“I didn’t mean to offend any one,” said Pelle absently. He looked as if he had not come back to earth, and appeared to have no intention of doing anything.
“Oh, didn’t you! That’s fortunate for you, or I might have taken a color-print of your doleful face, however unwillingly. By the way, mother said I was to give you her love.”
“Are you Ferdinand?” asked Pelle, raising his head.
“Oh, don’t pretend!” said Ferdinand. “Being in gaol seems to have made a swell of you!”
“I didn’t recognize you,” said Pelle earnestly, suddenly recalled to the world around him.
“Oh, all right—if you say so. It must be the fault of my nose. I got it bashed in the evening after I’d buried mother. I was to give you her love, by the way.”
“Thank you!” said Pelle heartily. Old memories from the “Ark” filled his mind and sent his blood coursing through his veins once more. “Is it long since your mother died?” he asked sympathetically.
Ferdinand nodded. “It was a good thing, however,” he said, “for now there’s no one I need go and have a bad conscience about. I’d made up my mind that she deserved to have things comfortable in her old age, and I was awfully careful; but all the same I was caught for a little robbery and got eight months. That was just after you got in—but of course you know that.”
“No! How could I know it?”
“Well, I telegraphed it over to you. I was just opposite you, in Wing A, and when I’d reckoned out your cell, I bespoke the whole line one evening, and knocked a message through to you. But there was a sanctimonious parson at the corner of your passage, one of those moral folk—oh, you didn’t even know that, then? Well, I’d always suspected him of not passing my message on, though a chap like that’s had an awful lot of learning put into him. Then when I came out I said to myself that there must be an end to all this, for mother’d taken it very much to heart, and was failing. I managed to get into one of the streets where honest thieves live, and went about as a colporteur, and it all went very well. It would have been horribly mean if she’d died of hunger. And we had a jolly good time for six months, but then she slipped away all the same, and I can just tell you that I’ve never been in such low spirits as the day they put her underground in the cemetery. Well, I said to myself, there lies mother smelling the weeds from underneath, so you can just as well give it all up, for there’s nothing more to trouble about now. And I went up to the office and asked for a settlement, and they cheated me of fifty subscribers, the rogues!