Two-Master Toby Quite Contrary

He  knew that he was not going to stay at the English clergyman's house where he was taken at first. He did not want to stay.

The English clergyman was poor and she had five children nearly all the same age and they wore shabby clothes and were always quarreling and snatching toys from each other. Toby hated their untidy house and was so disagreeable to them that after the first day or two nobody would play with him. By the second day they had given him a nickname which made him furious.

 It was Bailey who thought of it first. Bailey was a little girl with impudent blue eyes and a turned-up nose, and Toby hated her. He was playing by himself under a tree, just as he had been playing the day the deadly flu broke out. He was making heaps of earth and paths for a garden and Bailey came and stood near to watch him. Presently she got rather interested and suddenly made a suggestion.

"Why don't you put a heap of stones there and pretend it is a rockery?" she said. "There in the middle," and she leaned over him to point.

"Go away!" cried Toby. "I don't want girls. Go away!"

For a moment Bailey looked angry, and then she began to tease. She was always teasing her brothers. She danced round and round him and made faces and sang and laughed.

"Master Toby, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells, And marigolds all in a row."

The song is really Mistress Mary quite contrary,but she change Mistress Mary to Master Toby since he was a boy. She sang it until the other children heard and laughed, too; and the crosser Toby got, the more they sang "Master Toby, quite contrary"; and after that as long as he stayed with them they called him "Master Toby Quite Contrary" when they spoke of him to each other, and often when they spoke to him.

"You are going to be sent home," Bailey said to him, "at the end of the week. And we're glad of it."

"I am glad of it, too," answered Toby. "Where is home?"

"He doesn't know where home is!" said Bailey, with seven-year-old scorn. "It's England, of course. Our grandpa lives there and our brother Mat was sent to him last year. You are not going to your grandpa. You have none. You are going to your aunt, Her name is Mrs. Amelia Craven."

 "I don't know anything about her," snapped Toby.

"I know you don't," Bailey answered. "You don't know anything. Boys never do. I heard father and mother talking about her. She lives in a great, big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes near her. She's so cross she won't let them, and they wouldn't come if she would let them. She's a hunchback, and she's horrid."

"I don't believe you," said Toby; and he turned his back and stuck his fingers in his ears, because he would not listen any more.

But he thought over it a great deal afterward; and when Mr. Crawford told him that night that he was going to sail away to England in a few days and go to his aunt, Mrs. Amelia Craven, who lived at Misselthwaite Manor, he looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested that they did not know what to think about him. They tried to be kind to him, but he only turned his face away when Mrs. Crawford attempted to kiss him, and held himself stiffly when Mr. Crawford patted his shoulder.

"He is such a plain child," Mrs. Crawford said pityingly, afterward. "And his father was such a handsome creature. He had a very handsome manner, too, and Toby has the most unattractive ways I ever saw in a child. The children call him 'Master Toby Quite Contrary,' and though it's naughty of them, one can't help understanding it."

"Perhaps if his father had carried his handsome face and his handsome manners oftener into the nursery Toby might have learned some handsome ways too. It is very sad, now the poor man is gone, to remember that many people never even knew that he had a child at all."

 "I believe he scarcely ever looked at him," sighed Mrs. Crawford. "When his nurse was dead there was no one to give a thought to the little thing. Think of the servants running away and leaving him all alone in that deserted house. Colonel McGrew said she nearly jumped out of her skin when she opened the door and found him standing by himself in the middle of the room."

Toby made the long voyage to England under the care of an officer's husband, who was taking his children to leave them in a boarding-school. He was very much absorbed in his own little boy and girl, and was rather glad to hand the child over to the man Mrs. Amelia Craven sent to meet him, in London. The man was her housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor, and his name was Mr. Medlock. He was a stout man, with very red cheeks and sharp black eyes. He wore a black suit and a top hat that was black as well. Toby did not like him at all, but as he very seldom liked people there was nothing remarkable in that; besides which it was very evident Mr. Medlock did not think much of him.

"My word! he's a plain little piece of goods!" he said. "And we'd heard that his father was a very handsome man. He hasn't handed much of it down, has he, sir?"

"Perhaps he will improve as he grows older," the officer's husband said good-naturedly. "If he were not so sallow and had a nicer expression, his features are rather good. Children alter so much."

 "He'll have to alter a good deal," answered Mr. Medlock. "And, there's nothing likely to improve children at Misselthwaite-if you ask me!"

 They thought Toby was not listening because he was standing a little apart from them at the window of the private hotel they had gone to. He was watching the passing buses and cabs and people, but he heard quite well and was made very curious about his aunt and the place she lived in. What sort of a place was it, and what would she be like? What was a hunchback? He had never seen one. Perhaps there were none in Antarctica.

Since he had been living in other people's houses and had had no nurse, he had begun to feel lonely and to think queer thoughts which were new to him. He had begun to wonder why he had never seemed to belong to anyone even when his father and mother had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but he had never seemed to really be anyone's little boy. He had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of him. He did not know that this was because he was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, he did not know he was disagreeable. He often thought that other people were, but he did not know that he was so himself.

 He thought Mr. Medlock the most disagreeable person he had ever seen, with his common, highly colored face and his common fine top hat. When the next day came they set out on their journey to Yorkshire, he walked through the station to the railway carriage with his head up and trying to keep as far away from him as he could, because he did not want to seem to belong to him. It would have made him angry to think people imagined he was his little boy.

