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‘Then why doesn’t tha’ read somethin’ or learn a bit o’ spellin’? Tha’st old enough to be learnin’ thy book a good bit now.’
‘I haven’t any books,’ said Mary. ‘Those I had were left in India.’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Martha. ‘If Mrs Medlock’d let thee go int’ th’ library, there’s thousands o’ books there.’
Mary did not ask where the library was, because she was suddenly inspired by a new idea. She made up her mind to go and find it herself. She was not troubled about Mrs Medlock. Mrs Medlock seemed always to be in her comfortable housekeeper’s sitting-room downstairs. In this queer place one scarcely ever saw anyone at all. In fact, there was no one to see but the servants, and when their master was away they lived a luxurious life below stairs, where there was a huge kitchen hung about with shining brass and pewter, and a large servants’ hall where there were four or five abundant meals eaten every day, and where a great deal of lively romping went on when Mrs Medlock was out of the way.
Mary’s meals were served regularly, and Martha waited on her, but no one troubled themselves about her in the least. Mrs Medlock came and looked at her every day or two, but no one inquired what she did or told her what to do. She supposed that perhaps this was the English way of treating children. In India she had always been attended by her Ayah, who had followed her about and waited on her, hand and foot. She had often been tired of her company. Now she was followed by nobody and was learning to dress herself, because Martha looked as though she thought she was silly and stupid when she wanted to have things handed to her and put on.
‘Hasn’t tha’ got good sense?’ she said once, when Mary had stood waiting for her to put on her gloves for her. ‘Our Susan Ann is twice as sharp as thee an’ she’s only four year’ old. Sometimes tha’ looks fair soft in th’ head.’
Mary had worn her contrary scowl for an hour after that, but it made her think several entirely new things.
She stood at the window for about ten minutes this morning after Martha had swept up the hearth for the last time and gone downstairs. She was thinking over the new idea which had come to her when she heard of the library. She did not care very much about the library itself, because she had read very few books; but to hear of it brought back to her mind the hundred rooms with closed doors. She wondered if they were all really locked and what she would find if she could get into any of them. Were there a hundred really? Why shouldn’t she go and see how many doors she could count? It would be something to do on this morning when she could not go out. She had never been taught to ask permission to do things, and she knew nothing at all about authority, so she would not have thought it necessary to ask Mrs Medlock if she might walk about the house, even if she had seen her.
She opened the door of the room and went into the corridor, and then she began her wanderings. It was a long corridor and it branched into other corridors and it led her up short flights of steps which mounted to others again. There were doors and doors, and there were pictures on the walls. Sometimes they were pictures of dark, curious landscapes, but oftenest they were portraits of men and women in queer, grand costumes made of satin and velvet. She found herself in one long gallery whose walls were covered with those portraits. She had never thought there could be so many in any house. She walked slowly down this place and stared at the faces, which also seemed to stare at her. She felt as if they were wondering what a little girl from India was doing in their house. Some were pictures of children – little girls in thick satin frocks which reached to their feet and stood out about them, and boys with puffed sleeves and lace collars and long hair, or with big ruffs around their necks. She always stopped to look at the children, and wonder what their names were, and where they had gone, and why they wore such odd clothes. There was a stiff, plain little girl rather like herself. She wore a green brocade dress and held a green parrot on her finger. Her eyes had a sharp, curious look.
‘Where do you live now?’ said Mary aloud to her. ‘I wish you were here.’
Surely no other little girl ever spent such a queer morning. It seemed as if there was no one in all the huge, rambling house but her own small self, wandering about upstairs and down, through narrow passages and wide ones, where it seemed to her that no one but herself had ever walked. Since so many rooms had been built, people must have lived in them, but it all seemed so empty that she could not quite believe it true.
It was not until she climbed to the second floor that she thought of turning the handle of a door. All the doors were shut, as Mrs Medlock had said they were, but at last she put her hand on the handle of one of them and turned it. She was almost frightened for a moment when she felt that it turned without difficulty and that when she pushed upon the door itself it slowly and heavily opened. It was a massive door and opened into a big bedroom. There were embroidered hangings on the wall, and inlaid furniture such as she had seen in India stood about the room. A broad window with leaded panes looked out upon the moor; and over the mantel was another portrait of the stiff, plain little girl who seemed to stare at her more curiously than ever.
