Eppie, “and you and me can mark out the beds, and make holes and plant
the roots. It’ll be a deal livelier at the Stone-pits when we’ve got
some flowers, for I always think the flowers can see us and know what
we’re talking about. And I’ll have a bit o’ rosemary, and bergamot, and
thyme, because they’re so sweet-smelling; but there’s no lavender only
in the gentlefolks’ gardens, I think.”
“That’s no reason why you shouldn’t have some,” said Aaron, “for I can
bring you slips of anything; I’m forced to cut no end of ’em when I’m
gardening, and throw ’em away mostly. There’s a big bed o’ lavender at
the Red House: the missis is very fond of it.”
“Well,” said Silas, gravely, “so as you don’t make free for us, or ask
for anything as is worth much at the Red House: for Mr. Cass’s been so
good to us, and built us up the new end o’ the cottage, and given us
beds and things, as I couldn’t abide to be imposin’ for garden-stuff or
anything else.”
“No, no, there’s no imposin,’” said Aaron; “there’s never a garden in
all the parish but what there’s endless waste in it for want o’
somebody as could use everything up. It’s what I think to myself
sometimes, as there need nobody run short o’ victuals if the land was
made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find its
way to a mouth. It sets one thinking o’ that—gardening does. But I must
go back now, else mother ’ull be in trouble as I aren’t there.”
“Bring her with you this afternoon, Aaron,” said Eppie; “I shouldn’t
like to fix about the garden, and her not know everything from the
first—should _you_, father?”
“Aye, bring her if you can, Aaron,” said Silas; “she’s sure to have a
word to say as’ll help us to set things on their right end.”
Aaron turned back up the village, while Silas and Eppie went on up the
lonely sheltered lane.
“O daddy!” she began, when they were in privacy, clasping and squeezing
Silas’s arm, and skipping round to give him an energetic kiss. “My
little old daddy! I’m so glad. I don’t think I shall want anything else
when we’ve got a little garden; and I knew Aaron would dig it for us,”
she went on with roguish triumph—“I knew that very well.”
“You’re a deep little puss, you are,” said Silas, with the mild passive
happiness of love-crowned age in his face; “but you’ll make yourself
fine and beholden to Aaron.”
“Oh, no, I shan’t,” said Eppie, laughing and frisking; “he likes it.”
“Come, come, let me carry your prayer-book, else you’ll be dropping it,
jumping i’ that way.”
Eppie was now aware that her behaviour was under observation, but it
was only the observation of a friendly donkey, browsing with a log
fastened to his foot—a meek donkey, not scornfully critical of human
trivialities, but thankful to share in them, if possible, by getting
his nose scratched; and Eppie did not fail to gratify him with her
usual notice, though it was attended with the inconvenience of his
following them, painfully, up to the very door of their home.
But the sound of a sharp bark inside, as Eppie put the key in the door,
modified the donkey’s views, and he limped away again without bidding.
The sharp bark was the sign of an excited welcome that was awaiting
them from a knowing brown terrier, who, after dancing at their legs in
a hysterical manner, rushed with a worrying noise at a tortoise-shell
kitten under the loom, and then rushed back with a sharp bark again, as
much as to say, “I have done my duty by this feeble creature, you
perceive”; while the lady-mother of the kitten sat sunning her white
bosom in the window, and looked round with a sleepy air of expecting
caresses, though she was not going to take any trouble for them.
The presence of this happy animal life was not the only change which
had come over the interior of the stone cottage. There was no bed now
in the living-room, and the small space was well filled with decent
furniture, all bright and clean enough to satisfy Dolly Winthrop’s eye.
The oaken table and three-cornered oaken chair were hardly what was
likely to be seen in so poor a cottage: they had come, with the beds
and other things, from the Red House; for Mr. Godfrey Cass, as every
one said in the village, did very kindly by the weaver; and it was
nothing but right a man should be looked on and helped by those who
could afford it, when he had brought up an orphan child, and been
father and mother to her—and had lost his money too, so as he had
nothing but what he worked for week by week, and when the weaving was
going down too—for there was less and less flax spun—and Master Marner
was none so young. Nobody was jealous of the weaver, for he was
regarded as an exceptional person, whose claims on neighbourly help
were not to be matched in Raveloe. Any superstition that remained
concerning him had taken an entirely new colour; and Mr. Macey, now a
very feeble old man of fourscore and six, never seen except in his
chimney-corner or sitting in the sunshine at his door-sill, was of
opinion that when a man had done what Silas had done by an orphan
child, it was a sign that his money would come to light again, or
leastwise that the robber would be made to answer for it—for, as Mr.
Macey observed of himself, his faculties were as strong as ever.
Silas sat down now and watched Eppie with a satisfied gaze as she
spread the clean cloth, and set on it the potato-pie, warmed up slowly
in a safe Sunday fashion, by being put into a dry pot over a
slowly-dying fire, as the best substitute for an oven. For Silas would
not consent to have a grate and oven added to his conveniences: he
loved the old brick hearth as he had loved his brown pot—and was it not
there when he had found Eppie? The gods of the hearth exist for us
still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it
bruise its own roots.
Silas ate his dinner more silently than usual, soon laying down his
knife and fork, and watching half-abstractedly Eppie’s play with Snap
and the cat, by which her own dining was made rather a lengthy
business. Yet it was a sight that might well arrest wandering thoughts:
Eppie, with the rippling radiance of her hair and the whiteness of her
rounded chin and throat set off by the dark-blue cotton gown, laughing
merrily as the kitten held on with her four claws to one shoulder, like
a design for a jug-handle, while Snap on the right hand and Puss on the
other put up their paws towards a morsel which she held out of the
reach of both—Snap occasionally desisting in order to remonstrate with
the cat by a cogent worrying growl on the greediness and futility of
her conduct; till Eppie relented, caressed them both, and divided the
morsel between them.
But at last Eppie, glancing at the clock, checked the play, and said,
“O daddy, you’re wanting to go into the sunshine to smoke your pipe.
But I must clear away first, so as the house may be tidy when godmother
comes. I’ll make haste—I won’t be long.”
Silas had taken to smoking a pipe daily during the last two years,
having been strongly urged to it by the sages of Raveloe, as a practice
“good for the fits”; and this advice was sanctioned by Dr. Kimble, on
the ground that it was as well to try what could do no harm—a principle
which was made to answer for a great deal of work in that gentleman’s
medical practice. Silas did not highly enjoy smoking, and often
wondered how his neighbours could be so fond of it; but a humble sort
of acquiescence in what was held to be good, had become a strong habit
of that new self which had been developed in him since he had found
Eppie on his hearth: it had been the only clew his bewildered mind
could hold by in cherishing this young life that had been sent to him
out of the darkness into which his gold had departed. By seeking what
was needful for Eppie, by sharing the effect that everything produced
on her, he had himself come to appropriate the forms of custom and
belief which were the mould of Raveloe life; and as, with reawakening
sensibilities, memory also reawakened, he had begun to ponder over the
elements of his old faith, and blend them with his new impressions,
till he recovered a consciousness of unity between his past and
present. The sense of presiding goodness and the human trust which come
with all pure peace and joy, had given him a dim impression that there
had been some error, some mistake, which had thrown that dark shadow
over the days of his best years; and as it grew more and more easy to
him to open his mind to Dolly Winthrop, he gradually communicated to
her all he could describe of his early life. The communication was
necessarily a slow and difficult process, for Silas’s meagre power of
explanation was not aided by any readiness of interpretation in Dolly,
whose narrow outward experience gave her no key to strange customs, and
made every novelty a source of wonder that arrested them at every step
of the narrative. It was only by fragments, and at intervals which left
Dolly time to revolve what she had heard till it acquired some
familiarity for her, that Silas at last arrived at the climax of the
sad story—the drawing of lots, and its false testimony concerning him;
and this had to be repeated in several interviews, under new questions
on her part as to the nature of this plan for detecting the guilty and
clearing the innocent.
“And yourn’s the same Bible, you’re sure o’ that, Master Marner—the
Bible as you brought wi’ you from that country—it’s the same as what
they’ve got at church, and what Eppie’s a-learning to read in?”
“Yes,” said Silas, “every bit the same; and there’s drawing o’ lots in
the Bible, mind you,” he added in a lower tone.
“Oh, dear, dear,” said Dolly in a grieved voice, as if she were hearing
an unfavourable report of a sick man’s case. She was silent for some
minutes; at last she said—
“There’s wise folks, happen, as know how it all is; the parson knows,
I’ll be bound; but it takes big words to tell them things, and such as
poor folks can’t make much out on. I can never rightly know the meaning
o’ what I hear at church, only a bit here and there, but I know it’s
good words—I do. But what lies upo’ your mind—it’s this, Master Marner:
as, if Them above had done the right thing by you, They’d never ha’ let
you be turned out for a wicked thief when you was innicent.”
“Ah!” said Silas, who had now come to understand Dolly’s phraseology,
“that was what fell on me like as if it had been red-hot iron; because,
you see, there was nobody as cared for me or clave to me above nor
below. And him as I’d gone out and in wi’ for ten year and more, since
when we was lads and went halves—mine own familiar friend in whom I
trusted, had lifted up his heel again’ me, and worked to ruin me.”
“Eh, but he was a bad un—I can’t think as there’s another such,” said
Dolly. “But I’m o’ercome, Master Marner; I’m like as if I’d waked and
didn’t know whether it was night or morning. I feel somehow as sure as
I do when I’ve laid something up though I can’t justly put my hand on
it, as there was a rights in what happened to you, if one could but
make it out; and you’d no call to lose heart as you did. But we’ll talk
on it again; for sometimes things come into my head when I’m leeching
or poulticing, or such, as I could never think on when I was sitting
still.”
Dolly was too useful a woman not to have many opportunities of
illumination of the kind she alluded to, and she was not long before
she recurred to the subject.
