The Secret Garden
“Eh!” he said, “that sounds as if tha’d got wits enow. Tha’rt a
Yorkshire lad for sure. An’ tha’rt diggin’, too. How’d tha’ like to
plant a bit o’ somethin’? I can get thee a rose in a pot.”
“Go and get it!” said Colin, digging excitedly. “Quick! Quick!”
It was done quickly enough indeed. Ben Weatherstaff went his way
forgetting rheumatics. Dickon took his spade and dug the hole deeper
and wider than a new digger with thin white hands could make it. Mary
slipped out to run and bring back a watering-can. When Dickon had
deepened the hole Colin went on turning the soft earth over and over.
He looked up at the sky, flushed and glowing with the strangely new
exercise, slight as it was.
“I want to do it before the sun goes quite—quite down,” he said.
Mary thought that perhaps the sun held back a few minutes just on
purpose. Ben Weatherstaff brought the rose in its pot from the
greenhouse. He hobbled over the grass as fast as he could. He had begun
to be excited, too. He knelt down by the hole and broke the pot from
the mould.
“Here, lad,” he said, handing the plant to Colin. “Set it in the earth
thysel’ same as th’ king does when he goes to a new place.”
The thin white hands shook a little and Colin’s flush grew deeper as he
set the rose in the mould and held it while old Ben made firm the
earth. It was filled in and pressed down and made steady. Mary was
leaning forward on her hands and knees. Soot had flown down and marched
forward to see what was being done. Nut and Shell chattered about it
from a cherry-tree.
“It’s planted!” said Colin at last. “And the sun is only slipping over
the edge. Help me up, Dickon. I want to be standing when it goes.
That’s part of the Magic.”
And Dickon helped him, and the Magic—or whatever it was—so gave him
strength that when the sun did slip over the edge and end the strange
lovely afternoon for them there he actually stood on his two
feet—laughing.
CHAPTER XXIII.
MAGIC
Dr. Craven had been waiting some time at the house when they returned
to it. He had indeed begun to wonder if it might not be wise to send
someone out to explore the garden paths. When Colin was brought back to
his room the poor man looked him over seriously.
“You should not have stayed so long,” he said. “You must not overexert
yourself.”
“I am not tired at all,” said Colin. “It has made me well. Tomorrow I
am going out in the morning as well as in the afternoon.”
“I am not sure that I can allow it,” answered Dr. Craven. “I am afraid
it would not be wise.”
“It would not be wise to try to stop me,” said Colin quite seriously.
“I am going.”
Even Mary had found out that one of Colin’s chief peculiarities was
that he did not know in the least what a rude little brute he was with
his way of ordering people about. He had lived on a sort of desert
island all his life and as he had been the king of it he had made his
own manners and had had no one to compare himself with. Mary had indeed
been rather like him herself and since she had been at Misselthwaite
had gradually discovered that her own manners had not been of the kind
which is usual or popular. Having made this discovery she naturally
thought it of enough interest to communicate to Colin. So she sat and
looked at him curiously for a few minutes after Dr. Craven had gone.
She wanted to make him ask her why she was doing it and of course she
did.
“What are you looking at me for?” he said.
“I’m thinking that I am rather sorry for Dr. Craven.”
“So am I,” said Colin calmly, but not without an air of some
satisfaction. “He won’t get Misselthwaite at all now I’m not going to
die.”
“I’m sorry for him because of that, of course,” said Mary, “but I was
thinking just then that it must have been very horrid to have had to be
polite for ten years to a boy who was always rude. I would never have
done it.”
“Am I rude?” Colin inquired undisturbedly.
“If you had been his own boy and he had been a slapping sort of man,”
said Mary, “he would have slapped you.”
“But he daren’t,” said Colin.
“No, he daren’t,” answered Mistress Mary, thinking the thing out quite
without prejudice. “Nobody ever dared to do anything you didn’t
like—because you were going to die and things like that. You were such
a poor thing.”
“But,” announced Colin stubbornly, “I am not going to be a poor thing.
I won’t let people think I’m one. I stood on my feet this afternoon.”
“It is always having your own way that has made you so queer,” Mary
went on, thinking aloud.
Colin turned his head, frowning.
“Am I queer?” he demanded.
“Yes,” answered Mary, “very. But you needn’t be cross,” she added
impartially, “because so am I queer—and so is Ben Weatherstaff. But I
am not as queer as I was before I began to like people and before I
found the garden.”
“I don’t want to be queer,” said Colin. “I am not going to be,” and he
frowned again with determination.
He was a very proud boy. He lay thinking for a while and then Mary saw
his beautiful smile begin and gradually change his whole face.
“I shall stop being queer,” he said, “if I go every day to the garden.
There is Magic in there—good Magic, you know, Mary. I am sure there
is.”
“So am I,” said Mary.
“Even if it isn’t real Magic,” Colin said, “we can pretend it is.
