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                            1861

                        SILAS MARNER

                       by George Eliot

                          PART ONE


                    CHAPTER ONE

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 folks, 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
simple 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, counter-balancing 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, treadmill 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
idea 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 wheel-wright'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 overwise, 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; and 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 usually 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: prosecution was held by them to be forbidden
to Christians, even if it had been a case in which there was no scandal
to the community. But they 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 fold 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 TWO

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 hill-sides,
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 white-washed 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
in which he had vainly trusted among the streets and in 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 mere 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 out 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 THREE

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, and accepted 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 merrymakings, 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. When 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. When 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 as 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 twelve-month, 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 someone'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 the 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
into 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 tomorrow. 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've 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 tomorrow
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 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 tomorrow.'

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'll 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 tomorrow, 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 tomorrow, 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 thoughts 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 FOUR

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.

'Hey-day,' said Bryce, who had long had his eye on Wildfire, 'you're on
your brother's horse today: 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 hindquarters.'

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 'staked' his
horse. 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 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 fore-finger encountered there
were of too pale a colour to cover that small debt, without payment of
which Jennings 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
house-keepers 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 FIVE

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 come 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 tonight, 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 SIX

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 says. 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 practising, I wish you'd practise 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
countryside. 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 came 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
say 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; though 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.

'I should think there did- a very partic'lar thing,' said Mr Macey,
nodding sideways. 'For Mr Drumlow- poor old gentleman, I was fond on
him, though he'd got a bit confused in his head, what wi' age and wi'
taking a drop o' summat warm when the service come of a cold morning.
And young Mr Lammeter, he'd have no way but he must be married in
janiwary, which, to be sure, 's a unreasonable time to be married in,
for it isn't like a christening or a burying, as you can't help; and so
Mr Drumlow- poor old gentleman, I was fond on him- but when he come to
put the questions, he put 'em by the rule o' contrairy, like, and he
says, "Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded wife?" says he, and then he
says, "Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded husband?" says he. But
the partic'larest thing of all is, as nobody took any notice on it but
me, and they answered straight off "yes", like as if it had been me
saying "Amen" i' the right place, without listening to what went
before.'

'But you knew what was going on well enough, didn't you, Mr Macey? You
were live enough, eh?' said the butcher.

'Lor bless you!' said Mr Macey, pausing, and smiling in pity at the
impotence of his hearers' imagination- 'why, I was all of a tremble: it
was as if I'd been a coat pulled by the two tails, like; for I couldn't
stop the parson, I couldn't take upon me to do that; and yet I said to
myself, I says, "Suppose they shouldn't be fast married, 'cause the
words are contrairy?" and my head went working like a mill, for I was
allays uncommon for turning things over and seeing all round 'em; and I
says to myself, "Is't the meanin' or the words as makes folks fast i'
wedlock?" For the parson meant right, and the bride and bridegroom meant
right. But then, when I come to think on it, meanin' goes but a little
way i' most things, for you may mean to stick things together and your
glue may be bad, and then where are you? And so I says to mysen, "It
isn't the meanin', it's the glue." And I was worreted as if I'd got
three bells to pull at once, when we got into the vestry, and they begun
to sign their names. But where's the use o' talking?- you can't think
what goes on in a 'cute man's inside.'

'But you held in for all that, didn't you, Mr Macey?' said the landlord.

'Aye, I held in tight till I was by mysen wi' Mr Drumlow, and then I out
wi' everything, but respectful, as I allays did. And he made light on
it, and he says, "Pooh, pooh, Macey, make yourself easy," he says, "it's
neither the meaning nor the words- it's the regester does it- that's the
glue." So you see he settled it easy; for parsons and doctors know
everything by heart, like, so as they aren't worreted wi' thinking
what's the rights and wrongs o' things, as I'n been many and many's the
time. And sure enough the wedding turned out all right, on'y poor Mrs
Lammeter- that's Miss Osgood as was- died afore the lasses were growed
up; but for prosperity and everything respectable, there's no family
more looked on.'

Every one of Mr Macey's audience had heard this story many times, but it
was listened to as if it had been a favourite tune, and at certain
points the puffing of the pipes was momentarily suspended, that the
listeners might give their whole minds to the expected words. But there
was more to come; and Mr Snell, the landlord, duly put the leading
question.

'Why, old Mr Lammeter had a pretty fortin, didn't they say, when he come
into these parts?'

'Well, yes,' said Mr Macey; 'but I daresay it's as much as this Mr
Lammeter's done to keep it whole. For there was allays a talk as nobody
could get rich on the Warrens: though he holds it cheap, for it's what
they call Charity Land.'

'Aye, and there's few folks know so well as you how it come to be
Charity Land, eh, Mr Macey?' said the butcher.

'How should they?' said the old clerk, with some contempt. 'Why, my
grandfather made the grooms' livery for that Mr Cliff as came and built
the big stables at the Warrens. Why, they're stables four times as big
as Squire Cass's, for he thought o' nothing but hosses and hunting,
Cliff didn't- a Lunnon tailor, some folks said, as had gone mad wi'
cheating. For he couldn't ride; lor bless you! they said he'd got no
more grip o' the hoss than if his legs had been cross sticks: my
grandfather heared old Squire Cass say so many and many a time. But ride
he would, as if old Harry had been a-driving him; and he'd a son, a lad
o' sixteen; and nothing would his father have him do, but he must ride
and ride- though the lad was frighted, they said. And it was a common
saying as the father wanted to ride the tailor out o' the lad, and make
a gentleman on him- not but what I'm a tailor myself, but in respect as
God made me such, I'm proud on it, for "Macey tailor", 's been wrote up
over our door since afore the Queen's heads went out on the shillings.
But Cliff, he was ashamed o' being called a tailor, and he was sore
vexed as his riding was laughed at, and nobody o' the gentlefolks
hereabout could abide him. Howsomever, the poor lad got sickly and died,
and the father didn't live long after him, for he got queerer nor ever,
and they said he used to go out i' the dead o' the night, wi' a lantern
in his hand, to the stables, and set a lot o' lights burning, for he got
as he couldn't sleep; and there he'd stand, cracking his whip and
looking at his hosses; and they said it was a mercy as the stables
didn't get burnt down wi' the poor dumb creaturs in 'em. But at last he
died raving, and they found as he'd left all his property, Warrens and
all, to a Lunnon Charity, and that's how the Warrens came to be Charity
land; though, as for the stables, Mr Lammeter never uses 'em- they're
out o' all charicter- lor bless you! if you was to set the doors
a-banging in 'em, it 'ud sound like thunder half o'er the parish.'

'Aye, but there's more going on in the stables than what folks see by
daylight, eh, Mr Macey?' said the landlord.

'Aye, aye; go that way of a dark night, that's all,' said Mr Macey
winking mysteriously, 'and then make believe, if you like, as you didn't
see lights i' the stables, nor hear the stamping o' the hosses, nor the
cracking o' the whips, and howling, too, if it's tow'rt daybreak.
"Cliff's Holiday" has been the name of it ever sin' I were a boy; that's
to say, some said as it was the holiday Old Harry gev him from roasting,
like. That's what my father told me, and he was a reasonable man, though
there's folks nowadays know what happened afore they were born better
nor they know their own business.'

'What do you say to that, eh, Dowlas?' said the landlord, turning to the
farrier, who was swelling with impatience for his cue. 'There's a nut
for you to crack.'

Mr Dowlas was the negative spirit in the company, and was proud of his
position.

'Say? I say what a man should say as doesn't shut his eyes to look at a
finger-post. I say, as I'm ready to wager any man ten pound, if he'll
stand out wi' me any dry night in the pasture before the Warren stables,
as we shall neither see lights nor hear noises, if it isn't the blowing
of our own noses. That's what I say, and I've said it many a time; but
there's nobody'ull ventur a ten-pun' note on their ghos'es as they make
so sure of.'

'Why, Dowlas, that's easy betting, that is,' said Ben Winthrop. 'You
might as well bet a man as he wouldn't catch the rheumatise if he stood
up to 's neck in the pool of a frosty night. It 'ud be fine fun for a
man to win his bet as he'd catch the rheumatise. Folks as believe in
Cliff's Holiday aren't agoing to ventur near it for a matter o' ten
pound.'

'If Master Dowlas wants to know the truth on it,' said Mr Macey, with a
sarcastic smile, tapping his thumbs together, 'he's no call to lay any
bet- let him go and stan' by himself- there's nobody 'ull hinder him;
and then he can let the parish'ners know if they're wrong.'

'Thank you! I'm obliged to you,' said the farrier, with a snort of
scorn. 'If folks are fools, it's no business o' mine. I don't want to
make out the truth about ghos'es: I know it a'ready. But I'm not against
a bet- everything fair and open. Let any man bet me ten pound as I shall
see Cliff's Holiday, and I'll go and stand by myself. I want no company.
I'd as lief do it as I'd fill this pipe.'

'Ah, but who's to watch you, Dowlas, and see you do it? That's no fair
bet,' said the butcher.

'No fair bet?' replied Mr Dowlas, angrily. 'I should like to hear any
man stand up and say I want to be unfair. Come now, Master Lundy, I
should like to hear you say it.'

