APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/books/silus_marn/CHAP11_21

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                    CHAPTER ELEVEN

SOME women, I grant, would not appear to advantage seated on a pillion,
and attired in a drab joseph and a drab beaver-bonnet, with a crown
resembling a small stew-pan; for a garment suggesting a coachman's
greatcoat, cut out under an exiguity of cloth that would only allow of
miniature capes, is not well adapted to conceal deficiencies of contour,
nor is drab a colour that will throw sallow cheeks into lively contrast.
It was all the greater triumph to Miss Nancy Lammeter's beauty that she
looked thoroughly bewitching in that costume, as, seated on a pillion
behind her tall, erect father, she held one arm round him, and looked
down, with open-eyed anxiety, at the treacherous snow-covered pools and
puddles, which sent up formidable splashings of mud under the stamp of
Dobbin's foot. A painter would, perhaps, have preferred her in those
moments when she was free from self-consciousness; but certainly the
bloom on her cheeks was at its highest point of contrast with the
surrounding drab when she arrived at the door of the Red House, and saw
Mr Godfrey Cass ready to lift her from the pillion. She wished her
sister Priscilla had come up at the same time with the servant, for then
she would have contrived that Mr Godfrey should have lifted off
Priscilla first, and, in the meantime, she would have persuaded her
father to go round to the horseblock instead of alighting at the
doorsteps. It was very painful, when you had made it quite dear to a
young man that you were determined not to marry him, however much he
might wish it, that he would still continue to pay you marked
attentions; besides, why didn't he always show the same attentions, if
he meant them sincerely, instead of being so strange as Mr Godfrey Cass
was, sometimes behaving as if he didn't want to speak to her, and taking
no notice of her for weeks and weeks, and then, all of a sudden, almost
making love again? Moreover, it was quite plain he had no real love for
her, else he would not let people have that to say of him which they did
say. Did he suppose that Miss Nancy Lammeter was to be won by any man,
squire or no squire, who led a bad life? That was not what she had been
used to see in her own father, who was the soberest and best man in that
country-side, only a little hot and hasty now and then, if things were
not done to the minute.

All these thoughts rushed through Miss Nancy's mind, in their habitual
succession, in the moments between her first sight of Mr Godfrey Cass
standing at the door and her own arrival there. Happily, the Squire came
out too, and gave a loud greeting to the father, so that, somehow, under
cover of this noise, she seemed to find concealment for her confusion
and neglect of any suitably formal behaviour, while she was being lifted
from the pillion by strong arms, which seemed to find her ridiculously
small and light. And there was the best reason for hastening into the
house at once, since the snow was beginning to fall again, and
threatening an unpleasant journey for such guests as were still on the
road. These were a small minority; for already the afternoon was
beginning to decline, and there would not be too much time for the
ladies who came from a distance to attire themselves in readiness for
the early tea which was to inspirit them for the dance.

There was a buzz of voices through the house, as Miss Nancy entered,
mingled with the scrape of a fiddle preluding in the kitchen; but the
Lammeters were guests whose arrival had evidently been thought of so
much that it had been watched for from the windows, for Mrs Kimble, who
did the honours at the Red House on these great occasions, came forward
to meet Miss Nancy in the hall, and conduct her upstairs. Mrs Kimble was
the Squire's sister, as well as the doctor's wife- a double dignity,
with which her diameter was in direct proportion; so that, a journey
upstairs being rather fatiguing to her, she did not oppose Miss Nancy's
request to be allowed to find her way alone to the Blue Room, where the
Miss Lammeters' bandboxes had been deposited on their arrival in the
morning.

There was hardly a bedroom in the house where feminine compliments were
not passing and feminine toilettes going forward, in various stages, in
space made scanty by extra beds spread upon the floor; and Miss Nancy,
as she entered the Blue Room, had to make her little formal curtsy to a
group of six. On the one hand, there were ladies no less important than
the two Miss Gunns, the wine merchant's daughters from Lytherly, dressed
in the height of fashion, with the tightest skirts and the shortest
waists, and gazed at by Miss Ladbrook (of the Old Pastures) with a
shyness not unsustained by inward criticism. Partly, Miss Ladbrook felt
that her own skirt must be regarded as unduly lax by the Miss Gunns, and
partly, that it was a pity the Miss Gunns did not show that judgment
which she herself would show if she were in their place, by stopping a
little on this side of the fashion. On the other hand, Mrs Ladbrook was
standing in skullcap and front, with her turban in her hand, curtsying
and smiling blandly and saying 'After you, ma'am' to another lady in
similar circumstances, who had politely offered the precedence at the
looking-glass.

But Miss Nancy had no sooner made her curtsy than an elderly lady came
forward, whose full white muslin kerchief, and mob-cap round her curls
of smooth grey hair, were in daring contrast with the puffed yellow
satins and top-knotted caps of her neighbours. She approached Miss Nancy
with much primness, and said, with a slow, treble suavity:

'Niece, I hope I see you well in health.' Miss Nancy kissed her aunt's
cheek dutifully, and answered, with the same sort of amiable primness,
'Quite well, I thank you, aunt, and I hope I see you the same.'

'Thank you, niece, I keep my health for the present. And how is my
brother-in-law?'

These dutiful questions and answers were continued until it was
ascertained in detail that the Lammeters were all as well as usual, and
the Osgoods likewise, also that niece Priscilla must certainly arrive
shortly, and that travelling on pillions in snowy weather was
unpleasant, though a joseph was a great protection. Then Nancy was
formally introduced to her aunt's visitors, the Miss Gunns, as being the
daughters of a mother known to their mother, though now for the first
time induced to make a journey into these parts; and these ladies were
so taken by surprise at finding such a lovely face and figure in an
out-of-the-way country place, that they began to feel some curiosity
about the dress she would put on when she took off her joseph. Miss
Nancy, whose thoughts were always conducted with the propriety and
moderation conspicuous in her manners, remarked to herself that the Miss
Gunns were rather hard-featured than otherwise, and that such very low
dresses as they wore might have been attributed to vanity if their
shoulders had been pretty, but that, being as they were, it was not
reasonable to suppose that they showed their necks from a love of
display, but rather from some obligation not inconsistent with sense and
modesty. She felt convinced, as she opened her box, that this must be
her aunt Osgood's opinion, for Miss Nancy's mind resembled her aunt's to
a degree that everybody said was surprising, considering the kinship was
on Mr Osgood's side; and though you might not have supposed it from the
formality of their greeting, there was a devoted attachment and mutual
admiration between aunt and niece. Even Miss Nancy's refusal of her
cousin Gilbert Osgood (on the ground solely that he was her cousin),
though it had grieved her aunt greatly, had not in the least cooled the
preference which had determined her to leave Nancy several of her
hereditary ornaments, let Gilbert's future wife be whom she might.

Three of the ladies quickly retired, but the Miss Gunns were quite
content that Mrs Osgood's inclination to remain with her niece gave them
also a reason for staying to see the rustic beauty's toilette. And it
was really a pleasure- from the first opening of the bandbox, where
everything smelt of lavender and rose leaves, to the clasping of the
small coral necklace that fitted closely round her little white neck.
Everything belonging to Miss Nancy was of delicate purity and nattiness:
not a crease was where it had no business to be, not a bit of her linen
professed whiteness without fulfilling its profession; the very pins on
her pincushion were stuck in after a pattern from which she was careful
to allow no aberration; and as for her own person, it gave the same idea
of perfect unvarying neatness as the body of a little bird. It is true
that her light-brown hair was cropped behind like a boy's, and was
dressed in front in a number of flat rings, that lay quite away from her
face; but there was no sort of coiffure that could make Miss Nancy's
cheek and neck look otherwise than pretty; and when at last she stood
complete in her silvery twilled silk, her lace tucker, her coral
necklace, and coral ear-drops, the Miss Gunns could see nothing to
criticize except her hands, which bore the traces of butter-making,
cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work. But Miss Nancy was not
ashamed of that, for even while she was dressing she narrated to her
aunt how she and Priscilla had packed their boxes yesterday, because
this morning was baking morning, and since they were leaving home, it
was desirable to make a good supply of meat pies for the kitchen; and as
she concluded this judicious remark, she turned to the Miss Gunns that
she might not commit the rudeness of including them in the conversation.
The Miss Gunns smiled stiffly, and thought what a pity it was that these
rich country people, who could afford to buy such good clothes (really
Miss Nancy's lace and silk were very costly), should be brought up in
utter ignorance and vulgarity. She actually said 'mate' for 'meat',
''appen' for 'perhaps', and 'oss' for 'horse', which, to young ladies
living in good Lytherly society, who habitually said 'orse, even in
domestic privacy and only said 'appen on the right occasions, was
necessarily shocking. Miss Nancy, indeed, had never been to any school
higher than Dame Tedman's: her acquaintance with profane literature
hardly went beyond the rhymes she had worked in her large sampler under
the lamb and the shepherdess; and in order to balance an account, she
was obliged to effect her subtraction by removing visible metallic
shillings and sixpences from a visible metallic total. There is hardly a
servant-maid in these days who is not better informed than Miss Nancy;
yet she had the essential attributes of a lady- high veracity, delicate
honour in her dealings, deference to others, and refined personal
habits- and lest these should not suffice to convince grammatical fair
ones that her feelings can at all resemble theirs, I will add that she
was slightly proud and exacting, and as constant in her affection
towards a baseless opinion as towards an erring lover.

The anxiety about sister Priscilla, which had grown rather active by the
time the coral necklace was clasped, was happily ended by the entrance
of that cheerful-looking lady herself, with a face made blowsy by cold
and damp. After the first questions and greetings, she turned to Nancy,
and surveyed her from head to foot- then wheeled her round, to ascertain
that the back view was equally faultless.

'What do you think o' these gowns, aunt Osgood?' said Priscilla, while
Nancy helped her to unrobe.

'Very handsome indeed, niece,' said Mrs Osgood, with a slight increase
of formality. She always thought niece Priscilla too rough.

'I'm obliged to have the same as Nancy, you know, for all I'm five years
older and it makes me look yallow; for she never will have anything
without I have mine just like it, because she wants us to look like
sisters. And I tell her folks 'ull think it's my weakness makes me fancy
as I shall look pretty in what she looks pretty in. For I am ugly-
there's no denying that: I feature my father's family. But, law! I don't
mind, do you?' Priscilla here turned to the Miss Gunns, rattling on in
too much preoccupation with the delight of talking, to notice that her
candour was not appreciated. 'The pretty uns do for flycatchers- they
keep the men off us. I've no opinion o' the men, Miss Gunn- I don't know
what you have. And as for fretting and stewing about what they'll think
of you from morning till night, and making your life uneasy about what
they're doing when they're out o' your sight- as I tell Nancy, it's a
folly no woman need be guilty of, if she's got a good father and a good
home: let her leave it to them as have got no fortin, and can't help
themselves. As I say, Mr Have-your-own-way is the best husband, and the
only one I'd ever promise to obey. I know it isn't pleasant, when you've
been used to living in a big way, and managing hogsheads and all that to
go and put your nose in by somebody else's fireside, or to sit down by
yourself to a scrag or a knuckle; but, thank God! my father's a sober
man and likely to live; and if you've got a man by the chimney-corner,
it doesn't matter if he's childish- the business needn't be broke up.'

The delicate process of getting her narrow gown over her head without
injury to her smooth curls, obliged Miss Priscilla to pause in this
rapid survey of life, and Mrs Osgood seized the opportunity of rising
and saying:

'Well, niece, you'll follow us. The Miss Gunns will like to go down.'

'Sister,' said Nancy, when they were alone, 'you've offended the Miss
Gunns, I'm sure.'

'What have I done, child?' said Priscilla, in some alarm.

'Why, you asked them if they minded about being ugly- you're so very
blunt.'

'Law, did I? Well, it popped out: it's a mercy I said no more, for I'm a
bad un to live with folks when they don't like the truth. But as for
being ugly, look at me, child, in this silver-coloured silk- I told you
how it 'ud be- I look as yallow as a daffadil. Anybody 'ud say you
wanted to make a mawkin of me.'

'No, Priscy, don't say so. I begged and prayed of you not to let us have
this silk if you'd like another better. I was willing to have your
choice, you know I was,' said Nancy, in anxious self-vindication.

'Nonsense, child, you know you'd set your heart on this; and reason
good, for you're the colour o' cream. It 'ud be fine doings for you to
dress yourself to suit my skin. What I find fault with, is that notion
o' yours as I must dress myself just like you. But you do as you like
with me- you always did, from when first you begun to walk. If you
wanted to go the field's length, the field's length you'd go; and there
was no whipping you, for you looked as prim and innicent as a daisy all
the while.'

'Priscy,' said Nancy, gently, as she fastened a coral necklace, exactly
like her own, round Priscilla's neck, which was very far from being like
her own, 'I'm sure I'm willing to give way as far as is right, but who
shouldn't dress alike if it isn't sisters? Would you have us go about
looking as if we were no kin to one another- us that have got no mother
and not another sister in the world? I'd do what was right, if I dressed
in a gown dyed with cheese-colouring; and I'd rather you'd choose, and
let me wear what pleases you.'

'There you go again! You'd come round to the same thing if one talked to
you from Saturday night till Saturday morning. It'll be fine fun to see
how you'll master your husband and never raise your voice above the
singing o' the kettle all the while. I like to see the men mastered!'

'Don't talk so, Priscy,' said Nancy, blushing. 'You know I don't mean
ever to be married.'

'Oh, you never mean a fiddlestick's end!' said Priscilla, as she
arranged her discarded dress, and closed her bandbox. 'Who shall I have
to work for when father's gone, if you are to go and take notions in
your head and be an old maid, because some folks are no better than they
should be? I haven't a bit o' patience with you- sitting on an addled
egg for ever, as if there was never a fresh un in the world. One old
maid's enough out o' two sisters; and I shall do credit to a single
life, for God A'mighty meant me for it. Come, we can go down now. I'm as
ready as a mawkin can be- there's nothing awanting to frighten the
crows, now I've got my ear-droppers in.'

As the two Miss Lammeters walked into the large parlour together, anyone
who did not know the character of both, might certainly have supposed
that the reason why the square-shouldered, clumsy, high-featured
Priscilla wore a dress the facsimile of her pretty sister's, was either
the mistaken vanity of the one, or the malicious contrivance of the
other in order to set off her own rare beauty. But the good-natured
self-forgetful cheeriness and common-sense of Priscilla would soon have
dissipated the one suspicion; and the modest calm of Nancy's speech and
manners told clearly of a mind free from all disavowed devices.

Places of honour had been kept for the Miss Lammeters near the head of
the principal tea-table in the wainscoted parlour, now looking fresh and
pleasant with handsome branches of holly, yew, and laurel, from the
abundant growths of the old garden; and Nancy felt an inward flutter,
that no firmness of purpose could prevent, when she saw Mr Godfrey Cass
advancing to lead her to a seat between himself and Mr Crackenthorp,
while Priscilla was called to the opposite side between her father and
the Squire. It certainly did make some difference to Nancy that the
lover she had given up was the young man of quite the highest
consequence in the parish- at home in a venerable and unique parlour,
which was the extremity of grandeur in her experience, a parlour where
she might one day have been mistress, with the consciousness that she
was spoken of as 'Madam Cass', the Squire's wife. These circumstances
exalted her inward drama in her own eyes, and deepened the emphasis with
which she declared to herself that not the most dazzling rank should
induce her to marry a man whose conduct showed him careless of his
character, but that, 'love once, love always', was the motto of a true
and pure woman, and no man should ever have any right over her which
would be a call on her to destroy the dried flowers that she treasured,
and always would treasure, for Godfrey Cass's sake. And Nancy was
capable of keeping her word to herself under very trying conditions.
Nothing but a becoming blush betrayed the moving thoughts that urged
themselves upon her as she accepted the seat next to Mr Crackenthorp;
for she was so instinctively neat and adroit in all her actions, and her
pretty lips met each other with such quiet firmness, that it would have
been difficult for her to appear agitated.

It was not the rector's practice to let a charming blush pass without an
appropriate compliment. He was not in the least lofty or aristocratic,
but simply a merry-eyed, small-featured, grey-haired man, with his chin
propped by an ample, many-creased white neckcloth, which seemed to
predominate over every other point in his person, and somehow to impress
its peculiar character on his remarks; so that to have considered his
amenities apart from his cravat, would have been a severe, and perhaps a
dangerous, effort of abstraction.

'Ha, Miss Nancy,' he said, turning his head within his cravat, and
smiling down pleasantly upon her, 'when anybody pretends this has been a
severe winter, I shall tell them I saw the roses blooming on New Year's
Eve- eh, Godfrey, what do you say?'

Godfrey made no reply, and avoided looking at Nancy very markedly; for
though these complimentary personalities were held to be in excellent
taste in old-fashioned Raveloe society, reverent love has a politeness
of its own which it teaches to men otherwise of small schooling. But the
Squire was rather impatient at Godfrey's showing himself a dull spark in
this way. By this advanced hour of the day, the Squire was always in
higher spirits than we have seen him in at the breakfast-table, and felt
it quite pleasant to fulfil the hereditary duty of being noisily jovial
and patronizing: the large silver snuff-box was in active service, and
was offered without fail to all neighbours from time to time, however
often they might have declined the favour. At present, the Squire had
only given an express welcome to the heads of families as they appeared;
but always as the evening deepened, his hospitality rayed out more
widely, till he had tapped the youngest guests on the back and shown a
peculiar fondness for their presence, in the full belief that they must
feel their lives made happy by their belonging to a parish where there
was such a hearty man as Squire Cass to invite them and wish them well.
Even in this early stage of the jovial mood, it was natural that he
should wish to supply his son's deficiencies by looking and speaking for
him.

'Aye, aye,' he began, offering his snuff-box to Mr Lammeter, who for the
second time bowed his head and waved his hand in stiff rejection of the
offer, 'us old fellows may wish ourselves young tonight, when we see the
mistletoe-bough in the White Parlour. It's true, most things are gone
back'ard in these last thirty years- the country's going down since the
old king fell ill. But when I look at Miss Nancy here, I begin to think
the lasses keep up their quality; ding me if I remember a sample to
match her, not when I was a fine young fellow, and thought a deal about
my pigtail. No offence to you, madam,' he added, bending to Mrs
Crackenthorp, who sat by him, 'I didn't know you when you were as young
as Miss Nancy here.'

Mrs Crackenthorp- a small blinking woman, who fidgeted incessantly with
her lace, ribbons, and gold chain, turning her head about and making
subdued noises, very much like a guinea-pig, that twitches its nose and
soliloquizes in all company indiscriminately- now blinked and fidgeted
towards the Squire, and said, 'Oh, no- no offence.'

This emphatic compliment of the Squire's to Nancy was felt by others
besides Godfrey to have a diplomatic significance; and her father gave a
slight additional erectness to his back, as he looked across the table
at her with complacent gravity. That grave and orderly senior was not
going to bate a jot of his dignity by seeming elated at the notion of a
match between his family and the Squire's: he was gratified by any
honour paid to his daughter; but he must see an alteration in several
ways before his consent would be vouchsafed. His spare but healthy
person, and high-featured firm face, that looked as if it had never been
flushed by excess, was in strong contrast, not only with the Squire's,
but with the appearance of the Raveloe farmers generally- in accordance
with a favourite saying of his own that 'breed was stronger than
pasture'.

