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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Phantom Lover, by Vernon Lee
+
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+Title: A Phantom Lover
+
+Author: Vernon Lee
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8180]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 26, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PHANTOM LOVER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Katherine Delany, Suzanne L. Shell,
+Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+A PHANTOM LOVER
+
+
+
+
+By
+VERNON 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 the
+hearthstool at Florence, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst?
+
+You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of fantastic things, and urged
+me to write it out at once, although I protested that, in such matters, to
+write is to exorcise, to dispel the charm; and that printers' ink chases
+away the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as efficaciously as gallons
+of holy water.
+
+But if, as I suspect, you will now put down any charm that story may
+have possessed to the way in which we had been working ourselves up,
+that firelight evening, with all manner of fantastic stuff--if, as I
+fear, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst will strike you as stale and
+unprofitable--the sight of this little book will serve at least to remind
+you, in the middle of your Russian summer, that there is such a season
+as 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. I
+wonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not?
+The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderful
+elegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort of
+grace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of head
+and neck, and hands and fingers. Here are a lot of pencil sketches I made
+while I was preparing to paint her portrait. Yes; there's nothing but her
+in the whole sketchbook. Mere scratches, but they may give some idea of her
+marvellous, fantastic kind of grace. Here she is leaning over the
+staircase, and here sitting in the swing. Here she is walking quickly out
+of the room. That's her head. You see she isn't really handsome; her
+forehead is too big, and her nose too short. This gives no idea of her. It
+was altogether a question of movement. Look at the strange cheeks, hollow
+and rather flat; well, when she smiled she had the most marvellous dimples
+here. There was something exquisite and uncanny about it. Yes; I began the
+picture, but it was never finished. I did the husband first. I wonder who
+has 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 make
+much of it; it is merely blocked in, and seems quite mad. You see my idea
+was to make her leaning against a wall--there was one hung with yellow that
+seemed almost brown--so as to bring out the silhouette.
+
+It was very singular I should have chosen that particular wall. It does
+look rather insane in this condition, but I like it; it has something of
+her. 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 had
+relations in that part of the country; besides, I suppose the newspapers
+were full of it at the time. You didn't know that it all took place under
+my 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 much
+stranger than any one guessed. People could no more understand it than they
+could understand her. I doubt whether any one ever understood Alice Oke
+besides myself. You mustn't think me unfeeling. She was a marvellous,
+weird, exquisite creature, but one couldn't feel sorry for her. I felt much
+sorrier for the wretched creature of a husband. It seemed such an
+appropriate end for her; I fancy she would have liked it could she have
+known. Ah! I shall never have another chance of painting such a portrait as
+I wanted. She seemed sent me from heaven or the other place. You have never
+heard the story in detail? Well, I don't usually mention it, because people
+are 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; I
+must 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 for
+painting a couple of Kentish squireen? I really could not understand what
+had possessed me to say yes to that man. A friend of mine had brought him
+one 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 a
+beautiful fair complexion, beautiful fair moustache, and beautifully
+fitting clothes; absolutely like a hundred other young men you can see any
+day in the Park, and absolutely uninteresting from the crown of his head to
+the tip of his boots. Mr. Oke, who had been a lieutenant in the Blues
+before his marriage, was evidently extremely uncomfortable on finding
+himself in a studio. He felt misgivings about a man who could wear a velvet
+coat in town, but at the same time he was nervously anxious not to treat me
+in the very least like a tradesman. He walked round my place, looked at
+everything with the most scrupulous attention, stammered out a few
+complimentary phrases, and then, looking at his friend for assistance,
+tried to come to the point, but failed. The point, which the friend kindly
+explained, was that Mr. Oke was desirous to know whether my engagements
+would 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 he
+had come with the most improper proposal; and I noticed--the only
+interesting thing about him--a very odd nervous frown between his eyebrows,
+a perfect double gash,--a thing which usually means something abnormal: a
+mad-doctor of my acquaintance calls it the maniac-frown. When I had
+answered, he suddenly burst out into rather confused explanations: his
+wife--Mrs. Oke--had seen some of my--pictures--paintings--portraits--at
+the--the--what d'you call it?--Academy. She had--in short, they had made a
+very great impression upon her. Mrs. Oke had a great taste for art; she
+was, in short, extremely desirous of having her portrait and his painted by
+me, _etcetera_.
+
+"My wife," he suddenly added, "is a remarkable woman. I don't know whether
+you will think her handsome,--she isn't exactly, you know. But she's
+awfully strange," and Mr. Oke of Okehurst gave a little sigh and frowned
+that curious frown, as if so long a speech and so decided an expression of
+opinion had cost him a great deal.
+
+It was a rather unfortunate moment in my career. A very influential sitter
+of mine--you remember the fat lady with the crimson curtain behind
+her?--had come to the conclusion or been persuaded that I had painted her
+old and vulgar, which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique had turned
+against me, the newspapers had taken up the matter, and for the moment I
+was considered as a painter to whose brushes no woman would trust her
+reputation. 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 to
+regret my rashness; and my disgust at the thought of wasting a whole summer
+upon the portrait of a totally uninteresting Kentish squire, and his
+doubtless equally uninteresting wife, grew greater and greater as the time
+for execution approached. I remember so well the frightful temper in which
+I got into the train for Kent, and the even more frightful temper in which
+I got out of it at the little station nearest to Okehurst. It was pouring
+floods. I felt a comfortable fury at the thought that my canvases would get
+nicely wetted before Mr. Oke's coachman had packed them on the top of the
+waggonette. It was just what served me right for coming to this confounded
+place to paint these confounded people. We drove off in the steady
+downpour. The roads were a mass of yellow mud; the endless flat
+grazing-grounds under the oak-trees, after having been burnt to cinders in
+a long drought, were turned into a hideous brown sop; the country seemed
+intolerably monotonous.
+
+My spirits sank lower and lower. I began to meditate upon the modern Gothic
+country-house, with the usual amount of Morris furniture, Liberty rugs, and
+Mudie novels, to which I was doubtless being taken. My fancy pictured very
+vividly the five or six little Okes--that man certainly must have at least
+five children--the aunts, and sisters-in-law, and cousins; the eternal
+routine 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 would
+regard in the light of a remarkable woman. And my spirit sank within me,
+and I cursed my avarice in accepting the commission, my spiritlessness in
+not throwing it over while yet there was time. We had meanwhile driven into
+a large park, or rather a long succession of grazing-grounds, dotted about
+with large oaks, under which the sheep were huddled together for shelter
+from the rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a line
+of 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 there
+was none to be seen in the distance--nothing but the undulation of sere
+grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose,
+from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made a
+sudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. It
+was not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brick
+house, with the rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the time of
+James 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 indicating
+the possibility of one to the back; no lawn either, but on the other side
+of the sandy dip, which suggested a filled-up moat, a huge oak, short,
+hollow, with wreathing, blasted, black branches, upon which only a handful
+of leaves shook in the rain. It was not at all what I had pictured to
+myself the home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst.
+
+My host received me in the hall, a large place, panelled and carved, hung
+round with portraits up to its curious ceiling--vaulted and ribbed like the
+inside of a ship's hull. He looked even more blond and pink and white, more
+absolutely mediocre in his tweed suit; and also, I thought, even more
+good-natured and duller. He took me into his study, a room hung round with
+whips and fishing-tackle in place of books, while my things were being
+carried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire was smouldering. He gave the
+embers 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--in
+short, I believe my wife is asleep."
+
+"Is Mrs. Oke unwell?" I asked, a sudden hope flashing across me that I
+might be off the whole matter.
+
+"Oh no! Alice is quite well; at least, quite as well as she usually is. My
+wife," he added, after a minute, and in a very decided tone, "does not
+enjoy 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 be
+worried or excited, the doctors say; requires lots of repose,--that sort
+of thing."
+
+There was a dead pause. This man depressed me, I knew not why. He had a
+listless, puzzled look, very much out of keeping with his evident admirable
+health and strength.
+
+"I suppose you are a great sportsman?" I asked from sheer despair, nodding
+in 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 beneath
+his feet. "I--I have no time for all that now," he added, as if an
+explanation were due. "A married man--you know. Would you like to come up
+to your rooms?" he suddenly interrupted himself. "I have had one arranged
+for you to paint in. My wife said you would prefer a north light. If that
+one doesn't suit, you can have your choice of any other."
+
+I followed him out of the study, through the vast entrance-hall. In less
+than a minute I was no longer thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Oke and the boredom
+of doing their likeness; I was simply overcome by the beauty of this house,
+which I had pictured modern and philistine. It was, without exception, the
+most perfect example of an old English manor-house that I had ever seen;
+the most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Out
+of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and
+inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching
+from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship's
+hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at
+intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of
+coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded red
+and blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with the
+tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak
+cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. The beautifully damascened
+suits of court armour looked, without being at all rusty, as if no modern
+hand had ever touched them; the very rugs under foot were of
+sixteenth-century Persian make; the only things of to-day were the big
+bunches of flowers and ferns, arranged in majolica dishes upon the
+landings. 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 Sleeping
+Beauty.
+
+"What a magnificent house!" I exclaimed as I followed my host through a
+long corridor, also hung with leather, wainscoted with carvings, and
+furnished with big wedding coffers, and chairs that looked as if they came
+out of some Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong impression that all
+this was natural, spontaneous--that it had about it nothing of the
+picturesqueness which swell studios have taught to rich and aesthetic
+houses. Mr. Oke misunderstood me.
+
+"It is a nice old place," he said, "but it's too large for us. You see, my
+wife's health does not allow of our having many guests; and there are no
+children."
+
+I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his voice; and he evidently was
+afraid there might have seemed something of the kind, for he added
+immediately--
+
+"I don't care for children one jackstraw, you know, myself; can't
+understand 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. Oke
+of Okehurst was doing so at the present moment.
+
+When he had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to
+me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary
+imaginative impression which this house had given me.
+
+I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides the sort of spasm of
+imaginative interest sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentric
+personalities, I know nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter and
+less analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of
+house. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of
+the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the
+great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers
+reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework,
+a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the
+hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every
+now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled the
+room;--to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complex
+and indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, and
+which, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a
+genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire.
+
+After I had dressed for dinner I resumed my place in the arm-chair, and
+resumed also my reverie, letting all these impressions of the past--which
+seemed faded like the figures in the arras, but still warm like the embers
+in the fireplace, still sweet and subtle like the perfume of the dead
+rose-leaves and broken spices in the china bowls--permeate me and go to my
+head. Of Oke and Oke's wife I did not think; I seemed quite alone, isolated
+from 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 fill
+with greyness; and my eyes wandered to the mullioned bow-window, beyond
+whose panes, between whose heavy stonework, stretched a greyish-brown
+expanse 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 with
+the blood-red of the sunset. Between the falling of the raindrops from the
+ivy outside, there came, fainter or sharper, the recurring bleating of the
+lambs 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 subsequent
+knowledge of her; whence I conclude that I could not at first have
+experienced the strange interest and admiration which that extraordinary
+woman very soon excited in me. Interest and admiration, be it well
+understood, of a very unusual kind, as she was herself a very unusual kind
+of woman; and I, if you choose, am a rather unusual kind of man. But I can
+explain that better anon.
