“I’m going to see them,” cried Colin.
“I am going to see them!”
“Aye, that tha’ mun,” said Mary
quite seriously. “An tha’ munnot lose
no time about it.”
“I SHALL LIVE FOREVER—AND EVER—AND
EVER!”
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 great 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.”