'Miss Nancy's wonderful like what her mother was, though; isn't she,
Kimble?' said the stout lady of that name, looking round for her
husband.

But Doctor Kimble (county apothecaries in old days enjoyed that title
without authority of diploma), being a thin and agile man, was flitting
about the room with his hands in his pockets, making himself agreeable
to his feminine patients, with medical impartiality, and being welcomed
everywhere as a doctor by hereditary right- not one of those miserable
apothecaries who canvass for practice in strange neighbourhoods, and
spend all their income in starving their one horse, but a man of
substance, able to keep an extravagant table like the best of his
patients. Time out of mind the Raveloe doctor had been a Kimble; Kimble
was inherently a doctor's name; and it was difficult to contemplate
firmly the melancholy fact that the actual Kimble had no son, so that
his practice might one day be handed over to a successor, with the
incongruous name of Taylor or Johnson. But in that case the wiser people
in Raveloe would employ Dr Blick of Flitton- as less unnatural.

'Did you speak to me, my dear?' said the authentic doctor, coming
quickly to his wife's side; but, as if foreseeing that she would be too
much out of breath to repeat her remark, he went on immediately- 'Ha,
Miss Priscilla, the sight of you revives the taste of that
super-excellent pork-pie. I hope the batch isn't near an end.'

'Yes, indeed, it is, doctor,' said Priscilla; 'but I'll answer for it
the next shall be as good. My pork-pies don't turn out well by chance.'

'Not as your doctoring does, eh, Kimble?- because folks forget to take
your physic, eh?' said the Squire, who regarded physic and doctors as
many loyal churchmen regard the church and the clergy- tasting a joke
against them when he was in health, but impatiently eager for their aid
when anything was the matter with him. He tapped his box, and looked
round with a triumphant laugh.

'Ah, she has a quick wit, my friend Priscilla has,' said the doctor,
choosing to attribute the epigram to the lady rather than allow a
brother-in-law that advantage over him. 'She saves a little pepper to
sprinkle over her talk- that's the reason why she never puts too much
into her pies. There's my wife now, she never has an answer at her
tongue's end; but if I offend her, she's sure to scarify my throat with
black pepper the next day, or else give me the colic with watery greens.
That's an awful tit-for-tat.' Here the vivacious doctor made a pathetic
grimace.

'Did you ever hear the like?' said Mrs Kimble, laughing above her double
chin with much good-humour, aside to Mrs Crackenthorp, who blinked and
nodded, and seemed to intend a smile, which, by the correlation of
forces, went off in small twitchings and noises.

'I suppose that's the sort of tit-for-tat adopted in your profession,
Kimble, if you've a grudge against a patient,' said the rector.

'Never do have a grudge against our patients,' said Mr Kimble, 'except
when they leave us: and then, you see, we haven't the chance of
prescribing for 'em. Ha, Miss Nancy,' he continued, suddenly skipping to
Nancy's side, 'you won't forget your promise? You're to save a dance for
me, you know.'

'Come, come, Kimble, don't you be too for'ard,' said the Squire. 'Give
the young uns fair-play. There's my son Godfrey'll be wanting to have a
round with you if you run off with Miss Nancy. He's bespoke her for the
first dance, I'll be bound. Eh, sir! what do you say?' he continued,
throwing himself backward, and looking at Godfrey. 'Haven't you asked
Miss Nancy to open the dance with you?'

Godfrey, sorely uncomfortable under this significant insistence about
Nancy, and afraid to think where it would end by the time his father had
set his usual hospitable example of drinking before and after supper,
saw no course open but to turn to Nancy and say, with as little
awkwardness as possible:

'No; I've not asked her yet, but I hope she'll consent- if somebody else
hasn't been before me.'

'No, I've not engaged myself,' said Nancy, quietly, though blushingly.
(If Mr Godfrey founded any hopes on her consenting to dance with him, he
would soon be undeceived; but there was no need for her to be uncivil.)

'Then I hope you've no objections to dancing with me,' said Godfrey,
beginning to lose the sense that there was anything uncomfortable in
this arrangement.

'No, no objections,' said Nancy, in a cold tone.

'Ah, well, you're a lucky fellow, Godfrey,' said uncle Kimble; 'but
you're my godson, so I won't stand in your way. Else I'm not so very
old, eh, my dear?' he went on, skipping to his wife's side again. 'You
wouldn't mind my having a second after you were gone- not if I cried a
good deal first?'

'Come, come, take a cup o' tea and stop your tongue, do,' said
good-humoured Mrs Kimble, feeling some pride in a husband who must be
regarded as so clever and amusing by the company generally. If he had
only not been irritable at cards!

While safe, well-tested personalities were enlivening the tea in this
way, the sound of the fiddle approaching within a distance at which it
could be heard distinctly, made the young people look at each other with
sympathetic impatience for the end of the meal.

'Why, there's Solomon in the hall,' said the Squire, 'and playing my
fav'rite tune, I believe- "The flaxen-headed ploughboy"- he's for giving
us a hint as we aren't enough in a hurry to hear him play. Bob,' he
called out to this third long-legged son, who was at the other end of
the room, 'open the door, and tell Solomon to come in. He shall give us
a tune here.'

Bob obeyed, and Solomon walked in, fiddling as he walked, for he would
on no account break off in the middle of a tune.

'Here, Solomon,' said the Squire, with loud patronage. 'Round here, my
man. Ah, I knew it was "The flaxen-headed ploughboy": there's no finer
tune.'

Solomon Macey, a small hale old man with an abundant crop of long white
hair reaching nearly to his shoulders, advanced to the indicated spot,
bowing reverently while he fiddled, as much as to say that he respected
the company, though he respected the keynote more. As soon as he had
repeated the tune and lowered his fiddle, he bowed again to the Squire
and the rector, and said, 'I hope I see your honour and your reverence
well, and wishing you health and long life and a happy New Year. And
wishing the same to you, Mr Lammeter, sir; and to the other gentlemen,
and the madams, and the young lasses.'

As Solomon uttered the last words, he bowed in all directions
solicitously, lest he should be wanting in due respect. But thereupon he
immediately began to prelude, and fell into the tune which he knew would
be taken as a special compliment by Mr Lammeter.

'Thank ye, Solomon, thank ye,' said Mr Lammeter, when the fiddle paused
again. 'That's "Over the hills and far away", that is. My father used to
say to me, whenever we heard that tune, "Ah, lad, I come from over the
hills and far away." There's a many tunes I don't make head or tail of;
but that speaks to me like the blackbird's whistle. I suppose it's the
name: there's a deal in the name of a tune.'

But Solomon was already impatient to prelude again, and presently broke
with much spirit into 'Sir Roger de Coverley', at which there was a
sound of chairs pushed back, and laughing voices.

'Aye, aye, Solomon, we know what that means,' said the Squire, rising.
'It's time to begin the dance, eh? Lead the way, then, and we'll all
follow you.'

So Solomon, holding his white head on one side, and playing vigorously,
marched forward at the head of the gay procession into the White
Parlour, where the mistletoe-bough was hung, and multitudinous tallow
candles made rather a brilliant effect, gleaming from among the berried
holly-boughs, and reflected in the old-fashioned oval mirrors fastened
in the panels of the white wainscot. A quaint procession! Old Solomon,
in his seedy clothes and long white locks, seemed to be luring that
decent company by the magic scream of his fiddle- luring discreet
matrons in turban-shaped caps, nay, Mrs Crackenthorp herself, the summit
of whose perpendicular feather was on a level with the Squire's
shoulder- luring fair lasses complacently conscious of very short waists
and skirts blameless of front-folds- burly fathers, in large variegated
waistcoats, and ruddy sons, for the most part shy and sheepish, in short
nether garments and very long coat-tails.

Already, Mr Macey and a few other privileged villagers, who were allowed
to be spectators on these great occasions, were seated on benches placed
for them near the door; and great was the admiration and satisfaction in
that quarter when the couples had formed themselves for the dance, and
the Squire led off with Mrs Crackenthorp, joining hands with the rector
and Mrs Osgood. That was as it should be- that was what everybody had
been used to- and the charter of Raveloe seemed to be renewed by the
ceremony. It was not thought of as an unbecoming levity for the old and
middle-aged people to dance a little before sitting down to cards, but
rather as part of their social duties. For what were these if not to be
merry at appropriate times, interchanging visits and poultry with due
frequency, paying each other old-established compliments in sound
traditional phrases, passing well-tried personal jokes, urging your
guests to eat and drink too much out of hospitality, and eating and
drinking too much in your neighbour's house to show that you liked your
cheer? And the parson naturally set an example in these social duties.
For it would not have been possible for the Raveloe mind, without a
peculiar revelation, to know that a clergyman should be a pale-faced
memento of solemnities, instead of a reasonably faulty man, whose
exclusive authority to read prayers and preach, to christen, marry, and
bury you, necessarily co-existed with the right to sell you the ground
to be buried in, and to take tithe in kind; on which last point, of
course, there was a little grumbling, but not to the extent of
irreligion- not beyond the grumbling at the rain, which was by no means
accompanied with a spirit of impious defiance, but with a desire that
the prayer for fine weather might be read forthwith.

There was no reason, then, why the rector's dancing should not be
received as part of the fitness of things quite as much as the Squire's,
or why, on the other hand, Mr Macey's official respect should restrain
him from subjecting the parson's performance to that criticism with
which minds of extraordinary acuteness must necessarily contemplate the
doings of their fallible fellow-men.

'The Squire's pretty springe, considering his weight,' said Mr Macey,
'and he stamps uncommon well. But Mr Lammeter beats 'em all for shapes:
you see, he holds his head like a sodger, and he isn't so cushiony as
most o' the oldish gentle-folks- they run fat in general; but he's got a
fine leg. The parson's nimble enough, but he hasn't got much of a leg:
it's a bit too thick down'ard, and his knees might be a bit nearer
wi'out damage; but he might do worse, he might do worse. Though he
hasn't that grand way o' waving his hand as the Squire has.'

'Talk o' nimbleness, look at Mrs Osgood,' said Ben Winthrop, who was
holding his son Aaron between his knees. 'She trips along with her
little steps, so as nobody can see how she goes- it's like as if she had
little wheels to her feet. She doesn't look a day older nor last year:
she's the finest-made woman as is, let the next be where she will.'

'I don't heed how the women are made,' said Mr Macey, with some
contempt. 'They wear nayther coat nor breeches: you can't make much out
o' their shapes.'

'Fayder,' said Aaron, whose feet were busy beating out the tune, 'how
does that big cock's-feather stick in Mrs Crackenthorp's yead? Is there
a little hole for it, like in my shuttle-cock?'

'Hush, lad, hush; that's the way the ladies dress theirselves, that is,'
said the father, adding, however, in an undertone to Mr Macey, 'It does
make her look funny, though- partly like a short-necked bottle wi' a
long quill in it. Hey, by jingo, there's the young Squire leading off
now, wi' Miss Nancy for partners. There's a lass for you!- like a
pink-and-white posy- there's nobody 'ud think as anybody could be so
pritty. I shouldn't wonder if she's Madam Cass some day, arter all- and
nobody more rightfuller, for they'd make a fine match. You can find
nothing against Master Godfrey's shapes, Macey, I'll bet a penny.'

Mr Macey screwed up his mouth, leaned his head further on one side, and
twirled his thumbs with a presto movement as his eyes followed Godfrey
up the dance. At last he summed up his opinion.

'Pretty well down'ard, but a bit too round i' the shoulder-blades. And
as for them coats as he gets from the Flitton tailor, they're a poor cut
to pay double money for.'

'Ah, Mr Macey, you and me are two folks,' said Ben, slightly indignant
at this carping. 'When I've got a pot o' good ale, I like to swaller it,
and do my inside good i'stead o' smelling and staring at it to see if I
can't find faut wi' the brewing. I should like you to pick me out a
finer-limbed young fellow nor Master Godfrey- one as 'ud knock you down
easier, or's more pleasanter-looksed when he's piert and merry.'

'Tchuh!' said Mr Macey, provoked to increased severity, 'he isn't come
to his right colour yet: he's partly like a slack-baked pie. And I doubt
he's got a soft place in his head, else why should he be turned round
the finger by that offal Dunsey as nobody's seen o' late, and let him
kill that fine hunting hoss as was the talk o' the country? And one
while he was allays after Miss Nancy, and then it all went off again,
like a smell o' hot porridge, as I may say. That wasn't my way, when I
went a-coorting.'

'Ah, but mayhap Miss Nancy hung off, like, and your lass didn't,' said
Ben.

'I should say she didn't,' said Mr Macey, significantly. 'Before I said
"sniff", I took care to know as she'd say "snaff", and pretty quick too.
I wasn't a-going to open my mouth, like a dog at a fly, and snap it to
again, wi' nothing to swaller.'

'Well, I think Miss Nancy's a-coming round again,' said Ben, 'for Master
Godfrey doesn't look so down-hearted tonight. And I see he's for taking
her away to sit down, now they're at the end o' the dance: that looks
like sweet-hearting that does.'

The reason why Godfrey and Nancy had left the dance was not so tender as
Ben imagined. In the close press of couples a slight accident had
happened to Nancy's dress, which, while it was short enough to show her
neat ankle in front, was long enough behind to be caught under the
stately stamp of the Squire's foot, so as to rend certain stitches at
the waist, and cause much sisterly agitation in Priscilla's mind, as
well as serious concern in Nancy's. One's thoughts may be much occupied
with love-struggles, but hardly so as to be insensible to a disorder in
the general framework of things. Nancy had no sooner completed her duty
in the figure they were dancing than she said to Godfrey, with a deep
blush, that she must go and sit down till Priscilla could come to her;
for the sisters had already exchanged a short whisper and an open-eyed
glance full of meaning. No reason less urgent than this could have
prevailed on Nancy to give Godfrey this opportunity of sitting apart
with her. As for Godfrey, he was feeling so happy and oblivious under
the long charm of the country-dance with Nancy, that he got rather bold
on the strength of her confusion, and was capable of leading her
straight away, without leave asked, into the adjoining small parlour,
where the card-tables were set.

'Oh no, thank you,' said Nancy, coldly, as soon as she perceived where
he was going, 'not in there. I'll wait here till Priscilla's ready to
come to me. I'm sorry to bring you out of the dance and make myself
troublesome.'

'Why, you'll be more comfortable here by yourself,' said the artful
Godfrey; 'I'll leave you here till your sister can come.' He spoke in an
indifferent tone.

That was an agreeable proposition, and just what Nancy desired; why,
then, was she a little hurt that Mr Godfrey should make it? They
entered, and she seated herself on a chair against one of the
card-tables, as the stiffest and most unapproachable position she could
choose.

'Thank you, sir,' she said immediately. 'I needn't give you any more
trouble. I'm sorry you've had such an unlucky partner.'

'That's very ill-natured of you,' said Godfrey, standing by her without
any sign of intended departure, 'to be sorry you've danced with me.'

'Oh, no, sir, I don't mean to say what's ill-natured at all,' said
Nancy, looking distractingly prim and pretty. 'When gentlemen have so
many pleasures, one dance can make but very little.'

'You know that isn't true. You know one dance with you matters more to
me than all the other pleasures in the world.'

It was a long, long while since Godfrey had said anything so direct as
that, and Nancy was startled. But her instinctive dignity and repugnance
to any show of emotion made her sit perfectly still, and only throw a
little more decision into her voice as she said:

'No, indeed, Mr Godfrey, that's not known to me, and I have very good
reasons for thinking different. But if it's true, I don't wish to hear
it.'

'Would you never forgive me, then, Nancy- never think well of me, let
what would happen- would you never think the present made amends for the
past? Not if I turned a good fellow, and gave up everything you didn't
like?'

Godfrey was half conscious that this sudden opportunity of speaking to
Nancy alone had driven him beside himself; but blind feeling had got the
mastery of his tongue. Nancy really felt much agitated by the
possibility Godfrey's words suggested, but this very pressure of emotion
that she was in danger of finding too strong for her, roused all her
power of self-command.

'I should be glad to see a good change in anybody, Mr Godfrey,' she
answered, with the slightest discernible difference of tone, 'but it 'ud
be better if no change was wanted.'

'You're very hard-hearted, Nancy,' said Godfrey, pettishly. 'You might
encourage me to be a better fellow. I'm very miserable- but you've no
feeling.'

'I think those have the least feeling that act wrong to begin with,'
said Nancy, sending out a flash in spite of herself. Godfrey was
delighted with that little flash, and would have liked to go on and make
her quarrel with him; Nancy was so exasperatingly quiet and firm. She
was not indifferent to him yet, though--

The entrance of Priscilla, bustling forward and saying, 'Dear heart
alive, child, let us look at this gown,' cut off Godfrey's hopes of a
quarrel.

'I suppose I must go now,' he said to Priscilla.

'It's no matter to me whether you go or stay,' said that frank lady,
searching for something in her pocket, with a preoccupied brow.

'Do you want me to go?' said Godfrey, looking at Nancy, who was now
standing up by Priscilla's order.

'As you like,' said Nancy, trying to recover all her former coldness,
and looking down carefully at the hem of her gown.

'Then I like to stay,' said Godfrey, with a reckless determination to
get as much of this joy as he could tonight, and think nothing of the
morrow.

                    CHAPTER TWELVE

WHILE Godfrey Cass was taking draughts of forgetfulness from the sweet
presence of Nancy, willingly losing all sense of that hidden bond which
at other moments galled and fretted him so as to mingle irritation with
the very sunshine, Godfrey's wife was walking with slow uncertain steps
through the snow-covered Raveloe lanes, carrying her child in her arms.

This journey on New Year's Eve was a premeditated act of vengeance which
she had kept in her heart ever since Godfrey, in a fit of passion, had
told her he would sooner die than acknowledge her as his wife. There
would be a great party at the Red House on New Year's Eve, she knew: her
husband would be smiling and smiled upon, hiding her existence in the
darkest corner of his heart. But she would mar his pleasure: she would
go in her dingy rags, with her faded face, once as handsome as the best,
with her little child that had its father's hair and eyes, and disclose
herself to the Squire as his eldest son's wife. It is seldom that the
miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those
who are less miserable. Molly knew that the cause of her dingy rags was
not her husband's neglect, but the demon Opium to whom she was enslaved,
body and soul, except in the lingering mother's tenderness that refused
to give him her hungry child. She knew this well; and yet, in the
moments of wretched unbenumbed consciousness, the sense of her want and
degradation transformed itself continually into bitterness towards
Godfrey. He was well off; and if she had her rights she would be well
off too. The belief that he repented his marriage, and suffered from it,
only aggravated her vindictiveness. Just and self-reproving thoughts do
not come to us too thickly, even in the purest air, and with the best
lessons of heaven and earth; how should those white-winged delicate
messengers make their way to Molly's poisoned chamber, inhabited by no
higher memories than those of a bar-maid's paradise of pink ribbons and
gentlemen's jokes?

