A PHANTOM LOVER

ByVERNON LEE

1890

To COUNT PETER BOUTOURLINE, _AT TAGANTCHA_, GOVERNMENT OF KIEW, RUSSIA. 

MY DEAR BOUTOURLINE, Do you remember my telling you, one afternoon that you sat upon thehearthstool at Florence, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst?

You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of fantastic things, and urgedme to write it out at once, although I protested that, in such matters, towrite is to exorcise, to dispel the charm; and that printers' ink chasesaway the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as efficaciously as gallonsof holy water. 

But if, as I suspect, you will now put down any charm that story mayhave possessed to the way in which we had been working ourselves up, that firelight evening, with all manner of fantastic stuff--if, as Ifear, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst will strike you as stale andunprofitable--the sight of this little book will serve at least to remindyou, in the middle of your Russian summer, that there is such a seasonas winter, such a place as Florence, and such a person as your friend, VERNON LEE

Kensington, _July_ 1886. 

1

That sketch up there with the boy's cap? Yes; that's the same woman. Iwonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not?The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderfulelegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort ofgrace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of headand neck, and hands and fingers. Here are a lot of pencil sketches I madewhile I was preparing to paint her portrait. Yes; there's nothing but herin the whole sketchbook. Mere scratches, but they may give some idea of hermarvellous, fantastic kind of grace. Here she is leaning over thestaircase, and here sitting in the swing. Here she is walking quickly outof the room. That's her head. You see she isn't really handsome; herforehead is too big, and her nose too short. This gives no idea of her. Itwas altogether a question of movement. Look at the strange cheeks, hollowand rather flat; well, when she smiled she had the most marvellous dimpleshere. There was something exquisite and uncanny about it. Yes; I began thepicture, but it was never finished. I did the husband first. I wonder whohas his likeness now? Help me to move these pictures away from the wall. Thanks. This is her portrait; a huge wreck. I don't suppose you can makemuch of it; it is merely blocked in, and seems quite mad. You see my ideawas to make her leaning against a wall--there was one hung with yellow thatseemed almost brown--so as to bring out the silhouette. 

It was very singular I should have chosen that particular wall. It doeslook rather insane in this condition, but I like it; it has something ofher. I would frame it and hang it up, only people would ask questions. Yes;you have guessed quite right--it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst. I forgot you hadrelations in that part of the country; besides, I suppose the newspaperswere full of it at the time. You didn't know that it all took place undermy eyes? I can scarcely believe now that it did: it all seems so distant, vivid but unreal, like a thing of my own invention. It really was muchstranger than any one guessed. People could no more understand it than theycould understand her. I doubt whether any one ever understood Alice Okebesides myself. You mustn't think me unfeeling. She was a marvellous, weird, exquisite creature, but one couldn't feel sorry for her. I felt muchsorrier for the wretched creature of a husband. It seemed such anappropriate end for her; I fancy she would have liked it could she haveknown. Ah! I shall never have another chance of painting such a portrait asI wanted. She seemed sent me from heaven or the other place. You have neverheard the story in detail? Well, I don't usually mention it, because peopleare so brutally stupid or sentimental; but I'll tell it you. Let me see. It's too dark to paint any more today, so I can tell it you now. Wait; Imust turn her face to the wall. Ah, she was a marvellous creature!

2

You remember, three years ago, my telling you I had let myself in forpainting a couple of Kentish squireen? I really could not understand whathad possessed me to say yes to that man. A friend of mine had brought himone day to my studio--Mr. Oke of Okehurst, that was the name on his card. He was a very tall, very well-made, very good-looking young man, with abeautiful fair complexion, beautiful fair moustache, and beautifullyfitting clothes; absolutely like a hundred other young men you can see anyday in the Park, and absolutely uninteresting from the crown of his head tothe tip of his boots. Mr. Oke, who had been a lieutenant in the Bluesbefore his marriage, was evidently extremely uncomfortable on findinghimself in a studio. He felt misgivings about a man who could wear a velvetcoat in town, but at the same time he was nervously anxious not to treat mein the very least like a tradesman. He walked round my place, looked ateverything with the most scrupulous attention, stammered out a fewcomplimentary phrases, and then, looking at his friend for assistance, tried to come to the point, but failed. The point, which the friend kindlyexplained, was that Mr. Oke was desirous to know whether my engagementswould allow of my painting him and his wife, and what my terms would be. The poor man blushed perfectly crimson during this explanation, as if hehad come with the most improper proposal; and I noticed--the onlyinteresting thing about him--a very odd nervous frown between his eyebrows, a perfect double gash, --a thing which usually means something abnormal: amad-doctor of my acquaintance calls it the maniac-frown. When I hadanswered, he suddenly burst out into rather confused explanations: hiswife--Mrs. Oke--had seen some of my--pictures--paintings--portraits--atthe--the--what d'you call it?--Academy. She had--in short, they had made avery great impression upon her. Mrs. Oke had a great taste for art; shewas, in short, extremely desirous of having her portrait and his painted byme, _etcetera_. 

"My wife, " he suddenly added, "is a remarkable woman. I don't know whetheryou will think her handsome, --she isn't exactly, you know. But she'sawfully strange, " and Mr. Oke of Okehurst gave a little sigh and frownedthat curious frown, as if so long a speech and so decided an expression ofopinion had cost him a great deal. 

It was a rather unfortunate moment in my career. A very influential sitterof mine--you remember the fat lady with the crimson curtain behindher?--had come to the conclusion or been persuaded that I had painted herold and vulgar, which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique had turnedagainst me, the newspapers had taken up the matter, and for the moment Iwas considered as a painter to whose brushes no woman would trust herreputation. Things were going badly. So I snapped but too gladly at Mr. Oke's offer, and settled to go down to Okehurst at the end of a fortnight. But the door had scarcely closed upon my future sitter when I began toregret my rashness; and my disgust at the thought of wasting a whole summerupon the portrait of a totally uninteresting Kentish squire, and hisdoubtless equally uninteresting wife, grew greater and greater as the timefor execution approached. I remember so well the frightful temper in whichI got into the train for Kent, and the even more frightful temper in whichI got out of it at the little station nearest to Okehurst. It was pouringfloods. I felt a comfortable fury at the thought that my canvases would getnicely wetted before Mr. Oke's coachman had packed them on the top of thewaggonette. It was just what served me right for coming to this confoundedplace to paint these confounded people. We drove off in the steadydownpour. The roads were a mass of yellow mud; the endless flatgrazing-grounds under the oak-trees, after having been burnt to cinders ina long drought, were turned into a hideous brown sop; the country seemedintolerably monotonous. 

My spirits sank lower and lower. I began to meditate upon the modern Gothiccountry-house, with the usual amount of Morris furniture, Liberty rugs, andMudie novels, to which I was doubtless being taken. My fancy pictured veryvividly the five or six little Okes--that man certainly must have at leastfive children--the aunts, and sisters-in-law, and cousins; the eternalroutine of afternoon tea and lawn-tennis; above all, it pictured Mrs. Oke, the bouncing, well-informed, model housekeeper, electioneering, charity-organising young lady, whom such an individual as Mr. Oke wouldregard in the light of a remarkable woman. And my spirit sank within me, and I cursed my avarice in accepting the commission, my spiritlessness innot throwing it over while yet there was time. We had meanwhile driven intoa large park, or rather a long succession of grazing-grounds, dotted aboutwith large oaks, under which the sheep were huddled together for shelterfrom the rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a lineof low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill. It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and therewas none to be seen in the distance--nothing but the undulation of seregrass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose, from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made asudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. Itwas not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brickhouse, with the rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the time ofJames I. , --a forlorn, vast place, set in the midst of the pasture-land, with no trace of garden before it, and only a few large trees indicatingthe possibility of one to the back; no lawn either, but on the other sideof the sandy dip, which suggested a filled-up moat, a huge oak, short, hollow, with wreathing, blasted, black branches, upon which only a handfulof leaves shook in the rain. It was not at all what I had pictured tomyself the home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst. 

My host received me in the hall, a large place, panelled and carved, hunground with portraits up to its curious ceiling--vaulted and ribbed like theinside of a ship's hull. He looked even more blond and pink and white, moreabsolutely mediocre in his tweed suit; and also, I thought, even moregood-natured and duller. He took me into his study, a room hung round withwhips and fishing-tackle in place of books, while my things were beingcarried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire was smouldering. He gave theembers a nervous kick with his foot, and said, as he offered me a cigar--

"You must excuse my not introducing you at once to Mrs. Oke. My wife--inshort, I believe my wife is asleep. "

"Is Mrs. Oke unwell?" I asked, a sudden hope flashing across me that Imight be off the whole matter. 

"Oh no! Alice is quite well; at least, quite as well as she usually is. Mywife, " he added, after a minute, and in a very decided tone, "does notenjoy very good health--a nervous constitution. Oh no! not at all ill, nothing at all serious, you know. Only nervous, the doctors say; mustn't beworried or excited, the doctors say; requires lots of repose, --that sortof thing. "

There was a dead pause. This man depressed me, I knew not why. He had alistless, puzzled look, very much out of keeping with his evident admirablehealth and strength. 

"I suppose you are a great sportsman?" I asked from sheer despair, noddingin the direction of the whips and guns and fishing-rods. 