“Master Marner,” she said, one day that she came to bring home Eppie’s
washing, “I’ve been sore puzzled for a good bit wi’ that trouble o’
yourn and the drawing o’ lots; and it got twisted back’ards and
for’ards, as I didn’t know which end to lay hold on. But it come to me
all clear like, that night when I was sitting up wi’ poor Bessy Fawkes,
as is dead and left her children behind, God help ’em—it come to me as
clear as daylight; but whether I’ve got hold on it now, or can anyways
bring it to my tongue’s end, that I don’t know. For I’ve often a deal
inside me as’ll never come out; and for what you talk o’ your folks in
your old country niver saying prayers by heart nor saying ’em out of a
book, they must be wonderful cliver; for if I didn’t know ‘Our Father,’
and little bits o’ good words as I can carry out o’ church wi’ me, I
might down o’ my knees every night, but nothing could I say.”
“But you can mostly say something as I can make sense on, Mrs.
Winthrop,” said Silas.
“Well, then, Master Marner, it come to me summat like this: I can make
nothing o’ the drawing o’ lots and the answer coming wrong; it ’ud
mayhap take the parson to tell that, and he could only tell us i’ big
words. But what come to me as clear as the daylight, it was when I was
troubling over poor Bessy Fawkes, and it allays comes into my head when
I’m sorry for folks, and feel as I can’t do a power to help ’em, not if
I was to get up i’ the middle o’ the night—it comes into my head as
Them above has got a deal tenderer heart nor what I’ve got—for I can’t
be anyways better nor Them as made me; and if anything looks hard to
me, it’s because there’s things I don’t know on; and for the matter o’
that, there may be plenty o’ things I don’t know on, for it’s little as
I know—that it is. And so, while I was thinking o’ that, you come into
my mind, Master Marner, and it all come pouring in:—if _I_ felt i’ my
inside what was the right and just thing by you, and them as prayed and
drawed the lots, all but that wicked un, if _they_’d ha’ done the right
thing by you if they could, isn’t there Them as was at the making on
us, and knows better and has a better will? And that’s all as ever I
can be sure on, and everything else is a big puzzle to me when I think
on it. For there was the fever come and took off them as were
full-growed, and left the helpless children; and there’s the breaking
o’ limbs; and them as ’ud do right and be sober have to suffer by them
as are contrairy—eh, there’s trouble i’ this world, and there’s things
as we can niver make out the rights on. And all as we’ve got to do is
to trusten, Master Marner—to do the right thing as fur as we know, and
to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o’ good and
rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what
we can know—I feel it i’ my own inside as it must be so. And if you
could but ha’ gone on trustening, Master Marner, you wouldn’t ha’ run
away from your fellow-creaturs and been so lone.”
“Ah, but that ’ud ha’ been hard,” said Silas, in an under-tone; “it ’ud
ha’ been hard to trusten then.”
“And so it would,” said Dolly, almost with compunction; “them things
are easier said nor done; and I’m partly ashamed o’ talking.”
“Nay, nay,” said Silas, “you’re i’ the right, Mrs. Winthrop—you’re i’
the right. There’s good i’ this world—I’ve a feeling o’ that now; and
it makes a man feel as there’s a good more nor he can see, i’ spite o’
the trouble and the wickedness. That drawing o’ the lots is dark; but
the child was sent to me: there’s dealings with us—there’s dealings.”
This dialogue took place in Eppie’s earlier years, when Silas had to
part with her for two hours every day, that she might learn to read at
the dame school, after he had vainly tried himself to guide her in that
first step to learning. Now that she was grown up, Silas had often been
led, in those moments of quiet outpouring which come to people who live
together in perfect love, to talk with _her_ too of the past, and how
and why he had lived a lonely man until she had been sent to him. For
it would have been impossible for him to hide from Eppie that she was
not his own child: even if the most delicate reticence on the point
could have been expected from Raveloe gossips in her presence, her own
questions about her mother could not have been parried, as she grew up,
without that complete shrouding of the past which would have made a
painful barrier between their minds. So Eppie had long known how her
mother had died on the snowy ground, and how she herself had been found
on the hearth by father Silas, who had taken her golden curls for his
lost guineas brought back to him. The tender and peculiar love with
which Silas had reared her in almost inseparable companionship with
himself, aided by the seclusion of their dwelling, had preserved her
from the lowering influences of the village talk and habits, and had
kept her mind in that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to
be an invariable attribute of rusticity. Perfect love has a breath of
poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human
beings; and this breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie from the time
when she had followed the bright gleam that beckoned her to Silas’s
hearth; so that it is not surprising if, in other things besides her
delicate prettiness, she was not quite a common village maiden, but had
a touch of refinement and fervour which came from no other teaching
than that of tenderly-nurtured unvitiated feeling. She was too childish
and simple for her imagination to rove into questions about her unknown
father; for a long while it did not even occur to her that she must
have had a father; and the first time that the idea of her mother
having had a husband presented itself to her, was when Silas showed her
the wedding-ring which had been taken from the wasted finger, and had
been carefully preserved by him in a little lackered box shaped like a
shoe. He delivered this box into Eppie’s charge when she had grown up,
and she often opened it to look at the ring: but still she thought
hardly at all about the father of whom it was the symbol. Had she not a
father very close to her, who loved her better than any real fathers in
the village seemed to love their daughters? On the contrary, who her
mother was, and how she came to die in that forlornness, were questions
that often pressed on Eppie’s mind. Her knowledge of Mrs. Winthrop, who
was her nearest friend next to Silas, made her feel that a mother must
be very precious; and she had again and again asked Silas to tell her
how her mother looked, whom she was like, and how he had found her
against the furze bush, led towards it by the little footsteps and the
outstretched arms. The furze bush was there still; and this afternoon,
when Eppie came out with Silas into the sunshine, it was the first
object that arrested her eyes and thoughts.
“Father,” she said, in a tone of gentle gravity, which sometimes came
like a sadder, slower cadence across her playfulness, “we shall take
the furze bush into the garden; it’ll come into the corner, and just
against it I’ll put snowdrops and crocuses, ’cause Aaron says they
won’t die out, but’ll always get more and more.”
“Ah, child,” said Silas, always ready to talk when he had his pipe in
his hand, apparently enjoying the pauses more than the puffs, “it
wouldn’t do to leave out the furze bush; and there’s nothing prettier,
to my thinking, when it’s yallow with flowers. But it’s just come into
my head what we’re to do for a fence—mayhap Aaron can help us to a
thought; but a fence we must have, else the donkeys and things ’ull
come and trample everything down. And fencing’s hard to be got at, by
what I can make out.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you, daddy,” said Eppie, clasping her hands suddenly,
after a minute’s thought. “There’s lots o’ loose stones about, some of
’em not big, and we might lay ’em atop of one another, and make a wall.
You and me could carry the smallest, and Aaron ’ud carry the rest—I
know he would.”
“Eh, my precious un,” said Silas, “there isn’t enough stones to go all
round; and as for you carrying, why, wi’ your little arms you couldn’t
carry a stone no bigger than a turnip. You’re dillicate made, my dear,”
he added, with a tender intonation—“that’s what Mrs. Winthrop says.”
“Oh, I’m stronger than you think, daddy,” said Eppie; “and if there
wasn’t stones enough to go all round, why they’ll go part o’ the way,
and then it’ll be easier to get sticks and things for the rest. See
here, round the big pit, what a many stones!”
She skipped forward to the pit, meaning to lift one of the stones and
exhibit her strength, but she started back in surprise.
“Oh, father, just come and look here,” she exclaimed—“come and see how
the water’s gone down since yesterday. Why, yesterday the pit was ever
so full!”
“Well, to be sure,” said Silas, coming to her side. “Why, that’s the
draining they’ve begun on, since harvest, i’ Mr. Osgood’s fields, I
reckon. The foreman said to me the other day, when I passed by ’em,
‘Master Marner,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if we lay your bit o’
waste as dry as a bone.’ It was Mr. Godfrey Cass, he said, had gone
into the draining: he’d been taking these fields o’ Mr. Osgood.”
“How odd it’ll seem to have the old pit dried up!” said Eppie, turning
away, and stooping to lift rather a large stone. “See, daddy, I can
carry this quite well,” she said, going along with much energy for a
few steps, but presently letting it fall.
“Ah, you’re fine and strong, aren’t you?” said Silas, while Eppie shook
her aching arms and laughed. “Come, come, let us go and sit down on the
bank against the stile there, and have no more lifting. You might hurt
yourself, child. You’d need have somebody to work for you—and my arm
isn’t over strong.”
Silas uttered the last sentence slowly, as if it implied more than met
the ear; and Eppie, when they sat down on the bank, nestled close to
his side, and, taking hold caressingly of the arm that was not over
strong, held it on her lap, while Silas puffed again dutifully at the
pipe, which occupied his other arm. An ash in the hedgerow behind made
a fretted screen from the sun, and threw happy playful shadows all
about them.
“Father,” said Eppie, very gently, after they had been sitting in
silence a little while, “if I was to be married, ought I to be married
with my mother’s ring?”
Silas gave an almost imperceptible start, though the question fell in
with the under-current of thought in his own mind, and then said, in a
subdued tone, “Why, Eppie, have you been a-thinking on it?”
“Only this last week, father,” said Eppie, ingenuously, “since Aaron
talked to me about it.”
“And what did he say?” said Silas, still in the same subdued way, as if
he were anxious lest he should fall into the slightest tone that was
not for Eppie’s good.
“He said he should like to be married, because he was a-going in
four-and-twenty, and had got a deal of gardening work, now Mr. Mott’s
given up; and he goes twice a-week regular to Mr. Cass’s, and once to
Mr. Osgood’s, and they’re going to take him on at the Rectory.”
“And who is it as he’s wanting to marry?” said Silas, with rather a sad
smile.
“Why, me, to be sure, daddy,” said Eppie, with dimpling laughter,
kissing her father’s cheek; “as if he’d want to marry anybody else!”
“And you mean to have him, do you?” said Silas.
“Yes, some time,” said Eppie, “I don’t know when. Everybody’s married
some time, Aaron says. But I told him that wasn’t true: for, I said,
look at father—he’s never been married.”