‘Perhaps she slept here once,’ said Mary. ‘She stares at me so that she makes me feel queer.’
After that she opened more doors and more. She saw so many rooms that she became quite tired and began to think that there must be a hundred, though she had not counted them. In all of them there were old pictures or old tapestries with strange scenes worked on them. There were curious pieces of furniture and curious ornaments in nearly all of them.
In one room, which looked like a lady’s sitting-room, the hangings were all embroidered velvet, and in a cabinet were about a hundred little elephants made of ivory. They were of different sizes, and some had their mahouts or palanquins on their backs. Some were much bigger than the others and some were so tiny that they seemed only babies. Mary had seen carved ivory in India and she knew all about the elephants. She opened the door of the cabinet and stood on a footstool and played with these for quite a long time. When she got tired she set the elephants in order and shut the door of the cabinet.
In all her wanderings through the long corridors and the empty rooms she had seen nothing alive; but in this room she saw something. Just after she had closed the cabinet door she heard a tiny rustling sound. It made her jump and look around at the sofa by the fireplace, from which it seemed to come. In the corner of the sofa there was a cushion, and in the velvet which covered it there was a hole, and out of the hole peeped a tiny head with a pair of frightened eyes in it.
Mary crept softly across the room to look. The bright eyes belonged to a little grey mouse, and the mouse had eaten a hole into the cushion and made a comfortable nest there. Six baby mice were cuddled up asleep near her. If there was no one else alive in the hundred rooms there were seven mice who did not look lonely at all.
‘If they wouldn’t be so frightened I would take them back with me,’ said Mary.
She had wandered about long enough to feel too tired to wander any further, and she turned back. Two or three times she lost her way by turning down the wrong corridor and was obliged to ramble up and down until she found the right one; but at last she reached her own floor again, though she was some distance from her own room and did not know exactly where she was.
‘I believe I have taken a wrong turning again,’ she said, standing still at what seemed the end of a short passage with tapestry on the wall. ‘I don’t know which way to go. How still everything is!’
It was while she was standing here and just after she had said this that the stillness was broken by a sound. It was another cry, but not quite like the one she had heard last night; it was only a short one, a fretful, childish whine muffled by passing through walls.
‘It’s nearer than it was,’ said Mary, her heart beating rather faster. ‘And it is crying.’
She put her hand accidentally upon the tapestry near her, and then sprang back, feeling quite startled. The tapestry was the covering of a door which fell open and showed her that there was another part of the corridor behind it, and Mrs Medlock was coming up it with her bunch of keys in her hand and a very cross look on her face.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said, and she took Mary by the arm and pulled her away. ‘What did I tell you?’
‘I turned round the wrong corner,’ explained Mary. ‘I didn’t know which way to go and I heard someone crying.’
She quite hated Mrs Medlock at the moment, but she hated her more the next.
‘You didn’t hear anything of the sort,’ said the housekeeper. ‘You come along back to your own nursery or I’ll box your ears.’
And she took her by the arm and half pushed, half pulled her up one passage and down another, until she pushed her in at the door of her own room.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘you stay where you’re told to stay or you’ll find yourself locked up. The master had better get you a governess, same as he said he would. You’re one that needs someone to look sharp after you. I’ve got enough to do.’
She went out of the room and slammed the door after her, and Mary went and sat on the hearth-rug, pale with rage. She did not cry, but ground her teeth.
‘There was someone crying – there was – there was!’ she said to herself.
She had heard it twice now, and some time she would find out. She had found out a great deal this morning. She felt as if she had been on a long journey, and at any rate she had had something to amuse her all the time, and she had played with the ivory elephants and had seen the grey mouse and its babies in their nest in the velvet cushion.
CHAPTER 7 The Key of the Garden (#ulink_57f10a52-c742-54ea-92f5-e6efee0a002a)
Two days after this, when Mary opened her eyes she sat upright in bed immediately, and called to Martha.
‘Look at the moor! Look at the moor!’
