The Secret Garden
“Well, Dickon will come to see you tomorrow morning, and he’ll bring
his creatures with him.”
“Oh! Oh!” Colin cried out in delight.
“But that’s not all,” Mary went on, almost pale with solemn excitement.
“The rest is better. There is a door into the garden. I found it. It is
under the ivy on the wall.”
If he had been a strong healthy boy Colin would probably have shouted
“Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” but he was weak and rather hysterical; his
eyes grew bigger and bigger and he gasped for breath.
“Oh! Mary!” he cried out with a half sob. “Shall I see it? Shall I get
into it? Shall I _live_ to get into it?” and he clutched her hands and
dragged her toward him.
“Of course you’ll see it!” snapped Mary indignantly. “Of course you’ll
live to get into it! Don’t be silly!”
And she was so un-hysterical and natural and childish that she brought
him to his senses and he began to laugh at himself and a few minutes
afterward she was sitting on her stool again telling him not what she
imagined the secret garden to be like but what it really was, and
Colin’s aches and tiredness were forgotten and he was listening
enraptured.
“It is just what you thought it would be,” he said at last. “It sounds
just as if you had really seen it. You know I said that when you told
me first.”
Mary hesitated about two minutes and then boldly spoke the truth.
“I had seen it—and I had been in,” she said. “I found the key and got
in weeks ago. But I daren’t tell you—I daren’t because I was so afraid
I couldn’t trust you—_for sure!_”
CHAPTER XIX.
“IT HAS COME!”
Of course Dr. Craven had been sent for the morning after Colin had had
his tantrum. He was always sent for at once when such a thing occurred
and he always found, when he arrived, a white shaken boy lying on his
bed, sulky and still so hysterical that he was ready to break into
fresh sobbing at the least word. In fact, Dr. Craven dreaded and
detested the difficulties of these visits. On this occasion he was away
from Misselthwaite Manor until afternoon.
“How is he?” he asked Mrs. Medlock rather irritably when he arrived.
“He will break a blood-vessel in one of those fits some day. The boy is
half insane with hysteria and self-indulgence.”
“Well, sir,” answered Mrs. Medlock, “you’ll scarcely believe your eyes
when you see him. That plain sour-faced child that’s almost as bad as
himself has just bewitched him. How she’s done it there’s no telling.
The Lord knows she’s nothing to look at and you scarcely ever hear her
speak, but she did what none of us dare do. She just flew at him like a
little cat last night, and stamped her feet and ordered him to stop
screaming, and somehow she startled him so that he actually did stop,
and this afternoon—well just come up and see, sir. It’s past
crediting.”
The scene which Dr. Craven beheld when he entered his patient’s room
was indeed rather astonishing to him. As Mrs. Medlock opened the door
he heard laughing and chattering. Colin was on his sofa in his
dressing-gown and he was sitting up quite straight looking at a picture
in one of the garden books and talking to the plain child who at that
moment could scarcely be called plain at all because her face was so
glowing with enjoyment.
“Those long spires of blue ones—we’ll have a lot of those,” Colin was
announcing. “They’re called Del-phin-iums.”
“Dickon says they’re larkspurs made big and grand,” cried Mistress
Mary. “There are clumps there already.”
Then they saw Dr. Craven and stopped. Mary became quite still and Colin
looked fretful.
“I am sorry to hear you were ill last night, my boy,” Dr. Craven said a
trifle nervously. He was rather a nervous man.
“I’m better now—much better,” Colin answered, rather like a Rajah. “I’m
going out in my chair in a day or two if it is fine. I want some fresh
air.”
Dr. Craven sat down by him and felt his pulse and looked at him
curiously.
“It must be a very fine day,” he said, “and you must be very careful
not to tire yourself.”
“Fresh air won’t tire me,” said the young Rajah.
As there had been occasions when this same young gentleman had shrieked
aloud with rage and had insisted that fresh air would give him cold and
kill him, it is not to be wondered at that his doctor felt somewhat
startled.
“I thought you did not like fresh air,” he said.
“I don’t when I am by myself,” replied the Rajah; “but my cousin is
going out with me.”
“And the nurse, of course?” suggested Dr. Craven.
“No, I will not have the nurse,” so magnificently that Mary could not
help remembering how the young native Prince had looked with his
diamonds and emeralds and pearls stuck all over him and the great
rubies on the small dark hand he had waved to command his servants to
approach with salaams and receive his orders.
“My cousin knows how to take care of me. I am always better when she is
with me. She made me better last night. A very strong boy I know will
push my carriage.”
Dr. Craven felt rather alarmed. If this tiresome hysterical boy should
chance to get well he himself would lose all chance of inheriting
Misselthwaite; but he was not an unscrupulous man, though he was a weak
one, and he did not intend to let him run into actual danger.
“He must be a strong boy and a steady boy,” he said. “And I must know
something about him. Who is he? What is his name?”
“It’s Dickon,” Mary spoke up suddenly. She felt somehow that everybody
who knew the moor must know Dickon. And she was right, too. She saw
that in a moment Dr. Craven’s serious face relaxed into a relieved
smile.
“Oh, Dickon,” he said. “If it is Dickon you will be safe enough. He’s
as strong as a moor pony, is Dickon.”
“And he’s trusty,” said Mary. “He’s th’ trustiest lad i’ Yorkshire.”
She had been talking Yorkshire to Colin and she forgot herself.
“Did Dickon teach you that?” asked Dr. Craven, laughing outright.