'Very like you would,' said the butcher. 'But it's no business o' mine.
You're none o' my bargains, and I aren't a-going to try and 'bate your
price. If anybody'll bid for you at your own vallying, let him. I'm for
peace and quietness, I am.'

'Yes, that's what every yapping cur is, when you hold a stick up at
him,' said the farrier. 'But I'm afraid o' neither man nor ghost, and
I'm ready to lay a fair bet- I aren't a turn-tail cur.'

'Aye, but there's this in it, Dowlas,' said the landlord, speaking in a
tone of much candour and tolerance. 'There's folks, i' my opinion, they
can't see ghos'es, not if they stood as plain as a pike-staff before
'em. And there's reason i' that. For there's my wife, now, can't smell,
not if she'd the strongest of cheese under her nose. I never see'd a
ghost myself, but then I says to myself, "Very like I haven't got the
smell for 'em." I mean, putting a ghost for a smell, or else
contrairi-ways. And so, I'm for holding with both sides; for, as I say,
the truth lies between 'em. And if Dowlas was to go and stand, and say
he'd never seen a wink o' Cliff's Holiday all the night through, I'd
back him; and if anybody said as Cliff's Holiday was certain sure, for
all that, I'd back him too. For the smell's what I go by.'

The landlord's analogical argument was not well received by the farrier-
a man intensely opposed to compromise.

'Tut, tut,' he said, setting down his glass with refreshed irritation;
'what's the smell got to do with it? Did ever a ghost give a man a black
eye? That's what I should like to know. If ghos'es want me to believe in
'em, let 'em leave off skulking i' the dark and i' lone places- let 'em
come where there's company and candles.'

'As if ghos'es 'ud want to be believed in by anybody so ignirant!' said
Mr Macey, in deep disgust at the farrier's crass incompetence to
apprehend the conditions of ghostly phenomena.

                    CHAPTER SEVEN

YET the next moment there seemed to be some evidence that ghosts had a
more condescending disposition than Mr Macey attributed to them; for the
pale thin figure of Silas Marner was suddenly seen standing in the warm
light, uttering no word, but looking round at the company with his
strange unearthly eyes. The long pipes gave a simultaneous movement,
like the antennae of startled insects, and every man present, not
excepting even the sceptical farrier, had an impression that he saw, not
Silas Marner in the flesh, but an apparition; for the door by which
Silas had entered was hidden by the high-screened seats, and no one had
noticed his approach. Mr Macey, sitting a long way off the ghost, might
be supposed to have felt an argumentative triumph, which would tend to
neutralize his share of the general alarm. Had he not always said that
when Silas Marner was in that strange trance of his, his soul went loose
from his body? Here was the demonstration: nevertheless, on the whole,
he would have been as well contented without it. For a few moments there
was a dead silence, Marner's want of breath and agitation not allowing
him to speak. The landlord, under the habitual sense that he was bound
to keep his house open to all company, and confident in the protection
of his unbroken neutrality, at last took on himself the task of adjuring
the ghost.

'Master Marner,' he said, in a conciliatory tone, 'what's lacking to
you? What's your business here?'

'Robbed!' said Silas, gaspingly. 'I've been robbed! I want the
constable- and the Justice- and Squire Cass- and Mr Crackenthorp.'

'Lay hold on him, Jem Rodney,' said the landlord, the idea of a ghost
subsiding; 'he's off his head, I doubt. He's wet through.'

Jem Rodney was the outermost man, and sat conveniently near Marner's
standing-place; but he declined to give his services.

'Come and lay hold on him yourself, Mr Snell, if you've a mind,' said
Jem, rather sullenly. 'He's been robbed, and murdered too, for what I
know,' he added, in a muttering tone.

'Jem Rodney!' said Silas, turning and fixing his strange eyes on the
suspected man.

'Aye, Master Marner, what do you want wi' me?' said Jem, trembling a
little, and seizing his drinking-can as a defensive weapon.

'If it was you stole my money,' said Silas, clasping his hands
entreatingly, and raising his voice to a cry, 'give it me back- and I
won't meddle with you. I won't set the constable on you. Give it me
back, and I'll let you- I'll let you have a guinea.'

'Me stole your money!' said Jem, angrily. 'I'll pitch this can at your
eye if you talk o' my stealing your money.'

'Come, come, Master Marner,' said the landlord, now rising resolutely,
and seizing Marner by the shoulder, 'if you've got any information to
lay, speak it out sensible, and show as you're in your right mind, if
you expect anybody to listen to you. You're as wet as a drownded rat.
Sit down and dry yourself, and speak straight forrard.'

'Ah, to be sure, man,' said the farrier, who began to feel that he had
not been quite on a par with himself and the occasion. 'Let's have no
more staring and screaming, else we'll have you strapped for a madman.
That was why I didn't speak at the first- thinks I, the man's run mad.'

'Aye, aye, make him sit down,' said several voices at once, well pleased
that the reality of ghosts remained still an open question.

The landlord forced Marner to take off his coat, and then to sit down on
a chair aloof from everyone else, in the centre of the circle, and in
the direct rays of the fire. The weaver, too feeble to have any distinct
purpose beyond that of getting help to recover his money, submitted
unresistingly. The transient fears of the company were now forgotten in
their strong curiosity, and all faces were turned towards Silas, when
the landlord, having seated himself again, said:

'Now then, Master Marner, what's this you've got to say, as you've been
robbed? speak out.'

'He'd better not say again as it was me robbed him,' cried Jem Rodney,
hastily. 'What could I ha' done with his money? I could as easy steal
the parson's surplice, and wear it.'

'Hold your tongue, Jem, and let's hear what he's got to say,' said the
landlord. 'Now then, Master Marner.'

Silas now told his story under frequent questioning, as the mysterious
character of the robbery became evident.

This strangely novel situation of opening his trouble to his Raveloe
neighbours, of sitting in the warmth of a hearth not his own, and
feeling the presence of faces and voices which were his nearest promise
of help, had doubtless its influence on Marner, in spite of his
passionate preoccupation with his loss. Our consciousness rarely
registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us:
there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the
smallest sign of the bud.

The slight suspicion with which his hearers at first listened to him,
gradually melted away before the convincing simplicity of his distress:
it was impossible for the neighbours to doubt that Marner was telling
the truth, not because they were capable of arguing at once from the
nature of his statements to the absence of any motive for making them
falsely, but because, as Mr Macey observed, 'Folks as had the devil to
back 'em were not likely to be so mushed' as poor Silas was. Rather,
from the strange fact that the robber had left no traces, and had
happened to know the nick of time, utterly incalculable by mortal
agents, when Silas would go away from home without locking his door, the
more probable conclusion seemed to be, that his disreputable intimacy in
that quarter, if it ever existed, had been broken up, and that, in
consequence, this ill turn had been done to Marner by somebody it was
quite in vain to set the constable after. Why this preternatural felon
should be obliged to wait till the door was left unlocked, was a
question which did not present itself.

'It isn't Jem Rodney as has done this work, Master Marner,' said the
landlord. 'You musn't be a-casting your eye at poor Jem. There may be a
bit of a reckoning against Jem for the matter of a hare or so, if
anybody was bound to keep their eyes staring open, and niver to wink-
but Jem's been a-sitting here drinking his can, like the decentest man
i' the parish, since before you left your house, Master Marner, by your
own account.'

'Aye, aye,' said Mr Macey; 'let's have no accusing o' the innicent. That
isn't the law. There must be folks to swear again' a man before he can
be ta'en up. Let's have no accusing o' the innicent, Master Marner.'

Memory was not so utterly torpid in Silas that it could not be awakened
by these words. With a movement of compunction, as new and strange to
him as everything else within the last hour, he started from his chair,
and went close up to Jem, looking at him as if he wanted to assure
himself of the expression in his face.

'I was wrong,' he said- 'yes, yes- I ought to have thought. There's
nothing to witness against you, Jem. Only you'd been into my house
oftener than anybody else, and so you came into my head. I don't accuse
you- I won't accuse anybody- only,' he added, lifting up his hands to
his head, and turning away with bewildered misery, 'I try- I try to
think where my money can be.'

'Aye, aye, they're gone where it's hot enough to melt 'em, I doubt,'
said Mr Macey.

'Tchuh!' said the farrier. And then he asked, with a cross-examining
air, 'How much money might there be in the bags, Master Marner?'

'Two hundred and seventy-two pounds, twelve and sixpence, last night
when I counted it,' said Silas, seating himself again, with a groan.

'Pooh! why, they'd be none so heavy to carry. Some tramp's been in,
that's all; and as for the no footmarks, and the bricks and the sand
being all right- why, your eyes are pretty much like a insect's, Master
Marner; they're obliged to look so close, you can't see much at a time.
It's my opinion as, if I'd been you, or you'd been me- for it comes to
the same thing- you wouldn't have thought you'd found everything as you
left it. But what I vote is, as two of the sensiblest o' the company
should go with you to Master Kench, the constable's- he's ill i' bed, I
know that much- and get him to appoint one of us his deppity; for that's
the law, and I don't think anybody 'ull take upon him to contradick me
there. it isn't much of a walk to Kench's; and then, if it's me as is
deppity, I'll go back with you, Master Marner, and examine your
primises; and if anybody's got any fault to find with that, I'll thank
him to stand up and say it out like a man.'