She had set out at an early hour, but had lingered on the road, inclined
by her indolence to believe that if she waited under a warm shed the
snow would cease to fall. She had waited longer than she knew, and now
that she found herself belated in the snow-hidden ruggedness of the long
lanes, even the animation of a vindictive purpose could not keep her
spirit from failing. It was seven o'clock, and by this time she was not
very far from Raveloe, but she was not familiar enough with those
monotonous lanes to know how near she was to her journey's end. She
needed comfort, and she knew but one comforter- the familiar demon in
her bosom; but she hesitated a moment, after drawing out the black
remnant, before she raised it to her lips. In that moment the mother's
love pleaded for painful consciousness rather than oblivion- pleaded to
be left in aching weariness, rather than to have the encircling arms
benumbed so that they could not feel the dear burden. In another moment
Molly had flung something away, but it was not the black remnant- it was
an empty phial. And she walked on again under the breaking cloud, from
which there came now and then the light of a quickly-veiled star, for a
freezing wind had sprung up since the snowing had ceased. But she walked
always more and more drowsily, and clutched more and more automatically
the sleeping child at her bosom.

Slowly the demon was working his will, and cold and weariness were his
helpers. Soon she felt nothing but a supreme immediate longing that
curtained off all futurity- the longing to lie down and sleep. She had
arrived at a spot where her footsteps were no longer checked by a
hedgerow, and she had wandered vaguely, unable to distinguish any
objects, notwithstanding the wide whiteness around her, and the growing
starlight. She sank down against a straggling furze bush, an easy pillow
enough; and the bed of snow, too, was soft. She did not feel that the
bed was cold, and did not heed whether the child would wake and cry for
her. But her arms did not yet relax their instinctive clutch; and the
little one slumbered on as gently as if it had been rocked in a
lace-trimmed cradle.

But the complete torpor came at last: the fingers lost their tension,
the arms unbent; then the little head fell away from the bosom, and the
blue eyes opened wide on the cold starlight. At first there was a little
peevish cry of 'mammy', and an effort to regain the pillowing arm and
bosom; but mammy's ear was deaf, and the pillow seemed to be slipping
away backward. Suddenly, as the child rolled downward on its mother's
knees, all wet with snow, its eyes were caught by a bright glancing
light on the white ground, and, with the ready transition of infancy, it
was immediately absorbed in watching the bright living thing running
towards it, yet never arriving. That bright living thing must be caught;
and in an instant the child had slipped on all-fours, and held out one
little hand to catch the gleam. But the gleam would not be caught in
that way, and now the head was held up to see where the cunning gleam
came from. It came from a very bright place; and the little one, rising
on its legs, toddled through the snow, the old grimy shawl in which it
was wrapped trailing behind it, and the queer little bonnet dangling at
its back- toddled on to the open door of Silas Marner's cottage, and
right up to the warm hearth, where there was a bright fire of logs and
sticks, which had thoroughly warmed the old sack (Silas's greatcoat)
spread out on the bricks to dry. The little one, accustomed to be left
to itself for long hours without notice from its mother, squatted down
on the sack, and spread its tiny hands towards the blaze, in perfect
contentment, gurgling and making inarticulate communications to the
cheerful fire, like a new-hatched gosling beginning to find itself
comfortable. But presently the warmth had a lulling effect, and the
little golden head sank down on the old sack, and the blue eyes were
veiled by their delicate half-transparent lids.

But where was Silas Marner while this stranger-visitor had come to his
hearth? He was in the cottage, but he did not see the child. During the
last few weeks, since he had lost his money, he had contracted the habit
of opening his door, and looking out from time to time, as if he thought
that his money might be somehow coming back to him, or that some trace,
some news of it, might be mysteriously on the road, and be caught by the
listening ear or the straining eye. It was chiefly at night, when he was
not occupied in his loom, that he fell into this repetition of an act
for which he could have assigned no definite purpose, and which can
hardly be understood except by those who have undergone a bewildering
separation from a supremely loved object. In the evening twilight, and
later whenever the night was not dark, Silas looked out on that narrow
prospect round the Stone-pits, listening and gazing, not with hope, but
with mere yearning and unrest.

This morning he had been told by some of his neighbours that it was New
Year's Eve, and that he must sit up and hear the old year rung out and
the new rung in, because that was good luck, and might bring his money
back again. This was only a friendly Raveloe-way of jesting with the
half-crazy oddities of a miser, but it had perhaps helped to throw Silas
into a more than usually excited state. Since the on-coming of twilight
he had opened his door again and again, though only to shut it
immediately at seeing all distance veiled by the falling snow. But the
last time he opened it the snow had ceased, and the clouds were parting
here and there. He stood and listened, and gazed for a long while- there
was really something on the road coming towards him then, but he caught
no sign of it; and the stillness and the wide trackless snow seemed to
narrow his solitude, and touched his yearning with the chill of despair.
He went in again, and put his right hand on the latch of the door to
close it- but he did not close it: he was arrested, as he had been
already since his loss, by the invisible wand of catalepsy, and stood
like a graven image, with wide but sightless eyes, holding open his
door, powerless to resist either the good or evil that might enter
there.

When Marner's sensibility returned, he continued the action which had
been arrested, and closed his door, unaware of the chasm in his
consciousness, unaware of any intermediate change, except that the light
had grown dim, and that he was chilled and faint. He thought he had been
too long standing at the door and looking out. Turning towards the
hearth, where the two logs had fallen apart, and sent forth only a red
uncertain glimmer, he seated himself on his fireside chair, and was
stooping to push his logs together, when, to his blurred vision, it
seemed as if there were gold on the floor in front of the hearth. Gold!-
his own gold- brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken
away! He felt his heart begin to beat violently, and for a few moments
he was unable to stretch out his hand and grasp the restored treasure.
The heap of gold seemed to glow and get larger beneath his agitated
gaze. He leaned forward at last, and stretched forth his hand; but
instead of the hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his
fingers encountered soft warm curls. In utter amazement, Silas fell on
his knees and bent his head low to examine the marvel: it was a sleeping
child- a round, fair thing, with soft yellow rings all over its head.
Could this be his little sister come back to him in a dream- his little
sister whom he had carried about in his arms for a year before she died,
when he was a small boy without shoes or stockings? That was the first
thought that darted across Silas's blank wonderment. Was it a dream? He
rose to his feet again, pushed his logs together, and, throwing on some
dried leaves and sticks, raised a flame; but the flame did not disperse
the vision- it only lit up more distinctly the little round form of the
child and its shabby clothing. It was very much like his little sister.
Silas sank into his chair powerless, under the double presence of an
inexplicable surprise and a hurrying influx of memories. How and when
had the child come in without his knowledge? He had never been beyond
the door. But along with that question, and almost thrusting it away,
there was a vision of the old home and the old streets leading to
Lantern Yard- and within that vision another, of the thoughts which had
been present with him in those far-off scenes. The thoughts were strange
to him now, like old friendships impossible to revive; and yet he had a
dreamy feeling that this child was somehow a message come to him from
that far-off life: it stirred fibres that had never been moved in
Raveloe- old quiverings of tenderness- old impressions of awe at the
presentiment of some Power presiding over his life; for his imagination
had not yet extricated itself from the sense of mystery in the child's
sudden presence, and had formed no conjectures of ordinary natural means
by which the event could have been brought about.

But there was a cry on the hearth: the child had awakened, and Marner
stooped to lift it on his knee. It clung round his neck, and burst
louder and louder into that mingling of inarticulate cries with 'mammy'
by which little children express the bewilderment of waking. Silas
pressed it to him, and almost unconsciously uttered sounds of hushing
tenderness, while he bethought himself that some of his porridge, which
had got cool by the dying fire, would do to feed the child with if it
were only warmed up a little.

He had plenty to do through the next hour. The porridge, sweetened with
some dry brown sugar from an old store which he had refrained from using
for himself, stopped the cries of the little one, and made her lift her
blue eyes with a wide gaze at Silas, as he put the spoon into her mouth.
Presently she slipped from his knee and began to toddle about, but with
a pretty stagger that made Silas jump up and follow her lest she should
fall against anything that would hurt her. But she only fell in a
sitting posture on the ground, and began to pull at her boots, looking
up at him with a crying face as if the boots hurt her. He took her on
his knee again, but it was some time before it occurred to Silas's dull
bachelor mind that the wet boots were the grievance, pressing on her
warm ankles. He got them off with difficulty, and baby was at once
happily occupied with the primary mystery of her own toes, inviting
Silas, with much chuckling, to consider the mystery too. But the wet
boots had at last suggested to Silas that the child had been walking on
the snow, and this roused him from his entire oblivion of any ordinary
means by which it could have entered or been brought into his house.
Under the prompting of this new idea, and without waiting to form
conjectures, he raised the child in his arms, and went to the door. As
soon as he had opened it, there was the cry of 'mammy' again, which
Silas had not heard since the child's first hungry waking. Bending
forward, he could just discern the marks made by the little feet on the
virgin snow, and he followed their track to the furze bushes. 'Mammy!'
the little one cried again and again, stretching itself forward so as
almost to escape from Silas's arms, before he himself was aware that
there was something more than the bush before him- that there was a
human body, with the head sunk low in the furze, and half-covered with
the shaken snow.

                    CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT was after the early supper-time at the Red House, and the
entertainment was in that stage when bashfulness itself had passed into
easy jollity, when gentlemen, conscious of unusual accomplishments,
could at length be prevailed on to dance a hornpipe, and when the Squire
preferred talking loudly, scattering snuff, and patting his visitors'
backs, to sitting longer at the whist-table- a choice exasperating to
uncle Kimble, who, being always volatile in sober business hours, became
intense and bitter over cards and brandy, shuffled before his
adversary's deal with a glare of suspicion, and turned up a mean
trump-card with an air of inexpressible disgust, as if in a world where
such things could happen one might as well enter on a course of reckless
profligacy. When the evening had advanced to this pitch of freedom and
enjoyment, it was usual for the servants, the heavy duties of supper
being well over, to get their share of amusement by coming to look on at
the dancing; so that the back regions of the house were left in
solitude.

There were two doors by which the White Parlour was entered from the
hall, and they were both standing open for the sake of air; but the
lower one was crowded with the servants and villagers, and only the
upper doorway was left free. Bob Cass was figuring in a hornpipe, and
his father, very proud of this lithe son, whom he repeatedly declared to
be just like himself in his young days, in a tone that implied this to
be the very highest stamp of juvenile merit, was the centre of a group
who had placed themselves opposite the performer, not far from the upper
door. Godfrey was standing a little way off, not to admire his brother's
dancing, but to keep sight of Nancy, who was seated in the group, near
her father. He stood aloof, because he wished to avoid suggesting
himself as a subject for the Squire's fatherly jokes in connection with
matrimony and Miss Nancy Lammeter's beauty, which were likely to become
more and more explicit. But he had the prospect of dancing with her
again when the hornpipe was concluded, and in the meantime it was very
pleasant to get long glances at her quite unobserved.

But when Godfrey was lifting his eyes from one of those long glances,
they encountered an object as startling to him at that moment as if it
had been an apparition from the dead. It was an apparition from that
hidden life which lies, like a dark by-street, behind the goodly
ornamented facade that meets the sunlight and the gaze of respectable
admirers. It was his own child, carried in Silas Marner's arms. That was
his instantaneous impression, unaccompanied by doubt, though he had not
seen the child for months past; and when the hope was rising that he
might possibly be mistaken, Mr Crackenthorp and Mr Lammeter had already
advanced to Silas, in astonishment at this strange advent. Godfrey
joined them immediately, unable to rest without hearing every word-
trying to control himself, but conscious that if anyone noticed him,
they must see that he was white-lipped and trembling.

But now all eyes at that end of the room were bent on Silas Marner; the
Squire himself had risen, and asked angrily, 'How's this?- what's this?-
what do you do coming in here in this way?'

'I'm come for the doctor- I want the doctor,' Silas had said, in the
first moment, to Mr Crackenthorp.

'Why, what's the matter, Marner?' said the rector. 'The doctor's here;
but say quietly what you want him for.'

'It's a woman,' said Silas, speaking low, and half-breathlessly, just as
Godfrey came up. 'She's dead, I think- dead in the snow at the
Stone-pits- not far from my door.'

Godfrey felt a great throb: there was one terror in his mind at that
moment: it was, that the woman might not be dead. That was an evil
terror- an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey's
kindly disposition; but no disposition is a security from evil wishes to
a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity.

'Hush, hush!' said Mr Crackenthorp. 'Go out into the hall there. I'll
fetch the doctor to you. Found a woman in the snow- and thinks she's
dead,' he added, speaking low to the Squire. 'Better say as little about
it as possible: it will shock the ladies. Just tell them a poor woman is
ill from cold and hunger. I'll go and fetch Kimble.'

By this time, however, the ladies had pressed forward, curious to know
what could have brought the solitary linen-weaver there under such
strange circumstances, and interested in the pretty child, who, half
alarmed and half attracted by the brightness and the numerous company,
now frowned and hid her face, now lifted up her head again and looked
round placably, until a touch or a coaxing word brought back the frown,
and made her bury her face with new determination.

'What child is it?' said several ladies at once, and, among the rest,
Nancy Lammeter, addressing Godfrey.

'I don't know- some poor woman's who has been found in the snow, I
believe,' was the answer Godfrey wrung from himself with a terrible
effort. ('After all, am I certain?' he hastened to add, silently, in
anticipation of his own conscience.)

'Why, you'd better leave the child here, then, Master Marner,' said
good-natured Mrs Kimble, hesitating, however, to take those dingy
clothes into contact with her own ornamented satin bodice. 'I'll tell
one o' the girls to fetch it.'

'No- no- I can't part with it, I can't let it go,' said Silas, abruptly.
'It's come to me- I've a right to keep it.'

The proposition to take the child from him had come to Silas quite
unexpectedly, and his speech, uttered under a strong sudden impulse, was
almost like a revelation to himself: a minute before, he had no distinct
intention about the child.

'Did you ever hear the like?' said Mrs Kimble, in mild surprise, to her
neighbour.

'Now, ladies, I must trouble you to stand aside,' said Mr Kimble, coming
from the card-room, in some bitterness at the interruption, but drilled
by the long habit of his profession into obedience to unpleasant calls,
even when he was hardly sober.

'It's a nasty business turning out now, eh, Kimble?' said the Squire.
'He might ha' gone for your young fellow- the 'prentice, there- what's
his name?'

'Might? aye- what's the use of talking about might?' growled uncle
Kimble, hastening out with Marner, and followed by Mr Crackenthorp and
Godfrey. 'Get me a pair of thick boots, Godfrey, will you? And stay, let
somebody run to Winthrop's and fetch Dolly- she's the best woman to get.
Ben was here himself before supper; is he gone?'

'Yes, sir, I met him,' said Marner; 'but I couldn't stop to tell him
anything, only I said I was going for the doctor, and he said the doctor
was at the Squire's. And I made haste and ran, and there was nobody to
be seen at the back o' the house, and so I went in to where the company
was.'

The child, no longer distracted by the bright light and the smiling
women's faces, began to cry and call for 'mammy', though always clinging
to Marner, who had apparently won her thorough confidence. Godfrey had
come back with the boots, and felt the cry as if some fibre were drawn
tight within him.

'I'll go,' he said, hastily, eager for some movement; 'I'll go and fetch
the woman- Mrs Winthrop.'

'Oh, pooh- send somebody else,' said uncle Kimble, hurrying away with
Marner.

'You'll let me know if I can be of any use, Kimble,' said Mr
Crackenthorp. But the doctor was out of hearing.

Godfrey, too, had disappeared: he was gone to snatch his hat and coat,
having just reflection enough to remember that he must not look like a
madman; but he rushed out of the house into the snow without heeding his
thin shoes.

In a few minutes he was on his rapid way to the Stone-pits by the side
of Dolly, who, though feeling that she was entirely in her place in
encountering cold and snow on an errand of mercy, was much concerned at
a young gentleman's getting his feet wet under a like impulse.

'You'd a deal better go back, sir,' said Dolly, with respectful
compassion. 'You've no call to catch cold; and I'd ask you if you'd be
so good as tell my husband to come, on your way back- he's at the
Rainbow, I doubt- if you found him anyway sober enough to be o' use. Or
else, there's Mrs Snell 'ud happen send the boy up to fetch and carry,
for there may be things wanted from the doctor's.'

'No, I'll stay, now I'm once out- I'll stay outside here,' said Godfrey,
when they came opposite Marner's cottage. 'You can come and tell me if I
can do anything.'

'Well, sir, you're very good: you've a tender heart,' said Dolly, going
to the door.

Godfrey was too painfully preoccupied to feel a twinge of self-reproach
at his undeserved praise. He walked up and down, unconscious that he was
plunging ankle-deep in snow, unconscious of everything but trembling
suspense about what was going on in the cottage, and the effect of each
alternative on his future lot. No, not quite unconscious of everything
else. Deeper down, and half-smothered by passionate desire and dread,
there was the sense that he ought not to be waiting on these
alternatives; that he ought to accept the consequences of his deeds, own
the miserable wife, and fulfil the claims of the helpless child. But he
had not moral courage enough to contemplate that active renunciation of
Nancy as possible for him; he had only conscience and heart enough to
make him for ever uneasy under the weakness that forbade the
renunciation. And at this moment his mind leaped away from all restraint
toward the sudden prospect of deliverance from his long bondage.

'Is she dead?' said the voice that predominated over every other within
him. 'If she is, I may marry Nancy; and then I shall be a good fellow in
future, and have no secrets, and the child- shall be taken care of
somehow.' But across that vision came the other possibility- 'She may
live, and then it's all up with me.'

Godfrey never knew how long it was before the door of the cottage opened
and Mr Kimble came out. He went forward to meet his uncle, prepared to
suppress the agitation he must feel, whatever news he was to hear.

'I waited for you, as I'd come so far,' he said, speaking first.

'Pooh, it was nonsense for you to come out: why didn't you send one of
the men? There's nothing to be done. She's dead- has been dead for
hours, I should say.'

'What sort of woman is she?' said Godfrey, feeling the blood rush to his
face.

'A young woman, but emaciated, with long black hair. Some vagrant- quite
in rags. She's got a wedding-ring on, however. They must fetch her away
to the workhouse tomorrow. Come, come along.'

'I want to look at her,' said Godfrey. 'I think I saw such a woman
yesterday. I'll overtake you in a minute or two.'

Mr Kimble went on, and Godfrey turned back to the cottage. He cast only
one glance at the dead face on the pillow, which Dolly had smoothed with
decent care; but he remembered that last look at his unhappy hated wife
so well, that at the end of sixteen years every line in the worn face
was present to him when he told the full story of this night.

He turned immediately towards the hearth where Silas Marner sat lulling
the child. She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep- only soothed by
sweet porridge and warmth into that wide gazing calm which makes us
older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the
presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or
beauty in the earth or sky- before a steady-glowing planet, or a
full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway. The
wide-open blue eyes looked up at Godfrey's without any uneasiness or
sign of recognition: the child could make no visible audible claim on
its father; and the father felt a strange mixture of feelings, a
conflict of regret and joy, that the pulse of that little heart had no
response for the half jealous yearning in his own, when the blue eyes
turned away from him slowly, and fixed themselves on the weaver's queer
face, which was bent low down to look at them, while the small hand
began to pull Marner's withered cheek with loving disfiguration.

'You'll take the child to the parish tomorrow?' asked Godfrey, speaking
as indifferently as he could.

'Who says so?' said Marner, sharply. 'Will they make me take her?'

'Why, you wouldn't like to keep her, should you- an old bachelor like
you?'

'Till anybody shows they've a right to take her away from me,' said
Marner. 'The mother's dead, and I reckon it's got no father: it's a lone
thing- and I'm a lone thing. My money's gone, I don't know where- and
this is come from I don't know where. I know nothing- I'm partly mazed.'

'Poor little thing!' said Godfrey. 'Let me give something towards
finding it clothes.'

He had put his hand in his pocket and found half-a-guinea, and,
thrusting it into Silas's hand, he hurried out of the cottage to
overtake Mr Kimble.

'Ah, I see it's not the same woman I saw,' he said, as he came up. 'It's
a pretty little child: the old fellow seems to want to keep it; that's
strange for a miser like him. But I gave him a trifle to help him out:
the parish isn't likely to quarrel with him for the right to keep the
child.'

'No; but I've seen the time when I might have quarrelled with him for it
myself. It's too late now, though. If the child ran into the fire, your
aunt's too fat to overtake it: she could only sit and grunt like an
alarmed sow. But what a fool you are, Godfrey, to come out in your
dancing shoes and stockings in this way- and you one of the beaux of the
evening, and at your own house! What do you mean by such freaks, young
fellow? Has Miss Nancy been cruel, and do you want to spite her by
spoiling your pumps?'

'Oh, everything has been disagreeable tonight. I was tired to death of
jigging and gallanting, and that bother about the hornpipes. And I'd got
to dance with the other Miss Gunn,' said Godfrey, glad of the subterfuge
his uncle had suggested to him.

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself
ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false
touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere
trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

Godfrey reappeared in the White Parlour with dry feet, and, since the
truth must be told, with a sense of relief and gladness that was too
strong for painful thoughts to struggle with. For could he not venture
now, whenever opportunity offered, to say the tenderest things to Nancy
Lammeter- to promise her and himself that he would always be just what
she would desire to see him? There was no danger that his dead wife
would be recognized: those were not days of active inquiry and wide
report; and as for the registry of their marriage, that was a long way
off, buried in unturned pages, away from everyone's interest but his
own. Dunsey might betray him if he came back; but Dunsey might be won to
silence.

And when events turn out so much better for a man than he has had reason
to dread, is it not a proof that his conduct has been less foolish and
blameworthy than it might otherwise have appeared? When we are treated
well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether
unmeritorious, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well,
and not mar our own good fortune. Where, after all, would be the use of
his confessing the past to Nancy Lammeter, and throwing away his
happiness?- nay, hers? for he felt some confidence that she loved him.
As for the child, he would see that it was cared for: he would never
forsake it; he would do everything but own it. Perhaps it would be just
as happy in life without being owned by its father, seeing that nobody
could tell how things would turn out, and that- is there any other
reason wanted?- well, then, that the father would be much happier
without owning the child.

                    CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THERE was a pauper's burial that week in Raveloe, and up Kench Yard at
Batherley it was known that the dark-haired woman with the fair child,
who had lately come to lodge there, was gone away again. That was all
the express note taken that Molly had disappeared from the eyes of men.
But the unwept death which, to the general lot, seemed as trivial as the
summer-shed leaf, was charged with the force of destiny to certain human
lives that we know of, shaping their joys and sorrows even to the end.

Silas Marner's determination to keep the 'tramp's child' was matter of
hardly less surprising and iterated talk in the village than the robbery
of his money. That softening of feeling towards him which dated from his
misfortune, that merging of suspicion and dislike in a rather
contemptuous pity for him as lone and crazy, was now accompanied with a
more active sympathy, especially amongst the women. Notable mothers, who
knew what it was to keep children 'whole and sweet'; lazy mothers, who
knew what it was to be interrupted in folding their arms and scratching
their elbows by the mischievous propensities of children just firm on
their legs, were equally interested in conjecturing how a lone man would
manage with a two-year-old child on his hands, and were equally ready
with their suggestions: the notable chiefly telling him what he had
better do, and the lazy ones being emphatic in telling him what he would
never be able to do.

Among the notable mothers, Dolly Winthrop was the one whose neighbourly
offices were the most acceptable to Marner, for they were rendered
without any show of bustling instruction. Silas had shown her the
half-guinea given to him by Godfrey, and had asked her what he should do
about getting some clothes for the child.

'Eh, Master Marner,' said Dolly, 'there's no call to buy, no more nor a
pair o' shoes; for I've got the little petticoats as Aaron wore five
years ago, and it's ill spending the money on them baby-clothes, for the
child 'ull grow like grass i' May, bless it- that it will.'

And the same day Dolly brought her bundle, and displayed to Marner, one
by one, the tiny garments in their due order of succession, most of them
patched and darned, but clean and neat as fresh-sprung herbs. This was
the introduction to a great ceremony with soap and water, from which
Baby came out in new beauty, and sat on Dolly's knee, handling her toes
and chuckling and patting her palms together with an air of having made
several discoveries about herself, which she communicated by alternate
sounds of 'gug-gug-gug', and 'mammy'. The 'mammy' was not a cry of need
or uneasiness: Baby had been used to utter it without expecting either
sound or touch to follow.

'Anybody 'ud think the angils in heaven couldn't be prettier,' said
Dolly, rubbing the golden curls and kissing them. 'And to think of its
being covered wi' them dirty rags- and the poor mother- froze to death;
but there's Them as took care of it, and brought it to your door, Master
Marner. The door was open, and it walked in over the snow, like as if it
had been a little starved robin. Didn't you say the door was open?'

'Yes,' said Silas, meditatively. 'Yes- the door was open. The money's
gone I don't know where, and this is come from I don't know where.'

He had not mentioned to anyone his unconsciousness of the child's
entrance, shrinking from questions which might lead to the fact he
himself suspected- namely, that he had been in one of his trances.

'Ah,' said Dolly, with soothing gravity, 'it's like the night and the
morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest-
one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may
strive and scrat and fend, but it's little we can do arter all- the big
things come and go wi' no striving o' our'n- they do, that they do; and
I think you're in the right on it to keep the little un' Master Marner,
seeing as it's been sent to you, though there's folks as thinks
different. You'll happen be a bit moithered with it while it's so
little; but I'll come, and welcome, and see to it for you: I've a bit o'
time to spare most days, for when one gets up betimes i' the morning,
the clock seems to stan' still tow'rt ten, afore it's time to go about
the victual. So, as I say, I'll come to see to the child for you, and
welcome.'

'Thank you... kindly,' said Silas, hesitating a little, 'I'll be glad if
you'll tell me things. But,' he added, uneasily, leaning forward to look
at Baby with some jealousy, as she was resting her head backward against
Dolly's arm, and eyeing him contentedly from a distance- 'But I want to
do things for it myself, else it may get fond o' somebody else, and not
fond o' me. I've been used to fending for myself in the house- I can
learn, I can learn.'

'Eh, to be sure,' said Dolly, gently. 'I've seen men as are wonderful
handy wi' children. The men are awk'ard and contrairy mostly, God help
'em- but when the drink's out of 'em, they aren't unsensible, though
they're bad for leeching and bandaging- so fiery and unpatient. You see
this goes first, next the skin,' proceeded Dolly, taking up the little
shirt, and putting it on.

'Yes,' said Marner, docilely, bringing his eyes very close, that they
might be initiated in the mysteries; whereupon Baby seized his head with
both her small arms, and put her lips against his face with purring
noises.

'See there,' said Dolly, with a woman's tender tact, 'she's fondest o'
you. She wants to go o' your lap, I'll be bound. Go, then: take her,
Master Marner; you can put the things on, and then you can say as you've
done for her from the first of her coming to you.'

Marner took her on his lap, trembling with an emotion mysterious to
himself, at something unknown dawning on his life. Thought and feeling
were so confused within him, that if he had tried to give them
utterance, he could only have said that the child was come instead of
the gold- that the gold had turned into the child. He took the garments
from Dolly, and put them on under her teaching; interrupted, of course,
by Baby's gymnastics.

'There, then! why, you take to it quite easy, Master Marner,' said
Dolly; 'but what shall you do when you're forced to sit in your loom?
For she'll get busier and mischievouser every day- she will, bless her.
It's lucky as you've got that high hearth i'stead of a grate, for that
keeps the fire more out of her reach; but if you've got anything as can
be spilt or broke, or as is fit to cut her fingers off, she'll be at it-
and it is but right you should know.'

Silas meditated a little while in some perplexity. 'I'll tie her to the
leg o' the loom,' he said at last- 'tie her with a good long strip o'
something.'

'Well, mayhap that'll do, as it's a little gell, for they're easier
persuaded to sit i' one place nor the lads. I know what the lads are;
for I've had four- four I've had, God knows- and if you was to take and
tie 'em up, they'd make a fighting and a crying as if you was ringing
pigs. But I'll bring you my little chair, and some bits o' red rag and
things for her to play wi'; an' she'll sit and chatter to 'em as if they
was alive. Eh, if it wasn't a sin to the lads to wish 'em made
different, bless 'em, I should ha' been glad for one of 'em to be a
little gell; and to think as I could ha' taught her to scour, and mend,
and the knitting, and everything. But I can teach 'em this little un,
Master Marner, when she gets old enough.'

'But she'll be my little un,' said Marner, rather hastily. 'She'll be
nobody else's.'

'No, to be sure; you'll have a right to her if you're a father to her,
and bring her up according. But,' added Dolly, coming to a point which
she had determined beforehand to touch upon, 'you must bring her up like
christened folks's children, and take her to church, and let her learn
her catechize, as my little Aaron can say off- the "I believe", and
everything, and "hurt nobody by word or deed",- as well as if he was the
clerk. That's what you must do, Master Marner, if you'd do the right
thing by the orphin child.'

Marner's pale face flushed suddenly under a new anxiety. His mind was
too busy trying to give some definite bearing to Dolly's words for him
to think of answering her.

'And it's my belief,' she went on, 'as the poor little creatur has never
been christened, and it's nothing but right as the parson should be
spoke to; and if you was noways unwilling, I'd talk to Mr Macey about it
this very day. For if the child ever went anyways wrong, and you hadn't
done your part by it, Master Marner- 'noculation, and everything to save
it from harm- it 'ud be a thorn i' your bed for ever o' this side the
grave; and I can't think as it 'ud be easy lying down for anybody when
they'd got to another world, if they hadn't done their part by the
helpless children as come wi'out their own asking.'

Dolly herself was disposed to be silent for some time now, for she had
spoken from the depths of her own simple belief, and was much concerned
to know whether her words would produce the desired effect on Silas. He
was puzzled and anxious, for Dolly's word 'christened' conveyed no
distinct meaning to him. He had only heard of baptism, and had only seen
the baptism of grown-up men and women.

'What is it as you mean by "christened"?' he said at last, timidly.
'Won't folks be good to her without it?'

'Dear, dear! Master Marner,' said Dolly, with gentle distress and
compassion. 'Had you never no father nor mother as taught you to say
your prayers, and as there's good words and good things to keep us from
harm?'

'Yes,' said Silas, in a low voice; 'I know a deal about that- used to,
used to. But your ways are different: my country was a good way off.' He
paused a few moments, and then added, more decidedly, 'But I want to do
everything as can be done for the child. And whatever's right for it i'
this country, and you think 'ull do it good, I'll act according, if
you'll tell me.'

'Well, then, Master Marner,' said Dolly, inwardly rejoiced, 'I'll ask Mr
Macey to speak to the parson about it; and you must fix on a name for
it, because it must have a name giv' it when it's christened.'

'My mother's name was Hephzibah,' said Silas, 'and my little sister was
named after her.'

'Eh, that's a hard name,' said Dolly. 'I partly think it isn't a
christened name.'

'It's a Bible name,' said Silas, old ideas recurring.

'Then I've no call to speak again' it,' said Dolly, rather startled by
Silas's knowledge on this head; 'but you see I'm no scholard, and I'm
slow at catching the words. My husband says I'm allays like as if I was
putting the haft for the handle- that's what he says- for he's very
sharp, God help him. But it was awk'ard calling your little sister by
such a hard name, when you'd got nothing big to say, like- wasn't it,
Master Marner?'

'We called her Eppie,' said Silas.

'Well, if it was noways wrong to shorten the name, it 'ud be a deal
handier. And so I'll go now, Master Marner, and I'll speak about the
christening afore dark; and I wish you the best o' luck, and it's my
belief as it'll come to you, if you do what's right by the orphin
child;- and there's the 'noculation to be seen to; and as to washing its
bits o' things, you need look to nobody but me, for I can do 'em wi' one
hand when I've got my suds about. Eh, the blessed angil! You'll let me
bring my Aaron one o' these days, and he'll show her his little cart as
his father's made for him, and the black-and-white pup as he's got
a-rearing.'

Baby was christened, the rector deciding that a double baptism was the
lesser risk to incur; and on this occasion Silas, making himself as
clean and tidy as he could, appeared for the first time within the
church, and shared in the observances held sacred by his neighbours. He
was quite unable, by means of anything he heard or saw, to identify the
Raveloe religion with his old faith: if he could at any time in his
previous life have done so, it must have been by the aid of a strong
feeling ready to vibrate with sympathy, rather than by a comparison of
phrases and ideas; and now for long years that feeling had been dormant.
He had no distinct idea about the baptism and the church-going, except
that Dolly had said it was for the good of the child; and in this way,
as the weeks grew to months, the child created fresh and fresh links
between his life and the lives from which he had hitherto shrunk
continually into narrower isolation. Unlike the gold which needed
nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude- which was
hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and
started to no human tones- Eppie was a creature of endless claims and
ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds,
and living movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy,
and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her. The gold
had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to nothing
beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes
that forced his thoughts onward, and carried them far away from their
old eager pacing towards the same blank limit- carried them away to the
new things that would come with the coming years, when Eppie would have
learned to understand how her father Silas cared for her; and made him
look for images of that time in the ties and charities that bound
together the families of the neighbours. The gold had asked that he
should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more
to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his
web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all
its pauses a holiday, reawakening his senses with her fresh life, even
to the old winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early spring
sunshine, and warming him into joy because she had joy.

And when the sunshine grew strong and lasting, so that the buttercups
were thick in the meadows, Silas might be seen in the sunny midday, or
in the late afternoon when the shadows were lengthening under the
hedgerows, strolling out with uncovered head to carry Eppie beyond the
Stone-pits to where the flowers grew, till they reached some favourite
bank where he could sit down, while Eppie toddled to pluck the flowers,
and make remarks to the winged things that murmured happily above the
bright petals, calling 'Dad-dad's' attention continually by bringing him
the flowers. Then she would turn her ear to some sudden bird-note, and
Silas learned to please her by making signs of hushed stillness, that
they might listen for the note to come again: so that when it came, she
set up her small back and laughed with gurgling triumph. Sitting on the
banks in this way, Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs
again; and as the leaves, with their unchanged outline and markings, lay
on his palm, there was a sense of crowding remembrances from which he
turned away timidly, taking refuge in Eppie's little world, that lay
lightly on his enfeebled spirit.

As the child's mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing
into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold
narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full
consciousness.

It was an influence which must gather force with every new year: the
tones that stirred Silas's heart grew articulate, and called for more
distinct answers; shapes and sounds grew clearer for Eppie's eyes and
ears, and there was more that 'Dad-dad' was imperatively required to
notice and account for. Also, by the time Eppie was three years old, she
developed a fine capacity for mischief, and for devising ingenious ways
of being troublesome, which found much exercise, not only for Silas's
patience, but for his watchfulness and penetration. Sorely was poor
Silas puzzled on such occasions by the incompatible demands of love.
Dolly Winthrop told him punishment was good for Eppie, and that, as for
rearing a child without making it tingle a little in soft and safe
places now and then, it was not to be done.

'To be sure, there's another thing you might do, Master Marner,' added
Dolly, meditatively: 'you might shut her up once i' the coal-hole. That
was what I did wi' Aaron; for I was that silly wi' the youngest lad, as
I could never bear to smack him. Not as I could find i' my heart to let
him stay i' the coal-hole more nor a minute, but it was enough to colly
him all over, so as he must be new washed and dressed, and it was as
good as a rod to him- that was. But I put it upon your conscience,
Master Marner, as there's one of 'em you must choose- ayther smacking or
the coal-hole- else she'll get so masterful, there'll be no holding
her.'

Silas was impressed with the melancholy truth of this last remark; but
his force of mind failed before the only two penal methods open to him,
not only because it was painful to him to hurt Eppie, but because he
trembled at a moment's contention with her, lest she should love him the
less for it. Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a
small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still
more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master? It
was clear that Eppie, with her short toddling steps, must lead father
Silas a pretty dance on any fine morning when circumstances favoured
mischief.

For example. He had wisely chosen a broad strip of linen as a means of
fastening her to his loom when he was busy: it made a broad belt round
her waist, and was long enough to allow of her reaching the truckle-bed
and sitting down on it, but not long enough for her to attempt any
dangerous climbing. One bright summer's morning Silas had been more
engrossed than usual in 'setting up' a new piece of work, an occasion on
which his scissors were in requisition. These scissors, owing to an
especial warning of Dolly's, had been kept carefully out of Eppie's
reach; but the click of them had had a peculiar attraction for her ear,
and, watching the results of that click, she had derived the philosophic
lesson that the same cause would produce the same effect. Silas had
seated himself in his loom, and the noise of weaving had begun; but he
had left his scissors on a ledge which Eppie's arm was long enough to
reach; and now, like a small mouse, watching her opportunity, she stole
quietly from her corner, secured the scissors, and toddled to the bed
again, setting up her back as a mode of concealing the fact. She had a
distinct intention as to the use of the scissors; and having cut the
linen strip in a jagged but effectual manner, in two moments she had run
out at the open door where the sunshine was inviting her, while poor
Silas believed her to be a better child than usual. It was not until he
happened to need his scissors that the terrible fact burst upon him:
Eppie had run out by herself- had perhaps fallen into the Stone-pit.
Silas, shaken by the worst fear that could have befallen him, rushed
out, calling 'Eppie!' and ran eagerly about the unenclosed space,
exploring the dry cavities into which she might have fallen, and then
gazing with questioning dread at the smooth red surface of the water.
The cold drops stood on his brow. How long had she been out? There was
one hope- that she had crept through the stile and got into the fields
where he habitually took her to stroll. But the grass was high in the
meadow, and there was no descrying her, if she were there, except by a
close search that would be a trespass on Mr Osgood's crop. Still, that
misdemeanour must be committed; and poor Silas, after peering all round
the hedgerows, traversed the grass, beginning with perturbed vision to
see Eppie behind every group of red sorrel, and to see her moving always
farther off as he approached. The meadow was searched in vain; and he
got over the stile into the next field, looking with dying hope towards
a small pond which was now reduced to its summer shallowness, so as to
leave a wide margin of good adhesive mud. Here, however, sat Eppie,
discoursing cheerfully to her own small boot, which she was using as a
bucket to convey the water into a deep mark, while her little naked foot
was planted comfortably on a cushion of olive-green mud. A red-headed
calf was observing her with alarmed doubt through the opposite hedge.

