Haunted portraits are a time-honored Gothic trope used for a variety of reasons: sometimes they suggest the continued ramifications of past generations’ tragedies, secrets, or crimes; sometimes they symbolize the manner in which humans cling to deep-seated cycles and resist change; on other occasions, the portrait with moving eyes – or shifting positions, or changing expressions – is simply a very chilling thing to imagine.
Washington Irving, Bram Stoker, J. S. Le Fanu, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and many others have used the motif of a haunted (or simply haunting) portrait which is often tied to the history of the house in which it is hanged (sometimes revealing an uncanny similarity with a living relative of the centuries-dead sitter).
“The Ebony Frame” is – like so many of Nesbit’s stories – one of hefty loss, romantic tragedy, and star-crossed love. Nesbit’s characters are consistently punished for aspiring to happiness, and if they manage – against all odds – to achieve it, they are doubly punished by losing twofold what they had so briefly gained (cf. the unwitting honeymooners in “Man-Size in Marble,” or the innocent but impossibly vexed sweethearts in “Uncle Abraham’s Romance”). The protagonist of this tale is arguably one of the most tortured of all Nesbit’s lovers – although his romance lasts just one fleeting day – because his soul has been waiting two hundred years to be reunited with the object of his passion.
SUMMARY
The story is narrated in the first person by a former “hack” reporter – middle-class and unpretentious, yet descended from the Dukes of Picardy (a region in northeast France, on the border with the Low Countries) – who has recently inherited the family manor house (and a comfortable annual income to run it) from his deceased Aunt Dorcas.
He describes himself as a rather ordinary and skeptical person, uninterested in supernatural tales or romantic sentiments. At this point in his life, he is feeling depressed and without purpose – he has even lost interest in his pretty but simple-minded fiancée, Mildred – and the new acquisition gives him a much-needed project: something to live for. His primary concern is the practical business of sorting through his new home, an ancient, well-furnished house that has long been in his family.
While exploring, he is repelled by an “exceedingly bad” print hanging over the mantle of the main parlor. He goes to replace it but is struck by the frame: it is “of fine ebony, beautifully and curiously carved” and clearly intended for an important, likely expensive, oil painting, not a cheap print. When he questions the housemaid about the picture, she recalls that Aunt Dorcas purchased it two days before her death and had the frame taken off of a dirty, antique painting found in the attic – one as sooty and foul as a “chimley-back.”
Intrigued, the protagonist asks to be taken to it. It is indeed a black with grime, but after the housemaid gently washes it with soapy water, they realize that it is no picture at all, but a discolored, leather binding covering up a painting. He tears it away and finds two paintings inside – secured to one another, face to face.
When he pries them away, he looks to the first and he is stunned to see – himself: a portrait of some ancestor who exactly resembles him, save the early 17th century garb. The maid is so struck by the eerie resemblance that she believes it to be a colored photograph taken at a fancy dress ball – an assumption which he allows her to believe rather than admit that he had never been to any such ball.
Meanwhile, he turns to the second portrait which is found to be that of a stunningly beautiful woman -- a brunette with hazel eyes -- in a black, velvet gown sitting at a table covered with scientific tools, books, papers, pens and other symbols of learning. “Her eyes met those of the spectator bewilderingly … they commanded, as might those of an empress.”
Overwhelmed with attraction to the sitter, he immediately has the portrait cleaned and restored to its ebony frame over the mantle. He researches the paintings but finds no leads whatsoever, and there – he fears – the trail is destined to go cold.
One night, however, as he is gazing into the regal, hazel eyes, he indulges a fanciful impulse, and asks the sitter to “come down” and meet him, going so far as to worshipfully hold out his arms to the image. To his horror and ecstatic delight – though he was sober and well-rested – he notices the eyes of the picture dilate and her lips tremble with pleasure.
Then her hands stirred, her face twists into an arch smile, and the sitter in the black dress suddenly vanishes from the canvas and materializes before him. Everything is swallowed up by shadow, but he hears velvet swishing on the floor, feels a warm hand grasping his, and hears a throaty, female voice intone: “You called me. I am here.”
He is stunned, but the wheels are turning in his mind. “We are not strangers,” he says. “Oh, no,” she replies, “not strangers.” Mildred is purged from his thoughts, and there, with hand draped around his neck, in the sexually-charged atmosphere of the dark room, she relates their past.
She isn’t aware how much time has passed since their deaths because “there is no time in hell,” but she still remembers what happened during their lives. They were betrothed during the early-17th century, when their portraits were painted as a set, just before “he” went off to fight in “the wars” (the Thirty Years War of 1618 – 1648, which, for political reasons, pitted the French in league with the Continental Protestants against the Catholic League).
However, before they could be wed, while he was off fighting, she was accused of witchcraft (she claims unjustly, “just because I looked at the stars and gained more knowledge than other women”) and burned at the stake.
