Milly and Olly - Mrs. Humphry Ward (interesting books to read in english .TXT) 📗

enough on the map you _may_ find it, though I won't promise you.

"There it is," said Milly triumphantly, showing it to her mother and Olly.

"Quite right. Now look here," and Mrs. Norton took a pencil out of her pocket and drew a little line along the map. "First of all we shall get into the train and go to a place called--look, Milly."

"Bletchley," said Milly, following where the pencil pointed. "What an ugly name."

"It's an ugly place," said Mrs. Norton, "so perhaps it doesn't deserve a better name. And after Bletchley--look again, Milly."

"Rugby," said Milly, reading the names as her mother pointed, "and then Stafford, and then Crewe--what a funny name, mother!--and then Wigan, and then Warrington, and then Lancaster. Ox-en-holme, Kendal, Wind-er-mere. Oh, mother, what a long way! Why, we've got right to the top of England."

"Stop a bit, Milly, and let me tell you something about these places. First of all we shall get out of the train at Bletchley, and get into another train that will go faster than the first. And it will take us past all kinds of places, some pretty and some ugly, and some big and some small. At Stafford there is an old castle, Milly, where fierce people lived in old days and fought their neighbours. And at Crewe we shall get out and have our dinner. And at Wigan all the trees grow on one side as if some one had come and given them a push in the night; and at Lancaster there's another old castle, a very famous one, only now they have turned it into a prison, and people are shut up inside it. Then a little way after Lancaster you'll begin to see some mountains, far, far away, but first you'll see something else--just a little bit of blue sea, with mountains on the other side of it. And then will come Windermere, where we shall get out and drive in a carriage. And we shall drive right into the mountains, Olly, till they stand up all round us with their dear kind old faces that mother has loved ever since she was a baby."

The children looked up wonderingly at their mother, and they saw her face shining and her eyes as bright as theirs, as if she too was a child going out for a holiday.

"Oh! And, mother," said Olly, "you'll let us take Spot. She can go in my box."

Now Spot was the white kitten, so Milly and mother began to laugh.

"Suppose you go and ask Spot first, whether she'd like it, Olly," said Mrs. Norton, patting his sunburnt little face.


CHAPTER II

A JOURNEY NORTH

Milly and Oliver lived at Willingham, a little town in Oxfordshire, as I have already told you. Their father was a doctor, and they lived in an old-fashioned house, in a street, with a long shady garden stretching away behind it. Milly and Oliver loved their father, and whenever he put his brown face inside the nursery door, two pairs of little feet went running to meet him, and two pairs of little hands pulled him eagerly into the room. But they saw him very seldom; whereas their mother was always with them, teaching them their lessons, playing with them in the garden, telling them stories, mending their frocks, tucking them up in their snug little beds at night, sometimes praising them, sometimes scolding them; always loving and looking after them. Milly and Olly honestly believed that theirs was the best mother in the whole world. Nobody else could find out such nice plays, or tell them such wonderful stories, or dress dolls half so well. Two little neighbours of theirs, Jacky and Francis, had a poor sick mother who always lay on the sofa, and could hardly bear to have her little boys in the room with her. Milly and Oliver were never tired of wondering how Jacky and Francis got on with a mother like that. "How funny, and how dreadful it must be. Poor Jacky and Francis!" It never came into their, heads to say, "Poor Jacky's mother" too, but then you see they were such little people, and little people have only room in their heads for a very few thoughts at a time.

However, Milly had been away from her mother a good deal lately. About six months before my story begins she had been sent to school, to a kindergarten, as she was taught to call it. And there Milly had learnt all kinds of wonderful things--she had learnt how to make mats out of paper, blue mats, and pink mats, and yellow mats, and red mats; she had learned how to make a bit of soft clay look like a box, or a stool, or a bird's nest with three clay eggs inside it; she had begun to add up and take away; and, above all, she had begun to learn geography, and Fraeulein--for Milly's mistress was a German, and had a German name--was just now teaching her about islands, and lakes, and capes, and peninsulas, and many other things that all little girls have to learn about some time or other, unless they wish to grow up dunces.

