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chapter 5 of a phantom lover by vernon lee this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org

the following days mrs oak was in a condition of quite unusual good spirits some visitors distant relatives were expected and although she had expressed the utmost annoyance at the idea of their coming she was now seized with a fit of housekeeping activity and was perpetually about arranging things and giving orders although all arrangements as usual had been made and all orders given by her husband william oak was quite radiant if only alice were always well like this he exclaimed if only she would take or could take an interest in life how different things would be but he arrowed as if fearful lest he should be supposed to accuse her in any way how can she usually with her wretched health still it does make me awfully happy to see her like this i nodded but i cannot say that i really acquiesced in his views it seemed to me particularly with the recollection of yesterday's extraordinary scene that mrs oak's high spirits were anything but normal there was something in her unusual activity and still more unusual cheerfulness that was merely nervous and feverish and i had the whole day the impression of dealing with a woman who was ill and who would very speedily collapse mrs oak spent her day wandering from one room to another and from the garden to the greenhouse seeing whether all were in order when as a matter of fact all was always in order at oakhurst she did not give me any sitting and not a word was spoken about alice oak or christopher lovelock indeed to a casual observer it might seem as if all that craze about lovelock had completely departed or never existed about five o'clock as i was strolling among the red brick round gabled outhouses each with its armorial oak and the old-fashioned spaliad kitchen and fruit garden i saw mrs oak standing her hands full of york and lancaster roses upon the steps facing the stables a groom was curry-calming a horse and outside the coach house was mr oak's little high-wheeled cart let us have a drive suddenly exclaimed mrs oak on seeing me look what a beautiful evening and look at that dear little cart it is so long since i've driven and i feel as if i must drive again come with me and you harness jim at once and come round to the door i was quite amazed and still more so when the cart drove up before the door and mrs oak called me to accompany her she sent away the groom and in a minute we were rolling along at a tremendous pace along the yellow sand road with the seer pasture lands the big oaks on either side i could scarcely believe my senses this woman in her mannish little coat and hat driving a powerful young horse with the utmost skill and chattering like a schoolgirl of 16 could not be the delicate morbid exotic hot house creature unable to walk her to do anything who spent her days lying about on couches in the heavy atmosphere redolent with strange scents and associations of the yellow drawing room the movement of the light carriage the cool draft the very grind of the wheels upon the gravel seemed to go to her head like wine it is so long since i have done this sort of thing she kept repeating so long so long oh don't you think a delightful going at this pace with the idea that at any moment the horse may come down and we too be killed and she laughed her childish laugh and turned her face no longer pale but flushed with the movement and the excitement towards me card rolled on quicker and quicker one gate after another swinging two behind us as we flew up and down the little hills across the pasture lands through the little red brick gabled villages where the...

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chapter 4 of a phantom lover by vernon lee this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org

what mrs oak 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 she took out of an old italian ebony inlaid cabinet it took her some time to get them as a complicated arrangement of double locks and false drawers had to be put in play and while she was doing so i looked around the room in which i had been only three or four times before it was certainly the most 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 think of the cabin of a ship with a great mullioned window that led in as it were a perspective of the brownish green park land dotted with oaks and sloping upwards to the distant line of blueish furs against the horizon the walls were hung with flower damask whose yellow faded to brown united with the reddish color of the carved wayne scoting and the carved open beams for the rest it reminded me more of an italian room than an english one the furniture was tuscan of the early 17th century inlayed and carved there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures by some baloney's master on the walls and in a corner among a stack of dwarf orange trees a little italian harpsichord of exquisite curve and slenderness with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover in a recess was a shelf of old books mainly english and italian poets of the elizabethan time and close by it placed upon a carved wedding chest a large and beautiful melon shaped loot the panes of mullioned window were open and yet the air seemed heavy with an indescribable heady perfume not that of any growing flower but like that of old stuff that had lain for years among spices