+
+This much is certain, that I must have been immeasurably surprised at
+finding my hostess and future sitter so completely unlike everything I had
+anticipated. Or no--now I come to think of it, I scarcely felt surprised at
+all; or if I did, that shock of surprise could have lasted but an
+infinitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that, having once seen Alice
+Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have
+fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so
+completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed
+always 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 gradually
+learned to see it. To begin with, I must repeat and reiterate over and over
+again, that she was, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and exquisite
+woman I have ever seen, but with a grace and an exquisiteness that had
+nothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of what
+goes 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, for
+the last time. It is conceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand years
+there may arise a combination of lines, a system of movements, an outline,
+a gesture, which is new, unprecedented, and yet hits off exactly our
+desires for beauty and rareness? She was very tall; and I suppose people
+would have called her thin. I don't know, for I never thought about her as
+a body--bones, flesh, that sort of thing; but merely as a wonderful series
+of lines, and a wonderful strangeness of personality. Tall and slender,
+certainly, and with not one item of what makes up our notion of a
+well-built woman. She was as straight--I mean she had as little of what
+people call figure--as a bamboo; her shoulders were a trifle high, and she
+had a decided stoop; her arms and her shoulders she never once wore
+uncovered. But this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness and a
+stateliness, a play of outline with every step she took, that I can't
+compare to anything else; there was in it something of the peacock and
+something also of the stag; but, above all, it was her own. I wish I could
+describe her. I wish, alas!--I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundred
+thousand times--I could paint her, as I see her now, if I shut my
+eyes--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 straight
+supple back, the long exquisite neck, the head, with the hair cropped in
+short pale curls, always drooping a little, except when she would suddenly
+throw it back, and smile, not at me, nor at any one, nor at anything that
+had 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 whiteness
+in her full, wide-opened eyes: the moment when she had something of the
+stag in her movement. But where is the use of talking about her? I don't
+believe, you know, that even the greatest painter can show what is the real
+beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary sense: Titian's and
+Tintoretto's women must have been miles handsomer than they have made them.
+Something--and that the very essence--always escapes, perhaps because real
+beauty is as much a thing in time--a thing like music, a succession, a
+series--as in space. Mind you, I am speaking of a woman beautiful in the
+conventional sense. Imagine, then, how much more so in the case of a woman
+like 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 mere
+wretched words--words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning, an
+impotent conventional association? To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke of
+Okehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite and
+strange,--an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than you
+could bring home the perfume of some newly discovered tropical flower by
+comparing it with the scent of a cabbage-rose or a lily.
+
+That first dinner was gloomy enough. Mr. Oke--Oke of Okehurst, as the
+people down there called him--was horribly shy, consumed with a fear of
+making a fool of himself before me and his wife, I then thought. But that
+sort of shyness did not wear off; and I soon discovered that, although it
+was doubtless increased by the presence of a total stranger, it was
+inspired in Oke, not by me, but by his wife. He would look every now and
+then as if he were going to make a remark, and then evidently restrain
+himself, 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 was
+it the consciousness of stupidity; for when you got him alone, Oke,
+although always slow and timid, had a certain amount of ideas, and very
+defined political and social views, and a certain childlike earnestness and
+desire to attain certainty and truth which was rather touching. On the
+other hand, Oke's singular shyness was not, so far as I could see, the
+result 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 to
+be snubbed, to be corrected, by his or her better-half: there is a
+self-consciousness in both parties, a habit of watching and fault-finding,
+of being watched and found fault with. This was clearly not the case at
+Okehurst. Mrs. Oke evidently did not trouble herself about her husband in
+the very least; he might say or do any amount of silly things without
+rebuke or even notice; and he might have done so, had he chosen, ever since
+his wedding-day. You felt that at once. Mrs. Oke simply passed over his
+existence. 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 something
+far-fetched in her whole appearance, something suggesting study, which
+might lead one to tax her with affectation at first; she was dressed in a
+strange way, not according to any established aesthetic eccentricity, but
+individually, strangely, as if in the clothes of an ancestress of the
+seventeenth century. Well, at first I thought it a kind of pose on her
+part, this mixture of extreme graciousness and utter indifference which she
+manifested towards me. She always seemed to be thinking of something else;
+and although she talked quite sufficiently, and with every sign of superior
+intelligence, she left the impression of having been as taciturn as her
+husband.
+
+In the beginning, in the first few days of my stay at Okehurst, I imagined
+that Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort of flirt; and that her absent
+manner, her look, while speaking to you, into an invisible distance, her
+curious irrelevant smile, were so many means of attracting and baffling
+adoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners of certain foreign
+women--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 the
+faintest desire that I should pay court to her; indeed she did not honour
+me with sufficient thought for that; and I, on my part, began to be too
+much 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 rare
+and exquisite and baffling subject for a portrait, but also one of the most
+peculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that I look back upon it, I am
+tempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might be
+summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself--a Narcissus
+attitude--curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort of
+morbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristic
+save a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, to
+surprise and shock more particularly her husband, and thus be revenged for
+the 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 have
+really penetrated the something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was a
+waywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but could not explain--a something
+as difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appearance, and
+perhaps very closely connected therewith. I became interested in Mrs. Oke
+as if I had been in love with her; and I was not in the least in love. I
+neither dreaded parting from her, nor felt any pleasure in her presence. I
+had not the smallest wish to please or to gain her notice. But I had her on
+the brain. I pursued her, her physical image, her psychological
+explanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days, and prevented my
+ever feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary life. There were
+but few neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had a
+guest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with a
+sense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during our
+walks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horribly
+dull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also his
+wife thought the neighbours a bore. He never questioned his wife's judgment
+in these matters. He merely stated the case as if resignation were quite
+simple and inevitable; yet it seemed to me, sometimes, that this monotonous
+life of solitude, by the side of a woman who took no more heed of him than
+of a table or chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation in
+this young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. I
+often wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, as I had, the
+interest of a strange psychological riddle to solve, and of a great
+portrait to paint. He was, I found, extremely good,--the type of the
+perfectly conscientious young Englishman, the sort of man who ought to have
+been the Christian soldier kind of thing; devout, pure-minded, brave,
+incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually dense, and puzzled by
+all manner of moral scruples. The condition of his tenants and of his
+political party--he was a regular Kentish Tory--lay heavy on his mind. He
+spent hours every day in his study, doing the work of a land agent and a
+political whip, reading piles of reports and newspapers and agricultural
+treatises; and emerging for lunch with piles of letters in his hand, and
+that odd puzzled look in his good healthy face, that deep gash between his
+eyebrows, which my friend the mad-doctor calls the _maniac-frown_. It was
+with this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but I
+felt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him to
+represent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blond
+conventionality. I was perhaps rather unconscientious about the likeness of
+Mr. Oke; I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean as regards
+character, for my whole mind was swallowed up in thinking how I should
+paint Mrs. Oke, how I could best transport on to canvas that singular and
+enigmatic personality. I began with her husband, and told her frankly that
+I must have much longer to study her. Mr. Oke couldn't understand why it
+should be necessary to make a hundred and one pencil-sketches of his wife
+before even determining in what attitude to paint her; but I think he was
+rather pleased to have an opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst; my
+presence evidently broke the monotony of his life. Mrs. Oke seemed
+perfectly indifferent to my staying, as she was perfectly indifferent to my
+presence. Without being rude, I never saw a woman pay so little attention
+to a guest; she would talk with me sometimes by the hour, or rather let me
+talk to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She would lie back in a
+big seventeenth-century armchair while I played the piano, with that
+strange smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that strange whiteness
+in her eyes; but it seemed a matter of indifference whether my music
+stopped or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not take, or
+pretend to take, the very faintest interest; but that was nothing to me. I
+did not want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely wished to go on
+studying her.
+
+The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my presence
+as distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay in
+the porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who was
+occasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there a
+week--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular resemblance
+that existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that hung in the
+hall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in question was a
+full length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some stray
+Italian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a rather dark corner,
+facing the portrait, evidently painted to be its companion, of a dark man,
+with a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution and efficiency, in a
+black Vandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife; and in the corner
+of the woman's portrait were the words, "Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
+Pomfret, Esq., and wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst," and the date
+1626--"Nicholas Oke" being the name painted in the corner of the small
+portrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, at
+least so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days of
+Charles I, can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There were
+the same strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the thin
+cheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity of
+expression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventional
+manner of the time. One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, the
+same beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as her
+descendant; for I found that Mr. and Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, were
+both descended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, daughter of Virgil
+Pomfret. But the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soon
+saw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like her
+ancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-century look; nay,
+that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait.
+
+"You think I am like her," answered Mrs. Oke dreamily to my remark, and her
+eyes wandered off to that unseen something, and the faint smile dimpled her
+thin cheeks.
+
+"You are like her, and you know it. I may even say you wish to be like her,
+Mrs. Oke," I answered, laughing.
+
+"Perhaps I do."
+
+And she looked in the direction of her husband. I noticed that he had an
+expression of distinct annoyance besides that frown of his.
+
+"Isn't it true that Mrs. Oke tries to look like that portrait?" I asked,
+with a perverse curiosity.
+
+"Oh, fudge!" he exclaimed, rising from his chair and walking nervously to
+the window. "It's all nonsense, mere nonsense. I wish you wouldn't, Alice."
+
+"Wouldn't what?" asked Mrs. Oke, with a sort of contemptuous indifference.
+"If I am like that Alice Oke, why I am; and I am very pleased any one
+should think so. She and her husband are just about the only two members of
+our family--our most flat, stale, and unprofitable family--that ever were
+in the least degree interesting."
+
+Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain.
+
+"I don't see why you should abuse our family, Alice," he said. "Thank God,
+our people have always been honourable and upright men and women!"
+
+"Excepting always Nicholas Oke and Alice his wife, daughter of Virgil
+Pomfret, Esq.," she answered, laughing, as he strode out into the park.
+
+"How childish he is!" she exclaimed when we were alone. "He really minds,
+really feels disgraced by what our ancestors did two centuries and a half
+ago. I do believe William would have those two portraits taken down and
+burned if he weren't afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. And as it
+is, these two people really are the only two members of our family that
+ever were in the least interesting. I will tell you the story some day."
+
+As it was, the story was told to me by Oke himself. The next day, as we
+were taking our morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, laying
+about him all the time at the sere grasses with the hooked stick that he
+carried, like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose of
+cutting down his and other folk's thistles.
+
+"I fear you must have thought me very ill-mannered towards my wife
+yesterday," he said shyly; "and indeed I know I was."
+
+Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom every woman, every wife--and
+his own most of all--appeared in the light of something holy. "But--but--I
+have a prejudice which my wife does not enter into, about raking up ugly
+things in one's own family. I suppose Alice thinks that it is so long ago
+that it has really got no connection with us; she thinks of it merely as a
+picturesque story. I daresay many people feel like that; in short, I am
+sure they do, otherwise there wouldn't be such lots of discreditable family
+traditions afloat. But I feel as if it were all one whether it was long ago
+or not; when it's a question of one's own people, I would rather have it
+forgotten. I can't understand how people can talk about murders in their
+families, and ghosts, and so forth."
