The Reverend Simeon Gaunt keeps a poor parish and keeps it strictly, preaching a gospel with the comfort surgically removed. He is an ascetic of the practising kind: he fasts, he keeps vigils, and he is known to carry the instruments of penance and to use them on the only sinner he can reliably supervise, which is himself.
He is half-brother to Lady Lavinia Loveless, and his opinion of her trade in the departed is delivered to her face, in the word blasphemy, at regular intervals — after which he attends her table anyway, disapproving at close range, unable, it seems, either to save his sister or to leave her unsaved. Cairnholm finds him mortifying in both the old sense and the new.