Books: A Phantom Lover
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Vernon Lee >> A Phantom Lover
I got to understand this much little by little, yet I did not seem to have
really penetrated the something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was a
waywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but could not explain--a something
as difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appearance, and
perhaps very closely connected therewith. I became interested in Mrs. Oke
as if I had been in love with her; and I was not in the least in love. I
neither dreaded parting from her, nor felt any pleasure in her presence. I
had not the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. But I had her on
the brain. I pursued her, her physical image, her psychological
explanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days, and prevented my
ever feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There were
but few neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had a
guest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with a
sense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during our
walks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horribly
dull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also his
wife thought the neighbours a bore. He never questioned his wife's judgment
in these matters. He merely stated the case as if resignation were quite
simple and inevitable; yet it seemed to me, sometimes, that this monotonous
life of solitude, by the side of a woman who took no more heed of him than
of a table or chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation in
this young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. I
often wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, as I had, the
interest of a strange psychological riddle to solve, and of a great
portrait to paint. He was, I found, extremely good,--the type of the
perfectly conscientious young Englishman, the sort of man who ought to have
been the Christian soldier kind of thing; devout, pure-minded, brave,
incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually dense, and puzzled by
all manner of moral scruples. The condition of his tenants and of his
political party--he was a regular Kentish Tory--lay heavy on his mind. He
spent hours every day in his study, doing the work of a land agent and a
political whip, reading piles of reports and newspapers and agricultural
treatises; and emerging for lunch with piles of letters in his hand, and
that odd puzzled look in his good healthy face, that deep gash between his
eyebrows, which my friend the mad-doctor calls the _maniac-frown_. It was
with this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but I
felt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him to
represent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blond
conventionality. I was perhaps rather unconscientious about the likeness of
Mr. Oke; I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean as regards
character, for my whole mind was swallowed up in thinking how I should
paint Mrs. Oke, how I could best transport on to canvas that singular and
enigmatic personality. I began with her husband, and told her frankly that
I must have much longer to study her. Mr. Oke couldn't understand why it
should be necessary to make a hundred and one pencil-sketches of his wife
before even determining in what attitude to paint her; but I think he was
rather pleased to have an opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst; my
presence evidently broke the monotony of his life. Mrs. Oke seemed
perfectly indifferent to my staying, as she was perfectly indifferent to my
presence. Without being rude, I never saw a woman pay so little attention
to a guest; she would talk with me sometimes by the hour, or rather let me
talk to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She would lie back in a
big seventeenth-century armchair while I played the piano, with that
strange smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that strange whiteness
in her eyes; but it seemed a matter of indifference whether my music
stopped or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not take, or
pretend to take, the very faintest interest; but that was nothing to me. I
did not want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely wished to go on
studying her.
The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my presence
as distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay in
the porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who was
occasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there a
week--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular resemblance
that existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that hung in the
hall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in question was a
full length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some stray
Italian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a rather dark corner,
facing the portrait, evidently painted to be its companion, of a dark man,
with a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution and efficiency, in a
black Vandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife; and in the corner
of the woman's portrait were the words, "Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, Esq., and wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst," and the date
1626--"Nicholas Oke" being the name painted in the corner of the small
portrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, at
least so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days of
Charles I, can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There were
the same strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the thin
cheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity of
expression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventional
manner of the time. One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, the
same beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as her
descendant; for I found that Mr. and Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, were
both descended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret. But the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soon
saw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like her
ancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-century look; nay,
that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait.
"You think I am like her," answered Mrs. Oke dreamily to my remark, and her
eyes wandered off to that unseen something, and the faint smile dimpled her
thin cheeks.
"You are like her, and you know it. I may even say you wish to be like her,
Mrs. Oke," I answered, laughing.
"Perhaps I do."
And she looked in the direction of her husband. I noticed that he had an
expression of distinct annoyance besides that frown of his.
"Isn't it true that Mrs. Oke tries to look like that portrait?" I asked,
with a perverse curiosity.
"Oh, fudge!" he exclaimed, rising from his chair and walking nervously to
the window. "It's all nonsense, mere nonsense. I wish you wouldn't, Alice."
"Wouldn't what?" asked Mrs. Oke, with a sort of contemptuous indifference.
"If I am like that Alice Oke, why I am; and I am very pleased any one
should think so. She and her husband are just about the only two members of
our family--our most flat, stale, and unprofitable family--that ever were
in the least degree interesting."
Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain.