But Mr. Medlock was not in the least disturbed by him and his thoughts. He was the kind of man who would "stand no nonsense from young ones." At least, that is what he would have said if he had been asked. He had not wanted to go to London just when his brother Justin's son was going to be married, but he had a comfortable, well paid place as housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor and the only way in which he could keep it was to do at once what Mrs. Amelia Craven told him to do. He never dared even to ask a question.

"Captain Drake and her husband died of a deadly flu," Mrs. Craven had said in her short, cold way. "Captain Drake was my husband's sister and I am their son's guardian. The child is to be brought here. You must go to London and bring him yourself."

So he packed his small trunk and made the journey. Toby sat in his corner of the railway carriage and looked plain and fretful. He had nothing to read or to look at, and he had folded his thin little black-gloved hands in his lap. His black suit made him look paler than ever, and his limp dark hair straggled from under his black hat.

"A more marred-looking young one I never saw in my life," Mr. Medlock thought. (Marred is a Yorkshire word and means spoiled and pettish.) He had never seen a child who sat so still without doing anything; and at last he got tired of watching him and began to talk in a brisk, hard voice.

 "I suppose I may as well tell you something about where you are going to," he said. "Do you know anything about your aunt?"

"No," said Toby".

"Never heard your father and mother talk about her?"

"No," said Toby frowning. He frowned because he remembered that his father and mother had never talked to him about anything in particular. Certainly they had never told him things.

"Humph," muttered Mr. Medlock, staring at his queer, unresponsive little face. He did not say any more for a few moments and then he began again.

"I suppose you might as well be told something--to prepare you. You are going to a queer place."

Toby said nothing at all, and Mr. Medlock looked rather discomfited by his apparent indifference, but, after taking a breath, he went on.

"Not but that it's a grand big place in a gloomy way, and Mrs. Craven's proud of it in her way--and that's gloomy enough, too. The house is six hundred years old and it's on the edge of the moor, and there's near a hundred rooms in it, though most of them's shut up and locked. And there's pictures and fine old furniture and things that's been there for ages, and there's a big park round it and gardens and trees with branches trailing to the ground--some of them." He paused and took another breath. "But there's nothing else," he ended suddenly.

Toby had begun to listen in spite of himself. It all sounded so unlike Antarctica, and anything new rather attracted him. But he did not intend to look as if he were interested. That was one of his unhappy, disagreeable ways. So he sat still.

"Well," said Mr. Medlock. "What do you think of it?"

"Nothing," he answered. "I know nothing about such places."

 That made Mr. Medlock laugh a short sort of laugh.

"Eh!" he said, "but you are like an old man. Don't you care?"

"It doesn't matter" said Toby, "whether I care or not."

"You are right enough there," said Mr. Medlock. "It doesn't. What you're to be kept at Misselthwaite Manor for I don't know, unless because it's the easiest way. She's not going to trouble herself about you, that's sure and certain. She never troubles herself about no one."

He stopped himself as if he had just remembered something in time.

"She's got a crooked back," he said. "That set her wrong. She was a sour young woman and got no good of all her money and big place till she was married."

Toby's eyes turned toward him in spite of his intention not to seem to care. He had never thought of the hunchback's being married and he was a trifle surprised. Mr. Medlock saw this, and as he was a talkative man he continued with more interest. This was one way of passing some of the time, at any rate.

"He was a sweet, handsome thing and she'd have walked the world over to get him a blade o' grass he wanted. Nobody thought he'd marry her, but he did, and people said he married her for her money. But he didn't--he didn't," positively. "When he died--"

 Toby gave a little involuntary jump.

"Oh! did he die!" he exclaimed, quite without meaning to. He had just remembered a French fairy story he had once read called "Riquet a la Houppe." It had been about a poor hunchback and a handsome prince and it had made him suddenly sorry for Mrs. Amelia Craven.

"Yes, he died," Mr. Medlock answered. "And it made her queerer than ever. She cares about nobody. She won't see people. Most of the time she goes away, and when she is at Misselthwaite she shuts herself up in the West Wing and won't let any one but Pitcher see her. Pitcher's an old woman, but she took care of her when she was a child and she knows her ways."

It sounded like something in a book and it did not make Toby feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked--a house on the edge of a moor--whatsoever a moor was--sounded dreary. A woman with a crooked back who shut herself up also! He stared out of the window with his lips pinched together, and it seemed quite natural that the rain should have begun to pour down in gray slanting lines and splash and stream down the window-panes. If the handsome husband had been alive he might have made things cheerful by being something like his own father and by running in and out and going to parties as he had done in clothes "fit for Royalty." But he was not there any more.

 "You needn't expect to see her, because ten to one you won't," said Mr. Medlock. "And you mustn't expect that there will be people to talk to you. You'll have to play about and look after yourself. You'll be told what rooms you can go into and what rooms you're to keep out of. There's gardens enough. But when you're in the house don't go wandering and poking about. Mrs. Craven won't have it."

"I shall not want to go poking about," said sour little Toby and just as suddenly as he had begun to be rather sorry for Mrs. Amelia Craven he began to cease to be sorry and to think she was unpleasant enough to deserve all that had happened to her.

And he turned his face toward the streaming panes of the window of the railway carriage and gazed out at the gray rain-storm which looked as if it would go on forever and ever. He watched it so long and steadily that the grayness grew heavier and heavier before his eyes and he fell asleep.