CHAPTER II.
Laline, for her part, had almost forgotten the time when she had first flushed with indignation at the notion of running errands for her father.
One gets used to a great many things in three years, and it was three years since Laline, a forlorn little figure in deep mourning, had stood on the deck of a Folkestone steamer on her way to her widowed father and her motherless home. Of her father she knew very little indeed at that time, not having seen him for two years. England had become too hot to hold Mr. Garth about that period, and he had taken up his residence permanently in Boulogne; but for many years before he had been practically a stranger in that tiny household in Westmoreland. The late Mrs. Garth had been a gentle, dreamy-eyed lady, of refined but narrow mind, fond of poetry, fancywork, church-decoration, and district-visiting, easily shocked, and thoroughly orthodox in her views on all subjects. Her great aim with regard to her daughter, whom she loved devotedly, was to make of her a refined gentlewoman, and to guard her from all knowledge of, and contact with, the wickedness of the great world outside the hills of Westmoreland.
From this life of watchfulness, this sheltered, peaceful existence under the shadow of the little grey church in the valley, Laline was unexpectedly torn and transferred to an atmosphere of debt, neglect, and shiftlessness, the life of a ruined gamester, exiled from his native country, and earning by his wits a precarious subsistence in a back street of Boulogne.
Before her tears for her mother's loss were dry, Laline had begun to realise that Captain Garth fully intended that she should, in some measure, make up to him for the hundred a year which he had lost by his wife's death. He was kind to her in his manner, but he never for one moment understood her. When he tried to speak to her of her mother, she received his remarks in silence, watching him with great eyes full of wondering pain. His talk jarred on the girl, and it seemed a desecration to hear him discuss his dead wife in his favourite terms.
"A good woman, a very good woman, according to her lights! We didn't quite hit it off together; but I am not blaming her. And no doubt she has done her best with you; no doubt—— Why, my dear, what are you crying for?"
"I would so much rather that you did not talk to me about mother," the girl had said; and Captain Garth had respected her wish without in the least understanding it.
Then began a twofold existence for the dreamy, imaginative child. An indoor life of poverty and hard work—cooking, washing, tidying, dusting, and mending, under the superintendence of Bénoîte, until Laline could replace Aurélie the bonne and spare her father the latter's keep and wages, and an outdoor life of long rambles, sometimes by herself and sometimes in charge of the little Bertins' next door, up to the vallée or down to the sands and along the shore to the neighbouring seaside villages, with her friend the sea lapping the sands at her feet.
Day-dreams for ever filled her mind, sharing it with recollections of her happy childhood among the hills. Her soft, near-sighted eyes could never with bare vision perceive the coast of England; but the eldest Bertin boy possessed a telescope, by the aid of which she could distinguish with a bounding heart the white cliffs of her native land. All that she knew of joy and peace, of tender love and gentle sympathy, of refinement and of culture, came from her English experiences; her present life, half drudgery, half solitary wandering, was lonely and hard by comparison. In England she had been the one thought of her mother's mind, the vicar's favourite pupil, the village pet, "little Miss Garth," daughter of a lady known and honoured by all. Here, in the Rue Planché, she was "la p'tite Gart," who ran errands, begged for credit from tradespeople, and looked after the ménage with deaf and irascible old Bénoîte.