Books: A Phantom Lover
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Vernon Lee >> A Phantom Lover
Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish yellow wall as a background to her
white brocade dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make, seemed
but to bring out more clearly the slightness, the exquisite suppleness, of
her tall figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the other, as
if for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. Her voice, which was
delicate, shadowy, like her person, had a curious throbbing cadence, as if
she were reading the words of a melody, and restraining herself with
difficulty from singing it; and as she read, her long slender throat
throbbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin face. She
evidently knew the verses by heart, and her eyes were mostly fixed with
that distant smile in them, with which harmonised a constant tremulous
little smile in her lips.
"That is how I would wish to paint her!" I exclaimed within myself; and
scarcely noticed, what struck me on thinking over the scene, that this
strange being read these verses as one might fancy a woman would read
love-verses addressed to herself.
"Those are all written for Alice Oke--Alice the daughter of Virgil
Pomfret," she said slowly, folding up the papers. "I found them at the
bottom of this cabinet. Can you doubt of the reality of Christopher
Lovelock now?"
The question was an illogical one, for to doubt of the existence of
Christopher Lovelock was one thing, and to doubt of the mode of his death
was another; but somehow I did feel convinced.
"Look!" she said, when she had replaced the poems, "I will show you
something else." Among the flowers that stood on the upper storey of her
writing-table--for I found that Mrs. Oke had a writing-table in the yellow
room--stood, as on an altar, a small black carved frame, with a silk
curtain drawn over it: the sort of thing behind which you would have
expected to find a head of Christ or of the Virgin Mary. She drew the
curtain and displayed a large-sized miniature, representing a young man,
with auburn curls and a peaked auburn beard, dressed in black, but with
lace about his neck, and large pear-shaped pearls in his ears: a wistful,
melancholy face. Mrs. Oke took the miniature religiously off its stand, and
showed me, written in faded characters upon the back, the name "Christopher
Lovelock," and the date 1626.
"I found this in the secret drawer of that cabinet, together with the heap
of poems," she said, taking the miniature out of my hand.
I was silent for a minute.
"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.