When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to
live with her uncle everybody said she was the most
disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was
true, too. She had a little thin face and a little
thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression.
Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because
she had been born in India and had always been ill
in one way or another. Her father had held a
position under the English Government and had always
been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been
a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and
amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted
a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed
her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand
that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must
keep the child out of sight as much as possible.
So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby
she was kept out of the way, and when she became a
sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of
the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly
anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other
native servants, and as they always obeyed her and
gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem
Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying,
by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical
and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young
English governess who came to teach her to read and
write disliked her so much that she gave up her place
in three months, and when other governesses came to
try to fill it they always went away in a shorter
time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen
to really want to know how to read books she would
never have learned her letters at all.
One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine
years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she
became crosser still when she saw that the servant
who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah.
“Why did you come?” she said to the strange
woman. “I will not let you stay. Send
my Ayah to me.”
The woman looked frightened, but she only stammered
that the Ayah could not come and when Mary threw herself
into a passion and beat and kicked her, she looked
only more frightened and repeated that it was not
possible for the Ayah to come to Missie Sahib.
There was something mysterious in the air that morning.
Nothing was done in its regular order and several
of the native servants seemed missing, while those
whom Mary saw slunk or hurried about with ashy and
scared faces. But no one would tell her anything
and her Ayah did not come. She was actually left
alone as the morning went on, and at last she wandered
out into the garden and began to play by herself under
a tree near the veranda. She pretended that she
was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet
hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth, all the
time growing more and more angry and muttering to
herself the things she would say and the names she
would call Saidie when she returned.
