Books: A Phantom Lover
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Vernon Lee >> A Phantom Lover
"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.
I merely laughed.
"It's only because she has that play of his on the brain," I answered; "and
because she thinks you superstitious, and likes to tease you."
"I don't understand," sighed Oke.
How could he? And if I had tried to make him do so, he would merely have
thought I was insulting his wife, and have perhaps kicked me out of the
room. So I made no attempt to explain psychological problems to him, and he
asked me no more questions until once--But I must first mention a curious
incident that happened.
The incident was simply this. Returning one afternoon from our usual walk,
Mr. Oke suddenly asked the servant whether any one had come. The answer was
in the negative; but Oke did not seem satisfied. We had hardly sat down to
dinner when he turned to his wife and asked, in a strange voice which I
scarcely recognised as his own, who had called that afternoon.
"No one," answered Mrs. Oke; "at least to the best of my knowledge."
William Oke looked at her fixedly.
"No one?" he repeated, in a scrutinising tone; "no one, Alice?"
Mrs. Oke shook her head. "No one," she replied.
There was a pause.
"Who was it, then, that was walking with you near the pond, about five
o'clock?" asked Oke slowly.
His wife lifted her eyes straight to his and answered contemptuously--
"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.