_Something_ is there—_something!_”
“It’s Magic,” said Mary, “but not black. It’s as white as snow.”
They always called it Magic and indeed it seemed like it in the months
that followed—the wonderful months—the radiant months—the amazing ones.
Oh! the things which happened in that garden! If you have never had a
garden you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden you will
know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass
there. At first it seemed that green things would never cease pushing
their way through the earth, in the grass, in the beds, even in the
crevices of the walls. Then the green things began to show buds and the
buds began to unfurl and show color, every shade of blue, every shade
of purple, every tint and hue of crimson. In its happy days flowers had
been tucked away into every inch and hole and corner. Ben Weatherstaff
had seen it done and had himself scraped out mortar from between the
bricks of the wall and made pockets of earth for lovely clinging things
to grow on. Iris and white lilies rose out of the grass in sheaves, and
the green alcoves filled themselves with amazing armies of the blue and
white flower lances of tall delphiniums or columbines or campanulas.
“She was main fond o’ them—she was,” Ben Weatherstaff said. “She liked
them things as was allus pointin’ up to th’ blue sky, she used to tell.
Not as she was one o’ them as looked down on th’ earth—not her. She
just loved it but she said as th’ blue sky allus looked so joyful.”
The seeds Dickon and Mary had planted grew as if fairies had tended
them. Satiny poppies of all tints danced in the breeze by the score,
gaily defying flowers which had lived in the garden for years and which
it might be confessed seemed rather to wonder how such new people had
got there. And the roses—the roses! Rising out of the grass, tangled
round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their
branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long
garlands falling in cascades—they came alive day by day, hour by hour.
Fair fresh leaves, and buds—and buds—tiny at first but swelling and
working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent
delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden
air.
Colin saw it all, watching each change as it took place. Every morning
he was brought out and every hour of each day when it didn’t rain he
spent in the garden. Even gray days pleased him. He would lie on the
grass “watching things growing,” he said. If you watched long enough,
he declared, you could see buds unsheath themselves. Also you could
make the acquaintance of strange busy insect things running about on
various unknown but evidently serious errands, sometimes carrying tiny
scraps of straw or feather or food, or climbing blades of grass as if
they were trees from whose tops one could look out to explore the
country. A mole throwing up its mound at the end of its burrow and
making its way out at last with the long-nailed paws which looked so
like elfish hands, had absorbed him one whole morning. Ants’ ways,
beetles’ ways, bees’ ways, frogs’ ways, birds’ ways, plants’ ways, gave
him a new world to explore and when Dickon revealed them all and added
foxes’ ways, otters’ ways, ferrets’ ways, squirrels’ ways, and trout’
and water-rats’ and badgers’ ways, there was no end to the things to
talk about and think over.
And this was not the half of the Magic. The fact that he had really
once stood on his feet had set Colin thinking tremendously and when
Mary told him of the spell she had worked he was excited and approved
of it greatly. He talked of it constantly.
“Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said wisely
one day, “but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it.
Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen
until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.”
The next morning when they went to the secret garden he sent at once
for Ben Weatherstaff. Ben came as quickly as he could and found the
Rajah standing on his feet under a tree and looking very grand but also
very beautifully smiling.
“Good morning, Ben Weatherstaff,” he said. “I want you and Dickon and
Miss Mary to stand in a row and listen to me because I am going to tell
you something very important.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” answered Ben Weatherstaff, touching his forehead. (One
of the long concealed charms of Ben Weatherstaff was that in his
boyhood he had once run away to sea and had made voyages. So he could
reply like a sailor.)
“I am going to try a scientific experiment,” explained the Rajah. “When
I grow up I am going to make great scientific discoveries and I am
going to begin now with this experiment.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” said Ben Weatherstaff promptly, though this was the
first time he had heard of great scientific discoveries.
It was the first time Mary had heard of them, either, but even at this
stage she had begun to realize that, queer as he was, Colin had read
about a great many singular things and was somehow a very convincing
sort of boy. When he held up his head and fixed his strange eyes on you
it seemed as if you believed him almost in spite of yourself though he
was only ten years old—going on eleven. At this moment he was
especially convincing because he suddenly felt the fascination of
actually making a sort of speech like a grown-up person.
“The great scientific discoveries I am going to make,” he went on,
“will be about Magic. Magic is a great thing and scarcely anyone knows
anything about it except a few people in old books—and Mary a little,
because she was born in India where there are fakirs. I believe Dickon
knows some Magic, but perhaps he doesn’t know he knows it. He charms
animals and people. I would never have let him come to see me if he had
not been an animal charmer—which is a boy charmer, too, because a boy
is an animal. I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not
sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us—like
electricity and horses and steam.”
This sounded so imposing that Ben Weatherstaff became quite excited and
really could not keep still.
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said and he began to stand up quite straight.
“When Mary found this garden it looked quite dead,” the orator
proceeded. “Then something began pushing things up out of the soil and
making things out of nothing. One day things weren’t there and another