by Vernon Lee
5
What Mrs. Oke showed me in the yellow room was a large bundle of papers,some printed and some manuscript, but all of them brown with age, which shetook out of an old Italian ebony inlaid cabinet. It took her some time toget them, as a complicated arrangement of double locks and false drawershad to be put in play; and while she was doing so, I looked round the room,in which I had been only three or four times before. It was certainly themost beautiful room in this beautiful house, and, as it seemed to me now,the most strange. It was long and low, with something that made you thinkof the cabin of a ship, with a great mullioned window that let in, as itwere, a perspective of the brownish green park-land, dotted with oaks, andsloping upwards to the distant line of bluish firs against the horizon. Thewalls were hung with flowered damask, whose yellow, faded to brown, unitedwith the reddish colour of the carved wainscoting and the carved oakenbeams. For the rest, it reminded me more of an Italian room than an Englishone. The furniture was Tuscan of the early seventeenth century, inlaid andcarved; there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures, by someBolognese master, on the walls; and in a corner, among a stack of dwarforange-trees, a little Italian harpsichord of exquisite curve andslenderness, with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In arecess was a shelf of old books, mainly English and Italian poets of theElizabethan time; and close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, alarge and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The panes of the mullioned windowwere open, and yet the air seemed heavy, with an indescribable headyperfume, not that of any growing flower, but like that of old stuff thatshould have lain for years among spices.
"It is a beautiful room!" I exclaimed. "I should awfully like to paint youin it"; but I had scarcely spoken the words when I felt I had done wrong.This woman's husband could not bear the room, and it seemed to me vaguelyas if he were right in detesting it.
Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the tablewhere she was standing sorting the papers.
"Look!" she said, "these are all poems by Christopher Lovelock"; andtouching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent fingers, shecommenced reading some of them out loud in a slow, half-audible voice. Theywere songs in the style of those of Herrick, Waller, and Drayton,complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady called Dryope, inwhose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of the mistress ofOkehurst. The songs were graceful, and not without a certain faded passion:but I was thinking not of them, but of the woman who was reading them tome.
Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish yellow wall as a background to herwhite brocade dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make, seemedbut to bring out more clearly the slightness, the exquisite suppleness, ofher tall figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned the other, asif for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. Her voice, which wasdelicate, shadowy, like her person, had a curious throbbing cadence, as ifshe were reading the words of a melody, and restraining herself withdifficulty from singing it; and as she read, her long slender throatthrobbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin face. Sheevidently knew the verses by heart, and her eyes were mostly fixed withthat distant smile in them, with which harmonised a constant tremulouslittle smile in her lips.
"That is how I would wish to paint her!" I exclaimed within myself; andscarcely noticed, what struck me on thinking over the scene, that thisstrange being read these verses as one might fancy a woman would readlove-verses addressed to herself.
"Those are all written for Alice Oke--Alice the daughter of VirgilPomfret," she said slowly, folding up the papers. "I found them at thebottom of this cabinet. Can you doubt of the reality of ChristopherLovelock now?"
The question was an illogical one, for to doubt of the existence ofChristopher Lovelock was one thing, and to doubt of the mode of his deathwas another; but somehow I did feel convinced.
"Look!" she said, when she had replaced the poems, "I will show yousomething else." Among the flowers that stood on the upper storey of herwriting-table--for I found that Mrs. Oke had a writing-table in the yellowroom--stood, as on an altar, a small black carved frame, with a silkcurtain drawn over it: the sort of thing behind which you would haveexpected to find a head of Christ or of the Virgin Mary. She drew thecurtain and displayed a large-sized miniature, representing a young man,with auburn curls and a peaked auburn beard, dressed in black, but withlace about his neck, and large pear-shaped pearls in his ears: a wistful,melancholy face. Mrs. Oke took the miniature religiously off its stand, andshowed me, written in faded characters upon the back, the name "ChristopherLovelock," and the date 1626.
"I found this in the secret drawer of that cabinet, together with the heapof poems," she said, taking the miniature out of my hand.
I was silent for a minute.
"Does--does Mr. Oke know that you have got it here?" I asked; and thenwondered what in the world had impelled me to put such a question.
Mrs. Oke smiled that smile of contemptuous indifference. "I have neverhidden it from any one. If my husband disliked my having it, he might havetaken it away, I suppose. It belongs to him, since it was found in hishouse."
I did not answer, but walked mechanically towards the door. There wassomething heady and oppressive in this beautiful room; something, Ithought, almost repulsive in this exquisite woman. She seemed to me,suddenly, perverse and dangerous.
I scarcely know why, but I neglected Mrs. Oke that afternoon. I went to Mr.Oke's study, and sat opposite to him smoking while he was engrossed in hisaccounts, his reports, and electioneering papers. On the table, above theheap of paper-bound volumes and pigeon-holed documents, was, as soleornament of his den, a little photograph of his wife, done some yearsbefore. I don't know why, but as I sat and watched him, with his florid,honest, manly beauty, working away conscientiously, with that littleperplexed frown of his, I felt intensely sorry for this man.
