Archibald Craven and Colin Craven (father and son)

Archibald Craven and Colin Craven are father and son, a relationship that for ten years was defined by grief, avoidance, and mutual suffering before being transformed by the boy's secret recovery in the garden. Their estrangement began at Colin's birth, when his mother Lilias Craven died, and Archibald, unable to bear the sight of the child he believed would be a hunchback like himself, withdrew into a life of wandering and misery, leaving his son to grow up as a hidden, hysterical invalid in the locked rooms of Misselthwaite Manor.

Origins of Estrangement

From the moment of Colin's birth, Archibald Craven was consumed by a grief that turned to aversion. He had raved like a madman because the child was alive and the mother was dead, and he refused to see the infant. When he finally did, he found a weak, wretched thing that everyone expected to die within days. The boy survived, but Archibald's fear that he would be deformed and crippled, like himself, poisoned any possibility of paternal affection. He supplied doctors, nurses, and luxuries, but shrank from the mere thought of his son. The first time he returned to Misselthwaite after a year's absence and saw the small, miserable-looking boy lift to his face the great gray eyes with black lashes—so like and yet so horribly unlike the happy eyes he had adored—he turned away pale as death. After that, he scarcely ever saw Colin except when the boy was asleep, and all he knew of him was that he was a confirmed invalid with a vicious, hysterical, half-insane temper who could only be kept from dangerous furies by being given his own way in every detail. Colin himself came to believe that his father almost hated him, and that his father wished he would die.

The Turning Point: A Dream and a Letter

While Archibald wandered through the beautiful places of Europe, a slow change began. In a valley in the Austrian Tyrol, he sat by a stream and found himself thinking tenderly of the blue forget-me-nots at its edge, a simple thought that quietly pushed aside the dark ones. He felt something unbound and released in him, and whispered, "I almost feel as if—I were alive!" Later, at the Lake of Como, he had a vivid dream in which he heard a voice calling, "Archie! Archie!" and he answered, "Lilias! Lilias!" The voice replied, "In the garden! In the garden!" The next morning, he received a letter from Susan Sowerby, who had spoken to him once on the moor, urging him to come home. He read the letter twice, kept thinking about the dream, and decided to return to Misselthwaite at once.

The Reunion in the Garden

When Archibald arrived at the Manor, he was told that Colin was in the garden, and he felt drawn to the place he had so long forsaken. As he approached the ivy-covered wall, he heard sounds from inside—running feet, suppressed voices, and the uncontrollable laughter of children. Suddenly, the door was flung open and a boy burst through at full speed, dashing almost into his arms. Archibald held him away to look at him and gasped for breath. The boy was tall and handsome, glowing with life, with splendid color leaping to his face and eyes full of boyish laughter—eyes rimmed with black lashes that were unmistakably his mother's. "Father," the boy said, "I'm Colin. You can't believe it. I scarcely can myself. I'm Colin." Colin explained that the garden, Mary, Dickon, and the Magic had made him well, and he declared, "I'm going to live forever and ever and ever!" Archibald put his hands on both the boy's shoulders and held him still, unable to speak for a moment. Then he said, "Take me into the garden, my boy. And tell me all about it." They sat under their tree, and as Colin poured forth the story in headlong boy fashion, Archibald laughed until tears came into his eyes, and sometimes tears came when he was not laughing. At the end, Colin announced that he would walk back to the house with his father, never to use the wheelchair again. And so, across the lawn, the Master of Misselthwaite walked with his son, who held his head up in the air and walked as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire.