CHAPTER XXI.

CONCLUSION

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the

farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had

their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen in

districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills,

certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny

country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The

shepherd’s dog barked fiercely when one of these alien-looking men

appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for what

dog likes a figure bent under a heavy bag?—and these pale men rarely

stirred abroad without that mysterious burden. The shepherd himself,

though he had good reason to believe that the bag held nothing but

flaxen thread, or else the long rolls of strong linen spun from that

thread, was not quite sure that this trade of weaving, indispensable

though it was, could be carried on entirely without the help of the

Evil One. In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every

person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and

occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder.

No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and

how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who

knew his father and mother? To the peasants of old times, the world

outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and

mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a

conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back

with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts,

hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would

have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on

his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had

any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft. All

cleverness, whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the

tongue, or in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself

suspicious: honest folk, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly

not overwise or clever—at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing

the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and

dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they

partook of the nature of conjuring. In this way it came to pass that

those scattered linen-weavers—emigrants from the town into the

country—were to the last regarded as aliens by their rustic neighbours,

and usually contracted the eccentric habits which belong to a state of

loneliness.

In the early years of this century, such a linen-weaver, named Silas

Marner, worked at his vocation in a stone cottage that stood among the

nutty hedgerows near the village of Raveloe, and not far from the edge

of a deserted stone-pit. The questionable sound of Silas’s loom, so

unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, or the

simpler rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the

Raveloe boys, who would often leave off their nutting or birds’-nesting

to peep in at the window of the stone cottage, counterbalancing a

certain awe at the mysterious action of the loom, by a pleasant sense

of scornful superiority, drawn from the mockery of its alternating

noises, along with the bent, tread-mill attitude of the weaver. But

sometimes it happened that Marner, pausing to adjust an irregularity in

his thread, became aware of the small scoundrels, and, though chary of

his time, he liked their intrusion so ill that he would descend from

his loom, and, opening the door, would fix on them a gaze that was

always enough to make them take to their legs in terror. For how was it

possible to believe that those large brown protuberant eyes in Silas

Marner’s pale face really saw nothing very distinctly that was not

close to them, and not rather that their dreadful stare could dart

cramp, or rickets, or a wry mouth at any boy who happened to be in the

rear? They had, perhaps, heard their fathers and mothers hint that

Silas Marner could cure folks’ rheumatism if he had a mind, and add,

still more darkly, that if you could only speak the devil fair enough,

he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange lingering echoes

of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the

diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind

with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy

conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain

from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of

the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by

primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been

illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and

mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and

enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed

desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a

perpetual pasture to fear. “Is there anything you can fancy that you

would like to eat?” I once said to an old labouring man, who was in his

last illness, and who had refused all the food his wife had offered

him. “No,” he answered, “I’ve never been used to nothing but common

victual, and I can’t eat that.” Experience had bred no fancies in him

that could raise the phantasm of appetite.

And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered,

undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren parishes

lying on the outskirts of civilization—inhabited by meagre sheep and

thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central

plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and held farms

which, speaking from a spiritual point of view, paid highly-desirable

tithes. But it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an

hour’s journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never

reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion. It

was an important-looking village, with a fine old church and large

churchyard in the heart of it, and two or three large brick-and-stone

homesteads, with well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks,

standing close upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the

rectory, which peeped from among the trees on the other side of the

churchyard:—a village which showed at once the summits of its social

life, and told the practised eye that there was no great park and

manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs in

Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money

from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking

fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter tide.

It was fifteen years since Silas Marner had first come to Raveloe; he

was then simply a pallid young man, with prominent short-sighted brown

eyes, whose appearance would have had nothing strange for people of

average culture and experience, but for the villagers near whom he had

come to settle it had mysterious peculiarities which corresponded with

the exceptional nature of his occupation, and his advent from an

unknown region called “North’ard”. So had his way of life:—he invited

no comer to step across his door-sill, and he never strolled into the

village to drink a pint at the Rainbow, or to gossip at the

wheelwright’s: he sought no man or woman, save for the purposes of his

calling, or in order to supply himself with necessaries; and it was

soon clear to the Raveloe lasses that he would never urge one of them

to accept him against her will—quite as if he had heard them declare

that they would never marry a dead man come to life again. This view of

Marner’s personality was not without another ground than his pale face

and unexampled eyes; for Jem Rodney, the mole-catcher, averred that one

evening as he was returning homeward, he saw Silas Marner leaning

against a stile with a heavy bag on his back, instead of resting the

bag on the stile as a man in his senses would have done; and that, on

coming up to him, he saw that Marner’s eyes were set like a dead man’s,

and he spoke to him, and shook him, and his limbs were stiff, and his

hands clutched the bag as if they’d been made of iron; but just as he

had made up his mind that the weaver was dead, he came all right again,

like, as you might say, in the winking of an eye, and said

“Good-night,” and walked off. All this Jem swore he had seen, more by

token that it was the very day he had been mole-catching on Squire

Cass’s land, down by the old saw-pit. Some said Marner must have been

in a “fit,” a word which seemed to explain things otherwise incredible;

but the argumentative Mr. Macey, clerk of the parish, shook his head,

and asked if anybody was ever known to go off in a fit and not fall

down. A fit was a stroke, wasn’t it? and it was in the nature of a

stroke to partly take away the use of a man’s limbs and throw him on

the parish, if he’d got no children to look to. No, no; it was no

stroke that would let a man stand on his legs, like a horse between the

shafts, and then walk off as soon as you can say “Gee!” But there might

be such a thing as a man’s soul being loose from his body, and going

out and in, like a bird out of its nest and back; and that was how

folks got over-wise, for they went to school in this shell-less state

to those who could teach them more than their neighbours could learn

with their five senses and the parson. And where did Master Marner get

his knowledge of herbs from—and charms too, if he liked to give them

away? Jem Rodney’s story was no more than what might have been expected

by anybody who had seen how Marner had cured Sally Oates, and made her

sleep like a baby, when her heart had been beating enough to burst her

body, for two months and more, while she had been under the doctor’s

care. He might cure more folks if he would; but he was worth speaking

fair, if it was only to keep him from doing you a mischief.

It was partly to this vague fear that Marner was indebted for

protecting him from the persecution that his singularities might have

drawn upon him, but still more to the fact that, the old linen-weaver

in the neighbouring parish of Tarley being dead, his handicraft made

him a highly welcome settler to the richer housewives of the district,

and even to the more provident cottagers, who had their little stock of

yarn at the year’s end. Their sense of his usefulness would have

counteracted any repugnance or suspicion which was not confirmed by a

deficiency in the quality or the tale of the cloth he wove for them.

And the years had rolled on without producing any change in the

impressions of the neighbours concerning Marner, except the change from

novelty to habit. At the end of fifteen years the Raveloe men said just

the same things about Silas Marner as at the beginning: they did not

say them quite so often, but they believed them much more strongly when

they did say them. There was only one important addition which the

years had brought: it was, that Master Marner had laid by a fine sight

of money somewhere, and that he could buy up “bigger men” than himself.

But while opinion concerning him had remained nearly stationary, and

his daily habits had presented scarcely any visible change, Marner’s

inward life had been a history and a metamorphosis, as that of every

fervid nature must be when it has fled, or been condemned, to solitude.

His life, before he came to Raveloe, had been filled with the movement,

the mental activity, and the close fellowship, which, in that day as in

this, marked the life of an artisan early incorporated in a narrow

religious sect, where the poorest layman has the chance of

distinguishing himself by gifts of speech, and has, at the very least,

the weight of a silent voter in the government of his community. Marner

was highly thought of in that little hidden world, known to itself as

the church assembling in Lantern Yard; he was believed to be a young

man of exemplary life and ardent faith; and a peculiar interest had

been centred in him ever since he had fallen, at a prayer-meeting, into

a mysterious rigidity and suspension of consciousness, which, lasting

for an hour or more, had been mistaken for death. To have sought a

medical explanation for this phenomenon would have been held by Silas

himself, as well as by his minister and fellow-members, a wilful

self-exclusion from the spiritual significance that might lie therein.

Silas was evidently a brother selected for a peculiar discipline; and

though the effort to interpret this discipline was discouraged by the

absence, on his part, of any spiritual vision during his outward

trance, yet it was believed by himself and others that its effect was

seen in an accession of light and fervour. A less truthful man than he

might have been tempted into the subsequent creation of a vision in the

form of resurgent memory; a less sane man might have believed in such a

creation; but Silas was both sane and honest, though, as with many

honest and fervent men, culture had not defined any channels for his

sense of mystery, and so it spread itself over the proper pathway of

inquiry and knowledge. He had inherited from his mother some

acquaintance with medicinal herbs and their preparation—a little store

of wisdom which she had imparted to him as a solemn bequest—but of late

years he had had doubts about the lawfulness of applying this

knowledge, believing that herbs could have no efficacy without prayer,

and that prayer might suffice without herbs; so that the inherited

delight he had in wandering in the fields in search of foxglove and

dandelion and coltsfoot, began to wear to him the character of a

temptation.

Among the members of his church there was one young man, a little older

than himself, with whom he had long lived in such close friendship that

it was the custom of their Lantern Yard brethren to call them David and

Jonathan. The real name of the friend was William Dane, and he, too,

was regarded as a shining instance of youthful piety, though somewhat

given to over-severity towards weaker brethren, and to be so dazzled by

his own light as to hold himself wiser than his teachers. But whatever

blemishes others might discern in William, to his friend’s mind he was

faultless; for Marner had one of those impressible self-doubting

natures which, at an inexperienced age, admire imperativeness and lean

on contradiction. The expression of trusting simplicity in Marner’s

face, heightened by that absence of special observation, that

defenceless, deer-like gaze which belongs to large prominent eyes, was

strongly contrasted by the self-complacent suppression of inward

triumph that lurked in the narrow slanting eyes and compressed lips of

William Dane. One of the most frequent topics of conversation between

the two friends was Assurance of salvation: Silas confessed that he

could never arrive at anything higher than hope mingled with fear, and

listened with longing wonder when William declared that he had

possessed unshaken assurance ever since, in the period of his

conversion, he had dreamed that he saw the words “calling and election

sure” standing by themselves on a white page in the open Bible. Such

colloquies have occupied many a pair of pale-faced weavers, whose

unnurtured souls have been like young winged things, fluttering

forsaken in the twilight.