it is a beautiful room i exclaimed i should awfully like to paint you in 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 vaguely as if he were right in detesting it mrs oak took no notice of my exclamation but beckoned me to the table where she was standing sorting the papers look she said these are all poems by christopher lovelock and touching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent fingers she commenced reading some of them aloud in a slow half-audible voice there were songs in the style of those of herrick waller and drayton complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady called dry open whose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of the mistress of oakhurst 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 to me mrs oak was standing with the brownish yellow wall on a background to her white brocade dress which in its stiff 17th century make seemed but to bring out more clearly this lightness the exquisite suppleness of her tall figure she held the papers in one hand and leaned the other as if for support on the inlaid cabinet by her side her voice which was delicate shadowy like her person had a curious throbbing cadence as if she were reading the words of a melody and restraining herself with difficulty from singing it and as she read her long slender throat throbbed slightly and a faint redness came into her thin face she evidently knew the verses by heart and her eyes were mostly fixed with that distant smile in them with which harmonized a constant tremulous little smile in her lips that is how i would wish to paint her i exclaimed within myself and scarcely noticed what struck me on thinking over the scene that this strange being read these verses as one might...

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chapter 3 of a phantom lover by vernon lee this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org

from that moment i began to assume a certain interest in the eyes of mrs oak 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 scatterbrained 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 oak an almost unique subject for a portrait painter of any 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 the first 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 oak from doing so in the presence of william oak himself i had certainly guessed correctly to resemble the alice oak of the year 1626 was the caprice the mania the pose though whatever you may call it of the alice oak 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 idol women that i have ever met but it was more than that it was admirably characteristic it finished off the strange figure of mrs oak 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 gypsy 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 oak that i had learned from her husband the outline of the tragedy or mystery whichever it was of alice oak 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 columny poor wheelie i remember already when we were children and i used to come with my mother to spend christmas at oakhurst 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 oak and he always piously refused to do the part of nicholas when i wanted to have the scene on coates common i didn't know then that i was like the original alice oak 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 van dyke dress with the green of the park...

The second episode of our featured weekend book.

chapter 2 of a phantom lover by vernon lee this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org

i feel that i cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest impressions of mrs oak my recollection of them would be entirely colored by my subsequent knowledge of her wins i conclude that i could not at first have experienced the strange interest and admiration which that extraordinary woman very soon excited in me interest and admiration be it well understood of a very unusual kind as she was herself a very unusual kind of woman and i if you choose am a rather unusual kind of man but i can explain that better and on this much is certain that i must have been immeasurably surprised at finding my hostess and future sitters so completely unlike everything i had anticipated or no now i come to think of it i scarcely felt surprised at all or if i did that shock of surprise could have lasted but an infinitesimal part of a minute the fact is that having once seen alice oak in the reality it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different there was something so complete so completely unlike everyone else in her personality that she seemed always 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 gradually learn to see it to begin with i must repeat and reiterate over and over again that she was beyond all comparison the most graceful and exquisite woman i have ever seen but with a grace and an exquisiteness that had nothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of what goes by these names grace and exquisiteness recognized at once as perfect but which were seen in her for the first time and probably i do believe for the last time it is conceivable is it not that once in a thousand years there may arise a combination of lines a system of movements an outline a gesture which is new unprecedented and yet hits off exactly our desires for beauty and rareness she was very tall and i suppose people would have called her thin i don't know for i never thought about her as a body bones flesh that sort of thing but merely as a wonderful series of lines and a wonderful strangeness of personality tall and slender certainly and with not one item of what makes up our notion of a well-built woman she was as straight i mean she had as little of what people call figure as a bamboo her shoulders were a trifle high and she had a decided stoop her arms and her shoulders she never once wore uncovered but this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness any stateliness a play of outline with every step she took that i can't compare to anything else there was init something of the peacock and also something of this stag but above all it was her own i wish i could describe her i wish alas i wish i wish i have wished a hundred thousand times i could paint her as i see her now if i shut my eyes 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 straight supple back the long exquisite neck the head with the hair cropped in short pale curls always drooping a little except when she would suddenly throw it back and smile not at me nor had anyone nor had anything that had been said but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something with a strange dimple in her thin pale cheeks and the strange whiteness of her full wide opened eyes the moment when she had something of this stag in her movement but where is the use of talking about her i don't believe you know that even the greatest painter can show what is the real beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary...

