Читать книгу The Secret Garden / Таинственный сад - Фрэнсис Элиза Бёрнетт - Страница 3

Mary had liked to look at her mother from a distance and she had thought her very pretty, but as she knew very little of her she could scarcely have been expected to love her or to miss her very much when she was gone. She did not miss her at all, in fact, and as she was a self-absorbed [14] child she gave her entire thought to herself, as she had always done. If she had been older she would no doubt have been very anxious at being left alone in the world, but she was very young, and as she had always been taken care of, she supposed she always would be. What she thought was that she would like to know if she was going to nice people, who would be polite to her and give her her own way as her Ayah and the other native servants had done.

She knew that she was not going to stay at the English clergyman's house where she was taken at first. She did not want to stay. The English clergyman [15] was poor and he had five children nearly all the same age and they wore shabby clothes and were always quarreling and snatching toys from each other. Mary hated their untidy bungalow and was so disagreeable to them that after the first day or two nobody would play with her. By the second day they had given her a nickname which made her furious.

It was Basil who thought of it first and Mary hated him. One day he came up to her while she was playing and began to tease. He made faces, sang and laughed. He called her “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary”.

“You are going to be sent home,” Basil said to her, “at the end of the week. And we're glad of it.”

“I am glad of it, too,” answered Mary. “Where is home?”

“She doesn't know where home is!” said Basil, with sevenyear-old scorn [16]. “It's England, of course. Our grandmama lives there and our sister Mabel was sent to her last year. You are not going to your grandmama. You have none. You are going to your uncle. His name is Mr. Archibald Craven.”

“I don't know anything about him,” snapped Mary.

“I know you don't,” Basil answered. “You don't know anything. Girls never do. I heard father and mother talking about him. He lives in a great, big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes near him. He's so cross he won't let them, and they wouldn't come if he would let them. He's a hunchback[17], and he's horrid[18].”

“I don't believe you,” said Mary; and she turned her back and stuck her fingers in her ears, because she would not listen any more.

Mrs. Crawford began to pity Mary, afterward. She remembered her beautiful mother and she could not understand why Mary did not have pretty manners like her mother had. Mrs. Crawford believed that when Ayah was dead there was no one to take care of the little girl.

Mary made the long voyage to England under the care of an officer's wife, who was taking her children to leave them in a boarding-school. She was very much absorbed in her own little boy and girl, and was rather glad to hand the child over to the woman Mr. Archibald Craven sent to meet her, in London. The woman was his housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor, and her name was Mrs. Medlock. She was a stout[19]woman, with very red cheeks and sharp black eyes. She wore a very purple dress, a black silk mantle with jet fringe[20] on it and a black bonnet[21] with purple velvet flowers which stuck up and trembled when she moved her head. Mary did not like her at all, but as she very seldom liked people there was nothing remarkable in that; besides which it was very evident Mrs. Medlock did not think much of her.

“My word! she's a plain little piece of goods!” she said. “And we'd heard that her mother was a beauty. She hasn't handed much of it down, has she, ma'am?”

“Perhaps she will improve as she grows older,” the officer's wife said good-naturedly. “If she were not so sallow and had a nicer expression, her features are rather good. Children alter so much.”

“She'll have to alter a good deal,” answered Mrs. Medlock. “And, there's nothing likely to improve children at Misselthwaite-if you ask me!” They thought Mary was not listening because she was standing a little apart from them at the window of the private hotel they had gone to. She was watching the passing buses and cabs and people, but she heard quite well and was made very curious about her uncle and the place he lived in. What sort of a place was it, and what would he be like? What was a hunchback? She had never seen one.

Since Mary had been living in other people's houses and had had no Ayah, she had begun to feel lonely. She wanted to belong to anyone like other children. She had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of her. She often thought that other people were disagreeable, but she did not know that she was so herself.

She thought Mrs. Medlock the most disagreeable person she had ever seen, with her common, highly colored face and her common fine bonnet. When the next day they set out on their journey to Yorkshire, she walked through the station to the railway carriage with her head up and trying to keep as far away from her as she could, because she did not want to seem to belong to her. It would have made her angry to think people imagined she was her little girl.

