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Chapter XXV
THE CURTAIN
And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every
morning revealed new miracles. In the robin's nest there
were Eggs and the robin's mate sat upon them keeping them
warm with her feathery little breast and careful wings.
At first she was very nervous and the robin himself
was indignantly watchful. Even Dickon did not go
near the close-grown corner in those days, but waited
until by the quiet working of some mysterious spell he
seemed to have conveyed to the soul of the little pair
that in the garden there was nothing which was not quite
like themselves--nothing which did not understand the
wonderfulness of what was happening to them--the immense,
tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity
of Eggs. If there had been one person in that garden
who had not known through all his or her innermost being
that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world
would whirl round and crash through space and come to
an end--if there had been even one who did not feel it
and act accordingly there could have been no happiness
even in that golden springtime air. But they all knew
it and felt it and the robin and his mate knew they knew it.
At first the robin watched Mary and Colin with sharp anxiety.
For some mysterious reason he knew he need not watch Dickon.
The first moment he set his dew-bright black eye on Dickon
he knew he was not a stranger but a sort of robin without
beak or feathers. He could speak robin (which is a quite
distinct language not to be mistaken for any other). To speak
robin to a robin is like speaking French to a Frenchman.
Dickon always spoke it to the robin himself, so the queer
gibberish he used when he spoke to humans did not matter
in the least. The robin thought he spoke this gibberish
to them because they were not intelligent enough to
understand feathered speech. His movements also were robin.
They never startled one by being sudden enough to seem
dangerous or threatening. Any robin could understand Dickon,
so his presence was not even disturbing.
But at the outset it seemed necessary to be on guard
against the other two. In the first place the boy
creature did not come into the garden on his legs.
He was pushed in on a thing with wheels and the skins
of wild animals were thrown over him. That in itself
was doubtful. Then when he began to stand up and move
about he did it in a queer unaccustomed way and the
others seemed to have to help him. The robin used
to secrete himself in a bush and watch this anxiously,
his head tilted first on one side and then on the other.
He thought that the slow movements might mean that he was
preparing to pounce, as cats do. When cats are preparing
to pounce they creep over the ground very slowly.
The robin talked this over with his mate a great deal
for a few days but after that he decided not to speak
of the subject because her terror was so great that he
was afraid it might be injurious to the Eggs.
When the boy began to walk by himself and even to move more
quickly it was an immense relief. But for a long time--or it
seemed a long time to the robin--he was a source of some anxiety.
He did not act as the other humans did. He seemed very
fond of walking but he had a way of sitting or lying down
for a while and then getting up in a disconcerting manner to
begin again.
One day the robin remembered that when he himself had
been made to learn to fly by his parents he had done
much the same sort of thing. He had taken short flights
of a few yards and then had been obliged to rest.
So it occurred to him that this boy was learning to fly--or
rather to walk. He mentioned this to his mate and when he
told her that the Eggs would probably conduct themselves
in the same way after they were fledged she was quite
comforted and even became eagerly interested and derived
great pleasure from watching the boy over the edge of her
nest--though she always thought that the Eggs would be
much cleverer and learn more quickly. But then she said
indulgently that humans were always more clumsy and slow
than Eggs and most of them never seemed really to learn
to fly at all. You never met them in the air or on tree-tops.
After a while the boy began to move about as the others did,
but all three of the children at times did unusual things.
They would stand under the trees and move their arms and legs
and heads about in a way which was neither walking nor
running nor sitting down. They went through these movements
at intervals every day and the robin was never able to
explain to his mate what they were doing or tying to do.
He could only say that he was sure that the Eggs would
never flap about in such a manner; but as the boy who could
speak robin so fluently was doing the thing with them,
birds could be quite sure that the actions were not
of a dangerous nature. Of course neither the robin
nor his mate had ever heard of the champion wrestler,
Bob Haworth, and his exercises for making the muscles
stand out like lumps. Robins are not like human beings;
their muscles are always exercised from the first
and so they develop themselves in a natural manner.
If you have to fly about to find every meal you eat,
your muscles do not become atrophied (atrophied means wasted
away through want of use).
When the boy was walking and running about and digging
and weeding like the others, the nest in the corner was
brooded over by a great peace and content. Fears for
the Eggs became things of the past. Knowing that your
Eggs were as safe as if they were locked in a bank vault
and the fact that you could watch so many curious things
going on made setting a most entertaining occupation.
On wet days the Eggs' mother sometimes felt even a little
dull because the children did not come into the garden.
But even on wet days it could not be said that Mary and
Colin were dull. One morning when the rain streamed down
unceasingly and Colin was beginning to feel a little restive,
as he was obliged to remain on his sofa because it was
not safe to get up and walk about, Mary had an inspiration.
"Now that I am a real boy," Colin had said, "my legs and arms
and all my body are so full of Magic that I can't keep
them still. They want to be doing things all the time.
Do you know that when I waken in the morning, Mary,
when it's quite early and the birds are just shouting
outside and everything seems just shouting for joy--even
the trees and things we can't really hear--I feel as if I
must jump out of bed and shout myself. If I did it,
just think what would happen!"