The weekend's featured book.

chapter 2 of a phantom lover by vernon lee this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org

i feel that i cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest impressions of mrs oak my recollection of them would be entirely colored by my subsequent knowledge of her wins i conclude that i could not at first have experienced the strange interest and admiration which that extraordinary woman very soon excited in me interest and admiration be it well understood of a very unusual kind as she was herself a very unusual kind of woman and i if you choose am a rather unusual kind of man but i can explain that better and on this much is certain that i must have been immeasurably surprised at finding my hostess and future sitters so completely unlike everything i had anticipated or no now i come to think of it i scarcely felt surprised at all or if i did that shock of surprise could have lasted but an infinitesimal part of a minute the fact is that having once seen alice oak in the reality it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different there was something so complete so completely unlike everyone else in her personality that she seemed always 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 gradually learn to see it to begin with i must repeat and reiterate over and over again that she was beyond all comparison the most graceful and exquisite woman i have ever seen but with a grace and an exquisiteness that had nothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of what goes by these names grace and exquisiteness recognized at once as perfect but which were seen in her for the first time and probably i do believe for the last time it is conceivable is it not that once in a thousand years there may arise a combination of lines a system of movements an outline a gesture which is new unprecedented and yet hits off exactly our desires for beauty and rareness she was very tall and i suppose people would have called her thin i don't know for i never thought about her as a body bones flesh that sort of thing but merely as a wonderful series of lines and a wonderful strangeness of personality tall and slender certainly and with not one item of what makes up our notion of a well-built woman she was as straight i mean she had as little of what people call figure as a bamboo her shoulders were a trifle high and she had a decided stoop her arms and her shoulders she never once wore uncovered but this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness any stateliness a play of outline with every step she took that i can't compare to anything else there was init something of the peacock and also something of this stag but above all it was her own i wish i could describe her i wish alas i wish i wish i have wished a hundred thousand times i could paint her as i see her now if i shut my eyes 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 straight supple back the long exquisite neck the head with the hair cropped in short pale curls always drooping a little except when she would suddenly throw it back and smile not at me nor had anyone nor had anything that had been said but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something with a strange dimple in her thin pale cheeks and the strange whiteness of her full wide opened eyes the moment when she had something of this stag in her movement but where is the use of talking about her i don't believe you know that even the greatest painter can show what is the real beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary sense titians and...

A Phantom Lover
by Vernon Lee

Publication date 2011-10-11
Usage Public Domain Mark 1.0Creative Commons Licensepublicdomain
Topics Ghost story, horror, art in literature, literature, Librivox, audiobook
LibriVox recording of A Phantom Lover, by Vernon Lee.
Read by Anthony Leslie.

A Phantom Lover is a supernatural novella by Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget) first published in 1886. Set in a Kentish manor house, the story concerns a portrait painter commissioned by a squire, William Oke, to produce portraits of him and his wife, the eccentric Mrs. Alice Oke, who bears a striking resemblance to a woman in a mysterious, seventeenth century painting. (Summary by Anthony Leslie)

For further information, including links to online text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for this recording.

For more free audio books or to become a volunteer reader, visit LibriVox.org.

M4B Audiobook (64MB)
Addeddate 2011-10-11 18:36:19
Boxid OL100020513
External_metadata_update 2019-03-30T10:10:32Z
Identifier phantomlover_1110_librivox
Run time 2:21:17
Source Librivox recording of a public-domain text
Taped by LibriVox
Year 2011
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Publication date 2011-10-11
Usage Public Domain Mark 1.0Creative Commons Licensepublicdomain
Topics Ghost story, horror, art in literature, literature, Librivox, audiobook
LibriVox recording of A Phantom Lover, by Vernon Lee.
Read by Anthony Leslie.

