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.