THE YOUTH IN FLEET PRISON
Behind the closed shutters of the book-shop which bore the sign of “The
Juvenile Library,” in the musty room where George Gordon had burned the
errant copies of his ubiquitous Satire, old William Godwin sat reading
by a guttering candle, Livy’s Roman History in the original. It was his
favorite book, and in the early evenings, when not writing his crabbed
column for the _Courier_, or caustic diatribes for the reviews, he was
apt to be reading it. A sound in the living-room above drew his eyes
from the black-letter page.
“Jane!” he called morosely--“Jane Clermont!”
A lagging step came down the stair, and a girl entered, black-eyed,
creole in effect. Her cheeks held the flame of the wild-cherry leaf.
“Where is your sister?”
“I have no sister.”
The old man struck the table with his open hand. “Where is Mary, I say?”
“At the door.”
“Go and see what she is doing.”
The girl stood still, regarding her stepfather with a look that under
its beauty had a sullen half-contempt.
“Why don’t you do as I tell you?”
“I’m not going to be a spy for you, even if you _did_ marry my mother.
I’m tired of it.”
The anger on the old man’s face harshened. “If you were my own flesh
and blood,” he said sternly, “I would flog that French impudence of
yours to death. As long as you eat my bread, you will obey me.”
She looked at him with covert mockery on her full lips.
“I’m not a child any longer,” she said as she turned flauntingly away;
“I could earn my bread easier than by dusting tumble-down book-shelves.
Do you think I don’t know that?”
To William Godwin this defiant untutored girl had been a thorn in the
side--a perpetual slur and affront to the irksome discipline he laid
upon his own pliant Mary, the child of that first wife whose loss had
warped his manhood. Now he saw her as a live danger, a flagrant menace
whose wildness would infect his own daughter. It was this red-lipped
vixen who was teaching her the spirit of disobedience!
He raised his voice and called sharply: “Mary!”
There was no answer, and he shuffled down the shabby hall to the street
door. The old man glowered at the slender, beardless figure of the
youth who stood with her--the brown, long coat with curling lamb’s-wool
collar and cuffs, its pockets bulging with mysterious books. In a
senile rage, he ordered his daughter indoors.
Passers-by stopped to stare at the object of his rancor, standing
uncertainly in the semi-dusk, a brighter apparition, with luminous
eyes and extravagant locks. Words came thickly to the old man; he
launched into invective, splenetic and intemperate, at which the
listeners tittered.
As it chanced, a pedestrian heard the name he mouthed--a man
sharp-featured and ill dressed. With a low whistle he drew a soiled
slip of paper from his pocket and consulted it by a street lamp, his
grimy forefinger running down the list of names it contained.
“I thought so. I’ve a knack for names,” he muttered, and shouldered
through the bystanders.
“Not so fast, young master,” he said, laying his hand on the youth’s
arm; “t’other’s the way to the Fleet.”
The other drew back with a gesture of disgust. “The Fleet!” he echoed.
“Aye,” said the bailiff, winking to the crowd; “the pretty jug for folk
as spend more than they find in pocket; with a nice grating to see your
friends so genteel like.”
Breaking from her father’s hand, the girl in the doorway ran out with
fear in her blue eyes.
“Oh, where are you taking him?” she cried.
The fellow smirked. “I’m just going to show his honor to a hotel I
know, till he has time to see his pal Dellevelly of Golden Square to
borrow a tidy eighteen pound ten, which a bookseller not so far off
will be precious glad to get.”
“Eighteen pounds!” gasped the youth, with a hysteric laugh. “Debtors’
prison for only eighteen pounds! But I have the books still--he can
have them back.”
“After you’ve done with ’em, eh?” said the bailiff. “Oh, I know your
young gentlemen’s ways. Come along.”
“Father!” cried the girl, indignantly, as the bailiff dropped a heavy
grasp on the lamb’s-wool collar. “You’ll not let them take Shelley.
You’ll wait for the money, father.”