+
+"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed as
+if it required some to complete it.
+
+"I hope not," answered Oke gravely.
+
+His gravity made me smile.
+
+"Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked.
+
+"If there are such things as ghosts," he replied, "I don't think they
+should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as a
+warning or a punishment."
+
+We walked on some time in silence, I wondering at the strange type of this
+commonplace young man, and half wishing I could put something into my
+portrait that should be the equivalent of this curious unimaginative
+earnestness. Then Oke told me the story of those two pictures--told it me
+about as badly and hesitatingly as was possible for mortal man.
+
+He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, and therefore descended from
+the same old Kentish stock. The Okes of Okehurst could trace back to
+Norman, almost to Saxon times, far longer than any of the titled or
+better-known families of the neighbourhood. I saw that William Oke, in his
+heart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neighbours. "We have never done
+anything particular, or been anything particular--never held any office,"
+he said; "but we have always been here, and apparently always done our
+duty. An ancestor of ours was killed in the Scotch wars, another at
+Agincourt--mere honest captains." Well, early in the seventeenth century,
+the family had dwindled to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who had
+rebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas appears to have been
+somewhat different from the usual run of the family. He had, in his youth,
+sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have been
+less of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer very
+young, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from a
+neighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret," my
+host informed me, "and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite different
+sort of people--restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite of
+Henry VIII." It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having any
+Pomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an evident family
+dislike--the dislike of an Oke, one of the old, honourable, modest stock,
+which had quietly done its duty, for a family of fortune-seekers and Court
+minions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in a little house
+recently inherited from an uncle, a certain Christopher Lovelock, a young
+gallant and poet, who was in momentary disgrace at Court for some love
+affair. This Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neighbours
+of Okehurst--too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either for
+her husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one evening as he was riding home
+alone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen,
+but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wife
+dressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition had
+remained. "They used to tell it us when we were children," said my host, in
+a hoarse voice, "and to frighten my cousin--I mean my wife--and me with
+stories about Lovelock. It is merely a tradition, which I hope may die out,
+as I sincerely pray to heaven that it may be false." "Alice--Mrs. Oke--you
+see," he went on after some time, "doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps I
+am morbid. But I do dislike having the old story raked up."
+
+And we said no more on the subject.
+
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+From that moment I began to assume a certain interest in the eyes of Mrs.
+Oke; or rather, I began to perceive that I had a means of securing her
+attention. Perhaps it was wrong of me to do so; and I have often reproached
+myself very seriously later on. But after all, how was I to guess that I
+was making mischief merely by chiming in, for the sake of the portrait I
+had undertaken, and of a very harmless psychological mania, with what was
+merely the fad, the little romantic affectation or eccentricity, of a
+scatter-brained and eccentric young woman? How in the world should I have
+dreamed that I was handling explosive substances? A man is surely not
+responsible if the people with whom he is forced to deal, and whom he deals
+with as with all the rest of the world, are quite different from all other
+human creatures.
+
+So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, I really cannot blame
+myself. I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique subject for a
+portrait-painter of my particular sort, and a most singular, _bizarre_
+personality. I could not possibly do my subject justice so long as I was
+kept at a distance, prevented from studying the real character of the
+woman. I required to put her into play. And I ask you whether any more
+innocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a woman, and
+letting her talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of ancestors
+of hers of the time of Charles I., and a poet whom they had
+murdered?--particularly as I studiously respected the prejudices of my
+host, and refrained from mentioning the matter, and tried to restrain Mrs.
+Oke from doing so, in the presence of William Oke himself.
+
+I had certainly guessed correctly. To resemble the Alice Oke of the year
+1626 was the caprice, the mania, the pose, the whatever you may call it, of
+the Alice Oke of 1880; and to perceive this resemblance was the sure way of
+gaining her good graces. It was the most extraordinary craze, of all the
+extraordinary crazes of childless and idle women, that I had ever met; but
+it was more than that, it was admirably characteristic. It finished off the
+strange figure of Mrs. Oke, as I saw it in my imagination--this _bizarre_
+creature of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness--that she should have no
+interest in the present, but only an eccentric passion in the past. It
+seemed to give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes, to her
+irrelevant and far-off smile. It was like the words to a weird piece of
+gipsy music, this that she, who was so different, so distant from all women
+of her own time, should try and identify herself with a woman of the
+past--that she should have a kind of flirtation--But of this anon.
+
+I told Mrs. Oke that I had learnt from her husband the outline of the
+tragedy, or mystery, whichever it was, of Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
+Pomfret, and the poet Christopher Lovelock. That look of vague contempt, of
+a desire to shock, which I had noticed before, came into her beautiful,
+pale, diaphanous face.
+
+"I suppose my husband was very shocked at the whole matter," she
+said--"told it you with as little detail as possible, and assured you
+very solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be a mere dreadful
+calumny? Poor Willie! I remember already when we were children, and I
+used to come with my mother to spend Christmas at Okehurst, and my cousin
+was down here for his holidays, how I used to horrify him by insisting
+upon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs, and playing the story of the
+wicked Mrs. Oke; and he always piously refused to do the part of Nicholas,
+when I wanted to have the scene on Cotes Common. I didn't know then that I
+was like the original Alice Oke; I found it out only after our marriage.
+You really think that I am?"
+
+She certainly was, particularly at that moment, as she stood in a white
+Vandyck dress, with the green of the park-land rising up behind her, and
+the low sun catching her short locks and surrounding her head, her
+exquisitely bowed head, with a pale-yellow halo. But I confess I thought
+the original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though she might be, very
+uninteresting compared with this wayward and exquisite creature whom I had
+rashly promised myself to send down to posterity in all her unlikely
+wayward exquisiteness.
+
+One morning while Mr. Oke was despatching his Saturday heap of Conservative
+manifestoes and rural decisions--he was justice of the peace in a most
+literal sense, penetrating into cottages and huts, defending the weak and
+admonishing the ill-conducted--one morning while I was making one of my
+many pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that remain to me now!) of my
+future sitter, Mrs. Oke gave me her version of the story of Alice Oke and
+Christopher Lovelock.
+
+"Do you suppose there was anything between them?" I asked--"that she was
+ever in love with him? How do you explain the part which tradition ascribes
+to her in the supposed murder? One has heard of women and their lovers who
+have killed the husband; but a woman who combines with her husband to kill
+her lover, or at least the man who is in love with her--that is surely very
+singular." I was absorbed in my drawing, and really thinking very little of
+what I was saying.
+
+"I don't know," she answered pensively, with that distant look in her eyes.
+"Alice Oke was very proud, I am sure. She may have loved the poet very
+much, and yet been indignant with him, hated having to love him. She may
+have felt that she had a right to rid herself of him, and to call upon her
+husband to help her to do so."
+
+"Good heavens! what a fearful idea!" I exclaimed, half laughing. "Don't you
+think, after all, that Mr. Oke may be right in saying that it is easier and
+more comfortable to take the whole story as a pure invention?"
+
+"I cannot take it as an invention," answered Mrs. Oke contemptuously,
+"because I happen to know that it is true."
+
+"Indeed!" I answered, working away at my sketch, and enjoying putting this
+strange creature, as I said to myself, through her paces; "how is that?"
+
+"How does one know that anything is true in this world?" she replied
+evasively; "because one does, because one feels it to be true, I suppose."
+
+And, with that far-off look in her light eyes, she relapsed into silence.
+
+"Have you ever read any of Lovelock's poetry?" she asked me suddenly the
+next day.
+
+"Lovelock?" I answered, for I had forgotten the name. "Lovelock,
+who"--But I stopped, remembering the prejudices of my host, who was
+seated next to me at table.
+
+"Lovelock who was killed by Mr. Oke's and my ancestors."
+
+And she looked full at her husband, as if in perverse enjoyment of the
+evident annoyance which it caused him.
+
+"Alice," he entreated in a low voice, his whole face crimson, "for mercy's
+sake, don't talk about such things before the servants."
+
+Mrs. Oke burst into a high, light, rather hysterical laugh, the laugh of a
+naughty child.
+
+"The servants! Gracious heavens! do you suppose they haven't heard the
+story? Why, it's as well known as Okehurst itself in the neighbourhood.
+Don't they believe that Lovelock has been seen about the house? Haven't
+they all heard his footsteps in the big corridor? Haven't they, my dear
+Willie, noticed a thousand times that you never will stay a minute alone in
+the yellow drawing-room--that you run out of it, like a child, if I happen
+to leave you there for a minute?"
+
+True! How was it I had not noticed that? or rather, that I only now
+remembered having noticed it? The yellow drawing-room was one of the most
+charming rooms in the house: a large, bright room, hung with yellow damask
+and panelled with carvings, that opened straight out on to the lawn, far
+superior to the room in which we habitually sat, which was comparatively
+gloomy. This time Mr. Oke struck me as really too childish. I felt an
+intense desire to badger him.
+
+"The yellow drawing-room!" I exclaimed. "Does this interesting literary
+character haunt the yellow drawing-room? Do tell me about it. What happened
+there?"
+
+Mr. Oke made a painful effort to laugh.
+
+"Nothing ever happened there, so far as I know," he said, and rose from the
+table.
+
+"Really?" I asked incredulously.
+
+"Nothing did happen there," answered Mrs. Oke slowly, playing mechanically
+with a fork, and picking out the pattern of the tablecloth. "That is just
+the extraordinary circumstance, that, so far as any one knows, nothing ever
+did happen there; and yet that room has an evil reputation. No member of
+our family, they say, can bear to sit there alone for more than a minute.
+You see, William evidently cannot."
+
+"Have you ever seen or heard anything strange there?" I asked of my host.
+
+He shook his head. "Nothing," he answered curtly, and lit his cigar.
+
+"I presume you have not," I asked, half laughing, of Mrs. Oke, "since you
+don't mind sitting in that room for hours alone? How do you explain this
+uncanny reputation, since nothing ever happened there?"
+
+"Perhaps something is destined to happen there in the future," she
+answered, in her absent voice. And then she suddenly added, "Suppose you
+paint my portrait in that room?"
+
+Mr. Oke suddenly turned round. He was very white, and looked as if he were
+going to say something, but desisted.
+
+"Why do you worry Mr. Oke like that?" I asked, when he had gone into his
+smoking-room with his usual bundle of papers. "It is very cruel of you,
+Mrs. Oke. You ought to have more consideration for people who believe in
+such things, although you may not be able to put yourself in their frame of
+mind."
+
+"Who tells you that I don't believe in _such things_, as you call them?"
+she answered abruptly.
+
+"Come," she said, after a minute, "I want to show you why I believe in
+Christopher Lovelock. Come with me into the yellow room."
