With no earthly friend to help her, or so much as to see her, but the one so strangely assorted; with no knowledge even of the common daily tone and habits of the common members of the free community who are not shut up in prisons; born and bred in a social condition, false even with a reference to the falsest condition outside the walls; drinking from infancy of a well whose waters had their own peculiar stain, their own unwholesome and unnatural taste; the Child of the Marshalsea began her womanly life.
No matter through what mistakes and discouragements, what ridicule (not unkindly meant, but deeply felt) of her youth and little figure, what humble consciousness of her own babyhood and want of strength, even in the matter of lifting and carrying; through how much weariness and hopelessness, and how many secret tears; she drudged on, until recognised as useful, even indispensable. That time came. She took the place of eldest of the three, in all things but precedence; was the head of the fallen family; and bore, in her own heart, its anxieties and shames.
At thirteen, she could read and keep accounts, that is, could put down in words and figures how much the bare necessaries that they wanted would cost, and how much less they had to buy them with. 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 another of her own contriving. Once, among the heterogeneous crowd of inmates there appeared a dancing-master. Her sister had a great desire to learn the dancing-master’s art, and seemed to have a taste that way. At thirteen years old, the Child of the Marshalsea presented herself to the dancing-master, with a little bag in her hand, and preferred her humble petition.
‘If you please, I was born here, sir.’
‘Oh! You are the young lady, are you?’ said the dancing-master, surveying the small figure and uplifted face.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And what can I do for you?’ said the dancing-master.
‘Nothing for me, sir, thank you,’ anxiously undrawing the strings of the little bag; ‘but if, while you stay here, you could be so kind as to teach my sister cheap – ’
‘My child, I’ll teach her for nothing,’ said the dancing-master, shutting up the bag. He was as good-natured a dancing-master as ever danced to the Insolvent Court, and he kept his word. The sister was so apt a pupil, and the dancing-master had such abundant leisure to bestow upon her (for it took him a matter of ten weeks to set to his creditors, lead off, turn the Commissioners, and right and left back to his professional pursuits), that wonderful progress was made. Indeed the dancing-master was so proud of it, and so wishful to display it before he left to a few select friends among the collegians, that at six o’clock on a certain fine morning, a minuet de la cour came off in the yard – the college-rooms being of too confined proportions for the purpose – in which so much ground was covered, and the steps were so conscientiously executed, that the dancing-master, having to play the kit besides, was thoroughly blown.
The success of this beginning, which led to the dancing-master’s continuing his instruction after his release, emboldened the poor child to try again. She watched and waited months for a seamstress. In the fulness of time a milliner came in, and to her she repaired on her own behalf.
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ she said, looking timidly round the door of the milliner, whom she found in tears and in bed: ‘but I was born here.’
Everybody seemed to hear of her as soon as they arrived; for the milliner sat up in bed, drying her eyes, and said, just as the dancing-master had said:
‘Oh! You are the child, are you?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I am sorry I haven’t got anything for you,’ said the milliner, shaking her head.
‘It’s not that, ma’am. If you please I want to learn needle-work.’
‘Why should you do that,’ returned the milliner, ‘with me before you? It has not done me much good.’
‘Nothing – whatever it is – seems to have done anybody much good who comes here,’ she returned in all simplicity; ‘but I want to learn just the same.’
‘I am afraid you are so weak, you see,’ the milliner objected.
‘I don’t think I am weak, ma’am.’
‘And you are so very, very little, you see,’ the milliner objected.
‘Yes, I am afraid I am very little indeed,’ returned the Child of the Marshalsea; and so began to sob over that unfortunate defect of hers, which came so often in her way. The milliner – who was not morose or hard-hearted, only newly insolvent – was touched, took her in hand with goodwill, found her the most patient and earnest of pupils, and made her a cunning work-woman in course of time.
In course of time, and in the very self-same course of time, the Father of the Marshalsea gradually developed a new flower of character. The more Fatherly he grew as to the Marshalsea, and the more dependent he became on the contributions of his changing family, the greater stand he made by his forlorn gentility. With the same hand that he pocketed a collegian’s half-crown half an hour ago, he would wipe away the tears that streamed over his cheeks if any reference were made to his daughters’ earning their bread. So, over and above other daily cares, the Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her the care of preserving the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together.
The sister 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, but accepting the fact as an inevitable certainty – on whom her protection devolved. Naturally a retired and simple man, he had shown no particular sense of being ruined at the time when that calamity fell upon him, further than that he left off washing himself when the shock was announced, and never took to that luxury any more. He had been a very indifferent musical amateur in his better days; and when he fell with his brother, resorted for support to playing a clarionet as dirty as himself in a small Theatre Orchestra. It was the theatre in which his niece became a dancer; he had been a fixture there a long time when she took her poor station in it; and he accepted the task of serving as her escort and guardian, just as he would have accepted an illness, a legacy, a feast, starvation – anything but soap.
To enable this girl to earn her few weekly shillings, it was necessary for the Child of the Marshalsea to go through an elaborate form with the Father.
‘Fanny is not going to live with us just now, father. She will be here a good deal in the day, but she is going to live outside with uncle.’
‘You surprise me. Why?’
‘I think uncle wants a companion, father. He should be attended to, and looked after.’
‘A companion? He passes much of his time here. And you attend to him and look after him, Amy, a great deal more than ever your sister will. You all go out so much; you all go out so much.’
This was to keep up the ceremony and pretence of his having no idea that Amy herself went out by the day to work.
‘But we are always glad to come home, father; now, are we not? And as to Fanny, perhaps besides keeping uncle company and taking care of him, it may be as well for her not quite to live here, always. She was not born here as I was, you know, father.’
‘Well, Amy, well. I don’t quite follow you, but it’s natural I suppose that Fanny should prefer to be outside, and even that you often should, too. So, you and Fanny and your uncle, my dear, shall have your own way.