"I don't see why you should abuse our family, Alice," he said. "Thank God,
our people have always been honourable and upright men and women!"
"Excepting always Nicholas Oke and Alice his wife, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, Esq.," she answered, laughing, as he strode out into the park.
"How childish he is!" she exclaimed when we were alone. "He really minds,
really feels disgraced by what our ancestors did two centuries and a half
ago. I do believe William would have those two portraits taken down and
burned if he weren't afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. And as it
is, these two people really are the only two members of our family that
ever were in the least interesting. I will tell you the story some day."
As it was, the story was told to me by Oke himself. The next day, as we
were taking our morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, laying
about him all the time at the sere grasses with the hooked stick that he
carried, like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose of
cutting down his and other folk's thistles.
"I fear you must have thought me very ill-mannered towards my wife
yesterday," he said shyly; "and indeed I know I was."
Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom every woman, every wife--and
his own most of all--appeared in the light of something holy. "But--but--I
have a prejudice which my wife does not enter into, about raking up ugly
things in one's own family. I suppose Alice thinks that it is so long ago
that it has really got no connection with us; she thinks of it merely as a
picturesque story. I daresay many people feel like that; in short, I am
sure they do, otherwise there wouldn't be such lots of discreditable family
traditions afloat. But I feel as if it were all one whether it was long ago
or not; when it's a question of one's own people, I would rather have it
forgotten. I can't understand how people can talk about murders in their
families, and ghosts, and so forth."
"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed as
if it required some to complete it.
"I hope not," answered Oke gravely.
His gravity made me smile.
"Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked.
"If there are such things as ghosts," he replied, "I don't think they
should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as a
warning or a punishment."
We walked on some time in silence, I wondering at the strange type of this
commonplace young man, and half wishing I could put something into my
portrait that should be the equivalent of this curious unimaginative
earnestness. Then Oke told me the story of those two pictures--told it me
about as badly and hesitatingly as was possible for mortal man.
He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, and therefore descended from
the same old Kentish stock. The Okes of Okehurst could trace back to
Norman, almost to Saxon times, far longer than any of the titled or
better-known families of the neighbourhood. I saw that William Oke, in his
heart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neighbours. "We have never done
anything particular, or been anything particular--never held any office,"
he said; "but we have always been here, and apparently always done our
duty. An ancestor of ours was killed in the Scotch wars, another at
Agincourt--mere honest captains." Well, early in the seventeenth century,
the family had dwindled to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who had
rebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas appears to have been
somewhat different from the usual run of the family. He had, in his youth,
sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have been
less of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer very
young, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from a
neighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret," my
host informed me, "and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite different
sort of people--restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite of
Henry VIII." It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having any
Pomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an evident family
dislike--the dislike of an Oke, one of the old, honourable, modest stock,
which had quietly done its duty, for a family of fortune-seekers and Court
minions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in a little house
recently inherited from an uncle, a certain Christopher Lovelock, a young
gallant and poet, who was in momentary disgrace at Court for some love
affair. This Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neighbours
of Okehurst--too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either for
her husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one evening as he was riding home
alone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen,
but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wife
dressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition had
remained. "They used to tell it us when we were children," said my host, in
a hoarse voice, "and to frighten my cousin--I mean my wife--and me with
stories about Lovelock. It is merely a tradition, which I hope may die out,
as I sincerely pray to heaven that it may be false." "Alice--Mrs. Oke--you
see," he went on after some time, "doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps I
am morbid. But I do dislike having the old story raked up."
And we said no more on the subject.
4
From that moment I began to assume a certain interest in the eyes of Mrs.
Oke; or rather, I began to perceive that I had a means of securing her
attention. Perhaps it was wrong of me to do so; and I have often reproached
myself very seriously later on. But after all, how was I to guess that I
was making mischief merely by chiming in, for the sake of the portrait I
had undertaken, and of a very harmless psychological mania, with what was
merely the fad, the little romantic affectation or eccentricity, of a
scatter-brained and eccentric young woman? How in the world should I have
dreamed that I was handling explosive substances? A man is surely not
responsible if the people with whom he is forced to deal, and whom he deals
with as with all the rest of the world, are quite different from all other
human creatures.
So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, I really cannot blame
myself. I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique subject for a
portrait-painter of my particular sort, and a most singular, _bizarre_
personality. I could not possibly do my subject justice so long as I was
kept at a distance, prevented from studying the real character of the
woman. I required to put her into play. And I ask you whether any more
innocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a woman, and
letting her talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of ancestors
of hers of the time of Charles I., and a poet whom they had
murdered?--particularly as I studiously respected the prejudices of my
host, and refrained from mentioning the matter, and tried to restrain Mrs.
