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.”