Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

He sat on the edge of her chair and laid a caressing hand upon her hair; but he did not put his face down to hers—he could not have done so, for her face was turned to the cushion; but even then her sobs were not quite smothered. He could feel every throb as his hand lay upon her forehead. He made no attempt to restrain her. He had an intuition—it was a night of instincts—that her tears would do much more to soothe her than it would be in his power to do.

For an hour they remained there, silent in the majestic silence of the summer night. It was without the uttering of a word that she rose and stood in front of him at last. He kissed her quietly on the forehead and she passed into the house through the open glass door, and he was left alone.

He threw himself down on his chair once more, but only remained there for a minute. He sprang to his feet in the impulse of a sudden thought.

He went down by the terrace steps to the shrubberies, walking quickly but stealthily, and moving along among the solid black masses of the clipped boxes and laurels and bay trees. So he had stalked a tiger that he wanted to kill on his last night at Kashmir. He moved stealthily from brake to brake as though he expected to come upon an enemy skulking there. And then he crossed by the fountains and the stone-work of crescent seats and mutilated goddesses and leering satyrs, into the park and on to the avenue that bent away from the country road. He moved toward the entrance gates and the lodge with the same stealth of the animal who is hunting another animal, pausing every now and again among the trees to listen for the sound of footfalls.

He heard the scurrying of a rabbit—the swishing rush of a rat through the long grass, the flap and swoop of a bat hawking for moths—all the familiar sounds of the woodland and the creatures that roam by night, but no other sound did he hear.

“The infernal skunk!” he muttered. “The infernal skunk! He has not even the manliness to claim her—he does not even take enough interest in her to see where she lives—to look up at the light in her window. He lets her go from him, and he will come to-morrow to try on his game of blackmail. I wish I had found him skulking here. That’s what I want—to feel my fingers on his throat—to throttle the soul out of him and send him down to...” and so forth. He completed his sentence and added to it several other phrases, none of which could be said actually to border on the sentimental. He stood there, a naked man among his woods, thirsting for a tussle with the one who was trying to take his woman from him.

It was not until he had returned to the chair of civilization and had begun to think in the strain of fifty thousand years later, that he felt equal to contrasting this wretch’s bearing with that of the sailor man about whom his mother had read to him when he was a boy and she had thought it possible to impart to him a liking for the books that she liked—a sailor named Enoch Arden who had been cast away on a desert island—he had had great hopes of any story, even though written in poetry, which touched upon a man on a desert island. Enoch Arden returned to England to find his wife married to another man and quite happy, and he had been man enough to let her remain so. But Jack had not forgotten how that strong heroic soul had looked through the window of her new house the first thing on reaching the village. Ah, very different from this wretch—this infernal skunk who had preferred boozing in a bar at Framsby and then staggering upstairs at the “White Hart” to his bed. He had a huge contempt for the fellow who wouldn’t come to Overdean Manor Park to be throttled.

But soon his train of thought took another trend. He knew that Priscilla was womanly, though not at all like other women, to whom the conventions of society are the breath of life, and the pronouncement of a Church the voice of God. She had proved to him in many ways—notably in regard to her marrying of him—that she was prepared to act in accordance with her own feeling of right and wrong without pausing to consult with anyone as to whether or not her feeling agreed with accepted conventions or accepted canons. She had refused to be guilty of the hypocrisy of wearing mourning for the man whom she hated; and she had ignored the convention which would have compelled her to allow at least a year to pass before marrying the man whom she loved.

He reflected upon these proofs of her possession of a certain strong-mindedness and strength of character, and both before and after she had come to him as his wife he had many tokens of her superiority to other women in yielding only to the guidance of her own feeling. This being so, it was rather strange that he should now find that his thoughts had a trend in the direction of the question as to whether it might not be possible that, through her desire to please his mother—to prevent people from shaking their heads—she might be led to be untrue to herself—nay, might she not feel that she could only be true to herself by making such a move as would prevent people from saying, as in other circumstances they would be sure to do, that he was to blame in keeping her with him?

That was the direction in which his thoughts went after he had been sitting on his chair under her window for an hour. But another half-hour had passed before there came upon him in a flash a dreadful suggestion, sending him to his feet in a second as though it were a flash of lightning that hurled him out of his chair. He stood there breathing hard, his eyes turned in the direction of her window above him. He remembered how he had looked up to that window on that night in June when his longing had been: “Oh, that I could hear her voice at that window telling me that she is there!”