Hauntings

by Vernon Lee

  2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I started up at a sudden rap at my door.

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

  I had completely forgotten his existence.