Oke from doing so, in the presence of William Oke himself.
I had certainly guessed correctly. To resemble the Alice Oke of the year
1626 was the caprice, the mania, the pose, the whatever you may call it, of
the Alice Oke of 1880; and to perceive this resemblance was the sure way of
gaining her good graces. It was the most extraordinary craze, of all the
extraordinary crazes of childless and idle women, that I had ever met; but
it was more than that, it was admirably characteristic. It finished off the
strange figure of Mrs. Oke, as I saw it in my imagination--this _bizarre_
creature of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness--that she should have no
interest in the present, but only an eccentric passion in the past. It
seemed to give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes, to her
irrelevant and far-off smile. It was like the words to a weird piece of
gipsy music, this that she, who was so different, so distant from all women
of her own time, should try and identify herself with a woman of the
past--that she should have a kind of flirtation--But of this anon.
I told Mrs. Oke that I had learnt from her husband the outline of the
tragedy, or mystery, whichever it was, of Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, and the poet Christopher Lovelock. That look of vague contempt, of
a desire to shock, which I had noticed before, came into her beautiful,
pale, diaphanous face.
"I suppose my husband was very shocked at the whole matter," she
said--"told it you with as little detail as possible, and assured you
very solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be a mere dreadful
calumny? Poor Willie! I remember already when we were children, and I
used to come with my mother to spend Christmas at Okehurst, and my cousin
was down here for his holidays, how I used to horrify him by insisting
upon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs, and playing the story of the
wicked Mrs. Oke; and he always piously refused to do the part of Nicholas,
when I wanted to have the scene on Cotes Common. I didn't know then that I
was like the original Alice Oke; I found it out only after our marriage.
You really think that I am?"
She certainly was, particularly at that moment, as she stood in a white
Vandyck dress, with the green of the park-land rising up behind her, and
the low sun catching her short locks and surrounding her head, her
exquisitely bowed head, with a pale-yellow halo. But I confess I thought
the original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though she might be, very
uninteresting compared with this wayward and exquisite creature whom I had
rashly promised myself to send down to posterity in all her unlikely
wayward exquisiteness.
One morning while Mr. Oke was despatching his Saturday heap of Conservative
manifestoes and rural decisions--he was justice of the peace in a most
literal sense, penetrating into cottages and huts, defending the weak and
admonishing the ill-conducted--one morning while I was making one of my
many pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that remain to me now!) of my
future sitter, Mrs. Oke gave me her version of the story of Alice Oke and
Christopher Lovelock.
"Do you suppose there was anything between them?" I asked--"that she was
ever in love with him? How do you explain the part which tradition ascribes
to her in the supposed murder? One has heard of women and their lovers who
have killed the husband; but a woman who combines with her husband to kill
her lover, or at least the man who is in love with her--that is surely very
singular." I was absorbed in my drawing, and really thinking very little of
what I was saying.
"I don't know," she answered pensively, with that distant look in her eyes.
"Alice Oke was very proud, I am sure. She may have loved the poet very
much, and yet been indignant with him, hated having to love him. She may
have felt that she had a right to rid herself of him, and to call upon her
husband to help her to do so."
"Good heavens! what a fearful idea!" I exclaimed, half laughing. "Don't you
think, after all, that Mr. Oke may be right in saying that it is easier and
more comfortable to take the whole story as a pure invention?"
"I cannot take it as an invention," answered Mrs. Oke contemptuously,
"because I happen to know that it is true."
"Indeed!" I answered, working away at my sketch, and enjoying putting this
strange creature, as I said to myself, through her paces; "how is that?"
"How does one know that anything is true in this world?" she replied
evasively; "because one does, because one feels it to be true, I suppose."
And, with that far-off look in her light eyes, she relapsed into silence.
"Have you ever read any of Lovelock's poetry?" she asked me suddenly the
next day.
"Lovelock?" I answered, for I had forgotten the name. "Lovelock,
who"--But I stopped, remembering the prejudices of my host, who was
seated next to me at table.
"Lovelock who was killed by Mr. Oke's and my ancestors."
And she looked full at her husband, as if in perverse enjoyment of the
evident annoyance which it caused him.
"Alice," he entreated in a low voice, his whole face crimson, "for mercy's
sake, don't talk about such things before the servants."
Mrs. Oke burst into a high, light, rather hysterical laugh, the laugh of a
naughty child.