The rain-storm had ended and the grey mist and clouds had been swept away in the night by the wind. The wind itself had ceased and a brilliant, deep blue sky arched high over the moorland. Never, never had Mary dreamed of a sky so blue. In India skies were hot and blazing; this was of a deep, cool blue, which almost seemed to sparkle like the waters of some lovely, bottomless lake, and here and there, high, high in the arched blueness, floated small clouds of snow-white fleece. The far-reaching world of the moor itself looked softly blue instead of gloomy purple-black or awful dreary grey.
‘Aye,’ said Martha, with a cheerful grin. ‘Th’ storm’s over for a bit. It does like this at this time o’ th’ year. It goes off in a night like it was pretendin’ it had never been here an’ never meant to come again. That’s because th’ springtime’s on its way. It’s a long way off yet, but it’s comin’.’
‘I thought perhaps it always rained or looked dark in England,’ Mary said.
‘Eh! no!’ said Martha, sitting up on her heels among her black-lead brushes. ‘Nowt o’ th’ soart!’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Mary seriously. In India the natives spoke different dialects which only a few people understood, so she was not surprised when Martha used words she did not know.
Martha laughed as she had done the first morning.
‘There now,’ she said. ‘I’ve talked broad Yorkshire again like Mrs Medlock said I mustn’t. “Nowt o’ th’ soart” means “nothin’ of the sort”,’ slowly and carefully, ‘but it takes so long to say it. Yorkshire’s th’ sunniest place on earth when it is sunny. I told thee tha’d like th’ moor after a bit. Just you wait till you see th’ gold-coloured gorse blossoms an’ th’ blossoms o’ th’ broom, an’ th’ heather flowerin’, all purple bells, an’ hundreds o’ butterflies flutterin’ an’ bees hummin’ an’ skylarks soarin’ up an’ singin’. You’ll want to get out on it at sunrise an’ live out on it all day like Dickon does.’
‘Could I ever get there?’ asked Mary wistfully, looking through her window at the far-off blue. It was so new and big and wonderful and such a heavenly colour.
‘I don’t know,’ answered Martha. ‘Tha’s never used tha’ legs since tha’ was born, it seems to me. Tha’ couldn’t walk five mile. It’s five mile to our cottage.’
‘I should like to see your cottage.’
Martha stared at her a moment curiously before she took up her polishing brush and began to rub the grate again. She was thinking that the small plain face did not look quite as sour at this moment as it had done the first morning she saw it. It looked just a trifle like little Susan Ann’s when she wanted something very much.
‘I’ll ask my mother about it,’ she said. ‘She’s one o’ them that nearly always sees a way to do things. It’s my day out today an’ I’m goin’ home. Eh! I am glad. Mrs Medlock thinks a lot o’ Mother. Perhaps she could talk to her.’
‘I like your mother,’ said Mary.
‘I should think tha’ did,’ agreed Martha, polishing away.
‘I’ve never seen her,’ said Mary.
‘No, tha’ hasn’t,’ replied Martha.
She sat up on her heels again and rubbed the end of her nose with the back of her hand, as if puzzled for a moment, but she ended quite positively.
‘Well, she’s that sensible an’ hard workin’ an’ good natured an’ clean that no one could help likin’ her, whether they’d seen her or not. When I’m going home to her on my day out I just jump for joy when I’m crossin’ th’ moor.’
‘I like Dickon,’ added Mary. ‘And I’ve never seen him.’
‘Well,’ said Martha stoutly. ‘I’ve told thee that th’ very birds like him an’ th’ rabbits an’ wild sheep an’ ponies, an’ th’ foxes themselves. I wonder,’ staring at her reflectively, ‘what Dickon would think of thee?’
‘He wouldn’t like me,’ said Mary in her stiff, cold little way. ‘No one does.’
Martha looked reflective again.
‘How does tha’ like thysel’?’ she inquired, really quite as if she were curious to know.
Mary hesitated a moment and thought it over.
‘Not at all – really,’ she answered. ‘But I never thought of that before.’
Martha grinned a little as if at some homely recollection.