By this pregnant speech the farrier had re-established his
self-complacency, and waited with confidence to hear himself named as
one of the superlatively sensible men.

'Let us see how the night is, though,' said the landlord, who also
considered himself personally concerned in this proposition. 'Why, it
rains heavy still,' he said, returning from the door.

'Well, I'm not the man to be afraid o' the rain,' said the farrier. 'For
it'll look bad when Justice Malam hears as respectable men like us had a
information laid before 'em and took no steps.'

The landlord agreed with this view, and after taking the sense of the
company, and duly rehearsing a small ceremony known in high
ecclesiastical life as the nolo episcopari, he consented to take on
himself the chill dignity of going to Kench's. But to the farrier's
strong disgust, Mr Macey now started an objection to his proposing
himself as a deputy-constable; for that oracular old gentleman, claiming
to know the law, stated, as a fact delivered to him by his father, that
no doctor could be a constable.

'And you're a doctor, I reckon, though you're only a cow-doctor- for a
fly's a fly, though it may be a hoss-fly,' concluded Mr Macey, wondering
a little at his own ''cuteness'.

There was a hot debate upon this, the farrier being of course indisposed
to renounce the quality of doctor, but contending that a doctor could be
a constable if he liked- the law meant, he needn't be one if he didn't
like. Mr Macey thought this was nonsense, since the law was not likely
to be fonder of doctors than of other folks. Moreover, if it was in the
nature of doctors more than of other men not to like being constables,
how came Mr Dowlas to be so eager to act in that capacity?

'I don't want to act the constable,' said the farrier, driven into a
corner by this merciless reasoning; 'and there's no man can say it of
me, if he'd tell the truth. But if there's to be any jealousy and
envying about going to Kench's in the rain, let them go as like it- you
won't get me to go, I can tell you.'

By the landlord's intervention, however, the dispute was accommodated.
Mr Dowlas consented to go as a second person disinclined to act
officially; and so poor Silas, furnished with some old coverings, turned
out with his two companions into the rain again, thinking of the long
night-hours before him, not as those do who long to rest, but as those
who expect to 'watch for the morning'.

                    CHAPTER EIGHT

WHEN Godfrey Cass returned from Mrs Osgood's party at midnight, he was
not much surprised to learn that Dunsey had not come home. Perhaps he
had not sold Wildfire, and was waiting for another chance- perhaps, on
that foggy afternoon, he had preferred housing himself at the Red Lion
at Batherley for the night, if the run had kept him in that
neighbourhood; for he was not likely to feel much concern about leaving
his brother in suspense. Godfrey's mind was too full of Nancy Lammeter's
looks and behaviour, too full of the exasperation against himself and
his lot, which the sight of her always produced in him, for him to give
much thought to Wildfire or to the probabilities of Dunstan's conduct.

The next morning the whole village was excited by the story of the
robbery, and Godfrey, like everyone else, was occupied in gathering and
discussing news about it, and in visiting the Stone-pits. The rain had
washed away all possibility of distinguishing footmarks, but a close
investigation of the spot had disclosed, in the direction opposite to
the village, a tinder-box, with a flint and steel, half sunk in the mud.
It was not Silas's tinder-box, for the only one he had ever had was
still standing on his shelf; and the inference generally accepted was,
that the tinder-box in the ditch was somehow connected with the robbery.
A small minority shook their heads, and intimated their opinion that it
was not a robbery to have much light thrown on it by tinder-boxes, that
Master Marner's tale had a queer look with it, and that such things had
been known as a man's doing himself a mischief, and then setting the
justice to look for the doer. But when questioned closely as to their
grounds for this opinion, and what Master Marner had to gain by such
false pretences, they only shook their heads as before, and observed
that there was no knowing what some folks counted gain; moreover, that
everybody had a right to their own opinions, grounds or no grounds, and
that the weaver, as everybody knew, partly crazy. Mr Macey, though he
joined in the defence of Marner against all suspicions of deceit, also
pooh-poohed the tinder-box; indeed, repudiated it as a rather impious
suggestion, tending to imply that everything must be done by human
hands, and that there was no power which could make away with the
guineas without moving the bricks. Nevertheless, he turned round rather
sharply on Mr Tookey, when the zealous deputy, feeling that this was a
view of the case peculiarly suited to a parish-clerk, carried it still
farther, and doubted whether it was right to inquire into a robbery at
all when the circumstances were so mysterious.

'As if,' concluded Mr Tookey- 'as if there was nothing but what could be
made out by justices and constables.'

'Now, don't you be for overshooting the mark, Tookey,' said Mr Macey,
nodding his head aside, admonishingly. 'That's what you're allays at; if
I throw a stone and hit, you think there's summat better than hitting,
and you try to throw a stone beyond. What I said was against the
tinder-box: I said nothing against justices and constables, for they're
o' King George's making, and it 'ud be ill-becoming a man in a parish
office to fly out again' King George.'

While these discussions were going on amongst the group outside the
Rainbow, a higher consultation was being carried on within, under the
presidency of Mr Crackenthorp, the rector, assisted by Squire Cass and
other substantial parishioners. It had just occurred to Mr Snell, the
landlord- he being, as he observed, a man accustomed to put two and two
together- to connect with the tinder-box which, as deputy-constable, he
himself had had the honourable distinction of finding, certain
recollections of a pedlar who had called to drink at the house about a
month before, and had actually stated that he carried a tinder-box about
with him to light his pipe. Here, surely, was a clue to be followed out.
And as memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is
sometimes surprisingly fertile, Mr Snell gradually recovered a vivid
impression of the effect produced on him by the pedlar's countenance and
conversation. He had a 'look with his eye' which fell unpleasantly on Mr
Snell's sensitive organism. To be sure, he didn't say anything
particular- no, except that about the tinder-box- but it isn't what a
man says, it's the way he says it. Moreover, he had a swarthy
foreignness of complexion which boded little honesty.

'Did he wear ear-rings?' Mr Crackenthorp wished to know, having some
acquaintance with foreign customs.

'Well- stay- let me see,' said Mr Snell, like a docile clairvoyante, who
would really not make a mistake if she could help it. After stretching
the corners of his mouth and contracting his eyes, as if he were trying
to see the ear-rings, he appeared to give up the effort, and said,
'Well, he'd got ear-rings in his box to sell, so it's nat'ral to suppose
he might wear 'em. But he called at every house, a'most, in the village:
there's somebody else, mayhap, saw 'em in his ears, though I can't take
upon me rightly to say.'

Mr Snell was correct in his surmise, that somebody else would remember
the pedlar's ear-rings. For, on the spread of inquiry among the
villagers, it was stated with gathering emphasis, that the parson had
wanted to know whether the pedlar wore ear-rings in his ears, and an
impression was created that a great deal depended on the eliciting of
this fact. Of course everyone who heard the question, not having any
distinct image of the pedlar as without ear-rings, immediately had an
image of him with ear-rings, larger or smaller, as the case might be;
and the image was presently taken for a vivid recollection, so that the
glazier's wife, a well-intentioned woman, not given to lying, and whose
house was among the cleanest in the village, was ready to declare, as
sure as ever she meant to take the sacrament, the very next Christmas
that was ever coming, that she had seen big ear-rings, in the shape of
the young moon, in the pedlar's two ears; while Jinny Oates, the
cobbler's daughter, being a more imaginative person, stated not only
that she had seen them too, but that they had made her blood creep, as
it did at that very moment while there she stood.

Also, by way of throwing further light on this clue of the tinder-box, a
collection was made of all the articles purchased from the pedlar at
various houses and carried to the Rainbow to be exhibited there. In
fact, there was a general feeling in the village, that for the
clearing-up of this robbery there must be a great deal done at the
Rainbow, and that no man need offer his wife an excuse for going there
while it was the scene of severe public duties.

Some disappointment was felt, and perhaps a little indignation also,
when it became known that Silas Marner, on being questioned by the
Squire and the parson, had retained no other recollection of the pedlar
than that he had called at his door, but had not entered his house,
having turned away at once when Silas, holding the door ajar, had said
that he wanted nothing. This had been Silas's testimony, though he
clutched strongly at the idea of the pedlar's being the culprit, if only
because it gave him a definite image of a whereabout for his gold, after
it had been taken away from its hiding-place: he could see it now in the
pedlar's box. But it was observed with some irritation in the village,
that anybody but a 'blind creatur' like Marner would have seen the man
prowling about, for how came he to leave his tinder-box in the ditch
close by, if he hadn't been lingering there? Doubtless, he had made his
observations when he saw Marner at the door. Anybody might know- and
only look at him- that the weaver was a half-crazy miser. It was a
wonder the pedlar hadn't murdered him; men of that sort, with rings in
their ears, had been known for murderers often and often; there had been
one tried at the 'sizes, not so long ago but what there were people
living who remembered it.

Godfrey Cass, indeed, entering the Rainbow during one of Mr Snell's
frequently repeated recitals of his testimony, had treated it lightly,
stating that he himself had bought a pen-knife of the pedlar, and
thought him a merry grinning fellow enough; it was all nonsense, he
said, about the man's evil looks. But this was spoken of in the village
as the random talk of youth, 'as if it was only Mr Snell who had seen
something odd about the pedlar!' On the contrary, there were at least
half-a-dozen who were ready to go before Justice Malam, and give in much
more striking testimony than any the landlord could furnish. It was to
be hoped Mr Godfrey would not go to Tarley and throw cold water on what
Mr Snell said there, and so prevent the justice from drawing up a
warrant. He was suspected of intending this, when, after mid-day, he was
seen setting off on horseback in the direction of Tarley.

