“Barney!” he cried out. “There
is a child here! A child alone! In a place
like this! Mercy on us, who is she!”
“I am Mary Lennox,” the little girl said,
drawing herself up stiffly. She thought the man
was very rude to call her father’s bungalow “A
place like this!” “I fell asleep when
every one had the cholera and I have only just wakened
up. Why does nobody come?”
“It is the child no one ever saw!” exclaimed
the man, turning to his companions. “She
has actually been forgotten!”
“Why was I forgotten?” Mary said, stamping
her foot. “Why does nobody come?”
The young man whose name was Barney looked at her
very sadly. Mary even thought she saw him wink
his eyes as if to wink tears away.
“Poor little kid!” he said. “There
is nobody left to come.”
It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found
out that she had neither father nor mother left; that
they had died and been carried away in the night,
and that the few native servants who had not died also
had left the house as quickly as they could get out
of it, none of them even remembering that there was
a Missie Sahib. That was why the place was so
quiet. It was true that there was no one in the
bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake.
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. She did not miss her at all, in fact, and
as she was a self-absorbed child she gave her entire
thought to herself, as she had always done. If
she had been older she would no doubt have been very
anxious at being left alone in the world, but she was
very young, and as she had always been taken care
of, she supposed she always would be. 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 native
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 nearly all 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 and Mary hated him. She was playing by herself
under a tree, just as she had been playing the day
the cholera broke out. She was making heaps of
earth and paths for a garden and Basil came and stood
near to watch her. Presently he got rather interested
and suddenly made a suggestion.