‘Mother said that to me once,’ she said. ‘She was at her washtub an’ I was in a bad temper an’ talkin’ ill of folk an’ she turns round on me an’ says: “Tha’ young vixen, tha’! There tha’ stands sayin’ tha’ doesn’t like this one an’ tha’ doesn’t like that one. How does tha’ like thysel’?” It made me laugh an’ it brought me to my senses in a minute.’
She went away in high spirits as soon as she had given Mary her breakfast. She was going to walk five miles across the moor to the cottage, and she was going to help her mother with the washing and do the week’s baking and enjoy herself thoroughly.
Mary felt lonelier than ever when she knew she was no longer in the house. She went out into the garden as quickly as possible, and the first thing she did was to run round and round the fountain flower garden ten times. She counted the times carefully and when she had finished she felt in better spirits. The sunshine made the whole place look different. The high, deep, blue sky arched over Misselthwaite, as well as over the moor, and she kept lifting her face and looking up into it, trying to imagine what it would be like to lie down on one of the little snow-white clouds and float about. She went into the first kitchen-garden and found Ben Weatherstaff working there with two other gardeners. The change in the weather seemed to have done him good. He spoke to her of his own accord.
‘Springtime’s coming,’ he said. ‘Cannot tha’ smell it?’
Mary sniffed and thought she could.
‘I smell something nice and fresh and damp,’ she said.
‘That’s th’ good rich earth,’ he answered, digging away. ‘It’s in a good humour makin’ ready to grow things. It’s glad when plantin’ time comes. It’s dull in th’ winter when it’s got nowt to do. In th’ flower gardens out there things will be stirrin’ down below in th’ dark. Th’ sun’s warmin’ ’em. You’ll see bits o’ green spikes stickin’ out o’ th’ black earth after a bit.’
‘What will they be?’ asked Mary.
‘Crocuses an’ snowdrops an’ daffydowndillys. Has tha’ never seen them?’
‘No. Everything is hot, and wet, and green after the rains in India,’ said Mary. ‘And I think things grow up in a night.’
‘These won’t grow up in a night,’ said Weatherstaff. ‘Tha’ll have to wait for ’em. They’ll poke up a bit higher here, and push out a spike more there, an’ uncurl a leaf this day an’ another that. You watch ’em.’
‘I am going to,’ answered Mary.
Very soon she heard the soft rustling flight of wings again and she knew at once that the robin had come again. He was very pert and lively, and hopped about so close to her feet, and put his head on one side and looked at her so shyly that she asked Ben Weatherstaff a question.
‘Do you think he remembers me?’ she said.
‘Remembers thee!’ said Weatherstaff indignantly. ‘He knows every cabbage stump in th’ gardens, let alone th’ people. He’s never seen a little wench here before, an’ he’s bent on findin’ out all about thee. Tha’s no need to try to hide anything from him.’
‘Are things stirring down below in the dark in that garden where he lives?’ Mary inquired.
‘What garden?’ grunted Weatherstaff, becoming surly again.
‘The one where the old rose-trees are.’ She could not help asking, because she wanted so much to know. ‘Are all the flowers dead, or do some of them come again in the summer? Are there ever any roses?’
‘Ask him,’ said Ben Weatherstaff, hunching his shoulders towards the robin. ‘He’s the only one as knows. No one else has seen inside it for ten year’.’
Ten years was a long time, Mary thought. She had been born ten years ago.
She walked away, slowly thinking. She had begun to like the garden just as she had begun to like the robin and Dickon and Martha’s mother. She was beginning to like Martha, too. That seemed a good many people to like – when you were not used to liking. She thought of the robin as one of the people. She went to her walk outside the long, ivy-covered wall over which she could see the tree-tops; and the second time she walked up and down the most interesting and exciting thing happened to her, and it was all through Ben Weatherstaff’s robin.
She heard a chirp and a twitter, and when she looked at the bare flower-bed at her left side there he was hopping about and pretending 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. ‘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 towards 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 near by 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 8 The Robin Who Showed the Way (#ulink_3adad8ba-e1a7-53a2-82fd-de3f67275de7)
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 work 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 wall 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 can tell you 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 dough-cake 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.’
