When he appeared again he was greyer (he had soon begun to turn grey);
and the turnkey noticed that his hands went often to his trembling lips
again, as they had used to do when he first came in.
But he got pretty well over it in a month or two; and in the meantime
the children played about the yard as regularly as ever, but in black.
Then Mrs Bangham, long popular medium of communication with the outer
world, began to be infirm, and to be found oftener than usual comatose
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.