Читать книгу Таинственный сад / The secret garden - Фрэнсис-Элиза Ходжсон Бёрнетт - Страница 6

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.