It had seemed to the unsuspecting Silas that the friendship had

suffered no chill even from his formation of another attachment of a

closer kind. For some months he had been engaged to a young

servant-woman, waiting only for a little increase to their mutual

savings in order to their marriage; and it was a great delight to him

that Sarah did not object to William’s occasional presence in their

Sunday interviews. It was at this point in their history that Silas’s

cataleptic fit occurred during the prayer-meeting; and amidst the

various queries and expressions of interest addressed to him by his

fellow-members, William’s suggestion alone jarred with the general

sympathy towards a brother thus singled out for special dealings. He

observed that, to him, this trance looked more like a visitation of

Satan than a proof of divine favour, and exhorted his friend to see

that he hid no accursed thing within his soul. Silas, feeling bound to

accept rebuke and admonition as a brotherly office, felt no resentment,

but only pain, at his friend’s doubts concerning him; and to this was

soon added some anxiety at the perception that Sarah’s manner towards

him began to exhibit a strange fluctuation between an effort at an

increased manifestation of regard and involuntary signs of shrinking

and dislike. He asked her if she wished to break off their engagement;

but she denied this: their engagement was known to the church, and had

been recognized in the prayer-meetings; it could not be broken off

without strict investigation, and Sarah could render no reason that

would be sanctioned by the feeling of the community. At this time the

senior deacon was taken dangerously ill, and, being a childless

widower, he was tended night and day by some of the younger brethren or

sisters. Silas frequently took his turn in the night-watching with

William, the one relieving the other at two in the morning. The old

man, contrary to expectation, seemed to be on the way to recovery, when

one night Silas, sitting up by his bedside, observed that his usual

audible breathing had ceased. The candle was burning low, and he had to

lift it to see the patient’s face distinctly. Examination convinced him

that the deacon was dead—had been dead some time, for the limbs were

rigid. Silas asked himself if he had been asleep, and looked at the

clock: it was already four in the morning. How was it that William had

not come? In much anxiety he went to seek for help, and soon there were

several friends assembled in the house, the minister among them, while

Silas went away to his work, wishing he could have met William to know

the reason of his non-appearance. But at six o’clock, as he was

thinking of going to seek his friend, William came, and with him the

minister. They came to summon him to Lantern Yard, to meet the church

members there; and to his inquiry concerning the cause of the summons

the only reply was, “You will hear.” Nothing further was said until

Silas was seated in the vestry, in front of the minister, with the eyes

of those who to him represented God’s people fixed solemnly upon him.

Then the minister, taking out a pocket-knife, showed it to Silas, and

asked him if he knew where he had left that knife? Silas said, he did

not know that he had left it anywhere out of his own pocket—but he was

trembling at this strange interrogation. He was then exhorted not to

hide his sin, but to confess and repent. The knife had been found in

the bureau by the departed deacon’s bedside—found in the place where

the little bag of church money had lain, which the minister himself had

seen the day before. Some hand had removed that bag; and whose hand

could it be, if not that of the man to whom the knife belonged? For

some time Silas was mute with astonishment: then he said, “God will

clear me: I know nothing about the knife being there, or the money

being gone. Search me and my dwelling; you will find nothing but three

pound five of my own savings, which William Dane knows I have had these

six months.” At this William groaned, but the minister said, “The proof

is heavy against you, brother Marner. The money was taken in the night

last past, and no man was with our departed brother but you, for

William Dane declares to us that he was hindered by sudden sickness

from going to take his place as usual, and you yourself said that he

had not come; and, moreover, you neglected the dead body.”

“I must have slept,” said Silas. Then, after a pause, he added, “Or I

must have had another visitation like that which you have all seen me

under, so that the thief must have come and gone while I was not in the

body, but out of the body. But, I say again, search me and my dwelling,

for I have been nowhere else.”

The search was made, and it ended—in William Dane’s finding the

well-known bag, empty, tucked behind the chest of drawers in Silas’s

chamber! On this William exhorted his friend to confess, and not to

hide his sin any longer. Silas turned a look of keen reproach on him,

and said, “William, for nine years that we have gone in and out

together, have you ever known me tell a lie? But God will clear me.”

“Brother,” said William, “how do I know what you may have done in the

secret chambers of your heart, to give Satan an advantage over you?”

Silas was still looking at his friend. Suddenly a deep flush came over

his face, and he was about to speak impetuously, when he seemed checked

again by some inward shock, that sent the flush back and made him

tremble. But at last he spoke feebly, looking at William.

“I remember now—the knife wasn’t in my pocket.”

William said, “I know nothing of what you mean.” The other persons

present, however, began to inquire where Silas meant to say that the

knife was, but he would give no further explanation: he only said, “I

am sore stricken; I can say nothing. God will clear me.”

On their return to the vestry there was further deliberation. Any

resort to legal measures for ascertaining the culprit was contrary to

the principles of the church in Lantern Yard, according to which

prosecution was forbidden to Christians, even had the case held less

scandal to the community. But the members were bound to take other

measures for finding out the truth, and they resolved on praying and

drawing lots. This resolution can be a ground of surprise only to those

who are unacquainted with that obscure religious life which has gone on

in the alleys of our towns. Silas knelt with his brethren, relying on

his own innocence being certified by immediate divine interference, but

feeling that there was sorrow and mourning behind for him even

then—that his trust in man had been cruelly bruised. _The lots declared

that Silas Marner was guilty._ He was solemnly suspended from

church-membership, and called upon to render up the stolen money: only

on confession, as the sign of repentance, could he be received once

more within the folds of the church. Marner listened in silence. At

last, when everyone rose to depart, he went towards William Dane and

said, in a voice shaken by agitation—

“The last time I remember using my knife, was when I took it out to cut

a strap for you. I don’t remember putting it in my pocket again. _You_

stole the money, and you have woven a plot to lay the sin at my door.

But you may prosper, for all that: there is no just God that governs

the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against

the innocent.”

There was a general shudder at this blasphemy.

William said meekly, “I leave our brethren to judge whether this is the

voice of Satan or not. I can do nothing but pray for you, Silas.”

Poor Marner went out with that despair in his soul—that shaken trust in

God and man, which is little short of madness to a loving nature. In

the bitterness of his wounded spirit, he said to himself, “_She_ will

cast me off too.” And he reflected that, if she did not believe the

testimony against him, her whole faith must be upset as his was. To

people accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious

feeling has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that

simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have

never been severed by an act of reflection. We are apt to think it

inevitable that a man in Marner’s position should have begun to

question the validity of an appeal to the divine judgment by drawing

lots; but to him this would have been an effort of independent thought

such as he had never known; and he must have made the effort at a

moment when all his energies were turned into the anguish of

disappointed faith. If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men

as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that

spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.

Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair,

without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in his

innocence. The second day he took refuge from benumbing unbelief, by

getting into his loom and working away as usual; and before many hours

were past, the minister and one of the deacons came to him with the

message from Sarah, that she held her engagement to him at an end.

Silas received the message mutely, and then turned away from the

messengers to work at his loom again. In little more than a month from

that time, Sarah was married to William Dane; and not long afterwards

it was known to the brethren in Lantern Yard that Silas Marner had

departed from the town.

CHAPTER II.

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes

find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on

their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys

and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported

to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their

history, and share none of their ideas—where their mother earth shows

another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their

souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old

faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in

which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished,

and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.

But even _their_ experience may hardly enable them thoroughly to

imagine what was the effect on a simple weaver like Silas Marner, when

he left his own country and people and came to settle in Raveloe.

Nothing could be more unlike his native town, set within sight of the

widespread hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt

hidden even from the heavens by the screening trees and hedgerows.

There was nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and

looked out on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to

have any relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had

once been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The whitewashed

walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued

rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another,

pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult

and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit where the

minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and

handled the book in a long accustomed manner; the very pauses between

the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell

of voices in song: these things had been the channel of divine

influences to Marner—they were the fostering home of his religious

emotions—they were Christianity and God’s kingdom upon earth. A weaver

who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as

the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one

face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and

nurture.

And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the world in

Raveloe?—orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the large church

in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at their own doors

in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging along the lanes or

turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where men supped heavily and

slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be

laying up a stock of linen for the life to come. There were no lips in

Raveloe from which a word could fall that would stir Silas Marner’s

benumbed faith to a sense of pain. In the early ages of the world, we

know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by

its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and

be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to

the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from

his birth. And poor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike

the feeling of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in

sullenness, from the face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him

that the Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the

prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had taken

refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and needing

nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to bitterness.

The little light he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that

frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the

blackness of night.

His first movement after the shock had been to work in his loom; and he

went on with this unremittingly, never asking himself why, now he was

come to Raveloe, he worked far on into the night to finish the tale of

Mrs. Osgood’s table-linen sooner than she expected—without

contemplating beforehand the money she would put into his hand for the

work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without

reflection. Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to

become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of

his life. Silas’s hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and

his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves

under his effort. Then there were the calls of hunger; and Silas, in

his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to

fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire;

and all these immediate promptings helped, along with the weaving, to

reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He

hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his

love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the

future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him.

Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, now its old narrow pathway

was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had

fallen on its keenest nerves.

But at last Mrs. Osgood’s table-linen was finished, and Silas was paid

in gold. His earnings in his native town, where he worked for a

wholesale dealer, had been after a lower rate; he had been paid weekly,

and of his weekly earnings a large proportion had gone to objects of

piety and charity. Now, for the first time in his life, he had five

bright guineas put into his hand; no man expected a share of them, and

he loved no man that he should offer him a share. But what were the

guineas to him who saw no vista beyond countless days of weaving? It

was needless for him to ask that, for it was pleasant to him to feel

them in his palm, and look at their bright faces, which were all his

own: it was another element of life, like the weaving and the

satisfaction of hunger, subsisting quite aloof from the life of belief

and love from which he had been cut off. The weaver’s hand had known

the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full

breadth; for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the

symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed

to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for

him; for he loved the _purpose_ then. But now, when all purpose was

gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a

sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the

seeds of desire; and as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the

twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the

gathering gloom.

About this time an incident happened which seemed to open a possibility

of some fellowship with his neighbours. One day, taking a pair of shoes

to be mended, he saw the cobbler’s wife seated by the fire, suffering

from the terrible symptoms of heart-disease and dropsy, which he had

witnessed as the precursors of his mother’s death. He felt a rush of

pity at the mingled sight and remembrance, and, recalling the relief

his mother had found from a simple preparation of foxglove, he promised

Sally Oates to bring her something that would ease her, since the

doctor did her no good. In this office of charity, Silas felt, for the

first time since he had come to Raveloe, a sense of unity between his

past and present life, which might have been the beginning of his

rescue from the insect-like existence into which his nature had shrunk.

But Sally Oates’s disease had raised her into a personage of much

interest and importance among the neighbours, and the fact of her

having found relief from drinking Silas Marner’s “stuff” became a

matter of general discourse. When Doctor Kimble gave physic, it was

natural that it should have an effect; but when a weaver, who came from

nobody knew where, worked wonders with a bottle of brown waters, the

occult character of the process was evident. Such a sort of thing had

not been known since the Wise Woman at Tarley died; and she had charms

as well as “stuff”: everybody went to her when their children had fits.

Silas Marner must be a person of the same sort, for how did he know

what would bring back Sally Oates’s breath, if he didn’t know a fine

sight more than that? The Wise Woman had words that she muttered to

herself, so that you couldn’t hear what they were, and if she tied a

bit of red thread round the child’s toe the while, it would keep off

the water in the head. There were women in Raveloe, at that present

time, who had worn one of the Wise Woman’s little bags round their

necks, and, in consequence, had never had an idiot child, as Ann

Coulter had. Silas Marner could very likely do as much, and more; and

now it was all clear how he should have come from unknown parts, and be

so “comical-looking”. But Sally Oates must mind and not tell the

doctor, for he would be sure to set his face against Marner: he was

always angry about the Wise Woman, and used to threaten those who went

to her that they should have none of his help any more.

Silas now found himself and his cottage suddenly beset by mothers who

wanted him to charm away the whooping-cough, or bring back the milk,

and by men who wanted stuff against the rheumatics or the knots in the

hands; and, to secure themselves against a refusal, the applicants

brought silver in their palms. Silas might have driven a profitable

trade in charms as well as in his small list of drugs; but money on

this condition was no temptation to him: he had never known an impulse

towards falsity, and he drove one after another away with growing

irritation, for the news of him as a wise man had spread even to

Tarley, and it was long before people ceased to take long walks for the

sake of asking his aid. But the hope in his wisdom was at length

changed into dread, for no one believed him when he said he knew no

charms and could work no cures, and every man and woman who had an

accident or a new attack after applying to him, set the misfortune down

to Master Marner’s ill-will and irritated glances. Thus it came to pass

that his movement of pity towards Sally Oates, which had given him a

transient sense of brotherhood, heightened the repulsion between him

and his neighbours, and made his isolation more complete.

Gradually the guineas, the crowns, and the half-crowns grew to a heap,

and Marner drew less and less for his own wants, trying to solve the

problem of keeping himself strong enough to work sixteen hours a-day on

as small an outlay as possible. Have not men, shut up in solitary

imprisonment, found an interest in marking the moments by straight

strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of

straight strokes, arranged in triangles, has become a mastering

purpose? Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by

repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred

a want, which is incipient habit? That will help us to understand how

the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose

imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no

purpose beyond it. Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a

square, and then into a larger square; and every added guinea, while it

was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire. In this strange world,

made a hopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intense

nature, have sat weaving, weaving—looking towards the end of his

pattern, or towards the end of his web, till he forgot the riddle, and

everything else but his immediate sensations; but the money had come to

mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not only grew, but it

remained with him. He began to think it was conscious of him, as his

loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which

had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces. He

handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the

satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his

work was done, that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship. He

had taken up some bricks in his floor underneath his loom, and here he

had made a hole in which he set the iron pot that contained his guineas

and silver coins, covering the bricks with sand whenever he replaced

them. Not that the idea of being robbed presented itself often or

strongly to his mind: hoarding was common in country districts in those

days; there were old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known

to have their savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but

their rustic neighbours, though not all of them as honest as their

ancestors in the days of King Alfred, had not imaginations bold enough

to lay a plan of burglary. How could they have spent the money in their

own village without betraying themselves? They would be obliged to “run

away”—a course as dark and dubious as a balloon journey.

So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his

guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening

itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction

that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to

the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an

end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has

perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from

faith and love—only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have

had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit

theory. Strangely Marner’s face and figure shrank and bent themselves

into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that

he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube,

which has no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to

look trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see

only one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for which

they hunted everywhere: and he was so withered and yellow, that, though

he was not yet forty, the children always called him “Old Master

Marner”.

Yet even in this stage of withering a little incident happened, which

showed that the sap of affection was not all gone. It was one of his

daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields off, and

for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had had a brown

earthenware pot, which he held as his most precious utensil among the

very few conveniences he had granted himself. It had been his companion

for twelve years, always standing on the same spot, always lending its

handle to him in the early morning, so that its form had an expression

for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his

palm gave a satisfaction mingled with that of having the fresh clear

water. One day as he was returning from the well, he stumbled against

the step of the stile, and his brown pot, falling with force against

the stones that overarched the ditch below him, was broken in three

pieces. Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in

his heart. The brown pot could never be of use to him any more, but he

stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in its old place for a

memorial.

This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year after he

came to Raveloe. The livelong day he sat in his loom, his ear filled

with its monotony, his eyes bent close down on the slow growth of

sameness in the brownish web, his muscles moving with such even

repetition that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint as the

holding of his breath. But at night came his revelry: at night he

closed his shutters, and made fast his doors, and drew forth his gold.

Long ago the heap of coins had become too large for the iron pot to

hold them, and he had made for them two thick leather bags, which

wasted no room in their resting-place, but lent themselves flexibly to

every corner. How the guineas shone as they came pouring out of the

dark leather mouths! The silver bore no large proportion in amount to

the gold, because the long pieces of linen which formed his chief work

were always partly paid for in gold, and out of the silver he supplied

his own bodily wants, choosing always the shillings and sixpences to

spend in this way. He loved the guineas best, but he would not change

the silver—the crowns and half-crowns that were his own earnings,

begotten by his labour; he loved them all. He spread them out in heaps

and bathed his hands in them; then he counted them and set them up in

regular piles, and felt their rounded outline between his thumb and

fingers, and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earned

by the work in his loom, as if they had been unborn children—thought of

the guineas that were coming slowly through the coming years, through

all his life, which spread far away before him, the end quite hidden by

countless days of weaving. No wonder his thoughts were still with his

loom and his money when he made his journeys through the fields and the

lanes to fetch and carry home his work, so that his steps never

wandered to the hedge-banks and the lane-side in search of the once

familiar herbs: these too belonged to the past, from which his life had

shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy

fringe of its old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a

groove for itself in the barren sand.

But about the Christmas of that fifteenth year, a second great change

came over Marner’s life, and his history became blent in a singular

manner with the life of his neighbours.

CHAPTER III.

The greatest man in Raveloe was Squire Cass, who lived in the large red

house with the handsome flight of stone steps in front and the high

stables behind it, nearly opposite the church. He was only one among

several landed parishioners, but he alone was honoured with the title

of Squire; for though Mr. Osgood’s family was also understood to be of

timeless origin—the Raveloe imagination having never ventured back to

that fearful blank when there were no Osgoods—still, he merely owned

the farm he occupied; whereas Squire Cass had a tenant or two, who

complained of the game to him quite as if he had been a lord.

It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar

favour of Providence towards the landed interest, and the fall of

prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen

down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry

were plentifully anointing their wheels. I am speaking now in relation

to Raveloe and the parishes that resembled it; for our old-fashioned

country life had many different aspects, as all life must have when it

is spread over a various surface, and breathed on variously by

multitudinous currents, from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of

men, which are for ever moving and crossing each other with

incalculable results. Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the

rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan

earnestness: the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy

as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor

thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly

life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which

were the heirlooms of the poor. Betty Jay scented the boiling of Squire

Cass’s hams, but her longing was arrested by the unctuous liquor in

which they were boiled; and when the seasons brought round the great

merry-makings, they were regarded on all hands as a fine thing for the

poor. For the Raveloe feasts were like the rounds of beef and the

barrels of ale—they were on a large scale, and lasted a good while,

especially in the winter-time. After ladies had packed up their best

gowns and top-knots in bandboxes, and had incurred the risk of fording

streams on pillions with the precious burden in rainy or snowy weather,

when there was no knowing how high the water would rise, it was not to

be supposed that they looked forward to a brief pleasure. On this

ground it was always contrived in the dark seasons, when there was

little work to be done, and the hours were long, that several

neighbours should keep open house in succession. So soon as Squire

Cass’s standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests

had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr.

Osgood’s, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut,

pork-pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all its

freshness—everything, in fact, that appetites at leisure could desire,

in perhaps greater perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at

Squire Cass’s.