“No, child,” said Silas, “your father was a lone man till you was sent
to him.”
“But you’ll never be lone again, father,” said Eppie, tenderly. “That
was what Aaron said—‘I could never think o’ taking you away from Master
Marner, Eppie.’ And I said, ‘It ’ud be no use if you did, Aaron.’ And
he wants us all to live together, so as you needn’t work a bit, father,
only what’s for your own pleasure; and he’d be as good as a son to
you—that was what he said.”
“And should you like that, Eppie?” said Silas, looking at her.
“I shouldn’t mind it, father,” said Eppie, quite simply. “And I should
like things to be so as you needn’t work much. But if it wasn’t for
that, I’d sooner things didn’t change. I’m very happy: I like Aaron to
be fond of me, and come and see us often, and behave pretty to you—he
always _does_ behave pretty to you, doesn’t he, father?”
“Yes, child, nobody could behave better,” said Silas, emphatically.
“He’s his mother’s lad.”
“But I don’t want any change,” said Eppie. “I should like to go on a
long, long while, just as we are. Only Aaron does want a change; and he
made me cry a bit—only a bit—because he said I didn’t care for him, for
if I cared for him I should want us to be married, as he did.”
“Eh, my blessed child,” said Silas, laying down his pipe as if it were
useless to pretend to smoke any longer, “you’re o’er young to be
married. We’ll ask Mrs. Winthrop—we’ll ask Aaron’s mother what _she_
thinks: if there’s a right thing to do, she’ll come at it. But there’s
this to be thought on, Eppie: things _will_ change, whether we like it
or no; things won’t go on for a long while just as they are and no
difference. I shall get older and helplesser, and be a burden on you,
belike, if I don’t go away from you altogether. Not as I mean you’d
think me a burden—I know you wouldn’t—but it ’ud be hard upon you; and
when I look for’ard to that, I like to think as you’d have somebody
else besides me—somebody young and strong, as’ll outlast your own life,
and take care on you to the end.” Silas paused, and, resting his wrists
on his knees, lifted his hands up and down meditatively as he looked on
the ground.
“Then, would you like me to be married, father?” said Eppie, with a
little trembling in her voice.
“I’ll not be the man to say no, Eppie,” said Silas, emphatically; “but
we’ll ask your godmother. She’ll wish the right thing by you and her
son too.”
“There they come, then,” said Eppie. “Let us go and meet ’em. Oh, the
pipe! won’t you have it lit again, father?” said Eppie, lifting that
medicinal appliance from the ground.
“Nay, child,” said Silas, “I’ve done enough for to-day. I think,
mayhap, a little of it does me more good than so much at once.”
CHAPTER XVII.
While Silas and Eppie were seated on the bank discoursing in the
fleckered shade of the ash tree, Miss Priscilla Lammeter was resisting
her sister’s arguments, that it would be better to take tea at the Red
House, and let her father have a long nap, than drive home to the
Warrens so soon after dinner. The family party (of four only) were
seated round the table in the dark wainscoted parlour, with the Sunday
dessert before them, of fresh filberts, apples, and pears, duly
ornamented with leaves by Nancy’s own hand before the bells had rung
for church.
A great change has come over the dark wainscoted parlour since we saw
it in Godfrey’s bachelor days, and under the wifeless reign of the old
Squire. Now all is polish, on which no yesterday’s dust is ever allowed
to rest, from the yard’s width of oaken boards round the carpet, to the
old Squire’s gun and whips and walking-sticks, ranged on the stag’s
antlers above the mantelpiece. All other signs of sporting and outdoor
occupation Nancy has removed to another room; but she has brought into
the Red House the habit of filial reverence, and preserves sacredly in
a place of honour these relics of her husband’s departed father. The
tankards are on the side-table still, but the bossed silver is undimmed
by handling, and there are no dregs to send forth unpleasant
suggestions: the only prevailing scent is of the lavender and
rose-leaves that fill the vases of Derbyshire spar. All is purity and
order in this once dreary room, for, fifteen years ago, it was entered
by a new presiding spirit.
“Now, father,” said Nancy, “_is_ there any call for you to go home to
tea? Mayn’t you just as well stay with us?—such a beautiful evening as
it’s likely to be.”
The old gentleman had been talking with Godfrey about the increasing
poor-rate and the ruinous times, and had not heard the dialogue between
his daughters.
“My dear, you must ask Priscilla,” he said, in the once firm voice, now
become rather broken. “She manages me and the farm too.”
“And reason good as I should manage you, father,” said Priscilla, “else
you’d be giving yourself your death with rheumatism. And as for the
farm, if anything turns out wrong, as it can’t but do in these times,
there’s nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with
but himself. It’s a deal the best way o’ being master, to let somebody
else do the ordering, and keep the blaming in your own hands. It ’ud
save many a man a stroke, _I_ believe.”
“Well, well, my dear,” said her father, with a quiet laugh, “I didn’t
say you don’t manage for everybody’s good.”
“Then manage so as you may stay tea, Priscilla,” said Nancy, putting
her hand on her sister’s arm affectionately. “Come now; and we’ll go
round the garden while father has his nap.”
“My dear child, he’ll have a beautiful nap in the gig, for I shall
drive. And as for staying tea, I can’t hear of it; for there’s this
dairymaid, now she knows she’s to be married, turned Michaelmas, she’d
as lief pour the new milk into the pig-trough as into the pans. That’s
the way with ’em all: it’s as if they thought the world ’ud be new-made
because they’re to be married. So come and let me put my bonnet on, and
there’ll be time for us to walk round the garden while the horse is
being put in.”
When the sisters were treading the neatly-swept garden-walks, between
the bright turf that contrasted pleasantly with the dark cones and
arches and wall-like hedges of yew, Priscilla said—
“I’m as glad as anything at your husband’s making that exchange o’ land
with cousin Osgood, and beginning the dairying. It’s a thousand pities
you didn’t do it before; for it’ll give you something to fill your
mind. There’s nothing like a dairy if folks want a bit o’ worrit to
make the days pass. For as for rubbing furniture, when you can once see
your face in a table there’s nothing else to look for; but there’s
always something fresh with the dairy; for even in the depths o’ winter
there’s some pleasure in conquering the butter, and making it come
whether or no. My dear,” added Priscilla, pressing her sister’s hand
affectionately as they walked side by side, “you’ll never be low when
you’ve got a dairy.”
“Ah, Priscilla,” said Nancy, returning the pressure with a grateful
glance of her clear eyes, “but it won’t make up to Godfrey: a dairy’s
not so much to a man. And it’s only what he cares for that ever makes
me low. I’m contented with the blessings we have, if he could be
contented.”
“It drives me past patience,” said Priscilla, impetuously, “that way o’
the men—always wanting and wanting, and never easy with what they’ve
got: they can’t sit comfortable in their chairs when they’ve neither
ache nor pain, but either they must stick a pipe in their mouths, to
make ’em better than well, or else they must be swallowing something
strong, though they’re forced to make haste before the next meal comes
in. But joyful be it spoken, our father was never that sort o’ man. And
if it had pleased God to make you ugly, like me, so as the men wouldn’t
ha’ run after you, we might have kept to our own family, and had
nothing to do with folks as have got uneasy blood in their veins.”
“Oh, don’t say so, Priscilla,” said Nancy, repenting that she had
called forth this outburst; “nobody has any occasion to find fault with
Godfrey. It’s natural he should be disappointed at not having any
children: every man likes to have somebody to work for and lay by for,
and he always counted so on making a fuss with ’em when they were
little. There’s many another man ’ud hanker more than he does. He’s the
best of husbands.”
“Oh, I know,” said Priscilla, smiling sarcastically, “I know the way o’
wives; they set one on to abuse their husbands, and then they turn
round on one and praise ’em as if they wanted to sell ’em. But
father’ll be waiting for me; we must turn now.”
The large gig with the steady old grey was at the front door, and Mr.
Lammeter was already on the stone steps, passing the time in recalling
to Godfrey what very fine points Speckle had when his master used to
ride him.
“I always _would_ have a good horse, you know,” said the old gentleman,
not liking that spirited time to be quite effaced from the memory of
his juniors.
“Mind you bring Nancy to the Warrens before the week’s out, Mr. Cass,”
was Priscilla’s parting injunction, as she took the reins, and shook
them gently, by way of friendly incitement to Speckle.
“I shall just take a turn to the fields against the Stone-pits, Nancy,
and look at the draining,” said Godfrey.
“You’ll be in again by tea-time, dear?”
“Oh, yes, I shall be back in an hour.”
It was Godfrey’s custom on a Sunday afternoon to do a little
contemplative farming in a leisurely walk. Nancy seldom accompanied
him; for the women of her generation—unless, like Priscilla, they took
to outdoor management—were not given to much walking beyond their own
house and garden, finding sufficient exercise in domestic duties. So,
when Priscilla was not with her, she usually sat with Mant’s Bible
before her, and after following the text with her eyes for a little
while, she would gradually permit them to wander as her thoughts had
already insisted on wandering.
But Nancy’s Sunday thoughts were rarely quite out of keeping with the
devout and reverential intention implied by the book spread open before
her. She was not theologically instructed enough to discern very
clearly the relation between the sacred documents of the past which she
opened without method, and her own obscure, simple life; but the spirit
of rectitude, and the sense of responsibility for the effect of her
conduct on others, which were strong elements in Nancy’s character, had
made it a habit with her to scrutinize her past feelings and actions
with self-questioning solicitude. Her mind not being courted by a great
variety of subjects, she filled the vacant moments by living inwardly,
again and again, through all her remembered experience, especially
through the fifteen years of her married time, in which her life and
its significance had been doubled. She recalled the small details, the
words, tones, and looks, in the critical scenes which had opened a new
epoch for her by giving her a deeper insight into the relations and
trials of life, or which had called on her for some little effort of
forbearance, or of painful adherence to an imagined or real duty—asking
herself continually whether she had been in any respect blamable. This
excessive rumination and self-questioning is perhaps a morbid habit
inevitable to a mind of much moral sensibility when shut out from its
due share of outward activity and of practical claims on its
affections—inevitable to a noble-hearted, childless woman, when her lot
is narrow. “I can do so little—have I done it all well?” is the
perpetually recurring thought; and there are no voices calling her away
from that soliloquy, no peremptory demands to divert energy from vain
regret or superfluous scruple.
