The arrangement between us was that she should lie down until my return, and to ensure its being carried out I saw her in bed before I started, but with the bang of the door she would be at the window to watch me go: there is one spot on the road where a thousand times I have turned to wave my stick to her, while she nodded and smiled and kissed her hand to me. That kissing of the hand was the one English custom she had learned.
In an hour or so I return, and perhaps find her in bed, according to promise, but still I am suspicious. The way to her detection is circuitous.
'I'll need to be rising now,' she says, with a yawn that may be genuine.
'How long have you been in bed?'
'You saw me go.'
'And then I saw you at the window. Did you go straight back to bed?'
'Surely I had that much sense.'
'The truth!'
'I might have taken a look at the clock first.'
'It is a terrible thing to have a mother who prevaricates. Have you been lying down ever since I left?'
'Thereabout.'
'What does that mean exactly?'
'Off and on.'
'Have you been to the garret?'
'What should I do in the garret?'
'But have you?'
'I might just have looked up the garret stair.'
'You have been redding up the garret again!'
'Not what you could call a redd up.'
'O, woman, woman, I believe you have not been in bed at all!'
'You see me in it.'
'My opinion is that you jumped into bed when you heard me open the door.'
'Havers.'
'Did you?'
'No.'
'Well, then, when you heard me at the gate?'
'It might have been when I heard you at the gate.'
As daylight goes she follows it with her sewing to the window, and gets another needleful out of it, as one may run after a departed visitor for a last word, but now the gas is lit, and no longer is it shameful to sit down to literature. If the book be a story by George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourites (and mine) among women novelists, or if it be a Carlyle, and we move softly, she will read, entranced, for hours. Her delight in Carlyle was so well known that various good people would send her books that contained a page about him; she could place her finger on any passage wanted in the biography as promptly as though she were looking for some article in her own drawer, and given a date she was often able to tell you what they were doing in Cheyne Row that day. Carlyle, she decided, was not so much an ill man to live with as one who needed a deal of managing, but when I asked if she thought she could have managed him she only replied with a modest smile that meant 'Oh no!' but had the face of 'Sal, I would have liked to try.'
One lady lent her some scores of Carlyle letters that have never been published, and crabbed was the writing, but though my mother liked to have our letters read aloud to her, she read every one of these herself, and would quote from them in her talk. Side by side with the Carlyle letters, which show him in his most gracious light, were many from his wife to a friend, and in one of these a romantic adventure is described - I quote from memory, and it is a poor memory compared to my mother's, which registered everything by a method of her own: 'What might be the age of Bell Tibbits? Well, she was born the week I bought the boiler, so she'll be one-and- fifty (no less!) come Martinmas.' Mrs. Carlyle had got into the train at a London station and was feeling very lonely, for the journey to Scotland lay before her and no one had come to see her off. Then, just as the train was starting, a man jumped into the carriage, to her regret until she saw his face, when, behold, they were old friends, and the last time they met (I forget how many years before) he had asked her to be his wife. He was very nice, and if I remember aright, saw her to her journey's end, though he had intended to alight at some half-way place. I call this an adventure, and I am sure it seemed to my mother to be the most touching and memorable adventure that can come into a woman's life. 'You see he hadna forgot,' she would say proudly, as if this was a compliment in which all her sex could share, and on her old tender face shone some of the elation with which Mrs.