"Oh no! not now. I was once. I have given up all that, " he answered, standing with his back to the fire, and staring at the polar bear beneathhis feet. "I--I have no time for all that now, " he added, as if anexplanation were due. "A married man--you know. Would you like to come upto your rooms?" he suddenly interrupted himself. "I have had one arrangedfor you to paint in. My wife said you would prefer a north light. If thatone doesn't suit, you can have your choice of any other. "

I followed him out of the study, through the vast entrance-hall. In lessthan a minute I was no longer thinking of Mr. And Mrs. Oke and the boredomof doing their likeness; I was simply overcome by the beauty of this house, which I had pictured modern and philistine. It was, without exception, themost perfect example of an old English manor-house that I had ever seen;the most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Outof the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved andinlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reachingfrom the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship'shull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted atintervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings ofcoats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded redand blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with thetarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oakcornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. The beautifully damascenedsuits of court armour looked, without being at all rusty, as if no modernhand had ever touched them; the very rugs under foot were ofsixteenth-century Persian make; the only things of to-day were the bigbunches of flowers and ferns, arranged in majolica dishes upon thelandings. Everything was perfectly silent; only from below came the chimes, silvery like an Italian palace fountain, of an old-fashioned clock. 

It seemed to me that I was being led through the palace of the SleepingBeauty. 

"What a magnificent house!" I exclaimed as I followed my host through along corridor, also hung with leather, wainscoted with carvings, andfurnished with big wedding coffers, and chairs that looked as if they cameout of some Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong impression that allthis was natural, spontaneous--that it had about it nothing of thepicturesqueness which swell studios have taught to rich and aesthetichouses. Mr. Oke misunderstood me. 

"It is a nice old place, " he said, "but it's too large for us. You see, mywife's health does not allow of our having many guests; and there are nochildren. "

I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his voice; and he evidently wasafraid there might have seemed something of the kind, for he addedimmediately--

"I don't care for children one jackstraw, you know, myself; can'tunderstand how any one can, for my part. "

If ever a man went out of his way to tell a lie, I said to myself, Mr. Okeof Okehurst was doing so at the present moment. 

When he had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted tome, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinaryimaginative impression which this house had given me. 

I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides the sort of spasm ofimaginative interest sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentricpersonalities, I know nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter andless analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort ofhouse. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures ofthe tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, thegreat bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embersreddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework, a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by thehands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, everynow and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled theroom;--to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complexand indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, andwhich, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require agenius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire. 

After I had dressed for dinner I resumed my place in the arm-chair, andresumed also my reverie, letting all these impressions of the past--whichseemed faded like the figures in the arras, but still warm like the embersin the fireplace, still sweet and subtle like the perfume of the deadrose-leaves and broken spices in the china bowls--permeate me and go to myhead. Of Oke and Oke's wife I did not think; I seemed quite alone, isolatedfrom the world, separated from it in this exotic enjoyment. 

Gradually the embers grew paler; the figures in the tapestry more shadowy;the columned and curtained bed loomed out vaguer; the room seemed to fillwith greyness; and my eyes wandered to the mullioned bow-window, beyondwhose panes, between whose heavy stonework, stretched a greyish-brownexpanse of sore and sodden park grass, dotted with big oaks; while far off, behind a jagged fringe of dark Scotch firs, the wet sky was suffused withthe blood-red of the sunset. Between the falling of the raindrops from theivy outside, there came, fainter or sharper, the recurring bleating of thelambs separated from their mothers, a forlorn, quavering, eerie little cry. 

I started up at a sudden rap at my door. 

"Haven't you heard the gong for dinner?" asked Mr. Oke's voice. 

I had completely forgotten his existence. 

3

I feel that I cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest impressions of Mrs. Oke. My recollection of them would be entirely coloured by my subsequentknowledge of her; whence I conclude that I could not at first haveexperienced the strange interest and admiration which that extraordinarywoman very soon excited in me. Interest and admiration, be it wellunderstood, of a very unusual kind, as she was herself a very unusual kindof woman; and I, if you choose, am a rather unusual kind of man. But I canexplain that better anon. 

This much is certain, that I must have been immeasurably surprised atfinding my hostess and future sitter so completely unlike everything I hadanticipated. Or no--now I come to think of it, I scarcely felt surprised atall; or if I did, that shock of surprise could have lasted but aninfinitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that, having once seen AliceOke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could havefancied her at all different: there was something so complete, socompletely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemedalways to have been present in one's consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma. 

Let me try and give you some notion of her: not that first impression, whatever it may have been, but the absolute reality of her as I graduallylearned to see it. To begin with, I must repeat and reiterate over and overagain, that she was, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and exquisitewoman I have ever seen, but with a grace and an exquisiteness that hadnothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of whatgoes by these names: grace and exquisiteness recognised at once as perfect, but which were seen in her for the first, and probably, I do believe, forthe last time. It is conceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand yearsthere may arise a combination of lines, a system of movements, an outline, a gesture, which is new, unprecedented, and yet hits off exactly ourdesires for beauty and rareness? She was very tall; and I suppose peoplewould have called her thin. I don't know, for I never thought about her asa body--bones, flesh, that sort of thing; but merely as a wonderful seriesof lines, and a wonderful strangeness of personality. Tall and slender, certainly, and with not one item of what makes up our notion of awell-built woman. She was as straight--I mean she had as little of whatpeople call figure--as a bamboo; her shoulders were a trifle high, and shehad a decided stoop; her arms and her shoulders she never once woreuncovered. But this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness and astateliness, a play of outline with every step she took, that I can'tcompare to anything else; there was in it something of the peacock andsomething also of the stag; but, above all, it was her own. I wish I coulddescribe her. I wish, alas!--I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundredthousand times--I could paint her, as I see her now, if I shut myeyes--even if it were only a silhouette. There! I see her so plainly, walking slowly up and down a room, the slight highness of her shoulders;just completing the exquisite arrangement of lines made by the straightsupple back, the long exquisite neck, the head, with the hair cropped inshort pale curls, always drooping a little, except when she would suddenlythrow it back, and smile, not at me, nor at any one, nor at anything thathad been said, but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something, with the strange dimple in her thin, pale cheeks, and the strange whitenessin her full, wide-opened eyes: the moment when she had something of thestag in her movement. But where is the use of talking about her? I don'tbelieve, you know, that even the greatest painter can show what is the realbeauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary sense: Titian's andTintoretto's women must have been miles handsomer than they have made them. Something--and that the very essence--always escapes, perhaps because realbeauty is as much a thing in time--a thing like music, a succession, aseries--as in space. Mind you, I am speaking of a woman beautiful in theconventional sense. Imagine, then, how much more so in the case of a womanlike Alice Oke; and if the pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint, can't succeed, how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion with merewretched words--words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning, animpotent conventional association? To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke ofOkehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite andstrange, --an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than youcould bring home the perfume of some newly discovered tropical flower bycomparing it with the scent of a cabbage-rose or a lily. 

That first dinner was gloomy enough. Mr. Oke--Oke of Okehurst, as thepeople down there called him--was horribly shy, consumed with a fear ofmaking a fool of himself before me and his wife, I then thought. But thatsort of shyness did not wear off; and I soon discovered that, although itwas doubtless increased by the presence of a total stranger, it wasinspired in Oke, not by me, but by his wife. He would look every now andthen as if he were going to make a remark, and then evidently restrainhimself, and remain silent. It was very curious to see this big, handsome, manly young fellow, who ought to have had any amount of success with women, suddenly stammer and grow crimson in the presence of his own wife. Nor wasit the consciousness of stupidity; for when you got him alone, Oke, although always slow and timid, had a certain amount of ideas, and verydefined political and social views, and a certain childlike earnestness anddesire to attain certainty and truth which was rather touching. On theother hand, Oke's singular shyness was not, so far as I could see, theresult of any kind of bullying on his wife's part. You can always detect, if you have any observation, the husband or the wife who is accustomed tobe snubbed, to be corrected, by his or her better-half: there is aself-consciousness in both parties, a habit of watching and fault-finding, of being watched and found fault with. This was clearly not the case atOkehurst. Mrs. Oke evidently did not trouble herself about her husband inthe very least; he might say or do any amount of silly things withoutrebuke or even notice; and he might have done so, had he chosen, ever sincehis wedding-day. You felt that at once. Mrs. Oke simply passed over hisexistence. I cannot say she paid much attention to any one's, even to mine. At first I thought it an affectation on her part--for there was somethingfar-fetched in her whole appearance, something suggesting study, whichmight lead one to tax her with affectation at first; she was dressed in astrange way, not according to any established aesthetic eccentricity, butindividually, strangely, as if in the clothes of an ancestress of theseventeenth century. Well, at first I thought it a kind of pose on herpart, this mixture of extreme graciousness and utter indifference which shemanifested towards me. She always seemed to be thinking of something else;and although she talked quite sufficiently, and with every sign of superiorintelligence, she left the impression of having been as taciturn as herhusband. 