There was one main thread of painful experience in Nancy’s married
life, and on it hung certain deeply-felt scenes, which were the
oftenest revived in retrospect. The short dialogue with Priscilla in
the garden had determined the current of retrospect in that frequent
direction this particular Sunday afternoon. The first wandering of her
thought from the text, which she still attempted dutifully to follow
with her eyes and silent lips, was into an imaginary enlargement of the
defence she had set up for her husband against Priscilla’s implied
blame. The vindication of the loved object is the best balm affection
can find for its wounds:—“A man must have so much on his mind,” is the
belief by which a wife often supports a cheerful face under rough
answers and unfeeling words. And Nancy’s deepest wounds had all come
from the perception that the absence of children from their hearth was
dwelt on in her husband’s mind as a privation to which he could not
reconcile himself.
Yet sweet Nancy might have been expected to feel still more keenly the
denial of a blessing to which she had looked forward with all the
varied expectations and preparations, solemn and prettily trivial,
which fill the mind of a loving woman when she expects to become a
mother. Was there not a drawer filled with the neat work of her hands,
all unworn and untouched, just as she had arranged it there fourteen
years ago—just, but for one little dress, which had been made the
burial-dress? But under this immediate personal trial Nancy was so
firmly unmurmuring, that years ago she had suddenly renounced the habit
of visiting this drawer, lest she should in this way be cherishing a
longing for what was not given.
Perhaps it was this very severity towards any indulgence of what she
held to be sinful regret in herself, that made her shrink from applying
her own standard to her husband. “It is very different—it is much worse
for a man to be disappointed in that way: a woman can always be
satisfied with devoting herself to her husband, but a man wants
something that will make him look forward more—and sitting by the fire
is so much duller to him than to a woman.” And always, when Nancy
reached this point in her meditations—trying, with predetermined
sympathy, to see everything as Godfrey saw it—there came a renewal of
self-questioning. _Had_ she done everything in her power to lighten
Godfrey’s privation? Had she really been right in the resistance which
had cost her so much pain six years ago, and again four years ago—the
resistance to her husband’s wish that they should adopt a child?
Adoption was more remote from the ideas and habits of that time than of
our own; still Nancy had her opinion on it. It was as necessary to her
mind to have an opinion on all topics, not exclusively masculine, that
had come under her notice, as for her to have a precisely marked place
for every article of her personal property: and her opinions were
always principles to be unwaveringly acted on. They were firm, not
because of their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity
inseparable from her mental action. On all the duties and proprieties
of life, from filial behaviour to the arrangements of the evening
toilette, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was three-and-twenty,
had her unalterable little code, and had formed every one of her habits
in strict accordance with that code. She carried these decided
judgments within her in the most unobtrusive way: they rooted
themselves in her mind, and grew there as quietly as grass. Years ago,
we know, she insisted on dressing like Priscilla, because “it was right
for sisters to dress alike,” and because “she would do what was right
if she wore a gown dyed with cheese-colouring”. That was a trivial but
typical instance of the mode in which Nancy’s life was regulated.
It was one of those rigid principles, and no petty egoistic feeling,
which had been the ground of Nancy’s difficult resistance to her
husband’s wish. To adopt a child, because children of your own had been
denied you, was to try and choose your lot in spite of Providence: the
adopted child, she was convinced, would never turn out well, and would
be a curse to those who had wilfully and rebelliously sought what it
was clear that, for some high reason, they were better without. When
you saw a thing was not meant to be, said Nancy, it was a bounden duty
to leave off so much as wishing for it. And so far, perhaps, the wisest
of men could scarcely make more than a verbal improvement in her
principle. But the conditions under which she held it apparent that a
thing was not meant to be, depended on a more peculiar mode of
thinking. She would have given up making a purchase at a particular
place if, on three successive times, rain, or some other cause of
Heaven’s sending, had formed an obstacle; and she would have
anticipated a broken limb or other heavy misfortune to any one who
persisted in spite of such indications.
“But why should you think the child would turn out ill?” said Godfrey,
in his remonstrances. “She has thriven as well as child can do with the
weaver; and _he_ adopted her. There isn’t such a pretty little girl
anywhere else in the parish, or one fitter for the station we could
give her. Where can be the likelihood of her being a curse to anybody?”
“Yes, my dear Godfrey,” said Nancy, who was sitting with her hands
tightly clasped together, and with yearning, regretful affection in her
eyes. “The child may not turn out ill with the weaver. But, then, he
didn’t go to seek her, as we should be doing. It will be wrong: I feel
sure it will. Don’t you remember what that lady we met at the Royston
Baths told us about the child her sister adopted? That was the only
adopting I ever heard of: and the child was transported when it was
twenty-three. Dear Godfrey, don’t ask me to do what I know is wrong: I
should never be happy again. I know it’s very hard for _you_—it’s
easier for me—but it’s the will of Providence.”
It might seem singular that Nancy—with her religious theory pieced
together out of narrow social traditions, fragments of church doctrine
imperfectly understood, and girlish reasonings on her small
experience—should have arrived by herself at a way of thinking so
nearly akin to that of many devout people, whose beliefs are held in
the shape of a system quite remote from her knowledge—singular, if we
did not know that human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude
the barriers of system.
Godfrey had from the first specified Eppie, then about twelve years
old, as a child suitable for them to adopt. It had never occurred to
him that Silas would rather part with his life than with Eppie. Surely
the weaver would wish the best to the child he had taken so much
trouble with, and would be glad that such good fortune should happen to
her: she would always be very grateful to him, and he would be well
provided for to the end of his life—provided for as the excellent part
he had done by the child deserved. Was it not an appropriate thing for
people in a higher station to take a charge off the hands of a man in a
lower? It seemed an eminently appropriate thing to Godfrey, for reasons
that were known only to himself; and by a common fallacy, he imagined
the measure would be easy because he had private motives for desiring
it. This was rather a coarse mode of estimating Silas’s relation to
Eppie; but we must remember that many of the impressions which Godfrey
was likely to gather concerning the labouring people around him would
favour the idea that deep affections can hardly go along with callous
palms and scant means; and he had not had the opportunity, even if he
had had the power, of entering intimately into all that was exceptional
in the weaver’s experience. It was only the want of adequate knowledge
that could have made it possible for Godfrey deliberately to entertain
an unfeeling project: his natural kindness had outlived that blighting
time of cruel wishes, and Nancy’s praise of him as a husband was not
founded entirely on a wilful illusion.
“I was right,” she said to herself, when she had recalled all their
scenes of discussion—“I feel I was right to say him nay, though it hurt
me more than anything; but how good Godfrey has been about it! Many men
would have been very angry with me for standing out against their
wishes; and they might have thrown out that they’d had ill-luck in
marrying me; but Godfrey has never been the man to say me an unkind
word. It’s only what he can’t hide: everything seems so blank to him, I
know; and the land—what a difference it ’ud make to him, when he goes
to see after things, if he’d children growing up that he was doing it
all for! But I won’t murmur; and perhaps if he’d married a woman who’d
have had children, she’d have vexed him in other ways.”
This possibility was Nancy’s chief comfort; and to give it greater
strength, she laboured to make it impossible that any other wife should
have had more perfect tenderness. She had been _forced_ to vex him by
that one denial. Godfrey was not insensible to her loving effort, and
did Nancy no injustice as to the motives of her obstinacy. It was
impossible to have lived with her fifteen years and not be aware that
an unselfish clinging to the right, and a sincerity clear as the
flower-born dew, were her main characteristics; indeed, Godfrey felt
this so strongly, that his own more wavering nature, too averse to
facing difficulty to be unvaryingly simple and truthful, was kept in a
certain awe of this gentle wife who watched his looks with a yearning
to obey them. It seemed to him impossible that he should ever confess
to her the truth about Eppie: she would never recover from the
repulsion the story of his earlier marriage would create, told to her
now, after that long concealment. And the child, too, he thought, must
become an object of repulsion: the very sight of her would be painful.
The shock to Nancy’s mingled pride and ignorance of the world’s evil
might even be too much for her delicate frame. Since he had married her
with that secret on his heart, he must keep it there to the last.
Whatever else he did, he could not make an irreparable breach between
himself and this long-loved wife.
Meanwhile, why could he not make up his mind to the absence of children
from a hearth brightened by such a wife? Why did his mind fly uneasily
to that void, as if it were the sole reason why life was not thoroughly
joyous to him? I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach
middle age without the clear perception that life never _can_ be
thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours,
dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation
of an untried good. Dissatisfaction seated musingly on a childless
hearth, thinks with envy of the father whose return is greeted by young
voices—seated at the meal where the little heads rise one above another
like nursery plants, it sees a black care hovering behind every one of
them, and thinks the impulses by which men abandon freedom, and seek
for ties, are surely nothing but a brief madness. In Godfrey’s case
there were further reasons why his thoughts should be continually
solicited by this one point in his lot: his conscience, never
thoroughly easy about Eppie, now gave his childless home the aspect of
a retribution; and as the time passed on, under Nancy’s refusal to
adopt her, any retrieval of his error became more and more difficult.
On this Sunday afternoon it was already four years since there had been
any allusion to the subject between them, and Nancy supposed that it
was for ever buried.
“I wonder if he’ll mind it less or more as he gets older,” she thought;
“I’m afraid more. Aged people feel the miss of children: what would
father do without Priscilla? And if I die, Godfrey will be very
lonely—not holding together with his brothers much. But I won’t be
over-anxious, and trying to make things out beforehand: I must do my
best for the present.”