+
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+What Mrs. Oke showed me in the yellow room was a large bundle of papers,
+some printed and some manuscript, but all of them brown with age, which she
+took out of an old Italian ebony inlaid cabinet. It took her some time to
+get them, as a complicated arrangement of double locks and false drawers
+had to be put in play; and while she was doing so, I looked round the room,
+in which I had been only three or four times before. It was certainly the
+most beautiful room in this beautiful house, and, as it seemed to me now,
+the most strange. It was long and low, with something that made you think
+of the cabin of a ship, with a great mullioned window that let in, as it
+were, a perspective of the brownish green park-land, dotted with oaks, and
+sloping upwards to the distant line of bluish firs against the horizon. The
+walls were hung with flowered damask, whose yellow, faded to brown, united
+with the reddish colour of the carved wainscoting and the carved oaken
+beams. For the rest, it reminded me more of an Italian room than an English
+one. The furniture was Tuscan of the early seventeenth century, inlaid and
+carved; there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures, by some
+Bolognese master, on the walls; and in a corner, among a stack of dwarf
+orange-trees, a little Italian harpsichord of exquisite curve and
+slenderness, with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In a
+recess was a shelf of old books, mainly English and Italian poets of the
+Elizabethan time; and close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, a
+large and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The panes of the mullioned window
+were open, and yet the air seemed heavy, with an indescribable heady
+perfume, not that of any growing flower, but like that of old stuff that
+should have lain for years among spices.
+
+"It is a beautiful room!" I exclaimed. "I should awfully like to paint you
+in it"; but I had scarcely spoken the words when I felt I had done wrong.
+This woman's husband could not bear the room, and it seemed to me vaguely
+as if he were right in detesting it.
+
+Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the table
+where she was standing sorting the papers.
+
+"Look!" she said, "these are all poems by Christopher Lovelock"; and
+touching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent fingers, she
+commenced reading some of them out loud in a slow, half-audible voice. They
+were songs in the style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton,
+complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady called Dryope, in
+whose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of the mistress of
+Okehurst. The songs were graceful, and not without a certain faded passion:
+but I was thinking not of them, but of the woman who was reading them to
+me.
+
+Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish yellow wall as a background to her
+white brocade dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make, seemed
+but to bring out more clearly the slightness, the exquisite suppleness, of
+her tall figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the other, as
+if for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. Her voice, which was
+delicate, shadowy, like her person, had a curious throbbing cadence, as if
+she were reading the words of a melody, and restraining herself with
+difficulty from singing it; and as she read, her long slender throat
+throbbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin face. She
+evidently knew the verses by heart, and her eyes were mostly fixed with
+that distant smile in them, with which harmonised a constant tremulous
+little smile in her lips.
+
+"That is how I would wish to paint her!" I exclaimed within myself; and
+scarcely noticed, what struck me on thinking over the scene, that this
+strange being read these verses as one might fancy a woman would read
+love-verses addressed to herself.
+
+"Those are all written for Alice Oke--Alice the daughter of Virgil
+Pomfret," she said slowly, folding up the papers. "I found them at the
+bottom of this cabinet. Can you doubt of the reality of Christopher
+Lovelock now?"
+
+The question was an illogical one, for to doubt of the existence of
+Christopher Lovelock was one thing, and to doubt of the mode of his death
+was another; but somehow I did feel convinced.
+
+"Look!" she said, when she had replaced the poems, "I will show you
+something else." Among the flowers that stood on the upper storey of her
+writing-table--for I found that Mrs. Oke had a writing-table in the yellow
+room--stood, as on an altar, a small black carved frame, with a silk
+curtain drawn over it: the sort of thing behind which you would have
+expected to find a head of Christ or of the Virgin Mary. She drew the
+curtain and displayed a large-sized miniature, representing a young man,
+with auburn curls and a peaked auburn beard, dressed in black, but with
+lace about his neck, and large pear-shaped pearls in his ears: a wistful,
+melancholy face. Mrs. Oke took the miniature religiously off its stand, and
+showed me, written in faded characters upon the back, the name "Christopher
+Lovelock," and the date 1626.
+
+"I found this in the secret drawer of that cabinet, together with the heap
+of poems," she said, taking the miniature out of my hand.
+
+I was silent for a minute.
+
+"Does--does Mr. Oke know that you have got it here?" I asked; and then
+wondered what in the world had impelled me to put such a question.
+
+Mrs. Oke smiled that smile of contemptuous indifference. "I have never
+hidden it from any one. If my husband disliked my having it, he might have
+taken it away, I suppose. It belongs to him, since it was found in his
+house."
+
+I did not answer, but walked mechanically towards the door. There was
+something heady and oppressive in this beautiful room; something, I
+thought, almost repulsive in this exquisite woman. She seemed to me,
+suddenly, perverse and dangerous.
+
+I scarcely know why, but I neglected Mrs. Oke that afternoon. I went to Mr.
+Oke's study, and sat opposite to him smoking while he was engrossed in his
+accounts, his reports, and electioneering papers. On the table, above the
+heap of paper-bound volumes and pigeon-holed documents, was, as sole
+ornament of his den, a little photograph of his wife, done some years
+before. I don't know why, but as I sat and watched him, with his florid,
+honest, manly beauty, working away conscientiously, with that little
+perplexed frown of his, I felt intensely sorry for this man.
+
+But this feeling did not last. There was no help for it: Oke was not as
+interesting as Mrs. Oke; and it required too great an effort to pump up
+sympathy for this normal, excellent, exemplary young squire, in the
+presence of so wonderful a creature as his wife. So I let myself go to the
+habit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk over her strange craze, or rather
+of drawing her out about it. I confess that I derived a morbid and
+exquisite pleasure in doing so: it was so characteristic in her, so
+appropriate to the house! It completed her personality so perfectly, and
+made it so much easier to conceive a way of painting her. I made up my mind
+little by little, while working at William Oke's portrait (he proved a less
+easy subject than I had anticipated, and, despite his conscientious
+efforts, was a nervous, uncomfortable sitter, silent and brooding)--I made
+up my mind that I would paint Mrs. Oke standing by the cabinet in the
+yellow room, in the white Vandyck dress copied from the portrait of her
+ancestress. Mr. Oke might resent it, Mrs. Oke even might resent it; they
+might refuse to take the picture, to pay for it, to allow me to exhibit;
+they might force me to run my umbrella through the picture. No matter. That
+picture should be painted, if merely for the sake of having painted it; for
+I felt it was the only thing I could do, and that it would be far away my
+best work. I told neither of my resolution, but prepared sketch after
+sketch of Mrs. Oke, while continuing to paint her husband.
+
+Mrs. Oke was a silent person, more silent even than her husband, for she
+did not feel bound, as he did, to attempt to entertain a guest or to show
+any interest in him. She seemed to spend her life--a curious, inactive,
+half-invalidish life, broken by sudden fits of childish cheerfulness--in an
+eternal daydream, strolling about the house and grounds, arranging the
+quantities of flowers that always filled all the rooms, beginning to read
+and then throwing aside novels and books of poetry, of which she always had
+a large number; and, I believe, lying for hours, doing nothing, on a couch
+in that yellow drawing-room, which, with her sole exception, no member of
+the Oke family had ever been known to stay in alone. Little by little I
+began to suspect and to verify another eccentricity of this eccentric
+being, and to understand why there were stringent orders never to disturb
+her in that yellow room.
+
+It had been a habit at Okehurst, as at one or two other English
+manor-houses, to keep a certain amount of the clothes of each generation,
+more particularly wedding dresses. A certain carved oaken press, of which
+Mr. Oke once displayed the contents to me, was a perfect museum of
+costumes, male and female, from the early years of the seventeenth to the
+end of the eighteenth century--a thing to take away the breath of a
+_bric-a-brac_ collector, an antiquary, or a _genre_ painter. Mr. Oke was
+none of these, and therefore took but little interest in the collection,
+save in so far as it interested his family feeling. Still he seemed well
+acquainted with the contents of that press.
+
+He was turning over the clothes for my benefit, when suddenly I noticed
+that he frowned. I know not what impelled me to say, "By the way, have you
+any dresses of that Mrs. Oke whom your wife resembles so much? Have you got
+that particular white dress she was painted in, perhaps?"
+
+Oke of Okehurst flushed very red.
+
+"We have it," he answered hesitatingly, "but--it isn't here at present--I
+can't find it. I suppose," he blurted out with an effort, "that Alice has
+got it. Mrs. Oke sometimes has the fancy of having some of these old things
+down. I suppose she takes ideas from them."
+
+A sudden light dawned in my mind. The white dress in which I had seen Mrs.
+Oke in the yellow room, the day that she showed me Lovelock's verses, was
+not, as I had thought, a modern copy; it was the original dress of Alice
+Oke, the daughter of Virgil Pomfret--the dress in which, perhaps,
+Christopher Lovelock had seen her in that very room.
+
+The idea gave me a delightful picturesque shudder. I said nothing. But I
+pictured to myself Mrs. Oke sitting in that yellow room--that room which no
+Oke of Okehurst save herself ventured to remain in alone, in the dress of
+her ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, haunting something
+that seemed to fill the place--that vague presence, it seemed to me, of the
+murdered cavalier poet.
+
+Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, as a result of being
+extremely indifferent. She really did not care in the least about anything
+except her own ideas and day-dreams, except when, every now and then, she
+was seized with a sudden desire to shock the prejudices or superstitions of
+her husband. Very soon she got into the way of never talking to me at all,
+save about Alice and Nicholas Oke and Christopher Lovelock; and then, when
+the fit seized her, she would go on by the hour, never asking herself
+whether I was or was not equally interested in the strange craze that
+fascinated her. It so happened that I was. I loved to listen to her, going
+on discussing by the hour the merits of Lovelock's poems, and analysing her
+feelings and those of her two ancestors. It was quite wonderful to watch
+the exquisite, exotic creature in one of these moods, with the distant look
+in her grey eyes and the absent-looking smile in her thin cheeks, talking
+as if she had intimately known these people of the seventeenth century,
+discussing every minute mood of theirs, detailing every scene between them
+and their victim, talking of Alice, and Nicholas, and Lovelock as she might
+of her most intimate friends. Of Alice particularly, and of Lovelock. She
+seemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that had
+crossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me,
+speaking of herself in the third person, of her own feelings--as if I were
+listening to a woman's confidences, the recital of her doubts, scruples,
+and agonies about a living lover. For Mrs. Oke, who seemed the most
+self-absorbed of creatures in all other matters, and utterly incapable of
+understanding or sympathising with the feelings of other persons, entered
+completely and passionately into the feelings of this woman, this Alice,
+who, at some moments, seemed to be not another woman, but herself.
+
+"But how could she do it--how could she kill the man she cared for?" I once
+asked her.
+
+"Because she loved him more than the whole world!" she exclaimed, and
+rising suddenly from her chair, walked towards the window, covering her
+face with her hands.
+
+I could see, from the movement of her neck, that she was sobbing. She did
+not turn round, but motioned me to go away.
+
+"Don't let us talk any more about it," she said. "I am ill to-day, and
+silly."
