Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

“My God, my God!” he whispered, and once again there was silence. He could hear that she was shivering as if with cold. There was more than a hint of chattering teeth.

“Sit down,” he said, after a long pause. “Sit down and tell me what—what has happened.”

She fell shivering into his arms, a dead weight. He thought that she had fainted, but she had strength enough left to reassure him. She was clinging to him and her head was upon his shoulder.

“You will keep me, Jack, you will keep me from him,” she said in a gasping whisper. “I saw him there, I could not be mistaken—and the way he smiled.... But I knew that something like this was in store for us. It would be impossible for such happiness as ours to last. It is always when one has built up one’s happiness bit by bit, brick by brick, a palace—a palace was ours, Jack—a hand is put out and down it topples. That was why I married you in such haste, my darling. I told you, when you asked me, that I was afraid of losing you. But I haven’t lost you, dear; I have you still. I have you still!”

“You have, Priscilla. Whatever else may be doubtful, you may be certain that you have me still. I will not fail you. Oh, what a fool I should be if I let anything—or anyone—come between us! Where should I be without you? What should I be apart from you, darling? I know—I know what I should be because I know what I was before you came into my life. Do you fancy that I would shrink from killing a man who tried to part us? Let him try it!”

Then he started up with such suddenness that he almost seemed to fling her away from him. He stood in the middle of the room with clenched hands, and cursed the wretch who had done his best to wreck her life—who had not been content with what he had done in this way more than a year before, but who had been guilty of this contemptible fraud—pretending that he was dead so that he might return and complete the work that he had begun—the work in which he had been interrupted. He cursed him wildly—madly—his teeth set and his eyes like the eyes of a hungry wolf—worse—infinitely worse. And she sat by, listening to his ravening and glorying in it as the woman of the cave gloried in the anger of her man when he heard the wolves howl in the distance. She knew that her man would fight them and get the better of them. She knew that the man is fiercer than the wolf and forces the wolf to retreat before his anger. Every curse that Jack uttered—and he uttered a good many—added to her love for him. That was what she had come to by the stress of circumstances.

But she knew that when the passion of the wolf in the man had spent itself, the god in the man would take the upper hand. If there had not been a bit of a god in man he would have remained a wolf.

She noted the dwindling of the impromptu Commination

Service which he conducted without the aid of an acolyte. He paced the room for a while and then stopped in front of one of the windows looking out into the sapphire glow of the summer twilight. Before he turned to her the room had become perceptibly darker. She could not see the expression on his face, for his back was to the light, but she knew what it was by the sound of his voice, when he said, “Forgive me, Priscilla; I forgot myself.”

“You did, dear, you forgot yourself; you remembered only me,” she said. “Sit down, Jack, and let us talk it all over. I have recovered from the effects of that first sense of terror that I had. I suppose it was natural that I should be terror-stricken.”