With that last thought Nancy roused herself from her reverie, and
turned her eyes again towards the forsaken page. It had been forsaken
longer than she imagined, for she was presently surprised by the
appearance of the servant with the tea-things. It was, in fact, a
little before the usual time for tea; but Jane had her reasons.
“Is your master come into the yard, Jane?”
“No ’m, he isn’t,” said Jane, with a slight emphasis, of which,
however, her mistress took no notice.
“I don’t know whether you’ve seen ’em, ’m,” continued Jane, after a
pause, “but there’s folks making haste all one way, afore the front
window. I doubt something’s happened. There’s niver a man to be seen i’
the yard, else I’d send and see. I’ve been up into the top attic, but
there’s no seeing anything for trees. I hope nobody’s hurt, that’s
all.”
“Oh, no, I daresay there’s nothing much the matter,” said Nancy. “It’s
perhaps Mr. Snell’s bull got out again, as he did before.”
“I wish he mayn’t gore anybody then, that’s all,” said Jane, not
altogether despising a hypothesis which covered a few imaginary
calamities.
“That girl is always terrifying me,” thought Nancy; “I wish Godfrey
would come in.”
She went to the front window and looked as far as she could see along
the road, with an uneasiness which she felt to be childish, for there
were now no such signs of excitement as Jane had spoken of, and Godfrey
would not be likely to return by the village road, but by the fields.
She continued to stand, however, looking at the placid churchyard with
the long shadows of the gravestones across the bright green hillocks,
and at the glowing autumn colours of the Rectory trees beyond. Before
such calm external beauty the presence of a vague fear is more
distinctly felt—like a raven flapping its slow wing across the sunny
air. Nancy wished more and more that Godfrey would come in.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Some one opened the door at the other end of the room, and Nancy felt
that it was her husband. She turned from the window with gladness in
her eyes, for the wife’s chief dread was stilled.
“Dear, I’m so thankful you’re come,” she said, going towards him. “I
began to get—”
She paused abruptly, for Godfrey was laying down his hat with trembling
hands, and turned towards her with a pale face and a strange
unanswering glance, as if he saw her indeed, but saw her as part of a
scene invisible to herself. She laid her hand on his arm, not daring to
speak again; but he left the touch unnoticed, and threw himself into
his chair.
Jane was already at the door with the hissing urn. “Tell her to keep
away, will you?” said Godfrey; and when the door was closed again he
exerted himself to speak more distinctly.
“Sit down, Nancy—there,” he said, pointing to a chair opposite him. “I
came back as soon as I could, to hinder anybody’s telling you but me.
I’ve had a great shock—but I care most about the shock it’ll be to
you.”
“It isn’t father and Priscilla?” said Nancy, with quivering lips,
clasping her hands together tightly on her lap.
“No, it’s nobody living,” said Godfrey, unequal to the considerate
skill with which he would have wished to make his revelation. “It’s
Dunstan—my brother Dunstan, that we lost sight of sixteen years ago.
We’ve found him—found his body—his skeleton.”
The deep dread Godfrey’s look had created in Nancy made her feel these
words a relief. She sat in comparative calmness to hear what else he
had to tell. He went on:
“The Stone-pit has gone dry suddenly—from the draining, I suppose; and
there he lies—has lain for sixteen years, wedged between two great
stones. There’s his watch and seals, and there’s my gold-handled
hunting-whip, with my name on: he took it away, without my knowing, the
day he went hunting on Wildfire, the last time he was seen.”
Godfrey paused: it was not so easy to say what came next. “Do you think
he drowned himself?” said Nancy, almost wondering that her husband
should be so deeply shaken by what had happened all those years ago to
an unloved brother, of whom worse things had been augured.
“No, he fell in,” said Godfrey, in a low but distinct voice, as if he
felt some deep meaning in the fact. Presently he added: “Dunstan was
the man that robbed Silas Marner.”
The blood rushed to Nancy’s face and neck at this surprise and shame,
for she had been bred up to regard even a distant kinship with crime as
a dishonour.
“O Godfrey!” she said, with compassion in her tone, for she had
immediately reflected that the dishonour must be felt still more keenly
by her husband.
“There was the money in the pit,” he continued—“all the weaver’s money.
Everything’s been gathered up, and they’re taking the skeleton to the
Rainbow. But I came back to tell you: there was no hindering it; you
must know.”
He was silent, looking on the ground for two long minutes. Nancy would
have said some words of comfort under this disgrace, but she refrained,
from an instinctive sense that there was something behind—that Godfrey
had something else to tell her. Presently he lifted his eyes to her
face, and kept them fixed on her, as he said—
“Everything comes to light, Nancy, sooner or later. When God Almighty
wills it, our secrets are found out. I’ve lived with a secret on my
mind, but I’ll keep it from you no longer. I wouldn’t have you know it
by somebody else, and not by me—I wouldn’t have you find it out after
I’m dead. I’ll tell you now. It’s been ‘I will’ and ‘I won’t’ with me
all my life—I’ll make sure of myself now.”
Nancy’s utmost dread had returned. The eyes of the husband and wife met
with awe in them, as at a crisis which suspended affection.
“Nancy,” said Godfrey, slowly, “when I married you, I hid something
from you—something I ought to have told you. That woman Marner found
dead in the snow—Eppie’s mother—that wretched woman—was my wife: Eppie
is my child.”
He paused, dreading the effect of his confession. But Nancy sat quite
still, only that her eyes dropped and ceased to meet his. She was pale
and quiet as a meditative statue, clasping her hands on her lap.
“You’ll never think the same of me again,” said Godfrey, after a little
while, with some tremor in his voice.
She was silent.
“I oughtn’t to have left the child unowned: I oughtn’t to have kept it
from you. But I couldn’t bear to give you up, Nancy. I was led away
into marrying her—I suffered for it.”
Still Nancy was silent, looking down; and he almost expected that she
would presently get up and say she would go to her father’s. How could
she have any mercy for faults that must seem so black to her, with her
simple, severe notions?
But at last she lifted up her eyes to his again and spoke. There was no
indignation in her voice—only deep regret.
“Godfrey, if you had but told me this six years ago, we could have done
some of our duty by the child. Do you think I’d have refused to take
her in, if I’d known she was yours?”
At that moment Godfrey felt all the bitterness of an error that was not
simply futile, but had defeated its own end. He had not measured this
wife with whom he had lived so long. But she spoke again, with more
agitation.
“And—Oh, Godfrey—if we’d had her from the first, if you’d taken to her
as you ought, she’d have loved me for her mother—and you’d have been
happier with me: I could better have bore my little baby dying, and our
life might have been more like what we used to think it ’ud be.”
The tears fell, and Nancy ceased to speak.
“But you wouldn’t have married me then, Nancy, if I’d told you,” said
Godfrey, urged, in the bitterness of his self-reproach, to prove to
himself that his conduct had not been utter folly. “You may think you
would now, but you wouldn’t then. With your pride and your father’s,
you’d have hated having anything to do with me after the talk there’d
have been.”
“I can’t say what I should have done about that, Godfrey. I should
never have married anybody else. But I wasn’t worth doing wrong
for—nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems
beforehand—not even our marrying wasn’t, you see.” There was a faint
sad smile on Nancy’s face as she said the last words.
“I’m a worse man than you thought I was, Nancy,” said Godfrey, rather
tremulously. “Can you forgive me ever?”
“The wrong to me is but little, Godfrey: you’ve made it up to me—you’ve
been good to me for fifteen years. It’s another you did the wrong to;
and I doubt it can never be all made up for.”
“But we can take Eppie now,” said Godfrey. “I won’t mind the world
knowing at last. I’ll be plain and open for the rest o’ my life.”
“It’ll be different coming to us, now she’s grown up,” said Nancy,
shaking her head sadly. “But it’s your duty to acknowledge her and
provide for her; and I’ll do my part by her, and pray to God Almighty
to make her love me.”
“Then we’ll go together to Silas Marner’s this very night, as soon as
everything’s quiet at the Stone-pits.”
CHAPTER XIX.
Between eight and nine o’clock that evening, Eppie and Silas were
seated alone in the cottage. After the great excitement the weaver had
undergone from the events of the afternoon, he had felt a longing for
this quietude, and had even begged Mrs. Winthrop and Aaron, who had
naturally lingered behind every one else, to leave him alone with his
child. The excitement had not passed away: it had only reached that
stage when the keenness of the susceptibility makes external stimulus
intolerable—when there is no sense of weariness, but rather an
intensity of inward life, under which sleep is an impossibility. Any
one who has watched such moments in other men remembers the brightness
of the eyes and the strange definiteness that comes over coarse
features from that transient influence. It is as if a new fineness of
ear for all spiritual voices had sent wonder-working vibrations through
the heavy mortal frame—as if “beauty born of murmuring sound” had
passed into the face of the listener.
Silas’s face showed that sort of transfiguration, as he sat in his
arm-chair and looked at Eppie. She had drawn her own chair towards his
knees, and leaned forward, holding both his hands, while she looked up
at him. On the table near them, lit by a candle, lay the recovered
gold—the old long-loved gold, ranged in orderly heaps, as Silas used to
range it in the days when it was his only joy. He had been telling her
how he used to count it every night, and how his soul was utterly
desolate till she was sent to him.
“At first, I’d a sort o’ feeling come across me now and then,” he was
saying in a subdued tone, “as if you might be changed into the gold
again; for sometimes, turn my head which way I would, I seemed to see
the gold; and I thought I should be glad if I could feel it, and find
it was come back. But that didn’t last long. After a bit, I should have
thought it was a curse come again, if it had drove you from me, for I’d
got to feel the need o’ your looks and your voice and the touch o’ your
little fingers. You didn’t know then, Eppie, when you were such a
little un—you didn’t know what your old father Silas felt for you.”
“But I know now, father,” said Eppie. “If it hadn’t been for you,
they’d have taken me to the workhouse, and there’d have been nobody to
love me.”