In the beginning, in the first few days of my stay at Okehurst, I imaginedthat Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort of flirt; and that her absentmanner, her look, while speaking to you, into an invisible distance, hercurious irrelevant smile, were so many means of attracting and bafflingadoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners of certain foreignwomen--it is beyond English ones--which mean, to those who can understand, "pay court to me. " But I soon found I was mistaken. Mrs. Oke had not thefaintest desire that I should pay court to her; indeed she did not honourme with sufficient thought for that; and I, on my part, began to be toomuch interested in her from another point of view to dream of such a thing. I became aware, not merely that I had before me the most marvellously rareand exquisite and baffling subject for a portrait, but also one of the mostpeculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that I look back upon it, I amtempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might besummed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself--a Narcissusattitude--curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort ofmorbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristicsave a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, tosurprise and shock more particularly her husband, and thus be revenged forthe intense boredom which his want of appreciation inflicted upon her. 

I got to understand this much little by little, yet I did not seem to havereally penetrated the something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was awaywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but could not explain--a somethingas difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appearance, andperhaps very closely connected therewith. I became interested in Mrs. Okeas if I had been in love with her; and I was not in the least in love. Ineither dreaded parting from her, nor felt any pleasure in her presence. Ihad not the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. But I had her onthe brain. I pursued her, her physical image, her psychologicalexplanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days, and prevented myever feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There werebut few neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had aguest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with asense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during ourwalks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horriblydull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also hiswife thought the neighbours a bore. He never questioned his wife's judgmentin these matters. He merely stated the case as if resignation were quitesimple and inevitable; yet it seemed to me, sometimes, that this monotonouslife of solitude, by the side of a woman who took no more heed of him thanof a table or chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation inthis young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. Ioften wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, as I had, theinterest of a strange psychological riddle to solve, and of a greatportrait to paint. He was, I found, extremely good, --the type of theperfectly conscientious young Englishman, the sort of man who ought to havebeen the Christian soldier kind of thing; devout, pure-minded, brave, incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually dense, and puzzled byall manner of moral scruples. The condition of his tenants and of hispolitical party--he was a regular Kentish Tory--lay heavy on his mind. Hespent hours every day in his study, doing the work of a land agent and apolitical whip, reading piles of reports and newspapers and agriculturaltreatises; and emerging for lunch with piles of letters in his hand, andthat odd puzzled look in his good healthy face, that deep gash between hiseyebrows, which my friend the mad-doctor calls the _maniac-frown_. It waswith this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but Ifelt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him torepresent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blondconventionality. I was perhaps rather unconscientious about the likeness ofMr. Oke; I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean as regardscharacter, for my whole mind was swallowed up in thinking how I shouldpaint Mrs. Oke, how I could best transport on to canvas that singular andenigmatic personality. I began with her husband, and told her frankly thatI must have much longer to study her. Mr. Oke couldn't understand why itshould be necessary to make a hundred and one pencil-sketches of his wifebefore even determining in what attitude to paint her; but I think he wasrather pleased to have an opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst; mypresence evidently broke the monotony of his life. Mrs. Oke seemedperfectly indifferent to my staying, as she was perfectly indifferent to mypresence. Without being rude, I never saw a woman pay so little attentionto a guest; she would talk with me sometimes by the hour, or rather let metalk to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She would lie back in abig seventeenth-century armchair while I played the piano, with thatstrange smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that strange whitenessin her eyes; but it seemed a matter of indifference whether my musicstopped or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not take, orpretend to take, the very faintest interest; but that was nothing to me. Idid not want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely wished to go onstudying her. 

The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my presenceas distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay inthe porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who wasoccasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there aweek--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular resemblancethat existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that hung in thehall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in question was afull length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some strayItalian 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 ablack Vandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife; and in the cornerof the woman's portrait were the words, "Alice Oke, daughter of VirgilPomfret, Esq. , and wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst, " and the date1626--"Nicholas Oke" being the name painted in the corner of the smallportrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, atleast so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days ofCharles I, can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There werethe same strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the thincheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity ofexpression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventionalmanner of the time. One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, thesame beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as herdescendant; for I found that Mr. And Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, wereboth descended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, daughter of VirgilPomfret. But the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soonsaw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like herancestress, 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 hereyes wandered off to that unseen something, and the faint smile dimpled herthin 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 anexpression 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 tothe 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 oneshould think so. She and her husband are just about the only two members ofour family--our most flat, stale, and unprofitable family--that ever werein 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 VirgilPomfret, 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 halfago. I do believe William would have those two portraits taken down andburned if he weren't afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. And as itis, these two people really are the only two members of our family thatever 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 wewere taking our morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, layingabout him all the time at the sere grasses with the hooked stick that hecarried, like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose ofcutting down his and other folk's thistles. 

"I fear you must have thought me very ill-mannered towards my wifeyesterday, " he said shyly; "and indeed I know I was. "

Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom every woman, every wife--andhis own most of all--appeared in the light of something holy. "But--but--Ihave a prejudice which my wife does not enter into, about raking up uglythings in one's own family. I suppose Alice thinks that it is so long agothat it has really got no connection with us; she thinks of it merely as apicturesque story. I daresay many people feel like that; in short, I amsure they do, otherwise there wouldn't be such lots of discreditable familytraditions afloat. But I feel as if it were all one whether it was long agoor not; when it's a question of one's own people, I would rather have itforgotten. I can't understand how people can talk about murders in theirfamilies, and ghosts, and so forth. "

"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed asif 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 theyshould be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as awarning or a punishment. "

We walked on some time in silence, I wondering at the strange type of thiscommonplace young man, and half wishing I could put something into myportrait that should be the equivalent of this curious unimaginativeearnestness. Then Oke told me the story of those two pictures--told it meabout as badly and hesitatingly as was possible for mortal man. 

He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, and therefore descended fromthe same old Kentish stock. The Okes of Okehurst could trace back toNorman, almost to Saxon times, far longer than any of the titled orbetter-known families of the neighbourhood. I saw that William Oke, in hisheart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neighbours. "We have never doneanything particular, or been anything particular--never held any office, "he said; "but we have always been here, and apparently always done ourduty. An ancestor of ours was killed in the Scotch wars, another atAgincourt--mere honest captains. " Well, early in the seventeenth century, the family had dwindled to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who hadrebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas appears to have beensomewhat different from the usual run of the family. He had, in his youth, sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have beenless of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer veryyoung, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from aneighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret, " myhost informed me, "and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite differentsort of people--restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite ofHenry VIII. " It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having anyPomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an evident familydislike--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 Courtminions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in a little houserecently inherited from an uncle, a certain Christopher Lovelock, a younggallant and poet, who was in momentary disgrace at Court for some loveaffair. This Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neighboursof Okehurst--too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either forher husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one evening as he was riding homealone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen, but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wifedressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition hadremained. "They used to tell it us when we were children, " said my host, ina hoarse voice, "and to frighten my cousin--I mean my wife--and me withstories 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--yousee, " he went on after some time, "doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps Iam 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 herattention. Perhaps it was wrong of me to do so; and I have often reproachedmyself very seriously later on. But after all, how was I to guess that Iwas making mischief merely by chiming in, for the sake of the portrait Ihad undertaken, and of a very harmless psychological mania, with what wasmerely the fad, the little romantic affectation or eccentricity, of ascatter-brained and eccentric young woman? How in the world should I havedreamed that I was handling explosive substances? A man is surely notresponsible if the people with whom he is forced to deal, and whom he dealswith as with all the rest of the world, are quite different from all otherhuman creatures. 

So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, I really cannot blamemyself. I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique subject for aportrait-painter of my particular sort, and a most singular, _bizarre_personality. I could not possibly do my subject justice so long as I waskept at a distance, prevented from studying the real character of thewoman. I required to put her into play. And I ask you whether any moreinnocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a woman, andletting her talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of ancestorsof hers of the time of Charles I. , and a poet whom they hadmurdered?--particularly as I studiously respected the prejudices of myhost, 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 year1626 was the caprice, the mania, the pose, the whatever you may call it, ofthe Alice Oke of 1880; and to perceive this resemblance was the sure way ofgaining her good graces. It was the most extraordinary craze, of all theextraordinary crazes of childless and idle women, that I had ever met; butit was more than that, it was admirably characteristic. It finished off thestrange figure of Mrs. Oke, as I saw it in my imagination--this _bizarre_creature of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness--that she should have nointerest in the present, but only an eccentric passion in the past. Itseemed to give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes, to herirrelevant and far-off smile. It was like the words to a weird piece ofgipsy music, this that she, who was so different, so distant from all womenof her own time, should try and identify herself with a woman of thepast--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 thetragedy, or mystery, whichever it was, of Alice Oke, daughter of VirgilPomfret, and the poet Christopher Lovelock. That look of vague contempt, ofa 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, " shesaid--"told it you with as little detail as possible, and assured youvery solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be a mere dreadfulcalumny? Poor Willie! I remember already when we were children, and Iused to come with my mother to spend Christmas at Okehurst, and my cousinwas down here for his holidays, how I used to horrify him by insistingupon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs, and playing the story of thewicked 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 Iwas 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 whiteVandyck dress, with the green of the park-land rising up behind her, andthe low sun catching her short locks and surrounding her head, herexquisitely bowed head, with a pale-yellow halo. But I confess I thoughtthe original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though she might be, veryuninteresting compared with this wayward and exquisite creature whom I hadrashly promised myself to send down to posterity in all her unlikelywayward exquisiteness. 

