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 youngcreatures, 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 coldand began to pour. Every one was sent indoors, and there was a generalgloom suddenly over the company. Mrs. Oke seemed to have got sick of herguests, and was listlessly lying back on a couch, paying not the slightestattention to the chattering and piano-strumming in the room, when one ofthe guests suddenly proposed that they should play charades. He was adistant 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 dressup, and parade about, and feel as if we belonged to the past. I have heardyou have a marvellous collection of old costumes, more or less ever sincethe days of Noah, somewhere, Cousin Bill."
The whole party exclaimed in joy at this proposal. William Oke lookedpuzzled for a moment, and glanced at his wife, who continued to lielistless on her sofa.
"There is a press full of clothes belonging to the family," he answereddubiously, apparently overwhelmed by the desire to please his guests;"but--but--I don't know whether it's quite respectful to dress up in theclothes of dead people."
"Oh, fiddlestick!" cried the cousin. "What do the dead people know aboutit? Besides," he added, with mock seriousness, "I assure you we shallbehave in the most reverent way and feel quite solemn about it all, if onlyyou will give us the key, old man."
Again Mr. Oke looked towards his wife, and again met only her vague, absentglance.
"Very well," he said, and led his guests upstairs.
An hour later the house was filled with the strangest crew and thestrangest noises. I had entered, to a certain extent, into William Oke'sfeeling of unwillingness to let his ancestors' clothes and personality betaken in vain; but when the masquerade was complete, I must say that theeffect was quite magnificent. A dozen youngish men and women--those whowere staying in the house and some neighbours who had come for lawn-tennisand 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 beautifulsight than the panelled corridors, the carved and escutcheoned staircase,the dim drawing-rooms with their faded tapestries, the great hall with itsvaulted and ribbed ceiling, dotted about with groups or single figures thatseemed to have come straight from the past. Even William Oke, who, besidesmyself and a few elderly people, was the only man not masqueraded, seemeddelighted and fired by the sight. A certain schoolboy character suddenlycame out in him; and finding that there was no costume left for him, herushed upstairs and presently returned in the uniform he had worn beforehis marriage. I thought I had really never seen so magnificent a specimenof the handsome Englishman; he looked, despite all the modern associationsof his costume, more genuinely old-world than all the rest, a knight forthe Black Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular features andbeautiful fair hair and complexion. After a minute, even the elderly peoplehad got costumes of some sort--dominoes arranged at the moment, and hoodsand all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery andOriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become,so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement--with thechildishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlyingthe majority even of well-bred English men and women--Mr. Oke himself doingthe 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 eccentricbeing, with her fantastic, imaginative, morbid passion for the past, such acarnival as this must be positively revolting; and, absolutely indifferentas 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 theseothers 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 greycloak over one shoulder, a large grey hat slouched over the eyes, a daggerand 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 playingthe fool in the garments of men and women long dead and buried, there issomething questionable in the sudden appearance of a young married woman,the mistress of the house, in a riding-coat and jackboots; and Mrs. Oke'sexpression 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 marvelloustalent 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.," sheanswered, and took her seat at the head of the table. Involuntarily my eyessought those of Oke of Okehurst. He, who blushed as easily as a girl ofsixteen, was now as white as ashes, and I noticed that he pressed his handalmost convulsively to his mouth.
"Don't you recognise my dress, William?" asked Mrs. Oke, fixing her eyesupon him with a cruel smile.
He did not answer, and there was a moment's silence, which the theatricalcousin had the happy thought of breaking by jumping upon his seat andemptying 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 facebefore, answered in a loud and aggressive tone--
"To the health of the poet, Mr. Christopher Lovelock, if his ghost behonouring this house with its presence!"
I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midstof this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, andparti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, andeighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, andclowns, with faces painted and corked and floured over, I seemed to seethat sanguine sunset, washing like a sea of blood over the heather, towhere, by the black pond and the wind-warped firs, there lay the body ofChristopher Lovelock, with his dead horse near him, the yellow gravel andlilac ling soaked crimson all around; and above emerged, as out of theredness, 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.