“But I sent him away immediately—to America.”
“You allowed the lady to remain.”
“Then what would you have me say?” demanded the Doctor.
“Nothing,” said Mr. Puddicombe;—“not a word. Live it down in silence. There will be those, like myself, who, though they could not dare to say that in morals you were strictly correct, will love you the better for what you did.” The Doctor turned his face towards the dry, hard-looking man and showed that there was a tear in each of his eyes. “There are few of us not so infirm as sometimes to love best that which is not best. But when a man is asked a downright question, he is bound to answer the truth.”
“You would say nothing in your own defence.”
“Not a word. You know the French proverb: ‘Who excuses himself is his own accuser.’ The truth generally makes its way. As far as I can see, a slander never lives long.”
“Ten of my boys are gone!” said the Doctor, who had not hitherto spoken a word of this to anyone out of his own family;—“ten out of twenty.”
“That will only be a temporary loss.”
“That is nothing—nothing. It is the idea that the school should be failing.”
“They will come again. I do not believe that that letter would bring a boy. I am almost inclined to say, Dr. Wortle, that a man should never defend himself.”
“He should never have to defend himself.”
“It is much the same thing. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Dr. Wortle—if it will suit your plans. I will go up with you and will assist at the marriage. I do not for a moment think that you will require any countenance, or that if you did, that I could give it you.”
“No man that I know so efficiently.”
“But it may be that Mr. Peacocke will like to find that the clergymen from his neighbourhood are standing with him.” And so it was settled, that when the day should come on which the Doctor would take Mrs. Peacocke up with him to London, Mr. Puddicombe was to accompany them.
The Doctor when he left Mr. Puddicombe’s parsonage had by no means pledged himself not to send the letters. When a man has written a letter, and has taken some trouble with it, and more specially when he has copied it several times himself so as to have made many letters of it—when he has argued his point successfully to himself, and has triumphed in his own mind, as was likely to be the case with Dr. Wortle in all that he did, he does not like to make waste paper of his letters. As he rode home he tried to persuade himself that he might yet use them. He could not quite admit his friend’s point. Mr. Peacocke, no doubt, had known his own condition, and him a strict moralist might condemn. But he—he—Dr. Wortle—had known nothing. All that he had done was not to condemn the other man when he did know!
Nevertheless as he rode into his own yard, he made up his mind that he would burn the letters. He had shown them to no one else. He had not even mentioned them to his wife. He could burn them without condemning himself in the opinion of anyone. And he burned them. When Mr. Puddicombe found him at the station at Broughton as they were about to proceed to London with Mrs. Peacocke, he simply whispered the fate of the letters. “After what you said I destroyed what I had written.”
“Perhaps it was as well,” said Mr. Puddicombe.
When the telegram came to say that Mr. Peacocke was at Liverpool, Mrs. Peacocke was anxious immediately to rush up to London. But she was restrained by the Doctor—or rather by Mrs. Wortle under the Doctor’s orders. “No, my dear; no. You must not go till all will be ready for you to meet him in the church. The Doctor says so.”
“Am I not to see him till he comes up to the altar?”
On this there was another consultation between Mrs. Wortle and the Doctor, at which she explained how impossible it would be for the woman to go through the ceremony with due serenity and propriety of manner unless she should be first allowed to throw herself into his arms, and to welcome him back to her. “Yes,” she said, “he can come and see you at the hotel on the evening before, and again in the morning—so that if there be a word to say you can say it. Then when it is over he will bring you down here. The Doctor and Mr. Puddicombe will come down by a later train. Of course it is painful,” said Mrs. Wortle, “but you must bear up.” To her it seemed to be so painful that she was quite sure that she could not have borne it. To be married for the third time, and for the second time to the same husband! To Mrs. Peacocke, as she thought of it, the pain did not so much rest in that, as in the condition of life which these things had forced upon her.
“I must go up to town tomorrow, and must be away for two days,” said the Doctor out loud in the school, speaking immediately to one of the ushers, but so that all the boys present might hear him. “I trust that we shall have Mr. Peacocke with us the day after tomorrow.”
“We shall be very glad of that,” said the usher.
“And Mrs. Peacocke will come and eat her dinner again like before?” asked a little boy.
“I hope so, Charley.”
“We shall like that, because she has to eat it all
