Jill's Red Bag — A Closer Reading

Jill had struggled to her feet by this time, and was rubbing the back of her head ruefully.

Captain Willoughby was busy releasing Bumps from her bonds.

"It strikes me there has been a bit of bullying going on here," he said, eyeing Jack severely. "Is this the way you generally treat your small sister?"

"She likes it," asserted Jack eagerly. "On my honour she does--don't you, Bumps?"

"Yeth, I does!" sobbed his victim.

"Nurse has no business to leave you," said Mona Baron decisively, as she gave a sharp pull to the nursery bell. "Now, Jill, pick up some of these things at once. Why can't you keep Jack quiet? I don't know which is the worse of you. It is six of one and half-a-dozen of the other!"

She did not speak angrily, for these three pickles always afforded her considerable amusement. But she felt that a limit must be drawn somewhere, and when the nurse appeared, considerably ruffled by her sudden recall from the servants' hall, she was spoken to so sharply by her young mistress that she gave notice on the spot.

Mona went back to the drawing-room with Captain Willoughby.

"That makes the fifth nurse we have had in ten months," she said. "What can be done with them? They are too small to go to school."

"Can't you get a governess?"

"I suppose I must try. But I was made so miserable myself as a small child by one, that I resolved never to give them the chance of such an experience. I must talk it over with Miss Webb."

The nursery party up-stairs soon calmed down. Nurse restored order, and set the three delinquents in separate corners of the room. Her tongue was a powerful one, and she did not spare them.

"I shall be thankful to get out of the house, for never in my life have I seen such bold, owdacious children, and no respectable woman would stand it. Your sister ought to look after you herself, and then she'd know what you were like. She dances out to all her gaieties with that lazy Miss Webb, who's in a field of clover if any one is, and expects me to grind on in this four-walled room without a friend to keep me company. I would as soon be in prison, and I'm not going to stand it. And as for you, with your monkey tricks and your wicked ways, you want to be well whipped and placed in a reformatory. That's the place for the likes of you!"

No one dared speak. She talked on in the same strain for a good quarter of an hour, then dared them at the peril of their lives to move from their seats, and walked down to the servants' hall again.

"Sunday is a _dreadful_ day," observed Jill plaintively. "I wonder what it was made for!"

"I s'pose God thought it would make people good," said Jack; "it may do grown-up people good, but it makes children dreadfully wicked!"

"Yes," assented Jill; "because there's nothing to do after church, and we're always shut up in this old nursery. When I grow up I shall live in a house without any doors, so that I can never be shut up anywhere!"

Jack looked across at his sister meditatively.

"Then what would you do when robbers came?"

"I'd run away, of course, stupid!"

"They'd soon catch you. We'll try it to-morrow. I'll be the robber, and you can leave all the doors open to give yourself a chance, and I'll give you five minutes' start."

"Me too!" exclaimed Bumps, removing her thumb from her mouth, which she had been contentedly sucking.

"Oh, you!" said her brother scornfully. "You can't even be an early Christian without screaming the house down! But you've done one good thing! Nurse is going, and a jolly good job too! Nurses are all rot!"

Jill shook her head doubtfully.

"We shall only have another worse than this one! I wish we could do without them, like the Clarkes. Their mother looks after them."

"That's because they're poor--George told me so."

"What's poor?" asked Bumps.

"It's having no money," explained Jill.

"But we haven't no money," argued Bumps.

"No, you little stupid, but Mona has. I heard nurse say she was an heiress, and that's an awfully grand thing to be, it's next to being a princess in a fairy-book."

"Now we've sat still long enough," announced Jack with a yawn. "We'll have a kind of 'Puss in the Corner.' Our chairs will be the corners. We can easily get back to them before nurse comes."

"It's Sunday," objected Jill again.

"Here's Miss Webb!" shouted Jack.