“Eh, my precious child, the blessing was mine. If you hadn’t been sent
to save me, I should ha’ gone to the grave in my misery. The money was
taken away from me in time; and you see it’s been kept—kept till it was
wanted for you. It’s wonderful—our life is wonderful.”
Silas sat in silence a few minutes, looking at the money. “It takes no
hold of me now,” he said, ponderingly—“the money doesn’t. I wonder if
it ever could again—I doubt it might, if I lost you, Eppie. I might
come to think I was forsaken again, and lose the feeling that God was
good to me.”
At that moment there was a knocking at the door; and Eppie was obliged
to rise without answering Silas. Beautiful she looked, with the
tenderness of gathering tears in her eyes and a slight flush on her
cheeks, as she stepped to open the door. The flush deepened when she
saw Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey Cass. She made her little rustic curtsy, and
held the door wide for them to enter.
“We’re disturbing you very late, my dear,” said Mrs. Cass, taking
Eppie’s hand, and looking in her face with an expression of anxious
interest and admiration. Nancy herself was pale and tremulous.
Eppie, after placing chairs for Mr. and Mrs. Cass, went to stand
against Silas, opposite to them.
“Well, Marner,” said Godfrey, trying to speak with perfect firmness,
“it’s a great comfort to me to see you with your money again, that
you’ve been deprived of so many years. It was one of my family did you
the wrong—the more grief to me—and I feel bound to make up to you for
it in every way. Whatever I can do for you will be nothing but paying a
debt, even if I looked no further than the robbery. But there are other
things I’m beholden—shall be beholden to you for, Marner.”
Godfrey checked himself. It had been agreed between him and his wife
that the subject of his fatherhood should be approached very carefully,
and that, if possible, the disclosure should be reserved for the
future, so that it might be made to Eppie gradually. Nancy had urged
this, because she felt strongly the painful light in which Eppie must
inevitably see the relation between her father and mother.
Silas, always ill at ease when he was being spoken to by “betters,”
such as Mr. Cass—tall, powerful, florid men, seen chiefly on
horseback—answered with some constraint—
“Sir, I’ve a deal to thank you for a’ready. As for the robbery, I count
it no loss to me. And if I did, you couldn’t help it: you aren’t
answerable for it.”
“You may look at it in that way, Marner, but I never can; and I hope
you’ll let me act according to my own feeling of what’s just. I know
you’re easily contented: you’ve been a hard-working man all your life.”
“Yes, sir, yes,” said Marner, meditatively. “I should ha’ been bad off
without my work: it was what I held by when everything else was gone
from me.”
“Ah,” said Godfrey, applying Marner’s words simply to his bodily wants,
“it was a good trade for you in this country, because there’s been a
great deal of linen-weaving to be done. But you’re getting rather past
such close work, Marner: it’s time you laid by and had some rest. You
look a good deal pulled down, though you’re not an old man, _are_ you?”
“Fifty-five, as near as I can say, sir,” said Silas.
“Oh, why, you may live thirty years longer—look at old Macey! And that
money on the table, after all, is but little. It won’t go far either
way—whether it’s put out to interest, or you were to live on it as long
as it would last: it wouldn’t go far if you’d nobody to keep but
yourself, and you’ve had two to keep for a good many years now.”
“Eh, sir,” said Silas, unaffected by anything Godfrey was saying, “I’m
in no fear o’ want. We shall do very well—Eppie and me ’ull do well
enough. There’s few working-folks have got so much laid by as that. I
don’t know what it is to gentlefolks, but I look upon it as a
deal—almost too much. And as for us, it’s little we want.”
“Only the garden, father,” said Eppie, blushing up to the ears the
moment after.
“You love a garden, do you, my dear?” said Nancy, thinking that this
turn in the point of view might help her husband. “We should agree in
that: I give a deal of time to the garden.”
“Ah, there’s plenty of gardening at the Red House,” said Godfrey,
surprised at the difficulty he found in approaching a proposition which
had seemed so easy to him in the distance. “You’ve done a good part by
Eppie, Marner, for sixteen years. It ’ud be a great comfort to you to
see her well provided for, wouldn’t it? She looks blooming and healthy,
but not fit for any hardships: she doesn’t look like a strapping girl
come of working parents. You’d like to see her taken care of by those
who can leave her well off, and make a lady of her; she’s more fit for
it than for a rough life, such as she might come to have in a few
years’ time.”
A slight flush came over Marner’s face, and disappeared, like a passing
gleam. Eppie was simply wondering Mr. Cass should talk so about things
that seemed to have nothing to do with reality; but Silas was hurt and
uneasy.
“I don’t take your meaning, sir,” he answered, not having words at
command to express the mingled feelings with which he had heard Mr.
Cass’s words.
“Well, my meaning is this, Marner,” said Godfrey, determined to come to
the point. “Mrs. Cass and I, you know, have no children—nobody to
benefit by our good home and everything else we have—more than enough
for ourselves. And we should like to have somebody in the place of a
daughter to us—we should like to have Eppie, and treat her in every way
as our own child. It ’ud be a great comfort to you in your old age, I
hope, to see her fortune made in that way, after you’ve been at the
trouble of bringing her up so well. And it’s right you should have
every reward for that. And Eppie, I’m sure, will always love you and be
grateful to you: she’d come and see you very often, and we should all
be on the look-out to do everything we could towards making you
comfortable.”
A plain man like Godfrey Cass, speaking under some embarrassment,
necessarily blunders on words that are coarser than his intentions, and
that are likely to fall gratingly on susceptible feelings. While he had
been speaking, Eppie had quietly passed her arm behind Silas’s head,
and let her hand rest against it caressingly: she felt him trembling
violently. He was silent for some moments when Mr. Cass had
ended—powerless under the conflict of emotions, all alike painful.
Eppie’s heart was swelling at the sense that her father was in
distress; and she was just going to lean down and speak to him, when
one struggling dread at last gained the mastery over every other in
Silas, and he said, faintly—
“Eppie, my child, speak. I won’t stand in your way. Thank Mr. and Mrs.
Cass.”
Eppie took her hand from her father’s head, and came forward a step.
Her cheeks were flushed, but not with shyness this time: the sense that
her father was in doubt and suffering banished that sort of
self-consciousness. She dropped a low curtsy, first to Mrs. Cass and
then to Mr. Cass, and said—
“Thank you, ma’am—thank you, sir. But I can’t leave my father, nor own
anybody nearer than him. And I don’t want to be a lady—thank you all
the same” (here Eppie dropped another curtsy). “I couldn’t give up the
folks I’ve been used to.”
Eppie’s lips began to tremble a little at the last words. She retreated
to her father’s chair again, and held him round the neck: while Silas,
with a subdued sob, put up his hand to grasp hers.
The tears were in Nancy’s eyes, but her sympathy with Eppie was,
naturally, divided with distress on her husband’s account. She dared
not speak, wondering what was going on in her husband’s mind.
Godfrey felt an irritation inevitable to almost all of us when we
encounter an unexpected obstacle. He had been full of his own penitence
and resolution to retrieve his error as far as the time was left to
him; he was possessed with all-important feelings, that were to lead to
a predetermined course of action which he had fixed on as the right,
and he was not prepared to enter with lively appreciation into other
people’s feelings counteracting his virtuous resolves. The agitation
with which he spoke again was not quite unmixed with anger.
“But I’ve a claim on you, Eppie—the strongest of all claims. It’s my
duty, Marner, to own Eppie as my child, and provide for her. She is my
own child—her mother was my wife. I’ve a natural claim on her that must
stand before every other.”
Eppie had given a violent start, and turned quite pale. Silas, on the
contrary, who had been relieved, by Eppie’s answer, from the dread lest
his mind should be in opposition to hers, felt the spirit of resistance
in him set free, not without a touch of parental fierceness. “Then,
sir,” he answered, with an accent of bitterness that had been silent in
him since the memorable day when his youthful hope had perished—“then,
sir, why didn’t you say so sixteen year ago, and claim her before I’d
come to love her, i’stead o’ coming to take her from me now, when you
might as well take the heart out o’ my body? God gave her to me because
you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you’ve no
right to her! When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to
them as take it in.”
“I know that, Marner. I was wrong. I’ve repented of my conduct in that
matter,” said Godfrey, who could not help feeling the edge of Silas’s
words.
“I’m glad to hear it, sir,” said Marner, with gathering excitement;
“but repentance doesn’t alter what’s been going on for sixteen year.
Your coming now and saying ‘I’m her father’ doesn’t alter the feelings
inside us. It’s me she’s been calling her father ever since she could
say the word.”
“But I think you might look at the thing more reasonably, Marner,” said
Godfrey, unexpectedly awed by the weaver’s direct truth-speaking. “It
isn’t as if she was to be taken quite away from you, so that you’d
never see her again. She’ll be very near you, and come to see you very
often. She’ll feel just the same towards you.”
“Just the same?” said Marner, more bitterly than ever. “How’ll she feel
just the same for me as she does now, when we eat o’ the same bit, and
drink o’ the same cup, and think o’ the same things from one day’s end
to another? Just the same? that’s idle talk. You’d cut us i’ two.”
Godfrey, unqualified by experience to discern the pregnancy of Marner’s
simple words, felt rather angry again. It seemed to him that the weaver
was very selfish (a judgment readily passed by those who have never
tested their own power of sacrifice) to oppose what was undoubtedly for
Eppie’s welfare; and he felt himself called upon, for her sake, to
assert his authority.
“I should have thought, Marner,” he said, severely—“I should have
thought your affection for Eppie would make you rejoice in what was for
her good, even if it did call upon you to give up something. You ought
to remember your own life’s uncertain, and she’s at an age now when her
lot may soon be fixed in a way very different from what it would be in
her father’s home: she may marry some low working-man, and then,
whatever I might do for her, I couldn’t make her well-off. You’re
putting yourself in the way of her welfare; and though I’m sorry to
hurt you after what you’ve done, and what I’ve left undone, I feel now
it’s my duty to insist on taking care of my own daughter. I want to do
my duty.”
