CHAPTER VII.
A TEA MEETING.
Tiny was very ill the next day—too ill to get up, or to notice what was passing around her. Mrs. Coomber, who had had very little experience of sickness, was very anxious when she saw Tiny lying so quiet and lifeless-looking, the white bandage on her forehead making her poor little face look quite ghastly in its paleness. The fisherman had crept into the room before he went out, to look at her while she was asleep, and the sight had made his heart ache.
"I never thought I could ha' been such a brute as to hurt a little 'un like that," he said, drawing his sleeve across his eyes, and speaking in a whisper to his wife.
"It was the whisky," said his wife, by way of comforting him.
But Coomber would not accept even this poor comfort. "I was a fool to take so much," he said. "Wus than a fool, for I knowed it made me savage as a bear; and yet I let it get the mastery of me. But it's the last, mother; I took the bottle to the farm last night, and they're going to let me have the value of it in milk for the little 'un, and please God she gets well again, it's no more whisky I'll touch."
It was not easy for a man like Coomber to make such a promise, and still more difficult to keep it. For the first few days, while Tiny was very ill, it was not so hard to send Bob and Tom to Fellness, with the teal and widgeon he had shot; but when she began to get better, and the craving for the drink made itself felt, then began the tug of war. During the first few days of the little girl's illness, the fisherman kept carefully out of her sight, though he longed to see her once more, and hear her say she had forgiven him the cruel blow he had dealt to her.
Tiny, too, longed for him to come and see her in the daytime; but as it grew dusk the longing passed away, and every night, as the hour drew near when he usually came back from Fellness, a positive dread and terror of him seized her, and she would lie shivering and holding Mrs. Coomber's hand whenever she heard his voice in the kitchen.
Mrs. Coomber tried to persuade her husband to go and see the child in the daytime; but he only shook his head. "She hates me, and I don't deserve to see her agin," he said, gloomily.