The Secret Garden
to peck things out of the earth to persuade her that he had not
followed her. But she knew he had followed her and the surprise so
filled her with delight that she almost trembled a little.
“You do remember me!” she cried out. “You do! You are prettier than
anything else in the world!”
She chirped, and talked, and coaxed and he hopped, and flirted his tail
and twittered. It was as if he were talking. His red waistcoat was like
satin and he puffed his tiny breast out and was so fine and so grand
and so pretty that it was really as if he were showing her how
important and like a human person a robin could be. Mistress Mary
forgot that she had ever been contrary in her life when he allowed her
to draw closer and closer to him, and bend down and talk and try to
make something like robin sounds.
Oh! to think that he should actually let her come as near to him as
that! He knew nothing in the world would make her put out her hand
toward him or startle him in the least tiniest way. He knew it because
he was a real person—only nicer than any other person in the world. She
was so happy that she scarcely dared to breathe.
The flower-bed was not quite bare. It was bare of flowers because the
perennial plants had been cut down for their winter rest, but there
were tall shrubs and low ones which grew together at the back of the
bed, and as the robin hopped about under them she saw him hop over a
small pile of freshly turned up earth. He stopped on it to look for a
worm. The earth had been turned up because a dog had been trying to dig
up a mole and he had scratched quite a deep hole.
Mary looked at it, not really knowing why the hole was there, and as
she looked she saw something almost buried in the newly-turned soil. It
was something like a ring of rusty iron or brass and when the robin
flew up into a tree nearby she put out her hand and picked the ring up.
It was more than a ring, however; it was an old key which looked as if
it had been buried a long time.
Mistress Mary stood up and looked at it with an almost frightened face
as it hung from her finger.
“Perhaps it has been buried for ten years,” she said in a whisper.
“Perhaps it is the key to the garden!”
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ROBIN WHO SHOWED THE WAY
She looked at the key quite a long time. She turned it over and over,
and thought about it. As I have said before, she was not a child who
had been trained to ask permission or consult her elders about things.
All she thought about the key was that if it was the key to the closed
garden, and she could find out where the door was, she could perhaps
open it and see what was inside the walls, and what had happened to the
old rose-trees. It was because it had been shut up so long that she
wanted to see it. It seemed as if it must be different from other
places and that something strange must have happened to it during ten
years. Besides that, if she liked it she could go into it every day and
shut the door behind her, and she could make up some play of her own
and play it quite alone, because nobody would ever know where she was,
but would think the door was still locked and the key buried in the
earth. The thought of that pleased her very much.
Living as it were, all by herself in a house with a hundred
mysteriously closed rooms and having nothing whatever to do to amuse
herself, had set her inactive brain to working and was actually
awakening her imagination. There is no doubt that the fresh, strong,
pure air from the moor had a great deal to do with it. Just as it had
given her an appetite, and fighting with the wind had stirred her
blood, so the same things had stirred her mind. In India she had always
been too hot and languid and weak to care much about anything, but in
this place she was beginning to care and to want to do new things.
Already she felt less “contrary,” though she did not know why.
She put the key in her pocket and walked up and down her walk. No one
but herself ever seemed to come there, so she could walk slowly and
look at the wall, or, rather, at the ivy growing on it. The ivy was the
baffling thing. Howsoever carefully she looked she could see nothing
but thickly growing, glossy, dark green leaves. She was very much
disappointed. Something of her contrariness came back to her as she
paced the walk and looked over it at the tree-tops inside. It seemed so
silly, she said to herself, to be near it and not be able to get in.
She took the key in her pocket when she went back to the house, and she
made up her mind that she would always carry it with her when she went
out, so that if she ever should find the hidden door she would be
ready.
Mrs. Medlock had allowed Martha to sleep all night at the cottage, but
she was back at her work in the morning with cheeks redder than ever
and in the best of spirits.
“I got up at four o’clock,” she said. “Eh! it was pretty on th’ moor
with th’ birds gettin’ up an’ th’ rabbits scamperin’ about an’ th’ sun
risin’. I didn’t walk all th’ way. A man gave me a ride in his cart an’
I did enjoy myself.”
She was full of stories of the delights of her day out. Her mother had
been glad to see her and they had got the baking and washing all out of
the way. She had even made each of the children a doughcake with a bit
of brown sugar in it.
“I had ’em all pipin’ hot when they came in from playin’ on th’ moor.
An’ th’ cottage all smelt o’ nice, clean hot bakin’ an’ there was a
good fire, an’ they just shouted for joy. Our Dickon he said our
cottage was good enough for a king to live in.”
In the evening they had all sat round the fire, and Martha and her
mother had sewed patches on torn clothes and mended stockings and
Martha had told them about the little girl who had come from India and
who had been waited on all her life by what Martha called “blacks”
until she didn’t know how to put on her own stockings.
“Eh! they did like to hear about you,” said Martha. “They wanted to
know all about th’ blacks an’ about th’ ship you came in. I couldn’t
tell ’em enough.”
Mary reflected a little.
“I’ll tell you a great deal more before your next day out,” she said,
“so that you will have more to talk about. I dare say they would like
to hear about riding on elephants and camels, and about the officers
going to hunt tigers.”
