Alone In London | Page 2

nooks and recesses borrowed from the space belonging to the adjoining house; for the buildings were old, and had probably been one large dwelling in former times. It was plainly the only apartment the owner had; and all its arrangements were those of a man living alone, for there was something almost desolate about the look of the scanty furniture, though it was clean and whole. There had been a fire, but it had died out, and the coals were black in the grate, while the kettle still sat upon the top bar with a melancholy expression of neglect about it.
James Oliver himself had placed his chair near to the open door, where he could keep his eye upon the shop--a needless precaution, as at this hour no customers ever turned into it. He was an old man, and seemed very old and infirm by the dim light. He was thin and spare, with that peculiar spareness which results from the habit of always eating less than one can. His teeth, which had never had too much to do, had gone some years ago, and his cheeks fell in rather deeply. A fine network of wrinkles puckered about the corners of his eyes and mouth. He stooped a good deal, and moved about with the slowness and deliberation of age. Yet his face was very pleasant--a cheery, gentle, placid face, lighted up with a smile now and then, but with sufficient rareness to make it the more welcome and the more noticed when it came.
Old Oliver had a visitor this hot evening, a neat, small, dapper woman, with a little likeness to himself, who had been putting his room to rights, and looking to the repairs needed by his linen. She was just replacing her needle, cotton, and buttons in an old-fashioned housewife, which she always carried in her pocket, and was then going to put on her black silk bonnet and coloured shawl, before bidding him goodbye.
"Eh, Charlotte," said Oliver, after drawing a long and toilsome breath, "what would I give to be a-top of the Wrekin, seeing the sun set this evening! Many and many's the summer afternoon we've spent there when we were young, and all of us alive. Dost remember how many a mile of country we could see all round us, and how fresh the air blew across the thousands of green fields? Why, I saw Snowdon once, more than sixty miles off, when my eyes were young and it was a clear sunset. I always think of the top of the Wrekin when I read of Moses going up Mount Pisgah and seeing all the land about him, north and south, east and west. Eh, lass! there's a change in us all now!"
"Ah! it's like another world!" said the old woman, shaking her head slowly. "All the folks I used to sew for at Aston, and Uppington, and Overlehill, they'd mostly be gone or dead by now. It wouldn't seem like the same place at all. And now there's none but you and me left, brother James. Well, well! its lonesome, growing old."
"Yes, lonesome, yet not exactly lonesome," replied old Oliver, in a dreamy voice. "I'm growing dark a little, and just a trifle deaf, and I don't feel quite myself like I used to do; but I've got something I didn't use to have. Sometimes of an evening, before I've lit the gas, I've a sort of a feeling as if I could almost see the Lord Jesus, and hear him talking to me. He looks to me something like our eldest brother, him that died when we were little. Charlotte, thee remembers him? A white, quiet, patient face, with a smile like the sun shining behind clouds. Well, whether it's only a dream or no I cannot tell, but there's a face looks at me, or seems to look at me out of the dusk; and I think to myself, maybe the Lord Jesus says, 'Old Oliver's lonesome down there in the dark, and his eyes growing dim. I'll make myself half-plain to him.' Then he comes and sits here with me for a little while."
"Oh, that's all fancy as comes with you living quite alone," said Charlotte, sharply.
"Perhaps so! perhaps so!" answered the old man, with a meek sigh; "but I should be very lonesome without that."
They did not speak again until Charlotte had given a final shake to the bed in the corner, upon which her bonnet and shawl had been lying. She put them on neatly and primly; and when she was ready to go she spoke again in a constrained and mysterious manner.
"Heard nothing of Susan, I suppose?" she said.
"Not a word," answered old Oliver, sadly. "It's the only trouble I've got. That were the last passion I