+
+I closed the door gently behind me. What mystery was there in this woman's
+life? This listlessness, this strange self-engrossment and stranger mania
+about people long dead, this indifference and desire to annoy towards her
+husband--did it all mean that Alice Oke had loved or still loved some one
+who was not the master of Okehurst? And his melancholy, his preoccupation,
+the something about him that told of a broken youth--did it mean that he
+knew it?
+
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+The following days Mrs. Oke was in a condition of quite unusual good
+spirits. Some visitors--distant relatives--were expected, and although she
+had expressed the utmost annoyance at the idea of their coming, she was now
+seized with a fit of housekeeping activity, and was perpetually about
+arranging things and giving orders, although all arrangements, as usual,
+had been made, and all orders given, by her husband.
+
+William Oke was quite radiant.
+
+"If only Alice were always well like this!" he exclaimed; "if only she
+would take, or could take, an interest in life, how different things would
+be! But," he added, as if fearful lest he should be supposed to accuse her
+in any way, "how can she, usually, with her wretched health? Still, it does
+make me awfully happy to see her like this."
+
+I nodded. But I cannot say that I really acquiesced in his views. It seemed
+to me, particularly with the recollection of yesterday's extraordinary
+scene, that Mrs. Oke's high spirits were anything but normal. There was
+something in her unusual activity and still more unusual cheerfulness that
+was merely nervous and feverish; and I had, the whole day, the impression
+of dealing with a woman who was ill and who would very speedily collapse.
+
+Mrs. Oke spent her day wandering from one room to another, and from the
+garden to the greenhouse, seeing whether all was in order, when, as a
+matter of fact, all was always in order at Okehurst. She did not give
+me any sitting, and not a word was spoken about Alice Oke or Christopher
+Lovelock. Indeed, to a casual observer, it might have seemed as if all
+that craze about Lovelock had completely departed, or never existed.
+About five o'clock, as I was strolling among the red-brick round-gabled
+outhouses--each with its armorial oak--and the old-fashioned spalliered
+kitchen and fruit garden, I saw Mrs. Oke standing, her hands full of York
+and Lancaster roses, upon the steps facing the stables. A groom was
+currycombing a horse, and outside the coach-house was Mr. Oke's little
+high-wheeled cart.
+
+"Let us have a drive!" suddenly exclaimed Mrs. Oke, on seeing me. "Look
+what a beautiful evening--and look at that dear little cart! It is so long
+since I have driven, and I feel as if I must drive again. Come with me. And
+you, harness Jim at once and come round to the door."
+
+I was quite amazed; and still more so when the cart drove up before the
+door, and Mrs. Oke called to me to accompany her. She sent away the groom,
+and in a minute we were rolling along, at a tremendous pace, along the
+yellow-sand road, with the sere pasture-lands, the big oaks, on either
+side.
+
+I could scarcely believe my senses. This woman, in her mannish little coat
+and hat, driving a powerful young horse with the utmost skill, and
+chattering like a school-girl of sixteen, could not be the delicate,
+morbid, exotic, hot-house creature, unable to walk or to do anything, who
+spent her days lying about on couches in the heavy atmosphere, redolent
+with strange scents and associations, of the yellow drawing-room. The
+movement of the light carriage, the cool draught, the very grind of the
+wheels upon the gravel, seemed to go to her head like wine.
+
+"It is so long since I have done this sort of thing," she kept repeating;
+"so long, so long. Oh, don't you think it delightful, going at this pace,
+with the idea that any moment the horse may come down and we two be
+killed?" and she laughed her childish laugh, and turned her face, no longer
+pale, but flushed with the movement and the excitement, towards me.
+
+The cart rolled on quicker and quicker, one gate after another swinging to
+behind us, as we flew up and down the little hills, across the pasture
+lands, through the little red-brick gabled villages, where the people came
+out to see us pass, past the rows of willows along the streams, and the
+dark-green compact hop-fields, with the blue and hazy tree-tops of the
+horizon getting bluer and more hazy as the yellow light began to graze the
+ground. At last we got to an open space, a high-lying piece of common-land,
+such as is rare in that ruthlessly utilised country of grazing-grounds and
+hop-gardens. Among the low hills of the Weald, it seemed quite
+preternaturally high up, giving a sense that its extent of flat heather and
+gorse, bound by distant firs, was really on the top of the world. The sun
+was setting just opposite, and its lights lay flat on the ground, staining
+it with the red and black of the heather, or rather turning it into the
+surface of a purple sea, canopied over by a bank of dark-purple clouds--the
+jet-like sparkle of the dry ling and gorse tipping the purple like sunlit
+wavelets. A cold wind swept in our faces.
+
+"What is the name of this place?" I asked. It was the only bit of
+impressive scenery that I had met in the neighbourhood of Okehurst.
+
+"It is called Cotes Common," answered Mrs. Oke, who had slackened the pace
+of the horse, and let the reins hang loose about his neck. "It was here
+that Christopher Lovelock was killed."
+
+There was a moment's pause; and then she proceeded, tickling the flies from
+the horse's ears with the end of her whip, and looking straight into the
+sunset, which now rolled, a deep purple stream, across the heath to our
+feet--
+
+"Lovelock was riding home one summer evening from Appledore, when, as he
+had got half-way across Cotes Common, somewhere about here--for I have
+always heard them mention the pond in the old gravel-pits as about the
+place--he saw two men riding towards him, in whom he presently recognised
+Nicholas Oke of Okehurst accompanied by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailed
+him; and Lovelock rode up to meet him. 'I am glad to have met you, Mr.
+Lovelock,' said Nicholas, 'because I have some important news for you'; and
+so saying, he brought his horse close to the one that Lovelock was riding,
+and suddenly turning round, fired off a pistol at his head. Lovelock had
+time to move, and the bullet, instead of striking him, went straight into
+the head of his horse, which fell beneath him. Lovelock, however, had
+fallen in such a way as to be able to extricate himself easily from his
+horse; and drawing his sword, he rushed upon Oke, and seized his horse by
+the bridle. Oke quickly jumped off and drew his sword; and in a minute,
+Lovelock, who was much the better swordsman of the two, was having the
+better of him. Lovelock had completely disarmed him, and got his sword at
+Oke's throat, crying out to him that if he would ask forgiveness he should
+be spared for the sake of their old friendship, when the groom suddenly
+rode up from behind and shot Lovelock through the back. Lovelock fell, and
+Oke immediately tried to finish him with his sword, while the groom drew up
+and held the bridle of Oke's horse. At that moment the sunlight fell upon
+the groom's face, and Lovelock recognised Mrs. Oke. He cried out, 'Alice,
+Alice! it is you who have murdered me!' and died. Then Nicholas Oke sprang
+into his saddle and rode off with his wife, leaving Lovelock dead by the
+side of his fallen horse. Nicholas Oke had taken the precaution of removing
+Lovelock's purse and throwing it into the pond, so the murder was put down
+to certain highwaymen who were about in that part of the country. Alice Oke
+died many years afterwards, quite an old woman, in the reign of Charles
+II.; but Nicholas did not live very long, and shortly before his death got
+into a very strange condition, always brooding, and sometimes threatening
+to kill his wife. They say that in one of these fits, just shortly before
+his death, he told the whole story of the murder, and made a prophecy that
+when the head of his house and master of Okehurst should marry another
+Alice Oke descended from himself and his wife, there should be an end
+of the Okes of Okehurst. You see, it seems to be coming true. We have no
+children, and I don't suppose we shall ever have any. I, at least, have
+never wished for them."
+
+Mrs. Oke paused, and turned her face towards me with the absent smile in
+her thin cheeks: her eyes no longer had that distant look; they were
+strangely eager and fixed. I did not know what to answer; this woman
+positively frightened me. We remained for a moment in that same place, with
+the sunlight dying away in crimson ripples on the heather, gilding the
+yellow banks, the black waters of the pond, surrounded by thin rushes, and
+the yellow gravel-pits; while the wind blew in our faces and bent the
+ragged warped bluish tops of the firs. Then Mrs. Oke touched the horse, and
+off we went at a furious pace. We did not exchange a single word, I think,
+on the way home. Mrs. Oke sat with her eyes fixed on the reins, breaking
+the silence now and then only by a word to the horse, urging him to an even
+more furious pace. The people we met along the roads must have thought that
+the horse was running away, unless they noticed Mrs. Oke's calm manner and
+the look of excited enjoyment in her face. To me it seemed that I was in
+the hands of a madwoman, and I quietly prepared myself for being upset or
+dashed against a cart. It had turned cold, and the draught was icy in our
+faces when we got within sight of the red gables and high chimney-stacks of
+Okehurst. Mr. Oke was standing before the door. On our approach I saw a
+look of relieved suspense, of keen pleasure come into his face.
+
+He lifted his wife out of the cart in his strong arms with a kind of
+chivalrous tenderness.
+
+"I am so glad to have you back, darling," he exclaimed--"so glad! I was
+delighted to hear you had gone out with the cart, but as you have not
+driven for so long, I was beginning to be frightfully anxious, dearest.
+Where have you been all this time?"
+
+Mrs. Oke had quickly extricated herself from her husband, who had remained
+holding her, as one might hold a delicate child who has been causing
+anxiety. The gentleness and affection of the poor fellow had evidently not
+touched her--she seemed almost to recoil from it.
+
+"I have taken him to Cotes Common," she said, with that perverse look which
+I had noticed before, as she pulled off her driving-gloves. "It is such a
+splendid old place."
+
+Mr. Oke flushed as if he had bitten upon a sore tooth, and the double gash
+painted itself scarlet between his eyebrows.
+
+Outside, the mists were beginning to rise, veiling the park-land dotted
+with big black oaks, and from which, in the watery moonlight, rose on all
+sides the eerie little cry of the lambs separated from their mothers. It
+was damp and cold, and I shivered.
+
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+The next day Okehurst was full of people, and Mrs. Oke, to my amazement,
+was doing the honours of it as if a house full of commonplace, noisy young
+creatures, bent upon flirting and tennis, were her usual idea of felicity.
+
+The afternoon of the third day--they had come for an electioneering ball,
+and stayed three nights--the weather changed; it turned suddenly very cold
+and began to pour. Every one was sent indoors, and there was a general
+gloom suddenly over the company. Mrs. Oke seemed to have got sick of her
+guests, and was listlessly lying back on a couch, paying not the slightest
+attention to the chattering and piano-strumming in the room, when one of
+the guests suddenly proposed that they should play charades. He was a
+distant cousin of the Okes, a sort of fashionable artistic Bohemian,
+swelled out to intolerable conceit by the amateur-actor vogue of a season.
+
+"It would be lovely in this marvellous old place," he cried, "just to dress
+up, and parade about, and feel as if we belonged to the past. I have heard
+you have a marvellous collection of old costumes, more or less ever since
+the days of Noah, somewhere, Cousin Bill."
+
+The whole party exclaimed in joy at this proposal. William Oke looked
+puzzled for a moment, and glanced at his wife, who continued to lie
+listless on her sofa.
+
+"There is a press full of clothes belonging to the family," he answered
+dubiously, apparently overwhelmed by the desire to please his guests;
+"but--but--I don't know whether it's quite respectful to dress up in the
+clothes of dead people."
