Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives

by Frank Frankfort Moore

Now, nothing was known of the details of Jack Wingfield’s prodigality; but the terms of his grandfather’s will had assumed that his prodigality would be a matter of course, and all Framsby were ready to stand by the inference of so interesting a legal document. If there was any doubt in the matter, they were quite ready to give him the benefit of it by assuming that the piquancy of prodigality was attached to him. He would make the money fly, no fear! was the prediction of the men who winked at one another in the evening over the pewter measures of the “Field and Furrow”; and the tradesmen of Framsby hoped with all their heart and soul that he would. A prodigal during the first few years of his career is the idol of the tradesmen; later on they think of Jeroboam the son of Nebat first, and of the fate that befell his house, and of Pharaoh the monarch of Egypt afterwards. They turn away from the worship of idols and harden their hearts at the suggestion of credit.

But of course it was the representatives of the right set at Framsby who were most interested in the news that Jack Wingfield had come to the Manor House. The truth was that eligible men were not numerous in Framsby or the neighbourhood; and this was, socially speaking, rather a pity, considering what a number of eligible women there were. The worst of a country society, or, for the matter of that, the society in any community, is that every woman is “eligible,” but only a man here and there. Every girl in Framsby considered herself eligible, and her mother agreed with her; but there the matter began and ended. The select set was not the set from which eligible men made their selection, and the consequence was that the number of unmarried young women of various ages between twenty and forty-six became oppressive to any statistician who was thinking with interest, increased by alarm, of the future generation.

But none of them gave up all hope. Some of them hunted a little and got themselves splashed thoroughly with the mud of many ditches, and torn woefully with the briars of many gaps, and the barbarities of numerous fences—they made themselves blowsy at hockey and brown at golf, hoping that they would be taken for young women still; but they would not have minded being taken for middle-aged women or elderly women, if only they would be taken. It seemed, however, as if no man would take them at any estimate. Their devotion to sport was keen, but, unhappily, keenness does not invariably mean proficiency. It means talk, and there was consequently plenty of talk at Framsby about golf and hockey and lawn tennis and croquet, but the examples of play given by the exponents of every one of these games were deplorable. The Tennis and Croquet Club, however, absorbed practically the whole time of the members of the right set throughout the summer; but when it became known that the Manor House was occupied by Mr. Wingfield and his mother, the civility of these representatives of Framsby society caused them to steal some hours from the courts to pay their respects to the newcomers; and within a week Mrs. Wingfield and her son received twenty-five visitors, and an equal number of offers to propose them as members of the Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Unfortunately, Mr. Wingfield had not an opportunity of making the acquaintance of any of those visitors, the fact being that he had slipped out upon that convenient terrace which went round the front and the side of the house, the moment that the approach of the visitors became imminent. In two cases he was just half a minute too late to be absolutely free from any charge of impoliteness: the French window of the drawing-room, by which he was escaping, was stiff and jerky in one case, and in the other the edge of one wing got caught in the curtains, thereby detaining him most awkwardly for several seconds. The back view of him which the callers obtained did not afford them sufficient data for a detailed description of young Mr. Wingfield, but they made the most of it in conversation with their less fortunate associates the next day.

“Have you called on the Manor people yet? What, not yet? We were there yesterday. My husband knew old Mr. Wingfield very well, you know. Mrs. Wingfield is a charming person—quite handsome still. She had been looking forward to seeing us. She feared that there were no families with whom she could make real friends in this neighbourhood.”

“Was the son there? Did you see the son?”

“Ah, yes, we saw him—only for a short time, however; he had to hurry off to keep an appointment. What is he like? Oh, quite nice—rather retiring, I should say.”

“We heard some rather dreadful stories about him. Did he seem wild?”

“Oh, nothing to speak of. It doesn’t do to believe all that one hears about young men like that. I hear that the property, even allowing for the unlet farms, amounts to something close upon twenty thousand a year.”

And then the audience raised interested eyebrows and smiled complete acquiescence in the obvious truth that one should be slow to believe anything to the discredit of an eligible bachelor with an income approaching twenty thousand pounds a year.

It so happened, however, that Jack Wingfield was something of a lawn tennis player, and he had already entered for an open tournament to be held on the Framsby ground the first week in June; and he was glad when his mother told him that she had accepted the offer of Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst to put up his name and her own for the club. Jack Wingfield belonged to Ranelagh and Hurlingham and a couple of lawn tennis clubs, and he had snatched a second-class prize now and again at Cannes and Mentone. He had been told encouragingly by the men who had beaten him that he had in him the making of a first-class player; and perhaps he had, but he had also in him an inherited trait of self-depreciation which prevented him from working hard to attain anything. He thought very poorly of himself all round; and when urged by competent advisers to give himself a chance, he had invariably given his shrug, saying, “What’s the good? I’ll never be anything but a plater or an ‘also ran.’ I get some fun out of it as it is, but I’ll never do more than I have done.”