2
Mistress Mary Quite Contrary
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 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 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.”
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 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 woman, with very red cheeks and sharp black eyes.
She wore a very purple dress, a black silk mantle with jete fringe
on it and a black bonnet 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. Perhaps there were none in India.
Since she had been living in other people’s houses
and had had no Ayah, she had begun to feel lonely and to think
queer thoughts which were new to her. She had begun to wonder why
she had never seemed to belong to anyone even when her father and
mother had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their
fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be anyone’s
little girl. She had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one
had taken any notice of her. She did not know that this was because
she was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know
she was disagreeable. She often thought that other people were, 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.
But Mrs. Medlock was not in the least disturbed by
her and her thoughts. She was the kind of woman who would “stand no
nonsense from young ones.” At least, that is what she would have
said if she had been asked. She had not wanted to go to London just
when her sister Maria’s daughter was going to be married, but she
had a comfortable, well paid place as housekeeper at Misselthwaite
Manor and the only way in which she could keep it was to do 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 crepef
hat.
“A more marred-looking young one I never saw in my
life,” Mrs. Medlock thought. (Marred is a Yorkshire word and means
spoiled and pettish.) 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.
“I suppose I may as well tell you something about
where you are going to,” she said. “Do you know anything about your
uncle?”
“No,” said Mary.
“Never heard your father and mother talk about
him?”
“No,” said Mary frowning. She frowned because she
remembered that her father and mother had never talked to her about
anything in particular. Certainly they had never told her
things.
“Humph,” muttered Mrs. Medlock, staring at her
queer, unresponsive little face. She did not say any more for a few
moments and then she began again.
“I suppose you might as well be told something—to
prepare you. You are going to a queer place.”
Mary said nothing at all, and Mrs. Medlock looked
rather discomfited by her apparent indifference, but, after taking
a breath, she went on.
“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, 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. It
all sounded so unlike India, and anything new rather attracted her.
But she did not intend to look as if she were interested. That was
one of her unhappy, disagreeable ways. So she sat still.
“Well,” said Mrs. Medlock. “What do you think of
it?”
“Nothing,” she answered. “I know nothing about such
places.”
That made Mrs. Medlock laugh a short sort of
laugh.
“Eh!” she said, “but you are like an old woman.
Don’t you care?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mary, “whether I care or
not.”
“You are right enough there,” said Mrs. Medlock.
“It doesn’t. What you’re to be kept at Misselthwaite Manor for I
don’t know, unless because it’s the easiest way. He’s not going to
trouble himself about you, that’s sure and certain. He never
troubles himself about no one.”
She 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 à la Houppe.”4 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 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! She stared out of the window with
her lips pinched together, and it seemed quite natural that the
rain should have begun to pour down in gray slanting lines and
splash and stream down the window-panes. If the pretty wife had
been alive she might have made things cheerful by being something
like her own mother and by running in and out and going to parties
as she had done in frocks “full of lace.” 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 and poking about. 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 to be sorry and
to think he was unpleasant enough to deserve all that had happened
to him.
And she turned her face toward the streaming panes
of the window of the railway carriage and gazed out at the gray
rainstorm which looked as if it would go on forever and ever. She
watched it so long and steadily that the grayness grew heavier and
heavier before her eyes and she fell asleep.