Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

He certainly had done so; but what did this prove except that he had brains? It is only the empty-headed man who thinks that he is largely endowed with brains. She could recall several little things that Jack Wingfield had done—she left out of consideration altogether the things that he had said—which convinced her that he had some ability, and that he possessed something of the supreme gift of understanding how to make people do what he wanted them to do. If he had failed to exercise this valuable endowment of his upon the authorities at Oxford, he had succeeded in doing so upon the two young women who had paid him that remarkable visit on the day of his arrival at his home. By the exercise of extraordinary tact he had induced them to take lunch with him, and to sit with him afterwards in his drawing-room. If any one had said to her the day before this happened, “You will go boldly into a strange house, and you will there meet a young man whom you have never seen before; he will ask you to remain to lunch before you have even heard his name, or he yours, and you will accept his invitation without feeling—you who have been to a ‘finishing school’—that you have done anything outre”—if any one had said this to her she would at once have denied the possibility of such an incident taking place. And yet it had taken place, and the tact shown by the young man had made it seem quite an ordinary matter.

Did not this show that he possessed the supreme talent of knowing how to deal with people—how to persuade them that the unique was the usual—nay, the inevitable?

And then, what about their coming together on the road? How had he, a man whom she had seen but once before, and that in no regular way—how had he succeeded in getting her to confess to him that—that—well, all that she had confessed?

She really could not understand how it was that she had been led to confide in this young Mr. Wingfield what she had not even confided to her one dear friend, Rosa Caffyn: it must only have been by the exercise on his part of an extraordinary ability—more than ability, intuition—that he had drawn from her that confession. And would any one succeed in persuading her, after this, that Jack Wingfield was a bit of a fool?

And what an effect her stroll and chat with him had had upon her! She had been, as she told him (more confession), plunged into the black depths of despondency; and yet within five minutes, owing to his sympathetic attitude—owing to her feeling that he understood her and sympathized with her and applauded her boldness in standing out against her father’s prejudices in carrying out that form of hypocrisy known as mourning—she had been drawn out of the depths and made to feel that there might yet be a place for her in the world.

The result of her consideration of the whole of this question—the most interesting that had ever come within her ken—was to make her feel that she would like to have it in her power to do something for that man—something important—something that would make people see that he was not the brainless spendthrift which so many people, on quite insufficient evidence, assumed him to be.

She was perfectly well aware of the fact that she was not in love with him, and she felt that she understood him so well that she could not be mistaken in perceiving that neither was he in love with her. She had always been an observant girl, and she had had several opportunities of diagnosing—of subjecting to the interpretation of her mental spectroscope, so to speak—the various phases incidental to the progress of the phenomena of falling in love. She had never actually been in love herself, but several men had been in love with her, and with the exception of her music master at that finishing school, whose methods were very pronounced, all her incipient lovers had behaved alike, and she could see no difference between the way their love affected them and the way it affected some of the living things of the farm. The ingratiating tones of voice, the alternate little shynesses and boldnesses, the irritation at the approach of any others of the same sex, and the overweening desire to appear at their best before the object of their worship—all these foolish, pretty ways incidental to the condition known as being in love, she had observed in her incipient lovers, in common with other animals; and her observance of them enabled her to be always on her guard.

But he showed no sign of being even momentarily under such an influence as suggested its presence in some of the ways she knew so well. She felt that he was not in love with her, and she was glad that he was not. There is no such breaking up of friendship as love, and she felt that one suggestion of love on his part—one glance of love’s admiration—would have been enough to prevent her from looking forward to a hard-and-fast friendship with this young man of great interests in life. He had treated her all along in exactly the right spirit of companionship. There had not been a false note in their interchange of words. Their sympathies were alike, and their sense of humour. But she had noticed that there had been a certain lack of enthusiasm in the tone of his voice when referring to some matters upon which she would have been disposed to speak with warmth; there was the shrug of a man who has seen a good deal, in some of the things that he had said; and she had felt that his experiences, whatever they had been, had tended to make him too tolerant, and toleration she had good reason to believe was mostly the result of laziness. He was the sort of man who underrated his own powers, and was therefore disinclined to be active in the exercise of such ability as he possessed.

And then this farseeing young woman perceived that his grandfather had made a mistake in his over-anxiety to avoid one. If Jack Wingfield had entered upon possession of his property when he was six years younger he might have set about its management with enthusiasm, but in the interregnum to which he was forced to submit he had lost (she believed) something of the sanguine nature of the very young, which often causes them to do better work than they feel inclined ever to set their hand to later on.

But then she reflected that, however tolerant he had shown himself to be in talking of things in general, he had been as warm as she could possibly have wished in his criticism of the “best set” in Framsby and the empty arrogance of its leaders. Possibly it was her recollection of this fact that caused her to feel that she had never yet met a man on whose behalf she would do all that it was possible for her to do—it was with regret that she reflected upon how little it was in her power to do for him. She hoped that he would before long show the people around him who thought him a fool, that he was very far removed from being a fool. She did not stop to think if her anxiety on his behalf might not possibly have its origin in the feeling that if he proved himself too sapient he could hardly be guilty of the folly of striking up a friendship with her.