But this feeling did not last. There was no help for it: Oke was not asinteresting as Mrs. Oke; and it required too great an effort to pump upsympathy for this normal, excellent, exemplary young squire, in thepresence of so wonderful a creature as his wife. So I let myself go to thehabit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk over her strange craze, or ratherof drawing her out about it. I confess that I derived a morbid andexquisite pleasure in doing so: it was so characteristic in her, soappropriate to the house! It completed her personality so perfectly, andmade it so much easier to conceive a way of painting her. I made up my mindlittle by little, while working at William Oke's portrait (he proved a lesseasy subject than I had anticipated, and, despite his conscientiousefforts, was a nervous, uncomfortable sitter, silent and brooding)--I madeup my mind that I would paint Mrs. Oke standing by the cabinet in theyellow room, in the white Vandyck dress copied from the portrait of herancestress. Mr. Oke might resent it, Mrs. Oke even might resent it; theymight refuse to take the picture, to pay for it, to allow me to exhibit;they might force me to run my umbrella through the picture. No matter. Thatpicture should be painted, if merely for the sake of having painted it; forI felt it was the only thing I could do, and that it would be far away mybest work. I told neither of my resolution, but prepared sketch aftersketch of Mrs. Oke, while continuing to paint her husband.
Mrs. Oke was a silent person, more silent even than her husband, for shedid not feel bound, as he did, to attempt to entertain a guest or to showany interest in him. She seemed to spend her life--a curious, inactive,half-invalidish life, broken by sudden fits of childish cheerfulness--in aneternal daydream, strolling about the house and grounds, arranging thequantities of flowers that always filled all the rooms, beginning to readand then throwing aside novels and books of poetry, of which she always hada large number; and, I believe, lying for hours, doing nothing, on a couchin that yellow drawing-room, which, with her sole exception, no member ofthe Oke family had ever been known to stay in alone. Little by little Ibegan to suspect and to verify another eccentricity of this eccentricbeing, and to understand why there were stringent orders never to disturb
her in that yellow room.
It had been a habit at Okehurst, as at one or two other Englishmanor-houses, to keep a certain amount of the clothes of each generation,more particularly wedding dresses. A certain carved oaken press, of whichMr. Oke once displayed the contents to me, was a perfect museum ofcostumes, male and female, from the early years of the seventeenth to theend of the eighteenth century--a thing to take away the breath of a_bric-a-brac_ collector, an antiquary, or a _genre_ painter. Mr. Oke wasnone of these, and therefore took but little interest in the collection,save in so far as it interested his family feeling. Still he seemed wellacquainted with the contents of that press.
He was turning over the clothes for my benefit, when suddenly I noticedthat he frowned. I know not what impelled me to say, "By the way, have youany dresses of that Mrs. Oke whom your wife resembles so much? Have you gotthat particular white dress she was painted in, perhaps?"
Oke of Okehurst flushed very red.
"We have it," he answered hesitatingly, "but--it isn't here at present--Ican't find it. I suppose," he blurted out with an effort, "that Alice hasgot it. Mrs. Oke sometimes has the fancy of having some of these old thingsdown. I suppose she takes ideas from them."
A sudden light dawned in my mind. The white dress in which I had seen Mrs.Oke in the yellow room, the day that she showed me Lovelock's verses, wasnot, as I had thought, a modern copy; it was the original dress of AliceOke, the daughter of Virgil Pomfret--the dress in which, perhaps,Christopher Lovelock had seen her in that very room.
The idea gave me a delightful picturesque shudder. I said nothing. But Ipictured to myself Mrs. Oke sitting in that yellow room--that room which noOke of Okehurst save herself ventured to remain in alone, in the dress ofher ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, haunting somethingthat seemed to fill the place--that vague presence, it seemed to me, of themurdered cavalier poet.
Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, as a result of beingextremely indifferent. She really did not care in the least about anythingexcept her own ideas and day-dreams, except when, every now and then, shewas seized with a sudden desire to shock the prejudices or superstitions ofher husband. Very soon she got into the way of never talking to me at all,save about Alice and Nicholas Oke and Christopher Lovelock; and then, whenthe fit seized her, she would go on by the hour, never asking herselfwhether I was or was not equally interested in the strange craze thatfascinated her. It so happened that I was. I loved to listen to her, goingon discussing by the hour the merits of Lovelock's poems, and analysing herfeelings and those of her two ancestors. It was quite wonderful to watchthe exquisite, exotic creature in one of these moods, with the distant lookin her grey eyes and the absent-looking smile in her thin cheeks, talkingas if she had intimately known these people of the seventeenth century,discussing every minute mood of theirs, detailing every scene between themand their victim, talking of Alice, and Nicholas, and Lovelock as she mightof her most intimate friends. Of Alice particularly, and of Lovelock. Sheseemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that hadcrossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me,speaking of herself in the third person, of her own feelings--as if I werelistening to a woman's confidences, the recital of her doubts, scruples,and agonies about a living lover. For Mrs. Oke, who seemed the mostself-absorbed of creatures in all other matters, and utterly incapable ofunderstanding or sympathising with the feelings of other persons, enteredcompletely and passionately into the feelings of this woman, this Alice,who, at some moments, seemed to be not another woman, but herself.
"But how could she do it--how could she kill the man she cared for?" I onceasked her.
"Because she loved him more than the whole world!" she exclaimed, andrising suddenly from her chair, walked towards the window, covering herface with her hands.
I could see, from the movement of her neck, that she was sobbing. She didnot turn round, but motioned me to go away.
"Don't let us talk any more about it," she said. "I am ill to-day, andsilly."
I closed the door gently behind me. What mystery was there in this woman'slife? This listlessness, this strange self-engrossment and stranger maniaabout people long dead, this indifference and desire to annoy towards herhusband--did it all mean that Alice Oke had loved or still loved some onewho was not the master of Okehurst? And his melancholy, his preoccupation,the something about him that told of a broken youth--did it mean that heknew it?