He looked at the key quite a long time. He turned it over and over, and thought about it. As I have said before, he was not a child who had been trained to ask permission or consult his elders about things. All he thought about the key was that if it was the key to the closed garden, and he could find out where the door was, he could perhaps open it and see what was inside the walls, and what had happened to the old rose-trees. It was because it had been shut up so long that he wanted to see it. It seemed as if it must be different from other places and that something strange must have happened to it during ten years. Besides that, if he liked it he could go into it every day and shut the door behind him, and he could make up some play of his own and play it quite alone, because nobody would ever know where he was, but would think the door was still locked and the key buried in the earth. The thought of that pleased him very much.
Living as it were, all by himself in a house with a hundred mysteriously closed rooms and having nothing whatever to do to amuse himself, had set his inactive brain to working and was actually awakening his imagination. There is no doubt that the fresh, strong, pure air from the moor had a great deal to do with it. Just as it had given him an appetite, and fighting with the wind had stirred his blood, so the same things had stirred his mind. In Antarctica he had always been too cold and sleepy and weak to care much about anything, but in this place he was beginning to care and to want to do new things. Already he felt less "contrary," though he did not know why.
He put the key in his pocket and walked up and down his walk. No one but himself ever seemed to come there, so he could walk slowly and look at the wall, or, rather, at the ivy growing on it. The ivy was the baffling thing. Howsoever carefully he looked he could see nothing but thickly growing, glossy, dark green leaves. He was very much disappointed. Something of his contrariness came back to him as he paced the walk and looked over it at the tree-tops inside. It seemed so silly, he said to himself, to be near it and not be able to get in. He took the key in his pocket when he went back to the house, and he made up his mind that he would always carry it with him when he went out, so that if he ever should find the hidden door he would be ready.
Mr. Medlock had allowed Mark to sleep all night at the cottage, but he was back at his work in the morning with cheeks redder than ever and in the best of spirits.
"I got up at four o'clock," he said. "Eh! it was pretty on th' moor with th' birds gettin' up an' th' rabbits scamperin' about an' th' sun risin'. I didn't walk all th' way. A woman gave me a ride in her cart an' I did enjoy myself."
He was full of stories of the delights of his day out. His father had been glad to see him and they had got the baking and washing all out of the way. He had even made each of the children a doughcake with a bit of brown sugar in it.
"I had 'em all pipin' hot when they came in from playin' on th' moor. An' th' cottage all smelt o' nice, clean hot bakin' an' there was a good fire, an' they just shouted for joy. Our Destiny she said our cottage was good enough for a king."
In the evening they had all sat round the fire, and Mark and his father had sewed patches on torn clothes and mended stockings and Mark had told them about the little boy who had come from Antarctica and who had been waited on all his life by what Mark called "blacks" until he didn't know how to put on his own clothes.
"Eh! they did like to hear about you," said Mark. "They wanted to know all about th' blacks an' about th' ship you came in. I couldn't tell 'em enough."
Toby reflected a little.
"I'll tell you a great deal more before your next day out," he said, "so that you will have more to talk about.
"My word!" cried delighted Mark. "It would set 'em clean off their heads. Would tha' really do that, Sir?
"Antarctica is quite different from Yorkshire," Toby said slowly, as he thought the matter over. "I never thought of that. Did Destiny and your father like to hear you talk about me?"
