‘You could care for me, then,’ he urged her, ‘if you were only quite sure I loved you, and always would love you? Why, Bertha, I’d put my hand in that fire to save you from a finger-ache. I’d jump into the Weale there if I thought I could make you happy by doing it. I’d live my whole life your servant for a smile a year.’
His eyes flashed or moistened with every phrase, his gestures were superabundant and intense, and his voice was genuinely tender and impassioned.
His ardent eyes and voice thrilled the girl, and yet she doubted him. There was a fear in her mind which she could not shake away.
People in Beacon Hargate were not rich in opportunities for the study of the acted drama, but Bertha had seen a play or two in the great town hard by, and Lane looked and talked rather too much like a stage lover to her mind. In the unreal life behind the footlights lovers talked with just such a fluency, just such a tender fiery emphasis. In real life John Thistlewood came doggedly a-wooing with a shoulder propped against a doorpost, and had hard work to find a word for himself. If only that one absent element of faith could be imported into the business, Lane Protheroe’s fashion of courting was certain to be infinitely more delightful than John Thistlewood’s, but then the absent element was almost everything. And for poor Bertha the worst part of it seemed that she loved the man she doubted, and could not love the man in whose affection she held the profoundest faith. That the rough, clumsy, and persistent courtier loved her was one of the indisputable facts of life to her. She knew it just as surely as she knew that she was alive. She knew it, and the knowledge hurt her, for she could fancy nothing less hopeful than Thistle-wood’s wooing, and she was without a spark of mere vanity.
‘I think it is because you say so much that I don’t feel quite able to believe it all,’ she said. ‘You feel it when you talk about it, but it seems to me as if you had to talk before you get to feel it.’
His brows bent down over gloomy eyes again, and he folded his arms as he looked at her. Once more poor Bertha thought of the stage lover she had seen, and a long-drawn sigh escaped her.
‘I can’t think it’s all quite real,’ she said, almost desperately.
‘You think I say too much?’ he retorted. ‘It seems to me as if I said too little. It seems to me as if there weren’t any words to speak such thoughts and feelings.’
‘Is that because you don’t value the words? ‘she .’ asked him. ‘Don’t you think that if you felt what the words do mean that they’d seem enough for you?’
‘I know I’m a good-for-nothing beggar,’ he answered, with a sudden air of weary self-loathing and disdain. ‘I know. I’ve got a way of taking everything in deadly earnest for an hour or two. But,’ with a sudden swerve into the track of self-justification, ‘if that makes you think I’m fickle and weak-willed, you’re all wrong, darling. There are some fellows—I know plenty—who go through life like a lot of oysters. They don’t feel anything—they don’t care about anything, or anybody. But, bless your heart, my dear, they never get doubted.’