The Secret Garden: The Door in the Wall

Martha’s mother had sent Mary a present from her own scarce wages: a skipping-rope with red and blue handles, the first Mary had ever seen.Martha showed her how to use it, skipping easily up to a hundred, and told Mary the fresh air and exercise would do her nothing but good.Out in the garden, Mary practiced skipping every day, her cheeks growing redder and her legs growing stronger, until even old Ben Weatherstaff admitted he could hardly believe the change in her.

One day, while skipping down her favorite walk, she noticed the robin swaying on a branch of ivy that grew thick along the old garden wall.“You showed me where the key was yesterday,” she said to it. “You ought to show me the door today — but I don’t believe you know!”Just then a gust of wind swung the ivy aside, and Mary saw, half-hidden beneath the leaves, a round iron knob she had never noticed before.

Her heart pounding, she pulled the leaves aside with both hands, and underneath found a keyhole set into an old wooden door.She took the key from her pocket, fit it into the lock, and turned it with both hands until, at last, it gave way.She looked behind her to make sure no one was watching, pushed the old door slowly open, and slipped through it into the secret garden at last.

Inside, the walls were covered with the bare, tangled stems of climbing roses, and gray branches arched between the trees like the ruins of some forgotten, fairy-tale house.“How still it is,” Mary whispered to herself. “I am the first person who has spoken in here for ten years.”She walked slowly beneath the gray archways, wondering whether the whole garden was quite dead, or whether some of it might still be alive underneath.

Near one of the old flowerbeds, she knelt down and found tiny pale-green points pushing up out of the black earth.“It isn’t a quite dead garden!” she cried out softly. “Even if the roses are dead, there are other things alive.”She found a sharp piece of wood and began clearing away the weeds and thick grass crowding around the tiny green shoots, so they could breathe.

She worked happily for hours, clearing space around dozens of the little points, until at last she remembered it was long past time for her midday dinner.“I shall come back this afternoon,” she said, looking all around at what already felt like a whole new kingdom of her very own.