Hauntings

by Vernon Lee

  3

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my presenceas distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay inthe porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who wasoccasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there aweek--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular resemblancethat existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that hung in thehall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in question was afull length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some strayItalian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a rather dark corner,facing the portrait, evidently painted to be its companion, of a dark man,with a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution and efficiency, in ablack Vandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife; and in the cornerof the woman's portrait were the words, "Alice Oke, daughter of VirgilPomfret, Esq., and wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst," and the date1626--"Nicholas Oke" being the name painted in the corner of the smallportrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, atleast so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days ofCharles I, can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There werethe same strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the thincheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity ofexpression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventionalmanner of the time. One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, thesame beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as herdescendant; for I found that Mr. and Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, wereboth descended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, daughter of VirgilPomfret. But the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soonsaw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like herancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-century look; nay,that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait.

  "You think I am like her," answered Mrs. Oke dreamily to my remark, and hereyes wandered off to that unseen something, and the faint smile dimpled herthin cheeks.

  "You are like her, and you know it. I may even say you wish to be like her,Mrs. Oke," I answered, laughing.

  "Perhaps I do."

  And she looked in the direction of her husband. I noticed that he had anexpression of distinct annoyance besides that frown of his.

  "Isn't it true that Mrs. Oke tries to look like that portrait?" I asked,with a perverse curiosity.

  "Oh, fudge!" he exclaimed, rising from his chair and walking nervously tothe window. "It's all nonsense, mere nonsense. I wish you wouldn't, Alice."

  "Wouldn't what?" asked Mrs. Oke, with a sort of contemptuous indifference."If I am like that Alice Oke, why I am; and I am very pleased any oneshould think so. She and her husband are just about the only two members ofour family--our most flat, stale, and unprofitable family--that ever werein the least degree interesting."

  Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain.

  "I don't see why you should abuse our family, Alice," he said. "Thank God,our people have always been honourable and upright men and women!"

  "Excepting always Nicholas Oke and Alice his wife, daughter of VirgilPomfret, Esq.," she answered, laughing, as he strode out into the park.

  "How childish he is!" she exclaimed when we were alone. "He really minds,really feels disgraced by what our ancestors did two centuries and a halfago. I do believe William would have those two portraits taken down andburned if he weren't afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. And as itis, these two people really are the only two members of our family thatever were in the least interesting. I will tell you the story some day."

  As it was, the story was told to me by Oke himself. The next day, as wewere taking our morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, layingabout him all the time at the sere grasses with the hooked stick that hecarried, like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose ofcutting down his and other folk's thistles.

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

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

  "Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed asif it required some to complete it.

  "I hope not," answered Oke gravely.

  His gravity made me smile.

  "Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked.

  "If there are such things as ghosts," he replied, "I don't think theyshould be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as awarning or a punishment."

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

  He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, and therefore descended fromthe same old Kentish stock. The Okes of Okehurst could trace back toNorman, almost to Saxon times, far longer than any of the titled orbetter-known families of the neighbourhood. I saw that William Oke, in hisheart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neighbours. "We have never doneanything particular, or been anything particular--never held any office,"he said; "but we have always been here, and apparently always done ourduty. An ancestor of ours was killed in the Scotch wars, another atAgincourt--mere honest captains." Well, early in the seventeenth century,the family had dwindled to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who hadrebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas appears to have beensomewhat different from the usual run of the family. He had, in his youth,sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have beenless of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer veryyoung, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from aneighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret," myhost informed me, "and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite differentsort of people--restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite ofHenry VIII." It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having anyPomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an evident familydislike--the dislike of an Oke, one of the old, honourable, modest stock,which had quietly done its duty, for a family of fortune-seekers and Courtminions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in a little houserecently inherited from an uncle, a certain Christopher Lovelock, a younggallant and poet, who was in momentary disgrace at Court for some loveaffair. This Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neighboursof Okehurst--too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either forher husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one evening as he was riding homealone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen,but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wifedressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition hadremained. "They used to tell it us when we were children," said my host, ina hoarse voice, "and to frighten my cousin--I mean my wife--and me withstories about Lovelock. It is merely a tradition, which I hope may die out,as I sincerely pray to heaven that it may be false." "Alice--Mrs. Oke--yousee," he went on after some time, "doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps Iam morbid. But I do dislike having the old story raked up."

  And we said no more on the subject.