“No one was walking with me near the pond, at five o’clock or any other
hour.”
Mr. Oke turned purple, and made a curious hoarse noise like a man
choking.
“I—I thought I saw you walking with a man this afternoon, Alice,” he
brought out with an effort; adding, for the sake of appearances before
me, “I thought it might have been the curate come with that report for
me.”
Mrs. Oke smiled.
“I can only repeat that no living creature has been near me this
afternoon,” she said slowly. “If you saw any one with me, it must have
been Lovelock, for there certainly was no one else.”
And she gave a little sigh, like a person trying to reproduce in her
mind some delightful but too evanescent impression.
I looked at my host; from crimson his face had turned perfectly livid,
and he breathed as if some one were squeezing his windpipe.
No more was said about the matter. I vaguely felt that a great danger
was threatening. To Oke or to Mrs. Oke? I could not tell which; but I
was aware of an imperious inner call to avert some dreadful evil, to
exert myself, to explain, to interpose. I determined to speak to Oke
the following day, for I trusted him to give me a quiet hearing, and I
did not trust Mrs. Oke. That woman would slip through my fingers like a
snake if I attempted to grasp her elusive character.
I asked Oke whether he would take a walk with me the next afternoon,
and he accepted to do so with a curious eagerness. We started about
three o’clock. It was a stormy, chilly afternoon, with great balls of
white clouds rolling rapidly in the cold blue sky, and occasional lurid
gleams of sunlight, broad and yellow, which made the black ridge of the
storm, gathered on the horizon, look blue-black like ink.
We walked quickly across the sere and sodden grass of the park, and
on to the highroad that led over the low hills, I don’t know why, in
the direction of Cotes Common. Both of us were silent, for both of us
had something to say, and did not know how to begin. For my part, I
recognised the impossibility of starting the subject: an uncalled-for
interference from me would merely indispose Mr. Oke, and make him
doubly dense of comprehension. So, if Oke had something to say, which
he evidently had, it was better to wait for him.
Oke, however, broke the silence only by pointing out to me the
condition of the hops, as we passed one of his many hop-gardens. “It
will be a poor year,” he said, stopping short and looking intently
before him—“no hops at all. No hops this autumn.”
I looked at him. It was clear that he had no notion what he was saying.
The dark-green bines were covered with fruit; and only yesterday he
himself had informed me that he had not seen such a profusion of hops
for many years.
I did not answer, and we walked on. A cart met us in a dip of the road,
and the carter touched his hat and greeted Mr. Oke. But Oke took no
heed; he did not seem to be aware of the man’s presence.
The clouds were collecting all round; black domes, among which coursed
the round grey masses of fleecy stuff.
“I think we shall be caught in a tremendous storm,” I said; “hadn’t we
better be turning?” He nodded, and turned sharp round.
The sunlight lay in yellow patches under the oaks of the pasture-lands,
and burnished the green hedges. The air was heavy and yet cold, and
everything seemed preparing for a great storm. The rooks whirled
in black clouds round the trees and the conical red caps of the
oast-houses which give that country the look of being studded with
turreted castles; then they descended—a black line—upon the fields,
with what seemed an unearthly loudness of caw. And all round there
arose a shrill quavering bleating of lambs and calling of sheep, while
the wind began to catch the topmost branches of the trees.
Suddenly Mr. Oke broke the silence.
“I don’t know you very well,” he began hurriedly, and without turning
his face towards me; “but I think you are honest, and you have seen
a good deal of the world—much more than I. I want you to tell me—but
truly, please—what do you think a man should do if”—and he stopped for
some minutes.
“Imagine,” he went on quickly, “that a man cares a great deal—a very
great deal for his wife, and that he finds out that she—well, that—that
she is deceiving him. No—don’t misunderstand me; I mean—that she is
constantly surrounded by some one else and will not admit it—some one
whom she hides away. Do you understand? Perhaps she does not know all
the risk she is running, you know, but she will not draw back—she will
not avow it to her husband”—
“My dear Oke,” I interrupted, attempting to take the matter lightly,
“these are questions that can’t be solved in the abstract, or by people
to whom the thing has not happened. And it certainly has not happened
to you or me.”
