All the day long she had been watching for him, and no cries of children nor weary attention to work, nor quaint, practical comfort from her wise little first-born, could dull her ear to every footstep along the stony road outside, or steel her heart against the silent misery that was slowly creeping around and upon it.
Father had not been home either to dinner or to tea. She had sent Sue to the Major’s, but he had not been there all day. She had even been herself to the “Public” on the village green to ferret out news of him, but no one had met him since they had seen them together that morning on the churchyard corner, and she began to feel pretty sure now that he had gone on the spree to some more distant “diggings,” as he was wont to do at times when he was thoroughly in with his bad companions and wanted to be out of reach of her “worritin’.”
“I ’spect ’e be down at the Arbour,” moaned she to the little daughter who sat laboriously darning a pair of stockings at her side, while she herself passed the iron up and down over the fine damask table-linen belonging to her best customers up at the “house.” And her gaze crept out of the window across the marsh-land that swept to the sea from the base of the cliff, on whose crest their cottage stood. She could not see “the Harbour,” as the villagers called it, for it was three miles away where the river oozed through muddy banks to the sea, but she could see a bit of the long white road upon which he would come when he started homewards.
“There were a brig due to-night,” she added, “and father do like to be by when there be a brig due—the fellers keep so merry.”
She was silent a moment, taking up her goffering-tongs to goffer a pillow-case frill and holding them to her cheek to test the heat.
“There, I do wish I ’adn’t been such a silly as to let out to Jim Casey this morning!” she went on presently. “I might ha’ knowed ’e’d pay me out somehow. ’E allers does.”
“I ’ate Jim Casey,” said the child, lifting serious brown eyes to her mother’s face, for all the world like her father’s.
“And the Lord knows I do,” declared the mother peevishly. “It be all ’is fault as father be as ’e be. ’E ’ave done more ’arm than the Lord knows in this world, ’ave Casey.”
The child was silent. She didn’t understand, but she wasn’t meant to understand, and she didn’t want to. She was used to having her mother run on to her in an endless, peevish moan when things were “contrairy,” and she liked to sit and listen and feel important without knowing why.
“I’d like to pay Casey out some day, and no mistake,” said the mother vindictively.