Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

And it so happened that he carried off the silver cup, for he beat Mr. Donovan the next day, and Mr. Jeffares, the holder, found that he had strained a tendon on the Saturday morning, and so declined to contest it and also Mr. Wingfield’s offer to play for it when the tendon should be in working order. (There were some people who said that it was very sporting of Mr. Wingfield to make such an offer, and others that it was very sporting of Mr. Jeffares to decline entertaining it. But in the inner circle there were whispers that Mr. Jeffares’ tendon was a most accommodating one, for it had been known to strain itself upon two previous occasions when he had to meet an opponent who was likely to give him some trouble.)

She did not allow him to drive her up to the Manor House on Saturday—indeed, he did not make the suggestion that she should do so. She walked up to that fine old Georgian porch at the right visiting hour, and she had already been talking to Mrs. Wingfield for some time before Jack put in an appearance.

Again she was dressed in white, but her garments were not those of the tennis meeting. They were simpler and consequently more expensive, for there is nothing more expensive than simplicity in a woman’s toilette if it is to be the best; and second-class simplicity is in worse taste than abject display. Mrs. Wingfield knew all that was to be known about lace of all lands and of all periods, and she saw in a moment that the Mechlin which made a sort of pelerine for her dress was a specimen. But she felt that it was not a bit to be worn by a farmer’s daughter at any time—that was her first impression. A little later, when she found how graceful and natural and well-mannered was this particular daughter of the farm, she came to the conclusion (reluctantly, it must be confessed) that that piece of Mechlin not merely suited her extremely well, but that it was exactly the right thing for her to wear.

She was greatly impressed by Priscilla’s beauty; but more by her way of speaking, and most of all by her manners. Manners with Mrs. Wingfield meant an absence of mannerisms, just as distinction meant nothing that could be seen distinctly, and good taste something that was only known when a breach of it took place. Mrs. Wingfield did not find her deviating from the straight paths of good taste when she referred to her position in relation to the best set of Framsby. She did not boast of not being “received” by these ladies; nor did she sneer at their want of appreciation of her merits. She did not refer to Lady Gainsforth as “the dear Countess” or to Lady Cynthia by her Christian name, to impress upon Mrs. Wingfield the intimacy existing between her and Lady Gainsforth’s daughter. Indeed it was Mrs. Wingfield who introduced these noble names, and Priscilla knew that Mrs. Wingfield’s son must have mentioned them in connection with her own; so she merely said that the skating at Ullerfield Court, the Ullerfields’ place in Norfolk, had been very good indeed when she had stayed there with Lady Cynthia and Katie Ullerfield.

And then—also in response to Mrs. Wingfield’s enquiry—she went on to speak of her dairy experience. She thought that on the whole there could be no more interesting work than dairy work. They were in the middle of the dairy when Jack put in an appearance.

When they had had tea he took her round the greenhouses. She could talk freely with him on this tour; she had no sense of being restrained by the looming of a grave question ahead. She knew that although two days ago he had been at the point of blurting out something that it would have been impossible for her to reply to satisfactorily then, he would never regard such an incident as the flowering of a yucca in a hothouse as a legitimate excuse for asking her the question which she had restrained.

She had no fault to find with him upon this occasion. He talked about the patience of his mother alternately with the bother of orchids and the merits of the Phoenix Barbonica for indoors; and brought her safely back to the drawing-room, where she put a crown upon the good impression she had already produced upon Mrs. Wingfield by showing more than a mere working knowledge of Wedgwood. It so happened that Priscilla had worked up Wedgwood every year to beguile the tedium of her visits to her aunt Emily. The town where her aunt lived contained a museum of the products of the English Etruria, and she had a visiting acquaintance with every piece in the collection. Thus was the good impression which she produced upon Mrs. Wingfield sealed with a Wedgwood medallion. A girl who could wear without reproach a Mechlin lace collar of the best period and who could detect Hackwood’s handiwork on a tiny vase which was attributed to somebody else, could not be far wrong.

When she had gone away and his mother had come out from the drawing-room and was about to take a turn round the garden, he lit a cigar and gave her his arm. He was talking rapidly, not of Miss Wadhurst, but of his approaching struggle with Mr. Dunning. His mother knew, from the persistency with which he rushed away from every chance she offered him of touching upon Miss Wadhurst, that he was anxious to an extraordinary degree to get her own opinion of their visitor.

It was not until he had led her to her favourite seat in the curve of an Italian balustrade overlooking the stonework of a pond with a fountain in the centre that she said, “I don’t wonder that you are in love with her, Jack.”

“Great Gloriana! I—in love—with—whom?” he cried. “She is, I think, the nicest girl I ever met,” continued his mother. “She has elegance, and that is the rarest quality among the girls of nowadays—the elegance of a picture by Sir Joshua; and her dress—there was not a single jarring note. I thought at first that that piece of Mechlin round her neck was rather overdone—it is worth sixty or seventy pounds—ah, now you perceive how outrageous is my taste—appraising the value of a visitor’s dress. Dreadful!”