Chapter XX. "I Shall Live Forever--and Ever--And Ever!"

The Secret Garden

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

But they were obliged to wait more than a week because first
there came some very windy days and then Colin was threatened with a
cold, which two things happening one after the other would no doubt
have thrown him into a rage but that there was so much careful and
mysterious planning to do and almost every day Dickon came in, if
only for a few minutes, to talk about what was happening on the moor
and in the lanes and hedges and on the borders of streams. The
things he had to tell about otters' and badgers' and water-rats'
houses, not to mention birds' nests and field-mice and their burrows,
were enough to make you almost tremble with excitement when you heard
all the intimate details from an animal charmer and realized with
what thrilling eagerness and anxiety the whole busy underworld was
working.

"They're same as us," said Dickon, "only they have to build
their homes every year. An' it keeps 'em so busy they fair scuffle
to get 'em done."

The most absorbing thing, however, was the preparations to be
made before Colin could be transported with sufficient secrecy to the
garden. No one must see the chair-carriage and Dickon and Mary after
they turned a certain corner of the shrubbery and entered upon the
walk outside the ivied walls. As each day passed, Colin had become
more and more fixed in his feeling that the mystery surrounding the
garden was one of its greatest charms. Nothing must spoil that. No
one must ever suspect that they had a secret. People must think that
he was simply going out with Mary and Dickon because he liked them
and did not object to their looking at him. They had long and quite
delightful talks about their route. They would go up this path and
down that one and cross the other and go round among the fountain
flower-beds as if they were looking at the "bedding-out plants" the
head gardener, Mr. Roach, had been having arranged. That would seem
such a rational thing to do that no one would think it at all
mysterious. They would turn into the shrubbery walks and lose
themselves until they came to the long walls. It was almost as
serious and elaborately thought out as the plans of march made by
geat generals in time of war.

Rumors of the new and curious things which were occurring in the
invalid's apartments had of course filtered through the servants'
hall into the stable yards and out among the gardeners, but
notwithstanding this, Mr. Roach was startled one day when he received
orders from Master Colin's room to the effect that he must report
himself in the apartment no outsider had ever seen, as the invalid
himself desired to speak to him.

"Well, well," he said to himself as he hurriedly changed his
coat, "what's to do now? His Royal Highness that wasn't to be looked
at calling up a man he's never set eyes on."

Mr. Roach was not without curiosity. He had never caught even a
glimpse of the boy and had heard a dozen exaggerated stories about
his uncanny looks and ways and his insane tempers. The thing he had
heard oftenest was that he might die at any moment and there had been
numerous fanciful descriptions of a humped back and helpless limbs,
given by people who had never seen him.

"Things are changing in this house, Mr. Roach," said Mrs.
Medlock, as she led him up the back staircase to the corridor on to
which opened the hitherto mysterious chamber.

"Let's hope they're changing for the better, Mrs. Medlock," he
answered.

"They couldn't well change for the worse," she continued; "and
queer as it all is there's them as finds their duties made a lot
easier to stand up under. Don't you be surprised, Mr. Roach, if you
find yourself in the middle of a menagerie and Martha Sowerby's
Dickon more at home than you or me could ever be."

There really was a sort of Magic about Dickon, as Mary always
privately believed. When Mr. Roach heard his name he smiled quite
leniently.

"He'd be at home in Buckingham Palace or at the bottom of a coal
mine," he said. "And yet it's not impudence, either. He's just
fine, is that lad."

It was perhaps well he had been prepared or he might have been
startled. When the bedroom door was opened a large crow, which
seemed quite at home perched on the high back of a carven chair,
announced the entrance of a visitor by saying "Caw--Caw" quite
loudly. In spite of Mrs. Medlock's warning, Mr. Roach only just
escaped being sufficiently undignified to jump backward.

The young Rajah was neither in bed nor on his sofa. He was
sitting in an armchair and a young lamb was standing by him shaking
its tail in feeding-lamb fashion as Dickon knelt giving it milk from
its bottle. A squirrel was perched on Dickon's bent back attentively
nibbling a nut. The little girl from India was sitting on a big
footstool looking on.