One morning while Mr. Oke was despatching his Saturday heap of Conservativemanifestoes and rural decisions--he was justice of the peace in a mostliteral sense, penetrating into cottages and huts, defending the weak andadmonishing the ill-conducted--one morning while I was making one of mymany pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that remain to me now!) of myfuture sitter, Mrs. Oke gave me her version of the story of Alice Oke andChristopher Lovelock. 

"Do you suppose there was anything between them?" I asked--"that she wasever in love with him? How do you explain the part which tradition ascribesto her in the supposed murder? One has heard of women and their lovers whohave killed the husband; but a woman who combines with her husband to killher lover, or at least the man who is in love with her--that is surely verysingular. " I was absorbed in my drawing, and really thinking very little ofwhat 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 verymuch, and yet been indignant with him, hated having to love him. She mayhave felt that she had a right to rid herself of him, and to call upon herhusband to help her to do so. "

"Good heavens! what a fearful idea!" I exclaimed, half laughing. "Don't youthink, after all, that Mr. Oke may be right in saying that it is easier andmore 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 thisstrange creature, as I said to myself, through her paces; "how is that?"

"How does one know that anything is true in this world?" she repliedevasively; "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 thenext day. 

"Lovelock?" I answered, for I had forgotten the name. "Lovelock, who"--But I stopped, remembering the prejudices of my host, who wasseated 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 theevident annoyance which it caused him. 

"Alice, " he entreated in a low voice, his whole face crimson, "for mercy'ssake, don't talk about such things before the servants. "

Mrs. Oke burst into a high, light, rather hysterical laugh, the laugh of anaughty child. 

"The servants! Gracious heavens! do you suppose they haven't heard thestory? 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'tthey all heard his footsteps in the big corridor? Haven't they, my dearWillie, noticed a thousand times that you never will stay a minute alone inthe yellow drawing-room--that you run out of it, like a child, if I happento leave you there for a minute?"

True! How was it I had not noticed that? or rather, that I only nowremembered having noticed it? The yellow drawing-room was one of the mostcharming rooms in the house: a large, bright room, hung with yellow damaskand panelled with carvings, that opened straight out on to the lawn, farsuperior to the room in which we habitually sat, which was comparativelygloomy. This time Mr. Oke struck me as really too childish. I felt anintense desire to badger him. 

"The yellow drawing-room!" I exclaimed. "Does this interesting literarycharacter haunt the yellow drawing-room? Do tell me about it. What happenedthere?"

Mr. Oke made a painful effort to laugh. 

"Nothing ever happened there, so far as I know, " he said, and rose from thetable. 

"Really?" I asked incredulously. 

"Nothing did happen there, " answered Mrs. Oke slowly, playing mechanicallywith a fork, and picking out the pattern of the tablecloth. "That is justthe extraordinary circumstance, that, so far as any one knows, nothing everdid happen there; and yet that room has an evil reputation. No member ofour 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 youdon't mind sitting in that room for hours alone? How do you explain thisuncanny reputation, since nothing ever happened there?"

"Perhaps something is destined to happen there in the future, " sheanswered, in her absent voice. And then she suddenly added, "Suppose youpaint my portrait in that room?"

Mr. Oke suddenly turned round. He was very white, and looked as if he weregoing to say something, but desisted. 

"Why do you worry Mr. Oke like that?" I asked, when he had gone into hissmoking-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 insuch things, although you may not be able to put yourself in their frame ofmind. "

"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 inChristopher 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 shetook out of an old Italian ebony inlaid cabinet. It took her some time toget them, as a complicated arrangement of double locks and false drawershad 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 themost 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 thinkof the cabin of a ship, with a great mullioned window that let in, as itwere, a perspective of the brownish green park-land, dotted with oaks, andsloping upwards to the distant line of bluish firs against the horizon. Thewalls were hung with flowered damask, whose yellow, faded to brown, unitedwith the reddish colour of the carved wainscoting and the carved oakenbeams. For the rest, it reminded me more of an Italian room than an Englishone. The furniture was Tuscan of the early seventeenth century, inlaid andcarved; there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures, by someBolognese master, on the walls; and in a corner, among a stack of dwarforange-trees, a little Italian harpsichord of exquisite curve andslenderness, with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In arecess was a shelf of old books, mainly English and Italian poets of theElizabethan time; and close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, alarge and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The panes of the mullioned windowwere open, and yet the air seemed heavy, with an indescribable headyperfume, not that of any growing flower, but like that of old stuff thatshould have lain for years among spices. 

"It is a beautiful room!" I exclaimed. "I should awfully like to paint youin 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 vaguelyas if he were right in detesting it. 

Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the tablewhere she was standing sorting the papers. 

"Look!" she said, "these are all poems by Christopher Lovelock"; andtouching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent fingers, shecommenced reading some of them out loud in a slow, half-audible voice. Theywere songs in the style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton, complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady called Dryope, inwhose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of the mistress ofOkehurst. 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 tome. 

Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish yellow wall as a background to herwhite brocade dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make, seemedbut to bring out more clearly the slightness, the exquisite suppleness, ofher tall figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the other, asif for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. Her voice, which wasdelicate, shadowy, like her person, had a curious throbbing cadence, as ifshe were reading the words of a melody, and restraining herself withdifficulty from singing it; and as she read, her long slender throatthrobbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin face. Sheevidently knew the verses by heart, and her eyes were mostly fixed withthat distant smile in them, with which harmonised a constant tremulouslittle smile in her lips. 

"That is how I would wish to paint her!" I exclaimed within myself; andscarcely noticed, what struck me on thinking over the scene, that thisstrange being read these verses as one might fancy a woman would readlove-verses addressed to herself. 

"Those are all written for Alice Oke--Alice the daughter of VirgilPomfret, " she said slowly, folding up the papers. "I found them at thebottom of this cabinet. Can you doubt of the reality of ChristopherLovelock now?"

The question was an illogical one, for to doubt of the existence ofChristopher Lovelock was one thing, and to doubt of the mode of his deathwas another; but somehow I did feel convinced. 

"Look!" she said, when she had replaced the poems, "I will show yousomething else. " Among the flowers that stood on the upper storey of herwriting-table--for I found that Mrs. Oke had a writing-table in the yellowroom--stood, as on an altar, a small black carved frame, with a silkcurtain drawn over it: the sort of thing behind which you would haveexpected to find a head of Christ or of the Virgin Mary. She drew thecurtain and displayed a large-sized miniature, representing a young man, with auburn curls and a peaked auburn beard, dressed in black, but withlace about his neck, and large pear-shaped pearls in his ears: a wistful, melancholy face. Mrs. Oke took the miniature religiously off its stand, andshowed me, written in faded characters upon the back, the name "ChristopherLovelock, " and the date 1626. 

"I found this in the secret drawer of that cabinet, together with the heapof 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 thenwondered what in the world had impelled me to put such a question. 

Mrs. Oke smiled that smile of contemptuous indifference. "I have neverhidden it from any one. If my husband disliked my having it, he might havetaken it away, I suppose. It belongs to him, since it was found in hishouse. "

I did not answer, but walked mechanically towards the door. There wassomething heady and oppressive in this beautiful room; something, Ithought, 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 hisaccounts, his reports, and electioneering papers. On the table, above theheap of paper-bound volumes and pigeon-holed documents, was, as soleornament of his den, a little photograph of his wife, done some yearsbefore. I don't know why, but as I sat and watched him, with his florid, honest, manly beauty, working away conscientiously, with that littleperplexed 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 asinteresting as Mrs. Oke; and it required too great an effort to pump upsympathy for this normal, excellent, exemplary young squire, in thepresence of so wonderful a creature as his wife. So I let myself go to thehabit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk over her strange craze, or ratherof drawing her out about it. I confess that I derived a morbid andexquisite pleasure in doing so: it was so characteristic in her, soappropriate to the house! It completed her personality so perfectly, andmade it so much easier to conceive a way of painting her. I made up my mindlittle by little, while working at William Oke's portrait (he proved a lesseasy subject than I had anticipated, and, despite his conscientiousefforts, was a nervous, uncomfortable sitter, silent and brooding)--I madeup my mind that I would paint Mrs. Oke standing by the cabinet in theyellow room, in the white Vandyck dress copied from the portrait of herancestress. Mr. Oke might resent it, Mrs. Oke even might resent it; theymight 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. Thatpicture should be painted, if merely for the sake of having painted it; forI felt it was the only thing I could do, and that it would be far away mybest work. I told neither of my resolution, but prepared sketch aftersketch of Mrs. Oke, while continuing to paint her husband. 

Mrs. Oke was a silent person, more silent even than her husband, for shedid not feel bound, as he did, to attempt to entertain a guest or to showany interest in him. She seemed to spend her life--a curious, inactive, half-invalidish life, broken by sudden fits of childish cheerfulness--in aneternal daydream, strolling about the house and grounds, arranging thequantities of flowers that always filled all the rooms, beginning to readand then throwing aside novels and books of poetry, of which she always hada large number; and, I believe, lying for hours, doing nothing, on a couchin that yellow drawing-room, which, with her sole exception, no member ofthe Oke family had ever been known to stay in alone. Little by little Ibegan to suspect and to verify another eccentricity of this eccentricbeing, and to understand why there were stringent orders never to disturbher in that yellow room. 