For the Squire’s wife had died long ago, and the Red House was without

that presence of the wife and mother which is the fountain of wholesome

love and fear in parlour and kitchen; and this helped to account not

only for there being more profusion than finished excellence in the

holiday provisions, but also for the frequency with which the proud

Squire condescended to preside in the parlour of the Rainbow rather

than under the shadow of his own dark wainscot; perhaps, also, for the

fact that his sons had turned out rather ill. Raveloe was not a place

where moral censure was severe, but it was thought a weakness in the

Squire that he had kept all his sons at home in idleness; and though

some licence was to be allowed to young men whose fathers could afford

it, people shook their heads at the courses of the second son, Dunstan,

commonly called Dunsey Cass, whose taste for swopping and betting might

turn out to be a sowing of something worse than wild oats. To be sure,

the neighbours said, it was no matter what became of Dunsey—a spiteful

jeering fellow, who seemed to enjoy his drink the more when other

people went dry—always provided that his doings did not bring trouble

on a family like Squire Cass’s, with a monument in the church, and

tankards older than King George. But it would be a thousand pities if

Mr. Godfrey, the eldest, a fine open-faced good-natured young man who

was to come into the land some day, should take to going along the same

road with his brother, as he had seemed to do of late. If he went on in

that way, he would lose Miss Nancy Lammeter; for it was well known that

she had looked very shyly on him ever since last Whitsuntide

twelvemonth, when there was so much talk about his being away from home

days and days together. There was something wrong, more than

common—that was quite clear; for Mr. Godfrey didn’t look half so

fresh-coloured and open as he used to do. At one time everybody was

saying, What a handsome couple he and Miss Nancy Lammeter would make!

and if she could come to be mistress at the Red House, there would be a

fine change, for the Lammeters had been brought up in that way, that

they never suffered a pinch of salt to be wasted, and yet everybody in

their household had of the best, according to his place. Such a

daughter-in-law would be a saving to the old Squire, if she never

brought a penny to her fortune; for it was to be feared that,

notwithstanding his incomings, there were more holes in his pocket than

the one where he put his own hand in. But if Mr. Godfrey didn’t turn

over a new leaf, he might say “Good-bye” to Miss Nancy Lammeter.

It was the once hopeful Godfrey who was standing, with his hands in his

side-pockets and his back to the fire, in the dark wainscoted parlour,

one late November afternoon in that fifteenth year of Silas Marner’s

life at Raveloe. The fading grey light fell dimly on the walls

decorated with guns, whips, and foxes’ brushes, on coats and hats flung

on the chairs, on tankards sending forth a scent of flat ale, and on a

half-choked fire, with pipes propped up in the chimney-corners: signs

of a domestic life destitute of any hallowing charm, with which the

look of gloomy vexation on Godfrey’s blond face was in sad accordance.

He seemed to be waiting and listening for some one’s approach, and

presently the sound of a heavy step, with an accompanying whistle, was

heard across the large empty entrance-hall.

The door opened, and a thick-set, heavy-looking young man entered, with

the flushed face and the gratuitously elated bearing which mark the

first stage of intoxication. It was Dunsey, and at the sight of him

Godfrey’s face parted with some of its gloom to take on the more active

expression of hatred. The handsome brown spaniel that lay on the hearth

retreated under the chair in the chimney-corner.

“Well, Master Godfrey, what do you want with me?” said Dunsey, in a

mocking tone. “You’re my elders and betters, you know; I was obliged to

come when you sent for me.”

“Why, this is what I want—and just shake yourself sober and listen,

will you?” said Godfrey, savagely. He had himself been drinking more

than was good for him, trying to turn his gloom into uncalculating

anger. “I want to tell you, I must hand over that rent of Fowler’s to

the Squire, or else tell him I gave it you; for he’s threatening to

distrain for it, and it’ll all be out soon, whether I tell him or not.

He said, just now, before he went out, he should send word to Cox to

distrain, if Fowler didn’t come and pay up his arrears this week. The

Squire’s short o’ cash, and in no humour to stand any nonsense; and you

know what he threatened, if ever he found you making away with his

money again. So, see and get the money, and pretty quickly, will you?”

“Oh!” said Dunsey, sneeringly, coming nearer to his brother and looking

in his face. “Suppose, now, you get the money yourself, and save me the

trouble, eh? Since you was so kind as to hand it over to me, you’ll not

refuse me the kindness to pay it back for me: it was your brotherly

love made you do it, you know.”

Godfrey bit his lips and clenched his fist. “Don’t come near me with

that look, else I’ll knock you down.”

“Oh no, you won’t,” said Dunsey, turning away on his heel, however.

“Because I’m such a good-natured brother, you know. I might get you

turned out of house and home, and cut off with a shilling any day. I

might tell the Squire how his handsome son was married to that nice

young woman, Molly Farren, and was very unhappy because he couldn’t

live with his drunken wife, and I should slip into your place as

comfortable as could be. But you see, I don’t do it—I’m so easy and

good-natured. You’ll take any trouble for me. You’ll get the hundred

pounds for me—I know you will.”

“How can I get the money?” said Godfrey, quivering. “I haven’t a

shilling to bless myself with. And it’s a lie that you’d slip into my

place: you’d get yourself turned out too, that’s all. For if you begin

telling tales, I’ll follow. Bob’s my father’s favourite—you know that

very well. He’d only think himself well rid of you.”

“Never mind,” said Dunsey, nodding his head sideways as he looked out

of the window. “It ’ud be very pleasant to me to go in your

company—you’re such a handsome brother, and we’ve always been so fond

of quarrelling with one another, I shouldn’t know what to do without

you. But you’d like better for us both to stay at home together; I know

you would. So you’ll manage to get that little sum o’ money, and I’ll

bid you good-bye, though I’m sorry to part.”

Dunstan was moving off, but Godfrey rushed after him and seized him by

the arm, saying, with an oath—

“I tell you, I have no money: I can get no money.”

“Borrow of old Kimble.”

“I tell you, he won’t lend me any more, and I shan’t ask him.”

“Well, then, sell Wildfire.”

“Yes, that’s easy talking. I must have the money directly.”

“Well, you’ve only got to ride him to the hunt to-morrow. There’ll be

Bryce and Keating there, for sure. You’ll get more bids than one.”

“I daresay, and get back home at eight o’clock, splashed up to the

chin. I’m going to Mrs. Osgood’s birthday dance.”

“Oho!” said Dunsey, turning his head on one side, and trying to speak

in a small mincing treble. “And there’s sweet Miss Nancy coming; and we

shall dance with her, and promise never to be naughty again, and be

taken into favour, and—”

“Hold your tongue about Miss Nancy, you fool,” said Godfrey, turning

red, “else I’ll throttle you.”

“What for?” said Dunsey, still in an artificial tone, but taking a whip

from the table and beating the butt-end of it on his palm. “You’ve a

very good chance. I’d advise you to creep up her sleeve again: it ’ud

be saving time, if Molly should happen to take a drop too much laudanum

some day, and make a widower of you. Miss Nancy wouldn’t mind being a

second, if she didn’t know it. And you’ve got a good-natured brother,

who’ll keep your secret well, because you’ll be so very obliging to

him.”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Godfrey, quivering, and pale again,

“my patience is pretty near at an end. If you’d a little more sharpness

in you, you might know that you may urge a man a bit too far, and make

one leap as easy as another. I don’t know but what it is so now: I may

as well tell the Squire everything myself—I should get you off my back,

if I got nothing else. And, after all, he’ll know some time. She’s been

threatening to come herself and tell him. So, don’t flatter yourself

that your secrecy’s worth any price you choose to ask. You drain me of

money till I have got nothing to pacify _her_ with, and she’ll do as

she threatens some day. It’s all one. I’ll tell my father everything

myself, and you may go to the devil.”

Dunsey perceived that he had overshot his mark, and that there was a

point at which even the hesitating Godfrey might be driven into

decision. But he said, with an air of unconcern—

“As you please; but I’ll have a draught of ale first.” And ringing the

bell, he threw himself across two chairs, and began to rap the

window-seat with the handle of his whip.

Godfrey stood, still with his back to the fire, uneasily moving his

fingers among the contents of his side-pockets, and looking at the

floor. That big muscular frame of his held plenty of animal courage,

but helped him to no decision when the dangers to be braved were such

as could neither be knocked down nor throttled. His natural

irresolution and moral cowardice were exaggerated by a position in

which dreaded consequences seemed to press equally on all sides, and

his irritation had no sooner provoked him to defy Dunstan and

anticipate all possible betrayals, than the miseries he must bring on

himself by such a step seemed more unendurable to him than the present

evil. The results of confession were not contingent, they were certain;

whereas betrayal was not certain. From the near vision of that

certainty he fell back on suspense and vacillation with a sense of

repose. The disinherited son of a small squire, equally disinclined to

dig and to beg, was almost as helpless as an uprooted tree, which, by

the favour of earth and sky, has grown to a handsome bulk on the spot

where it first shot upward. Perhaps it would have been possible to

think of digging with some cheerfulness if Nancy Lammeter were to be

won on those terms; but, since he must irrevocably lose _her_ as well

as the inheritance, and must break every tie but the one that degraded

him and left him without motive for trying to recover his better self,

he could imagine no future for himself on the other side of confession

but that of “’listing for a soldier”—the most desperate step, short of

suicide, in the eyes of respectable families. No! he would rather trust

to casualties than to his own resolve—rather go on sitting at the

feast, and sipping the wine he loved, though with the sword hanging

over him and terror in his heart, than rush away into the cold darkness

where there was no pleasure left. The utmost concession to Dunstan

about the horse began to seem easy, compared with the fulfilment of his

own threat. But his pride would not let him recommence the conversation

otherwise than by continuing the quarrel. Dunstan was waiting for this,

and took his ale in shorter draughts than usual.