As for Milly's looks, I have told you already that she had blue eyes and a turn-up nose, and a dear sensible little face. And she had very thick fair hair, that was always tumbling about her eyes, and making her look, as nurse told her, like "a yellow owl in an ivy bush." Milly loved most people, except perhaps John the gardener, who was rather cross to the children, and was always calling to them not to walk "on them beds," and to be sure not to touch any of his fruit or flowers. She loved her father and her mother; she loved Olly with all her whole heart, though he was a tease, she loved her nurse, whom she and Olly called Nana, and who had been with them ever since Milly was born; and she loved Fraeulein, and was always begging flowers from her mother that she might take them to school for Fraeulein's table. So you see Milly was made up of loving. And she was a thoughtful little girl too, tidy with her dress, quick and quiet at her lessons, and always ready to sit still with her fairy-book or her doll, when mother was busy or tired. But there were two things in which Milly was not at all sensible in spite of her sensible face. She was much too ready to cry when any little thing went wrong, and she was dreadfully afraid of creatures of all sorts. She was afraid of her father's big dog, she was afraid of the dear brown cow that lived in the field beyond the garden, she was afraid of earwigs. I am even ashamed to say she was afraid of spiders. Once she ran away as if a lion were behind her from a white kitten that pulled her dress with its frolicsome paws to make her play with it; but that, Milly would tell you, was "when I was little," and she was quite sure she was a good deal braver now.

Now what am I to tell you about Olly?

Olly was just a round ball of fun and mischief. He had brown hair, brown eyes, a brown face, and brown hands. He was always touching and meddling with everything, indoors and out, to see what was inside it, or what it was made of. He liked teasing Milly, he liked his walks, he liked his sleep in the morning, he liked his dinner, he liked his tea, he liked everything in the world, except learning to read, and that he hated. He could only do one thing besides mischief. He could sing all kinds of tunes--quick tunes, slow tunes, and merry tunes. He had been able to sing tunes ever since he was quite a tiny baby, and his father and mother often talked together of how, in about a year, he should be taught to play on the piano, or perhaps on the violin, if he liked it better. You might hear his sharp, shrill little voice, singing about the house and the garden all day long. John the gardener called it "squealin'," and told Olly his songs were "capital good" for frightening away the birds.

Now, perhaps, you know a little more about Milly and Olly than you did when I began to tell you about them, and it is time you should hear of what happened to them on that wonderful journey of theirs up to the mountains.

First of all came the packing up. Milly could not make up her mind about her dolls; she had three--Rose, Mattie, and Katie--but Rose's frocks were very dirty, Mattie had a leg broken, and Katie's paint had been all washed off one wet night, when Olly left her out on the lawn. Now which of these was the tidiest and most respectable doll to take out on a visit? Milly did not know how to settle it.

"I think, Nana," she said at last to her nurse, who was packing the children's trunk, "I will take Katie. Mother always sends us away when we get white faces to make us look nice and red again; so, perhaps, if I take Katie her colour will come back too, you know."

"Perhaps it will, Miss Milly," said nurse, laughing; "anyhow, you had better give me the doll you want directly, for it is time I packed all the toys now. Now, Master Olly, you know I can't let you take all those things."

For there was Olly dragging along his wheelbarrow heaped up with toys with one hand, and his cart and horse with a box of bricks standing up in it with the other. He would not listen to what Milly said about it, and he would scarcely listen to nurse now.

"I can't do without my toys, Nana. I _must_ do mischief if you won't let me take all my toys; I can't help it."

"I haven't got room for half those, Master Olly, and you'll have ever so many new things to play with when we get to Ravensnest."

"There'll be the new children, Olly," said Milly, "and the little rivers and all the funny new flowers."

"Those aren't toys," said Olly, looking ready to cry. "I don't know nothing about them."

"Now," said nurse, making a place in the box, "bring me your bricks and your big ball, and your picture-books. There, that's all I can spare you."

"Wait one minute," said Olly, rushing off; and just then Mrs. Norton called nurse away to speak to her in the drawing-room. When nurse came back she saw nobody in the nursery. Milly had gone out in the garden, Olly was nowhere to be seen. And who had shut down the trunk, which was open when she left it? Me-ow, sounded very softly from somewhere close by.

"Why--Spot! Spot!" called nurse.

Me-ow, Me-ow, came again; a sad choky little mew, right from the middle of the children's trunk. "Master Olly and his tricks again," said nurse, running to the box and opening it. There, on the top, lay a quantity of frocks that nurse had left folded up on the floor, thrown in anyhow, with some toys scattered among them, and the frocks and toys were all dancing up and down as if they were bewitched. Nurse took out the frocks, and there was the children's collar-box, a large round cardboard-box with a lid, jumping from side to side like a box in a fairy tale; and such dreadful pitiful little mews