"Here is Mr. Roach, Master Colin," said Mrs. Medlock.

The young Rajah turned and looked his servitor over--at least
that was what the head gardener felt happened.

"Oh, you are Roach, are you?" he said. "I sent for you to give
you some very important orders."

"Very good, sir," answered Roach, wondering if he was to receive
instructions to fell all the oaks in the park or to transform the
orchards into water-gardens.

"I am going out in my chair this afternoon," said Colin. "If the
fresh air agrees with me I may go out every day. When I go, none of
the gardeners are to be anywhere near the Long Walk by the garden
walls. No one is to be there. I shall go out about two o'clock and
everyone must keep away until I send word that they may go back to
their work."

"Very good, sir," replied Mr. Roach, much relieved to hear that
the oaks might remain and that the orchards were safe. "Mary," said
Colin, turning to her, "what is that thing you say in India when you
have finished talking and want people to go?"

"You say, `You have my permission to go,'" answered Mary.

The Rajah waved his hand.

"You have my permission to go, Roach," he said. "But, remember,
this is very important."

"Caw--Caw!" remarked the crow hoarsely but not impolitely.

"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir," said Mr. Roach, and Mrs.
Medlock took him out of the room.

Outside in the corridor, being a rather good-natured man, he
smiled until he almost laughed.

"My word!" he said, "he's got a fine lordly way with him, hasn't
he? You'd think he was a whole Royal Family rolled into one--Prince
Consort and all.".

"Eh!" protested Mrs. Medlock, "we've had to let him trample all
over every one of us ever since he had feet and he thinks that's what
folks was born for."

"Perhaps he'll grow out of it, if he lives," suggested Mr.
Roach.

"Well, there's one thing pretty sure," said Mrs. Medlock. "If he
does live and that Indian child stays here I'll warrant she teaches
him that the whole orange does not belong to him, as Susan Sowerby
says. And he'll be likely to find out the size of his own
quarter."

Inside the room Colin was leaning back on his cushions.

"It's all safe now," he said. "And this afternoon I shall see
it--this afternoon I shall be in it!"

Dickon went back to the garden with his creatures and Mary
stayed with Colin. She did not think he looked tired but he was very
quiet before their lunch came and he was quiet while they were eating
it. She wondered why and asked him about it.

"What big eyes you've got, Colin," she said. "When you are
thinking they get as big as saucers. What are you thinking about
now?"

"I can't help thinking about what it will look like," he
answered.

"The garden?" asked Mary.

"The springtime," he said. "I was thinking that I've really
never seen it before. I scarcely ever went out and when I did go I
never looked at it. I didn't even think about it."

"I never saw it in India because there wasn't any," said
Mary.

Shut in and morbid as his life had been, Colin had more
imagination than she had and at least he had spent a good deal of
time looking at wonderful books and pictures.

"That morning when you ran in and said `It's come! It's come!,
you made me feel quite queer. It sounded as if things were coming
with a great procession and big bursts and wafts of music. I've a
picture like it in one of my books--crowds of lovely people and
children with garlands and branches with blossoms on them, everyone
laughing and dancing and crowding and playing on pipes. That was why
I said, `Perhaps we shall hear golden trumpets' and told you to throw
open the window."

"How funny!" said Mary. "That's really just what it feels like.
And if all the flowers and leaves and green things and birds and
wild creatures danced past at once, what a crowd it would be! I'm
sure they'd dance and sing and flute and that would be the wafts of
music."

They both laughed but it was not because the idea was laughable
but because they both so liked it.

A little later the nurse made Colin ready. She noticed that
instead of lying like a log while his clothes were put on he sat up
and made some efforts to help himself, and he talked and laughed with
Mary all the time.

"This is one of his good days, sir," she said to Dr. Craven, who
dropped in to inspect him. "He's in such good spirits that it makes
him stronger."

