“I’ve been very busy lately, and unfortunately I can’t find out anything about her. Is she just as cross?”
“When she’s in a bad temper she lets me understand that she could easily help to put us on the right track if she wanted to. I think it amuses her to see us fooled.”
“A child can’t be so knowing!”
“Don’t be so sure of that! Remember she’s not a child; her experiences have been too terrible. I have an idea that she hates me and only meditates on the mischief she can do me. You can’t imagine how spiteful she can be; it’s as though the exhalations from down there had turned to poison in her. If any one comes here that she notices I like, she reviles them as soon as they’re gone, says some poisonous thing about them in order to wound me. You’re the only one she spares, so I think there must be some secret link between you. Try to press her on the subject once more.”
They went in to her. As the door opened she slipped hastily down beneath the clothes—she had been listening at the door—and pretended to be asleep. Morten went back to his work and closed the door after him.
“Well, Johanna,” said Pelle, seating himself on the edge of the bed. “I’ve got a message for you. Can you guess who it’s from?”
“From grandmother!” she exclaimed, sitting up eagerly; but the next moment she was ashamed at having been outwitted, and crept down under the clothes, where she lay with compressed lips, and stole distrustful glances at Pelle. There was something in the glance and the carriage of her head that awakened dormant memories in him, but he could not fix them.
“No, not grandmother,” he said. “By-the-bye, where is she now? I should like to speak to her. Couldn’t you go out to her with me when you get well?”
She looked at him with sparkling eyes and a mocking expression. “Don’t you wish you may get it!” she answered.
“Tell me where she lives, Johanna,” Pelle went on, taking her thin hand in his, “there’s a good girl!”