Chapter 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. 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 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 all nearly 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. She was playing by herself under a tree, just as she had been playing the day the cholera broke out. Basil came and stood near to watch her and suddenly made a suggestion.

    “Why don’t you put a heap of stones there and pretend it is a rockery?” he said.

    “Go away!” cried Mary. “I don’t want boys. Go away!”

    For a moment Basil looked angry, and then he began to tease. 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 after that as long as she stayed with them they called her “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary”.

    “You are going to be sent home,” Basil said to her one day, “at the end of the week. And we’re glad of it.”

    “I am glad of it, too,” answered Mary. “Where is home?”

    “You are going to your uncle. His name is Mr. Archibald Craven. I heard father and mother talking about him. He lives in a big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes near him. 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.

    When Mrs. Crawford told her that night that she was going to sail away to England in a few days and going to her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, who lived at Misselthwaite Manor, she looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested that she did not know what to think about her.

    Mary made the long voyage to England under the care of an officer’s wife, who was very much absorbed in her own little boy and girl, and was tather glad to hand Mary over to the woman Mr. Archibald Craven sent to meet her in London. The woman was his housekeeper at Misselthwaite Mannor, and her name was Mrs. Medlock. She was a stout woman, with very red cheeks and sharp black eyes. Mary did not like her at all, but as she very seldom liked people there was nothing remarkable in that.

    “My word! She’s a plain little piece of goods!”she said. “And we’d heard that her mother was 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-naturedy. “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!”

    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 did not know that this was because she was a disagreeable child. 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. 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. But Mrs. Medlock was not in the least disturbed by her and her thoughts. She had not wanted to go to London, 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. “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 Iam their daughter’s guardian. The child is to be brought here. You must go to London and bring her yourself.”

    Mary sat in her corner of the railway carriage and looked plain and fretful. Mrs. Medlock 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.

    “I suppose you might as well be told something – to prepare you. You are going to a queer place.” Mary said nothing at all.

    “It’s a grand big place in a gloomy way. 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 trees with branches trailing to the ground – some of them.”

    It all sounded so unlike India. But may 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 srong. 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 was a sweet, pretty thing. 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.

    “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. She stared out of the window with her lips pinched together.

    “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 desere all that had happened to him.