Mamma cried over her, and Punch marveled. It was then that he heard for the first time Mamma's passionate appeal to him never to let Judy forget Mamma. Seeing that Judy was young, ridiculously young, and that Mamma, every evening for four weeks past, had come into the cabin to sing her and Punch to sleep with a mysterious tune that he called "Sonny, my soul," Punch could not understand what Mamma meant. But he strove to do his duty, for the moment Mamma left the cabin, he said to Judy: "Ju, you bemember Mamma?"
"'Torse I do," said Judy.
"Then always bemember Mamma, 'r else I won't give you the paper ducks that the red-haired Captain Sahib cut out for me."
So Judy promised always to "bemember Mamma."
Many and many a time was Mamma's command laid upon Punch, and Papa would say the same thing with an insistence that awed the child.
"You must make haste and learn to write, Punch," said Papa, "and then you'll be able to write letters to us in Bombay."
"I'll come into your room," said Punch, and Papa choked.
Papa and Mamma were always choking in those days. If Punch took Judy to task for not "bemembering," they choked. If Punch sprawled on the sofa in the Southampton lodging-house and sketched his future in purple and gold, they choked; and so they did if Judy put up her mouth for a kiss.
Through many days all four were vagabonds on the face of the earth: Punch with no one to give orders to, Judy too young for anything, and Papa and Mamma grave, distracted, and choking.
"Where," demanded Punch, wearied of a loathsome contrivance on four wheels with a mound of luggage atop—"where is our broom-gharri? This thing talks so much that I can't talk. Where is our own broom-gharri? When I was at Bandstand before we comed away, I asked Inverarity Sahib why he was sitting in it, and he said it was his own. And I said, 'I will give it you'—I like Inverarity Sahib—and I said, 'Can you put your legs through the pully-wag loops by the windows? And Inverarity Sahib said No, and laughed. I can put my legs through the pully-wag loops. I can put my legs through these pully-wag loops. Look! Oh, Mamma's crying again! I did n't know. I was n't not to do so."