The book-stall keeper got into the coach; and away they drove.
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Chapter XII
In Which Oliver is Taken Better Care of than He Ever was before. And in Which the Narrative Reverts to the Merry Old Gentleman and His Youthful Friends
THE coach rattled away, over nearly the same ground as that which Oliver had traversed when he first entered London in company with the Dodger; and, turning a different way when it reached the Angel at Islington, stopped at length before a neat house, in a quiet shady street near Pentonville. Here, a bed was prepared, without loss of time, in which Mr. Brownlow saw his young charge carefully and comfortably deposited; and here, he was tended with a kindness and solicitude that knew no bounds.
But, for many days, Oliver remained insensible to all the goodness of his new friends. The sun rose and sank, and rose and sank again, and many times after that; and still the boy lay stretched on his uneasy bed, dwindling away beneath the dry and wasting heat of fever. The worm does not his work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow creeping fire upon the living frame.
Weak, and thin, and pallid, he awoke at last from what seemed to have been a long and troubled dream. Feebly raising himself in the bed, with his head resting on his trembling arm, he looked anxiously around.
“What room is this? Where have I been brought to?” said Oliver. “This is not the place I went to sleep in.”
He uttered these words in a feeble voice, being very faint and weak; but they were overheard at once. The curtain at the bed’s head was hastily drawn back, and a motherly old lady, very neatly and precisely dressed, rose as she undrew it, from an arm-chair close by, in which she had been sitting at needle-work.
“Hush, my dear,” said the old lady softly. “You must be very quiet, or you’ll be ill again; and you have been very bad,—as bad as bad could be, pretty nigh. Lie down again; there’s a dear!” With those words, the old lady very gently placed Oliver’s head upon the pillow; and, smoothing back his hair from his forehead, looked so kindly and loving in his face, that he could not help placing his little withered hand in hers, and drawing it round his neck.
“Save us!” said the old lady, with tears in her eyes, “What a grateful little dear it is. Pretty creetur! What would his mother feel if she had sat by him as I have, and could see him now!”
“Perhaps she does see me,” whispered Oliver, folding his hands together; “perhaps she has sat by me. I almost feel as if she had.”
“That was the fever, my dear,” said the old lady mildly.
“I suppose it was,” replied Oliver, “because heaven is a long way off; and they are too happy there, to come down to the bedside of a poor boy. But if she knew I was ill, she must have pitied me, even there; for she was ill herself before she died. She can’t know anything about me though,” added Oliver after a moment’s silence. “If she had seen me hurt, it would have made her sorrowful; and her face has always looked sweet and happy, when I dreamed of her.”
The old lady made no reply to this; but wiping her eyes first, and her spectacles, which lay on the counter-pane, afterwards, as if they were part and parcel of those features, brought some cool stuff for Oliver to drink; and then, patting him on the cheek, told him he must lie very quiet, or he would be ill again.
So, Oliver kept very still; partly because he was anxious to obey the kind old lady in all things; and partly, to tell the truth, because he was completely exhausted with what he had already said. He soon fell into a gentle doze, from which he was awakened by the light of a candle: which, being brought near the bed, showed him a gentleman with a very large and loud-ticking gold watch in his hand, who felt his pulse, and said he was a great deal better.