+
+"Oh, fiddlestick!" cried the cousin. "What do the dead people know about
+it? Besides," he added, with mock seriousness, "I assure you we shall
+behave in the most reverent way and feel quite solemn about it all, if only
+you will give us the key, old man."
+
+Again Mr. Oke looked towards his wife, and again met only her vague, absent
+glance.
+
+"Very well," he said, and led his guests upstairs.
+
+An hour later the house was filled with the strangest crew and the
+strangest noises. I had entered, to a certain extent, into William Oke's
+feeling of unwillingness to let his ancestors' clothes and personality be
+taken in vain; but when the masquerade was complete, I must say that the
+effect was quite magnificent. A dozen youngish men and women--those who
+were staying in the house and some neighbours who had come for lawn-tennis
+and dinner--were rigged out, under the direction of the theatrical cousin,
+in the contents of that oaken press: and I have never seen a more beautiful
+sight than the panelled corridors, the carved and escutcheoned staircase,
+the dim drawing-rooms with their faded tapestries, the great hall with its
+vaulted and ribbed ceiling, dotted about with groups or single figures that
+seemed to have come straight from the past. Even William Oke, who, besides
+myself and a few elderly people, was the only man not masqueraded, seemed
+delighted and fired by the sight. A certain schoolboy character suddenly
+came out in him; and finding that there was no costume left for him, he
+rushed upstairs and presently returned in the uniform he had worn before
+his marriage. I thought I had really never seen so magnificent a specimen
+of the handsome Englishman; he looked, despite all the modern associations
+of his costume, more genuinely old-world than all the rest, a knight for
+the Black Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular features and
+beautiful fair hair and complexion. After a minute, even the elderly people
+had got costumes of some sort--dominoes arranged at the moment, and hoods
+and all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery and
+Oriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become,
+so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement--with the
+childishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlying
+the majority even of well-bred English men and women--Mr. Oke himself doing
+the mountebank like a schoolboy at Christmas.
+
+"Where is Mrs. Oke? Where is Alice?" some one suddenly asked.
+
+Mrs. Oke had vanished. I could fully understand that to this eccentric
+being, with her fantastic, imaginative, morbid passion for the past, such a
+carnival as this must be positively revolting; and, absolutely indifferent
+as she was to giving offence, I could imagine how she would have retired,
+disgusted and outraged, to dream her strange day-dreams in the yellow room.
+
+But a moment later, as we were all noisily preparing to go in to dinner,
+the door opened and a strange figure entered, stranger than any of these
+others who were profaning the clothes of the dead: a boy, slight and tall,
+in a brown riding-coat, leathern belt, and big buff boots, a little grey
+cloak over one shoulder, a large grey hat slouched over the eyes, a dagger
+and pistol at the waist. It was Mrs. Oke, her eyes preternaturally bright,
+and her whole face lit up with a bold, perverse smile.
+
+Every one exclaimed, and stood aside. Then there was a moment's silence,
+broken by faint applause. Even to a crew of noisy boys and girls playing
+the fool in the garments of men and women long dead and buried, there is
+something questionable in the sudden appearance of a young married woman,
+the mistress of the house, in a riding-coat and jackboots; and Mrs. Oke's
+expression did not make the jest seem any the less questionable.
+
+"What is that costume?" asked the theatrical cousin, who, after a second,
+had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Oke was merely a woman of marvellous
+talent whom he must try and secure for his amateur troop next season.
+
+"It is the dress in which an ancestress of ours, my namesake Alice Oke,
+used to go out riding with her husband in the days of Charles I.," she
+answered, and took her seat at the head of the table. Involuntarily my eyes
+sought those of Oke of Okehurst. He, who blushed as easily as a girl of
+sixteen, was now as white as ashes, and I noticed that he pressed his hand
+almost convulsively to his mouth.
+
+"Don't you recognise my dress, William?" asked Mrs. Oke, fixing her eyes
+upon him with a cruel smile.
+
+He did not answer, and there was a moment's silence, which the theatrical
+cousin had the happy thought of breaking by jumping upon his seat and
+emptying off his glass with the exclamation--
+
+"To the health of the two Alice Okes, of the past and the present!"
+
+Mrs. Oke nodded, and with an expression I had never seen in her face
+before, answered in a loud and aggressive tone--
+
+"To the health of the poet, Mr. Christopher Lovelock, if his ghost be
+honouring this house with its presence!"
+
+I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midst
+of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and
+parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
+eighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, and
+clowns, with faces painted and corked and floured over, I seemed to see
+that sanguine sunset, washing like a sea of blood over the heather, to
+where, by the black pond and the wind-warped firs, there lay the body of
+Christopher Lovelock, with his dead horse near him, the yellow gravel and
+lilac ling soaked crimson all around; and above emerged, as out of the
+redness, the pale blond head covered with the grey hat, the absent eyes,
+and strange smile of Mrs. Oke. It seemed to me horrible, vulgar,
+abominable, as if I had got inside a madhouse.
+
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+From that moment I noticed a change in William Oke; or rather, a change
+that had probably been coming on for some time got to the stage of being
+noticeable.
+
+I don't know whether he had any words with his wife about her masquerade of
+that unlucky evening. On the whole I decidedly think not. Oke was with
+every one a diffident and reserved man, and most of all so with his wife;
+besides, I can fancy that he would experience a positive impossibility of
+putting into words any strong feeling of disapprobation towards her, that
+his disgust would necessarily be silent. But be this as it may, I perceived
+very soon that the relations between my host and hostess had become
+exceedingly strained. Mrs. Oke, indeed, had never paid much attention to
+her husband, and seemed merely a trifle more indifferent to his presence
+than she had been before. But Oke himself, although he affected to address
+her at meals from a desire to conceal his feeling, and a fear of making the
+position disagreeable to me, very clearly could scarcely bear to speak to
+or even see his wife. The poor fellow's honest soul was quite brimful of
+pain, which he was determined not to allow to overflow, and which seemed to
+filter into his whole nature and poison it. This woman had shocked and
+pained him more than was possible to say, and yet it was evident that he
+could neither cease loving her nor commence comprehending her real nature.
+I sometimes felt, as we took our long walks through the monotonous country,
+across the oak-dotted grazing-grounds, and by the brink of the dull-green,
+serried hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops,
+the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, and
+the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down
+every tall thistle that caught his eye--I sometimes felt, I say, an intense
+and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. I
+seemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to imply
+such a comfortable acquiescence; and it seemed so unfair that just he
+should be condemned to puzzle for ever over this enigma, and wear out his
+soul trying to comprehend what now seemed so plain to me. But how would it
+ever be possible to get this serious, conscientious, slow-brained
+representative of English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness to
+understand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, of poetic
+vision, of love of morbid excitement, that walked this earth under the name
+of Alice Oke?
+
+So Oke of Okehurst was condemned never to understand; but he was condemned
+also to suffer from his inability to do so. The poor fellow was constantly
+straining after an explanation of his wife's peculiarities; and although
+the effort was probably unconscious, it caused him a great deal of pain.
+The gash--the maniac-frown, as my friend calls it--between his eyebrows,
+seemed to have grown a permanent feature of his face.
+
+Mrs. Oke, on her side, was making the very worst of the situation. Perhaps
+she resented her husband's tacit reproval of that masquerade night's freak,
+and determined to make him swallow more of the same stuff, for she clearly
+thought that one of William's peculiarities, and one for which she despised
+him, was that he could never be goaded into an outspoken expression of
+disapprobation; that from her he would swallow any amount of bitterness
+without complaining. At any rate she now adopted a perfect policy of
+teasing and shocking her husband about the murder of Lovelock. She was
+perpetually alluding to it in her conversation, discussing in his presence
+what had or had not been the feelings of the various actors in the tragedy
+of 1626, and insisting upon her resemblance and almost identity with the
+original Alice Oke. Something had suggested to her eccentric mind that it
+would be delightful to perform in the garden at Okehurst, under the huge
+ilexes and elms, a little masque which she had discovered among Christopher
+Lovelock's works; and she began to scour the country and enter into vast
+correspondence for the purpose of effectuating this scheme. Letters arrived
+every other day from the theatrical cousin, whose only objection was that
+Okehurst was too remote a locality for an entertainment in which he foresaw
+great glory to himself. And every now and then there would arrive some
+young gentleman or lady, whom Alice Oke had sent for to see whether they
+would do.
+
+I saw very plainly that the performance would never take place, and that
+Mrs. Oke herself had no intention that it ever should. She was one of those
+creatures to whom realisation of a project is nothing, and who enjoy
+plan-making almost the more for knowing that all will stop short at the
+plan. Meanwhile, this perpetual talk about the pastoral, about Lovelock,
+this continual attitudinising as the wife of Nicholas Oke, had the further
+attraction to Mrs. Oke of putting her husband into a condition of frightful
+though suppressed irritation, which she enjoyed with the enjoyment of a
+perverse child. You must not think that I looked on indifferent, although I
+admit that this was a perfect treat to an amateur student of character like
+myself. I really did feel most sorry for poor Oke, and frequently quite
+indignant with his wife. I was several times on the point of begging her to
+have more consideration for him, even of suggesting that this kind of
+behavior, particularly before a comparative stranger like me, was very poor
+taste. But there was something elusive about Mrs. Oke, which made it next
+to impossible to speak seriously with her; and besides, I was by no means
+sure that any interference on my part would not merely animate her
+perversity.
+
+One evening a curious incident took place. We had just sat down to dinner,
+the Okes, the theatrical cousin, who was down for a couple of days, and
+three or four neighbours. It was dusk, and the yellow light of the candles
+mingled charmingly with the greyness of the evening. Mrs. Oke was not well,
+and had been remarkably quiet all day, more diaphanous, strange, and
+far-away than ever; and her husband seemed to have felt a sudden return of
+tenderness, almost of compassion, for this delicate, fragile creature. We
+had been talking of quite indifferent matters, when I saw Mr. Oke suddenly
+turn very white, and look fixedly for a moment at the window opposite to
+his seat.
+
+"Who's that fellow looking in at the window, and making signs to you,
+Alice? Damn his impudence!" he cried, and jumping up, ran to the window,
+opened it, and passed out into the twilight. We all looked at each other in
+surprise; some of the party remarked upon the carelessness of servants in
+letting nasty-looking fellows hang about the kitchen, others told stories
+of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke did not speak; but I noticed the curious,
+distant-looking smile in her thin cheeks.
+
+After a minute William Oke came in, his napkin in his hand. He shut the
+window behind him and silently resumed his place.
+
+"Well, who was it?" we all asked.
+
+"Nobody. I--I must have made a mistake," he answered, and turned crimson,
+while he busily peeled a pear.
+
+"It was probably Lovelock," remarked Mrs. Oke, just as she might have said,
+"It was probably the gardener," but with that faint smile of pleasure still
+in her face. Except the theatrical cousin, who burst into a loud laugh,
+none of the company had ever heard Lovelock's name, and, doubtless
+imagining him to be some natural appanage of the Oke family, groom or
+farmer, said nothing, so the subject dropped.
