第 12 页

on pavements, with her basket of purchases spilt, and the change of her

clients ninepence short. His son began to supersede Mrs Bangham, and

to execute commissions in a knowing manner, and to be of the prison

prisonous, of the streets streety.

Time went on, and the turnkey began to fail. His chest swelled, and his

legs got weak, and he was short of breath. The well-worn wooden stool

was 'beyond him,' he complained. He sat in an arm-chair with a cushion,

and sometimes wheezed so, for minutes together, that he couldn't turn

the key. When he was overpowered by these fits, the debtor often turned

it for him. 'You and me,' said the turnkey, one snowy winter's night

when the lodge, with a bright fire in it, was pretty full of company,

'is the oldest inhabitants. I wasn't here myself above seven year before

you. I shan't last long. When I'm off the lock for good and all, you'll

be the Father of the Marshalsea.'

The turnkey went off the lock of this world next day. His words were

remembered and repeated; and tradition afterwards handed down from

generation to generation--a Marshalsea generation might be calculated as

about three months--that the shabby old debtor with the soft manner and

the white hair, was the Father of the Marshalsea.

And he grew to be proud of the title. If any impostor had arisen to

claim it, he would have shed tears in resentment of the attempt to

deprive him of his rights. A disposition began to be perceived in him

to exaggerate the number of years he had been there; it was generally

understood that you must deduct a few from his account; he was vain, the

fleeting generations of debtors said.

All new-comers were presented to him. He was punctilious in the exaction

of this ceremony. The wits would perform the office of introduction with

overcharged pomp and politeness, but they could not easily overstep his

sense of its gravity. He received them in his poor room (he disliked an

introduction in the mere yard, as informal--a thing that might happen

to anybody), with a kind of bowed-down beneficence. They were welcome to

the Marshalsea, he would tell them. Yes, he was the Father of the place.

So the world was kind enough to call him; and so he was, if more than

twenty years of residence gave him a claim to the title. It looked

small at first, but there was very good company there--among a

mixture--necessarily a mixture--and very good air.

It became a not unusual circumstance for letters to be put under his

door at night, enclosing half-a-crown, two half-crowns, now and then at

long intervals even half-a-sovereign, for the Father of the Marshalsea.

'With the compliments of a collegian taking leave.' He received the

gifts as tributes, from admirers, to a public character. Sometimes

these correspondents assumed facetious names, as the Brick, Bellows, Old

Gooseberry, Wideawake, Snooks, Mops, Cutaway, the Dogs-meat Man; but he

considered this in bad taste, and was always a little hurt by it.

In the fulness of time, this correspondence showing signs of wearing

out, and seeming to require an effort on the part of the correspondents

to which in the hurried circumstances of departure many of them might

not be equal, he established the custom of attending collegians of

a certain standing, to the gate, and taking leave of them there. The

collegian under treatment, after shaking hands, would occasionally

stop to wrap up something in a bit of paper, and would come back again

calling 'Hi!'

He would look round surprised.'Me?' he would say, with a smile. By

this time the collegian would be up with him, and he would paternally

add,'What have you forgotten? What can I do for you?'

'I forgot to leave this,' the collegian would usually return, 'for the

Father of the Marshalsea.'

'My good sir,' he would rejoin, 'he is infinitely obliged to you.' But,

to the last, the irresolute hand of old would remain in the pocket into

which he had slipped the money during two or three turns about the yard,

lest the transaction should be too conspicuous to the general body of

collegians.

One afternoon he had been doing the honours of the place to a rather

large party of collegians, who happened to be going out, when, as he was

coming back, he encountered one from the poor side who had been taken in

execution for a small sum a week before, had 'settled' in the course of

that afternoon, and was going out too. The man was a mere Plasterer in

his working dress; had his wife with him, and a bundle; and was in high

spirits.

'God bless you, sir,' he said in passing.

'And you,' benignantly returned the Father of the Marshalsea.

They were pretty far divided, going their several ways, when the

Plasterer called out, 'I say!--sir!' and came back to him.

'It ain't much,' said the Plasterer, putting a little pile of halfpence

in his hand, 'but it's well meant.'

The Father of the Marshalsea had never been offered tribute in copper

yet. His children often had, and with his perfect acquiescence it had

gone into the common purse to buy meat that he had eaten, and drink that

he had drunk; but fustian splashed with white lime, bestowing halfpence

on him, front to front, was new.

'How dare you!' he said to the man, and feebly burst into tears.

The Plasterer turned him towards the wall, that his face might not be

seen; and the action was so delicate, and the man was so penetrated with

repentance, and asked pardon so honestly, that he could make him no less

acknowledgment than, 'I know you meant it kindly. Say no more.'

'Bless your soul, sir,' urged the Plasterer, 'I did indeed. I'd do more

by you than the rest of 'em do, I fancy.'

'What would you do?' he asked.

'I'd come back to see you, after I was let out.'

'Give me the money again,' said the other, eagerly, 'and I'll keep it,

and never spend it. Thank you for it, thank you! I shall see you again?'

'If I live a week you shall.'

They shook hands and parted. The collegians, assembled in Symposium in

the Snuggery that night, marvelled what had happened to their Father; he

walked so late in the shadows of the yard, and seemed so downcast.

CHAPTER 7. The Child of the Marshalsea

The baby whose first draught of air had been tinctured with Doctor

Haggage's brandy, was handed down among the generations of collegians,

like the tradition of their common parent. In the earlier stages of her

existence, she was handed down in a literal and prosaic sense; it being

almost a part of the entrance footing of every new collegian to nurse

the child who had been born in the college.

'By rights,' remarked the turnkey when she was first shown to him, 'I

ought to be her godfather.'