Mary giggled inordinately.
"The nurse would come running and Mrs. Medlock would
come running and they would be sure you had gone crazy
and they'd send for the doctor," she said.
Colin giggled himself. He could see how they would
all look--how horrified by his outbreak and how amazed
to see him standing upright.
"I wish my father would come home," he said. "I want
to tell him myself. I'm always thinking about it--but we
couldn't go on like this much longer. I can't stand lying
still and pretending, and besides I look too different.
I wish it wasn't raining today."
It was then Mistress Mary had her inspiration.
"Colin," she began mysteriously, "do you know how many
rooms there are in this house?"
"About a thousand, I suppose," he answered.
"There's about a hundred no one ever goes into," said Mary.
"And one rainy day I went and looked into ever so many of them.
No one ever knew, though Mrs. Medlock nearly found me out.
I lost my way when I was coming back and I stopped at
the end of your corridor. That was the second time I
heard you crying."
Colin started up on his sofa.
"A hundred rooms no one goes into," he said. "It sounds
almost like a secret garden. Suppose we go and look at them.
wheel me in my chair and nobody would know we went"
"That's what I was thinking," said Mary. "No one would dare
to follow us. There are galleries where you could run.
We could do our exercises. There is a little Indian
room where there is a cabinet full of ivory elephants.
There are all sorts of rooms."
"Ring the bell," said Colin.
When the nurse came in he gave his orders.
"I want my chair," he said. "Miss Mary and I are going
to look at the part of the house which is not used.
John can push me as far as the picture-gallery because there
are some stairs. Then he must go away and leave us alone
until I send for him again."
Rainy days lost their terrors that morning. When the
footman had wheeled the chair into the picture-gallery
and left the two together in obedience to orders,
Colin and Mary looked at each other delighted. As soon
as Mary had made sure that John was really on his way back
to his own quarters below stairs, Colin got out of his chair.
"I am going to run from one end of the gallery to the other,"
he said, "and then I am going to jump and then we will
do Bob Haworth's exercises."
And they did all these things and many others. They looked
at the portraits and found the plain little girl dressed
in green brocade and holding the parrot on her finger.
"All these," said Colin, "must be my relations.
They lived a long time ago. That parrot one, I believe,
is one of my great, great, great, great aunts. She looks
rather like you, Mary--not as you look now but as you
looked when you came here. Now you are a great deal
fatter and better looking."
"So are you," said Mary, and they both laughed.
They went to the Indian room and amused themselves with
the ivory elephants. They found the rose-colored brocade
boudoir and the hole in the cushion the mouse had left,
but the mice had grown up and run away and the hole was empty.
They saw more rooms and made more discoveries than Mary
had made on her first pilgrimage. They found new corridors
and corners and flights of steps and new old pictures they
liked and weird old things they did not know the use of.
It was a curiously entertaining morning and the feeling
of wandering about in the same house with other people
but at the same time feeling as if one were miles away
from them was a fascinating thing.
"I'm glad we came," Colin said. "I never knew I
lived in such a big queer old place. I like it.
We will ramble about every rainy day. We shall always
be finding new queer corners and things."
That morning they had found among other things such
good appetites that when they returned to Colin's room
it was not possible to send the luncheon away untouched.
When the nurse carried the tray down-stairs she slapped it
down on the kitchen dresser so that Mrs. Loomis, the cook,
could see the highly polished dishes and plates.
"Look at that!" she said. "This is a house of mystery,
and those two children are the greatest mysteries in it."
"If they keep that up every day," said the strong
young footman John, "there'd be small wonder that he
weighs twice as much to-day as he did a month ago.
I should have to give up my place in time, for fear
of doing my muscles an injury."
That afternoon Mary noticed that something new had happened
in Colin's room. She had noticed it the day before but
had said nothing because she thought the change might
have been made by chance. She said nothing today but she
sat and looked fixedly at the picture over the mantel.
She could look at it because the curtain had been drawn aside.
That was the change she noticed.
"I know what you want me to tell you," said Colin,
after she had stared a few minutes. "I always know when
you want me to tell you something. You are wondering why
the curtain is drawn back. I am going to keep it like that."
"Why?" asked Mary.
"Because it doesn't make me angry any more to see her laughing.
I wakened when it was bright moonlight two nights ago
and felt as if the Magic was filling the room and making
everything so splendid that I couldn't lie still.
I got up and looked out of the window. The room was quite
light and there was a patch of moonlight on the curtain
and somehow that made me go and pull the cord. She looked
right down at me as if she were laughing because she was glad
I was standing there. It made me like to look at her.
I want to see her laughing like that all the time.
I think she must have been a sort of Magic person perhaps."
"You are so like her now," said Mary, "that sometimes I
think perhaps you are her ghost made into a boy."
That idea seemed to impress Colin. He thought it over
and then answered her slowly.
"If I were her ghost--my father would be fond of me."
"Do you want him to be fond of you?" inquired Mary.
"I used to hate it because he was not fond of me. If he
grew fond of me I think I should tell him about the Magic.
It might make him more cheerful."
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