+
+From that evening onwards things began to assume a different aspect. That
+incident was the beginning of a perfect system--a system of what? I
+scarcely know how to call it. A system of grim jokes on the part of Mrs.
+Oke, of superstitious fancies on the part of her husband--a system of
+mysterious persecutions on the part of some less earthly tenant of
+Okehurst. Well, yes, after all, why not? We have all heard of ghosts, had
+uncles, cousins, grandmothers, nurses, who have seen them; we are all a bit
+afraid of them at the bottom of our soul; so why shouldn't they be? I am
+too sceptical to believe in the impossibility of anything, for my part!
+
+Besides, when a man has lived throughout a summer in the same house with a
+woman like Mrs. Oke of Okehurst, he gets to believe in the possibility of a
+great many improbable things, I assure you, as a mere result of believing
+in her. And when you come to think of it, why not? That a weird creature,
+visibly not of this earth, a reincarnation of a woman who murdered her
+lover two centuries and a half ago, that such a creature should have the
+power of attracting about her (being altogether superior to earthly lovers)
+the man who loved her in that previous existence, whose love for her was
+his death--what is there astonishing in that? Mrs. Oke herself, I feel
+quite persuaded, believed or half believed it; indeed she very seriously
+admitted the possibility thereof, one day that I made the suggestion half
+in jest. At all events, it rather pleased me to think so; it fitted in so
+well with the woman's whole personality; it explained those hours and hours
+spent all alone in the yellow room, where the very air, with its scent of
+heady flowers and old perfumed stuffs, seemed redolent of ghosts. It
+explained that strange smile which was not for any of us, and yet was not
+merely for herself--that strange, far-off look in the wide pale eyes. I
+liked the idea, and I liked to tease, or rather to delight her with it. How
+should I know that the wretched husband would take such matters seriously?
+
+He became day by day more silent and perplexed-looking; and, as a result,
+worked harder, and probably with less effect, at his land-improving schemes
+and political canvassing. It seemed to me that he was perpetually
+listening, watching, waiting for something to happen: a word spoken
+suddenly, the sharp opening of a door, would make him start, turn crimson,
+and almost tremble; the mention of Lovelock brought a helpless look, half a
+convulsion, like that of a man overcome by great heat, into his face. And
+his wife, so far from taking any interest in his altered looks, went on
+irritating him more and more. Every time that the poor fellow gave one of
+those starts of his, or turned crimson at the sudden sound of a footstep,
+Mrs. Oke would ask him, with her contemptuous indifference, whether he had
+seen Lovelock. I soon began to perceive that my host was getting perfectly
+ill. He would sit at meals never saying a word, with his eyes fixed
+scrutinisingly on his wife, as if vainly trying to solve some dreadful
+mystery; while his wife, ethereal, exquisite, went on talking in her
+listless way about the masque, about Lovelock, always about Lovelock.
+During our walks and rides, which we continued pretty regularly, he would
+start whenever in the roads or lanes surrounding Okehurst, or in its
+grounds, we perceived a figure in the distance. I have seen him tremble at
+what, on nearer approach, I could scarcely restrain my laughter on
+discovering to be some well-known farmer or neighbour or servant. Once, as
+we were returning home at dusk, he suddenly caught my arm and pointed
+across the oak-dotted pastures in the direction of the garden, then started
+off almost at a run, with his dog behind him, as if in pursuit of some
+intruder.
+
+"Who was it?" I asked. And Mr. Oke merely shook his head mournfully.
+Sometimes in the early autumn twilights, when the white mists rose from the
+park-land, and the rooks formed long black lines on the palings, I almost
+fancied I saw him start at the very trees and bushes, the outlines of the
+distant oast-houses, with their conical roofs and projecting vanes, like
+gibing fingers in the half light.
+
+"Your husband is ill," I once ventured to remark to Mrs. Oke, as she sat
+for the hundred-and-thirtieth of my preparatory sketches (I somehow could
+never get beyond preparatory sketches with her). She raised her beautiful,
+wide, pale eyes, making as she did so that exquisite curve of shoulders and
+neck and delicate pale head that I so vainly longed to reproduce.
+
+"I don't see it," she answered quietly. "If he is, why doesn't he go up to
+town and see the doctor? It's merely one of his glum fits."
+
+"You should not tease him about Lovelock," I added, very seriously. "He
+will get to believe in him."
+
+"Why not? If he sees him, why he sees him. He would not be the only person
+that has done so"; and she smiled faintly and half perversely, as her eyes
+sought that usual distant indefinable something.
+
+But Oke got worse. He was growing perfectly unstrung, like a hysterical
+woman. One evening that we were sitting alone in the smoking-room, he began
+unexpectedly a rambling discourse about his wife; how he had first known
+her when they were children, and they had gone to the same dancing-school
+near Portland Place; how her mother, his aunt-in-law, had brought her for
+Christmas to Okehurst while he was on his holidays; how finally, thirteen
+years ago, when he was twenty-three and she was eighteen, they had been
+married; how terribly he had suffered when they had been disappointed of
+their baby, and she had nearly died of the illness.
+
+"I did not mind about the child, you know," he said in an excited voice;
+"although there will be an end of us now, and Okehurst will go to the
+Curtises. I minded only about Alice." It was next to inconceivable that
+this poor excited creature, speaking almost with tears in his voice and in
+his eyes, was the quiet, well-got-up, irreproachable young ex-Guardsman who
+had walked into my studio a couple of months before.
+
+Oke was silent for a moment, looking fixedly at the rug at his feet, when
+he suddenly burst out in a scarce audible voice--
+
+"If you knew how I cared for Alice--how I still care for her. I could kiss
+the ground she walks upon. I would give anything--my life any day--if only
+she would look for two minutes as if she liked me a little--as if she
+didn't utterly despise me"; and the poor fellow burst into a hysterical
+laugh, which was almost a sob. Then he suddenly began to laugh outright,
+exclaiming, with a sort of vulgarity of intonation which was extremely
+foreign to him--
+
+"Damn it, old fellow, this is a queer world we live in!" and rang for more
+brandy and soda, which he was beginning, I noticed, to take pretty freely
+now, although he had been almost a blue-ribbon man--as much so as is
+possible for a hospitable country gentleman--when I first arrived.
+
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+It became clear to me now that, incredible as it might seem, the thing that
+ailed William Oke was jealousy. He was simply madly in love with his wife,
+and madly jealous of her. Jealous--but of whom? He himself would probably
+have been quite unable to say. In the first place--to clear off any
+possible suspicion--certainly not of me. Besides the fact that Mrs. Oke
+took only just a very little more interest in me than in the butler or the
+upper-housemaid, I think that Oke himself was the sort of man whose
+imagination would recoil from realising any definite object of jealousy,
+even though jealously might be killing him inch by inch. It remained a
+vague, permeating, continuous feeling--the feeling that he loved her, and
+she did not care a jackstraw about him, and that everything with which she
+came into contact was receiving some of that notice which was refused to
+him--every person, or thing, or tree, or stone: it was the recognition of
+that strange far-off look in Mrs. Oke's eyes, of that strange absent smile
+on Mrs. Oke's lips--eyes and lips that had no look and no smile for him.
+
+Gradually his nervousness, his watchfulness, suspiciousness, tendency to
+start, took a definite shape. Mr. Oke was for ever alluding to steps or
+voices he had heard, to figures he had seen sneaking round the house. The
+sudden bark of one of the dogs would make him jump up. He cleaned and
+loaded very carefully all the guns and revolvers in his study, and even
+some of the old fowling-pieces and holster-pistols in the hall. The
+servants and tenants thought that Oke of Okehurst had been seized with a
+terror of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke smiled contemptuously at all these
+doings.
+
+"My dear William," she said one day, "the persons who worry you have just
+as good a right to walk up and down the passages and staircase, and to hang
+about the house, as you or I. They were there, in all probability, long
+before either of us was born, and are greatly amused by your preposterous
+notions of privacy."
+
+Mr. Oke laughed angrily. "I suppose you will tell me it is Lovelock--your
+eternal Lovelock--whose steps I hear on the gravel every night. I suppose
+he has as good a right to be here as you or I." And he strode out of the
+room.
+
+"Lovelock--Lovelock! Why will she always go on like that about Lovelock?"
+Mr. Oke asked me that evening, suddenly staring me in the face.
+
+I merely laughed.
+
+"It's only because she has that play of his on the brain," I answered; "and
+because she thinks you superstitious, and likes to tease you."
+
+"I don't understand," sighed Oke.
+
+How could he? And if I had tried to make him do so, he would merely have
+thought I was insulting his wife, and have perhaps kicked me out of the
+room. So I made no attempt to explain psychological problems to him, and he
+asked me no more questions until once--But I must first mention a curious
+incident that happened.
+
+The incident was simply this. Returning one afternoon from our usual walk,
+Mr. Oke suddenly asked the servant whether any one had come. The answer was
+in the negative; but Oke did not seem satisfied. We had hardly sat down to
+dinner when he turned to his wife and asked, in a strange voice which I
+scarcely recognised as his own, who had called that afternoon.
+
+"No one," answered Mrs. Oke; "at least to the best of my knowledge."
+
+William Oke looked at her fixedly.
+
+"No one?" he repeated, in a scrutinising tone; "no one, Alice?"
+
+Mrs. Oke shook her head. "No one," she replied.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"Who was it, then, that was walking with you near the pond, about five
+o'clock?" asked Oke slowly.
+
+His wife lifted her eyes straight to his and answered contemptuously--
+
+"No one was walking with me near the pond, at five o'clock or any other
+hour."
+
+Mr. Oke turned purple, and made a curious hoarse noise like a man choking.
+
+"I--I thought I saw you walking with a man this afternoon, Alice," he
+brought out with an effort; adding, for the sake of appearances before me,
+"I thought it might have been the curate come with that report for me."
+
+Mrs. Oke smiled.
+
+"I can only repeat that no living creature has been near me this
+afternoon," she said slowly. "If you saw any one with me, it must have been
+Lovelock, for there certainly was no one else."
+
+And she gave a little sigh, like a person trying to reproduce in her mind
+some delightful but too evanescent impression.
+
+I looked at my host; from crimson his face had turned perfectly livid, and
+he breathed as if some one were squeezing his windpipe.
+
+No more was said about the matter. I vaguely felt that a great danger was
+threatening. To Oke or to Mrs. Oke? I could not tell which; but I was aware
+of an imperious inner call to avert some dreadful evil, to exert myself, to
+explain, to interpose. I determined to speak to Oke the following day, for
+I trusted him to give me a quiet hearing, and I did not trust Mrs. Oke.
+That woman would slip through my fingers like a snake if I attempted to
+grasp her elusive character.
+
+I asked Oke whether he would take a walk with me the next afternoon, and he
+accepted to do so with a curious eagerness. We started about three o'clock.
+It was a stormy, chilly afternoon, with great balls of white clouds rolling
+rapidly in the cold blue sky, and occasional lurid gleams of sunlight,
+broad and yellow, which made the black ridge of the storm, gathered on the
+horizon, look blue-black like ink.
