The Chaplain of the Fleet. Walter Besant

prodigal son. The world and the flesh had no temptations for him. A good man, indeed. It is long since I saw him, and he knew not where I live, nor how. Yet he, who knew me when I was young, trusted still in me—whom no one else will trust. This it is to start in life with goodly promise of virtue, scholarship, and religion.”

      He cleared his throat, and was silent awhile.

      “Thy father did well, child. I will treat thee as my own daughter. Yet I know not, indeed, where to bestow thee, for this house is not fit for girls, and I have none other. Still, I would fain take thy father’s place, so far as in me lies. He, good man, lived in the country, where virtue, like fresh butter and new-laid eggs, flourishes easily and at the cost of a little husbandry in the way of prayer and meditation. As for us who live in great cities, and especially in the Rules or Liberties of the Fleet, we may say with the Psalmist, having examples to the contrary continually before us, with temptations such as dwellers in the fields wot not of, ‘He that keepeth the Law, happy is he!’ I have neither wife nor child to greet thee, Kitty. I must bestow thee somewhere. What shall we do?”

      He paused to think.

      “I might find a lodging——but no, that would not do. Or in——but the house is full of men. There is the clerk of St. Sepulchre’s, whose wife would take thee; but the rector bears me a heavy grudge. Ho! ho!” he laughed low down in his chest. “There is not a parish round London, from Limehouse to Westminster, and from Southwark to Highgate, where the niece of Dr. Shovel would not find herself flouted, out of the singular hatred which the clergy bear to me. For I undersell them all. And if they pass an Act to prevent my marrying, then will I bury for nothing and undersell them still. Well, I must take order in this matter. And who are you, my good woman?” He asked this of Mrs. Gambit.

      “Jane Gambit, sir,” she replied, “at your service, and the wife of Samuel Gambit, foreman of works. And my charge is not to leave Miss Kitty until she is safe in your reverence’s hands. There are the hands, to be sure; but as for safety——”

      She paused, and sniffed violently, looking round the room with a meaning air.

      “Why, woman, you would not think the child in danger with me?”

      “I know not, sir. But Miss Kitty has been brought up among gentlefolk, and the room is not one to which she has been accustomed to live in, or to eat in, or to sleep in, either at the Vicarage or the Hall. Tobacco and the smell of rum may be very well—in their place, which, I humbly submit, is in a tavern, not a gentlewoman’s parlour.”

      “The woman speaks reason,” he growled, laying his great hand upon the table. “See, my dear, my brother-in-law thought me holding a rich benefice in the Church. Those get rich benefices who have rich friends and patrons. I had none; therefore I hold no benefice. And as for my residence, why, truly, I have little choice except between this place and the Fleet Prison, or perhaps the King’s Bench. Else might I welcome thee in a better and more convenient lodging. Know, therefore, Kitty, without any concealment, that I live here secluded in the Liberties of the Fleet in order that my creditors, of whom I have as many as most men and more importunate, may no longer molest me when I take my walks abroad; that I am in this place outside the authority of the bishop; and that my occupation is to marry, with all safety and despatch without license, or asking of banns, or any of the usual delays, those good people who wish to be married secretly and quickly, and can afford at least one guinea fee for the ceremony.”

      I stared in amazement. To be sure, every clergyman can marry, but for a clergyman to do naught else seemed strange indeed.

      He saw my amazement; and, drawing his tall and burly figure upright, he began to deliver an oration—I call it an oration, because he so puffed his cheeks, rolled his sentences, and swelled himself out while he spoke, that it was more like a sermon or oration than a mere speech. In it he seemed to be trying at once to justify himself in my eyes, to assert his own self-respect, and to magnify his office.