“Go into the house!” thundered the old man. “He’s a good-for-nothing
vagabond, I tell you!” He thrust her back, and the slammed door
shut between her and the youth standing in the bailiff’s clutch,
half-wonderingly and disdainfully, like a bright-eyed, restless fox
amid sour grapes.
“Go to your room!” commanded her father, and the girl slowly obeyed,
dashing away her tears, while the old bookseller went back to the
cluttered shop and his reading of Livy’s Roman History.
* * * * *
In the chamber the girl entered, Jane Clermont looked up
half-scornfully.
“I heard it all,” she burst; “you are a little fool to take
it--scolding you like a child, and before all those people!”
Mary opened a bureau drawer and took out a small rosewood box
containing her one dearest possession. As she stood with her treasure
in her hand, Jane jumped to her feet.
“I’ve borne it as long as I can myself,” she cried under her breath.
“I’m going to run away before I am a fortnight older.”
“Run away? Where?”
Jane had begun to dance noiselessly on tiptoe with swift bacchante
movements. “I’m going to be an actress,” she confided, as she stood
at a _pirouette_. “I’ve been to see Mr. Sheridan--the _great_ Mr.
Sheridan--and he’s promised to get me a trial in a real part at Drury
Lane!” She paused, struck with the determination in the other’s face.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to Shelley.”
“Good! I’ll go with you. But you have no money. How can you help him?”
Mary held out the little box.
“Your mother’s brooch!” cried Jane. “Do you really care as much as that
for him?”--a little satirically.
Her companion was dressing for the street with rapid, uncertain
fingers. “It’s all I have,” she answered.
They sat in silence till they heard the outer door bolted and knew the
old man below had gone to his own room. Then they stole softly down the
creaking stair, undid the outer door cautiously and went out into the
evening bustle.
The pavements were crowded, and Mary clung to her companion’s arm, but
Jane walked nonchalantly, her dark eyes snapping with adventure. Not a
few turned to gaze at her piquant beauty. To one whose way led in the
same direction it brought a thought of a distant land.
“In a Suliote shawl she might be a maid of Missolonghi!” mused George
Gordon, as he strode across Fleet market behind the two girls. “Greece!
I wonder when I shall see it again!”
A shade of melancholy was in his face as he walked on, but not
discontent. The resentment of his London home-coming and the desolation
of that first black night at Newstead he had overcome. With the
companionship of his sister and in the calm freshness of frosty lake
and rolling wind-washed moor he had recovered some of the buoyant
spirits so suddenly stunned by the impact of the slanders that had met
him. The London papers he had left unopened, from a sensitive dread of
seeing the recital of his mother’s well-known eccentricities, which her
death might furnish excuse for recalling. His new book, whose stanzas
stood like mental mile-posts of his journey, had almost finished
its progress through the press. In its verses he hoped to stand for
something more than the petty cavilling of personal paragraphists.
It was to his publisher’s he was bound this night when that wistful
thought of the shores he best loved had shadowed his mood.
Crossing the open space on which faced the dark brick front and barred
windows of the Fleet Prison, he saw the two girlish forms pause before
its dismal entrance, where stood the shirt-sleeved warden, pipe in
mouth. What errand could have brought them there unaccompanied at such
an hour, he wondered.
Just then the clock of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West began a ponderous
stroke, and the warden knocked the ashes from his pipe.
“Eight o’clock,” he announced gruffly. “Prison’s closed.”
A cry of dismay fell from Mary’s lips--a cry freighted with tears.
“Then we can’t get poor Bysshe!”
Gordon turned back and approached the dingy portal. “I have a fancy to
see the inside of the old rookery, warden,” he said. “Perhaps these
visitors may enter with me.” His hand was in his pocket and a jingle
caught the warden’s acute ear. The gruff demeanor of the custodian
merged precipitately into the obsequious. He pushed open the gate with
alacrity and preceded them into the foul area of the prison.
