“Not for me—oh, not for me! Because—because—”
He put up his hand to stop her. The religious phrases that she had been accustomed to from her youth up, and that came naturally to her tongue, hurt him somehow as the foul-mouthed conversation of the fo’c’sle had never hurt him. From her lips he would not, if he could help himself, hear the phrases he had been accustomed to laugh at as canting and hypocritical.
“Don’t dear, don’t. I know what you are going to say. It is no good. We are so different altogether. I can’t believe—as you believe—I cannot. I ‘ll do my best to be a good man—I ‘ll never lie to you or—”
“It is no use,” she moaned, “no use at all. We cannot prevail by our own strength.”
He laughed bitterly.
“Belief is not a matter of will,” he said, “or I would believe just to please you—just because I want you more than anything in the wide world. All I can do is to be honest, and tell you I can’t believe. It need never make any difference to you, dear, never, never.”
The girl laid her face down on the hard rock again.
“And if—and if—next time your ship goes past here you were to fall from the mast, and be drowned, you think—you think you would just go out like a fire—that—that would be all.”
He kicked a stone till it fell over the edge of the cliff, and they could hear it going by leaps and bounds into the sea a hundred feet below.
“And you think,” he said, “I shall be eternally damned, tormented in fire and brimstone for ever and ever. Upon my word, Susy, mine is the kinder fate.”