Dr. Wortles School | Page 5

of the wall, there was a separate establishment
of servants, and a separate kitchen. There was no sending backwards or
forwards of food or of clothes,--unless it might be when some special
delicacy was sent in if a boy were unwell. For these no extra charge
was ever made, as had been done in the case of young Stantiloup. Then
a strange doctor had come, and had ordered the wine and the carriage.
There was no extra charge for the kindly glasses of wine which used to
be administered in quite sufficient plenty.
Behind the school, and running down to the little river Pin, there is a
spacious cricket-ground, and a court marked out for lawn-tennis. Up
close to the school is a racket-court. No doubt a good deal was done to

make the externals of the place alluring to those parents who love to
think that their boys shall be made happy at school. Attached to the
school, forming part of the building, is a pleasant, well-built residence,
with six or eight rooms, intended for the senior or classical
assistant-master. It had been the Doctor's scheme to find a married
gentleman to occupy this house, whose wife should receive a separate
salary for looking after the linen and acting as matron to the
school,--doing what his wife did till he became successful,--while the
husband should be in orders and take part of the church duties as a
second curate. But there had been a difficulty in this.
CHAPTER II.
THE NEW USHER.
THE Doctor had found it difficult to carry out the scheme described in
the last chapter. They indeed who know anything of such matters will
be inclined to call it Utopian, and to say that one so wise in worldly
matters as our schoolmaster should not have attempted to combine so
many things. He wanted a gentleman, a schoolmaster, a curate, a
matron, and a lady,--we may say all in one. Curates and ushers are
generally unmarried. An assistant schoolmaster is not often in orders,
and sometimes is not a gentleman. A gentleman, when he is married,
does not often wish to dispose of the services of his wife. A lady, when
she has a husband, has generally sufficient duties of her own to employ
her, without undertaking others. The scheme, if realised, would no
doubt be excellent, but the difficulties were too many. The Stantiloups,
who lived about twenty miles off, made fun of the Doctor and his
project; and the Bishop was said to have expressed himself as afraid
that he would not be able to license as curate any one selected as usher
to the school. One attempt was made after another in vain;--but at last it
was declared through the country far and wide that the Doctor had
succeeded in this, as in every other enterprise that he had attempted.
There had come a Rev. Mr. Peacocke and his wife. Six years since, Mr.
Peacocke had been well known at Oxford as a Classic, and had become
a Fellow of Trinity. Then he had taken orders, and had some time
afterwards married, giving up his Fellowship as a matter of course. Mr.

Peacocke, while living at Oxford, had been well known to a large
Oxford circle, but he had suddenly disappeared from that world, and it
had reached the ears of only a few of his more intimate friends that he
had undertaken the duties of vice-president of a classical college at
Saint Louis in the State of Missouri. Such a disruption as this was for a
time complete; but after five years Mr. Peacocke appeared again at
Oxford, with a beautiful American wife, and the necessity of earning an
income by his erudition.
It would at first have seemed very improbable that Dr. Wortle should
have taken into his school or into his parish a gentleman who had
chosen the United States as a field for his classical labours. The Doctor,
whose mind was by no means logical, was a thoroughgoing Tory of the
old school, and therefore considered himself bound to hate the name of
a republic. He hated rolling stones, and Mr. Peacocke had certainly
been a rolling stone. He loved Oxford with all his heart, and some years
since had been heard to say hard things of Mr. Peacocke, when that
gentleman deserted his college for the sake of establishing himself
across the Atlantic. But he was one who thought that there should be a
place of penitence allowed to those who had clearly repented of their
errors; and, moreover, when he heard that Mr. Peacocke was
endeavouring to establish himself in Oxford as a "coach" for
undergraduates, and also that he was a married man without any
encumbrance in the way of family, there seemed to him to be an