Mrs. Medlock was the kind of woman who would “stand no nonsense from young ones.” She had a comfortable, well paid place as housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor and did at once what Mr. Archibald Craven told her to do. She never dared even to ask a question.

“Captain Lennox and his wife died of the cholera,” Mr. Craven had said in his short, cold way. “Captain Lennox was my wife's brother and I am their daughter's guardian. The child is to be brought here. You must go to London and bring her yourself.”

So she packed her small trunk and made the journey.

Mary sat in her corner of the railway carriage and looked plain and fretful. She had nothing to read or to look at, and she had folded her thin little black-gloved hands in her lap. Her black dress made her look yellower than ever, and her limp light hair straggled from under her black crepe hat [22].

“A more marred-looking [23] young one I never saw in my life,” Mrs. Medlock thought. She had never seen a child who sat so still without doing anything; and at last she got tired of watching her and began to talk in a brisk, hard voice.

Mrs. Medlock asked Mary if she knew anything about your uncle. She said no, because her father and mother had never talked to her about anything in particular. Mrs. Medlock was surprised to hear that and she decided to tell her about the place she was going to.

“Not but that it's a grand big place in a gloomy way, and Mr. Craven's proud of it in his way-and that's gloomy enough, too. The house is six hundred years old and it's on the edge of the moor [24], and there's near a hundred rooms in it, though most of them's shut up and locked. And there's pictures and fine old furniture and things that's been there for ages, and there's a big park round it and gardens and trees with branches trailing to the ground-some of them.” She paused and took another breath. “But there's nothing else,” she ended suddenly.

Mary had begun to listen in spite of herself but she did not care. Suddenly Mrs. Medlock stopped herself as if she had just remembered something in time.

“He's got a crooked back,” she said. “That set him wrong. He was a sour young man and got no good of all his money and big place till he was married.”

Mary's eyes turned toward her in spite of her intention not to seem to care. She had never thought of the hunchback's being married and she was a trifle surprised. Mrs. Medlock saw this, and as she was a talkative woman she continued with more interest. This was one way of passing some of the time, at any rate.

“She was a sweet, pretty thing and he'd have walked the world over to get her a blade o' grass she wanted. Nobody thought she'd marry him, but she did, and people said she married him for his money. But she didn't-she didn't,” positively. “When she died-”

Mary gave a little involuntary jump.

“Oh! did she die!” she exclaimed, quite without meaning to. She had just remembered a French fairy story she had once read called “Riquet a la Houppe.” It had been about a poor hunchback and a beautiful princess and it had made her suddenly sorry for Mr. Archibald Craven.

“Yes, she died,” Mrs. Medlock answered. “And it made him queerer [25] than ever. He cares about nobody. He won't see people. Most of the time he goes away, and when he is at Misselthwaite he shuts himself up in the West Wing and won't let any one but Pitcher see him. Pitcher's an old fellow, but he took care of him when he was a child and he knows his ways.”

It sounded like something in a book and it did not make Mary feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked-a house on the edge of a moor- whatsoever a moor was-sounded dreary. A man with a crooked back who shut himself up also! If the pretty wife had been alive she might have made things cheerful by being something like her own mother. But she was not there any more.

“You needn't expect to see him, because ten to one you won't,” said Mrs. Medlock. “And you mustn't expect that there will be people to talk to you. You'll have to play about and look after yourself. You'll be told what rooms you can go into and what rooms you're to keep out of. There's gardens enough. But when you're in the house don't go wandering [26]and poking about [27]. Mr. Craven won't have it.”

“I shall not want to go poking about,” said sour little Mary and just as suddenly as she had begun to be rather sorry for Mr. Archibald Craven she began to cease [28] to be sorry and to think he was unpleasant enough to deserve all that had happened to him.

Mary turned her face toward the streaming panes of the window of the railway carriage and gazed out at the gray rain-storm. Sooner she fell asleep.