But by this time Godfrey's interest in the robbery had faded before his
growing anxiety about Dunstan and Wildfire, and he was going, not to
Tarley, but to Batherley, unable to rest in uncertainty about them any
longer. The possibility that Dunstan had played him the ugly trick of
riding away with Wildfire, to return at the end of a month, when he had
gambled away or otherwise squandered the price of the horse, was a fear
that urged itself upon him more, even, than the thought of an accidental
injury; and now that the dance at Mrs Osgood's was past, he was
irritated with himself that he had trusted his horse to Dunstan. Instead
of trying to still his fears, he encouraged them, with that
superstitious impression which clings to us all, that if we expect evil
very strongly it is the less likely to come; and when he heard a horse
approaching at a trot, and saw a hat rising above a hedge beyond an
angle of the lane, he felt as if his conjuration had succeeded. But no
sooner did the horse come within sight, than his heart sank again. It
was not Wildfire; and in a few moments more he discerned that the rider
was not Dunstan, but Bryce, who pulled up to speak, with a face that
implied something disagreeable.

'Well, Mr Godfrey, that's a lucky brother of yours, that Master Dunsey,
isn't he?'

'What do you mean?' said Godfrey, hastily.

'Why, hasn't he been home yet?' said Bryce.

'Home? no. What has happened? Be quick. What has he done with my horse?'

'Ah, I thought it was yours, though he pretended you had parted with it
to him.'

'Has he thrown him down and broken his knees?' said Godfrey, flushed
with exasperation.

'Worse than that,' said Bryce. 'You see, I'd made a bargain with him to
buy the horse for a hundred and twenty- a swinging price, but I always
liked the horse. And what does he do but go and stake him- fly at a
hedge with stakes in it, atop of a bank with a ditch before it. The
horse had been dead a pretty good while when he was found. So he hasn't
been home since, has he?'

'Home? no,' said Godfrey, 'and he'd better keep away. Confound me for a
fool! I might have known this would be the end of it.'

'Well, to tell you the truth,' said Bryce, 'after I'd bargained for the
horse, it did come into my head that he might be riding and selling the
horse without your knowledge, for I didn't believe it was his own. I
knew Master Dunsey was up to his tricks sometimes. But where can he be
gone? He's never been seen at Batherley. He couldn't have been hurt, for
he must have walked off.'

'Hurt?' said Godfrey, bitterly. 'He'll never be hurt- he's made to hurt
other people.'

'And so you did give him leave to sell the horse, eh?' said Bryce.

'Yes; I wanted to part with the horse- he was always a little too hard
in the mouth for me,' said Godfrey; his pride making him wince under the
idea that Bryce guessed the sale to be a matter of necessity. 'I was
going to see after him- I thought some mischief had happened. I'll go
back now,' he added, turning the horse's head, and wishing he could get
rid of Bryce; for he felt that the long-dreaded crisis in his life was
close upon him. 'You're coming on to Raveloe, aren't you?'

'Well, no, not now,' said Bryce. 'I was coming round there, for I had to
go to Flitton, and I thought I might as well take you in my way, and
just let you know all I knew myself about the horse. I suppose Master
Dunsey didn't like to show himself till the ill news had blown over a
bit. He's perhaps gone to pay a visit at the Three Crowns, by
Whitbridge- I know he's fond of the house.'

'Perhaps he is,' said Godfrey, rather absently. Then rousing himself, he
said, with an effort at carelessness, 'We shall hear of him soon enough,
I'll be bound.'

'Well, here's my turning,' said Bryce, not surprised to perceive that
Godfrey was rather 'down'; 'so I'll bid you good day, and wish I may
bring you better news another time.'

Godfrey rode along slowly, representing to himself the scene of
confession to his father from which he felt that there was now no longer
any escape. The revelation about the money must be made the very next
morning; and if he withheld the rest, Dunstan would be sure to come back
shortly, and finding that he must bear the brunt of his father's anger,
would tell the whole story out of spite, even though he had nothing to
gain by it. There was one step, perhaps, by which he might still win
Dunstan's silence and put off the evil day: he might tell his father
that he had himself spent the money paid to him by Fowler; and as he had
never been guilty of such an offence before, the affair would blow over
after a little storming. But Godfrey could not bend himself to this. He
felt that in letting Dunstan have the money, he had already been guilty
of a breach of trust hardly less culpable than that of spending the
money directly for his own behoof; and yet there was a distinction
between the two acts which made him feel that the one was so much more
blackening than the other as to be intolerable to him.

'I don't pretend to be a good fellow,' he said to himself; 'but I'm not
a scoundrel- at least, I'll stop short somewhere. I'll bear the
consequences of what I have done sooner than make believe I've done what
I never would have done. I'd never have spent the money for my own
pleasure- I was tortured into it.'

Through the remainder of this day Godfrey, with only occasional
fluctuations, kept his will bent in the direction of a complete avowal
to his father, and he withheld the story of Wildfire's loss till the
next morning, that it might serve him as an introduction to heavier
matter. The old Squire was accustomed to his son's frequent absence from
home, and thought neither Dunstan's nor Wildfire's non-appearance a
matter calling for remark. Godfrey said to himself again and again, that
if he let slip this one opportunity of confession, he might never have
another; the revelation might be made even in a more odious way than by
Dunstan's malignity: she might come, as she had threatened to do. And
then he tried to make the scene easier to himself by rehearsal: he made
up his mind how he would pass from the admission of his weakness in
letting Dunstan have the money to the fact that Dunstan had a hold on
him which he had been unable to shake off, and how he would work up his
father to expect something very bad before he told him the fact. The old
Squire was an implacable man: he made resolutions in violent anger, but
he was not to be moved from them after his anger had subsided- as fiery
volcanic matters cool and harden into rock. Like many violent and
implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own
heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and
then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard.
This was his system with his tenants: he allowed them to get into
arrears, neglect their fences, reduce their stock, sell their straw, and
otherwise go the wrong way,- and then, when he became short of money in
consequence of this indulgence, he took the hardest measures and would
listen to no appeal. Godfrey knew all this, and felt it with the greater
force because he had constantly suffered annoyance from witnessing his
father's sudden fits of unrelentingness, for which his own habitual
irresolution deprived him of all sympathy. (He was not critical on the
faulty indulgence which preceded these fits; that seemed to him natural
enough.) Still there was just the chance, Godfrey thought, that his
father's pride might see this marriage in a light that would induce him
to hush it up, rather than turn his son out and make the family the talk
of the country for ten miles round.

This was the view of the case that Godfrey managed to keep before him
pretty closely till midnight, and he went to sleep thinking that he had
done with inward debating. But when he awoke in the still morning
darkness he found it impossible to reawaken his evening thoughts; it was
as if they had been tired out and were not to be roused to further work.
Instead of arguments for confession, he could now feel the presence of
nothing but its evil consequences: the old dread of disgrace came back-
the old shrinking from the thought of raising a hopeless barrier between
himself and Nancy- the old disposition to rely on chances which might be
favourable to him, and save him from betrayal. Why, after all, should he
cut off the hope of them by his own act? He had seen the matter in a
wrong light yesterday. He had been in a rage with Dunstan, and had
thought of nothing but a thorough break-up of their mutual
understanding; but what it would be really wisest for him to do, was to
try and soften his father's anger against Dunsey, and keep things as
nearly as possible in their old condition. If Dunsey did not come back
for a few days (and Godfrey did not know but that the rascal had enough
money in his pocket to enable him to keep away still longer), everything
might blow over.

                    CHAPTER NINE

GODFREY rose and took his own breakfast earlier than usual, but lingered
in the wainscoted parlour till his younger brothers had finished their
meal and gone out, awaiting his father, who always went out and had a
walk with his managing-man before breakfast. Everyone breakfasted at a
different hour in the Red House, and the Squire was always the latest,
giving a long chance to a rather feeble morning appetite before he tried
it. The table had been spread with substantial eatables nearly two hours
before he presented himself- a tall, stout man of sixty, with a face in
which the knit brow and rather hard glance seemed contradicted by the
slack and feeble mouth. His person showed marks of habitual neglect, his
dress was slovenly; and yet there was something in the presence of the
old Squire distinguishable from that of the ordinary farmers in the
parish, who were perhaps every whit as refined as he, but, having
slouched their way through life with a consciousness of being in the
vicinity of their 'betters', wanted that self-possession and
authoritativeness of voice and carriage which belonged to a man who
thought of superiors as remote existences, with whom he had personally
little more to do than with America or the stars. The Squire had been
used to parish homage all his life, used to the pre-supposition that his
family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and
best; and as he never associated with any gentry higher than himself,
his opinion was not disturbed by comparison.

He glanced at his son as he entered the room, and said, 'What, sir!
haven't you had your breakfast yet?' but there was no pleasant morning
greeting between them; not because of any unfriendliness, but because
the sweet flower of courtesy is not a growth of such homes as the Red
House.

'Yes, sir,' said Godfrey, 'I've had my breakfast, but I was waiting to
speak to you.'