+
+We walked quickly across the sere and sodden grass of the park, and on to
+the highroad that led over the low hills, I don't know why, in the
+direction of Cotes Common. Both of us were silent, for both of us had
+something to say, and did not know how to begin. For my part, I recognised
+the impossibility of starting the subject: an uncalled-for interference
+from me would merely indispose Mr. Oke, and make him doubly dense of
+comprehension. So, if Oke had something to say, which he evidently had, it
+was better to wait for him.
+
+Oke, however, broke the silence only by pointing out to me the condition of
+the hops, as we passed one of his many hop-gardens. "It will be a poor
+year," he said, stopping short and looking intently before him--"no hops at
+all. No hops this autumn."
+
+I looked at him. It was clear that he had no notion what he was saying. The
+dark-green bines were covered with fruit; and only yesterday he himself had
+informed me that he had not seen such a profusion of hops for many years.
+
+I did not answer, and we walked on. A cart met us in a dip of the road, and
+the carter touched his hat and greeted Mr. Oke. But Oke took no heed; he
+did not seem to be aware of the man's presence.
+
+The clouds were collecting all round; black domes, among which coursed the
+round grey masses of fleecy stuff.
+
+"I think we shall be caught in a tremendous storm," I said; "hadn't we
+better be turning?" He nodded, and turned sharp round.
+
+The sunlight lay in yellow patches under the oaks of the pasture-lands, and
+burnished the green hedges. The air was heavy and yet cold, and everything
+seemed preparing for a great storm. The rooks whirled in black clouds round
+the trees and the conical red caps of the oast-houses which give that
+country the look of being studded with turreted castles; then they
+descended--a black line--upon the fields, with what seemed an unearthly
+loudness of caw. And all round there arose a shrill quavering bleating of
+lambs and calling of sheep, while the wind began to catch the topmost
+branches of the trees.
+
+Suddenly Mr. Oke broke the silence.
+
+"I don't know you very well," he began hurriedly, and without turning his
+face towards me; "but I think you are honest, and you have seen a good deal
+of the world--much more than I. I want you to tell me--but truly,
+please--what do you think a man should do if"--and he stopped for some
+minutes.
+
+"Imagine," he went on quickly, "that a man cares a great deal--a very great
+deal for his wife, and that he finds out that she--well, that--that she is
+deceiving him. No--don't misunderstand me; I mean--that she is constantly
+surrounded by some one else and will not admit it--some one whom she hides
+away. Do you understand? Perhaps she does not know all the risk she is
+running, you know, but she will not draw back--she will not avow it to her
+husband"--
+
+"My dear Oke," I interrupted, attempting to take the matter lightly, "these
+are questions that can't be solved in the abstract, or by people to whom
+the thing has not happened. And it certainly has not happened to you or
+me."
+
+Oke took no notice of my interruption. "You see," he went on, "the man
+doesn't expect his wife to care much about him. It's not that; he isn't
+merely jealous, you know. But he feels that she is on the brink of
+dishonouring herself--because I don't think a woman can really dishonour
+her husband; dishonour is in our own hands, and depends only on our own
+acts. He ought to save her, do you see? He must, must save her, in one way
+or another. But if she will not listen to him, what can he do? Must he seek
+out the other one, and try and get him out of the way? You see it's all the
+fault of the other--not hers, not hers. If only she would trust in her
+husband, she would be safe. But that other one won't let her."
+
+"Look here, Oke," I said boldly, but feeling rather frightened; "I know
+quite well what you are talking about. And I see you don't understand the
+matter in the very least. I do. I have watched you and watched Mrs. Oke
+these six weeks, and I see what is the matter. Will you listen to me?"
+
+And taking his arm, I tried to explain to him my view of the
+situation--that his wife was merely eccentric, and a little theatrical and
+imaginative, and that she took a pleasure in teasing him. That he, on the
+other hand, was letting himself get into a morbid state; that he was ill,
+and ought to see a good doctor. I even offered to take him to town with me.
+
+I poured out volumes of psychological explanations. I dissected Mrs. Oke's
+character twenty times over, and tried to show him that there was
+absolutely nothing at the bottom of his suspicions beyond an imaginative
+_pose_ and a garden-play on the brain. I adduced twenty instances, mostly
+invented for the nonce, of ladies of my acquaintance who had suffered from
+similar fads. I pointed out to him that his wife ought to have an outlet
+for her imaginative and theatrical over-energy. I advised him to take her
+to London and plunge her into some set where every one should be more or
+less in a similar condition. I laughed at the notion of there being any
+hidden individual about the house. I explained to Oke that he was suffering
+from delusions, and called upon so conscientious and religious a man to
+take every step to rid himself of them, adding innumerable examples of
+people who had cured themselves of seeing visions and of brooding over
+morbid fancies. I struggled and wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, and I
+really hoped I had made some impression. At first, indeed, I felt that not
+one of my words went into the man's brain--that, though silent, he was not
+listening. It seemed almost hopeless to present my views in such a light
+that he could grasp them. I felt as if I were expounding and arguing at a
+rock. But when I got on to the tack of his duty towards his wife and
+himself, and appealed to his moral and religious notions, I felt that I was
+making an impression.
+
+"I daresay you are right," he said, taking my hand as we came in sight of
+the red gables of Okehurst, and speaking in a weak, tired, humble voice. "I
+don't understand you quite, but I am sure what you say is true. I daresay
+it is all that I'm seedy. I feel sometimes as if I were mad, and just fit
+to be locked up. But don't think I don't struggle against it. I do, I do
+continually, only sometimes it seems too strong for me. I pray God night
+and morning to give me the strength to overcome my suspicions, or to remove
+these dreadful thoughts from me. God knows, I know what a wretched creature
+I am, and how unfit to take care of that poor girl."
+
+And Oke again pressed my hand. As we entered the garden, he turned to me
+once more.
+
+"I am very, very grateful to you," he said, "and, indeed, I will do my best
+to try and be stronger. If only," he added, with a sigh, "if only Alice
+would give me a moment's breathing-time, and not go on day after day
+mocking me with her Lovelock."
+
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+I had begun Mrs. Oke's portrait, and she was giving me a sitting. She was
+unusually quiet that morning; but, it seemed to me, with the quietness of a
+woman who is expecting something, and she gave me the impression of being
+extremely happy. She had been reading, at my suggestion, the "Vita Nuova,"
+which she did not know before, and the conversation came to roll upon that,
+and upon the question whether love so abstract and so enduring was a
+possibility. Such a discussion, which might have savoured of flirtation in
+the case of almost any other young and beautiful woman, became in the case
+of Mrs. Oke something quite different; it seemed distant, intangible, not
+of this earth, like her smile and the look in her eyes.
+
+"Such love as that," she said, looking into the far distance of the
+oak-dotted park-land, "is very rare, but it can exist. It becomes a
+person's whole existence, his whole soul; and it can survive the death, not
+merely of the beloved, but of the lover. It is unextinguishable, and goes
+on in the spiritual world until it meet a reincarnation of the beloved; and
+when this happens, it jets out and draws to it all that may remain of that
+lover's soul, and takes shape and surrounds the beloved one once more."
+
+Mrs. Oke was speaking slowly, almost to herself, and I had never, I think,
+seen her look so strange and so beautiful, the stiff white dress bringing
+out but the more the exotic exquisiteness and incorporealness of her
+person.
+
+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. There
+is something dreadfully esoteric in all you say."
+
+She smiled contemptuously.
+
+"I know people can't understand such matters," she replied, and was silent
+for 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 been
+holding her pulse.
+
+Still, I was in hopes that things might be beginning to go better in
+consequence of my interference. Mrs. Oke had scarcely once alluded to
+Lovelock in the last two or three days; and Oke had been much more cheerful
+and natural since our conversation. He no longer seemed so worried; and
+once or twice I had caught in him a look of great gentleness and
+loving-kindness, almost of pity, as towards some young and very frail
+thing, as he sat opposite his wife.
+
+But the end had come. After that sitting Mrs. Oke had complained of fatigue
+and retired to her room, and Oke had driven off on some business to the
+nearest town. I felt all alone in the big house, and after having worked a
+little at a sketch I was making in the park, I amused myself rambling about
+the house.
+
+It was a warm, enervating, autumn afternoon: the kind of weather that
+brings the perfume out of everything, the damp ground and fallen leaves,
+the flowers in the jars, the old woodwork and stuffs; that seems to bring
+on to the surface of one's consciousness all manner of vague recollections
+and expectations, a something half pleasurable, half painful, that makes it
+impossible to do or to think. I was the prey of this particular, not at all
+unpleasurable, restlessness. I wandered up and down the corridors, stopping
+to look at the pictures, which I knew already in every detail, to follow
+the 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. I
+took up one book after another and threw it aside; then I sat down to the
+piano and began to play irrelevant fragments. I felt quite alone, although
+I had heard the grind of the wheels on the gravel, which meant that my host
+had returned. I was lazily turning over a book of verses--I remember it
+perfectly well, it was Morris's "Love is Enough"--in a corner of the
+drawing-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 was
+something in his face that made me start up and follow him at once. He was
+extremely quiet, even stiff, not a muscle of his face moving, but very
+pale.
+
+"I have something to show you," he said, leading me through the vaulted
+hall, hung round with ancestral pictures, into the gravelled space that
+looked like a filled-up moat, where stood the big blasted oak, with its
+twisted, pointing branches. I followed him on to the lawn, or rather the
+piece of park-land that ran up to the house. We walked quickly, he in
+front, without exchanging a word. Suddenly he stopped, just where there
+jutted out the bow-window of the yellow drawing-room, and I felt Oke's hand
+tight upon my arm.
+
+"I have brought you here to see something," he whispered hoarsely; and he
+led me to the window.
+
+I looked in. The room, compared with the out door, was rather dark; but
+against the yellow wall I saw Mrs. Oke sitting alone on a couch in her
+white 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 believe
+now? Was it all my fancy? But I will have him this time. I have locked the
+door inside, and, by God! he shan't escape."
+
+The words were not out of Oke's mouth. I felt myself struggling with him
+silently 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 the
+thud 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 on
+its seat, lay Mrs. Oke, a pool of red forming in her white dress. Her mouth
+was convulsed, as if in that automatic shriek, but her wide-open white eyes
+seemed to smile vaguely and distantly.
+
+I know nothing of time. It all seemed to be one second, but a second that
+lasted hours. Oke stared, then turned round and laughed.
+
+"The damned rascal has given me the slip again!" he cried; and quickly
+unlocking the door, rushed out of the house with dreadful cries.
+
+That is the end of the story. Oke tried to shoot himself that evening, but
+merely fractured his jaw, and died a few days later, raving. There were all
+sorts of legal inquiries, through which I went as through a dream; and
+whence it resulted that Mr. Oke had killed his wife in a fit of momentary
+madness. That was the end of Alice Oke. By the way, her maid brought me a
+locket which was found round her neck, all stained with blood. It contained
+some very dark auburn hair, not at all the colour of William Oke's. I am
+quite sure it was Lovelock's.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Phantom Lover, by Vernon Lee
+
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