Here was clearly a case of aberration in a christened child which
demanded severe treatment; but Silas, overcome with convulsive joy at
finding his treasure again, could do nothing but snatch her up, and
cover her with half-sobbing kisses. It was not until he had carried her
home, and had begun to think of the necessary washing, that he
recollected the need that he should punish Eppie, and 'make her
remember'. The idea that she might run away again and come to harm, gave
him unusual resolution, and for the first time he determined to try the
coal-hole- a small closet near the hearth.

'Naughty, naughty Eppie,' he suddenly began, holding her on his knee,
and pointing to her muddy feet and clothes- 'naughty to cut with the
scissors, and run away. Eppie must go into the coal-hole for being
naughty. Daddy must put her in the coal-hole.'

He half expected that this would be shock enough, and that Eppie would
begin to cry. But instead of that, she began to shake herself on his
knee, as if the proposition opened a pleasing novelty. Seeing that he
must proceed to extremities, he put her into the coal-hole, and held the
door closed, with a trembling sense that he was using a strong measure.
For a moment there was silence, but then came a little cry, 'Opy, opy!'
and Silas let her out again, saying, 'Now Eppie 'ull never be naughty
again, else she must go into the coal-hole- a black naughty place.'

The weaving must stand still a long while this morning, for now Eppie
must be washed and have clean clothes on; but it was to be hoped that
this punishment would have a lasting effect, and save time in future-
though, perhaps, it would have been better if Eppie had cried more.

In half an hour she was clean again, and Silas having turned his back to
see what he could do with the linen band, threw it down again, with the
reflection that Eppie would be good without fastening for the rest of
the morning. He turned round again, and was going to place her in her
little chair near the loom, when she peeped out at him with black face
and hands again, and said, 'Eppie in de toal-hole!'

This total failure of the coal-hole discipline shook Silas's belief in
the efficacy of punishment. 'She'd take it all for fun,' he observed to
Dolly, 'if I didn't hurt her, and that I can't do, Mrs Winthrop. If she
makes me a bit o' trouble, I can bear it. And she's got no tricks but
what she'll grow out of.'

'Well, that's partly true, Master Marner,' said Dolly, sympathetically;
'and if you can't bring your mind to frighten her off touching things,
you must do what you can to keep 'em out of her way. That's what I do
wi' the pups as the lads are allays a-rearing. They will worry and gnaw-
worry and gnaw they will, if it was one's Sunday cap as hung anywhere so
as they could drag it. They know no difference, God help 'em: it's the
pushing o' the teeth as sets them on, that's what it is.'

So Eppie was reared without punishment, the burden of her misdeeds being
borne vicariously by father Silas. The stone hut was made a soft nest
for her, lined with downy patience: and also in the world that lay
beyond the stone hut for her, she knew nothing of frowns and denials.

Notwithstanding the difficulty of carrying her and his yarn or linen at
the same time, Silas took her with him in most of his journeys to the
farmhouses, unwilling to leave her behind at Dolly Winthrop's, who was
always ready to take care of her; and little curly-headed Eppie, the
weaver's child, became an object of interest at several out-lying
homesteads, as well as in the village. Hitherto he had been treated very
much as if he had been a useful gnome or brownie- a queer and
unaccountable creature, who must necessarily be looked at with wondering
curiosity and repulsion, and with whom one would be glad to make all
greetings and bargains as brief as possible, but who must be dealt with
in a propitiatory way, and occasionally have a present of pork or
garden-stuff to carry home with him, seeing that without him there was
no getting the yarn woven. But now Silas met with open smiling faces and
cheerful questioning, as a person whose satisfactions and difficulties
could be understood. Everywhere he must sit a little and talk about the
child, and words of interest were always ready for him: 'Ah, Master
Marner, you'll be lucky if she takes the measles soon and easy!'- or,
'Why, there isn't many lone men 'ud ha' been wishing to take up with a
little un like that: but I reckon the weaving makes you handier than men
as do out-door work- you're partly as handy as a woman, for weaving
comes next to spinning.' Elderly masters and mistresses, seated
observantly in large kitchen arm-chairs, shook their heads over the
difficulties attendant on rearing children, felt Eppie's round arms and
legs, and pronounced them remarkably firm, and told Silas that, if she
turned out well (which, however, there was no telling), it would be a
fine thing for him to have a steady lass to do for him when he got
helpless. Servant maidens were fond of carrying her out to look at the
hens and chickens, or to see if any cherries could be shaken down in the
orchard; and the small boys and girls approached her slowly, with
cautious movement and steady gaze, like little dogs face to face with
one of their own kind, till attraction had reached the point at which
the soft lips were put out for a kiss. No child was afraid of
approaching Silas when Eppie was near him: there was no repulsion around
him now, either for young or old; for the little child had come to link
him once more with the whole world. There was love between him and the
child that blent them into one, and there was love between the child and
the world- from men and women with parental looks and tones, to the red
lady-birds and the round pebbles.

Silas began now to think of Raveloe life entirely in relation to Eppie:
she must have everything that was a good in Raveloe; and he listened
docilely, that he might come to understand better what this life was,
from which, for fifteen years, he had stood aloof as from a strange
thing, with which he could have no communion: as some man who has a
precious plant to which he would give a nurturing home in a new soil,
thinks of the rain and sunshine, and all influences, in relation to his
nursling, and asks industriously for all knowledge that will help him to
satisfy the wants of the searching roots, or to guard leaf and bud from
invading harm. The disposition to hoard had been utterly crushed at the
very first by the loss of his long-stored gold: the coins he earned
afterwards seemed as irrelevant as stones brought to complete a house
suddenly buried by an earthquake; the sense of bereavement was too heavy
upon him for the old thrill of satisfaction to arise again at the touch
of the newly-earned coin. And now something had come to replace his
hoard which gave a growing purpose to the earnings, drawing his hope and
joy continually onward beyond the money.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led
them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels
now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is
put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright
land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little
child's.

                    CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THERE was one person, as you will believe, who watched with keener
though more hidden interest than any other the prosperous growth of
Eppie under the weaver's care. He dared not do anything that would imply
a stronger interest in a poor man's adopted child than could be expected
from the kindliness of the young Squire, when a chance meeting suggested
a little present to a simple old fellow whom others noticed with
goodwill; but he told himself that the time would come when he might do
something towards furthering the welfare of his daughter without
incurring suspicions. Was he very uneasy in the meantime at his
inability to give his daughter her birthright? I cannot say that he was.
The child was being taken care of, and would very likely be happy, as
people in humble stations often were- happier, perhaps, than those who
are brought up in luxury.

That famous ring that pricked its owner when he forgot duty and followed
desire- I wonder if it pricked very hard when he set out on the chase,
or whether it pricked but lightly then, and only pierced to the quick
when the chase had long been ended, and hope, folding her wings, looked
backward and became regret?

Godfrey Cass's cheek and eye were brighter than ever now. He was so
undivided in his aims, that he seemed like a man of firmness. No Dunsey
had come back: people had made up their minds that he was gone for a
soldier, or gone 'out of the country', and no one cared to be specific
in their inquiries on a subject delicate to a respectable family.
Godfrey had ceased to see the shadow of Dunsey across his path; and the
path now lay straight forward to the accomplishment of his best,
longest-cherished wishes. Everybody said Mr Godfrey had taken the right
turn; and it was pretty clear what would be the end of things, for there
were not many days in the week that he was not seen riding to the
Warrens. Godfrey himself, when he was asked jocosely if the day had been
fixed, smiled with the pleasant consciousness of a lover who could say
'yes', if he liked. He felt a reformed man, delivered from temptation;
and the vision of his future life seemed to him as a promised land for
which he had no cause to fight. He saw himself with all his happiness
centred on his own hearth, where Nancy would smile on him as he played
with the children.

And that other child- not on the hearth- he would not forget it; he
would see that it was well provided for. That was a father's duty.

                          PART TWO


                       CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IT was a bright autumn Sunday, sixteen years after Silas Marner had
found his new treasure on the hearth. The bells of the old Raveloe
church were ringing the cheerful peal which told that the morning
service was ended; and out of the arched doorway in the tower came
slowly, retarded by friendly greetings and questions, the richer
parishioners who had chosen this bright Sunday morning as eligible for
church-going. It was the rural fashion of that time for the more
important members of the congregation to depart first, while their
humbler neighbours waited and looked on, stroking their bent heads or
dropping their curtsies to any large ratepayer who turned to notice
them.

Foremost among these advancing groups of well-clad people, there are
some whom we shall recognize, in spite of Time, who has laid his hand on
them all. The tall blond man of forty is not much changed in feature
from the Godfrey Cass of six-and-twenty: he is only fuller in flesh, and
has only lost the indefinable look of youth- a loss which is marked even
when the eye is undulled and the wrinkles are not yet come. Perhaps the
pretty woman, not much younger than he, who is leaning on his arm, is
more changed than her husband: the lovely bloom that used to be always
on her cheek now comes but fitfully, with the fresh morning air or with
some strong surprise; yet to all who love human faces best for what they
tell of human experience, Nancy's beauty has a heightened interest.
Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an
ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the
fruit. But the years have not been so cruel to Nancy. The firm yet
placid mouth, the clear veracious glance of the brown eyes, speak now of
a nature that has been tested and has kept its highest qualities; and
even the costume, with its dainty neatness and purity, has more
significance now the coquetries of youth can have nothing to do with it.

Mr and Mrs Godfrey Cass (any higher title has died away from Raveloe
lips since the old Squire was gathered to his fathers, and his
inheritance was divided) have turned round to look for the tall aged man
and the plainly-dressed woman who are a little behind- Nancy having
observed that they must wait for 'father and Priscilla'- and now they
all turn into a narrower path leading across the churchyard to a small
gate opposite the Red House. We will not follow them now; for may there
not be some others in this departing congregation whom we should like to
see again- some of those who are not likely to be handsomely clad, and
whom we may not recognize so easily as the master and mistress of the
Red House?

But it is impossible to mistake Silas Marner. His large brown eyes seem
to have gathered a longer vision, as is the way with eyes that have been
short-sighted in early life, and they have a less vague, a more
answering look; but in everything else one sees signs of a frame much
enfeebled by the lapse of the sixteen years. The weaver's bent shoulders
and white hair give him almost the look of advanced age, though he is
not more than five-and-fifty; but there is the freshest blossom of youth
close by his side- a blonde dimpled girl of eighteen, who has vainly
tried to chastise her curly auburn hair into smoothness under her brown
bonnet: the hair ripples as obstinately as a brooklet under the March
breeze, and the little ringlets burst away from the restraining comb
behind and show themselves below the bonnet-crown. Eppie cannot help
being rather vexed about her hair, for there is no other girl in Raveloe
who has hair at all like it, and she thinks hair ought to be smooth. She
does not like to be blameworthy even in small things: you see how neatly
her prayer-book is folded in her spotted handkerchief.

That good-looking young fellow, in a new fustian suit, who walks behind
her, is not quite sure upon the question of hair in the abstract, when
Eppie puts it to him, and thinks that perhaps straight hair is the best
in general, but he doesn't want Eppie's hair to be different. She surely
divines that there is someone behind her who is thinking about her very
particularly, and mustering courage to come to her side as soon as they
are out in the lane, else why should she look rather shy, and take care
not to turn away her head from her father Silas, to whom she keeps
murmuring little sentences as to who was at church and who was not at
church, and how pretty the red mountain-ash is over the Rectory wall?

'I wish we had a little garden, father, with double daisies in, like Mrs
Winthrop's,' said Eppie, when they were out in the lane; 'only they say
it 'ud take a deal of digging and bringing fresh soil- and you couldn't
do that, could you, father? Anyhow, I shouldn't like you to do it, for
it 'ud be too hard work for you.'

'Yes, I could do it, child, if you want a bit o' garden: these long
evenings, I could work at taking in a little bit o' the waste, just
enough for a root or two o' flowers for you; and again, i' the morning,
I could have a turn wi' the spade before I sat down to the loom. Why
didn't you tell me before as you wanted a bit o' garden?'

'I can dig it for you, Master Marner,' said the young man in fustian,
who was now by Eppie's side, entering into the conversation without the
trouble of formalities. 'It'll be play to me after I've done my day's
work, or any odd bits o' time when the work's slack. And I'll bring you
some soil from Mr Cass's garden- he'll let me, and willing.'

'Eh, Aaron, my lad, are you there?' said Silas; 'I wasn't aware of you;
for when Eppie's talking o' things, I see nothing but what she's
a-saying. Well, if you could help me with the digging, we might get her
a bit o' garden all the sooner.'

'Then, if you'll think well and good,' said Aaron, 'I'll come to the
Stone-pits this afternoon, and we'll settle what land's to be taken in,
and I'll get up an hour earlier i' the morning, and begin on it.'

'But not if you don't promise me not to work at the hard digging,
father,' said Eppie. 'For I shouldn't ha' said anything about it,' she
added, half-bashfully, half-roguishly, 'only Mrs Winthrop said as Aaron
'ud be so good, and--'

'And you might ha' known it without mother telling you,' said Aaron.
'And Master Marner knows too, I hope, as I'm able and willing to do a
turn o' work for him, and he won't do me the unkindness to anyways take
it out o' my hands.'

'There, now, father, you won't work in it till it's all easy,' said
Eppie, 'and you and me can mark out the beds, and make holes and plant
the roots. It'll be a deal livelier at the Stone-pits when we've got
some flowers, for I always think the flowers can see us and know what
we're talking about. And I'll have a bit o' rosemary, and bergamot, and
thyme, because they're so sweet-smelling; but there's no lavender only
in the gentlefolks' gardens, I think.'

'That's no reason why you shouldn't have some,' said Aaron, 'for I can
bring you slips of anything; I'm forced to cut no end of 'em when I'm
gardening, and throw 'em away mostly. There's a big bed o' lavender at
the Red House: the missis is very fond of it.'

'Well,' said Silas, gravely, 'so as you don't make free for us, or ask
anything as is worth much at the Red House: for Mr Cass's been so good
to us, and built us up the new end o' the cottage, and given us beds and
things, as I couldn't abide to be imposin' for garden-stuff or anything
else.'

'No, no, there's no imposin',' said Aaron; 'there's never a garden in
all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody
as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as
there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most
on, and there was never a morsel but what could find its way to a mouth.
It sets one thinking o' that- gardening does. But I must go back now,
else mother 'ull be in trouble as I aren't there.'

'Bring her with you this afternoon, Aaron,' said Eppie; 'I shouldn't
like to fix about the garden, and her not know everything from the
first- should you, father?'

'Aye, bring her if you can, Aaron,' said Silas; 'she's sure to have a
word to say as'll help us to set things on their right end.'

Aaron turned back up the village, while Silas and Eppie went on up the
lonely sheltered lane.

'Oh, daddy!' she began, when they were in privacy, clasping and
squeezing Silas's arm, and skipping round to give him an energetic kiss.
'My little old daddy! I'm so glad. I don't think I shall want anything
else when we've got a little garden; and I knew Aaron would dig it for
us,' she went on with roguish triumph- 'I knew that very well.'

'You're a deep little puss, you are,' said Silas, with the mild passive
happiness of love-crowned age in his face; 'but you'll make yourself
fine and beholden to Aaron.'

'Oh, no, I shan't,' said Eppie, laughing and frisking; 'he likes it.'

'Come, come, let me carry your prayer-book, else you'll be dropping it,
jumping i' that way.'

Eppie was now aware that her behaviour was under observation, but it was
only the observation of a friendly donkey, browsing with a log fastened
to his foot- a meek donkey, not scornfully critical of human
trivialities, but thankful to share in them, if possible, by getting his
nose scratched; and Eppie did not fail to gratify him with her usual
notice, though it was attended with the inconvenience of his following
them, painfully, up to the very door of their home.

But the sound of a sharp bark inside, as Eppie put the key in the door,
modified the donkey's views, and he limped away again without bidding.
The sharp bark was the sign of an excited welcome that was awaiting them
from a knowing brown terrier, who, after dancing at their legs in a
hysterical manner, rushed with a worrying noise at a tortoise-shell
kitten under the loom, and then rushed back with a sharp bark again, as
much as to say, 'I have done my duty by this feeble creature, you
perceive'; while the lady-mother of the kitten sat sunning her white
bosom in the window, and looked round with a sleepy air of expecting
caresses, though she was not going to take any trouble for them.

The presence of this happy animal life was not the only change which had
come over this interior of the stone cottage. There was no bed now in
the living-room, and the small space was well filled with decent
furniture, all bright and clean enough to satisfy Dolly Winthrop's eye.
The oaken table and three-cornered oaken chair were hardly what was
likely to be seen in so poor a cottage: they had come, with the beds and
other things, from the Red House; for Mr Godfrey Cass, as everyone said
in the village, did very kindly by the weaver; and it was nothing but
right a man should be looked on and helped by those who could afford it,
when he had brought up an orphan child, and been father and mother to
her- and had lost his money too, so as he had nothing but what he worked
for week by week, and when the weaving was going down too- for there was
less and less flax spun- and Master Marner was none so young. Nobody was
jealous of the weaver, for he was regarded as an exceptional person,
whose claims on neighbourly help were not to be matched in Raveloe. Any
superstition that remained concerning him had taken an entirely new
colour; and Mr Macey, now a very feeble old man of fourscore and six,
never seen except in his chimney corner or sitting in the sunshine at
his door-sill, was of opinion that when a man had done what Silas had
done by an orphan child, it was a sign that his money would come to
light again, or leastwise that the robber would be made to answer for
it- for, as Mr Macey observed of himself, his faculties were as strong
as ever.

Silas sat down now and watched Eppie with a satisfied gaze as she spread
the clean cloth, and set on it the potato-pie, warmed up slowly in a
safe Sunday fashion, by being put into a dry pot over a slowly-dying
fire, as the best substitute for an oven. For Silas would not consent to
have a grate and oven added to his conveniences: he loved the old brick
hearth as he had loved his brown pot- and was it not there when he had
found Eppie? The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new
faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots.

Silas ate his dinner more silently than usual, soon laying down his
knife and fork, and watching half-abstractedly Eppie's play with Snap
and the cat, by which her own dining was made rather a lengthy business.
Yet it was a sight that might well arrest wandering thoughts: Eppie,
with the rippling radiance of her hair and the whiteness of her rounded
chin and throat set off by the dark-blue cotton gown, laughing merrily
as the kitten held on with her four claws to one shoulder, like a design
for a jug-handle, while Snap on the right hand and puss on the other put
up their paws towards a morsel which she held out of the reach of both-
Snap occasionally desisting in order to remonstrate with the cat by a
cogent worrying growl on the greediness and futility of her conduct;
till Eppie relented, caressed them both, and divided the morsel between
them.

But at last Eppie, glancing at the clock, checked the play, and said,
'Oh, daddy, you're wanting to go into the sunshine to smoke your pipe.
But I must clear away first, so as the house may be tidy when godmother
comes. I'll make haste- I won't be long.'

