealousy, even though jealously might be killing him inch by
inch. It remained a vague, permeating, continuous feeling—the feeling
that he loved her, and she did not care a jackstraw about him, and
that everything with which she came into contact was receiving some of
that notice which was refused to him—every person, or thing, or tree,
or stone: it was the recognition of that strange far-off look in Mrs.
Oke’s eyes, of that strange absent smile on Mrs. Oke’s lips—eyes and
lips that had no look and no smile for him.
Gradually his nervousness, his watchfulness, suspiciousness, tendency
to start, took a definite shape. Mr. Oke was for ever alluding to
steps or voices he had heard, to figures he had seen sneaking round
the house. The sudden bark of one of the dogs would make him jump up.
He cleaned and loaded very carefully all the guns and revolvers in his
study, and even some of the old fowling-pieces and holster-pistols
in the hall. The servants and tenants thought that Oke of Okehurst
had been seized with a terror of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke smiled
contemptuously at all these doings.
“My dear William,” she said one day, “the persons who worry you have
just as good a right to walk up and down the passages and staircase,
and to hang about the house, as you or I. They were there, in all
probability, long before either of us was born, and are greatly amused
by your preposterous notions of privacy.”
Mr. Oke laughed angrily. “I suppose you will tell me it is
Lovelock—your eternal Lovelock—whose steps I hear on the gravel every
night. I suppose he has as good a right to be here as you or I.” And he
strode out of the room.
“Lovelock—Lovelock! Why will she always go on like that about
Lovelock?” Mr. Oke asked me that evening, suddenly staring me in the
face.