“My word!” cried delighted Martha. “It would set ’em clean off their
heads. Would tha’ really do that, Miss? It would be same as a wild
beast show like we heard they had in York once.”
“India is quite different from Yorkshire,” Mary said slowly, as she
thought the matter over. “I never thought of that. Did Dickon and your
mother like to hear you talk about me?”
“Why, our Dickon’s eyes nearly started out o’ his head, they got that
round,” answered Martha. “But mother, she was put out about your
seemin’ to be all by yourself like. She said, ‘Hasn’t Mr. Craven got no
governess for her, nor no nurse?’ and I said, ‘No, he hasn’t, though
Mrs. Medlock says he will when he thinks of it, but she says he mayn’t
think of it for two or three years.’”
“I don’t want a governess,” said Mary sharply.
“But mother says you ought to be learnin’ your book by this time an’
you ought to have a woman to look after you, an’ she says: ‘Now,
Martha, you just think how you’d feel yourself, in a big place like
that, wanderin’ about all alone, an’ no mother. You do your best to
cheer her up,’ she says, an’ I said I would.”
Mary gave her a long, steady look.
“You do cheer me up,” she said. “I like to hear you talk.”
Presently Martha went out of the room and came back with something held
in her hands under her apron.
“What does tha’ think,” she said, with a cheerful grin. “I’ve brought
thee a present.”
“A present!” exclaimed Mistress Mary. How could a cottage full of
fourteen hungry people give anyone a present!
“A man was drivin’ across the moor peddlin’,” Martha explained. “An’ he
stopped his cart at our door. He had pots an’ pans an’ odds an’ ends,
but mother had no money to buy anythin’. Just as he was goin’ away our
’Lizabeth Ellen called out, ‘Mother, he’s got skippin’-ropes with red
an’ blue handles.’ An’ mother she calls out quite sudden, ‘Here, stop,
mister! How much are they?’ An’ he says ‘Tuppence’, an’ mother she
began fumblin’ in her pocket an’ she says to me, ‘Martha, tha’s brought
me thy wages like a good lass, an’ I’ve got four places to put every
penny, but I’m just goin’ to take tuppence out of it to buy that child
a skippin’-rope,’ an’ she bought one an’ here it is.”
She brought it out from under her apron and exhibited it quite proudly.
It was a strong, slender rope with a striped red and blue handle at
each end, but Mary Lennox had never seen a skipping-rope before. She
gazed at it with a mystified expression.
“What is it for?” she asked curiously.
“For!” cried out Martha. “Does tha’ mean that they’ve not got
skippin’-ropes in India, for all they’ve got elephants and tigers and
camels! No wonder most of ’em’s black. This is what it’s for; just
watch me.”
And she ran into the middle of the room and, taking a handle in each
hand, began to skip, and skip, and skip, while Mary turned in her chair
to stare at her, and the queer faces in the old portraits seemed to
stare at her, too, and wonder what on earth this common little cottager
had the impudence to be doing under their very noses. But Martha did
not even see them. The interest and curiosity in Mistress Mary’s face
delighted her, and she went on skipping and counted as she skipped
until she had reached a hundred.
“I could skip longer than that,” she said when she stopped. “I’ve
skipped as much as five hundred when I was twelve, but I wasn’t as fat
then as I am now, an’ I was in practice.”
Mary got up from her chair beginning to feel excited herself.
“It looks nice,” she said. “Your mother is a kind woman. Do you think I
could ever skip like that?”
“You just try it,” urged Martha, handing her the skipping-rope. “You
can’t skip a hundred at first, but if you practice you’ll mount up.
That’s what mother said. She says, ‘Nothin’ will do her more good than
skippin’ rope. It’s th’ sensiblest toy a child can have. Let her play
out in th’ fresh air skippin’ an’ it’ll stretch her legs an’ arms an’
give her some strength in ’em.’”
It was plain that there was not a great deal of strength in Mistress
Mary’s arms and legs when she first began to skip. She was not very
clever at it, but she liked it so much that she did not want to stop.
“Put on tha’ things and run an’ skip out o’ doors,” said Martha.
“Mother said I must tell you to keep out o’ doors as much as you could,
even when it rains a bit, so as tha’ wrap up warm.”
Mary put on her coat and hat and took her skipping-rope over her arm.
She opened the door to go out, and then suddenly thought of something
and turned back rather slowly.
“Martha,” she said, “they were your wages. It was your two-pence
really. Thank you.” She said it stiffly because she was not used to
thanking people or noticing that they did things for her. “Thank you,”
she said, and held out her hand because she did not know what else to
do.
Martha gave her hand a clumsy little shake, as if she was not
accustomed to this sort of thing either. Then she laughed.
“Eh! th’ art a queer, old-womanish thing,” she said. “If tha’d been our
’Lizabeth Ellen tha’d have given me a kiss.”
Mary looked stiffer than ever.
“Do you want me to kiss you?”
Martha laughed again.
“Nay, not me,” she answered. “If tha’ was different, p’raps tha’d want
to thysel’. But tha’ isn’t. Run off outside an’ play with thy rope.”
Mistress Mary felt a little awkward as she went out of the room.
Yorkshire people seemed strange, and Martha was always rather a puzzle
to her. At first she had disliked her very much, but now she did not.