At another time he asked him, ‘Do you walk much, Nandy, about the yard within the walls of that place of yours?’
‘No, sir; no. I haven’t any great liking for that.’
‘No, to be sure,’ he assented. ‘Very natural.’ Then he privately informed the circle (‘Legs going.’)
Once he asked the pensioner, in that general clemency which asked him anything to keep him afloat, how old his younger grandchild was?
‘John Edward,’ said the pensioner, slowly laying down his knife and fork to consider. ‘How old, sir? Let me think now.’
The Father of the Marshalsea tapped his forehead (‘Memory weak.’)
‘John Edward, sir? Well, I really forget. I couldn’t say at this minute, sir, whether it’s two and two months, or whether it’s two and five months. It’s one or the other.’
‘Don’t distress yourself by worrying your mind about it,’ he returned, with infinite forbearance. (‘Faculties evidently decaying—old man rusts in the life he leads!’)
The more of these discoveries that he persuaded himself he made in the pensioner, the better he appeared to like him; and when he got out of his chair after tea to bid the pensioner good-bye, on his intimating that he feared, honoured sir, his time was running out, he made himself look as erect and strong as possible.
‘We don’t call this a shilling, Nandy, you know,’ he said, putting one in his hand. ‘We call it tobacco.’