It had been a habit at Okehurst, as at one or two other Englishmanor-houses, to keep a certain amount of the clothes of each generation, more particularly wedding dresses. A certain carved oaken press, of whichMr. Oke once displayed the contents to me, was a perfect museum ofcostumes, male and female, from the early years of the seventeenth to theend 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 wasnone of these, and therefore took but little interest in the collection, save in so far as it interested his family feeling. Still he seemed wellacquainted with the contents of that press. 

He was turning over the clothes for my benefit, when suddenly I noticedthat he frowned. I know not what impelled me to say, "By the way, have youany dresses of that Mrs. Oke whom your wife resembles so much? Have you gotthat 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--Ican't find it. I suppose, " he blurted out with an effort, "that Alice hasgot it. Mrs. Oke sometimes has the fancy of having some of these old thingsdown. 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, wasnot, as I had thought, a modern copy; it was the original dress of AliceOke, 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 Ipictured to myself Mrs. Oke sitting in that yellow room--that room which noOke of Okehurst save herself ventured to remain in alone, in the dress ofher ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, haunting somethingthat seemed to fill the place--that vague presence, it seemed to me, of themurdered cavalier poet. 

Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, as a result of beingextremely indifferent. She really did not care in the least about anythingexcept her own ideas and day-dreams, except when, every now and then, shewas seized with a sudden desire to shock the prejudices or superstitions ofher 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, whenthe fit seized her, she would go on by the hour, never asking herselfwhether I was or was not equally interested in the strange craze thatfascinated her. It so happened that I was. I loved to listen to her, goingon discussing by the hour the merits of Lovelock's poems, and analysing herfeelings and those of her two ancestors. It was quite wonderful to watchthe exquisite, exotic creature in one of these moods, with the distant lookin her grey eyes and the absent-looking smile in her thin cheeks, talkingas if she had intimately known these people of the seventeenth century, discussing every minute mood of theirs, detailing every scene between themand their victim, talking of Alice, and Nicholas, and Lovelock as she mightof her most intimate friends. Of Alice particularly, and of Lovelock. Sheseemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that hadcrossed 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 werelistening to a woman's confidences, the recital of her doubts, scruples, and agonies about a living lover. For Mrs. Oke, who seemed the mostself-absorbed of creatures in all other matters, and utterly incapable ofunderstanding or sympathising with the feelings of other persons, enteredcompletely 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 onceasked her. 

"Because she loved him more than the whole world!" she exclaimed, andrising suddenly from her chair, walked towards the window, covering herface with her hands. 

I could see, from the movement of her neck, that she was sobbing. She didnot turn round, but motioned me to go away. 

"Don't let us talk any more about it, " she said. "I am ill to-day, andsilly. "

I closed the door gently behind me. What mystery was there in this woman'slife? This listlessness, this strange self-engrossment and stranger maniaabout people long dead, this indifference and desire to annoy towards herhusband--did it all mean that Alice Oke had loved or still loved some onewho 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 heknew it?

6

The following days Mrs. Oke was in a condition of quite unusual goodspirits. Some visitors--distant relatives--were expected, and although shehad expressed the utmost annoyance at the idea of their coming, she was nowseized with a fit of housekeeping activity, and was perpetually aboutarranging 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 shewould take, or could take, an interest in life, how different things wouldbe! But, " he added, as if fearful lest he should be supposed to accuse herin any way, "how can she, usually, with her wretched health? Still, it doesmake me awfully happy to see her like this. "

I nodded. But I cannot say that I really acquiesced in his views. It seemedto me, particularly with the recollection of yesterday's extraordinaryscene, that Mrs. Oke's high spirits were anything but normal. There wassomething in her unusual activity and still more unusual cheerfulness thatwas merely nervous and feverish; and I had, the whole day, the impressionof 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 thegarden to the greenhouse, seeing whether all was in order, when, as amatter of fact, all was always in order at Okehurst. She did not giveme any sitting, and not a word was spoken about Alice Oke or ChristopherLovelock. Indeed, to a casual observer, it might have seemed as if allthat craze about Lovelock had completely departed, or never existed. About five o'clock, as I was strolling among the red-brick round-gabledouthouses--each with its armorial oak--and the old-fashioned spallieredkitchen and fruit garden, I saw Mrs. Oke standing, her hands full of Yorkand Lancaster roses, upon the steps facing the stables. A groom wascurrycombing a horse, and outside the coach-house was Mr. Oke's littlehigh-wheeled cart. 

"Let us have a drive!" suddenly exclaimed Mrs. Oke, on seeing me. "Lookwhat a beautiful evening--and look at that dear little cart! It is so longsince I have driven, and I feel as if I must drive again. Come with me. Andyou, harness Jim at once and come round to the door. "

I was quite amazed; and still more so when the cart drove up before thedoor, 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 theyellow-sand road, with the sere pasture-lands, the big oaks, on eitherside. 

I could scarcely believe my senses. This woman, in her mannish little coatand hat, driving a powerful young horse with the utmost skill, andchattering like a school-girl of sixteen, could not be the delicate, morbid, exotic, hot-house creature, unable to walk or to do anything, whospent her days lying about on couches in the heavy atmosphere, redolentwith strange scents and associations, of the yellow drawing-room. Themovement of the light carriage, the cool draught, the very grind of thewheels 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 bekilled?" and she laughed her childish laugh, and turned her face, no longerpale, but flushed with the movement and the excitement, towards me. 

The cart rolled on quicker and quicker, one gate after another swinging tobehind us, as we flew up and down the little hills, across the pasturelands, through the little red-brick gabled villages, where the people cameout to see us pass, past the rows of willows along the streams, and thedark-green compact hop-fields, with the blue and hazy tree-tops of thehorizon getting bluer and more hazy as the yellow light began to graze theground. 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 andhop-gardens. Among the low hills of the Weald, it seemed quitepreternaturally high up, giving a sense that its extent of flat heather andgorse, bound by distant firs, was really on the top of the world. The sunwas setting just opposite, and its lights lay flat on the ground, stainingit with the red and black of the heather, or rather turning it into thesurface of a purple sea, canopied over by a bank of dark-purple clouds--thejet-like sparkle of the dry ling and gorse tipping the purple like sunlitwavelets. A cold wind swept in our faces. 

"What is the name of this place?" I asked. It was the only bit ofimpressive scenery that I had met in the neighbourhood of Okehurst. 

"It is called Cotes Common, " answered Mrs. Oke, who had slackened the paceof the horse, and let the reins hang loose about his neck. "It was herethat Christopher Lovelock was killed. "

There was a moment's pause; and then she proceeded, tickling the flies fromthe horse's ears with the end of her whip, and looking straight into thesunset, which now rolled, a deep purple stream, across the heath to ourfeet--

"Lovelock was riding home one summer evening from Appledore, when, as hehad got half-way across Cotes Common, somewhere about here--for I havealways heard them mention the pond in the old gravel-pits as about theplace--he saw two men riding towards him, in whom he presently recognisedNicholas Oke of Okehurst accompanied by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailedhim; 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'; andso 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 hadtime to move, and the bullet, instead of striking him, went straight intothe head of his horse, which fell beneath him. Lovelock, however, hadfallen in such a way as to be able to extricate himself easily from hishorse; and drawing his sword, he rushed upon Oke, and seized his horse bythe 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 thebetter of him. Lovelock had completely disarmed him, and got his sword atOke's throat, crying out to him that if he would ask forgiveness he shouldbe spared for the sake of their old friendship, when the groom suddenlyrode up from behind and shot Lovelock through the back. Lovelock fell, andOke immediately tried to finish him with his sword, while the groom drew upand held the bridle of Oke's horse. At that moment the sunlight fell uponthe 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 spranginto his saddle and rode off with his wife, leaving Lovelock dead by theside of his fallen horse. Nicholas Oke had taken the precaution of removingLovelock's purse and throwing it into the pond, so the murder was put downto certain highwaymen who were about in that part of the country. Alice Okedied many years afterwards, quite an old woman, in the reign of CharlesII. ; but Nicholas did not live very long, and shortly before his death gotinto a very strange condition, always brooding, and sometimes threateningto kill his wife. They say that in one of these fits, just shortly beforehis death, he told the whole story of the murder, and made a prophecy thatwhen the head of his house and master of Okehurst should marry anotherAlice Oke descended from himself and his wife, there should be an endof the Okes of Okehurst. You see, it seems to be coming true. We have nochildren, and I don't suppose we shall ever have any. I, at least, havenever wished for them. "

Mrs. Oke paused, and turned her face towards me with the absent smile inher thin cheeks: her eyes no longer had that distant look; they werestrangely eager and fixed. I did not know what to answer; this womanpositively frightened me. We remained for a moment in that same place, withthe sunlight dying away in crimson ripples on the heather, gilding theyellow banks, the black waters of the pond, surrounded by thin rushes, andthe yellow gravel-pits; while the wind blew in our faces and bent theragged warped bluish tops of the firs. Then Mrs. Oke touched the horse, andoff 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, breakingthe silence now and then only by a word to the horse, urging him to an evenmore furious pace. The people we met along the roads must have thought thatthe horse was running away, unless they noticed Mrs. Oke's calm manner andthe look of excited enjoyment in her face. To me it seemed that I was inthe hands of a madwoman, and I quietly prepared myself for being upset ordashed against a cart. It had turned cold, and the draught was icy in ourfaces when we got within sight of the red gables and high chimney-stacks ofOkehurst. Mr. Oke was standing before the door. On our approach I saw alook 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 ofchivalrous tenderness. 

