"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.