“I’m learning it as if it was French,” said Mary rather coldly. “It’s
like a native dialect in India. Very clever people try to learn them. I
like it and so does Colin.”
“Well, well,” he said. “If it amuses you perhaps it won’t do you any
harm. Did you take your bromide last night, Colin?”
“No,” Colin answered. “I wouldn’t take it at first and after Mary made
me quiet she talked me to sleep—in a low voice—about the spring
creeping into a garden.”
“That sounds soothing,” said Dr. Craven, more perplexed than ever and
glancing sideways at Mistress Mary sitting on her stool and looking
down silently at the carpet. “You are evidently better, but you must
remember—”
“I don’t want to remember,” interrupted the Rajah, appearing again.
“When I lie by myself and remember I begin to have pains everywhere and
I think of things that make me begin to scream because I hate them so.
If there was a doctor anywhere who could make you forget you were ill
instead of remembering it I would have him brought here.” And he waved
a thin hand which ought really to have been covered with royal signet
rings made of rubies. “It is because my cousin makes me forget that she
makes me better.”
Dr. Craven had never made such a short stay after a “tantrum”; usually
he was obliged to remain a very long time and do a great many things.
This afternoon he did not give any medicine or leave any new orders and
he was spared any disagreeable scenes. When he went downstairs he
looked very thoughtful and when he talked to Mrs. Medlock in the
library she felt that he was a much puzzled man.
“Well, sir,” she ventured, “could you have believed it?”
“It is certainly a new state of affairs,” said the doctor. “And there’s
no denying it is better than the old one.”
“I believe Susan Sowerby’s right—I do that,” said Mrs. Medlock. “I
stopped in her cottage on my way to Thwaite yesterday and had a bit of
talk with her. And she says to me, ‘Well, Sarah Ann, she mayn’t be a
good child, an’ she mayn’t be a pretty one, but she’s a child, an’
children needs children.’ We went to school together, Susan Sowerby and
me.”
“She’s the best sick nurse I know,” said Dr. Craven. “When I find her
in a cottage I know the chances are that I shall save my patient.”
Mrs. Medlock smiled. She was fond of Susan Sowerby.
“She’s got a way with her, has Susan,” she went on quite volubly. “I’ve
been thinking all morning of one thing she said yesterday. She says,
‘Once when I was givin’ th’ children a bit of a preach after they’d
been fightin’ I ses to ’em all, “When I was at school my jography told
as th’ world was shaped like a orange an’ I found out before I was ten
that th’ whole orange doesn’t belong to nobody. No one owns more than
his bit of a quarter an’ there’s times it seems like there’s not enow
quarters to go round. But don’t you—none o’ you—think as you own th’
whole orange or you’ll find out you’re mistaken, an’ you won’t find it
out without hard knocks.” ‘What children learns from children,’ she
says, ‘is that there’s no sense in grabbin’ at th’ whole orange—peel
an’ all. If you do you’ll likely not get even th’ pips, an’ them’s too
bitter to eat.’”
“She’s a shrewd woman,” said Dr. Craven, putting on his coat.
“Well, she’s got a way of saying things,” ended Mrs. Medlock, much
pleased. “Sometimes I’ve said to her, ‘Eh! Susan, if you was a
different woman an’ didn’t talk such broad Yorkshire I’ve seen the
times when I should have said you was clever.’”
That night Colin slept without once awakening and when he opened his
eyes in the morning he lay still and smiled without knowing it—smiled
because he felt so curiously comfortable. It was actually nice to be
awake, and he turned over and stretched his limbs luxuriously. He felt
as if tight strings which had held him had loosened themselves and let
him go. He did not know that Dr. Craven would have said that his nerves
had relaxed and rested themselves. Instead of lying and staring at the
wall and wishing he had not awakened, his mind was full of the plans he
and Mary had made yesterday, of pictures of the garden and of Dickon
and his wild creatures. It was so nice to have things to think about.
And he had not been awake more than ten minutes when he heard feet
running along the corridor and Mary was at the door. The next minute
she was in the room and had run across to his bed, bringing with her a
waft of fresh air full of the scent of the morning.
“You’ve been out! You’ve been out! There’s that nice smell of leaves!”
he cried.
She had been running and her hair was loose and blown and she was
bright with the air and pink-cheeked, though he could not see it.
“It’s so beautiful!” she said, a little breathless with her speed. “You
never saw anything so beautiful! It has _come!_ I thought it had come
that other morning, but it was only coming. It is here now! It has
come, the Spring! Dickon says so!”
“Has it?” cried Colin, and though he really knew nothing about it he
felt his heart beat. He actually sat up in bed.
“Open the window!” he added, laughing half with joyful excitement and
half at his own fancy. “Perhaps we may hear golden trumpets!”
And though he laughed, Mary was at the window in a moment and in a
moment more it was opened wide and freshness and softness and scents
and birds’ songs were pouring through.
“That’s fresh air,” she said. “Lie on your back and draw in long
breaths of it. That’s what Dickon does when he’s lying on the moor. He
says he feels it in his veins and it makes him strong and he feels as
if he could live forever and ever. Breathe it and breathe it.”
She was only repeating what Dickon had told her, but she caught Colin’s
fancy.
“’Forever and ever’! Does it make him feel like that?” he said, and he
did as she told him, drawing in long deep breaths over and over again
until he felt that something quite new and delightful was happening to
him.
Mary was at his bedside again.