say “please” and “thank you” and Mary had always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry. She wondered a little what this girl would do if one slapped her in the face. She was a round, rosy, good- natured-looking creature, but she had a sturdy way which made Mistress Mary wonder if she might not even slap back- if the person who slapped her was only a little girl.
“You are a strange servant,” she said from her pillows, rather haughtily.
Martha sat up on her heels, with her blacking-brush in her hand, and laughed, without seeming the least out of temper.
“Eh! I know that,” she said. “If there was a grand Missus at Misselthwaite I should never have been even one of th' under house-maids. I might have been let to be scullery maid [43]but I'd never have been let upstairs. I'm too common an' I talk too much Yorkshire. But this is a funny house for all it's so grand. Seems like there's neither Master nor Mistress except Mr. Pitcher an' Mrs. Medlock. Mr. Craven, he won't be troubled about anythin' when he's here, an' he's nearly always away. Mrs. Medlock gave me th' place out o' kindness. She told me she could never have done it if Misselthwaite had been like other big houses.”
“Are you going to be my servant?” Mary asked, still in her imperious little Indian way.
Martha began to rub her grate again.
Martha did not expect to hear that. She was so amazed. She began to speak in broad Yorkshire but Mary did not understand her at all. At first Martha thought that Mary was a black. These words made Mary furious. She began to call Martha bad words. She did not even try to control her rage and humiliation. Somehow she suddenly felt so horribly lonely and she threw herself face downward on the pillows and burst into tears. She cried so loud that good-natured Martha was a little frightened and quite sorry for her. She bent over her and beg her pardon. There was something comforting and really friendly in her queer Yorkshire speech and Mary gradually stopped crying and became quiet. Martha looked relieved. When Mary at last decided to get up, the clothes Martha took from the wardrobe were not the ones she had worn when she arrived the night before with Mrs. Medlock. The dressing process was one which taught them both something. Martha had “buttoned up” her little sisters and brothers but she had never seen a child who stood still and waited for another person to do things for her as if she had neither hands nor feet of her own.
It had not been the custom that Mistress Mary should do anything but stand and allow herself to be dressed like a doll, but before she was ready for breakfast she began to suspect that her life at Misselthwaite Manor would end by teaching her a number of things quite new to her-things such as putting on her own shoes and stockings, and picking up things she let fall. If Martha had been a well-trained fine young lady's maid she would have been more subservient [44] [45] and respectful and would have known that it was her business to brush hair, and button boots, and pick things up and lay them away. She was, however, only an untrained Yorkshire rustic1 who had been brought up in a moorland cottage with a swarm of little brothers and sisters who had never dreamed of doing anything but waiting on themselves and on the younger ones who were either babies in arms or just learning to totter about and tumble over [46] things.
At first Mary listened to Martha very coldly and wondered at her freedom of manner. But later she began to notice what she was saying. Martha told Mary about her family and especially about Dickon who liked animals and had his own pony.
Mary had never possessed an animal pet of her own and had always thought she should like one. So she began to feel a slight interest in Dickon, and as she had never before been interested in any one but herself, it was the dawning of a healthy sentiment [47] When she went into the room which had been made into a nursery for her, she found that it was rather like the one she had slept in. It was not a child's room, but a grown-up person's room, with gloomy old pictures on the walls and heavy old oak chairs. A table in the center was set with a good substantial breakfast. But she had always had a very small appetite, and she looked with something more than indifference at the first plate Martha set before her.
Martha made her eat porridge but she did not want. She said that she did not know what it was to be hungry. Martha looked indignant. She said if Dickon and Phil had been there they would have eaten the whole breakfast. She also added that when she had a day off she would go home to help her mother. Listening to her, Mary drank some tea and ate a little toast and some marmalade. After that Martha said to Mary to run out and play but she did not want to play alone. Martha convinced her to go by herself just to learn to play like other children did when they did not have sisters and brothers. Martha found her coat and hat for her and a pair of stout little boots and she showed her her way downstairs. She warned her that one of the gardens was locked up. No one had been in it for ten years. There was another locked door added to the hundred in the strange house. Mr. Craven had it shut when his wife died so sudden. He won't let no one go inside. It was her garden. He locked the door and dug a hole and buried the key.
After she was gone Mary turned down the walk which led to the door in the shrubbery [48]. She could not help thinking about the garden which no one had been into for ten years. She wondered what it would look like and whether there were any flowers still alive in it. When she had passed through the shrubbery gate she found herself in great gardens, with wide lawns and winding walks with clipped borders. There were trees, and flower-beds, and evergreens [49]clipped into strange shapes, and a large pool with an old gray fountain in its midst. But the flower-beds were bare and wintry and the fountain was not playing. This was not the garden which was shut up. How could a garden be shut up? You could always walk into a garden.
She was just thinking this when she saw that, at the end of the path she was following, there seemed to be a long wall, with ivy growing over it. She was not familiar enough with England to know that she was coming upon the kitchengardens where the vegetables and fruit were growing. She went toward the wall and found that there was a green door in the ivy [50], and that it stood open. This was not the closed garden, evidently, and she could go into it.
She went through the door and found that it was a garden with walls all round it and that it was only one of several walled gardens which seemed to open into one another. She saw another open green door. The place was bare and ugly enough, Mary thought, as she stood and stared about her. Presently an old man with a spade over his shoulder walked through the door leading from the second garden. He did not seem at all pleased to see her. Mary asked a permission to go to the kitchen-garden. The old man allowed her to do that. She went down the path and through the second green door. There, she found more walls, but in the second wall there was another green door and it was not open. Perhaps it led into the garden which no one had seen for ten years. Mary went to the green door and turned the handle. It opened quite easily and she walked through it and found herself in an orchard. There were walls all round it also and trees trained against them but there was no green door to be seen anywhere. Mary looked for it, and yet when she had entered the upper end of the garden she had noticed that the wall did not seem to end with the orchard but to extend beyond it as if it enclosed a place at the other side. She could see the tops of trees above the wall, and when she stood still she saw a bird sitting on the topmost branch of one of them, and suddenly he burst into his winter song.
She stopped and listened to him and somehow his cheerful, friendly little whistle gave her a pleased feeling- even a disagreeable little girl may be lonely, and the big closed house and big bare moor and big bare gardens had made this one feel as if there was no one left in the world but herself. If she had been an affectionate child, who had been used to being loved, she would have broken