“It’s just like you,” Godfrey burst out, in a bitter tone, “to talk

about my selling Wildfire in that cool way—the last thing I’ve got to

call my own, and the best bit of horse-flesh I ever had in my life. And

if you’d got a spark of pride in you, you’d be ashamed to see the

stables emptied, and everybody sneering about it. But it’s my belief

you’d sell yourself, if it was only for the pleasure of making somebody

feel he’d got a bad bargain.”

“Aye, aye,” said Dunstan, very placably, “you do me justice, I see. You

know I’m a jewel for ’ticing people into bargains. For which reason I

advise you to let _me_ sell Wildfire. I’d ride him to the hunt

to-morrow for you, with pleasure. I shouldn’t look so handsome as you

in the saddle, but it’s the horse they’ll bid for, and not the rider.”

“Yes, I daresay—trust my horse to you!”

“As you please,” said Dunstan, rapping the window-seat again with an

air of great unconcern. “It’s _you_ have got to pay Fowler’s money;

it’s none of my business. You received the money from him when you went

to Bramcote, and _you_ told the Squire it wasn’t paid. I’d nothing to

do with that; you chose to be so obliging as to give it me, that was

all. If you don’t want to pay the money, let it alone; it’s all one to

me. But I was willing to accommodate you by undertaking to sell the

horse, seeing it’s not convenient to you to go so far to-morrow.”

Godfrey was silent for some moments. He would have liked to spring on

Dunstan, wrench the whip from his hand, and flog him to within an inch

of his life; and no bodily fear could have deterred him; but he was

mastered by another sort of fear, which was fed by feelings stronger

even than his resentment. When he spoke again, it was in a

half-conciliatory tone.

“Well, you mean no nonsense about the horse, eh? You’ll sell him all

fair, and hand over the money? If you don’t, you know, everything ’ull

go to smash, for I’ve got nothing else to trust to. And you’ll have

less pleasure in pulling the house over my head, when your own skull’s

to be broken too.”

“Aye, aye,” said Dunstan, rising; “all right. I thought you’d come

round. I’m the fellow to bring old Bryce up to the scratch. I’ll get

you a hundred and twenty for him, if I get you a penny.”

“But it’ll perhaps rain cats and dogs to-morrow, as it did yesterday,

and then you can’t go,” said Godfrey, hardly knowing whether he wished

for that obstacle or not.

“Not _it_,” said Dunstan. “I’m always lucky in my weather. It might

rain if you wanted to go yourself. You never hold trumps, you know—I

always do. You’ve got the beauty, you see, and I’ve got the luck, so

you must keep me by you for your crooked sixpence; you’ll _ne_-ver get

along without me.”

“Confound you, hold your tongue!” said Godfrey, impetuously. “And take

care to keep sober to-morrow, else you’ll get pitched on your head

coming home, and Wildfire might be the worse for it.”

“Make your tender heart easy,” said Dunstan, opening the door. “You

never knew me see double when I’d got a bargain to make; it ’ud spoil

the fun. Besides, whenever I fall, I’m warranted to fall on my legs.”

With that, Dunstan slammed the door behind him, and left Godfrey to

that bitter rumination on his personal circumstances which was now

unbroken from day to day save by the excitement of sporting, drinking,

card-playing, or the rarer and less oblivious pleasure of seeing Miss

Nancy Lammeter. The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher

sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable

than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which

leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own

griefs and discontents. The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we

are apt to think very prosaic figures—men whose only work was to ride

round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles, and who

passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification of

senses dulled by monotony—had a certain pathos in them nevertheless.

Calamities came to _them_ too, and their early errors carried hard

consequences: perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of

purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life

in which the days would not seem too long, even without rioting; but

the maiden was lost, and the vision passed away, and then what was left

to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt, or for

carrying a gun over the furrows, but to drink and get merry, or to

drink and get angry, so that they might be independent of variety, and

say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already any

time that twelvemonth? Assuredly, among these flushed and dull-eyed men

there were some whom—thanks to their native human-kindness—even riot

could never drive into brutality; men who, when their cheeks were

fresh, had felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse, had been pierced

by the reeds they leaned on, or had lightly put their limbs in fetters

from which no struggle could loose them; and under these sad

circumstances, common to us all, their thoughts could find no

resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of their own petty

history.

That, at least, was the condition of Godfrey Cass in this

six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction, helped

by those small indefinable influences which every personal relation

exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which

was a blight on his life. It was an ugly story of low passion,

delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from

the privacy of Godfrey’s bitter memory. He had long known that the

delusion was partly due to a trap laid for him by Dunstan, who saw in

his brother’s degrading marriage the means of gratifying at once his

jealous hate and his cupidity. And if Godfrey could have felt himself

simply a victim, the iron bit that destiny had put into his mouth would

have chafed him less intolerably. If the curses he muttered half aloud

when he was alone had had no other object than Dunstan’s diabolical

cunning, he might have shrunk less from the consequences of avowal. But

he had something else to curse—his own vicious folly, which now seemed

as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do

when their promptings have long passed away. For four years he had

thought of Nancy Lammeter, and wooed her with tacit patient worship, as

the woman who made him think of the future with joy: she would be his

wife, and would make home lovely to him, as his father’s home had never

been; and it would be easy, when she was always near, to shake off

those foolish habits that were no pleasures, but only a feverish way of

annulling vacancy. Godfrey’s was an essentially domestic nature, bred

up in a home where the hearth had no smiles, and where the daily habits

were not chastised by the presence of household order. His easy

disposition made him fall in unresistingly with the family courses, but

the need of some tender permanent affection, the longing for some

influence that would make the good he preferred easy to pursue, caused

the neatness, purity, and liberal orderliness of the Lammeter

household, sunned by the smile of Nancy, to seem like those fresh

bright hours of the morning when temptations go to sleep and leave the

ear open to the voice of the good angel, inviting to industry,

sobriety, and peace. And yet the hope of this paradise had not been

enough to save him from a course which shut him out of it for ever.

Instead of keeping fast hold of the strong silken rope by which Nancy

would have drawn him safe to the green banks where it was easy to step

firmly, he had let himself be dragged back into mud and slime, in which

it was useless to struggle. He had made ties for himself which robbed

him of all wholesome motive, and were a constant exasperation.

Still, there was one position worse than the present: it was the

position he would be in when the ugly secret was disclosed; and the

desire that continually triumphed over every other was that of warding

off the evil day, when he would have to bear the consequences of his

father’s violent resentment for the wound inflicted on his family

pride—would have, perhaps, to turn his back on that hereditary ease and

dignity which, after all, was a sort of reason for living, and would

carry with him the certainty that he was banished for ever from the

sight and esteem of Nancy Lammeter. The longer the interval, the more

chance there was of deliverance from some, at least, of the hateful

consequences to which he had sold himself; the more opportunities

remained for him to snatch the strange gratification of seeing Nancy,

and gathering some faint indications of her lingering regard. Towards

this gratification he was impelled, fitfully, every now and then, after

having passed weeks in which he had avoided her as the far-off

bright-winged prize that only made him spring forward and find his

chain all the more galling. One of those fits of yearning was on him

now, and it would have been strong enough to have persuaded him to

trust Wildfire to Dunstan rather than disappoint the yearning, even if

he had not had another reason for his disinclination towards the

morrow’s hunt. That other reason was the fact that the morning’s meet

was near Batherley, the market-town where the unhappy woman lived,

whose image became more odious to him every day; and to his thought the

whole vicinage was haunted by her. The yoke a man creates for himself

by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature; and the

good-humoured, affectionate-hearted Godfrey Cass was fast becoming a

bitter man, visited by cruel wishes, that seemed to enter, and depart,

and enter again, like demons who had found in him a ready-garnished

home.

What was he to do this evening to pass the time? He might as well go to

the Rainbow, and hear the talk about the cock-fighting: everybody was

there, and what else was there to be done? Though, for his own part, he

did not care a button for cock-fighting. Snuff, the brown spaniel, who

had placed herself in front of him, and had been watching him for some

time, now jumped up in impatience for the expected caress. But Godfrey

thrust her away without looking at her, and left the room, followed

humbly by the unresenting Snuff—perhaps because she saw no other career

open to her.

CHAPTER IV.

Dunstan Cass, setting off in the raw morning, at the judiciously quiet

pace of a man who is obliged to ride to cover on his hunter, had to

take his way along the lane which, at its farther extremity, passed by

the piece of unenclosed ground called the Stone-pit, where stood the

cottage, once a stone-cutter’s shed, now for fifteen years inhabited by

Silas Marner. The spot looked very dreary at this season, with the

moist trodden clay about it, and the red, muddy water high up in the

deserted quarry. That was Dunstan’s first thought as he approached it;

the second was, that the old fool of a weaver, whose loom he heard

rattling already, had a great deal of money hidden somewhere. How was

it that he, Dunstan Cass, who had often heard talk of Marner’s

miserliness, had never thought of suggesting to Godfrey that he should

frighten or persuade the old fellow into lending the money on the

excellent security of the young Squire’s prospects? The resource

occurred to him now as so easy and agreeable, especially as Marner’s

hoard was likely to be large enough to leave Godfrey a handsome surplus

beyond his immediate needs, and enable him to accommodate his faithful

brother, that he had almost turned the horse’s head towards home again.

Godfrey would be ready enough to accept the suggestion: he would snatch

eagerly at a plan that might save him from parting with Wildfire. But

when Dunstan’s meditation reached this point, the inclination to go on

grew strong and prevailed. He didn’t want to give Godfrey that

pleasure: he preferred that Master Godfrey should be vexed. Moreover,

Dunstan enjoyed the self-important consciousness of having a horse to

sell, and the opportunity of driving a bargain, swaggering, and

possibly taking somebody in. He might have all the satisfaction

attendant on selling his brother’s horse, and not the less have the

further satisfaction of setting Godfrey to borrow Marner’s money. So he

rode on to cover.

Bryce and Keating were there, as Dunstan was quite sure they would

be—he was such a lucky fellow.