A Phantom Lover is a supernatural novella by Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget) first published in 1886. Set in a Kentish manor house, the story concerns a portrait painter commissioned by a squire, William Oke, to produce portraits of him and his wife, the eccentric Mrs. Alice Oke, who bears a striking resemblance to a woman in a mysterious, seventeenth century painting. (Summary by Anthony Leslie)

For further information, including links to online text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for this recording.

For more free audio books or to become a volunteer reader, visit LibriVox.org.

M4B Audiobook (64MB)
Addeddate 2011-10-11 18:36:19
Boxid OL100020513
External_metadata_update 2019-03-30T10:10:32Z
Identifier phantomlover_1110_librivox
Run time 2:21:17
Source Librivox recording of a public-domain text
Taped by LibriVox
Year 2011
plus-circle Add Review
comment
Preface A Phantom Lover by Vernon Lee Public Domain Library Free Audiobooks No Copyright

Slow and steady.
Chant Arabe Suzuki Piano Bk1 Right Hand With Orchestra Free Download Kids and Beginners

Four Noncanonical Sherlock Holmes Short Stories
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Publication date 2021-04-20
Usage Public Domain Mark 1.0Creative Commons Licensepublicdomain
Topics librivox, audiobooks, private investigators, gentleman detectives, deductive reasoning
LibriVox recording of Four Noncanonical Sherlock Holmes Short Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Read in English by Peter Yearsley; Michele Eaton; David Purdy; Algy Pug; Alan Mapstone; Rob Marland; Larry Wilson; Zames Curran; Twinkle; Tomas Peter; Lauren-Emma Blake; chuckconvr; Adrian Stephens; Marvin; Lewis West; NoelVox; Brant Burgiss

Although the Sherlock Holmes canon traditionally consists of four novels and 56 short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle, there are many Sherlock Holmes stories outside the canon. Most of these noncanonical stories were written by authors other than Doyle, but there are four short stories about Holmes written by Doyle that are nonetheless excluded from the canon, for various reasons. This LibriVox album consists of these four noncanonical stories. The first story, "The Field Bazaar", was first published in 1896 in a special issue of a University of Edinburgh student newspaper called The Student. Doyle wrote this very brief story to support a fundraising event at the university, his alma mater, but most scholars consider the story to be a parody and therefore not part of the canon. The second and third stories, "The Lost Special" and "The Man with the Watches", were both published in The Strand Magazine in 1898 and both feature mysteries involving trains. These two stories are not part of the canon because neither story mentions Holmes by name, although literary scholars have proposed that the unnamed "amateur reasoner" in "The Lost Special" and the unnamed "well-known criminal investigator" in "The Man with the Watches" are intended to be Holmes, and this theory is accepted for the purposes of this LibriVox album. Doyle wrote the fourth story, "How Watson Learned the Trick", for a miniature book that was placed in Queen Mary's Dolls' House, a dollhouse built for Queen Mary in the 1920s that housed a tiny library featuring works by several famous authors of the day, the contents of which were published in 1924 for public consumption. Considered a companion piece to "The Field Bazaar" due to both stories consisting entirely of conversations between Holmes and Watson over breakfast, "How Watson Learned the Trick" is similarly excluded from the canon on the grounds of being a parody. - Summary by David Purdy

Cast List:

Sherlock Holmes: Peter Yearsley
Dr. Watson: David Purdy
Herbert de Lernac: Algy Pug
James: NoelVox
James Bland: Lewis West
Inspector Collins: Alan Mapstone
John Palmer: Brant Burgiss
Potter Hood; Dude: Zames Curran
James McPherson; John: chuckconvr
Edward; Kenyon Junction Station Master: Tomas Peter
Sparrow MacCoy; Earlstown Station Master: Adrian Stephens
Coroner; Newton Station Master: Lauren-Emma Blake
Barton Moss Station Master: Marvin
Manchester Station Master: Larry Wilson
Collins Green Station Master: Twinkle
St. Helens Station Master: Rob Marland
Narrator: Michele Eaton
Edited by: Peter Yearsley
Proof listener: Dulcamara

For further information, including links to online text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for this recording.

For more free audio books or to become a volunteer reader, visit librivox.org.

The second part of this story by Poe will delight fans of the gothic writer.