This address, delivered with entire simplicity, set the whole company gasping.  Most of all it seemed to astonish the woman, who could not be expected to know that my uncle’s chivalry accepted all her sex, the lowest with the highest, in the image in which God made it and without defacement.

The priest was the first to recover himself.  “My good sir,” said he, “your man may be the father of twelve or the father of lies; but I’ll not marry him after stroke of noon, for that’s my rule.  Moreover”—­ he swept a hand towards the bridal party behind him—­“these turtles have invited me to eat roast duck and green peas with ’em, and I hate my gravy cold.”

“Ay, sir?” asked my uncle.  “Do you tell me that folks marry and give in marriage within this dreadful place?”

“Now and then, sir; and in the liberties and purlieus thereof with a proclivity that would astonish you; which, since I cannot hinder it, I sanctify.  My name is Figg, sir—­Jonathan Figg; and my office, Chaplain of the Fleet.”

“And if it please you, sir,” I put in, “my father has sent me in search of you, to beg that you will come to him at once.”

“And you have heard me say, young sir, that I marry no man after stroke of noon; no, nor will visit him sick unless he be in articulo mortis.”

“But my father neither wants to be married, sir, nor is he sick at all.  I believe it is some matter of witnessing an oath.”

“Hath he better than roast duck and green peas to offer, hey?  No?  Then tell him he may come and witness my oath, that I’ll see him first to Jericho.”

“Whereby, if I mistake not,” said Mr. Knox, quietly, “your pocket will continue light of two guineas; and I may add, from what I know of Sir John Constantine, that he is quite capable, if he receive such an answer, of having your blood in a bottle.”

“‘Sir John Constantine?’ did I hear you say. Sir John Constantine?’” queried the Reverend Mr. Figg, with a complete change of manner.  “That’s quite another thing!  Anything to oblige Sir John Constantine, I’m sure—­”

“Do you know him?” asked my uncle.

“Well—­er—­no; I can’t honestly declare that I know him; but, of course, one knows of him—­that is to say, I understand him to be a gentleman of title; a knight at least.”

“Yes,” my uncle answered, “he is at least that.  What a very extraordinary person!” he added in a wondering aside.

Oddly enough, as we were leaving, I heard the woman Nan say pretty much the same of my uncle.  She added that she had a great mind to kiss him.

We found my father and the prisoner seated with the bottle between them on the rickety liquor-stained table.  Yet—­as I remember the scene now—­not all the squalor of the room could efface or diminish the majesty of their two figures.  They sat like two tall old kings, eye to eye, not friends, or reconciled only in this last and lonely hour by meditation on man’s common fate.  If I cannot make you understand this, what follows will seem to you absurd, though indeed at the time it was not so.