The debtor irresolutely thought of it for a minute, and said, 'Perhaps

you wouldn't object to really being her godfather?'

'Oh! _I_ don't object,' replied the turnkey, 'if you don't.'

Thus it came to pass that she was christened one Sunday afternoon, when

the turnkey, being relieved, was off the lock; and that the turnkey

went up to the font of Saint George's Church, and promised and vowed and

renounced on her behalf, as he himself related when he came back, 'like

a good 'un.'

This invested the turnkey with a new proprietary share in the child,

over and above his former official one. When she began to walk and talk,

he became fond of her; bought a little arm-chair and stood it by the

high fender of the lodge fire-place; liked to have her company when he

was on the lock; and used to bribe her with cheap toys to come and talk

to him. The child, for her part, soon grew so fond of the turnkey that

she would come climbing up the lodge-steps of her own accord at all

hours of the day. When she fell asleep in the little armchair by the

high fender, the turnkey would cover her with his pocket-handkerchief;

and when she sat in it dressing and undressing a doll which soon came

to be unlike dolls on the other side of the lock, and to bear a horrible

family resemblance to Mrs Bangham--he would contemplate her from the

top of his stool with exceeding gentleness. Witnessing these things,

the collegians would express an opinion that the turnkey, who was a

bachelor, had been cut out by nature for a family man. But the turnkey

thanked them, and said, 'No, on the whole it was enough to see other

people's children there.' At what period of her early life the little

creature began to perceive that it was not the habit of all the world to

live locked up in narrow yards surrounded by high walls with spikes at

the top, would be a difficult question to settle. But she was a very,

very little creature indeed, when she had somehow gained the knowledge

that her clasp of her father's hand was to be always loosened at the

door which the great key opened; and that while her own light steps were

free to pass beyond it, his feet must never cross that line. A pitiful

and plaintive look, with which she had begun to regard him when she was

still extremely young, was perhaps a part of this discovery.

With a pitiful and plaintive look for everything, indeed, but with

something in it for only him that was like protection, this Child of

the Marshalsea and the child of the Father of the Marshalsea, sat by her

friend the turnkey in the lodge, kept the family room, or wandered about

the prison-yard, for the first eight years of her life. With a pitiful

and plaintive look for her wayward sister; for her idle brother; for the

high blank walls; for the faded crowd they shut in; for the games of the

prison children as they whooped and ran, and played at hide-and-seek,

and made the iron bars of the inner gateway 'Home.'

Wistful and wondering, she would sit in summer weather by the high

fender in the lodge, looking up at the sky through the barred window,

until, when she turned her eyes away, bars of light would arise between

her and her friend, and she would see him through a grating, too.

'Thinking of the fields,' the turnkey said once, after watching her,

'ain't you?'

'Where are they?' she inquired.

'Why, they're--over there, my dear,' said the turnkey, with a vague

flourish of his key. 'Just about there.'

'Does anybody open them, and shut them? Are they locked?'

The turnkey was discomfited. 'Well,' he said. 'Not in general.'

'Are they very pretty, Bob?' She called him Bob, by his own particular

request and instruction.

'Lovely. Full of flowers. There's buttercups, and there's daisies,

and there's'--the turnkey hesitated, being short of floral

nomenclature--'there's dandelions, and all manner of games.'

'Is it very pleasant to be there, Bob?'

'Prime,' said the turnkey.

'Was father ever there?'

'Hem!' coughed the turnkey. 'O yes, he was there, sometimes.'

'Is he sorry not to be there now?'

'N-not particular,' said the turnkey.

'Nor any of the people?' she asked, glancing at the listless crowd

within. 'O are you quite sure and certain, Bob?'

At this difficult point of the conversation Bob gave in, and changed the

subject to hard-bake: always his last resource when he found his little

friend getting him into a political, social, or theological corner.

But this was the origin of a series of Sunday excursions that these two

curious companions made together. They used to issue from the lodge on

alternate Sunday afternoons with great gravity, bound for some meadows

or green lanes that had been elaborately appointed by the turnkey in

the course of the week; and there she picked grass and flowers to bring

home, while he smoked his pipe. Afterwards, there were tea-gardens,

shrimps, ale, and other delicacies; and then they would come back hand

in hand, unless she was more than usually tired, and had fallen asleep

on his shoulder.

In those early days, the turnkey first began profoundly to consider

a question which cost him so much mental labour, that it remained

undetermined on the day of his death. He decided to will and bequeath

his little property of savings to his godchild, and the point arose how

could it be so 'tied up' as that only she should have the benefit of

it? His experience on the lock gave him such an acute perception of the

enormous difficulty of 'tying up' money with any approach to tightness,

and contrariwise of the remarkable ease with which it got loose, that

through a series of years he regularly propounded this knotty point to

every new insolvent agent and other professional gentleman who passed in

and out.

'Supposing,' he would say, stating the case with his key on the

professional gentleman's waistcoat; 'supposing a man wanted to leave his

property to a young female, and wanted to tie it up so that nobody else

should ever be able to make a grab at it; how would you tie up that

property?'

'Settle it strictly on herself,' the professional gentleman would

complacently answer.

'But look here,' quoth the turnkey. 'Supposing she had, say a brother,

say a father, say a husband, who would be likely to make a grab at that

property when she came into it--how about that?'

'It would be settled on herself, and they would have no more legal claim

on it than you,' would be the professional answer.

'Stop a bit,' said the turnkey. 'Supposing she was tender-hearted, and

they came over her. Where's your law for tying it up then?'

The deepest character whom the turnkey sounded, was unable to produce

his law for tying such a knot as that. So, the turnkey thought about it

all his life, and died intestate after all.

But that was long afterwards, when his god-daughter was past sixteen.