Mary threw Gordon a quick glance of gratitude as she passed into the
warden’s office--to return without the little rosewood box. Across the
look had flitted a shudder at the shouts and oaths that tainted the
inclosure, and as she emerged he caught the gleam of relief with which
she saw him still in the court.
A moment later the bailiff, who had figured in the scene before
Godwin’s shop, was leading the way along a noisome gallery. It was
littered with refuse of vegetable and provision-men who cried their
wares all day up and down. At one side gaped a coffee-house, at the
other an ordinary, both reeking with stale odors and tobacco-smoke,
and a noisy club was meeting in the tap-room. Laughter and the click
of glasses floated in the air, a suffocating atmosphere of tawdry
boisterousness.
Jane Clermont stole more than one sidelong glance as Gordon’s uneven
step followed. At length the bailiff paused and unlocked a barred door.
Mary knocked, but there was no answer; she pushed the door open and the
girls entered.
From his station in the background, Gordon saw a dingy chamber,
possessing as furniture only a cot, a chair, and a narrow board mantel,
on which a candle was burning, stuck upright in its own tallow.
Standing before this breast-high impromptu table, a pamphlet spread
open, upon it, his shoulders stooped, his eyes devouring the page,
was the room’s solitary occupant. He had thrown off the long coat
with the lamb’s-wool trimming, his collar was open leaving his throat
unfettered, and his long locks hung negligently about his face.
“Bysshe!” cried Mary, ecstatically.
The figure by the mantel turned, flinging back his tumbled hair as if
to toss away his abstraction.
“Mary!” he echoed, and sprang forward. “What are you doing here?”
“We’ve come for you. The debt is cancelled. To think of your being shut
up here!” she said with a shiver, as a burst of noises rose from the
court below.
“Cancelled!” he repeated with a hesitating laugh. “Your father would
better have let me stay, Mary. I shall be just as bad again in a month.
I couldn’t resist buying a book if it meant the gallows!”
She did not undeceive him, but handed him his great-coat, and gathered
the volumes tossed on to the couch to stuff into its bulging pockets.
Jane had been scrutinizing the room. “What’s that?” she inquired,
pointing to a plate of food which sat on the far end of the mantel, as
though it had been impatiently pushed aside.
The youth colored uneasily. “Why, I suppose that was my supper,” he
said shamefacedly; “I must have forgotten to eat it.”
Jane laughed, picked up the pamphlet for which the meal had been
forgotten, and read the title aloud. “‘Twelve Butchers for a Jury and
a Jeffreys for a Judge. An Appeal against the Pending Frame-Breakers
Bill to legalize the Murder of the Stocking-Weavers. By Percy Bysshe
Shelley!’”
“Frame-Breakers!” she finished disdainfully. “Stocking-Weavers!”
Shelley’s delicate face flushed as he folded the pamphlet.
“Are they not men?” he exclaimed. “And being men, have they no natural
rights? Is British law to shoot them down like wild beasts for the
defense of their livelihood? Oh, if I were only a peer, with a voice in
Parliament!” He spoke with fierce emphasis, but in tone soft, vibrating
and persuasive--a sustained, song-like quality in it.
“Percy Bysshe Shelley!” Gordon’s mind recited the name wonderingly. He
remembered a placard he had seen in a book-shop window: “For writing
the which he stands expelled from University College, Oxford.” So this
was the heir to a baronetcy, the author of “Queen Mab,” the stripling
iconoclast who had laughed at fulminating attorney-generals, had fled
to Lynmouth beach--where he had spent his days making little wooden
boxes, inclosed in resined bladders, weighted with lead and equipped
with tiny mast and sail, and had sent them, filled with his contraband
writings, out on the rollers of the Atlantic in the hope that they
might reach some free mind on the Irish shore or on some ocean brig.
Gordon left his post and went slowly down the stair, past the blackened
office, wherein the warden sat admiringly fingering the brooch that had
wiped out a debt to old William Godwin the bookseller, and into the
street.
The words of the youth he had seen sounded in his brain: “If I were
only a peer, with a voice in Parliament!”
That voice was his. When had he used it for his fellow-man?