"I'll call in again later in the afternoon, after he has come
in," said Dr. Craven. "I must see how the going out agrees with him.
I wish," in a very low voice, "that he would let you go with
him."

"I'd rather give up the case this moment, sir, than even stay
here while it's suggested," answered the nurse. With sudden
firmness.

"I hadn't really decided to suggest it," said the doctor, with
his slight nervousness. "We'll try the experiment. Dickon's a lad
I'd trust with a new-born child."

The strongest footman in the house carried Colin down stairs and
put him in his wheeled chair near which Dickon waited outside. After
the manservant had arranged his rugs and cushions the Rajah waved his
hand to him and to the nurse.

"You have my permission to go," he said, and they both
disappeared quickly and it must be confessed giggled when they were
safely inside the house.

Dickon began to push the wheeled chair slowly and steadily.
Mistress Mary walked beside it and Colin leaned back and lifted his
face to the sky. The arch of it looked very high and the small snowy
clouds seemed like white birds floating on outspread wings below its
crystal blueness. The wind swept in soft big breaths down from the
moor and was strange with a wild clear scented sweetness. Colin kept
lifting his thin chest to draw it in, and his big eyes looked as if
it were they which were listening--listening, instead of his ears.

"There are so many sounds of singing and humming and calling
out," he said. "What is that scent the puffs of wind bring?"

"It's gorse on th' moor that's openin' out," answered Dickon.
"Eh! th' bees are at it wonderful today."

Not a human creature was to be caught sight of in the paths they
took. In fact every gardener or gardener's lad had been witched
away. But they wound in and out among the shrubbery and out and
round the fountain beds, following their carefully planned route for
the mere mysterious pleasure of it. But when at last they turned
into the Long Walk by the ivied walls the excited sense of an
approaching thrill made them, for some curious reason they could not
have explained, begin to speak in whispers.

"This is it," breathed Mary. "This is where I used to walk up
and down and wonder and wonder." "Is it?" cried Colin, and his eyes
began to search the ivy with eager curiousness. "But I can see
nothing," he whispered. "There is no door."

"That's what I thought," said Mary.

Then there was a lovely breathless silence and the chair wheeled
on.

"That is the garden where Ben Weatherstaff works," said Mary.

"Is it?" said Colin.

A few yards more and Mary whispered again.

"This is where the robin flew over the wall," she said.

"Is it?" cried Colin. "Oh! I wish he'd come again!"

"And that," said Mary with solemn delight, pointing under a big
lilac bush, "is where he perched on the little heap of earth and
showed me the key."

Then Colin sat up.

"Where? Where? There?" he cried, and his eyes were as big as the
wolf's in Red Riding-Hood, when Red Riding-Hood felt called upon to
remark on them. Dickon stood still and the wheeled chair stopped.

"And this," said Mary, stepping on to the bed close to the ivy,
"is where I went to talk to him when he chirped at me from the top of
the wall. And this is the ivy the wind blew back," and she took hold
of the hanging green curtain.

"Oh! is it--is it!" gasped Colin.

"And here is the handle, and here is the door. Dickon push him
in--push him in quickly!"

And Dickon did it with one strong, steady, splendid push.

But Colin had actually dropped back against his cushions, even
though he gasped with delight, and he had covered his eyes with his
hands and held them there shutting out everything until they were
inside and the chair stopped as if by magic and the door was closed.
Not till then did he take them away and look round and round and
round as Dickon and Mary had done. And over walls and earth and trees
and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender little
leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the gray urns
in the alcoves and here and there everywhere were touches or splashes
of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow
above his head and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet
pipes and humming and scents and scents. And the sun fell warm upon
his face like a hand with a lovely touch. And in wonder Mary and
Dickon stood and stared at him. He looked so strange and different
because a pink glow of color had actually crept all over him--ivory
face and neck and hands and all.

"I shall get well! I shall get well!" he cried out. "Mary!
Dickon! I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and
ever!"