“Heyday!” said Bryce, who had long had his eye on Wildfire, “you’re on

your brother’s horse to-day: how’s that?”

“Oh, I’ve swopped with him,” said Dunstan, whose delight in lying,

grandly independent of utility, was not to be diminished by the

likelihood that his hearer would not believe him—“Wildfire’s mine now.”

“What! has he swopped with you for that big-boned hack of yours?” said

Bryce, quite aware that he should get another lie in answer.

“Oh, there was a little account between us,” said Dunsey, carelessly,

“and Wildfire made it even. I accommodated him by taking the horse,

though it was against my will, for I’d got an itch for a mare o’

Jortin’s—as rare a bit o’ blood as ever you threw your leg across. But

I shall keep Wildfire, now I’ve got him, though I’d a bid of a hundred

and fifty for him the other day, from a man over at Flitton—he’s buying

for Lord Cromleck—a fellow with a cast in his eye, and a green

waistcoat. But I mean to stick to Wildfire: I shan’t get a better at a

fence in a hurry. The mare’s got more blood, but she’s a bit too weak

in the hind-quarters.”

Bryce of course divined that Dunstan wanted to sell the horse, and

Dunstan knew that he divined it (horse-dealing is only one of many

human transactions carried on in this ingenious manner); and they both

considered that the bargain was in its first stage, when Bryce replied

ironically—

“I wonder at that now; I wonder you mean to keep him; for I never heard

of a man who didn’t want to sell his horse getting a bid of half as

much again as the horse was worth. You’ll be lucky if you get a

hundred.”

Keating rode up now, and the transaction became more complicated. It

ended in the purchase of the horse by Bryce for a hundred and twenty,

to be paid on the delivery of Wildfire, safe and sound, at the

Batherley stables. It did occur to Dunsey that it might be wise for him

to give up the day’s hunting, proceed at once to Batherley, and, having

waited for Bryce’s return, hire a horse to carry him home with the

money in his pocket. But the inclination for a run, encouraged by

confidence in his luck, and by a draught of brandy from his

pocket-pistol at the conclusion of the bargain, was not easy to

overcome, especially with a horse under him that would take the fences

to the admiration of the field. Dunstan, however, took one fence too

many, and got his horse pierced with a hedge-stake. His own

ill-favoured person, which was quite unmarketable, escaped without

injury; but poor Wildfire, unconscious of his price, turned on his

flank and painfully panted his last. It happened that Dunstan, a short

time before, having had to get down to arrange his stirrup, had

muttered a good many curses at this interruption, which had thrown him

in the rear of the hunt near the moment of glory, and under this

exasperation had taken the fences more blindly. He would soon have been

up with the hounds again, when the fatal accident happened; and hence

he was between eager riders in advance, not troubling themselves about

what happened behind them, and far-off stragglers, who were as likely

as not to pass quite aloof from the line of road in which Wildfire had

fallen. Dunstan, whose nature it was to care more for immediate

annoyances than for remote consequences, no sooner recovered his legs,

and saw that it was all over with Wildfire, than he felt a satisfaction

at the absence of witnesses to a position which no swaggering could

make enviable. Reinforcing himself, after his shake, with a little

brandy and much swearing, he walked as fast as he could to a coppice on

his right hand, through which it occurred to him that he could make his

way to Batherley without danger of encountering any member of the hunt.

His first intention was to hire a horse there and ride home forthwith,

for to walk many miles without a gun in his hand, and along an ordinary

road, was as much out of the question to him as to other spirited young

men of his kind. He did not much mind about taking the bad news to

Godfrey, for he had to offer him at the same time the resource of

Marner’s money; and if Godfrey kicked, as he always did, at the notion

of making a fresh debt from which he himself got the smallest share of

advantage, why, he wouldn’t kick long: Dunstan felt sure he could worry

Godfrey into anything. The idea of Marner’s money kept growing in

vividness, now the want of it had become immediate; the prospect of

having to make his appearance with the muddy boots of a pedestrian at

Batherley, and to encounter the grinning queries of stablemen, stood

unpleasantly in the way of his impatience to be back at Raveloe and

carry out his felicitous plan; and a casual visitation of his

waistcoat-pocket, as he was ruminating, awakened his memory to the fact

that the two or three small coins his forefinger encountered there were

of too pale a colour to cover that small debt, without payment of which

the stable-keeper had declared he would never do any more business with

Dunsey Cass. After all, according to the direction in which the run had

brought him, he was not so very much farther from home than he was from

Batherley; but Dunsey, not being remarkable for clearness of head, was

only led to this conclusion by the gradual perception that there were

other reasons for choosing the unprecedented course of walking home. It

was now nearly four o’clock, and a mist was gathering: the sooner he

got into the road the better. He remembered having crossed the road and

seen the finger-post only a little while before Wildfire broke down;

so, buttoning his coat, twisting the lash of his hunting-whip compactly

round the handle, and rapping the tops of his boots with a

self-possessed air, as if to assure himself that he was not at all

taken by surprise, he set off with the sense that he was undertaking a

remarkable feat of bodily exertion, which somehow and at some time he

should be able to dress up and magnify to the admiration of a select

circle at the Rainbow. When a young gentleman like Dunsey is reduced to

so exceptional a mode of locomotion as walking, a whip in his hand is a

desirable corrective to a too bewildering dreamy sense of unwontedness

in his position; and Dunstan, as he went along through the gathering

mist, was always rapping his whip somewhere. It was Godfrey’s whip,

which he had chosen to take without leave because it had a gold handle;

of course no one could see, when Dunstan held it, that the name

_Godfrey Cass_ was cut in deep letters on that gold handle—they could

only see that it was a very handsome whip. Dunsey was not without fear

that he might meet some acquaintance in whose eyes he would cut a

pitiable figure, for mist is no screen when people get close to each

other; but when he at last found himself in the well-known Raveloe

lanes without having met a soul, he silently remarked that that was

part of his usual good luck. But now the mist, helped by the evening

darkness, was more of a screen than he desired, for it hid the ruts

into which his feet were liable to slip—hid everything, so that he had

to guide his steps by dragging his whip along the low bushes in advance

of the hedgerow. He must soon, he thought, be getting near the opening

at the Stone-pits: he should find it out by the break in the hedgerow.

He found it out, however, by another circumstance which he had not

expected—namely, by certain gleams of light, which he presently guessed

to proceed from Silas Marner’s cottage. That cottage and the money

hidden within it had been in his mind continually during his walk, and

he had been imagining ways of cajoling and tempting the weaver to part

with the immediate possession of his money for the sake of receiving

interest. Dunstan felt as if there must be a little frightening added

to the cajolery, for his own arithmetical convictions were not clear

enough to afford him any forcible demonstration as to the advantages of

interest; and as for security, he regarded it vaguely as a means of

cheating a man by making him believe that he would be paid. Altogether,

the operation on the miser’s mind was a task that Godfrey would be sure

to hand over to his more daring and cunning brother: Dunstan had made

up his mind to that; and by the time he saw the light gleaming through

the chinks of Marner’s shutters, the idea of a dialogue with the weaver

had become so familiar to him, that it occurred to him as quite a

natural thing to make the acquaintance forthwith. There might be

several conveniences attending this course: the weaver had possibly got

a lantern, and Dunstan was tired of feeling his way. He was still

nearly three-quarters of a mile from home, and the lane was becoming

unpleasantly slippery, for the mist was passing into rain. He turned up

the bank, not without some fear lest he might miss the right way, since

he was not certain whether the light were in front or on the side of

the cottage. But he felt the ground before him cautiously with his

whip-handle, and at last arrived safely at the door. He knocked loudly,

rather enjoying the idea that the old fellow would be frightened at the

sudden noise. He heard no movement in reply: all was silence in the

cottage. Was the weaver gone to bed, then? If so, why had he left a

light? That was a strange forgetfulness in a miser. Dunstan knocked

still more loudly, and, without pausing for a reply, pushed his fingers

through the latch-hole, intending to shake the door and pull the

latch-string up and down, not doubting that the door was fastened. But,

to his surprise, at this double motion the door opened, and he found

himself in front of a bright fire which lit up every corner of the

cottage—the bed, the loom, the three chairs, and the table—and showed

him that Marner was not there.

Nothing at that moment could be much more inviting to Dunsey than the

bright fire on the brick hearth: he walked in and seated himself by it

at once. There was something in front of the fire, too, that would have

been inviting to a hungry man, if it had been in a different stage of

cooking. It was a small bit of pork suspended from the kettle-hanger by

a string passed through a large door-key, in a way known to primitive

housekeepers unpossessed of jacks. But the pork had been hung at the

farthest extremity of the hanger, apparently to prevent the roasting

from proceeding too rapidly during the owner’s absence. The old staring

simpleton had hot meat for his supper, then? thought Dunstan. People

had always said he lived on mouldy bread, on purpose to check his

appetite. But where could he be at this time, and on such an evening,

leaving his supper in this stage of preparation, and his door

unfastened? Dunstan’s own recent difficulty in making his way suggested

to him that the weaver had perhaps gone outside his cottage to fetch in

fuel, or for some such brief purpose, and had slipped into the

Stone-pit. That was an interesting idea to Dunstan, carrying

consequences of entire novelty. If the weaver was dead, who had a right

to his money? Who would know where his money was hidden? _Who would

know that anybody had come to take it away?_ He went no farther into

the subtleties of evidence: the pressing question, “Where _is_ the

money?” now took such entire possession of him as to make him quite

forget that the weaver’s death was not a certainty. A dull mind, once

arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to

retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started

was purely problematic. And Dunstan’s mind was as dull as the mind of a

possible felon usually is. There were only three hiding-places where he

had ever heard of cottagers’ hoards being found: the thatch, the bed,

and a hole in the floor. Marner’s cottage had no thatch; and Dunstan’s

first act, after a train of thought made rapid by the stimulus of

cupidity, was to go up to the bed; but while he did so, his eyes

travelled eagerly over the floor, where the bricks, distinct in the

fire-light, were discernible under the sprinkling of sand. But not

everywhere; for there was one spot, and one only, which was quite

covered with sand, and sand showing the marks of fingers, which had

apparently been careful to spread it over a given space. It was near

the treddles of the loom. In an instant Dunstan darted to that spot,

swept away the sand with his whip, and, inserting the thin end of the

hook between the bricks, found that they were loose. In haste he lifted

up two bricks, and saw what he had no doubt was the object of his

search; for what could there be but money in those two leathern bags?