It would be difficult to say whether it were Silas or Eppie that was
more deeply stirred by this last speech of Godfrey’s. Thought had been
very busy in Eppie as she listened to the contest between her old
long-loved father and this new unfamiliar father who had suddenly come
to fill the place of that black featureless shadow which had held the
ring and placed it on her mother’s finger. Her imagination had darted
backward in conjectures, and forward in previsions, of what this
revealed fatherhood implied; and there were words in Godfrey’s last
speech which helped to make the previsions especially definite. Not
that these thoughts, either of past or future, determined her
resolution—_that_ was determined by the feelings which vibrated to
every word Silas had uttered; but they raised, even apart from these
feelings, a repulsion towards the offered lot and the newly-revealed
father.
Silas, on the other hand, was again stricken in conscience, and alarmed
lest Godfrey’s accusation should be true—lest he should be raising his
own will as an obstacle to Eppie’s good. For many moments he was mute,
struggling for the self-conquest necessary to the uttering of the
difficult words. They came out tremulously.
“I’ll say no more. Let it be as you will. Speak to the child. I’ll
hinder nothing.”
Even Nancy, with all the acute sensibility of her own affections,
shared her husband’s view, that Marner was not justifiable in his wish
to retain Eppie, after her real father had avowed himself. She felt
that it was a very hard trial for the poor weaver, but her code allowed
no question that a father by blood must have a claim above that of any
foster-father. Besides, Nancy, used all her life to plenteous
circumstances and the privileges of “respectability,” could not enter
into the pleasures which early nurture and habit connect with all the
little aims and efforts of the poor who are born poor: to her mind,
Eppie, in being restored to her birthright, was entering on a too long
withheld but unquestionable good. Hence she heard Silas’s last words
with relief, and thought, as Godfrey did, that their wish was achieved.
“Eppie, my dear,” said Godfrey, looking at his daughter, not without
some embarrassment, under the sense that she was old enough to judge
him, “it’ll always be our wish that you should show your love and
gratitude to one who’s been a father to you so many years, and we shall
want to help you to make him comfortable in every way. But we hope
you’ll come to love us as well; and though I haven’t been what a father
should ha’ been to you all these years, I wish to do the utmost in my
power for you for the rest of my life, and provide for you as my only
child. And you’ll have the best of mothers in my wife—that’ll be a
blessing you haven’t known since you were old enough to know it.”
“My dear, you’ll be a treasure to me,” said Nancy, in her gentle voice.
“We shall want for nothing when we have our daughter.”
Eppie did not come forward and curtsy, as she had done before. She held
Silas’s hand in hers, and grasped it firmly—it was a weaver’s hand,
with a palm and finger-tips that were sensitive to such pressure—while
she spoke with colder decision than before.
“Thank you, ma’am—thank you, sir, for your offers—they’re very great,
and far above my wish. For I should have no delight i’ life any more if
I was forced to go away from my father, and knew he was sitting at
home, a-thinking of me and feeling lone. We’ve been used to be happy
together every day, and I can’t think o’ no happiness without him. And
he says he’d nobody i’ the world till I was sent to him, and he’d have
nothing when I was gone. And he’s took care of me and loved me from the
first, and I’ll cleave to him as long as he lives, and nobody shall
ever come between him and me.”
“But you must make sure, Eppie,” said Silas, in a low voice—“you must
make sure as you won’t ever be sorry, because you’ve made your choice
to stay among poor folks, and with poor clothes and things, when you
might ha’ had everything o’ the best.”
His sensitiveness on this point had increased as he listened to Eppie’s
words of faithful affection.
“I can never be sorry, father,” said Eppie. “I shouldn’t know what to
think on or to wish for with fine things about me, as I haven’t been
used to. And it ’ud be poor work for me to put on things, and ride in a
gig, and sit in a place at church, as ’ud make them as I’m fond of
think me unfitting company for ’em. What could _I_ care for then?”
Nancy looked at Godfrey with a pained questioning glance. But his eyes
were fixed on the floor, where he was moving the end of his stick, as
if he were pondering on something absently. She thought there was a
word which might perhaps come better from her lips than from his.
“What you say is natural, my dear child—it’s natural you should cling
to those who’ve brought you up,” she said, mildly; “but there’s a duty
you owe to your lawful father. There’s perhaps something to be given up
on more sides than one. When your father opens his home to you, I think
it’s right you shouldn’t turn your back on it.”
“I can’t feel as I’ve got any father but one,” said Eppie, impetuously,
while the tears gathered. “I’ve always thought of a little home where
he’d sit i’ the corner, and I should fend and do everything for him: I
can’t think o’ no other home. I wasn’t brought up to be a lady, and I
can’t turn my mind to it. I like the working-folks, and their victuals,
and their ways. And,” she ended passionately, while the tears fell,
“I’m promised to marry a working-man, as’ll live with father, and help
me to take care of him.”
Godfrey looked up at Nancy with a flushed face and smarting dilated
eyes. This frustration of a purpose towards which he had set out under
the exalted consciousness that he was about to compensate in some
degree for the greatest demerit of his life, made him feel the air of
the room stifling.
“Let us go,” he said, in an under-tone.
“We won’t talk of this any longer now,” said Nancy, rising. “We’re your
well-wishers, my dear—and yours too, Marner. We shall come and see you
again. It’s getting late now.”
In this way she covered her husband’s abrupt departure, for Godfrey had
gone straight to the door, unable to say more.
CHAPTER XX.
Nancy and Godfrey walked home under the starlight in silence. When they
entered the oaken parlour, Godfrey threw himself into his chair, while
Nancy laid down her bonnet and shawl, and stood on the hearth near her
husband, unwilling to leave him even for a few minutes, and yet fearing
to utter any word lest it might jar on his feeling. At last Godfrey
turned his head towards her, and their eyes met, dwelling in that
meeting without any movement on either side. That quiet mutual gaze of
a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge
from a great weariness or a great danger—not to be interfered with by
speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh
enjoyment of repose.
But presently he put out his hand, and as Nancy placed hers within it,
he drew her towards him, and said—
“That’s ended!”
She bent to kiss him, and then said, as she stood by his side, “Yes,
I’m afraid we must give up the hope of having her for a daughter. It
wouldn’t be right to want to force her to come to us against her will.
We can’t alter her bringing up and what’s come of it.”
“No,” said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with
his usually careless and unemphatic speech—“there’s debts we can’t pay
like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by.
While I’ve been putting off and putting off, the trees have been
growing—it’s too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said
about a man’s turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to
somebody else. I wanted to pass for childless once, Nancy—I shall pass
for childless now against my wish.”
Nancy did not speak immediately, but after a little while she
asked—“You won’t make it known, then, about Eppie’s being your
daughter?”
“No: where would be the good to anybody?—only harm. I must do what I
can for her in the state of life she chooses. I must see who it is
she’s thinking of marrying.”
“If it won’t do any good to make the thing known,” said Nancy, who
thought she might now allow herself the relief of entertaining a
feeling which she had tried to silence before, “I should be very
thankful for father and Priscilla never to be troubled with knowing
what was done in the past, more than about Dunsey: it can’t be helped,
their knowing that.”
“I shall put it in my will—I think I shall put it in my will. I
shouldn’t like to leave anything to be found out, like this of Dunsey,”
said Godfrey, meditatively. “But I can’t see anything but difficulties
that ’ud come from telling it now. I must do what I can to make her
happy in her own way. I’ve a notion,” he added, after a moment’s pause,
“it’s Aaron Winthrop she meant she was engaged to. I remember seeing
him with her and Marner going away from church.”
“Well, he’s very sober and industrious,” said Nancy, trying to view the
matter as cheerfully as possible.
Godfrey fell into thoughtfulness again. Presently he looked up at Nancy
sorrowfully, and said—
“She’s a very pretty, nice girl, isn’t she, Nancy?”
“Yes, dear; and with just your hair and eyes: I wondered it had never
struck me before.”
“I think she took a dislike to me at the thought of my being her
father: I could see a change in her manner after that.”
“She couldn’t bear to think of not looking on Marner as her father,”
said Nancy, not wishing to confirm her husband’s painful impression.
“She thinks I did wrong by her mother as well as by her. She thinks me
worse than I am. But she _must_ think it: she can never know all. It’s
part of my punishment, Nancy, for my daughter to dislike me. I should
never have got into that trouble if I’d been true to you—if I hadn’t
been a fool. I’d no right to expect anything but evil could come of
that marriage—and when I shirked doing a father’s part too.”
Nancy was silent: her spirit of rectitude would not let her try to
soften the edge of what she felt to be a just compunction. He spoke
again after a little while, but the tone was rather changed: there was
tenderness mingled with the previous self-reproach.
“And I got _you_, Nancy, in spite of all; and yet I’ve been grumbling
and uneasy because I hadn’t something else—as if I deserved it.”
“You’ve never been wanting to me, Godfrey,” said Nancy, with quiet
sincerity. “My only trouble would be gone if you resigned yourself to
the lot that’s been given us.”
“Well, perhaps it isn’t too late to mend a bit there. Though it _is_
too late to mend some things, say what they will.”
CHAPTER XXI.
The next morning, when Silas and Eppie were seated at their breakfast,
he said to her—
“Eppie, there’s a thing I’ve had on my mind to do this two year, and
now the money’s been brought back to us, we can do it. I’ve been
turning it over and over in the night, and I think we’ll set out
to-morrow, while the fine days last. We’ll leave the house and
everything for your godmother to take care on, and we’ll make a little
bundle o’ things and set out.”
“Where to go, daddy?” said Eppie, in much surprise.
“To my old country—to the town where I was born—up Lantern Yard. I want
to see Mr. Paston, the minister: something may ha’ come out to make ’em
know I was innicent o’ the robbery. And Mr. Paston was a man with a
deal o’ light—I want to speak to him about the drawing o’ the lots. And
I should like to talk to him about the religion o’ this country-side,
for I partly think he doesn’t know on it.”
