The Secret Garden | Page 4

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 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. Basil was a little boy with impudent
blue eyes and a turned-up nose and Mary hated him. She was playing
by herself under a tree, just as she had been playing the day the cholera
broke out. She was making heaps of earth and paths for a garden and
Basil came and stood near to watch her. Presently he got rather
interested and suddenly made a suggestion.
"Why don't you put a heap of stones there and pretend it is a rockery?"
he said. "There in the middle," and he leaned over her to point.
"Go away!" cried Mary. "I don't want boys. Go away!"
For a moment Basil looked angry, and then he began to tease. He was
always teasing his sisters. He danced round and round her and made
faces and sang and laughed.
"Mistress Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With
silver bells, and cockle shells, And marigolds all in a row."
He sang it until the other children heard and laughed, too; and the
crosser Mary got, the more they sang "Mistress Mary, quite contrary";
and after that as long as she stayed with them they called her "Mistress
Mary Quite Contrary" when they spoke of her to each other, and often
when they spoke to her.
"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 seven-year-old
scorn. "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, and he's horrid."
"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.
But she thought over it a great deal afterward; and when Mrs. Crawford
told her that night that she was going to sail away to England in a few
days and go to her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, who lived at
Misselthwaite Manor, she looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested
that they did not know what to think about her. They tried to be kind to
her, but she only turned her face away when Mrs. Crawford attempted
to kiss her, and held herself stiffly when Mr. Crawford patted her
shoulder.
"She is such a plain child," Mrs. Crawford said pityingly, afterward.
"And her mother was such a pretty creature. She had a very pretty
manner, too, and Mary has the most unattractive ways I ever saw in a
child. The children call her 'Mistress Mary Quite Contrary,' and though
it's naughty of them, one can't help understanding it."
"Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty
manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty
ways too. It is very sad, now the poor beautiful thing is gone, to
remember that many people never even knew that she had a child at
all."
"I believe she scarcely ever looked at her," sighed Mrs. Crawford.
"When her Ayah was dead there was no one to give a thought to the
little thing. Think of the servants running away and leaving her all

alone in that deserted bungalow. Colonel McGrew said he nearly
jumped out of his skin when he opened the door and found her standing
by herself in the middle of the room."
Mary