Silas had taken to smoking a pipe daily during the last two years,
having been strongly urged to it by the sages of Raveloe, as a practice
'good for the fits'; and this advice was sanctioned by Dr Kimble, on the
ground that it was as well to try what could do no harm- a principle
which was made to answer for a great deal of work in that gentleman's
medical practice. Silas did not highly enjoy smoking, and often wondered
how his neighbours could be so fond of it; but a humble sort of
acquiescence in what was held to be good, had become a strong habit of
that new self which had been developed in him since he had found Eppie
on his hearth: it had been the only clue his bewildered mind could hold
by in cherishing this young life that had been sent to him out of the
darkness into which his gold had departed. By seeking what was needful
for Eppie, by sharing the effect that everything produced on her, he had
himself come to appropriate the forms of custom and belief which were
the mould of Raveloe life; and as, with reawakening sensibilities,
memory also reawakened, he had begun to ponder over the elements of his
old faith, and blend them with his new impressions, till he recovered a
consciousness of unity between his past and present. The sense of
presiding goodness and the human trust which come with all pure peace
and joy, had given him a dim impression that there had been some error,
some mistake, which had thrown that dark shadow over the days of his
best years; and as it grew more and more easy to him to open his mind to
Dolly Winthrop, he gradually communicated to her all he could describe
of his early life. The communication was necessarily a slow and
difficult process, for Silas's meagre power of explanation was not aided
by any readiness of interpretation in Dolly, whose narrow outward
experience gave her no key to strange customs, and made every novelty a
source of wonder that arrested them at every step of the narrative. It
was only by fragments, and at intervals which left Dolly time to revolve
what she had heard till it acquired some familiarity for her, that Silas
at last arrived at the climax of the sad story- the drawing of lots, and
its false testimony concerning him; and this had to be repeated in
several interviews, under new questions on her part as to the nature of
this plan for detecting the guilty and clearing the innocent.

'And yourn's the same Bible, you're sure o' that, Master Marner- the
Bible as you brought wi' you from that country- it's the same as what
they've got at church, and what Eppie's a-learning to read in?'

'Yes,' said Silas, 'every bit the same; and there's drawing o' lots in
the Bible, mind you,' he added, in a lower tone.

'Oh, dear, dear,' said Dolly, in a grieved voice, as if she were hearing
an unfavourable report of a sick man's case. She was silent for some
minutes; at last she said:

'There's wise folks, happen, as know how it all is; the parson knows,
I'll be bound; but it takes big words to tell them things, and such as
poor folks can't make much out on. I can never rightly know the meaning
o' what I hear at church, only a bit here and there, but I know it's
good words- I do. But what lies upo' your mind- it's this, Master
Marner: as, if Them above had done the right thing by you, They'd never
ha' let you be turned out for a wicked thief when you was innicent.'

'Ah!' said Silas, who had now come to understand Dolly's phraseology,
'that was what fell on me like as if it had been red-hot iron; because,
you see, there was nobody as cared for me or clave to me above nor
below. And him as I'd gone out and in wi' for ten years and more, since
when we was lads and went halves- mine own famil'ar friend, in whom I
trusted, had lifted up his heel again' me, and worked to ruin me.'

'Eh, but he was a bad un- I can't think as there's another such,' said
Dolly. 'But I'm o'ercome, Master Marner; I'm like as if I'd waked and
didn't know whether it was night or morning. I feel somehow as sure as I
do when I've laid something up though I can't justly put my hand on it,
as there was a right in what happened to you, if one could but make it
out; and you'd no call to lose heart as you did. But we'll talk on it
again; for sometimes things come into my head when I'm leeching or
poulticing, or such, as I could never think on when I was sitting
still.'

Dolly was too useful a woman not to have many opportunities of
illumination of the kind she alluded to, and she was not long before she
recurred to the subject.

'Master Marner,' she said, one day that she came to bring home Eppie's
washing, 'I've been sore puzzled for a good bit wi' that trouble o'
yourn and the drawing o' lots; and it got twisted back'ards and
for'ards, as I didn't know which end to lay hold on. But it come to me
all clear like, that night when I was sitting up wi' poor Bessy Fawkes,
as is dead and left her children behind, God help 'em- it come to me as
clear as daylight; but whether I've got hold on it now, or can anyways
bring it to my tongue's end, that I don't know. For I've often a deal
inside me as'll niver come out; and for what you talk o' your folks in
your old country niver saying prayers by heart nor saying 'em out of a
book, they must be wonderful cliver; for if I didn't know "Our Father",
and little bits o' good words as I can carry out o' church wi' me, I
might down o' my knees every night, but nothing could I say.'

'But you can mostly say something as I can make sense on, Mrs Winthrop,'
said Silas.

'Well, then, Master Marner, it come to me summat like this: I can make
nothing o' the drawing o' lots and the answer coming wrong; it 'ud
mayhap take the parson to tell that, and he could only tell us i' big
words. But what come to me as clear as the daylight, it was when I was
troubling overpoor Bessy Fawkes, and it allays comes into my head when
I'm sorry for folks, and feel as I can't do a power to help 'em, not if
I was to get up i' the middle o' the night- it comes into my head as
Them above has got a deal tenderer heart nor what I've got- for I can't
be anyways better nor Them as made me, and if anything looks hard to me,
it's because there's things I don't know on; and for the matter o' that,
there may be plenty o' things I don't know on, for it's little as I
know- that it is. And so, while I was thinking o' that, you come into my
mind, Master Marner, and it all come pouring in:-- if I felt i' my
inside what was the right and just thing by you, and them as prayed and
drawed the lots, all but that wicked un, if they'd ha' done the right
thing by you if they could, isn't there Them as was at the making on us,
and knows better and has a better will? And that's all as ever I can be
sure on, and everything else is a big puzzle to me when I think on it.
For there was the fever come and took off them as were full-growed, and
left the helpless children; and there's the breaking o' limbs; and them
as 'ud do right and be sober have to suffer by them as are contrairy-
eh, there's trouble i' this world, and there's things as we can niver
make out the rights on. And all as we've got to do is to trusten, Master
Marner- to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if
us as knows so little can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure
as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know- I feel it i'
my own inside as it must be so. And if you could but ha' gone on
trustening, Master Marner, you wouldn't ha' run away from your
fellow-creaturs and been so lone.'

'Ah, but that 'ud ha' been hard,' said Silas, in an undertone; 'it 'ud
ha' been hard to trusten then.'

'And so it would,' said Dolly, almost with compunction; 'them things are
easier said nor done; and I'm partly ashamed o' talking.'

'Nay, nay,' said Silas, 'you're i' the right, Mrs Winthrop- you're i'
the right. There's good i' this world- I've a feeling o' that now; and
it makes a man feel as there's a good more nor he can see, i' spite o'
the trouble and the wickedness. That drawing o' the lots is dark; but
the child was sent to me: there's dealings with us- there's dealings.'

This dialogue took place in Eppie's earlier years, when Silas had to
part with her for two hours every day, that she might learn to read at
the dame school, after he had vainly tried himself to guide her in that
first step to learning. Now that she was grown up, Silas had often been
led, in those moments of quiet outpouring which come to people who live
together in perfect love, to talk with her too of the past, and how and
why he had lived a lonely man until she had been sent to him. For it
would have been impossible for him to hide from Eppie that she was not
his own child: even if the most delicate reticence on the point could
have been expected from Raveloe gossips in her presence, her own
questions about her mother could not have been parried, as she grew up,
without that complete shrouding of the past which would have made a
painful barrier between their minds. So Eppie had long known how her
mother had died on the snowy ground, and how she herself had been found
on the hearth by father Silas, who had taken her golden curls for his
lost guineas brought back to him. The tender and peculiar love with
which Silas had reared her in almost inseparable companionship with
himself, aided by the seclusion of their dwelling, had preserved her
from the lowering influences of the village talk and habits, and had
kept her mind in that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to
be an invariable attribute of rusticity. Perfect love has a breath of
poetry which can exalt the relations of the least instructed human
beings; and this breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie from the time
when she had followed the bright gleam that beckoned her to Silas's
hearth; so that it is not surprising if, in other things besides her
delicate prettiness, she was not quite a common village maiden, but had
a touch of refinement and fervour which came from no other teaching than
that of tenderly nurtured and unvitiated feeling. She was too childish
and simple for her imagination to rove into questions about her unknown
father; for a long while it did not even occur to her that she must have
had a father; and the first time that the idea of her mother having had
a husband presented itself to her, was when Silas showed her the
wedding-ring which had been taken from the wasted finger, and had been
carefully preserved by him in a little lacquered box shaped like a shoe.
He delivered this box into Eppie's charge when she had grown up, and she
often opened it to look at the ring; but still she thought hardly at all
about the father to whom it was the symbol. Had she not a father very
close to her, who loved her better than any real fathers in the village
seemed to love their daughters? On the contrary, who her mother was, and
how she came to die in that forlornness, were questions that often
pressed on Eppie's mind. Her knowledge of Mrs Winthrop, who was her
nearest friend next to Silas, made her feel that a mother must be very
precious; and she had again and again asked Silas to tell her how her
mother looked, whom she was like, and how he had found her against the
furze bush, led towards it by the little footsteps and the outstretched
arms. The furze bush was there still; and this afternoon, when Eppie
came out with Silas into the sunshine, it was the first object that
arrested her eyes and thoughts.

'Father,' she said, in a tone of gentle gravity, which sometimes came
like a sadder, slower cadence across her playfulness, 'we shall take the
furze bush into the garden; it'll come into the corner, and just against
it I'll put snowdrops and crocuses, 'cause Aaron says they won't die
out, but'll always get more and more.'

'Ah, child,' said Silas, always ready to talk when he had his pipe in
his hand, apparently enjoying the pauses more than the puffs, 'it
wouldn't do to leave out the furze bush; and there's nothing prettier,
to my thinking, when it's yallow with flowers. But it's just come into
my head what we're to do for a fence- mayhap Aaron can help us to a
thought; but a fence we must have, else the donkeys and things 'ull come
and trample everything down. And fencing's hard to be got at, by what I
can make out.'

'Oh, I'll tell you, daddy,' said Eppie, clasping her hands suddenly,
after a minute's thought. 'There's lots o' loose stones about, some of
'em not big, and we might lay 'em atop of one another and make a wall.
You and me could carry the smallest, and Aaron 'ud carry the rest- I
know he would.'

'Eh, my precious un,' said Silas, 'there isn't enough stones to go all
round; and as for you carrying, why wi' your little arms you couldn't
carry a stone no bigger than a turnip. You're dillicate made, my dear,'
he added, with a tender intonation- 'that's what Mrs Winthrop says.'

'Oh, I'm stronger than you think, daddy,' said Eppie; 'and if there
wasn't stones enough to go all round, why they'll go part o' the way,
and then it'll be easier to get sticks and things for the rest. See
here, round the big pit, what a many stones!'

She skipped forward to the pit, meaning to lift one of the stones and
exhibit her strength, but she started back in surprise.

'Oh, father, just come and look here,' she exclaimed- 'come and see how
the water's gone down since yesterday. Why, yesterday the pit was ever
so full!'

'Well, to be sure,' said Silas, coming to her side. 'Why, that's the
draining they've begun on, since harvest, i' Mr Osgood's fields, I
reckon. The foreman said to me the other day, when I passed by 'em,
"Master Marner," he said, "I shouldn't wonder if we lay your bit o'
waste as dry as a bone." It was Mr Godfrey Cass, he said, had gone into
the draining: he'd been taking these fields o' Mr Osgood.'

'How odd it'll seem to have the old pit dried up,' said Eppie, turning
away, and stooping to lift rather a large stone. 'See, daddy, I can
carry this quite well,' she said, going along with much energy for a few
steps, but presently letting it fall.

'Ah, you're fine and strong, arn't you?' said Silas, while Eppie shook
her aching arms and laughed. 'Come, come, let us go and sit down on the
bank against the stile there, and have no more lifting. You might hurt
yourself, child. You'd need have somebody to work for you- and my arm
isn't over strong.'

Silas uttered the last sentence slowly, as if it implied more than met
the ear; and Eppie, when they sat down on the bank, nestled close to his
side, and, taking hold caressingly of the arm that was not over strong,
held it on her lap, while Silas puffed again dutifully at the pipe,
which occupied his other arm. An ash in the hedgerow behind made a
fretted screen from the sun, and threw happy playful shadows all about
them.

'Father,' said Eppie, very gently, after they had been sitting in
silence a little while, 'if I was to be married, ought I to be married
with my mother's ring?'

Silas gave an almost imperceptible start, though the question fell in
with the undercurrent of thought in his own mind, and then said, in a
subdued tone, 'Why, Eppie, have you been a-thinking on it?'

'Only this last week, father,' said Eppie, ingenuously, 'since Aaron
talked to me about it.'

'And what did he say?' said Silas, still in the same subdued way, as if
he were anxious lest he should fall into the slightest tone that was not
for Eppie's good.

'He said he should like to be married, because he was a-going in
four-and-twenty, and had got a deal of gardening work, now Mr Mott's
given up; and he goes twice a-week regular to Mr Cass's, and once to Mr
Osgood's, and they're going to take him on at the Rectory.'

'And who is it as he's wanting to marry?' said Silas, with rather a sad
smile.

'Why, me, to be sure, daddy,' said Eppie, with dimpling laughter,
kissing her father's cheek; 'as if he'd want to marry anybody else!'

'And you mean to have him, do you?' said Silas.

'Yes, some time,' said Eppie, 'I don't know when. Everybody's married
some time, Aaron says. But I told him that wasn't true; for, I said,
look at father- he's never been married.'

'No, child,' said Silas, 'your father was a lone man till you was sent
to him.'

'But you'll never be lone again, father,' said Eppie, tenderly. 'That
was what Aaron said- "I could never think o' taking you away from Master
Marner, Eppie." And I said, "It 'ud be no use if you did, Aaron." And he
wants us all to live together, so as you needn't work a bit, father,
only what's for your own pleasure; and he'd be as good as a son to you-
that was what he said.'

'And should you like that, Eppie?' said Silas, looking at her.

'I shouldn't mind it, father,' said Eppie, quite simply. 'And I should
like things to be so as you needn't work much. But if it wasn't for
that, I'd sooner things didn't change. I'm very happy: I like Aaron to
be fond of me, and come and see us often, and behave pretty to you- he
always does behave pretty to you, doesn't he, father?'

'Yes, child, nobody could behave better,' said Silas, emphatically.
'He's his mother's lad.'

'But I don't want any change,' said Eppie. 'I should like to go on a
long, long while, just as we are. Only Aaron does want a change; and he
made me cry a bit- only a bit- because he said I didn't care for him,
for if I cared for him I should want us to be married, as he did.'

'Eh, my blessed child,' said Silas, laying down his pipe as if it were
useless to pretend to smoke any longer, 'you're o'er young to be
married. We'll ask Mrs Winthrop- we'll ask Aaron's mother what she
thinks: if there's a right thing to do, she'll come at it. But there's
this to be thought on, Eppie: things will change, whether we like it or
not; things won't go on for a long while just as they are and no
difference. I shall get older and helplesser, and be a burden on you,
belike, if I don't go away from you altogether. Not as I mean you'd
think me a burden- I know you wouldn't- but it 'ud be hard upon you; and
when I look for'ard to that, I like to think as you'd have somebody else
besides me- somebody young and strong, as'll outlast your own life, and
take care on you to the end.' Silas paused, and, resting his wrists on
his knees, lifted his hands up and down meditatively as he looked on the
ground.

'Then, would you like me to be married, father?' said Eppie, with a
little trembling in her voice.

'I'll not be the man to say no, Eppie,' said Silas, emphatically; 'but
we'll ask your godmother. She'll wish the right thing by you and her son
too.'

'There they come, then,' said Eppie. 'Let us go and meet 'em. Oh, the
pipe! won't you have it lit again, father?' said Eppie, lifting that
medicinal appliance from the ground.

'Nay, child,' said Silas, 'I've done enough for today. I think, mayhap,
a little of it does me more good than so much at once.'

                    CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

WHILE Silas and Eppie were seated on the bank discoursing in the
fleckered shade of the ash tree, Miss Priscilla Lammeter was resisting
her sister's arguments, that it would be better to stay tea at the Red
House, and let her father have a long nap, than drive home to the
Warrens so soon after dinner. The family party (of four only) were
seated round the table in the dark wainscoted parlour, with the Sunday
dessert before them, of fresh filberts, apples, and pears, duly
ornamented with leaves by Nancy's own hand before the bells had rung for
church.

A great change has come over the dark wainscoted parlour since we saw it
in Godfrey's bachelor days, and under the wifeless reign of the old
Squire. Now all is polish, on which no yesterday's dust is ever allowed
to settle, from the yard's width of oaken boards round the carpet, to
the old Squire's gun and whips and walking-sticks, ranged on the stag's
antlers above the mantelpiece. All other signs of sporting and outdoor
occupation Nancy has removed to another room; but she has brought into
the Red House the habit of filial reverence, and preserves sacredly in a
place of honour these relics of her husband's departed father. The
tankards are on the side table still, but the bossed silver is undimmed
by handling, and there are no dregs to send forth unpleasant
suggestions: the only prevailing scent is of the lavender and
rose-leaves that fill the vases of Derbyshire spar. All is purity and
order in this once dreary room, for, fifteen years ago, it was entered
by a new presiding spirit.

'Now, father,' said Nancy, 'is there any call for you to go home to tea?
Mayn't you just as well stay with us?- such a beautiful evening as it's
likely to be.'

The old gentleman had been talking with Godfrey about the increasing
poor-rate and the ruinous times, and had not heard the dialogue between
his daughters.

'My dear, you must ask Priscilla,' he said, in the once firm voice, now
become rather broken. 'She manages me and the farm too.'

'And reason good as I should manage you, father,' said Priscilla, 'else
you'd be giving yourself your death with rheumatism. And as for the
farm, if anything turns out wrong, as it can't but do in these times,
there's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with
but himself. It's a deal the best way o' being master, to let somebody
else do the ordering, and keep the blaming in your own hands. It 'ud
save many a man a stroke, I believe.'

'Well, well, my dear,' said her father, with a quiet laugh, 'I didn't
say you don't manage for everybody's good.'

'Then manage so as you may stay tea, Priscilla,' said Nancy, putting her
hand on her sister's arm affectionately. 'Come, now; and we'll go round
the garden while father has his nap.'

'My dear child, he'll have a beautiful nap in the gig, for I shall
drive. And as for staying tea, I can't hear of it; for there's this
dairymaid, now she knows she's to be married, turned Michaelmas, she'd
as lieve pour the new milk into the pig-trough as into the pans. That's
the way with 'em all: it's as if they thought the world 'ud be new-made
because they're to be married. So come and let me put my bonnet on, and
there'll be time for us to walk round the garden while the horse is
being put in.'

