Ben Weatherstaff discovers the secret

Ben Weatherstaff, the surly old gardener at Misselthwaite Manor, had long suspected that something unusual was happening behind the high ivy-covered walls of the locked garden. For ten years he had believed the garden was sealed and abandoned, but his own secret visits—climbing over the wall to prune the roses once a year in memory of Lilias Craven—had kept a few of the plants alive. When rheumatics stopped his annual climbs two years earlier, he had no way of knowing that Mary Lennox had found the buried key, entered the garden, and begun to restore it with Dickon Sowerby's help, or that Colin Craven had been brought there in his wheelchair.

The Discovery Over the Wall

One late afternoon, as the sun was deepening into gold and the garden lay in its mellow hour, Ben Weatherstaff climbed a ladder to look over the wall—perhaps drawn by a vague unease or the sounds of activity he could not place. What he saw shocked him into fury. There, inside the forbidden garden, were Mary Lennox, Dickon Sowerby, and a boy he did not immediately recognize, sitting under a plum tree. Ben's indignant face glared over the wall, and he shook his fist at Mary, shouting that if she were his child he would give her a hiding. He accused her of being a meddlesome wench who had poked her nose where it was not wanted, and he could not understand how she had gotten in.

Colin's Defiant Response

At the first sound of Ben's torrent of words, Colin Craven sat up in his wheelchair, spellbound. Then he recovered himself and commanded Dickon to wheel him directly in front of the old gardener. When the chair stopped under Ben's nose, the old man's jaw dropped. He stared at the boy with the great black-rimmed eyes and the thin white hand extended haughtily, and he gasped, recognizing the face: "Who tha' art? Aye, that I do—wi' tha' mother's eyes starin' at me out o' tha' face. Lord knows how tha' come here. But tha'rt th' poor cripple." Those words—"tha'rt th' poor cripple"—ignited something in Colin. His face flushed scarlet and he sat bolt upright, shouting that he was not a cripple. Mary, standing nearby, cried out in fierce indignation that there was not a lump as big as a pin on his back. Ben, still staring, asked hoarsely if Colin had not got a crooked back or crooked legs. The accusation of being a cripple, even in whispers, was more than Colin could endure. In a surge of anger and insulted pride, he tore the coverings off his lower limbs, scrambled out of the chair with Dickon's help, and stood upright on the grass—straight as an arrow, his head thrown back, his strange eyes flashing lightning. "Look at me!" he flung up at Ben. "Just look at me—you! Just look at me!" Dickon cried out that Colin was as straight as any lad in Yorkshire.

Ben's Transformation and Acceptance

Ben Weatherstaff's reaction was queer beyond measure. He choked and gulped, and suddenly tears ran down his weather-wrinkled cheeks as he struck his old hands together. "Eh!" he burst forth, "th' lies folk tells! Tha'rt as thin as a lath an' as white as a wraith, but there's not a knob on thee. Tha'lt make a mon yet. God bless thee!" Colin, standing straighter than ever, declared himself Ben's master when his father was away and commanded the old man to obey him. He told Ben that this was his garden now, that Ben must not dare to say a word about it, and that he was to come down from the ladder and be brought into the secret. Ben, his crabbed old face still wet with tears, touched his hat in gardener fashion and said, "Yes, sir! Yes, sir!" before disappearing down the ladder. When he returned through the door in the wall, he found Colin standing against a tree, still holding himself straight and tall. Colin commanded him to look him over and asked directly if he was a hunchback or had crooked legs. Ben answered that there was nothing of the sort, and asked what Colin had been doing with himself, hiding out of sight and letting folk think he was a cripple and half-witted. Colin said shortly that everyone thought he was going to die, but he was not. Ben, with dry exultation, declared that Colin had too much pluck in him to die, and that when he saw him put his legs on the ground in such a hurry he knew the boy was all right. The old gardener then sat down on a rug under the tree, and Colin, now seated like a Rajah, gave him orders: the garden was to remain a secret, and Ben was to come only when no one could see him. Ben revealed that he had been coming over the wall for years to tend the roses, because Lilias Craven had asked him to take care of them. Colin, taking up Mary's trowel, began to dig in the earth himself, and Ben, chuckling, offered to bring him a rose in a pot to plant. Colin planted the rose himself as the sun slipped over the edge, standing on his two feet and laughing. The discovery thus ended not in punishment or exposure, but in the expansion of the secret circle to include the one person who had loved the garden all along.