"I am so glad to have you back, darling, " he exclaimed--"so glad! I wasdelighted to hear you had gone out with the cart, but as you have notdriven 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 remainedholding her, as one might hold a delicate child who has been causinganxiety. The gentleness and affection of the poor fellow had evidently nottouched her--she seemed almost to recoil from it. 

"I have taken him to Cotes Common, " she said, with that perverse look whichI had noticed before, as she pulled off her driving-gloves. "It is such asplendid old place. "

Mr. Oke flushed as if he had bitten upon a sore tooth, and the double gashpainted itself scarlet between his eyebrows. 

Outside, the mists were beginning to rise, veiling the park-land dottedwith big black oaks, and from which, in the watery moonlight, rose on allsides the eerie little cry of the lambs separated from their mothers. Itwas 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 youngcreatures, 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 coldand began to pour. Every one was sent indoors, and there was a generalgloom suddenly over the company. Mrs. Oke seemed to have got sick of herguests, and was listlessly lying back on a couch, paying not the slightestattention to the chattering and piano-strumming in the room, when one ofthe guests suddenly proposed that they should play charades. He was adistant 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 dressup, and parade about, and feel as if we belonged to the past. I have heardyou have a marvellous collection of old costumes, more or less ever sincethe days of Noah, somewhere, Cousin Bill. "

The whole party exclaimed in joy at this proposal. William Oke lookedpuzzled for a moment, and glanced at his wife, who continued to lielistless on her sofa. 

"There is a press full of clothes belonging to the family, " he answereddubiously, apparently overwhelmed by the desire to please his guests;"but--but--I don't know whether it's quite respectful to dress up in theclothes of dead people. "

"Oh, fiddlestick!" cried the cousin. "What do the dead people know aboutit? Besides, " he added, with mock seriousness, "I assure you we shallbehave in the most reverent way and feel quite solemn about it all, if onlyyou will give us the key, old man. "

Again Mr. Oke looked towards his wife, and again met only her vague, absentglance. 

"Very well, " he said, and led his guests upstairs. 

An hour later the house was filled with the strangest crew and thestrangest noises. I had entered, to a certain extent, into William Oke'sfeeling of unwillingness to let his ancestors' clothes and personality betaken in vain; but when the masquerade was complete, I must say that theeffect was quite magnificent. A dozen youngish men and women--those whowere staying in the house and some neighbours who had come for lawn-tennisand 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 beautifulsight than the panelled corridors, the carved and escutcheoned staircase, the dim drawing-rooms with their faded tapestries, the great hall with itsvaulted and ribbed ceiling, dotted about with groups or single figures thatseemed to have come straight from the past. Even William Oke, who, besidesmyself and a few elderly people, was the only man not masqueraded, seemeddelighted and fired by the sight. A certain schoolboy character suddenlycame out in him; and finding that there was no costume left for him, herushed upstairs and presently returned in the uniform he had worn beforehis marriage. I thought I had really never seen so magnificent a specimenof the handsome Englishman; he looked, despite all the modern associationsof his costume, more genuinely old-world than all the rest, a knight forthe Black Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular features andbeautiful fair hair and complexion. After a minute, even the elderly peoplehad got costumes of some sort--dominoes arranged at the moment, and hoodsand all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery andOriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become, so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement--with thechildishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlyingthe majority even of well-bred English men and women--Mr. Oke himself doingthe 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 eccentricbeing, with her fantastic, imaginative, morbid passion for the past, such acarnival as this must be positively revolting; and, absolutely indifferentas 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 theseothers 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 greycloak over one shoulder, a large grey hat slouched over the eyes, a daggerand 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 playingthe fool in the garments of men and women long dead and buried, there issomething questionable in the sudden appearance of a young married woman, the mistress of the house, in a riding-coat and jackboots; and Mrs. Oke'sexpression 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 marvelloustalent 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. , " sheanswered, and took her seat at the head of the table. Involuntarily my eyessought those of Oke of Okehurst. He, who blushed as easily as a girl ofsixteen, was now as white as ashes, and I noticed that he pressed his handalmost convulsively to his mouth. 

"Don't you recognise my dress, William?" asked Mrs. Oke, fixing her eyesupon him with a cruel smile. 

He did not answer, and there was a moment's silence, which the theatricalcousin had the happy thought of breaking by jumping upon his seat andemptying 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 facebefore, answered in a loud and aggressive tone--

"To the health of the poet, Mr. Christopher Lovelock, if his ghost behonouring this house with its presence!"

I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midstof this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, andparti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, andeighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, andclowns, with faces painted and corked and floured over, I seemed to seethat sanguine sunset, washing like a sea of blood over the heather, towhere, by the black pond and the wind-warped firs, there lay the body ofChristopher Lovelock, with his dead horse near him, the yellow gravel andlilac ling soaked crimson all around; and above emerged, as out of theredness, 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 changethat had probably been coming on for some time got to the stage of beingnoticeable. 

I don't know whether he had any words with his wife about her masquerade ofthat unlucky evening. On the whole I decidedly think not. Oke was withevery 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 ofputting into words any strong feeling of disapprobation towards her, thathis disgust would necessarily be silent. But be this as it may, I perceivedvery soon that the relations between my host and hostess had becomeexceedingly strained. Mrs. Oke, indeed, had never paid much attention toher husband, and seemed merely a trifle more indifferent to his presencethan she had been before. But Oke himself, although he affected to addressher at meals from a desire to conceal his feeling, and a fear of making theposition disagreeable to me, very clearly could scarcely bear to speak toor even see his wife. The poor fellow's honest soul was quite brimful ofpain, which he was determined not to allow to overflow, and which seemed tofilter into his whole nature and poison it. This woman had shocked andpained him more than was possible to say, and yet it was evident that hecould 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, andthe iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut downevery tall thistle that caught his eye--I sometimes felt, I say, an intenseand impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. Iseemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to implysuch a comfortable acquiescence; and it seemed so unfair that just heshould be condemned to puzzle for ever over this enigma, and wear out hissoul trying to comprehend what now seemed so plain to me. But how would itever be possible to get this serious, conscientious, slow-brainedrepresentative of English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness tounderstand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, of poeticvision, of love of morbid excitement, that walked this earth under the nameof Alice Oke?

So Oke of Okehurst was condemned never to understand; but he was condemnedalso to suffer from his inability to do so. The poor fellow was constantlystraining after an explanation of his wife's peculiarities; and althoughthe 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. Perhapsshe 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 clearlythought that one of William's peculiarities, and one for which she despisedhim, was that he could never be goaded into an outspoken expression ofdisapprobation; that from her he would swallow any amount of bitternesswithout complaining. At any rate she now adopted a perfect policy ofteasing and shocking her husband about the murder of Lovelock. She wasperpetually alluding to it in her conversation, discussing in his presencewhat had or had not been the feelings of the various actors in the tragedyof 1626, and insisting upon her resemblance and almost identity with theoriginal Alice Oke. Something had suggested to her eccentric mind that itwould be delightful to perform in the garden at Okehurst, under the hugeilexes and elms, a little masque which she had discovered among ChristopherLovelock's works; and she began to scour the country and enter into vastcorrespondence for the purpose of effectuating this scheme. Letters arrivedevery other day from the theatrical cousin, whose only objection was thatOkehurst was too remote a locality for an entertainment in which he foresawgreat glory to himself. And every now and then there would arrive someyoung gentleman or lady, whom Alice Oke had sent for to see whether theywould do. 

I saw very plainly that the performance would never take place, and thatMrs. Oke herself had no intention that it ever should. She was one of thosecreatures to whom realisation of a project is nothing, and who enjoyplan-making almost the more for knowing that all will stop short at theplan. Meanwhile, this perpetual talk about the pastoral, about Lovelock, this continual attitudinising as the wife of Nicholas Oke, had the furtherattraction to Mrs. Oke of putting her husband into a condition of frightfulthough suppressed irritation, which she enjoyed with the enjoyment of aperverse child. You must not think that I looked on indifferent, although Iadmit that this was a perfect treat to an amateur student of character likemyself. I really did feel most sorry for poor Oke, and frequently quiteindignant with his wife. I was several times on the point of begging her tohave more consideration for him, even of suggesting that this kind ofbehavior, particularly before a comparative stranger like me, was very poortaste. But there was something elusive about Mrs. Oke, which made it nextto impossible to speak seriously with her; and besides, I was by no meanssure that any interference on my part would not merely animate herperversity. 

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, andthree or four neighbours. It was dusk, and the yellow light of the candlesmingled charmingly with the greyness of the evening. Mrs. Oke was not well, and had been remarkably quiet all day, more diaphanous, strange, andfar-away than ever; and her husband seemed to have felt a sudden return oftenderness, almost of compassion, for this delicate, fragile creature. Wehad been talking of quite indifferent matters, when I saw Mr. Oke suddenlyturn very white, and look fixedly for a moment at the window opposite tohis 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 insurprise; some of the party remarked upon the carelessness of servants inletting nasty-looking fellows hang about the kitchen, others told storiesof 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 thewindow 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 stillin her face. Except the theatrical cousin, who burst into a loud laugh, none of the company had ever heard Lovelock's name, and, doubtlessimagining him to be some natural appanage of the Oke family, groom orfarmer, said nothing, so the subject dropped. 

From that evening onwards things began to assume a different aspect. Thatincident was the beginning of a perfect system--a system of what? Iscarcely 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 ofmysterious persecutions on the part of some less earthly tenant ofOkehurst. Well, yes, after all, why not? We have all heard of ghosts, haduncles, cousins, grandmothers, nurses, who have seen them; we are all a bitafraid of them at the bottom of our soul; so why shouldn't they be? I amtoo 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 awoman like Mrs. Oke of Okehurst, he gets to believe in the possibility of agreat many improbable things, I assure you, as a mere result of believingin 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 herlover two centuries and a half ago, that such a creature should have thepower of attracting about her (being altogether superior to earthly lovers)the man who loved her in that previous existence, whose love for her washis death--what is there astonishing in that? Mrs. Oke herself, I feelquite persuaded, believed or half believed it; indeed she very seriouslyadmitted the possibility thereof, one day that I made the suggestion halfin jest. At all events, it rather pleased me to think so; it fitted in sowell with the woman's whole personality; it explained those hours and hoursspent all alone in the yellow room, where the very air, with its scent ofheady flowers and old perfumed stuffs, seemed redolent of ghosts. Itexplained that strange smile which was not for any of us, and yet was notmerely for herself--that strange, far-off look in the wide pale eyes. Iliked the idea, and I liked to tease, or rather to delight her with it. Howshould 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 schemesand political canvassing. It seemed to me that he was perpetuallylistening, watching, waiting for something to happen: a word spokensuddenly, the sharp opening of a door, would make him start, turn crimson, and almost tremble; the mention of Lovelock brought a helpless look, half aconvulsion, like that of a man overcome by great heat, into his face. Andhis wife, so far from taking any interest in his altered looks, went onirritating him more and more. Every time that the poor fellow gave one ofthose starts of his, or turned crimson at the sudden sound of a footstep, Mrs. Oke would ask him, with her contemptuous indifference, whether he hadseen Lovelock. I soon began to perceive that my host was getting perfectlyill. He would sit at meals never saying a word, with his eyes fixedscrutinisingly on his wife, as if vainly trying to solve some dreadfulmystery; while his wife, ethereal, exquisite, went on talking in herlistless way about the masque, about Lovelock, always about Lovelock. During our walks and rides, which we continued pretty regularly, he wouldstart whenever in the roads or lanes surrounding Okehurst, or in itsgrounds, we perceived a figure in the distance. I have seen him tremble atwhat, on nearer approach, I could scarcely restrain my laughter ondiscovering to be some well-known farmer or neighbour or servant. Once, aswe were returning home at dusk, he suddenly caught my arm and pointedacross the oak-dotted pastures in the direction of the garden, then startedoff almost at a run, with his dog behind him, as if in pursuit of someintruder. 

"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 thepark-land, and the rooks formed long black lines on the palings, I almostfancied I saw him start at the very trees and bushes, the outlines of thedistant oast-houses, with their conical roofs and projecting vanes, likegibing fingers in the half light. 

"Your husband is ill, " I once ventured to remark to Mrs. Oke, as she satfor the hundred-and-thirtieth of my preparatory sketches (I somehow couldnever get beyond preparatory sketches with her). She raised her beautiful, wide, pale eyes, making as she did so that exquisite curve of shoulders andneck 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 totown and see the doctor? It's merely one of his glum fits. "

"You should not tease him about Lovelock, " I added, very seriously. "Hewill get to believe in him. "

"Why not? If he sees him, why he sees him. He would not be the only personthat has done so"; and she smiled faintly and half perversely, as her eyessought that usual distant indefinable something. 

But Oke got worse. He was growing perfectly unstrung, like a hystericalwoman. One evening that we were sitting alone in the smoking-room, he beganunexpectedly a rambling discourse about his wife; how he had first knownher when they were children, and they had gone to the same dancing-schoolnear Portland Place; how her mother, his aunt-in-law, had brought her forChristmas to Okehurst while he was on his holidays; how finally, thirteenyears ago, when he was twenty-three and she was eighteen, they had beenmarried; how terribly he had suffered when they had been disappointed oftheir 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 theCurtises. I minded only about Alice. " It was next to inconceivable thatthis poor excited creature, speaking almost with tears in his voice and inhis eyes, was the quiet, well-got-up, irreproachable young ex-Guardsman whohad walked into my studio a couple of months before. 

Oke was silent for a moment, looking fixedly at the rug at his feet, whenhe suddenly burst out in a scarce audible voice--

"If you knew how I cared for Alice--how I still care for her. I could kissthe ground she walks upon. I would give anything--my life any day--if onlyshe would look for two minutes as if she liked me a little--as if shedidn't utterly despise me"; and the poor fellow burst into a hystericallaugh, which was almost a sob. Then he suddenly began to laugh outright, exclaiming, with a sort of vulgarity of intonation which was extremelyforeign to him--

"Damn it, old fellow, this is a queer world we live in!" and rang for morebrandy and soda, which he was beginning, I noticed, to take pretty freelynow, although he had been almost a blue-ribbon man--as much so as ispossible for a hospitable country gentleman--when I first arrived. 

9

It became clear to me now that, incredible as it might seem, the thing thatailed 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 probablyhave been quite unable to say. In the first place--to clear off anypossible suspicion--certainly not of me. Besides the fact that Mrs. Oketook only just a very little more interest in me than in the butler or theupper-housemaid, I think that Oke himself was the sort of man whoseimagination would recoil from realising any definite object of jealousy, even though jealously might be killing him inch by inch. It remained avague, permeating, continuous feeling--the feeling that he loved her, andshe did not care a jackstraw about him, and that everything with which shecame into contact was receiving some of that notice which was refused tohim--every person, or thing, or tree, or stone: it was the recognition ofthat strange far-off look in Mrs. Oke's eyes, of that strange absent smileon Mrs. Oke's lips--eyes and lips that had no look and no smile for him. 

Gradually his nervousness, his watchfulness, suspiciousness, tendency tostart, took a definite shape. Mr. Oke was for ever alluding to steps orvoices he had heard, to figures he had seen sneaking round the house. Thesudden bark of one of the dogs would make him jump up. He cleaned andloaded very carefully all the guns and revolvers in his study, and evensome of the old fowling-pieces and holster-pistols in the hall. Theservants and tenants thought that Oke of Okehurst had been seized with aterror of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke smiled contemptuously at all thesedoings. 

"My dear William, " she said one day, "the persons who worry you have justas good a right to walk up and down the passages and staircase, and to hangabout the house, as you or I. They were there, in all probability, longbefore either of us was born, and are greatly amused by your preposterousnotions of privacy. "

Mr. Oke laughed angrily. "I suppose you will tell me it is Lovelock--youreternal Lovelock--whose steps I hear on the gravel every night. I supposehe has as good a right to be here as you or I. " And he strode out of theroom. 

"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; "andbecause 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 havethought I was insulting his wife, and have perhaps kicked me out of theroom. So I made no attempt to explain psychological problems to him, and heasked me no more questions until once--But I must first mention a curiousincident 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 wasin the negative; but Oke did not seem satisfied. We had hardly sat down todinner when he turned to his wife and asked, in a strange voice which Iscarcely 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 fiveo'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 otherhour. "

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, " hebrought 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 thisafternoon, " she said slowly. "If you saw any one with me, it must have beenLovelock, for there certainly was no one else. "

And she gave a little sigh, like a person trying to reproduce in her mindsome delightful but too evanescent impression. 

I looked at my host; from crimson his face had turned perfectly livid, andhe breathed as if some one were squeezing his windpipe. 

No more was said about the matter. I vaguely felt that a great danger wasthreatening. To Oke or to Mrs. Oke? I could not tell which; but I was awareof an imperious inner call to avert some dreadful evil, to exert myself, toexplain, to interpose. I determined to speak to Oke the following day, forI 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 tograsp her elusive character. 

I asked Oke whether he would take a walk with me the next afternoon, and heaccepted 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 rollingrapidly in the cold blue sky, and occasional lurid gleams of sunlight, broad and yellow, which made the black ridge of the storm, gathered on thehorizon, look blue-black like ink. 

We walked quickly across the sere and sodden grass of the park, and on tothe highroad that led over the low hills, I don't know why, in thedirection of Cotes Common. Both of us were silent, for both of us hadsomething to say, and did not know how to begin. For my part, I recognisedthe impossibility of starting the subject: an uncalled-for interferencefrom me would merely indispose Mr. Oke, and make him doubly dense ofcomprehension. So, if Oke had something to say, which he evidently had, itwas better to wait for him. 

Oke, however, broke the silence only by pointing out to me the condition ofthe hops, as we passed one of his many hop-gardens. "It will be a pooryear, " he said, stopping short and looking intently before him--"no hops atall. No hops this autumn. "

I looked at him. It was clear that he had no notion what he was saying. Thedark-green bines were covered with fruit; and only yesterday he himself hadinformed 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, andthe carter touched his hat and greeted Mr. Oke. But Oke took no heed; hedid not seem to be aware of the man's presence. 

The clouds were collecting all round; black domes, among which coursed theround grey masses of fleecy stuff. 

"I think we shall be caught in a tremendous storm, " I said; "hadn't webetter be turning?" He nodded, and turned sharp round. 