And, from their weight, they must be filled with guineas. Dunstan felt

round the hole, to be certain that it held no more; then hastily

replaced the bricks, and spread the sand over them. Hardly more than

five minutes had passed since he entered the cottage, but it seemed to

Dunstan like a long while; and though he was without any distinct

recognition of the possibility that Marner might be alive, and might

re-enter the cottage at any moment, he felt an undefinable dread laying

hold on him, as he rose to his feet with the bags in his hand. He would

hasten out into the darkness, and then consider what he should do with

the bags. He closed the door behind him immediately, that he might shut

in the stream of light: a few steps would be enough to carry him beyond

betrayal by the gleams from the shutter-chinks and the latch-hole. The

rain and darkness had got thicker, and he was glad of it; though it was

awkward walking with both hands filled, so that it was as much as he

could do to grasp his whip along with one of the bags. But when he had

gone a yard or two, he might take his time. So he stepped forward into

the darkness.

CHAPTER V.

When Dunstan Cass turned his back on the cottage, Silas Marner was not

more than a hundred yards away from it, plodding along from the village

with a sack thrown round his shoulders as an overcoat, and with a horn

lantern in his hand. His legs were weary, but his mind was at ease,

free from the presentiment of change. The sense of security more

frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason

it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have

been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given

event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged

as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of

time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A

man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt

by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though

the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the

older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing

conception of his own death. This influence of habit was necessarily

strong in a man whose life was so monotonous as Marner’s—who saw no new

people and heard of no new events to keep alive in him the idea of the

unexpected and the changeful; and it explains simply enough, why his

mind could be at ease, though he had left his house and his treasure

more defenceless than usual. Silas was thinking with double complacency

of his supper: first, because it would be hot and savoury; and

secondly, because it would cost him nothing. For the little bit of pork

was a present from that excellent housewife, Miss Priscilla Lammeter,

to whom he had this day carried home a handsome piece of linen; and it

was only on occasion of a present like this, that Silas indulged

himself with roast-meat. Supper was his favourite meal, because it came

at his time of revelry, when his heart warmed over his gold; whenever

he had roast-meat, he always chose to have it for supper. But this

evening, he had no sooner ingeniously knotted his string fast round his

bit of pork, twisted the string according to rule over his door-key,

passed it through the handle, and made it fast on the hanger, than he

remembered that a piece of very fine twine was indispensable to his

“setting up” a new piece of work in his loom early in the morning. It

had slipped his memory, because, in coming from Mr. Lammeter’s, he had

not had to pass through the village; but to lose time by going on

errands in the morning was out of the question. It was a nasty fog to

turn out into, but there were things Silas loved better than his own

comfort; so, drawing his pork to the extremity of the hanger, and

arming himself with his lantern and his old sack, he set out on what,

in ordinary weather, would have been a twenty minutes’ errand. He could

not have locked his door without undoing his well-knotted string and

retarding his supper; it was not worth his while to make that

sacrifice. What thief would find his way to the Stone-pits on such a

night as this? and why should he come on this particular night, when he

had never come through all the fifteen years before? These questions

were not distinctly present in Silas’s mind; they merely serve to

represent the vaguely-felt foundation of his freedom from anxiety.

He reached his door in much satisfaction that his errand was done: he

opened it, and to his short-sighted eyes everything remained as he had

left it, except that the fire sent out a welcome increase of heat. He

trod about the floor while putting by his lantern and throwing aside

his hat and sack, so as to merge the marks of Dunstan’s feet on the

sand in the marks of his own nailed boots. Then he moved his pork

nearer to the fire, and sat down to the agreeable business of tending

the meat and warming himself at the same time.

Any one who had looked at him as the red light shone upon his pale

face, strange straining eyes, and meagre form, would perhaps have

understood the mixture of contemptuous pity, dread, and suspicion with

which he was regarded by his neighbours in Raveloe. Yet few men could

be more harmless than poor Marner. In his truthful simple soul, not

even the growing greed and worship of gold could beget any vice

directly injurious to others. The light of his faith quite put out, and

his affections made desolate, he had clung with all the force of his

nature to his work and his money; and like all objects to which a man

devotes himself, they had fashioned him into correspondence with

themselves. His loom, as he wrought in it without ceasing, had in its

turn wrought on him, and confirmed more and more the monotonous craving

for its monotonous response. His gold, as he hung over it and saw it

grow, gathered his power of loving together into a hard isolation like

its own.

As soon as he was warm he began to think it would be a long while to

wait till after supper before he drew out his guineas, and it would be

pleasant to see them on the table before him as he ate his unwonted

feast. For joy is the best of wine, and Silas’s guineas were a golden

wine of that sort.

He rose and placed his candle unsuspectingly on the floor near his

loom, swept away the sand without noticing any change, and removed the

bricks. The sight of the empty hole made his heart leap violently, but

the belief that his gold was gone could not come at once—only terror,

and the eager effort to put an end to the terror. He passed his

trembling hand all about the hole, trying to think it possible that his

eyes had deceived him; then he held the candle in the hole and examined

it curiously, trembling more and more. At last he shook so violently

that he let fall the candle, and lifted his hands to his head, trying

to steady himself, that he might think. Had he put his gold somewhere

else, by a sudden resolution last night, and then forgotten it? A man

falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding

stones; and Silas, by acting as if he believed in false hopes, warded

off the moment of despair. He searched in every corner, he turned his

bed over, and shook it, and kneaded it; he looked in his brick oven

where he laid his sticks. When there was no other place to be searched,

he kneeled down again and felt once more all round the hole. There was

no untried refuge left for a moment’s shelter from the terrible truth.

Yes, there was a sort of refuge which always comes with the prostration

of thought under an overpowering passion: it was that expectation of

impossibilities, that belief in contradictory images, which is still

distinct from madness, because it is capable of being dissipated by the

external fact. Silas got up from his knees trembling, and looked round

at the table: didn’t the gold lie there after all? The table was bare.

Then he turned and looked behind him—looked all round his dwelling,

seeming to strain his brown eyes after some possible appearance of the

bags where he had already sought them in vain. He could see every

object in his cottage—and his gold was not there.

Again he put his trembling hands to his head, and gave a wild ringing

scream, the cry of desolation. For a few moments after, he stood

motionless; but the cry had relieved him from the first maddening

pressure of the truth. He turned, and tottered towards his loom, and

got into the seat where he worked, instinctively seeking this as the

strongest assurance of reality.

And now that all the false hopes had vanished, and the first shock of

certainty was past, the idea of a thief began to present itself, and he

entertained it eagerly, because a thief might be caught and made to

restore the gold. The thought brought some new strength with it, and he

started from his loom to the door. As he opened it the rain beat in

upon him, for it was falling more and more heavily. There were no

footsteps to be tracked on such a night—footsteps? When had the thief

come? During Silas’s absence in the daytime the door had been locked,

and there had been no marks of any inroad on his return by daylight.

And in the evening, too, he said to himself, everything was the same as

when he had left it. The sand and bricks looked as if they had not been

moved. _Was_ it a thief who had taken the bags? or was it a cruel power

that no hands could reach, which had delighted in making him a second

time desolate? He shrank from this vaguer dread, and fixed his mind

with struggling effort on the robber with hands, who could be reached

by hands. His thoughts glanced at all the neighbours who had made any

remarks, or asked any questions which he might now regard as a ground

of suspicion. There was Jem Rodney, a known poacher, and otherwise

disreputable: he had often met Marner in his journeys across the

fields, and had said something jestingly about the weaver’s money; nay,

he had once irritated Marner, by lingering at the fire when he called

to light his pipe, instead of going about his business. Jem Rodney was

the man—there was ease in the thought. Jem could be found and made to

restore the money: Marner did not want to punish him, but only to get

back his gold which had gone from him, and left his soul like a forlorn

traveller on an unknown desert. The robber must be laid hold of.

Marner’s ideas of legal authority were confused, but he felt that he

must go and proclaim his loss; and the great people in the village—the

clergyman, the constable, and Squire Cass—would make Jem Rodney, or

somebody else, deliver up the stolen money. He rushed out in the rain,

under the stimulus of this hope, forgetting to cover his head, not

caring to fasten his door; for he felt as if he had nothing left to

lose. He ran swiftly, till want of breath compelled him to slacken his

pace as he was entering the village at the turning close to the

Rainbow.

The Rainbow, in Marner’s view, was a place of luxurious resort for rich

and stout husbands, whose wives had superfluous stores of linen; it was

the place where he was likely to find the powers and dignities of

Raveloe, and where he could most speedily make his loss public. He

lifted the latch, and turned into the bright bar or kitchen on the

right hand, where the less lofty customers of the house were in the

habit of assembling, the parlour on the left being reserved for the

more select society in which Squire Cass frequently enjoyed the double

pleasure of conviviality and condescension. But the parlour was dark

to-night, the chief personages who ornamented its circle being all at

Mrs. Osgood’s birthday dance, as Godfrey Cass was. And in consequence

of this, the party on the high-screened seats in the kitchen was more

numerous than usual; several personages, who would otherwise have been

admitted into the parlour and enlarged the opportunity of hectoring and

condescension for their betters, being content this evening to vary

their enjoyment by taking their spirits-and-water where they could

themselves hector and condescend in company that called for beer.

