Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

The thought that a son of hers—her only son—should be guilty of anything so base, so cruel, so mean, so selfish, made her feel sadder than she would have felt had the news been brought to her that he was dead.

She felt that so long as she lived there would cling to her the consciousness that she had brought into the world a son who had been guilty of an act of vice which she could never condone. That was what her whole future would be—clouded with that consciousness, when she had been hoping so much that was good for the days to come.

And then, like every other good woman who is a mother of sons whose feet have strayed from the straight road, she began to think if she had any reason to reproach herself for his lapse. Had anything that she had said or done led up to his commission of the baseness? Was she to be reproached because of the ease with which she had withdrawn whatever distaste she had at first felt for the idea of his wishing to marry a girl who was not socially in his own rank of life? Surely not. If she had opposed his wishes as so many other mothers would have done, she might find reason for some self-reproach; but she had been kind and sympathetic and had taken the girl to her heart; and yet this was how he had shown his appreciation of her kindness—of her ridding herself of every prejudice that she might reasonably have had in regard to his loving of a girl situated as Priscilla was. This was how he was rewarding her!

The impression of which she was conscious at that moment was only one of disappointment—supreme disappointment—such disappointment as one may feel at the end of one’s life on finding out that the object for which one has lived and laboured from the beginning to the end is absolutely worthless. She felt sad, not angry. She felt that if her son were to appear before her she could weep, but she could not denounce him.

While she sat there thinking over the whole matter, her tears began to fall before she became aware of it; and it was while she was holding her handkerchief to her eyes that they came up, her son and Priscilla, walking across the springy turf of the lawn so that she heard no sound of their approach.

When she removed all the tears that a handkerchief can remove—it only touches the outward ones—they were standing before her.

She did not cry out; she did not start. She only looked at them and turned away her head.

“Speak to her,” said he in a low voice, and he too turned away his face from the accusation of his mother’s tears.

Priscilla took a step forward and knelt before her, leaning across her knees with caressing arms about her waist.

“You will forgive us, dearest mother,” she said. “You will forgive me because I did it out of love for him, and you will forgive him because he did it out of love for me. Whichever of us is most to blame you will forgive the most because that one is the one that loved the most.”