Eppie was very joyful, for there was the prospect not only of wonder
and delight at seeing a strange country, but also of coming back to
tell Aaron all about it. Aaron was so much wiser than she was about
most things—it would be rather pleasant to have this little advantage
over him. Mrs. Winthrop, though possessed with a dim fear of dangers
attendant on so long a journey, and requiring many assurances that it
would not take them out of the region of carriers’ carts and slow
waggons, was nevertheless well pleased that Silas should revisit his
own country, and find out if he had been cleared from that false
accusation.
“You’d be easier in your mind for the rest o’ your life, Master
Marner,” said Dolly—“that you would. And if there’s any light to be got
up the yard as you talk on, we’ve need of it i’ this world, and I’d be
glad on it myself, if you could bring it back.”
So on the fourth day from that time, Silas and Eppie, in their Sunday
clothes, with a small bundle tied in a blue linen handkerchief, were
making their way through the streets of a great manufacturing town.
Silas, bewildered by the changes thirty years had brought over his
native place, had stopped several persons in succession to ask them the
name of this town, that he might be sure he was not under a mistake
about it.
“Ask for Lantern Yard, father—ask this gentleman with the tassels on
his shoulders a-standing at the shop door; he isn’t in a hurry like the
rest,” said Eppie, in some distress at her father’s bewilderment, and
ill at ease, besides, amidst the noise, the movement, and the multitude
of strange indifferent faces.
“Eh, my child, he won’t know anything about it,” said Silas;
“gentlefolks didn’t ever go up the Yard. But happen somebody can tell
me which is the way to Prison Street, where the jail is. I know the way
out o’ that as if I’d seen it yesterday.”
With some difficulty, after many turnings and new inquiries, they
reached Prison Street; and the grim walls of the jail, the first object
that answered to any image in Silas’s memory, cheered him with the
certitude, which no assurance of the town’s name had hitherto given
him, that he was in his native place.
“Ah,” he said, drawing a long breath, “there’s the jail, Eppie; that’s
just the same: I aren’t afraid now. It’s the third turning on the left
hand from the jail doors—that’s the way we must go.”
“Oh, what a dark ugly place!” said Eppie. “How it hides the sky! It’s
worse than the Workhouse. I’m glad you don’t live in this town now,
father. Is Lantern Yard like this street?”
“My precious child,” said Silas, smiling, “it isn’t a big street like
this. I never was easy i’ this street myself, but I was fond o’ Lantern
Yard. The shops here are all altered, I think—I can’t make ’em out; but
I shall know the turning, because it’s the third.”
“Here it is,” he said, in a tone of satisfaction, as they came to a
narrow alley. “And then we must go to the left again, and then straight
for’ard for a bit, up Shoe Lane: and then we shall be at the entry next
to the o’erhanging window, where there’s the nick in the road for the
water to run. Eh, I can see it all.”
“O father, I’m like as if I was stifled,” said Eppie. “I couldn’t ha’
thought as any folks lived i’ this way, so close together. How pretty
the Stone-pits ’ull look when we get back!”
“It looks comical to _me_, child, now—and smells bad. I can’t think as
it usened to smell so.”
Here and there a sallow, begrimed face looked out from a gloomy doorway
at the strangers, and increased Eppie’s uneasiness, so that it was a
longed-for relief when they issued from the alleys into Shoe Lane,
where there was a broader strip of sky.
“Dear heart!” said Silas, “why, there’s people coming out o’ the Yard
as if they’d been to chapel at this time o’ day—a weekday noon!”
Suddenly he started and stood still with a look of distressed
amazement, that alarmed Eppie. They were before an opening in front of
a large factory, from which men and women were streaming for their
midday meal.
“Father,” said Eppie, clasping his arm, “what’s the matter?”
But she had to speak again and again before Silas could answer her.
“It’s gone, child,” he said, at last, in strong agitation—“Lantern
Yard’s gone. It must ha’ been here, because here’s the house with the
o’erhanging window—I know that—it’s just the same; but they’ve made
this new opening; and see that big factory! It’s all gone—chapel and
all.”
“Come into that little brush-shop and sit down, father—they’ll let you
sit down,” said Eppie, always on the watch lest one of her father’s
strange attacks should come on. “Perhaps the people can tell you all
about it.”
But neither from the brush-maker, who had come to Shoe Lane only ten
years ago, when the factory was already built, nor from any other
source within his reach, could Silas learn anything of the old Lantern
Yard friends, or of Mr. Paston the minister.
“The old place is all swep’ away,” Silas said to Dolly Winthrop on the
night of his return—“the little graveyard and everything. The old
home’s gone; I’ve no home but this now. I shall never know whether they
got at the truth o’ the robbery, nor whether Mr. Paston could ha’ given
me any light about the drawing o’ the lots. It’s dark to me, Mrs.
Winthrop, that is; I doubt it’ll be dark to the last.”
“Well, yes, Master Marner,” said Dolly, who sat with a placid listening
face, now bordered by grey hairs; “I doubt it may. It’s the will o’
Them above as a many things should be dark to us; but there’s some
things as I’ve never felt i’ the dark about, and they’re mostly what
comes i’ the day’s work. You were hard done by that once, Master
Marner, and it seems as you’ll never know the rights of it; but that
doesn’t hinder there _being_ a rights, Master Marner, for all it’s dark
to you and me.”
“No,” said Silas, “no; that doesn’t hinder. Since the time the child
was sent to me and I’ve come to love her as myself, I’ve had light
enough to trusten by; and now she says she’ll never leave me, I think I
shall trusten till I die.”
CONCLUSION
There was one time of the year which was held in Raveloe to be
especially suitable for a wedding. It was when the great lilacs and
laburnums in the old-fashioned gardens showed their golden and purple
wealth above the lichen-tinted walls, and when there were calves still
young enough to want bucketfuls of fragrant milk. People were not so
busy then as they must become when the full cheese-making and the
mowing had set in; and besides, it was a time when a light bridal dress
could be worn with comfort and seen to advantage.
Happily the sunshine fell more warmly than usual on the lilac tufts the
morning that Eppie was married, for her dress was a very light one. She
had often thought, though with a feeling of renunciation, that the
perfection of a wedding-dress would be a white cotton, with the tiniest
pink sprig at wide intervals; so that when Mrs. Godfrey Cass begged to
provide one, and asked Eppie to choose what it should be, previous
meditation had enabled her to give a decided answer at once.
Seen at a little distance as she walked across the churchyard and down
the village, she seemed to be attired in pure white, and her hair
looked like the dash of gold on a lily. One hand was on her husband’s
arm, and with the other she clasped the hand of her father Silas.
“You won’t be giving me away, father,” she had said before they went to
church; “you’ll only be taking Aaron to be a son to you.”
Dolly Winthrop walked behind with her husband; and there ended the
little bridal procession.
There were many eyes to look at it, and Miss Priscilla Lammeter was
glad that she and her father had happened to drive up to the door of
the Red House just in time to see this pretty sight. They had come to
keep Nancy company to-day, because Mr. Cass had had to go away to
Lytherley, for special reasons. That seemed to be a pity, for otherwise
he might have gone, as Mr. Crackenthorp and Mr. Osgood certainly would,
to look on at the wedding-feast which he had ordered at the Rainbow,
naturally feeling a great interest in the weaver who had been wronged
by one of his own family.
“I could ha’ wished Nancy had had the luck to find a child like that
and bring her up,” said Priscilla to her father, as they sat in the
gig; “I should ha’ had something young to think of then, besides the
lambs and the calves.”
“Yes, my dear, yes,” said Mr. Lammeter; “one feels that as one gets
older. Things look dim to old folks: they’d need have some young eyes
about ’em, to let ’em know the world’s the same as it used to be.”
Nancy came out now to welcome her father and sister; and the wedding
group had passed on beyond the Red House to the humbler part of the
village.
Dolly Winthrop was the first to divine that old Mr. Macey, who had been
set in his arm-chair outside his own door, would expect some special
notice as they passed, since he was too old to be at the wedding-feast.
“Mr. Macey’s looking for a word from us,” said Dolly; “he’ll be hurt if
we pass him and say nothing—and him so racked with rheumatiz.”
So they turned aside to shake hands with the old man. He had looked
forward to the occasion, and had his premeditated speech.
“Well, Master Marner,” he said, in a voice that quavered a good deal,
“I’ve lived to see my words come true. I was the first to say there was
no harm in you, though your looks might be again’ you; and I was the
first to say you’d get your money back. And it’s nothing but rightful
as you should. And I’d ha’ said the ‘Amens,’ and willing, at the holy
matrimony; but Tookey’s done it a good while now, and I hope you’ll
have none the worse luck.”
In the open yard before the Rainbow the party of guests were already
assembled, though it was still nearly an hour before the appointed
feast time. But by this means they could not only enjoy the slow advent
of their pleasure; they had also ample leisure to talk of Silas
Marner’s strange history, and arrive by due degrees at the conclusion
that he had brought a blessing on himself by acting like a father to a
lone motherless child. Even the farrier did not negative this
sentiment: on the contrary, he took it up as peculiarly his own, and
invited any hardy person present to contradict him. But he met with no
contradiction; and all differences among the company were merged in a
general agreement with Mr. Snell’s sentiment, that when a man had
deserved his good luck, it was the part of his neighbours to wish him
joy.
As the bridal group approached, a hearty cheer was raised in the
Rainbow yard; and Ben Winthrop, whose jokes had retained their
acceptable flavour, found it agreeable to turn in there and receive
congratulations; not requiring the proposed interval of quiet at the
Stone-pits before joining the company.
Eppie had a larger garden than she had ever expected there now; and in
other ways there had been alterations at the expense of Mr. Cass, the
landlord, to suit Silas’s larger family. For he and Eppie had declared
that they would rather stay at the Stone-pits than go to any new home.
The garden was fenced with stones on two sides, but in front there was
an open fence, through which the flowers shone with answering gladness,
as the four united people came within sight of them.
“O father,” said Eppie, “what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody
could be happier than we are.”