'Ah! well,' said the Squire, throwing himself indifferently into his
chair, and speaking in a ponderous coughing fashion, which was felt in
Raveloe to be a sort of privilege of his rank, while he cut a piece of
beef, and held it up before the deer-hound that had come in with him,
'Ring the bell for my ale, will you? You youngsters' business is your
own pleasure, mostly. There's no hurry about it for anybody but
yourselves.'

The Squire's life was quite as idle as his sons', but it was a fiction
kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was
exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was
constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm. Godfrey waited,
before he spoke again, until the ale had been brought and the door
closed- an interval during which Fleet, the deer-hound, had consumed
enough bits of beef to make a poor man's holiday dinner.

'There's been a cursed piece of ill-luck with Wildfire,' he began;
'happened the day before yesterday.'

'What! broke his knees?' said the Squire, after taking a draught of ale.
'I thought you knew how to ride better than that, sir. I never threw a
horse down in my life. If I had, I might ha' whistled for another, for
my father wasn't quite so ready to unstring as some other fathers I know
of. But they must turn over a new leaf- they must. What with mortgages
and arrears, I'm as short o' cash as a roadside pauper. And that fool
Kimble says the newspaper's talking about peace. Why, the country
wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Prices 'ud run down like a jack, and I
should never get my arrears, not if I sold all the fellows up. And
there's that damned Fowler, I won't put up with him any longer; I've
told Winthrop to go to Cox this very day. The lying scoundrel told me
he'd be sure to pay me a hundred last month. He takes advantage because
he's on that outlying farm, and thinks I shall forget him.'

The Squire had delivered this speech in a coughing and interrupted
manner, but with no pause long enough for Godfrey to make it a pretext
for taking up the word again. He felt that his father meant to ward off
any request for money on the ground of the misfortune with Wildfire, and
that the emphasis he had thus been led to lay on his shortness of cash
and his arrears was likely to produce an attitude of mind the most
unfavourable for his own disclosure. But he must go on, now he had
begun.

'It's worse than breaking the horse's knees- he's been staked and
killed,' lie said, as soon as his father was silent, and had begun to
cut his meat. 'But I wasn't thinking of asking you to buy me another
horse; I was only thinking I had lost the means of paying you with the
price of Wildfire, as I'd meant to do. Dunsey took him to the hunt to
sell him for me the other day, and after he'd made a bargain for a
hundred and twenty with Bryce, he went after the hounds, and took some
fool's leap or other, that did for the horse at once. If it hadn't been
for that, I should have paid you a hundred pounds this morning.'

The Squire had laid down his knife and fork, and was staring at his son
in amazement, not being sufficiently quick of brain to form a probable
guess as to what could have caused so strange an inversion of the
paternal and filial relations as this proposition of his son to pay him
a hundred pounds.

'The truth is, sir- I'm very sorry- I was quite to blame,' said Godfrey.
'Fowler did pay that hundred pounds. He paid it to me, when I was over
there one day last month. And Dunsey bothered me for the money, and I
let him have it, because I hoped I should be able to pay it you before
this.'

The Squire was purple with anger before his son had done speaking, and
found utterance difficult. 'You let Dunsey have it, sir? And how long
have you been so thick with Dunsey that you must collogue with him to
embezzle my money? Are you turning out a scamp? I tell you, I won't have
it. I'll turn the whole pack of you out of the house together, and marry
again. I'd have you to remember, sir, my property's got no entail on it;
since my grandfather's time the Casses can do as they like with their
land. Remember that, sir. Let Dunsey have the money! Why should you let
Dunsey have the money? There's some lie at the bottom of it.'

'There's no lie, sir,' said Godfrey. 'I wouldn't have spent the money
myself, but Dunsey bothered me, and I was a fool and let him have it.
But I meant to pay it, whether he did or not. That's the whole story. I
never meant to embezzle money, and I'm not the man to do it. You never
knew me do a dishonest trick, sir.'

'Where's Dunsey, then? What do you stand talking there for? Go and fetch
Dunsey, as I tell you, and let him give account of what he wanted the
money for, and what's he's done with it. He shall repent it. I'll turn
him out. I said I would, and I'll do it. He shan't brave me. Go and
fetch him.'

'Dunsey isn't come back, sir.'

'What! did he break his own neck then?' said the Squire, with some
disgust at the idea that, in that case, he could not fulfil his threat.

'No, he wasn't hurt, I believe, for the horse was found dead, and Dunsey
must have walked off. I daresay we shall see him again by and by. I
don't know where he is.'

'And what must you be letting him have my money for? Answer me that,'
said the Squire, attacking Godfrey again, since Dunsey was not within
reach.

'Well, sir, I don't know,' said Godfrey, hesitatingly. That was a feeble
evasion, but Godfrey was not fond of lying, and, not being sufficiently
aware that no sort of duplicity can long flourish without the help of
vocal falsehoods, he was quite unprepared with invented motives.

'You don't know? I tell you what it is, sir. You've been up to some
trick, and you've been bribing him not to tell,' said the Squire, with a
sudden acuteness which startled Godfrey, who felt his heart beat
violently at the nearness of his father's guess. The sudden alarm pushed
him on to take the next step- a very slight impulse suffices for that on
a downward road.

'Why, sir,' he said, trying to speak with careless ease, 'it was a
little affair between me and Dunsey; it's no matter to anybody else.
it's hardly worth while to pry into young men's fooleries: it wouldn't
have made any difference to you, sir, if I'd not had the bad luck to
lose Wildfire. I should have paid you the money.'

'Fooleries! Pshaw! it's time you'd done with fooleries. And I'd have you
know, sir, you must ha' done with 'em,' said the Squire, frowning and
casting an angry glance at his son. 'Your goings-on are not what I shall
find money for any longer. There's my grandfather had his stables full
o' horses, and kept a good house too, and in worse times, by what I can
make out; and so might I, if I hadn't four good-for-nothing fellows to
hang on me like horse-leeches. I've been too good a father to you all-
that's what it is. But I shall pull up, sir.'

Godfrey was silent. He was not likely to be very penetrating in his
judgments, but he had always had a sense that his father's indulgence
had not been kindness, and had had a vague longing for some discipline
that would have checked his own errant weakness, and helped his better
will. The Squire ate his bread and meat hastily, took a deep draught of
ale, then turned his chair from the table, and began to speak again.

'It'll be all the worse for you, you know- you'd need try and help me
keep things together.'

'Well, sir, I've often offered to take the management of things, but you
know you've taken it ill always, and seemed to think I wanted to push
you out of your place.'

'I know nothing o' your offering or o' my taking it ill,' said the
Squire, whose memory consisted in certain strong impressions unmodified
by detail; 'but I know, one while you seemed to be thinking o' marrying,
and I didn't offer to put any obstacles in your way, as some fathers
would. I'd as lieve you married Lammeter's daughter as anybody. I
suppose, if I'd said you nay, you'd ha' kept on with it; but, for want
o' contradiction you've changed your mind. You're a shilly-shally
fellow: you take after your poor mother. She never had a will of her
own; a woman has no call for one, if she's got a proper man for her
husband. But your wife had need have one, for you hardly know your own
mind enough to make both your legs walk one way. The lass hasn't said
downright she won't have you, has she?'

'No,' said Godfrey, feeling very hot and uncomfortable; 'but I don't
think she will.'

'Think! why, haven't you the courage to ask her? Do you stick to it, you
want to have her- that's the thing?'

'There's no other woman I want to marry,' said Godfrey, evasively.

'Well, then, let me make the offer for you, that's all, if you haven't
the pluck to do it yourself. Lammeter isn't likely to be loath for his
daughter to marry into my family, I should think. And as for the pretty
lass, she wouldn't have her cousin- and there's nobody else, as I see,
could ha' stood in your way.'

'I'd rather let it be, please sir, at present,' said Godfrey, in alarm.
'I think she's a little offended with me just now, and I should like to
speak for myself. A man must manage these things for himself.'

'Well, speak then and manage it, and see if you can't turn over a new
leaf. That's what a man must do when he thinks o' marrying.'

'I don't see how I can think of it at present, sir. You wouldn't like to
settle me on one of the farms, I suppose, and I don't think she'd come
to live in this house with all my brothers. It's a different sort of
life to what she's been used to.'

'Not come to live in this house? Don't tell me. You ask her, that's
all,' said the Squire, with a short, scornful laugh.

'I'd rather let the thing be, at present, sir,' said Godfrey. 'I hope
you won't try to hurry it on by saying anything.'

'I shall do what I choose,' said the Squire, 'and I shall let you know
I'm master; else you may turn out and find an estate to drop into
somewhere else. Go out and tell Winthrop not to go to Cox's, but wait
for me. And tell 'em to get my horse saddled. And stop: look out and get
that hack o' Dunsey's sold, and hand me the money, will you? He'll keep
no more hacks at my expense. And if you know where he's sneaking- I
daresay you do- you may tell him to spare himself the journey o' coming
back home. Let him turn ostler, and keep himself. He shan't hang on me
any more.'

'I don't know where he is, sir; and if I did, it isn't my place to tell
him to keep away,' said Godfrey, moving towards the door.

'Confound it, sir, don't stay arguing, but go and order my horse,' said
the Squire, taking up a pipe.

