"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.