When the sisters were treading the neatly-swept garden-walks, between
the bright turf that contrasted pleasantly with the dark cones and
arches and wall-like hedges of yew, Priscilla said:

'I'm as glad as anything at your husband's making that exchange o' land
with cousin Osgood, and beginning the dairying. It's a thousand pities
you didn't do it before; for it'll give you something to fill your mind.
There's nothing like a dairy if folks want a bit o' worrit to make the
days pass. For as for rubbing furniture, when you can once see your face
in a table there's nothing else to look for; but there's always
something fresh with the dairy; for even in the depths o' winter there's
some pleasure in conquering the butter, and making it come whether or
no. My dear,' added Priscilla, pressing her sister's hand affectionately
as they walked side by side, 'you'll never be low when you've got a
dairy.'

'Ah, Priscilla,' said Nancy, returning the pressure with a grateful
glance of her clear eyes, 'but it won't make up to Godfrey: a dairy's
not so much to a man. And it's only what he cares for that ever makes me
low. I'm contented with the blessings we have, if he could be
contented.'

'It drives me past patience,' said Priscilla, impetuously, 'that way o'
the men- always wanting and wanting, and never easy with what they've
got: they can't sit comfortable in their chairs when they've neither
ache nor pain, but either they must stick a pipe in their mouths, to
make 'em better than well, or else they must be swallowing something
strong, though they're forced to make haste before the next meal comes
in. But, joyful be it spoken, our father was never that sort o' man. And
if it had pleased God to make you ugly, like me, so as the men wouldn't
ha' run after you, we might have kept to our own family, and had nothing
to do with folks as have got uneasy blood in their veins.'

'Oh, don't say so, Priscilla,' said Nancy, repenting that she had called
forth this outburst; 'nobody has any occasion to find fault with
Godfrey. It's natural he should be disappointed at not having any
children: every man likes to have somebody to work for and lay by for,
and he always counted so on making a fuss with 'em when they were
little. There's many another man 'ud hanker more than he does. He's the
best of husbands.'

'Oh, I know,' said Priscilla, smiling sarcastically, 'I know the way o'
wives; they set one on to abuse their husbands, and then they turn round
on one and praise 'em as if they wanted to sell 'em. But father'll be
waiting for me; we must turn now.'

The large gig with the steady old grey was at the front door, and Mr
Lammeter was already on the stone steps, passing the time in recalling
to Godfrey what very fine points Speckle had when his master used to
ride him.

'I always would have a good horse, you know,' said the old gentleman,
not liking that spirited time to be quite effaced from the memory of his
juniors.

'Mind you bring Nancy to the Warrens before the week's out, Mr Cass,'
was Priscilla's parting injunction, as she took the reins, and shook
them gently, by way of friendly incitement to Speckle.

'I shall just take a turn to the fields against the Stone-pits, Nancy,
and look at the draining,' said Godfrey.

'You'll be in again by tea-time, dear?'

'Oh, yes, I shall be back in an hour.'

It was Godfrey's custom on a Sunday afternoon to do a little
contemplative farming in a leisurely walk. Nancy seldom accompanied him;
for the women of her generation- unless like Priscilla, they took to
outdoor management- were not given to much walking beyond their own
house and garden, finding sufficient exercise in domestic duties. So,
when Priscilla was not with her, she usually sat with Mant's Bible
before her, and after following the text with her eyes for a little
while, she would gradually permit them to wander as her thoughts had
already insisted on wandering.

But Nancy's Sunday thoughts were rarely quite out of keeping with the
devout and reverential intention implied by the book spread open before
her. She was not theologically instructed enough to discern very clearly
the relation between the sacred documents of the past which she opened
without method, and her own obscure, simple life; but the spirit of
rectitude, and the sense of responsibility for the effect of her conduct
on others, which were strong elements in Nancy's character, had made it
a habit with her to scrutinize her past feelings and actions with
self-questioning solicitude. Her mind not being courted by a great
variety of subjects, she filled the vacant moments by living inwardly,
again and again, through all her remembered experience, especially
through the fifteen years of her married time, in which her life and its
significance had been doubled. She recalled the small details, the
words, tones, and looks, in the critical scenes which had opened a new
epoch for her, by giving her a deeper insight into the relations and
trials of life, or which had called on her for some little effort of
forbearance, or of painful adherence to an imagined or real duty- asking
herself continually whether she had been in any respect blameable. This
excessive rumination and self-questioning is perhaps a morbid habit
inevitable to a mind of much moral sensibility when shut out from its
due share of outward activity and of practical claims on its affections-
inevitable to a noble-hearted, childless woman, when her lot is narrow.
'I can do so little- have I done it all well?' is the perpetually
recurring thought; and there are no voices calling her away from that
soliloquy, no peremptory demands to divert energy from vain regret or
superfluous scruple.

There was one main thread of painful experience in Nancy's married life,
and on it hung certain deeply-felt scenes, which were the oftenest
revived in retrospect. The short dialogue with Priscilla in the garden
had determined the current of retrospect in that frequent direction this
particular Sunday afternoon. The first wandering of her thought from the
text, which she still attempted dutifully to follow with her eyes and
silent lips, was into an imaginary enlargement of the defence she had
set up for her husband against Priscilla's implied blame. The
vindication of the loved object is the best balm affection can find for
its wounds: 'A man must have so much on his mind,' is the belief by
which a wife often supports a cheerful face under rough answers and
unfeeling words. And Nancy's deepest wounds had all come from the
perception that the absence of children from their hearth was dwelt on
in her husband's mind as a privation to which he could not reconcile
himself.

Yet sweet Nancy might have been expected to feel still more keenly the
denial of a blessing to which she had looked forward with all the varied
expectations and preparations, solemn and prettily trivial, which fill
the mind of a loving woman when she expects to become a mother. Was
there not a drawer filled with the neat work of her hands, all unworn
and untouched, just as she had arranged it there fourteen years ago-
just, but for one little dress, which had been made the burial-dress?
But under this immediate personal trial Nancy was so firmly unmurmuring,
that years ago she had suddenly renounced the habit of visiting this
drawer, lest she should in this way be cherishing a longing for what was
not given.

Perhaps it was this very severity towards any indulgence of what she
held to be sinful regret in herself, that made her shrink from applying
her own standard to her husband. 'It was very different- it was much
worse for a man to be disappointed in that way: a woman could always be
satisfied with devoting herself to her husband, but a man wanted
something that would make him look forward more- and sitting by the fire
was so much duller to him than to a woman.' And always, when Nancy
reached this point in her meditations- trying, with predetermined
sympathy, to see everything as Godfrey saw it- there came a renewal of
self-questioning. Had she done everything in her power to lighten
Godfrey's privation? Had she really been right in the resistance which
had caused her so much pain six years ago, and again four years ago- the
resistance to her husband's wish that they should adopt a child?
Adoption was more remote from the ideas and habits of that time than of
our own; still Nancy had her opinion on it. It was as necessary to her
mind to have an opinion on all topics, not exclusively masculine, that
had come under her notice, as for her to have a precisely marked place
for every article of her personal property: and her opinions were always
principles, to be unwaveringly acted on. They were firm, not because of
their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity inseparable from
her mental action. On all the duties and proprieties of life, from
filial behaviour to the arrangement of the evening toilette, pretty
Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was three-and-twenty, had her
unalterable little code, and had formed every one of her habits in
strict accordance with that code. She carried these decided judgments
within her in the most unobtrusive way: they rooted themselves in her
mind, and grew there as quietly as grass. Years ago, we know, she
insisted on dressing like Priscilla, because 'it was right for sisters
to dress alike', and because 'she would do what was right if she wore a
gown dyed with cheese-colouring'. That was a trivial but typical
instance of the mode in which Nancy's life was regulated.

It was one of those rigid principles, and no petty egoistic feeling,
which had been the ground of Nancy's difficult resistance to her
husband's wish. To adopt a child, because children of your own had been
denied you, was to try and choose your lot in spite of Providence: the
adopted child, she was convinced, would never turn out well, and would
be a curse to those who had wilfully and rebelliously sought what it was
clear that, for some high reason, they were better without. When you saw
a thing was not meant to be, said Nancy, it was a bounden duty to leave
off so much as wishing for it. And so far, perhaps, the wisest of men
could scarcely make more than a verbal improvement in her principle. But
the conditions under which she held it apparent that a thing was not
meant to be, depended on a more peculiar mode of thinking. She would
have given up making a purchase at a particular place if, on three
successive times, rain, or some other cause of Heaven's sending, had
formed an obstacle; and she would have anticipated a broken limb or
other heavy misfortune to anyone who persisted in spite of such
indications.

'But why should you think the child would turn out ill?' said Godfrey,
in his remonstrances. 'She has thriven as well as child can do with the
weaver; and he adopted her. There isn't such a pretty little girl
anywhere else in the parish, or one fitter for the station we could give
her. Where can be the likelihood of her being a curse to anybody?'

'Yes, my dear Godfrey,' said Nancy, who was sitting with her hands
tightly clasped together, with yearning, regretful affection in her
eyes. 'The child may not turn out ill with the weaver. But, then, he
didn't go to seek her, as we should be doing. It will be wrong: I feel
sure it will. Don't you remember what that lady we met at the Royston
Baths told us about the child her sister adopted? That was the only
adopting I ever heard of: and the child was transported when it was
twenty-three. Dear Godfrey, don't ask me to do what I know is wrong: I
should never be happy again. I know it's very hard for you- it's easier
for me- but it's the will of Providence.'

It might seem singular that Nancy- with her religious theory pieced
together out of narrow social traditions, fragments of church doctrine
imperfectly understood, and girlish reasonings on her small experience-
should have arrived by herself at a way of thinking so nearly akin to
that of many devout people, whose beliefs are held in the shape of a
system quite remote from her knowledge- singular, if we did not know
that human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers
of system.

Godfrey had from the first specified Eppie, then about twelve years old,
as a child suitable for them to adopt. It had never occurred to him that
Silas would rather part with his life than with Eppie. Surely the weaver
would wish the best to the child he had taken so much trouble with, and
would be glad that such good fortune should happen to her: she would
always be very grateful to him, and he would be well provided for to the
end of his life- provided for as the excellent part he had done by the
child deserved. Was it not an appropriate thing for people in a higher
station to take a charge off the hands of a man in a lower? It seemed an
eminently appropriate thing to Godfrey, for reasons that were known only
to himself; and by a common fallacy, he imagined the measure would be
easy because he had private motives for desiring it. This was rather a
coarse mode of estimating Silas's relation to Eppie; but we must
remember that many of the impressions which Godfrey was likely to gather
concerning the labouring people around him would favour the idea that
deep affections can hardly go along with callous palms and scant means;
and he had not had the opportunity, even if he had had the power, of
entering intimately into all that was exceptional in the weaver's
experience. It was only the want of adequate knowledge that could have
made it possible for Godfrey deliberately to entertain an unfeeling
project: his natural kindness had outlived that blighting time of cruel
wishes, and Nancy's praise of him as a husband was not founded entirely
on a wilful illusion.

'I was right,' she said to herself, when she had recalled all their
scenes of discussion- 'I feel I was right to say him nay, though it hurt
me more than anything; but how good Godfrey has been about it! Many men
would have been very angry with me for standing out again their wishes;
and they might have thrown out that they'd had ill-luck in marrying me;
but Godfrey has never been the man to say me an unkind word. It's only
what he can't hide: everything seems so blank to him, I know; and the
land- what a difference it 'ud make to him, when he goes to see after
things, if he'd children growing up that he was doing it all for! But I
won't murmur; and perhaps if he'd married a woman who'd have had
children, she'd have vexed him in other ways.'

This possibility was Nancy's chief comfort; and to give it greater
strength, she laboured to make it impossible that any other wife should
have had more perfect tenderness. She had been forced to vex him by that
one denial. Godfrey was not insensible to her loving effort, and did
Nancy no injustice as to the motives of her obstinacy. It was impossible
to have lived with her fifteen years and not be aware that an unselfish
clinging to the right, and a sincerity clear as the flower-born dew,
were her main characteristics; indeed, Godfrey felt this so strongly,
that his own more wavering nature, too averse to facing difficulty to be
unvaryingly simple and truthful, was kept in a certain awe of this
gentle wife who watched his looks with a yearning to obey them. It
seemed to him impossible that he should ever confess to her the truth
about Eppie: she would never recover from the repulsion the story of his
earlier marriage would create, told to her now, after that long
concealment. And the child, too, he thought, must become an object of
repulsion: the very sight of her would be painful. The shock to Nancy's
mingled pride and ignorance of the world's evil might even be too much
for her delicate frame. Since he had married her with that secret on his
heart he must keep it there to the last. Whatever else he did, he could
not make an irreparable breach between himself and this long-loved wife.

Meanwhile, why could he not make up his mind to the absence of children
from a hearth brightened by such a wife? Why did his mind fly uneasily
to that void, as if it were the sole reason why life was not thoroughly
joyous to him? I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach
middle age without the clear perception that life never can be
thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours,
dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation
of an untried good. Dissatisfaction, seated musingly on a childless
hearth, thinks with envy of the father whose return is greeted by young
voices- seated at the meal where the little heads rise one above another
like nursery plants, it sees a black care hovering behind every one of
them, and thinks the impulses by which men abandon freedom, and seek for
ties, are surely nothing but a brief madness. In Godfrey's case there
were further reasons why his thoughts should be continually solicited by
this one point in his lot: his conscience, never thoroughly easy about
Eppie, now gave his childless home the aspect of a retribution; and as
the time passed on, under Nancy's refusal to adopt her, any retrieval of
his error became more and more difficult.

On this Sunday afternoon it was already four years since there had been
any allusion to the subject between them, and Nancy supposed that it was
for ever buried.

'I wonder if he'll mind it less or more as he gets older,' she thought;
'I'm afraid more. Aged people feel the miss of children: what would
father do without Priscilla? And if I die, Godfrey will be very lonely-
not holding together with his brothers much. But I won't be
over-anxious, and trying to make things out beforehand: I must do my
best for the present.'

With that last thought Nancy roused herself from her reverie, and turned
her eyes again towards the forsaken page. It had been forsaken longer
than she imagined, for she was presently surprised by the appearance of
the servant with the tea-things. It was, in fact, a little before the
usual time for tea; but Jane had her reasons.

'Is your master come into the yard, Jane?'

'No 'm, he isn't,' said Jane, with a slight emphasis, of which, however,
her mistress took no notice.

'I don't know whether you've seen 'em, 'm,' continued Jane, after a
pause, 'but there's folks making haste all one way, afore the front
window. I doubt something's happened. There's niver a man to be seen i'
the yard, else I'd send and see. I've been up into the top attic, but
there's no seeing anything for trees. I hope nobody's hurt, that's all.'

'Oh, no, I daresay there's nothing much the matter,' said Nancy. 'It's
perhaps Mr Snell's bull got out again, as he did before.'

'I wish he mayn't gore anybody, then, that's all,' said Jane, not
altogether despising a hypothesis which covered a few imaginary
calamities.

'That girl is always terrifying me,' thought Nancy; 'I wish Godfrey
would come in.'

She went to the front window and looked as far as she could see along
the road, with an uneasiness which she felt to be childish, for there
were now no such signs of excitement as Jane had spoken of, and Godfrey
would not be likely to return by the village road, but by the fields.
She continued to stand, however, looking at the placid churchyard with
the long shadows of the gravestones across the bright green hillocks,
and at the glowing autumn colours of the Rectory trees beyond. Before
such calm external beauty the presence of a vague fear is more
distinctly felt- like a raven flapping its slow wing across the sunny
air. Nancy wished more and more that Godfrey would come in.

                       CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SOME one opened the door at the other end of the room, and Nancy felt
that it was her husband. She turned from the window with gladness in her
eyes, for the wife's chief dread was stilled.

'Dear, I'm so thankful you're come,' she said, going towards him. 'I
began to get--'

She paused abruptly, for Godfrey was laying down his hat with trembling
hands, and turned towards her with a pale face and a strange unanswering
glance, as if he saw her indeed, but saw her as part of a scene
invisible to herself. She laid her hand on his arm, not daring to speak
again; but he left the touch unnoticed, and threw himself into his
chair.

Jane was already at the door with the hissing urn. 'Tell her to keep
away, will you?' said Godfrey; and when the door was closed again he
exerted himself to speak more distinctly.

'Sit down, Nancy- there,' he said, pointing to a chair opposite him. 'I
came back as soon as I could, to hinder anybody's telling you but me.
I've had a great shock- but I care most about the shock it'll be to
you.'

'It isn't father and Priscilla?' said Nancy, with quivering lips,
clasping her hands together tightly on her lap.

'No, it's nobody living,' said Godfrey, unequal to the considerate skill
with which he would have wished to make his revelation. 'It's Dunstan-
my brother Dunstan, that we lost sight of sixteen years ago. We've found
him- found his body- his skeleton.'

The deep dread Godfrey's look had created in Nancy made her feel these
words a relief. She sat in comparative calmness to hear what else he had
to tell. He went on:

'The Stone-pit has gone dry suddenly- from the draining, I suppose; and
there he lies- has lain for sixteen years, wedged between two great
stones. There's his watch and seals, and there's my gold-handled hunting
whip, with my name on: he took it away, without my knowing, the day he
went hunting on Wildfire, the last time he was seen.'

Godfrey paused: it was not so easy to say what came next. 'Do you think
he drowned himself?' said Nancy, almost wondering that her husband
should be so deeply shaken by what had happened all those years ago to
an unloved brother, of whom worse things had been augured.

'No, he fell in,' said Godfrey, in a low but distinct voice, as if he
felt some deep meaning in the fact. Presently he added: 'Dunstan was the
man that robbed Silas Marner.'

The blood rushed to Nancy's face and neck at this surprise and shame,
for she had been bred up to regard even a distant kinship with crime as
a dishonour.

'Oh, Godfrey!' she said, with compassion in her tone, for she had
immediately reflected that the dishonour must be felt still more keenly
by her husband.

'There was the money in the pit,' he continued- 'all the weaver's money.
Everything's being gathered up, and they're taking the skeleton to the
Rainbow. But I came back to tell you: there was no hindering it; you
must know.'

He was silent, looking on the ground for two long minutes. Nancy would
have said some words of comfort under this disgrace, but she refrained,
from an instinctive sense that there was something behind- that Godfrey
had something else to tell her. Presently he lifted his eyes to her
face, and kept them fixed on her, as he said:

'Everything comes to light, Nancy, sooner or later. When God Almighty
wills it, our secrets are found out. I've lived with a secret on my
mind, but I'll keep it from you no longer. I wouldn't have you know it
by somebody else, and not by me- I wouldn't have you find it out after
I'm dead. I'll tell you now. It's been "I will" and "I won't" with me
all my life- I'll make sure of myself now.'

Nancy's utmost dread had returned. The eyes of the husband and wife met
with awe in them, as at a crisis which suspended affection.

'Nancy,' said Godfrey, slowly, 'when I married you, I hid something from
you- something I ought to have told you. That woman Marner found dead in
the snow- Eppie's mother- that wretched woman- was my wife: Eppie is my
child.'

He paused, dreading the effect of his confession. But Nancy sat quite
still, only that her eyes dropped and ceased to meet his. She was pale
and quiet as a meditative statue, clasping her hands on her lap.

'You'll never think the same of me again,' said Godfrey, after a little
while, with some tremor in his voice.

She was silent.

