Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her,
and stood with her back against it, looking about
her and breathing quite fast with excitement, and
wonder, and delight.
She was standing inside the secret garden.
THE STRANGEST HOUSE ANY ONE EVER LIVED IN
It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place
any one could imagine. The high walls which shut
it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing
roses which were so thick that they were matted together.
Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen
a great many roses in India. All the ground was
covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it
grew clumps of bushes which were surely rose-bushes
if they were alive. There were numbers of standard
roses which had so spread their branches that they
were like little trees. There were other trees
in the garden, and one of the things which made the
place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing
roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils
which made light swaying curtains, and here and there
they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching
branch and had crept from one tree to another and
made lovely bridges of themselves. There were
neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did
not know whether they were dead or alive, but their
thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like
a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls,
and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen
from their fastenings and run along the ground.
It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made
it all look so mysterious. Mary had thought it
must be different from other gardens which had not
been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it
was different from any other place she had ever seen
in her life.
“How still it is!” she whispered.
“How still!”
Then she waited a moment and listened at the stillness.
The robin, who had flown to his tree-top, was still
as all the rest. He did not even flutter his
wings; he sat without stirring, and looked at Mary.
“No wonder it is still,” she whispered
again. “I am the first person who has spoken
in here for ten years.”
She moved away from the door, stepping as softly as
if she were afraid of awakening some one. She
was glad that there was grass under her feet and that
her steps made no sounds. She walked under one
of the fairy-like gray arches between the trees and
looked up at the sprays and tendrils which formed
them.
“I wonder if they are all quite dead,”
she said. “Is it all a quite dead garden?
I wish it wasn’t.”
If she had been Ben Weatherstaff she could have told
whether the wood was alive by looking at it, but she
could only see that there were only gray or brown
sprays and branches and none showed any signs of even
a tiny leaf-bud anywhere.
But she was inside the wonderful garden and
she could come through the door under the ivy any
time and she felt as if she had found a world all
her own.
