With this profession of faith, the doctor, who was an old
jail-bird, and was more sodden than usual, and had the additional and
unusual stimulus of money in his pocket, returned to his associate and
chum in hoarseness, puffiness, red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt,
and brandy. Now, the debtor was a very different man from the doctor, but he had
already begun to travel, by his opposite segment of the circle, to the
same point. Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a
dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that
kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with
strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have
broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he
was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took
one step upward.
When he was relieved of the perplexed affairs that nothing would make
plain, through having them returned upon his hands by a dozen agents in
succession who could make neither beginning, middle, nor end of them or
him, he found his miserable place of refuge a quieter refuge than it
had been before. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder
children now played regularly about the yard, and everybody knew the
baby, and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her.
'Why, I'm getting proud of you,' said his friend the turnkey, one day.
'You'll be the oldest inhabitant soon. The Marshalsea wouldn't be like
the Marshalsea now, without you and your family.'
The turnkey really was proud of him. He would mention him in laudatory
terms to new-comers, when his back was turned. 'You took notice of him,'
he would say, 'that went out of the lodge just now?'
New-comer would probably answer Yes.
'Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed'cated at no
end of expense. Went into the Marshal's house once to try a new piano
for him. Played it, I understand, like one o'clock--beautiful! As to
languages--speaks anything. We've had a Frenchman here in his time, and
it's my opinion he knowed more French than the Frenchman did. We've had
an Italian here in his time, and he shut him up in about half a minute.
You'll find some characters behind other locks, I don't say you won't;
but if you want the top sawyer in such respects as I've mentioned, you
must come to the Marshalsea.'
When his youngest child was eight years old, his wife, who had long been
languishing away--of her own inherent weakness, not that she retained
any greater sensitiveness as to her place of abode than he did--went
upon a visit to a poor friend and old nurse in the country, and died
there. He remained shut up in his room for a fortnight afterwards;
and an attorney's clerk, who was going through the Insolvent Court,
engrossed an address of condolence to him, which looked like a Lease,
and which all the prisoners signed.