Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

She was an austere woman of thirty, of a pale complexion, which in the eyes of every agricultural community is the stamp of gentility in a lady. Mrs. Wadhurst took no interest in the cultivation of anything except her own pallor. She had once been known as the Lily of Limborough, and she lived in the perpetual remembrance of this tradition. She did not annoy her husband very much; and though there were a good many people who said that Phineas Wadhurst would have shown himself to be longer-headed if he had married a woman in his own station in life, who would have looked after the dairy and kept all the “hands” busy, yet the man felt secretly proud of his wife’s idleness and of her attention to her complexion. She read her novels and worked in crewels, and after five years became the mother of a girl, who grew up to be an extremely attractive creature, but a creature of whom her mother found great difficulty in making a lady.

Mrs. Wadhurst’s ideal lady did not differ greatly from the ideal of the agriculturists; only she added to their definition a rider that she was to be one who should be visited by Framsby. To be on visiting terms with Framsby represented the height of her social ambition.

But Framsby is a queer place. It has eight thousand inhabitants and three distinct “sets” of gentility. The aristocracy of the town is made up of the family of a land agent, the family of a retired physician, the family of a solicitor still in practice, the family of a clergyman’s widow, whose grandfather once “had the hounds,” as she tells you before you have quite made up your mind whether the day is quite wonderful for this time of the year, or if you mean to attend the forthcoming Sale of Work. These and the elderly wife of a retired colonial civil servant made up the ruling “set” at Framsby. They were on golfing terms with the other sets, but socially they declined to look on them as their equals. The other sets consisted of the bank managers, two of the three doctors and their families—for some reason or other the third doctor, with a foolish talkative wife and a couple of exceedingly plain daughters, had entrée at the aristocratic gatherings—a couple of retired officers of Sappers and their families, and some officials, the county surveyor, the master of the grammar school, and the manager of the brewery, each with his entourage.

Of course the clergymen of the Established Church and their families were, ex officio, members of all sets, but it was clearly understood by the ruling party that they were only admitted on sufferance—they must at all times recollect that they were only honorary members, without any power of voting or vetoing on any of the great questions of leaving cards on strangers, or of the membership of the Badminton Club.

And the funny part of the matter was that while the members of the best set were neither people of good family nor people who were in the least degree interesting in themselves, whereas several of the other set were both well born and educated, no one was found to dispute the fact that the one was the right set and the other the wrong set.

When a girl in the wrong set was spoken to or patronized by a frump in the other, she showed herself to be greatly pleased, and became quite cool and “distant” with her own associates; and when one of the frumps snubbed the ambitions of a girl in the wrong set, all the other girls in the wrong set became chilling in their attitude to that girl; and a knowledge of these facts may perhaps account for the impression which was very general in other parts of the county that Framsby was a queer place, and that its precious “sets” might be roughly classified as toads and toadies. It was clearly understood that Framsby was an awful place for strangers to come to. No matter how clever they were—no matter how greatly distinguished in the world outside Framsby—they were not visited, except by the tradesmen, until they had been resident for at least two years. This circumstance, however, by no means raised an insurmountable barrier between them and the people who were hunting up subscribers for some of their numerous “objects.” The newcomers were invariably called on for subscriptions by the very cream of the aristocracy of Framsby—subscriptions to the Hospital, to the Maternity Home, to the School Treats, to the Decayed Gardeners’ Fund, the Decayed Gentlewomen’s Fund, the Poor Brave Things’ Fund, the Zenana Missions Fund, the Guild of St. Michael and All Angels Fund, the Guild of Repentant Motherhood (affiliated with the Guild of St. Salome), and the Guild of Aimless Idlers. These and a score of equally excellent “objects” were without any delay brought under the notice of all newcomers; so that if the old inhabitants showed themselves to be extremely discourteous and inhospitable in regard to strangers, it must be acknowledged that they made up for their neglect of social “calls” by the frequency and the persistence of their visitations when they thought there was anything to be got out of them.

And these were the people for whose patronage Phineas Wadhurst’s wife pined all her life, and it was solely that her daughter might one day be received by some of the best set in Framsby that she agreed with her sister that Priscilla should be “finished” at a school the fees of which were notoriously exorbitant.

This was the point at which Priscilla’s review of the past began while she sat on her chair that afternoon, when for the first time for a year she had a sense of peace—a sense of her life being cleansed from some impurity that had been clinging to it. It was the sense of the rain-washed air that induced this feeling; and she smiled while she remembered how, even so long ago as the time of which she was thinking, she had been amused by the seriousness with which her pale mother and her aunt Emily discussed the likelihood there was that when the fact of her being “finished” at that expensive school should be reasonably presented to the right people at Framsby, it would prove irresistible as a claim upon their compassion, so that they would come to visit her in flocks.

Alas! she had gone to the expensive school and had learned when there a great number of things—some of them not even charged for in the long list of extras; but still she was only regarded by the great people of Framsby as a farmer’s daughter. Nay, several of the wrong set who had been on visiting terms with Mrs. Wadhurst took umbrage at the girl’s being sent to a school to which they could not afford to send their daughters; and they talked of the great evils that frequently resulted from a girl being educated “above her station”—Priscilla remembered the ridiculous phrase for many days. But whatever their ideas on proportionate education may have been, Priscilla was educated. She took good care that she had everything that her father’s money was paid for her to acquire. She did not mean to be over-exacting, but the truth was that she had a passion for learning everything that could be taught to her; and she easily took every prize that it was possible for her to take at the school.

But still the best set showed no signs of taking her up; and whatever chance she had of this form of rapture vanished on that day when, at a local bazaar, a young Austrian prince who spoke no English, was a visitor. He had been brought by Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst, but that lady, having another engagement in the town, had asked one of the best set to lead him to some person who could speak German. But a full parade of all the members of the best set failed to yield even one person who could speak one word of that language. They were all smiling profusely, but they smiled in English, and the prince knew no English. Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst was in despair, when suddenly Miss Caffyn, the daughter of the Rector of St. Mary’s in the Meadows, brought up, without a word of warning, Priscilla Wadhurst, offering the great lady a personal guarantee that she would have no difficulty with the prince.