Dr. Wortles School | Page 5

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 additional reason for pardoning that American escapade. Circumstances brought the two men together. There were friends at Oxford who knew how anxious the Doctor was to carry out that plan of his in reference to an usher, a curate, and a matron, and here were the very things combined. Mr. Peacocke's scholarship and power of teaching were acknowledged; he was already in orders; and it was declared that Mrs. Peacocke was undoubtedly