The library at the rectory was a spacious and handsome room, in the centre of which stood a large writing-table, at which the Doctor was accustomed to sit when he was at work—facing the door, with a bow-window at his right hand. But he rarely remained there when anyone was summoned into the room, unless someone were summoned with whom he meant to deal in a spirit of severity. Mr. Peacocke would be there perhaps three or four times a-week, and the Doctor would always get up from his chair and stand, or seat himself elsewhere in the room, and would probably move about with vivacity, being a fidgety man of quick motions, who sometimes seemed as though he could not hold his own body still for a moment. But now when Mr. Peacocke entered the room he did not leave his place at the table. “Would you take a chair?” he said; “there is something that we must talk about.”
“Colonel Lefroy has been with you, I take it.”
“A man calling himself by that name has been here. Will you not take a chair?”
“I do not know that it will be necessary. What he has told you—what I suppose he has told you—is true.”
“You had better at any rate take a chair. I do not believe that what he has told me is true.”
“But it is.”
“I do not believe that what he has told me is true. Some of it cannot, I think, be true. Much of it is not so—unless I am more deceived in you than I ever was in any man. At any rate sit down.” Then the schoolmaster did sit down. “He has made you out to be a perjured, wilful, cruel bigamist.”
“I have not been such,” said Peacocke, rising from his chair.
“One who has been willing to sacrifice a woman to his passion.”
“No; no.”
“Who deceived her by false witnesses.”
“Never.”
“And who has now refused to allow her to see her own husband’s brother, lest she should learn the truth.”
“She is there—at any rate for you to see.”
“Therefore the man is a liar. A long story has to be told, as to which at present I can only guess what may be the nature. I presume the story will be the same as that you would have told had the man never come here.”
“Exactly the same, Dr. Wortle.”
“Therefore you will own that I am right in asking you to sit down. The story may be very long—that is, if you mean to tell it.”
“I do—and did. I was wrong from the first in supposing that the nature of my marriage need be of no concern to others, but to herself and to me.”
“Yes—Mr. Peacocke; yes. We are, all of us, joined together too closely to admit of isolation such as that.” There was something in this which grated against the schoolmaster’s pride, though nothing had been said as to which he did not know that much harder things must meet his ears before the matter could be brought to an end between him and the Doctor. The “Mister” had been prefixed to his name, which had been omitted for the last three or four months in the friendly intercourse which had taken place between them; and then, though it had been done in the form of agreeing with what he himself had said, the Doctor had made his first complaint by declaring that no man had a right to regard his own moral life as isolated from the lives of others around him. It was as much as to declare at once that he had been wrong in bringing this woman to Bowick, and calling her Mrs. Peacocke. He had said as much himself, but that did not make the censure lighter when it came to him from the mouth of the Doctor. “But come,” said the Doctor, getting up from his seat at the table, and throwing himself into an easy-chair, so as to mitigate the austerity of the position; “let us hear the true story. So big a liar as that American gentleman probably never put his foot in this room before.”
Then Mr. Peacocke told the story, beginning with all those incidents of the woman’s life which had seemed to be so cruel both to him and to others at St. Louis before he had been in any degree intimate with her. Then came the departure of the two men, and the necessity for pecuniary assistance, which Mr. Peacocke now passed over lightly, saying nothing specially of the assistance which he himself had rendered. “And she was left quite alone?” asked the Doctor.
“Quite alone.”
“And for how long?”
“Eighteen months had passed before we heard any tidings. Then there came news that Colonel Lefroy was dead.”
“The husband?”
“We did not know which. They were both Colonels.”
“And then?”
“Did he tell you that I went down into Mexico?”
“Never mind what he told me. All that he told me were lies. What you tell me I shall believe. But tell me everything.”
There was a tone of complete authority in the Doctor’s voice, but mixed with this there was a kindliness which made the schoolmaster determined that he would tell everything as far as he knew how. “When I heard that one of them was dead, I went away down to the borders of Texas, in order that I might learn the truth.”
“Did she know that you were going?”
“Yes;—I told her the day I started.”
“And you
