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Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment." The next morning when they went to the secret garden he sent at once for Ben Weatherstaff. Ben came as quickly as he could and found the Rajah standing on his feet under a tree and looking very grand but also very beautifully smiling.
This was plain speaking, and Mary Lennox had never heard the truth about herself in her life. Native servants always salaamed and submitted to you, whatever you did. She had never thought much about her looks, but she wondered if she was as unattractive as Ben Weatherstaff and she also wondered if she looked as sour as he had looked before the robin came.
She used the wrong Magic until she made him beat her. If she'd used the right Magic and had said something nice perhaps he wouldn't have got as drunk as a lord and perhaps perhaps he might have bought her a new bonnet." Ben Weatherstaff chuckled and there was shrewd admiration in his little old eyes. "Tha'rt a clever lad as well as a straight-legged one, Mester Colin," he said.
"I've heard Jem Fettleworth's wife say th' same thing over thousands o' times callin' Jem a drunken brute," said Ben Weatherstaff dryly. "Summat allus come o' that, sure enough. He gave her a good hidin' an' went to th' Blue Lion an' got as drunk as a lord." Colin drew his brows together and thought a few minutes. Then he cheered up. "Well," he said, "you see something did come of it.
A scrawny buttermilk-faced young besom, allus askin' questions an' pokin' tha' nose where it wasna' wanted. I never knowed how tha' got so thick wi' me. If it hadna' been for th' robin Drat him " "Ben Weatherstaff," called out Mary, finding her breath. She stood below him and called up to him with a sort of gasp. "Ben Weatherstaff, it was the robin who showed me the way!"
"She was main fond o' them she was," Ben Weatherstaff said. "She liked them things as was allus pointin' up to th' blue sky, she used to tell. Not as she was one o' them as looked down on th' earth not her. She just loved it but she said as th' blue sky allus looked so joyful." The seeds Dickon and Mary had planted grew as if fairies had tended them.
Get thee gone an' play thee. I've done talkin' for to-day." And he said it so crossly that she knew there was not the least use in staying another minute. She went skipping slowly down the outside walk, thinking him over and saying to herself that, queer as it was, here was another person whom she liked in spite of his crossness. She liked old Ben Weatherstaff. Yes, she did like him.
He was very much pleased to see gardening begun on his own estate. He had often wondered at Ben Weatherstaff. Where gardening is done all sorts of delightful things to eat are turned up with the soil. Now here was this new kind of creature who was not half Ben's size and yet had had the sense to come into his garden and begin at once.
"Are all the flowers dead, or do some of them come again in the summer? Are there ever any roses?" "Ask him," said Ben Weatherstaff, hunching his shoulders toward the robin. "He's the only one as knows. No one else has seen inside it for ten year'." Ten years was a long time, Mary thought. She had been born ten years ago. She walked away, slowly thinking.
He lay quite still and listened while she went on talking about the roses which might have clambered from tree to tree and hung down about the many birds which might have built their nests there because it was so safe. And then she told him about the robin and Ben Weatherstaff, and there was so much to tell about the robin and it was so easy and safe to talk about it that she ceased to be afraid.
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