Later he established the custom of attending collegians of a certain standing to the gate, and taking leave of them there.  The collegian under treatment would often wrap up something in a paper and give it to him, “For the Father of the Marshalsea.”

II.—­The Child of the Marshalsea

The youngest child of the Father of the Marshalsea, born within the jail, was a very, very little creature indeed when she gained the knowledge that while her own light steps were free to pass beyond the prison gate, her father’s feet must never cross that line.

At thirteen she could read and keep accounts—­that is, could put down in words and figures how much the bare necessaries they needed would cost, and how much less they had to buy them with.  From the first she was inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and to be that something for the sake of the rest.  Recognised as useful, even indispensable, she took the place of eldest of the three in all but precedence; was the head of the fallen family, and bore, in her own heart, its anxieties and shames.  She had been, by snatches of a few weeks at a time, to an evening school outside, and got her sister and brother sent to day schools by desultory starts, during three or four years.  There was no instruction for any of them at home; but she knew well—­no one better—­that a man so broken as to be the Father of the Marshalsea could be no father to his own children.

To these scanty means of improvement she added others.  Her sister Fanny, having a great desire to learn dancing, the Child of the Marshalsea persuaded a dancing-master, detained for a short time, to teach her.  And Fanny became a dancer.

There was a ruined uncle in the family group, ruined by his brother, the Father of the Marshalsea, and knowing no more how than his ruiner did, on whom Fanny’s protection devolved.  Naturally a retired and simple man, he had shown no particular sense of being ruined, further than that he left off washing when the shock was announced, and never took to that luxury any more.  Having been a very indifferent musical amateur in his better days, when he fell with his brother he resorted for support to playing a clarionet in a small theatre orchestra.  It was the theatre in which his niece became a dancer, and he accepted the task of serving as her escort and guardian.

To get her brother—­christened Edward, but called Tip—­out of the prison was a more difficult task.  Every post she obtained for him he always gave up, returning with the announcement that he was tired of it, and had cut it.

One day he came back, and said he was in for good, that he had been taken for forty pounds odd.  For the first time in all those years, she sank under her cares.  It was so hard to make Tip understand that the Father of the Marshalsea must not know the truth about his son.

For, the Father of the Marshalsea, as he grew more dependent on the contributions of his changing family, made the greater stand by his forlorn gentility.  So the pretence had to be kept up that neither of his daughters earned their bread.