"What can the meaning of that be?" asked Lady Arthur.
"To make you ask the meaning of it," said Mr. Eildon. "I who am skilled in these matters have no doubt that it is the herald of some soothing syrup for the human race under the trials of teething." He was standing at the carriage-door till the train would start, and he stood aside to let a young lady and a boy in deep mourning enter. The pair were hardly seated when the girl's eye fell on the great white board and its announcement. She bent her head and hid her face in her handkerchief: it was not difficult to guess that she had very recently parted with her mother for ever, and the words on the board were more than she could stand unmoved.
Miss Adamson too had been thinking of her mother, the hard-working woman who had toiled in her little shop to support her sickly husband and educate her daughter—the kindly patient face, the hands that had never spared themselves, the footsteps that had plodded so incessantly to and fro. The all that had been gone so long came back to her, and she felt almost the pang of first separation, when it seemed as if the end of her life had been extinguished and the motive-power for work had gone. But she carried her mother in her heart: with her it was still "my mother and I."
Lady Arthur did not think of her mother: she had lost her early, and besides, her thoughts and feelings had been all absorbed by her husband.
Alice Garscube had never known her mother, and as she looked gravely at the girl who was crying behind her handkerchief, she envied her—she had known her mother.
As for Mr. Eildon, he had none but bright and happy thoughts connected with his mother. It was true, she was a widow, but she was a kind and stately lady, round whom her family moved as round a sun and centre, giving light and heat and all good cheer; he could afford to joke about "my mother and I."
What a vast deal of varied emotion these words must have stirred in the multitudes of travelers coming and going in all directions!
In jumping into the carriage when the last bell rang, Mr. Eildon missed his footing and fell back, with no greater injury, fortunately, than grazing the skin, of his hand.
"Is it much hurt?" Lady Arthur asked.
He held it up and said, "'Who ran to help me when I fell?'"