Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

And that was why she sent him away—it was actually approaching noon, so quickly does a day pass when lovers who have recognized each other as such for the first time come together. They had not stirred from the apple orchard. When they had left the house immediately after breakfast there had been some talk between them about the great dairy; he avowed himself to be dying to see the dairy and she had promised to make him acquainted with all the details of it’s working. But they had not stirred from the orchard. She sat among the apple blossoms; all the world before their eyes was filled with apple blossoms; apple blossoms were trembling in the air between their eyes and the blue sky, and with every gracious breath that came among the overhanging boughs a snow of apple blossoms fluttered to their feet.

And then the high walls of the orchard gave them such a sense of security.

They never went near the dairy. Neither of them had a thought for it; even though its management was on the borders of the sublime. The first move that they made meant separating (for the time being), and they were long in making it. Of course it was she who sent him away. She thought that she would do well to meet her father alone and break the news to him.

When her lover had gone from her, she ran into the house and up the stairs that led to a small gable room with a window commanding a view of the steep lane through which he would have to pass crossing the country to the Manor. She waited breathless until he swam into her ken. He remained in her sight for the better part of three minutes, and then his occultation took place by the denseness of the foliage of the hedgerow. But that three minutes!...

Slowly she went to her own room and threw herself into an easy chair—the very one in which she had sat scarcely more than a month ago when reading the batch of American newspapers. That was the thought which came to her now, and with it came a sense of the enormous space of time that lay between the events of that day and the event of the hour in which she was living. It was impossible to believe that it was to be measured by weeks and not by years. Had she no premonition on that afternoon, when the earth was smiling in all its newly washed greenery, that the man whom she had seen for the first time that day would become so much a part of her life—a part?—nay, all—all her life? She could not remember having had such a thought suggested to her at that time; but that only made her feel that her memory was treacherous. She felt sure that she must have had such a premonition. Even though she had had a great deal to think about on that afternoon she must have had space to ask herself if she did not hope to meet him again.

She remembered how extraordinary had been her sense of relief when she had sat at this window in this same chair trying to realize the truth—trying to realize that she was once more free—that the course of life which she had planned out for herself and to which she was becoming reconciled, as men who have been sentenced to imprisonment for life become reconciled to their servitude, was to be changed—that she was free to live and to love as she pleased.

It had taken her a long time to realize the exact extent of what the news meant to her; and among the details of the vista of realization that opened itself out before her then, the figure of Jack Wingfield sitting by her side among the apple blossoms had no place. She had never so much as dreamt that within a month she should be within a step of possessing that park through which she had been walking and that house with the spacious rooms she had always admired, but, of course, in a distant and impersonal way.

Now she thoroughly realized how extraordinary was the happiness which was within her reach; but, as is usual in the case of imaginative people in similar circumstances, there came to her a cold suggestion of the possibility of disaster—a feeling that it was impossible for such happiness as hers to continue—a dread lest the cup which was being filled for her lips should be shattered before it reached them. She had experienced these pranks of Fate before now, and she had found that it was wise not to count upon anything on which she had set her heart, taking place in all the perfection in which it existed in her imagination.

That was why she now made herself miserable for some time, saying in her heart:

“It is too bright—the prospect is too full of sunshine. He will be killed in a motor accident—the house will catch fire and he will be burnt in his room—something will happen—I know it! It is not given to any girl to realize such happiness as I see before me.”