The sunlight lay in yellow patches under the oaks of the pasture-lands, andburnished the green hedges. The air was heavy and yet cold, and everythingseemed preparing for a great storm. The rooks whirled in black clouds roundthe trees and the conical red caps of the oast-houses which give thatcountry the look of being studded with turreted castles; then theydescended--a black line--upon the fields, with what seemed an unearthlyloudness of caw. And all round there arose a shrill quavering bleating oflambs and calling of sheep, while the wind began to catch the topmostbranches of the trees. 

Suddenly Mr. Oke broke the silence. 

"I don't know you very well, " he began hurriedly, and without turning hisface towards me; "but I think you are honest, and you have seen a good dealof 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 someminutes. 

"Imagine, " he went on quickly, "that a man cares a great deal--a very greatdeal for his wife, and that he finds out that she--well, that--that she isdeceiving him. No--don't misunderstand me; I mean--that she is constantlysurrounded by some one else and will not admit it--some one whom she hidesaway. Do you understand? Perhaps she does not know all the risk she isrunning, you know, but she will not draw back--she will not avow it to herhusband"--

"My dear Oke, " I interrupted, attempting to take the matter lightly, "theseare questions that can't be solved in the abstract, or by people to whomthe thing has not happened. And it certainly has not happened to you orme. "

Oke took no notice of my interruption. "You see, " he went on, "the mandoesn't expect his wife to care much about him. It's not that; he isn'tmerely jealous, you know. But he feels that she is on the brink ofdishonouring herself--because I don't think a woman can really dishonourher husband; dishonour is in our own hands, and depends only on our ownacts. He ought to save her, do you see? He must, must save her, in one wayor another. But if she will not listen to him, what can he do? Must he seekout the other one, and try and get him out of the way? You see it's all thefault of the other--not hers, not hers. If only she would trust in herhusband, she would be safe. But that other one won't let her. "

"Look here, Oke, " I said boldly, but feeling rather frightened; "I knowquite well what you are talking about. And I see you don't understand thematter in the very least. I do. I have watched you and watched Mrs. Okethese 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 thesituation--that his wife was merely eccentric, and a little theatrical andimaginative, and that she took a pleasure in teasing him. That he, on theother 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'scharacter twenty times over, and tried to show him that there wasabsolutely nothing at the bottom of his suspicions beyond an imaginative_pose_ and a garden-play on the brain. I adduced twenty instances, mostlyinvented for the nonce, of ladies of my acquaintance who had suffered fromsimilar fads. I pointed out to him that his wife ought to have an outletfor her imaginative and theatrical over-energy. I advised him to take herto London and plunge her into some set where every one should be more orless in a similar condition. I laughed at the notion of there being anyhidden individual about the house. I explained to Oke that he was sufferingfrom delusions, and called upon so conscientious and religious a man totake every step to rid himself of them, adding innumerable examples ofpeople who had cured themselves of seeing visions and of brooding overmorbid fancies. I struggled and wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, and Ireally hoped I had made some impression. At first, indeed, I felt that notone of my words went into the man's brain--that, though silent, he was notlistening. It seemed almost hopeless to present my views in such a lightthat he could grasp them. I felt as if I were expounding and arguing at arock. But when I got on to the tack of his duty towards his wife andhimself, and appealed to his moral and religious notions, I felt that I wasmaking an impression. 

"I daresay you are right, " he said, taking my hand as we came in sight ofthe red gables of Okehurst, and speaking in a weak, tired, humble voice. "Idon't understand you quite, but I am sure what you say is true. I daresayit is all that I'm seedy. I feel sometimes as if I were mad, and just fitto be locked up. But don't think I don't struggle against it. I do, I docontinually, only sometimes it seems too strong for me. I pray God nightand morning to give me the strength to overcome my suspicions, or to removethese dreadful thoughts from me. God knows, I know what a wretched creatureI 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 meonce more. 

"I am very, very grateful to you, " he said, "and, indeed, I will do my bestto try and be stronger. If only, " he added, with a sigh, "if only Alicewould give me a moment's breathing-time, and not go on day after daymocking me with her Lovelock. "

10

I had begun Mrs. Oke's portrait, and she was giving me a sitting. She wasunusually quiet that morning; but, it seemed to me, with the quietness of awoman who is expecting something, and she gave me the impression of beingextremely 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 apossibility. Such a discussion, which might have savoured of flirtation inthe case of almost any other young and beautiful woman, became in the caseof Mrs. Oke something quite different; it seemed distant, intangible, notof this earth, like her smile and the look in her eyes. 

"Such love as that, " she said, looking into the far distance of theoak-dotted park-land, "is very rare, but it can exist. It becomes aperson's whole existence, his whole soul; and it can survive the death, notmerely of the beloved, but of the lover. It is unextinguishable, and goeson in the spiritual world until it meet a reincarnation of the beloved; andwhen this happens, it jets out and draws to it all that may remain of thatlover'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 bringingout but the more the exotic exquisiteness and incorporealness of herperson. 

I did not know what to answer, so I said half in jest--

"I fear you have been reading too much Buddhist literature, Mrs. Oke. Thereis something dreadfully esoteric in all you say. "

She smiled contemptuously. 

"I know people can't understand such matters, " she replied, and was silentfor some time. But, through her quietness and silence, I felt, as it were, the throb of a strange excitement in this woman, almost as if I had beenholding her pulse. 

Still, I was in hopes that things might be beginning to go better inconsequence of my interference. Mrs. Oke had scarcely once alluded toLovelock in the last two or three days; and Oke had been much more cheerfuland natural since our conversation. He no longer seemed so worried; andonce or twice I had caught in him a look of great gentleness andloving-kindness, almost of pity, as towards some young and very frailthing, as he sat opposite his wife. 

But the end had come. After that sitting Mrs. Oke had complained of fatigueand retired to her room, and Oke had driven off on some business to thenearest town. I felt all alone in the big house, and after having worked alittle at a sketch I was making in the park, I amused myself rambling aboutthe house. 

It was a warm, enervating, autumn afternoon: the kind of weather thatbrings the perfume out of everything, the damp ground and fallen leaves, the flowers in the jars, the old woodwork and stuffs; that seems to bringon to the surface of one's consciousness all manner of vague recollectionsand expectations, a something half pleasurable, half painful, that makes itimpossible to do or to think. I was the prey of this particular, not at allunpleasurable, restlessness. I wandered up and down the corridors, stoppingto look at the pictures, which I knew already in every detail, to followthe pattern of the carvings and old stuffs, to stare at the autumn flowers, arranged in magnificent masses of colour in the big china bowls and jars. Itook up one book after another and threw it aside; then I sat down to thepiano and began to play irrelevant fragments. I felt quite alone, althoughI had heard the grind of the wheels on the gravel, which meant that my hosthad returned. I was lazily turning over a book of verses--I remember itperfectly well, it was Morris's "Love is Enough"--in a corner of thedrawing-room, when the door suddenly opened and William Oke showed himself. He did not enter, but beckoned to me to come out to him. There wassomething in his face that made me start up and follow him at once. He wasextremely quiet, even stiff, not a muscle of his face moving, but verypale. 

"I have something to show you, " he said, leading me through the vaultedhall, hung round with ancestral pictures, into the gravelled space thatlooked like a filled-up moat, where stood the big blasted oak, with itstwisted, pointing branches. I followed him on to the lawn, or rather thepiece of park-land that ran up to the house. We walked quickly, he infront, without exchanging a word. Suddenly he stopped, just where therejutted out the bow-window of the yellow drawing-room, and I felt Oke's handtight upon my arm. 

"I have brought you here to see something, " he whispered hoarsely; and heled me to the window. 

I looked in. The room, compared with the out door, was rather dark; butagainst the yellow wall I saw Mrs. Oke sitting alone on a couch in herwhite dress, her head slightly thrown back, a large red rose in her hand. 

"Do you believe now?" whispered Oke's voice hot at my ear. "Do you believenow? Was it all my fancy? But I will have him this time. I have locked thedoor inside, and, by God! he shan't escape. "

The words were not out of Oke's mouth. I felt myself struggling with himsilently outside that window. But he broke loose, pulled open the window, and leapt into the room, and I after him. As I crossed the threshold, something flashed in my eyes; there was a loud report, a sharp cry, and thethud of a body on the ground. 

Oke was standing in the middle of the room, with a faint smoke about him;and at his feet, sunk down from the sofa, with her blond head resting onits seat, lay Mrs. Oke, a pool of red forming in her white dress. Her mouthwas convulsed, as if in that automatic shriek, but her wide-open white eyesseemed to smile vaguely and distantly. 

I know nothing of time. It all seemed to be one second, but a second thatlasted hours. Oke stared, then turned round and laughed. 

"The damned rascal has given me the slip again!" he cried; and quicklyunlocking the door, rushed out of the house with dreadful cries. 

That is the end of the story. Oke tried to shoot himself that evening, butmerely fractured his jaw, and died a few days later, raving. There were allsorts of legal inquiries, through which I went as through a dream; andwhence it resulted that Mr. Oke had killed his wife in a fit of momentarymadness. That was the end of Alice Oke. By the way, her maid brought me alocket which was found round her neck, all stained with blood. It containedsome very dark auburn hair, not at all the colour of William Oke's. I amquite sure it was Lovelock's.