However, she acknowledges that the devil did approach her with an offer (“I was innocent before [that, though], you know it, don’t you?”) to allow her to come back through the medium of the enchanted picture frame at the cost of her soul. If her portrait stayed with the frame, she would be able to return from the grave if someone summoned her.
Unfortunately, the night after her execution, her mother had been weeping in front of the painting, begging to be reunited with her daughter. This kicked the spell into action, which horrified the mother, who fled the room and ordered both paintings to be removed and encased in leather. When “he” returned from the war, “they lied to you, and you married another woman,” but, she crows “I knew you would walk the world again, and that I should find you.”
So far, he is delighted. There will be a cost to him, however: for her to remain a living woman, he must also surrender his soul. It is no trouble: he is only too eager to do it. She is thrilled, but controls her obvious pleasure, calmly ordering him to meet her the following night at midnight to begin the Satanic rites. The nuzzle and snuggle one another in the darkness until he falls asleep and awakes alone. She has been restored to the painting.
The following day he entertains dreadful-dull Mildred and her mother for lunch. They tease him about the new paintings, and he suffers their barbs, keeping his tongue sheathed, but all the while loathing Mildred’s “chocolate-box barmaid style of prettiness… with her rather pinched waist, her rather tight boots, her rather vulgar voice, sitting in the chair where my dear lady had sat.”
Eventually, however, he is so sickened by her obnoxious, bourgeois confidence – so unbecoming compared with his lady’s imperial grace – that he makes up an excuse and leaves them to walk the streets for hours, pondering his lover and their impending reunion.
All, however, is lost: as he begins to make is way back home at eleven o’clock, he sees the sky flush red – his house is on fire. As he races to the scene, he sees Mildred pitiably “leaning out the first-floor window, wringing her hands” (as though she couldn’t step outside to safety” and charges past the firemen into the haze, hunting for the portrait.
Suddenly, he feels arms around his neck and voice whispering “save me.” Mindful of his lady’s previous fiery demise, he is only too eager to save her from a second. He carries the figure to safety, but as he makes his way towards the door, he gradually becomes aware that the woman is actually Mildred.
Once she is safe, he rushes back for the painting, makes the drawing room, and sees a vision of the woman in black velvet reaching out to him from amidst the flames, but the floor collapses under him…
Somehow, he is spared from the fire – and has presumably not yet forfeited his soul – but his inheritance is burned to ashes, along with the ebony frame and the two portraits. Now that the painting and frame are separated, the spell is forever broken, and his lady’s spirit is forever lost to hell.
He remarks with bitterness how the fire was caused by the housemaid falling asleep while reading, how he has gone on to marry Mildred, has grown fat, dull, and prosperous, but has never doubted the reality of his experience:
“I deny, with all my soul in the denial, that it was a dream. There are no such dreams. Dreams of longing and pain there are in plenty; but dreams of complete, of unspeakable happiness? ah, no? it is the rest of life that is the dream.”
ANALYSIS
Like so many of her contemporaries, Nesbit was fascinated by the concept of reincarnation. To name just a few: E. F. Benson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood (who believed himself to be reincarnated), Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, and especially Robert W. Chambers and Oliver Onions (both of whose fiction is riddled with centuries-old souls walking around unawares in modern bodies) all cranked out stories of middle-classed plodders gradually becoming acquainted with the fact that they were priestesses, pirates, slave girls, or sorcerers in past lives.
The Fin de Siècle era – also called the Belle Epoque, or the Gay Nineties – was one noted for what the French called the “malady of the century,” namely boredom, pessimism, and dissatisfaction. Intellectuals brooded over the glories of past civilizations, imagining themselves anywhere but in the stilted, affected atmosphere of conventional, pre-war Europe.
Ironically, the ability to enjoy leisure – to vacation, play sports, and spend time away from work – was what seemed to draw people to fancied past lives as courtesans and cavaliers who unquestionably suffered far more from their hardships than the intelligentsia did from their boredom. As one documentary puts it
“For most people, common people, things were looking up. There was time now for sports, trips to the country; even a workman could buy his own bike. But for others, the artistic, the rich, it didn't feel so good. The rabble was everywhere, standards were lower, doom was at hand.”
Although the progressive Nesbit was hardly a member of that class of snobs who nursed pessimism at the thought of tradesmen having time to holiday, she certainly wrote about disaffected, distracted people who longed for anything other than the society they belong to. They are frequently scandalous, adulterous, jaded, and cynical.
At the end of this narrative, our lonely protagonist muses that it doesn’t matter that he has married the simple Mildred, grown fat, and successful, because his waking life is a mere dream. He doesn’t care a jot for reality, for it is only in his daydreams and fantasies that he can eke out a slice of genuine feeling. If any horror lurks in this otherwise mystical tale, the reader may find it there.
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