"The servants! Gracious heavens! do you suppose they haven't heard the
story? Why, it's as well known as Okehurst itself in the neighbourhood.
Don't they believe that Lovelock has been seen about the house? Haven't
they all heard his footsteps in the big corridor? Haven't they, my dear
Willie, noticed a thousand times that you never will stay a minute alone in
the yellow drawing-room--that you run out of it, like a child, if I happen
to leave you there for a minute?"
True! How was it I had not noticed that? or rather, that I only now
remembered having noticed it? The yellow drawing-room was one of the most
charming rooms in the house: a large, bright room, hung with yellow damask
and panelled with carvings, that opened straight out on to the lawn, far
superior to the room in which we habitually sat, which was comparatively
gloomy. This time Mr. Oke struck me as really too childish. I felt an
intense desire to badger him.
"The yellow drawing-room!" I exclaimed. "Does this interesting literary
character haunt the yellow drawing-room? Do tell me about it. What happened
there?"
Mr. Oke made a painful effort to laugh.
"Nothing ever happened there, so far as I know," he said, and rose from the
table.
"Really?" I asked incredulously.
"Nothing did happen there," answered Mrs. Oke slowly, playing mechanically
with a fork, and picking out the pattern of the tablecloth. "That is just
the extraordinary circumstance, that, so far as any one knows, nothing ever
did happen there; and yet that room has an evil reputation. No member of
our family, they say, can bear to sit there alone for more than a minute.
You see, William evidently cannot."
"Have you ever seen or heard anything strange there?" I asked of my host.
He shook his head. "Nothing," he answered curtly, and lit his cigar.
"I presume you have not," I asked, half laughing, of Mrs. Oke, "since you
don't mind sitting in that room for hours alone? How do you explain this
uncanny reputation, since nothing ever happened there?"
"Perhaps something is destined to happen there in the future," she
answered, in her absent voice. And then she suddenly added, "Suppose you
paint my portrait in that room?"
Mr. Oke suddenly turned round. He was very white, and looked as if he were
going to say something, but desisted.
"Why do you worry Mr. Oke like that?" I asked, when he had gone into his
smoking-room with his usual bundle of papers. "It is very cruel of you,
Mrs. Oke. You ought to have more consideration for people who believe in
such things, although you may not be able to put yourself in their frame of
mind."
"Who tells you that I don't believe in _such things_, as you call them?"
she answered abruptly.
"Come," she said, after a minute, "I want to show you why I believe in
Christopher Lovelock. Come with me into the yellow room."
5
What Mrs. Oke showed me in the yellow room was a large bundle of papers,
some printed and some manuscript, but all of them brown with age, which she
took out of an old Italian ebony inlaid cabinet. It took her some time to
get them, as a complicated arrangement of double locks and false drawers
had to be put in play; and while she was doing so, I looked round the room,
in which I had been only three or four times before. It was certainly the
most beautiful room in this beautiful house, and, as it seemed to me now,
the most strange. It was long and low, with something that made you think
of the cabin of a ship, with a great mullioned window that let in, as it
were, a perspective of the brownish green park-land, dotted with oaks, and
sloping upwards to the distant line of bluish firs against the horizon. The
walls were hung with flowered damask, whose yellow, faded to brown, united
with the reddish colour of the carved wainscoting and the carved oaken
beams. For the rest, it reminded me more of an Italian room than an English
one. The furniture was Tuscan of the early seventeenth century, inlaid and
carved; there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures, by some
Bolognese master, on the walls; and in a corner, among a stack of dwarf
orange-trees, a little Italian harpsichord of exquisite curve and
slenderness, with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In a
recess was a shelf of old books, mainly English and Italian poets of the
Elizabethan time; and close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, a
large and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The panes of the mullioned window
were open, and yet the air seemed heavy, with an indescribable heady
perfume, not that of any growing flower, but like that of old stuff that
should have lain for years among spices.
"It is a beautiful room!" I exclaimed. "I should awfully like to paint you
in it"; but I had scarcely spoken the words when I felt I had done wrong.
This woman's husband could not bear the room, and it seemed to me vaguely
as if he were right in detesting it.
Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the table
where she was standing sorting the papers.
"Look!" she said, "these are all poems by Christopher Lovelock"; and
touching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent fingers, she
commenced reading some of them out loud in a slow, half-audible voice. They
were songs in the style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton,
complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady called Dryope, in
whose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of the mistress of
Okehurst. The songs were graceful, and not without a certain faded passion:
but I was thinking not of them, but of the woman who was reading them to
me.