Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

“But you found out all about it in spite of Jenkins being bound over,” said she.

He smiled less grimly, accepting her compliment, and then rose from the table, having finished his supper, and went into the room that he used as his office. His business methods were admirable. For over thirty years he had spent an hour in his office every night before going to bed. This space out of every day was small, but it was quite enough to enable him to know exactly how he stood financially from one week to another. His system was admirable; but it had helped to kill his wife.

When Priscilla went to her own room and looked out upon that May night of pale starlight and clear sky she could not help feeling that an element of interest had come into her life, beyond any that had ever been associated with it. Here was a man who represented an estate of twelve thousand pounds a year, and the question was, “What is to be the result of his entering into possession of this splendid property? Is he to turn it to good account, or to dissipate it like the young fools of whom I have heard so much lately?”

Here there was a question of real interest beyond any that had ever risen above the somewhat restricted horizon of her life. What were all the questions that her father had to decide in connection with his farm compared with this? What were all the questions connected with the social life of Framsby, or even Birchleigh—proud of its ten thousand inhabitants—compared with this?

Was he a fool—the fool that her father believed him to be, forming his conclusion on the reports made to him by Mr. Hickman, the solicitor, at Framsby—the fool who, according to the proverb, is quickly parted from his money?

This was the question the answer to which was bound to influence the answer that should be given to the other question.

She could not bring herself to think of him as a fool. To be sure it could not be denied that his attitude in relation to certain matters was not at all that which the majority of people would think justifiable; and in the eyes of most persons, her father included, this fact was in itself strong presumptive evidence that he was inclined to be a young fool. A man who declines to fall into line with the prejudices and the conventionalities of the majority of his elders is looked on as a bit of a fool. Yes; unless he succeeds in becoming a leader of thought, in which case he becomes a hero, though as a rule he has been dead some time before this happens. Priscilla knew a good deal in a general way of the history of the world, and the men who made history, in action and by putting their thoughts on paper; but she could not remember one of these who had not begun life by being looked on as a bit of a fool.

Now, of all the institutions that have existed for the conservation of the conventional, Oxford University is the most notorious; and yet people were ready to call that undergraduate, Mr. Wingfield, a giddy young fool because he had refused to accede to one of the most cherished—one of the least worthily cherished—of its conventions!

Putting the matter in this way, she felt that she had every right to decline to accept the judgment of such people.

But what about his own confession to her? Had he not confessed quite frankly to her that he had no brains?