      “It is not likely, child,” he said, “that thou hast been told of these marriages in the Fleet. Know, therefore, that in this asylum, called the Rules of the Fleet, where debtors find some semblance of freedom and creditors cease to dun, there has grown up a custom of late years by which marriages are here rapidly performed (for the good of the country), which the beneficed clergy would not undertake without great expense, trouble, delay, and the vexation of getting parents’ and guardians’ consent, to say nothing of the prodigality and wasteful expense of feasting which follows what is called a regular marriage. Therefore, finding myself some years ago comfortably settled in the place, after contracting a greater debt than is usually possible for an unbeneficed clergyman, I undertook this trade, which is lucrative, honourable, and easy. There are indeed,” he added, “both in the Prison and the Rules, but more especially the latter, many Fleet parsons”—here he rolled his great head with complacency—“but none, my child, so great and celebrated as myself. Some, indeed, are mere common cheats, whose marriages—call them, rather, sacrilegious impostures—are not worth the paper of their pretended certificates. Some are perhaps what they profess to be, regularly ordained clergymen of the Church of England and Ireland as by law established, the supreme head of which is his gracious Majesty. But even these are tipplers, and beggars, and paupers—men who drink gin of an evening and small beer in the morning, whose gowns are as ragged as their reputations, and who take their fees in shillings, with a dram thrown in, and herd with the common offscourings of the town, whom they marry. Illiterate, too: not a Greek verse or a Latin hexameter among them all. Go not into the company of such, lest thou be corrupted by their talk. In the words of King Lemuel: ‘Let them drink and forget their poverty, and remember their misery no more.’” Here he paused and adjusted his gown, as if he were in a pulpit. Indeed, for the moment, he imagined, perhaps, that he was preaching. “As for me, Gregory Shovel, my marriages are what they pretend to be, as tight as any of the archbishop’s own tying, conducted with due decorum by a member of the University of Cambridge, a man whose orders are beyond dispute, whose history is known to all, an approved and honoured scholar. Yes, my niece, behold in me one who has borne off University and College medals for Latin verse. My Latin verses, wherein I have been said to touch Horace, and even to excel Ovid, whether in the tender elegiac, the stately alcaic, the melting sapphic, or the easy-flowing hendecasyllabic loved of Martial, have conferred upon my head the bays of fame. Other Fleet parsons? Let them hide their ignorant heads in their second-hand peruques! By the thunders of Jupiter!”—his powerful voice rose and rolled about the room like the thunder by which he swore—“By the thunders of Jupiter, I am their Bishop! Let them acknowledge that I, and I alone, am The Chaplain of the Fleet!”

      During this speech he swelled himself out so enormously, and so flourished his long gown, that he seemed to fill the whole room. I shrank into a corner, and clasped Mrs. Gambit’s hand.

      This kind of terror I have always felt since, whenever, which is rare, I have heard a man speak in such a full, rich, manliness of voice. It was a voice with which he might have led thousands to follow him and do his bidding. When I read of any great orator at whose speeches the people went mad, so that they did what he told them were it but to rush along the road to certain death, I think of the Reverend Dr. Shovel. I am sure that Peter the Hermit, or St. Bernard, must have had such a voice. While he spoke, though the words were not noble, the air was such, the voice was such, the eloquence was such, that my senses were carried away, and I felt that in the hands of such a man no one was master of himself. His demeanour was so majestic, that even the shabby, dirty room in which he spoke became for the time a temple fit for the sacred rites conducted by so great and good a man: the noise of carts, the voices of men and women, were drowned and stilled beneath the rolling music of his voice. I was rapt and astonished and terrified.

      Mrs. Gambit was so far impressed when the Doctor began this oration, that she instantly assumed that attitude of mind and body in which country people always listen to a sermon: that is to say, she stood with her chin up, her eyes fixed on the ceiling (fie! how black it was!), her hands crossed, and her thoughts wandering freely whithersoever they listed. It is a practice which sometimes produces good effects, save when the preacher, which is seldom, hath in his own mind a clear message to deliver from the Revealed Word. For it prevents a congregation from discerning the poverty of the discourse;