Godfrey left the room, hardly knowing whether he were more relieved by
the sense that the interview was ended without having made any change in
his position, or more uneasy that he had entangled himself still further
in prevarication and deceit. What had passed about his proposing to
Nancy had raised a new alarm, lest by some after-dinner words of his
father's to Mr Lammeter he should be thrown into the embarrassment of
being obliged to absolutely decline her when she seemed to be within his
reach. He fled to his usual refuge, that of hoping for some unforeseen
turn of fortune, some favourable chance which would save him from
unpleasant consequences- perhaps even "justify his insincerity by
manifesting its prudence. And in this point of trusting to some throw of
fortune's dice, Godfrey can hardly be called specially old-fashioned.
Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own
devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished
man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his
mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from
the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his
income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will
presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible
simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state
of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the
responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on
the chance, that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the
supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will
adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the
hope that his friend will never know; let him forsake a decent craft
that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never
called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed
Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The
evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by
which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.

                    CHAPTER TEN

JUSTICE MALAM was naturally regarded in Tarley and Raveloe as a man of
capacious mind, seeing that he could draw much wider conclusions without
evidence than could be expected of his neighbours who were not on the
Commission of the Peace. Such a man was not likely to neglect the clue
of the tinder-box, and an inquiry was set on foot concerning a pedlar,
name unknown, with curly black hair and a foreign complexion, carrying a
box of cutlery and jewellery, and wearing large rings in his ears. But
either because inquiry was too slow-footed to overtake him, or because
the description applied to so many pedlars that inquiry did not know how
to choose among them, weeks passed away, and there was no other result
concerning the robbery than a gradual cessation of the excitement it had
caused in Raveloe. Dunstan Cass's absence was hardly a subject of
remark: he had once before had a quarrel with his father, and had gone
off, nobody knew whither, to return at the end of six weeks, take up his
old quarters unforbidden, and swagger as usual. His own family, who
equally expected this issue, with the sole difference that the Squire
was determined this time to forbid him the old quarters, never mentioned
his absence; and when his uncle Kimble or Mr Osgood noticed it, the
story of his having killed Wildfire, and committed some offence against
his father, was enough to prevent surprise. To connect the fact of
Dunsey's disappearance with that of the robbery occurring on the same
day, lay quite away from the track of everyone's thought- even
Godfrey's, who had better reason than anyone else to know what his
brother was capable of. He remembered no mention of the weaver between
them since the time, twelve years ago, when it was their boyish sport to
deride him; and, besides, his imagination constantly created an alibi
for Dunstan: he saw him continually in some congenial haunt, to which he
had walked off on leaving Wildfire- saw him sponging on chance
acquaintances, and meditating a return home to the old amusement of
tormenting his elder brother. Even if any brain in Raveloe had put the
said two facts together, I doubt whether a combination so injurious to
the prescriptive respectability of a family with a mural monument and
venerable tankards, would not have been suppressed as of unsound
tendency. But Christmas puddings, brawn, and abundance of spirituous
liquors, throwing the mental originality into the channel of nightmare,
are great preservatives against a dangerous spontaneity of waking
thought.

When the robbery was talked of at the Rainbow and elsewhere, in good
company, the balance continued to waver between the rational explanation
founded on the tinder-box, and the theory of an impenetrable mystery
that mocked investigation. The advocates of the tinder-box-and-pedlar
view considered the other side a muddle-headed and credulous set, who,
because they themselves were wall-eyed, supposed everybody else to have
the same blank outlook; and the adherents of the inexplicable, more than
hinted that their antagonists were animals inclined to crow before they
had found any corn- mere skimming-dishes in point of depth- whose
clear-sightedness consisted in supposing there was nothing behind a
barn-door because they couldn't see through it; so that, though their
controversy did not serve to elicit the fact concerning the robbery, it
elicited some true opinions of collateral importance.

But while poor Silas's loss served thus to brush the slow current of
Raveloe conversation, Silas himself was feeling the withering desolation
of that bereavement, about which his neighbours were arguing at their
ease. To anyone who had observed him before he lost his gold, it might
have seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as his could hardly be
susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any subtraction but such as
would put an end to it altogether. But in reality it had been an eager
life, filled with immediate purpose, which fenced him in from the wide,
cheerless unknown. It had been a clinging life; and though the object
round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it
satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence was broken down- the
support was snatched away. Marner's thoughts could no longer move in
their old round, and were baffled by a blank like that which meets a
plodding ant when the earth has broken away on its homeward path. The
loom was there, and the weaving, and the growing pattern in the cloth;
but the bright treasure in the hole under his feet was gone; the
prospect of handling and counting it was gone: the evening had no
phantasm of delight to still the poor soul's craving. The thought of the
money he would get by his actual work could bring no joy, for its meagre
image was only a fresh reminder of his loss; and hope was too heavily
crushed by the sudden blow for his imagination to dwell on the growth of
a new hoard from that small beginning.

He filled up the blank with grief. As he sat weaving, he every now and
then moaned low, like one in pain: it was the sign that his thoughts had
come round again to the sudden chasm- to the empty evening-time. And all
the evening, as he sat in his loneliness by his dull fire, he leaned his
elbows on his knees, and clasped his head with his hands, and moaned
very low- not as one who seeks to be heard.

And yet he was not utterly forsaken in his trouble. The repulsion Marner
had always created in his neighbours was partly dissipated by the new
light in which this misfortune had shown him. Instead of a man who had
more cunning than honest folks could come by, and, what was worse, had
not the inclination to use that cunning in a neighbourly way, it was now
apparent that Silas had not cunning enough to keep his own. He was
generally spoken of as a 'poor mushed creatur'; and that avoidance of
his neighbours, which had before been referred to his ill-will, and to a
probable addiction to worse company, was now considered mere craziness.

This change to a kindlier feeling was shown in various ways. The odour
of Christmas cooking being on the wind, it was the season when
superfluous pork and black puddings are suggestive of charity in
well-to-do families; and Silas's misfortune had brought him uppermost in
the memory of housekeepers like Mrs Osgood. Mr Crackenthorp, too, while
he admonished Silas that his money had probably been taken from him
because he thought too much of it, and never came to church, enforced
the doctrine by a present of pigs' pettitoes, well calculated to
dissipate unfounded prejudices against the clerical character.
Neighbours, who had nothing but verbal consolation to give, showed a
disposition not only to greet Silas, and discuss his misfortune at some
length when they encountered him in the village, but also to take the
trouble of calling at his cottage, and getting him to repeat all the
details on the very spot; and then they would try to cheer him by
saying: 'Well, Master Marner, you're no worse off nor other poor folks,
after all; and if you was to be crippled, the parish 'ud give you a
'lowance.'

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours
with our words is, that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of
ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and
pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our egoism; but language is a
stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair
proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and
bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and
hypocritical.

Mr Macey, for example, coming one evening expressly to let Silas know
that recent events had given him the advantage of standing more
favourably in the opinion of a man whose judgment was not formed
lightly, opened the conversation by saying, as soon as he had seated
himself and adjusted his thumbs:

'Come, Master Marner, why, you've no call to sit a-moaning. You're a
deal better off to ha' lost your money, nor to ha' kep it by foul means.
I used to think, when you first come into these parts, as you were no
better nor you should be; you were younger a deal than what you are now;
but you were allays a staring, white-faced creatur, partly like a
bald-faced calf, as I may say. But there's no knowing: it isn't every
queer-looksed thing as Old Harry's had the making of- I mean, speaking
o' toads and such; for they're often harmless, like, and useful against
varmin. And it's pretty much the same wi' you, as fur as I can see.
Though as to the yarbs and stuff to cure the breathing, if you brought
that sort o' knowledge from distant parts, you might ha' been a bit
freer of it. And if the knowledge wasn't well come by, why, you might
ha' made up for it by coming to church reg'lar; for, as for the children
as the Wise Woman charmed, I've been at the christening of 'em again and
again, and they took the water just as well. And that's reasonable; for
if Old Harry's a mind to do a bit o' kindness for a holiday, like, who's
got anything against it? That's my thinking; and I've been clerk of this
parish forty year, and I know, when the parson and me does the cussing
of a Ash-Wednesday, there's no cussing o' folks as have a mind to be
cured without a doctor, let Kimble say what he will. And so, Master
Marner, as I was saying- for there's windings i' things as they may
carry you to the fur end o' the prayer-book afore you get back to 'em-
my advice is, as you keep up your sperrits; for as for thinking you're a
deep 'un, and ha' got more inside you nor 'ull bear daylight, I'm not o'
that opinion at all, and so I tell the neighbours. For, says I, you talk
o' Master Marner making out a tale- why, it's nonsense, that is: it 'ud
take a 'cute man to make a tale like that; and, says I, he looked as
scared as a rabbit.'

During this discursive address Silas had continued motionless in his
previous attitude, leaning his elbows on his knees, and pressing his
hands against his head. Mr Macey, not doubting that he had been listened
to, paused, in the expectation of some appreciatory reply, but Marner
remained silent. He had a sense that the old man meant to be
good-natured and neighbourly; but the kindness fell on him as sunshine
falls on the wretched- he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was
very far off him.

'Come, Master Marner, have you got nothing to say to that?' said Mr
Macey at last, with a slight accent of impatience.

