Ben Weatherstaff cried out, “you are a real child instead of a sharp old woman. You talk like Dickon talks to his animals on the moor.”
“Do you know Dickon?” Mary asked.
“Everybody knows him. Dickon is wandering about everywhere. Blackberries and heather-bells know him. Foxes shows him where their cubs lie, skylarks don’t hide their nests from him.”
Chapter V
The cry in the corridor
Each day which passed by for Mary Lennox was exactly like the others. Every morning she awoke in her room and found Martha. Every morning she ate her breakfast in the nursery. After each breakfast she gazed out of the window across to the huge moor. Then she went out. She began to walk quickly or even run along the paths.
One day she woke up and was hungry. When she sat down to her breakfast she did not glance disdainfully at her porridge and push it away, but took up her spoon and began to eat it.
Then she went out. There was nothing else to do. She walked round and round the gardens and wandered about the paths in the park.
One place she went to oftener than to any other. It was the long walk outside the gardens with the walls round them. There were bare flower-beds on either side of it and against the walls ivy grew thickly. There was one part of the wall where the creeping dark green leaves were more bushy than elsewhere.
“Where is that secret garden?” she said to herself.
She ran up the walk to the green door. Then she ran down the path through the other door and then into the orchard.
She walked round and looked closely at the side of the orchard wall, but there was no door in it. Then she ran through the kitchen-gardens again and out into the walk outside the long ivy-covered wall. She walked to the end of it and looked at it, but there was no door; and then she walked to the other end, looking again, but there was no door.
“It’s very queer,” she said. “Ben Weatherstaff said there was no door and there is no door. But Mr. Craven buried the key.”
She stayed out of doors nearly all day, and when she sat down to her supper at night she felt hungry and drowsy and comfortable.
“Why did Mr. Craven hate the garden?” she asked Martha.
“Do you think about that garden?” said Martha.
“Why did he hate it?” Mary persisted.
“Mrs. Medlock says it’s not to be talked about[14]. There are lots of things in this place not to be talked over. That’s Mr. Craven’s order. Listen. It was Mrs. Craven’s garden and she loved it very much. They were planting flowers together. And nobody came into that garden. Mr. Craven and his wife shut the door and stayed there hours and hours, reading and talking. And there was an old tree with a branch. She liked to sit on that branch. But one day when she was sitting there, the branch broke and she fell on the ground and was hurt. Then she died. That’s why he hates it. No one goes there, and he doesn’t let anyone talk about it.”
Mary did not ask any more questions. She looked at the red fire and listened to the wind. But as she was listening to the wind she began to listen to something else. It was a curious sound-a child was crying somewhere. But Mary was sure this sound was inside the house, not outside it. It was far away, but it was inside. She turned round and looked at Martha.
“Do you hear anyone crying?” she said.
Martha suddenly looked confused.
“No,” she answered. “It’s the wind.”
“But listen,” said Mary. “It’s in the house-down one of those long corridors. It is someone crying-and it isn’t a grown-up person.”
Martha ran and shut the door and turned the key.
“It was the wind,” said Martha stubbornly. “Or it was little Betty Butterworth, the scullery-maid[15]. She’s had the toothache all day.”
But Mary did not believe she was speaking the truth.
Chapter VI
“There was someone crying – there was!”
The next day the rain poured down in torrents.
“What do you do in your cottage when it rains like this?” she asked Martha.
“Eh! The biggest ones go out in the cow-shed and play there,” Martha answered. “Dickon doesn’t mind the wet. He goes out just the same[16]. He once found a little fox cub half drowned in its hole and he brought it home to keep it warm. He found a half-drowned young crow another time and he brought it home, too, and tamed it. Its name is Soot because it’s black.”
“I want to have a raven or a fox cub to with it,” said Mary. “But I have nothing.”
Martha looked perplexed.
“Can you knit?” she asked.
“No,” answered Mary.
“Can you sew?”
“No.”
“Can you read?”
“Yes. But I have no books,” said Mary. “Those I had were left in India.”
“That’s a pity,” said Martha. “Ask Mrs. Medlock to go into the library, there are thousands of books there.”
Mary did not ask where the library was, because she was suddenly inspired by a new idea. She decided to go and find it herself. She was not troubled about Mrs. Medlock. Mrs. Medlock was always in her comfortable housekeeper’s sitting-room downstairs. In this queer place one scarcely ever saw anyone at all.
Mrs. Medlock came and looked at her every day, but no one inquired what she did or told her what to do. She supposed that perhaps this was the English custom. In India, her Ayah followed her all the time. Mary was often tired of her company. Now she nobody followed her.
Mary stood at the window for about ten minutes this morning after her breakfast. She was thinking over the new idea. She did not care very much about the library itself, because she read very few books. But the hundred rooms with closed doors! She wondered if they were all really locked. Were there a hundred really? How many doors can she count?
She opened the door of the room and went into the corridor. 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, sometimes they were portraits of men and women in queer, grand costumes. She found herself in one long gallery whose walls were covered with these portraits. She walked slowly down this place and stared at the faces. Some were pictures of children-little girls in thick satin frocks and boys with puffed sleeves and lace collars and long hair, or with big ruffs around their necks.
Suddenly she heard a cry. It was a short one, a fretful, childish whine.
“It’s near,” said Mary.
She put her hand accidentally upon the tapestry near her, and then sprang back. The tapestry was the covering of a door. Suddenly Mrs. Medlock came up 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.”
“You didn’t hear anything!” said the housekeeper. “Come back to your own nursery!”
And she took her by the arm and pushed, 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 here.