Oke took no notice of my interruption. “You see,” he went on, “the man
doesn’t expect his wife to care much about him. It’s not that; he isn’t
merely jealous, you know. But he feels that she is on the brink of
dishonouring herself—because I don’t think a woman can really dishonour
her husband; dishonour is in our own hands, and depends only on our own
acts. He ought to save her, do you see? He must, must save her, in one
way or another. But if she will not listen to him, what can he do? Must
he seek out the other one, and try and get him out of the way? You see
it’s all the fault of the other—not hers, not hers. If only she would
trust in her husband, she would be safe. But that other one won’t let
her.”
“Look here, Oke,” I said boldly, but feeling rather frightened; “I know
quite well what you are talking about. And I see you don’t understand
the matter in the very least. I do. I have watched you and watched Mrs.
Oke these six weeks, and I see what is the matter. Will you listen to
me?”
And taking his arm, I tried to explain to him my view of the
situation—that his wife was merely eccentric, and a little theatrical
and imaginative, and that she took a pleasure in teasing him. That he,
on the other hand, was letting himself get into a morbid state; that he
was ill, and ought to see a good doctor. I even offered to take him to
town with me.
I poured out volumes of psychological explanations. I dissected Mrs.
Oke’s character twenty times over, and tried to show him that there
was absolutely nothing at the bottom of his suspicions beyond an
imaginative _pose_ and a garden-play on the brain. I adduced twenty
instances, mostly invented for the nonce, of ladies of my acquaintance
who had suffered from similar fads. I pointed out to him that his wife
ought to have an outlet for her imaginative and theatrical over-energy.
I advised him to take her to London and plunge her into some set where
every one should be more or less in a similar condition. I laughed at
the notion of there being any hidden individual about the house. I
explained to Oke that he was suffering from delusions, and called upon
so conscientious and religious a man to take every step to rid himself
of them, adding innumerable examples of people who had cured themselves
of seeing visions and of brooding over morbid fancies. I struggled and
wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, and I really hoped I had made some
impression. At first, indeed, I felt that not one of my words went into
the man’s brain—that, though silent, he was not listening. It seemed
almost hopeless to present my views in such a light that he could grasp
them. I felt as if I were expounding and arguing at a rock. But when
I got on to the tack of his duty towards his wife and himself, and
appealed to his moral and religious notions, I felt that I was making
an impression.
“I daresay you are right,” he said, taking my hand as we came in sight
of the red gables of Okehurst, and speaking in a weak, tired, humble
voice. “I don’t understand you quite, but I am sure what you say is
true. I daresay it is all that I’m seedy. I feel sometimes as if I were
mad, and just fit to be locked up. But don’t think I don’t struggle
against it. I do, I do continually, only sometimes it seems too strong
for me. I pray God night and morning to give me the strength to
overcome my suspicions, or to remove these dreadful thoughts from me.
God knows, I know what a wretched creature I am, and how unfit to take
care of that poor girl.”
And Oke again pressed my hand. As we entered the garden, he turned to
me once more.
“I am very, very grateful to you,” he said, “and, indeed, I will do my
best to try and be stronger. If only,” he added, with a sigh, “if only
Alice would give me a moment’s breathing-time, and not go on day after
day mocking me with her Lovelock.”
10
I had begun Mrs. Oke’s portrait, and she was giving me a sitting.
She was unusually quiet that morning; but, it seemed to me, with the
quietness of a woman who is expecting something, and she gave me the
impression of being extremely happy. She had been reading, at my
suggestion, the “Vita Nuova,” which she did not know before, and the
conversation came to roll upon that, and upon the question whether love
so abstract and so enduring was a possibility. Such a discussion, which
might have savoured of flirtation in the case of almost any other young
and beautiful woman, became in the case of Mrs. Oke something quite
different; it seemed distant, intangible, not of this earth, like her
smile and the look in her eyes.
“Such love as that,” she said, looking into the far distance of the
oak-dotted park-land, “is very rare, but it can exist. It becomes a
person’s whole existence, his whole soul; and it can survive the death,
not merely of the beloved, but of the lover. It is unextinguishable,
and goes on in the spiritual world until it meet a reincarnation of
the beloved; and when this happens, it jets out and draws to it all
that may remain of that lover’s soul, and takes shape and surrounds the
beloved one once more.”
Mrs. Oke was speaking slowly, almost to herself, and I had never, I
think, seen her look so strange and so beautiful, the stiff white dress
bringing out but the more the exotic exquisiteness and incorporealness
of her person.