'Oh,' said Marner, slowly, shaking his head between his hands, 'I thank
you- thank you- kindly.'

'Aye, aye, to be sure: I thought you would,' said Mr Macey; 'and my
advice is- have you got a Sunday suit?'

'No,' said Marner.

'I doubted it was so,' said Mr Macey. 'Now, let me advise you to get a
Sunday suit: there's Tookey, he's a poor creatur, but he's got my
tailoring business, and some o' my money in it, and he shall make a suit
at a low price, and give you trust, and then you can come to church, and
be a bit neighbourly. Why you've never heared me say "Amen" since you
come into these parts, and I recommend you to lose no time, for it'll be
poor work when Tookey has it all to himself, for I mayn't be equil to
stand i' the desk at all, come another winter.' Here Mr Macey paused,
perhaps expecting some sign of emotion in his hearer; but not observing
any, he went on. 'And as for the money for the suit o' clothes, why, you
get a matter of a pound a-week at your weaving, Master Marner, and
you're a young man, eh, for all you look so mushed. Why, you couldn't
ha' been five-and-twenty when you come into these parts, eh?'

Silas started a little at the change to a questioning tone, and answered
mildly, 'I don't know; I can't rightly say- it's a long while since.'

After receiving such an answer as this, it is not surprising that Mr
Macey observed, later on in the evening at the Rainbow, that Marner's
head was 'all of a muddle', and that it was to be doubted if he ever
knew when Sunday came round, which showed him a worse heathen than many
a dog.

Another of Silas's comforters, besides Mr Macey, came to him with a mind
highly charged on the same topic. This was Mrs Winthrop, the
wheelwright's wife. The inhabitants of Raveloe were not severely regular
in their churchgoing, and perhaps there was hardly a person in the
parish who would not have held that to go to church every Sunday in the
calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and
get an undue advantage over their neighbours- a wish to be better than
the 'common run', that would have implied a reflection on those who had
had godfathers and godmothers as well as themselves, and had an equal
right to the burying-service. At the same time, it was understood to be
requisite for all who were not household servants, or young men, to take
the sacrament at one of the great festivals: Squire Cass himself took it
on Christmas-day; while those who were held to be 'good livers' went to
church with a greater, though still with moderate frequency.

Mrs Winthrop was one of these: she was in all respects a woman of
scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties, that life seemed to offer
them too scantily unless she rose at half-past four, though this threw a
scarcity of work over the more advanced hours of the morning, which it
was a constant problem with her to remove. Yet she had not the vixenish
temper which is sometimes supposed to be a necessary condition of such
habits: she was a very mild, patient woman, whose nature it was to seek
out all the sadder and more serious elements of life, and pasture her
mind upon them. She was the person always first thought of in Raveloe
when there was illness or death in a family, when leeches were to be
applied, or there was a sudden disappointment in a monthly nurse. She
was a 'comfortable woman'- good-looking, fresh-complexioned, having her
lips always slightly screwed, as if she felt herself in a sick-room with
the doctor or the clergyman present. But she was never whimpering; no
one had seen her shed tears; she was simply grave and inclined to shake
her head and sigh, almost imperceptibly, like a funereal mourner who is
not a relation. It seemed surprising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his
quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with Dolly; but she took her
husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else,
considering that 'men would be so', and viewing the stronger sex in the
light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally
troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.

This good wholesome woman could hardly fail to have her mind drawn
strongly towards Silas Marner, now that he appeared in the light of a
sufferer; and one Sunday afternoon she took her little boy Aaron with
her, and went to call on Silas, carrying in her hand some small
lard-cakes, flat paste-like articles, much esteemed in Raveloe. Aaron,
an apple-cheeked youngster of seven, with a clean starched frill, which
looked like a plate for the apples, needed all his adventurous curiosity
to embolden him against the possibility that the big-eyed weaver might
do him some bodily injury; and his dubiety was much increased when, on
arriving at the Stone-pits, they heard the mysterious sound of the loom.

'Ah, it is as I thought,' said Mrs Winthrop, sadly.

They had to knock loudly before Silas heard them; but when he did come
to the door, he showed no impatience, as he would once have done, at a
visit that had been unasked for and unexpected. Formerly, his heart had
been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was
empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop
utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and
half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from
without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of
his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.
He opened the door wide to admit Dolly, but without otherwise returning
her greeting than by moving the armchair a few inches as a sign that she
was to sit down in it. Dolly, as soon as she was seated, removed the
white cloth that covered her lard-cakes, and said in her gravest way:

'I'd a baking yisterday, Master Marner, and the lard-cakes turned out
better nor common, and I'd ha' asked you to accept some, if you'd
thought well. I don't eat such things myself, for a bit o' bread's what
I like from one year's end to the other; but men's stomichs are made so
comical, they want a change- they do, I know, God help 'em.'

Dolly sighed gently as she held out the cakes to Silas, who thanked her
kindly, and looked very close at them, absently, being accustomed to
look so at everything he took into his hand- eyed all the while by the
wondering bright orbs of the small Aaron, who had made an outwork of his
mother's chair, and was peeping round from behind it.

'There's letters pricked on 'em,' said Dolly. 'I can't read 'em myself,
and there's nobody, not Mr Macey himself, rightly knows what they mean;
but they've a good meaning, for they're the same as is on the
pulpit-cloth at church. What are they, Aaron, my dear?'

Aaron retreated completely behind his outwork.

'Oh, go, that's naughty,' said his mother, mildly. 'Well, whativer the
letters are, they've a good meaning; and it's a stamp as has been in our
house, Ben says, ever since he was a little un, and his mother used to
put it on the cakes, and I've allays put it on too; for if there's any
good, we've need of it i' this world.'

'It's I.H.S.' said Silas, at which proof of learning Aaron peeped round
the chair again.

'Well, to be sure, you can read 'em off,' said Dolly. 'Ben's read 'em to
me many and many a time, but they slip out o' my mind again; the more's
the pity, for they're good letters, else they wouldn't be in the church;
and so I prick 'em on all the loaves and all the cakes, though sometimes
they won't hold, because o' the rising- for, as I said, if there's any
good to be got, we've need on it i' this world- that we have; and I hope
they'll bring good to you, Master Marner, for it's wi' that will I
brought you the cakes; and you see the letters have held better nor
common.'

Silas was as unable to interpret the letters as Dolly, but there was no
possibility of misunderstanding the desire to give comfort that made
itself heard in her quiet tones. He said, with more feeling than before-
'Thank you- thank you kindly.' But he laid down the cake and seated
himself absently- drearily unconscious of any distinct benefit towards
which the cake and the letters, or even Dolly's kindness, could tend for
him.

'Ah, if there's good anywhere, we've need of it,' repeated Dolly, who
did not lightly forsake a serviceable phrase. She looked at Silas
pityingly as she went on. 'But you didn't hear the church-bells this
morning, Master Marner. I doubt you didn't know it was Sunday. Living so
lone here, you lose your count, I daresay; and then, when your loom
makes a noise, you can't hear the bells, more partic'lar now the frost
kills the sound.'

'Yes, I did; I heard 'em,' said Silas, to whom Sunday bells were a mere
accident of the day, and not part of its sacredness. There had been no
bells in Lantern Yard.

'Dear heart!' said Dolly, pausing before she spoke again. 'But what a
pity it is you should work of a Sunday, and not clean yourself- if you
didn't go to church; for if you'd a roasting bit, it might be as you
couldn't leave it, being a lone man. But there's the bakehus, if you
could make up your mind to spend a twopence on the oven now and then,-
not every week, in course- I shouldn't like to do that myself,- you
might carry your bit o' dinner there, for it's nothing but right to have
a bit o' summat hot of a Sunday, and not to make it as you can't know
your dinner from Saturday. But now, upo' Christmas-day, this blessed
Christmas as is ever coming, if you was to take your dinner to the
bakehus, and go to church, and see the holly and the yew, and hear the
anthim, and then take the sacramen', you'd be a deal the better, and
you'd know which end you stood on, and you could put your trust i' Them
as knows better nor we do, seein' you'd ha' done what it lies on us all
to do.'

Dolly's exhortation, which was an unusually long effort of speech for
her, was uttered in the soothing persuasive tone with which she would
have tried to prevail on a sick man to take his medicine, or a basin of
gruel for which he had no appetite. Silas had never before been closely
urged on the point of his absence from church, which had only been
thought of as a part of his general queerness; and he was too direct and
simple to evade Dolly's appeal.

'Nay, nay,' he said, 'I know nothing o' church. I've never been to
church.'

'No!' said Dolly, in a low tone of wonderment. Then bethinking herself
of Silas's advent from an unknown country, she said, 'Could it ha' been
as they'd no church where you was born?'

'Oh, yes,' said Silas, meditatively, sitting in his usual posture of
leaning on his knees, and supporting his head. 'There was churches- a
many- it was a big town. But I knew nothing of 'em- I went to chapel.'