CHAPTER VI.

The conversation, which was at a high pitch of animation when Silas

approached the door of the Rainbow, had, as usual, been slow and

intermittent when the company first assembled. The pipes began to be

puffed in a silence which had an air of severity; the more important

customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each

other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked; while the

beer-drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept

their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if

their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing

sadness. At last Mr. Snell, the landlord, a man of a neutral

disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences as those

of beings who were all alike in need of liquor, broke silence, by

saying in a doubtful tone to his cousin the butcher—

“Some folks ’ud say that was a fine beast you druv in yesterday, Bob?”

The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man, was not disposed to

answer rashly. He gave a few puffs before he spat and replied, “And

they wouldn’t be fur wrong, John.”

After this feeble delusive thaw, the silence set in as severely as

before.

“Was it a red Durham?” said the farrier, taking up the thread of

discourse after the lapse of a few minutes.

The farrier looked at the landlord, and the landlord looked at the

butcher, as the person who must take the responsibility of answering.

“Red it was,” said the butcher, in his good-humoured husky treble—“and

a Durham it was.”

“Then you needn’t tell _me_ who you bought it of,” said the farrier,

looking round with some triumph; “I know who it is has got the red

Durhams o’ this country-side. And she’d a white star on her brow, I’ll

bet a penny?” The farrier leaned forward with his hands on his knees as

he put this question, and his eyes twinkled knowingly.

“Well; yes—she might,” said the butcher, slowly, considering that he

was giving a decided affirmative. “I don’t say contrairy.”

“I knew that very well,” said the farrier, throwing himself backward

again, and speaking defiantly; “if _I_ don’t know Mr. Lammeter’s cows,

I should like to know who does—that’s all. And as for the cow you’ve

bought, bargain or no bargain, I’ve been at the drenching of

her—contradick me who will.”

The farrier looked fierce, and the mild butcher’s conversational spirit

was roused a little.

“I’m not for contradicking no man,” he said; “I’m for peace and

quietness. Some are for cutting long ribs—I’m for cutting ’em short

myself; but _I_ don’t quarrel with ’em. All I say is, it’s a lovely

carkiss—and anybody as was reasonable, it ’ud bring tears into their

eyes to look at it.”

“Well, it’s the cow as I drenched, whatever it is,” pursued the

farrier, angrily; “and it was Mr. Lammeter’s cow, else you told a lie

when you said it was a red Durham.”

“I tell no lies,” said the butcher, with the same mild huskiness as

before, “and I contradick none—not if a man was to swear himself black:

he’s no meat o’ mine, nor none o’ my bargains. All I say is, it’s a

lovely carkiss. And what I say, I’ll stick to; but I’ll quarrel wi’ no

man.”

“No,” said the farrier, with bitter sarcasm, looking at the company

generally; “and p’rhaps you aren’t pig-headed; and p’rhaps you didn’t

say the cow was a red Durham; and p’rhaps you didn’t say she’d got a

star on her brow—stick to that, now you’re at it.”

“Come, come,” said the landlord; “let the cow alone. The truth lies

atween you: you’re both right and both wrong, as I allays say. And as

for the cow’s being Mr. Lammeter’s, I say nothing to that; but this I

say, as the Rainbow’s the Rainbow. And for the matter o’ that, if the

talk is to be o’ the Lammeters, _you_ know the most upo’ that head, eh,

Mr. Macey? You remember when first Mr. Lammeter’s father come into

these parts, and took the Warrens?”

Mr. Macey, tailor and parish-clerk, the latter of which functions

rheumatism had of late obliged him to share with a small-featured young

man who sat opposite him, held his white head on one side, and twirled

his thumbs with an air of complacency, slightly seasoned with

criticism. He smiled pityingly, in answer to the landlord’s appeal, and

said—

“Aye, aye; I know, I know; but I let other folks talk. I’ve laid by

now, and gev up to the young uns. Ask them as have been to school at

Tarley: they’ve learnt pernouncing; that’s come up since my day.”

“If you’re pointing at me, Mr. Macey,” said the deputy clerk, with an

air of anxious propriety, “I’m nowise a man to speak out of my place.

As the psalm says—

‘I know what’s right, nor only so,

But also practise what I know.’

“Well, then, I wish you’d keep hold o’ the tune, when it’s set for you;

if you’re for prac_tis_ing, I wish you’d prac_tise_ that,” said a large

jocose-looking man, an excellent wheelwright in his week-day capacity,

but on Sundays leader of the choir. He winked, as he spoke, at two of

the company, who were known officially as the “bassoon” and the

“key-bugle,” in the confidence that he was expressing the sense of the

musical profession in Raveloe.

Mr. Tookey, the deputy-clerk, who shared the unpopularity common to

deputies, turned very red, but replied, with careful moderation—“Mr.

Winthrop, if you’ll bring me any proof as I’m in the wrong, I’m not the

man to say I won’t alter. But there’s people set up their own ears for

a standard, and expect the whole choir to follow ’em. There may be two

opinions, I hope.”

“Aye, aye,” said Mr. Macey, who felt very well satisfied with this

attack on youthful presumption; “you’re right there, Tookey: there’s

allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himsen, and

there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him. There’d be two ’pinions

about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.”

“Well, Mr. Macey,” said poor Tookey, serious amidst the general

laughter, “I undertook to partially fill up the office of parish-clerk

by Mr. Crackenthorp’s desire, whenever your infirmities should make you

unfitting; and it’s one of the rights thereof to sing in the choir—else

why have you done the same yourself?”

“Ah! but the old gentleman and you are two folks,” said Ben Winthrop.

“The old gentleman’s got a gift. Why, the Squire used to invite him to

take a glass, only to hear him sing the ‘Red Rovier’; didn’t he, Mr.

Macey? It’s a nat’ral gift. There’s my little lad Aaron, he’s got a

gift—he can sing a tune off straight, like a throstle. But as for you,

Master Tookey, you’d better stick to your ‘Amens’: your voice is well

enough when you keep it up in your nose. It’s your inside as isn’t

right made for music: it’s no better nor a hollow stalk.”

This kind of unflinching frankness was the most piquant form of joke to

the company at the Rainbow, and Ben Winthrop’s insult was felt by

everybody to have capped Mr. Macey’s epigram.

“I see what it is plain enough,” said Mr. Tookey, unable to keep cool

any longer. “There’s a consperacy to turn me out o’ the choir, as I

shouldn’t share the Christmas money—that’s where it is. But I shall

speak to Mr. Crackenthorp; I’ll not be put upon by no man.”

“Nay, nay, Tookey,” said Ben Winthrop. “We’ll pay you your share to

keep out of it—that’s what we’ll do. There’s things folks ’ud pay to be

rid on, besides varmin.”

“Come, come,” said the landlord, who felt that paying people for their

absence was a principle dangerous to society; “a joke’s a joke. We’re

all good friends here, I hope. We must give and take. You’re both right

and you’re both wrong, as I say. I agree wi’ Mr. Macey here, as there’s

two opinions; and if mine was asked, I should say they’re both right.

Tookey’s right and Winthrop’s right, and they’ve only got to split the

difference and make themselves even.”

The farrier was puffing his pipe rather fiercely, in some contempt at

this trivial discussion. He had no ear for music himself, and never

went to church, as being of the medical profession, and likely to be in

requisition for delicate cows. But the butcher, having music in his

soul, had listened with a divided desire for Tookey’s defeat and for

the preservation of the peace.

“To be sure,” he said, following up the landlord’s conciliatory view,

“we’re fond of our old clerk; it’s nat’ral, and him used to be such a

singer, and got a brother as is known for the first fiddler in this

country-side. Eh, it’s a pity but what Solomon lived in our village,

and could give us a tune when we liked; eh, Mr. Macey? I’d keep him in

liver and lights for nothing—that I would.”

“Aye, aye,” said Mr. Macey, in the height of complacency; “our family’s

been known for musicianers as far back as anybody can tell. But them

things are dying out, as I tell Solomon every time he comes round;

there’s no voices like what there used to be, and there’s nobody

remembers what we remember, if it isn’t the old crows.”

“Aye, you remember when first Mr. Lammeter’s father come into these

parts, don’t you, Mr. Macey?” said the landlord.

“I should think I did,” said the old man, who had now gone through that

complimentary process necessary to bring him up to the point of

narration; “and a fine old gentleman he was—as fine, and finer nor the

Mr. Lammeter as now is. He came from a bit north’ard, so far as I could

ever make out. But there’s nobody rightly knows about those parts: only

it couldn’t be far north’ard, nor much different from this country, for

he brought a fine breed o’ sheep with him, so there must be pastures

there, and everything reasonable. We heared tell as he’d sold his own

land to come and take the Warrens, and that seemed odd for a man as had

land of his own, to come and rent a farm in a strange place. But they

said it was along of his wife’s dying; though there’s reasons in things

as nobody knows on—that’s pretty much what I’ve made out; yet some

folks are so wise, they’ll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all

the while the real reason’s winking at ’em in the corner, and they

niver see’t. Howsomever, it was soon seen as we’d got a new parish’ner

as know’d the rights and customs o’ things, and kep a good house, and

was well looked on by everybody. And the young man—that’s the Mr.

Lammeter as now is, for he’d niver a sister—soon begun to court Miss

Osgood, that’s the sister o’ the Mr. Osgood as now is, and a fine

handsome lass she was—eh, you can’t think—they pretend this young lass

is like her, but that’s the way wi’ people as don’t know what come

before ’em. _I_ should know, for I helped the old rector, Mr. Drumlow

as was, I helped him marry ’em.”

Here Mr. Macey paused; he always gave his narrative in instalments,

expecting to be questioned according to precedent.

“Aye, and a partic’lar thing happened, didn’t it, Mr. Macey, so as you

were likely to remember that marriage?” said the landlord, in a

congratulatory tone.