“No, no, sir,” sobbed Oliver, clinging to the hand which held the well-known cane; “no, no, sir; I will be good indeed; indeed, indeed I will, sir! I am a very little boy, sir; and it is so—so——”
“So what?” inquired Mr. Bumble in amazement.
“So lonely, sir! So very lonely!” cried the child. “Everybody hates me. Oh, sir, don’t, don’t, pray, be cross to me!” The child beat his hand upon his heart, and looked in his companion’s face with tears of real agony.
The poor boy was put to bed by Sowerberry the first night. His master said, as they climbed the stairs:
“Your bed’s under the counter. You don’t mind sleeping among the coffins, I suppose? But it doesn’t much matter whether you do or don’t, for you can’t sleep anywhere else. Come, don’t keep me here all night!”
Dickens pitied children for the terrors with which they were threatened, as Oliver was threatened by the board, and he pitied them also for the terrors that their imaginations brought to them at night. Sowerberry’s lack of sympathy was as great as Bumble’s. When one of his own children showed evidence of dread of retiring alone, Dickens sat upstairs with his family in the evenings afterward. He did not tell the child the reason, but she was saved from terror.
Oliver ran away from Sowerberry’s, and when passing the workhouse he peeped between the bars of the gate into the garden. A very little boy was there who came to the gate to say “Good-bye” to him. He had been one of Oliver’s little friends.
“Kiss me,” said the child, climbing up the low gate and flinging his little arms round Oliver’s neck: “Good-bye, dear! God bless you!”
The blessing was from a young child’s lips, but it was the first that Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles and sufferings and troubles and changes of his after-life he never once forgot it.
When Oliver was taken to commit burglary by Bill Sykes, and was wounded and brought into the home he was assisting to rob, the good lady of the house sent for a doctor. The doctor dressed the arm, and when the boy fell asleep he brought Mrs. Maylie and Rose to see the criminal.