Dolly was much puzzled at this new word, but she was rather afraid of
inquiring further, lest 'chapel' might mean some haunt of wickedness.
After a little thought, she said:

'Well, Master Marner, it's niver too late to turn over a new leaf, and
if you've niver had no church, there's no telling the good it'll do you.
For I feel so set up and comfortable as niver was, when I've been and
heard the prayers, and the singing to the praise and glory o' God, as Mr
Macey gives out- and Mr Crackenthorp saying good words, and more
particular on Sacramen' Day; and if a bit o' trouble comes, I feel as I
can put up wi' it, for I've looked for help i' the right quarter, and
gev myself up to Them as we must all give ourselves up to at the last;
and if we'n done our part, it isn't to be believed as Them as are above
us 'ull be worse nor we are, and come short o' Theirn.'

Poor Dolly's exposition of her simple Raveloe theology fell rather
unmeaningly on Silas's ears, for there was no word in it that could
rouse a memory of what he had known as religion, and his comprehension
was quite baffled by the plural pronoun, which was no heresy of Dolly's,
but only her way of avoiding a presumptuous familiarity. He remained
silent, not feeling inclined to assent to the part of Dolly's speech
which he fully understood- her recommendation that he should go to
church. Indeed, Silas was so unaccustomed to talk beyond the brief
questions and answers necessary for the transaction of his simple
business, that words did not easily come to him without the urgency of a
distinct purpose.

But now, little Aaron, having become used to the weaver's awful
presence, had advanced to his mother's side, and Silas, seeming to
notice him for the first time, tried to return Dolly's signs of goodwill
by offering the lad a bit of lard-cake. Aaron shrank back a little, and
rubbed his head against his mother's shoulder, but still thought the
piece of cake worth the risk of putting his hand out for it.

'Oh, for shame, Aaron,' said his mother, taking him on her lap, however;
'why, you don't want cake again yet awhile. He's wonderful hearty,' she
went on, with a little sigh- 'that he is, God knows. He's my youngest,
and we spoil him sadly, for either me or the father must allays hev him
in our sight- that we must.'

She stroked Aaron's brown head, and thought it must do Master Marner
good to see such a 'pictur of a child'. But Marner, on the other side of
the hearth, saw the neat-featured rosy face as a mere dim round, with
two dark spots in it.

'And he's got a voice like a bird- you wouldn't think,' Dolly went on;
'he can sing a Christmas carril as his father's taught him; and I take
it for a token as he'll come to good, as he can learn the good tunes so
quick. Come, Aaron, stan' up and sing the carril to Master Marner,
come.'

Aaron replied by rubbing his forehead against his mother's shoulder.

'Oh, that's naughty,' said Dolly, gently. 'Stan' up, when mother tells
you, and let me hold the cake till you've done.'

Aaron was not indisposed to display his talents, even to an ogre, under
protecting circumstances; and after a few more signs of coyness,
consisting chiefly in rubbing the backs of his hands over his eyes, and
then peeping between them at Master Marner, to see if he looked anxious
for the 'carril', he at length allowed his head to be duly adjusted, and
standing behind the table, which let him appear above it only as far as
his broad frill, so that he looked like a cherubic head untroubled with
a body, he began with a clear chirp, and in a melody that had the rhythm
of an industrious hammer,


               'God rest you, merry gentlemen,

                 Let nothing you dismay,

                For Jesus Christ our Savior

                 Was born on Christmas-day.'


Dolly listened with a devout look, glancing at Marner in some confidence
that this strain would help to allure him to church.

'That's Christmas music,' she said, when Aaron had ended, and had
secured his piece of cake again. 'There's no other music equil to the
Christmas music- "Hark the erol angils sing." And you may judge what it
is at church, Master Marner, with the bassoon and the voices, as you
can't help thinking you've got to a better place a'ready- for I wouldn't
speak ill o' this world, seeing as Them put us in it as knows best; but
what wi' the drink, and the quarrelling, and the bad illnesses, and the
hard dying, as I've seen times and times, one's thankful to hear of a
better. The boy sings pretty, don't he, Master Marner?'

'Yes,' said Silas, absently, 'very pretty.'

The Christmas carol, with its hammer-like rhythm, had fallen on his ears
as strange music, quite unlike a hymn, and could have none of the effect
Dolly contemplated. But he wanted to show her that he was grateful, and
the only mode that occurred to him was to offer Aaron a bit more cake.

'Oh, no, thank you, Master Marner,' said Dolly, holding down Aaron's
willing hands. 'We must be going home now. And so I wish you good-bye,
Master Marner; and if you ever feel anyways bad in your inside, as you
can't fend for yourself, I'll come and clean up for you, and get you a
bit o' victual, and willing. But I beg and pray of you to leave off
weaving of a Sunday, for it's bad for soul and body- and the money as
comes i' that way 'ull be a bad bed to lie down on at the last, if it
doesn't fly away, nobody knows where, like the white frost. And you'll
excuse me being that free with you, Master Marner, for I wish you well-
I do. Make your bow, Aaron.'

Silas said 'Good-bye, and thank you, kindly', as he opened the door for
Dolly, but he couldn't help feeling relieved when she was gone- relieved
that he might weave again and moan at his ease. Her simple view of life
and its comforts, by which she had tried to cheer him, was only like a
report of unknown objects, which his imagination could not fashion. The
fountains of human love and divine faith had not yet been unlocked and
his soul was still the shrunken rivulet, with only this difference, that
its little groove of sand was blocked up, and it wandered confusedly
against dark obstruction.

And so, notwithstanding the honest persuasions of Mr Macey and Dolly
Winthrop, Silas spent his Christmas-day in loneliness, eating his meat
in sadness of heart, though the meat had come to him as a neighbourly
present. In the morning he looked out on the black frost that seemed to
press cruelly on every blade of grass, while the half-icy red pool
shivered under the bitter wind; but towards evening the snow began to
fall, and curtained from him even that dreary outlook, shutting him
close up with his narrow grief. And he sat in his robbed home through
the livelong evening, not caring to close his shutters or lock his door,
pressing his head between his hands and moaning, till the cold grasped
him and told him that his fire was grey.

Nobody in this world but himself knew that he was the same Silas Marner
who had once loved his fellow with tender love, and trusted in an unseen
goodness. Even to himself that past experience had become dim. But in
Raveloe village the bells rang merrily, and the church was fuller than
all through the rest of the year, with red faces among the abundant
dark-green boughs- faces prepared for a longer service than usual by an
odorous breakfast of toast and ale. Those green boughs, the hymn and
anthem never heard but at Christmas- even the Athanasian Creed, which
was discriminated from the others only as being longer and of
exceptional virtue, since it was only read on rare occasions- brought a
vague exulting sense, for which the grown men could as little have found
words as the children, that something great and mysterious had been done
for them in heaven above, and in earth below, which they were
appropriating by their presence. And then the red faces made their way
through the black biting frost to their own homes, feeling themselves
free for the rest of the day to eat, drink, and be merry, and using that
Christian freedom without diffidence.

At Squire Cass's family party that day nobody mentioned Dunstan- nobody
was sorry for his absence, or feared it would be too long. The doctor
and his wife, uncle and aunt Kimble, were there, and the annual
Christmas talk was carried through without any omissions, rising to the
climax of Mr Kimble's experience when he walked the London hospitals
thirty years back, together with striking professional anecdotes then
gathered. Whereupon cards followed, with aunt Kimble's annual failure to
follow suit, and uncle Kimble's irascibility concerning the odd trick
which was rarely explicable to him, when it was not on his side, without
a general visitation of tricks to see that they were formed on sound
principles: the whole being accompanied by a strong steaming odour of
spirits-and-water.

But the party on Christmas-day, being a strictly family party, was not
the pre-eminently brilliant celebration of the season at the Red House.
It was the great dance on New Year's Eve that made the glory of Squire
Cass's hospitality, as of his forefathers', time out of mind. This was
the occasion when all the society of Raveloe and Tarley, whether old
acquaintances separated by long rutty distances, or cooled acquaintances
separated by misunderstandings concerning runaway calves, or
acquaintances founded on intermittent condescension, counted on meeting
and on comporting themselves with mutual appropriateness. This was the
occasion on which fair dames who came on pillions sent their bandboxes
before them, supplied with more than their evening costume; for the
feast was not to end with a single evening, like a paltry entertainment,
where the whole supply of eatables is put on the table at once, and
bedding is scanty. The Red House was provisioned as if for a siege; and
as for the spare feather-beds ready to be laid on floors, they were as
plentiful as might naturally be expected in a family that had killed its
own geese for many generations.

Godfrey Cass was looking forward to this New Year's Eve with a foolish
reckless longing, that made him half deaf to his importunate companion,
Anxiety.

'Dunsey will becoming home soon: there will be a great blow-up, and how
will you bribe his spite to silence?' said Anxiety.

'Oh, he won't come home before New Year's Eve, perhaps,' said Godfrey;
'and I shall sit by Nancy then, and dance with her, and get a kind look
from her in spite of herself.'

'But money is wanted in another quarter,' said Anxiety, in a louder
voice, 'and how will you get it without selling your mother's diamond
pin? And if you don't get it...?'

'Well, but something may happen to make things easier. At any rate,
there's one pleasure for me close at hand: Nancy is coming.'

'Yes, and suppose your father should bring matters to a pass that will
oblige you to decline marrying her- and to give your reasons?'

'Hold your tongue, and don't worry me. I can see Nancy's eyes, just as
they will look at me, and feel her hand in mine already?'

But Anxiety went on, though in noisy Christmas company; refusing to be
utterly quieted even by much drinking.