From the hour of his first decisive meeting with Charity, love had wrought so rich a ferment in Seth Shellett that the world was now transformed for him. Not for the first time, but for the first time with conscious excitement, he saw the sky squandered above him and life springing green at his feet. He was released, in part, from the lethargy that had made him stupid; the earth of him was broken up, and the pulsing light of his being became one with the energy of all creation. He heard the thunder of the universal tides and knew them for his own: knew, not with his intellectual parts, which worked as sluggishly as ever (and so had not the skill to mud a clear emotion with sophistical invention), but with senses tempered fine by desire. This desire had once seemed simple and specific enough; but with every day that passed it grew in power and subtlety and range, as a flower, rooted in earth, discovers to sunlight the pride of colour and lyric of form that have lain secreted in her seed. He moved, at blessed intervals, in a country of new marvels and new terrors. Charity was the core of his life and the sum of its meaning; and nothing could content him now but complete and public possession of her. After the brawl with Hugh Marden—an incident that was like to have driven him from the Squire’s service and to ruin, but somehow, unexpectedly, did nothing of the kind—he had flung her fiercely away from him, thinking himself cheated. But the same jealousy that drove him from her pulled him back: he wanted her, could not withstand her, and found himself unable to endure the possibility of her finding a new lover to replace him with. So he sought her again (she was not hard to find) and wooed her again. At first she pretended she would have none of him, being eager to regain her ascendancy, and liking the taste of power that such punishing of him yielded her; but at last, fearing to resist longer, she allowed herself to be coaxed back into his arms. The rapture of this reunion—for now she gave generously, and seemed to give all her heart—was enriched by a hundred shades of feeling that had been absent, or unperceived, in the wild beginnings of intimacy; for it was an experience radiant with recognition, and quickened and complicated by the quarrel of which it made an end. This hand he touched, this warm mouth, was her hand, her mouth: her very self was in them, and her self, at the lightest contact, flowed out like liquid fire to join with his.
And so, inevitably, his mind turned towards marriage. This was ambitious in him, and only the extreme of love would have encouraged him to cherish such a scheme; for though in his humble way he was a likely fellow, and had had the luck, while still young, to step into the shoes of an older man, he could not think himself good enough, by worldly standards, for the daughter of Farmer Noke of the Roughs, a man notoriously rich and powerful, and of a proud and ugly temper. Seth did not flatter himself that his suit would meet with favour in that quarter; but, though the fact disquieted and baffled him, he did not for a moment allow it to shake his purpose. Far more grievous an obstacle, in his estimation, was Charity’s evasion of the question, and her discomfort when his persistence made evasion impossible. The merest mention of marriage was enough to make her unhappy and petulant. Yet Seth was for ever mentioning it; and she knew, and he knew she knew, that the moody silences into which he not infrequently lapsed were filled with this obsession of his. Sometimes when she had begged him, with anger or with tears, not to worrit her no more about it, he would sit for half an hour without speaking: not vengefully, or to punish her, but because his mind could not leave its one idea, and, if he must not speak of that, only silence was left to him.
Now, once again, he began. ‘When’ll us get married, lovey?’
‘I dunnaw,’ said Charity.