'I oughtn't to have left the child unowned: I oughtn't to have kept it
from you. But I couldn't bear to give you up, Nancy. I was led away into
marrying her- I suffered for it.'

Still Nancy was silent, looking down; and he almost expected that she
would presently get up and say she would go to her father's. How could
she have any mercy for faults that must seem so black to her, with her
simple, severe notions?

But at last she lifted up her eyes to his again and spoke. There was no
indignation in her voice- only deep regret.

'Godfrey, if you had but told me this six years ago, we could have done
some of our duty by the child. Do you think I'd have refused to take her
in, if I'd known she was yours?'

At that moment Godfrey felt all the bitterness of an error that was not
simply futile, but had defeated its own end. He had not measured this
wife with whom he had lived so long. But she spoke again, with more
agitation.

'And- Oh, Godfrey- if we'd had her from the first, if you'd taken to her
as you ought, she'd have loved me for her mother- and you'd have been
happier with me: I could better have bore my little baby dying, and our
life might have been more like what we used to think it 'ud be.'

The tears fell, and Nancy ceased to speak.

'But you wouldn't have married me then, Nancy, if I'd told you,' said
Godfrey, urged, in the bitterness of his self-reproach, to prove to
himself that his conduct had not been utter folly. 'You may think you
would now, but you wouldn't then. With your pride and your father's,
you'd have hated having anything to do with me after the talk there'd
have been.'

'I can't say what I should have done about that, Godfrey. I should never
have married anybody else. But I wasn't worth doing wrong for- nothing
is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand- not even
our marrying wasn't, you see.' There was a faint sad smile on Nancy's
face as she said the last words.

'I'm a worse man than you thought I was, Nancy,' said Godfrey, rather
tremulously. 'Can you forgive me ever?'

'The wrong to me is but little, Godfrey: you've made it up to me- you've
been good to me for fifteen years. It's another you did the wrong to;
and I doubt it can never be all made up for.'

'But we can take Eppie now,' said Godfrey. 'I won't mind the world
knowing at last. I'll be plain and open for the rest o' my life.'

'It'll be different coming to us, now she's grown up,' said Nancy,
shaking her head sadly. 'But it's your duty to acknowledge her and
provide for her; and I'll do my part by her, and pray to God Almighty to
make her love me.'

'Then we'll go together to Silas Marner's this very night, as soon as
everything's quiet at the Stone-pits.'

                    CHAPTER NINETEEN

BETWEEN eight and nine o'clock that evening, Eppie and Silas were seated
alone in the cottage. After the great excitement the weaver had
undergone from the events of the afternoon, he had felt a longing for
this quietude, and had even begged Mrs Winthrop and Aaron, who had
naturally lingered behind everyone else, to leave him alone with his
child. The excitement had not passed away: it had only reached that
stage when the keenness of the susceptibility makes external stimulus
intolerable- when there is no sense of weariness, but rather an
intensity of inward life, under which sleep is an impossibility. Anyone
who has watched such moments in other men remembers the brightness of
the eyes and the strange definiteness that comes over coarse features
from that transient influence. It is as if a new fineness of ear for all
spiritual voices had sent wonder-working vibrations through the heavy
mortal frame- as if 'beauty born of murmuring sound' had passed into the
face of the listener.

Silas's face showed that sort of transfiguration, as he sat in his
arm-chair and looked at Eppie. She had drawn her own chair towards his
knees, and leaned forward, holding both his hands, while she looked up
at him. On the table near them, lit by a candle, lay the recovered gold-
the old long-loved gold, ranged in orderly heaps, as Silas used to range
it in the days when it was his only joy. He had been telling her how he
used to count it every night, and how his soul was utterly desolate till
she was sent to him.

'At first, I'd a sort o' feeling come across me now and then,' he was
saying in a subdued tone, 'as if you might be changed into the gold
again; for sometimes, turn my head which way I would, I seemed to see
the gold; and I thought I should be glad if I could feel it, and find it
was come back. But that didn't last long. After a bit, I should have
thought it was a curse come again, if it had drove you from me, for I'd
got to feel the need o' your looks and your voice and the touch o' your
little fingers. You didn't know then, Eppie, when you were such a little
un- you didn't know what your old father Silas felt for you.'

'But I know now, father,' said Eppie. 'If it hadn't been for you, they'd
have taken me to the workhouse, and there'd have been nobody to love
me.'

'Eh, my precious child, the blessing was mine. If you hadn't been sent
to save me, I should ha' gone to the grave in my misery. The money was
taken away from me in time; and you see it's been kept- kept till it was
wanted for you. It's wonderful- our life is wonderful.'

Silas sat in silence a few minutes, looking at the money. 'It takes no
hold of me now,' he said, ponderingly- 'the money doesn't. I wonder if
it ever could again- I doubt it might, if I lost you, Eppie. I might
come to think I was forsaken again, and lose the feeling that God was
good to me.'

At that moment there was a knocking at the door; and Eppie was obliged
to rise without answering Silas. Beautiful she looked, with the
tenderness of gathering tears in her eyes and a slight flush on her
cheeks, as she stepped to open the door. The flush deepened when she saw
Mr and Mrs Godfrey Cass. She made her little rustic curtsy, and held the
door wide for them to enter.

'We're disturbing you very late, my dear,' said Mrs Cass, taking Eppie's
hand, and looking in her face with an expression of anxious interest and
admiration. Nancy herself was pale and tremulous. Eppie, after placing
chairs for Mr and Mrs Cass, went to stand against Silas, opposite to
them.

'Well, Marner,' said Godfrey, trying to speak with perfect firmness,
'it's a great comfort to me to see you with your money again, that
you've been deprived of so many years. It was one of my family did you
the wrong- the more grief to me- and I feel bound to make up to you for
it in every way. Whatever I can do for you will be nothing but paying a
debt, even if I looked no farther than the robbery. But there are other
things I'm beholden- shall be beholden to you for, Marner.'

Godfrey checked himself. It had been agreed between him and his wife
that the subject of his fatherhood should be approached very carefully,
and that, if possible, the disclosure should be reserved for the future,
so that it might be made to Eppie gradually. Nancy had urged this,
because she felt strongly the painful light in which Eppie must
inevitably see the relation between her father and mother.

Silas, always ill at ease when he was being spoken to by 'betters', such
as Mr Cass- tall, powerful, florid men, seen chiefly on horseback-
answered with some constraint:

'Sir, I've a deal to thank you for a'ready. As for the robbery, I count
it no loss to me. And if I did, you couldn't help it: you aren't
answerable for it.'

'You may look at it in that way, Marner, but I never can; and I hope
you'll let me act according to my own feeling of what's just. I know
you're easily contented: you've been a hard-working man all your life.'

'Yes, sir, yes,' said Marner, meditatively. 'I should ha' been bad off
without my work: it was what I held by when everything else was gone
from me.'

'Ah,' said Godfrey, applying Marner's words simply to his bodily wants,
'it was a good trade for you in this country, because there's been a
great deal of linen-weaving to be done. But you're getting rather past
such close work, Marner: it's time you laid by and had some rest. You
look a good deal pulled down, though you're not an old man, are you?'

'Fifty-five, as near as I can say, sir,' said Silas.

'Oh, why, you may live thirty years longer- look at old Macey! And that
money on the table, after all, is but little. It won't go far either
way- whether it's put out to interest, or you were to live on it as long
as it would last: it wouldn't go far if you'd nobody to keep but
yourself, and you've had two to keep for a good many years now.'

'Eh, sir,' said Silas, unaffected by anything Godfrey was saying, 'I'm
in no fear o' want. We shall do very well- Eppie and me 'ull do well
enough. There's few working-folks have got so much laid by as that. I
don't know what it is to gentlefolks, but I look upon it as a deal-
almost too much. And as for us, it's little we want.'

'Only the garden, father,' said Eppie, blushing up to the ears the
moment after.

'You love a garden, do you, my dear?' said Nancy, thinking that this
turn in the point of view might help her husband. 'We should agree in
that: I give a deal of time to the garden.'

'Ah, there's plenty of gardening at the Red House,' said Godfrey,
surprised at the difficulty he found in approaching a proposition which
had seemed so easy to him in the distance. 'You've done a good part by
Eppie, Marner, for sixteen years. It 'ud be a great comfort to you to
see her well provided for, wouldn't it? She looks blooming and healthy,
but not fit for any hardships: she doesn't look like a strapping girl
come of working parents. You'd like to see her taken care of by those
who can leave her well off, and make a lady of her; she's more fit for
it than for a rough life, such as she might come to have in a few years'
time.'

A slight flush came over Marner's face, and disappeared, like a passing
gleam. Eppie was simply wondering Mr Cass should talk so about things
that seemed to have nothing to do with reality; but Silas was hurt and
uneasy.

'I don't take your meaning, sir,' he answered, not having words at
command to express the mingled feelings with which he had heard Mr
Cass's words.

'Well, my meaning is this, Marner,' said Godfrey, determined to come to
the point. 'Mrs Cass and I, you know, have no children- nobody to
benefit by our good home and everything else we have- more than enough
for ourselves. And we should like to have somebody in the place of a
daughter to us- we should like to have Eppie, and treat her in every way
as our own child. It would be a great comfort to you in your old age, I
hope, to see her fortune made in that way, after you have been at the
trouble of bringing her up so well. And it's right you should have every
reward for that. And Eppie, I'm sure, will always love you and be
grateful to you: she'd come and see you very often, and we should all be
on the look-out to do everything as we could towards making you
comfortable.'

A plain man like Godfrey Cass, speaking under some embarrassment,
necessarily blunders on words that are coarser than his intentions, and
that are likely to fall gratingly on susceptible feelings. While he had
been speaking, Eppie had quietly passed her arm behind Silas's head, and
let her hand rest against it caressingly: she felt him trembling
violently. He was silent for some moments when Mr Cass had ended-
powerless under the conflict of emotions, all alike painful. Eppie's
heart was swelling at the sense that her father was in distress; and she
was just going to lean down and speak to him, when one struggling dread
at last gained the mastery over every other in Silas, and he said,
faintly:

'Eppie, my child, speak. I won't stand in your way. Thank Mr and Mrs
Cass.'

Eppie took her hand from her father's head, and came forward a step. Her
cheeks were flushed, but not with shyness this time: the sense that her
father was in doubt and suffering banished that sort of
self-consciousness. She dropped a low curtsy, first to Mrs Cass and then
to Mr Cass, and said:

'Thank you, ma'am- thank you, sir. But I can't leave my father, nor own
anybody nearer than him. And I don't want to be a lady- thank you all
the same' (here Eppie dropped another curtsy). 'I couldn't give up the
folks I've been used to.'

Eppie's lips began to tremble a little at the last words. She retreated
to her father's chair again, and held him round the neck; while Silas,
with a subdued sob, put up his hand to grasp hers.

The tears were in Nancy's eyes, but her sympathy with Eppie was,
naturally, divided with distress on her husband's account. She dared not
speak, wondering what was going on in her husband's mind.

Godfrey felt an irritation inevitable to almost all of us when we
encounter an unexpected obstacle. He had been full of his own penitence
and resolution to retrieve his error as far as the time was left to him;
he was possessed with all-important feelings, that were to lead to a
predetermined course of action which he had fixed on as the right, and
he was not prepared to enter with lively appreciation into other
people's feelings counteracting his virtuous resolves. The agitation
with which he spoke again was not quite unmixed with anger.

'But I have a claim on you, Eppie- the strongest of all claims. It is my
duty, Marner, to own Eppie as my child, and provide for her. She is my
own child- her mother was my wife. I have a natural claim on her that
must stand before every other.'

Eppie had given a violent start, and turned quite pale. Silas, on the
contrary, who had been relieved, by Eppie's answer, from the dread lest
his mind should be in opposition to hers, felt the spirit of resistance
in him set free, not without a touch of parental fierceness. 'Then,
sir,' he answered, with an accent of bitterness that had been silent in
him since the memorable day when his youthful hope had perished- 'then,
sir, why didn't you say so sixteen years ago, and claim her before I'd
come to love her, i'stead o' coming to take her from me now, when you
might as well take the heart out o' my body? God gave her to me because
you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you've no
right to her! When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to
them as take it in.'

'I know that, Marner. I was wrong. I've repented of my conduct in that
matter,' said Godfrey, who could not help feeling the edge of Silas's
words.

'I'm glad to hear it, sir,' said Marner, with gathering excitement; 'but
repentance doesn't alter what's been going on for sixteen year. Your
coming now and saying "I'm her father" doesn't alter the feelings inside
us. It's me she's been calling her father ever since she could say the
word.'

'But I think you might look at the thing more reasonably, Marner,' said
Godfrey, unexpectedly awed by the weaver's direct truth-speaking. 'It
isn't as if she was to be taken quite away from you, so that you'd never
see her again. She'll be very near you, and come to see you very often.
She'll feel just the same towards you.'

'Just the same?' said Marner, more bitterly than ever. 'How'll she feel
just the same for me as she does now, when we eat o' the same bit, and
drink o' the same cup, and think of the same things from one day's end
to another? Just the same? that's idle talk. You'd cut us i' two.'

Godfrey, unqualified by experience to discern the pregnancy of Marner's
simple words, felt rather angry again. It seemed to him that the weaver
was very selfish (a judgment readily passed by those who have never
tested their own power of sacrifice) to oppose what was undoubtedly for
Eppie's welfare; and he felt himself called upon, for her sake, to
assert his authority.

'I should have thought, Marner,' he said, severely- 'I should have
thought your affection for Eppie would have made you rejoice in what was
for her good, even if it did call upon you to give up something. You
ought to remember that your own life is uncertain, and that she's at an
age now when her lot may soon be fixed in a way very different from what
it would be in her father's home: she may marry some low working-man,
and then, whatever I might do for her, I couldn't make her well-off.
You're putting yourself in the way of her welfare; and though I'm sorry
to hurt you after what you've done, and what I've left undone, I feel
now it's my duty to insist on taking care of my own daughter. I want to
do my duty.'

It would be difficult to say whether it were Silas or Eppie that was
most deeply stirred by this last speech of Godfrey's. Thought had been
very busy in Eppie as she listened to the contest between her old
long-loved father and this new unfamiliar father who had suddenly come
to fill the place of that black featureless shadow which had held the
ring and placed it on her mother's finger. Her imagination had darted
backward in conjectures, and forward in previsions, of what this
revealed fatherhood implied; and there were words in Godfrey's last
speech which helped to make the previsions especially definite. Not that
these thoughts, either of past or future, determined her resolution-
that was determined by the feelings which vibrated to every word Silas
had uttered; but they raised, even apart from these feelings, a
repulsion towards the offered lot and the newly-revealed father.

Silas, on the other hand, was again stricken in conscience, and alarmed
lest Godfrey's accusation should be true- lest he should be raising his
own will as an obstacle to Eppie's good. For many moments he was mute,
struggling for the self-conquest necessary to the uttering of the
difficult words. They came out tremulously.

'I'll say no more. Let it be as you will. Speak to the child. I'll
hinder nothing.'

Even Nancy, with all the acute sensibility of her own affections, shared
her husband's view, that Marner was not justifiable in his wish to
retain Eppie, after her real father had avowed himself. She felt that it
was a very hard trial for the poor weaver, but her code allowed no
question that a father by blood must have a claim above that of any
foster-father. Besides, Nancy, used all her life to plenteous
circumstances and the privileges of 'respectability', could not enter
into the pleasures which early nurture and habit connect with all the
little aims and efforts of the poor who are born poor: to her mind,
Eppie, in being restored to her birthright, was entering on a too long
withheld but unquestionable good. Hence she heard Silas's last words
with relief, and thought, as Godfrey did, that their wish was achieved.

'Eppie, my dear,' said Godfrey, looking at his daughter, not without
some embarrassment, under the sense that she was old enough to judge
him, 'it'll always be our wish that you should show your love and
gratitude to one who's been a father to you so many years, and we shall
want to help you to make him comfortable in every way. But we hope
you'll come to love us as well; and though I haven't been what a father
should have been to you all these years, I wish to do the utmost in my
power for you for the rest of my life, and provide for you as my only
child. And you'll have the best of mothers in my wife- that'll be a
blessing you haven't known since you were old enough to know it.'

'My dear, you'll be a treasure to me,' said Nancy, in her gentle voice.
'We shall want for nothing when we have our daughter.'

Eppie did not come forward and curtsy, as she had done before. She held
Silas's hand in hers, and grasped it firmly- it was a weaver's hand,
with a palm and finger-tips that were sensitive to such pressure- while
she spoke with colder decision than before.

'Thank you, ma'am- thank you, sir, for your offers- they're very great,
and far above my wish. For I should have no delight in life any more if
I was forced to go away from my father, and knew he was sitting at home,
a-thinking of me and feeling lone. We've been used to be happy together
every day, and I can't think o' no happiness without him. And he says
he'd nobody i' the world till I was sent to him, and he'd have nothing
when I was gone. And he's took care of me and loved me from the first,
and I'll cleave to him as long as he lives, and nobody shall ever come
between him and me.'

'But you must make sure, Eppie,' said Silas, in a low voice- 'you must
make sure as you won't ever be sorry, because you've made your choice to
stay among poor folks, and with poor clothes and things, when you might
ha' had everything o' the best.'

His sensitiveness on this point had increased as he listened to Eppie's
words of faithful affection.

'I can never be sorry, father,' said Eppie. 'I shouldn't know what to
think on or to wish for with fine things about me, as I haven't been
used to. And it 'ud be poor work for me to put on things, and ride in a
gig, and sit in a place at church, as 'ud make them as I'm fond of think
me unfitting company for 'em. What could I care for then?'

Nancy looked at Godfrey with a pained questioning glance. But his eyes
were fixed on the floor, where he was moving the end of his stick, as if
he were pondering on something absently. She thought there was a word
which might perhaps come better from her lips than from his.

'What you say is natural, my dear child- it's natural you should cling
to those who've brought you up,' she said, mildly; 'but there's a duty
you owe to your lawful father. There's perhaps something to be given up
on more sides than one. When your father opens his home to you, I think
it's right you shouldn't turn your back on it.'

'I can't feel as I've got any father but one,' said Eppie, impetuously,
while the tears gathered. 'I've always thought of a little home where
he'd sit i' the corner, and I should fend and do everything for him: I
can't think o' no other home. I wasn't brought up to be a lady, and I
can't turn my mind to it. I like the working folks, and their houses,
and their ways. And,' she ended passionately, while the tears fell, 'I'm
promised to marry a working man, as'll live with father, and help me to
take care of him.'

Godfrey looked up at Nancy with a flushed face and a smarting dilation
of the eyes. This frustration of a purpose towards which he had set out
under the exalted consciousness that he was about to compensate in some
degree for the greatest demerit of his life, made him feel the air of
the room stifling.

'Let us go,' he said, in an undertone.

'We won't talk of this any longer now,' said Nancy, rising. 'We're your
well-wishers, my dear- and yours too, Marner. We shall come and see you
again. It's getting late now.'

In this way she covered her husband's abrupt departure, for Godfrey had
gone straight to the door, unable to say more.

                    CHAPTER TWENTY

NANCY and Godfrey walked home under the starlight in silence. When they
entered the oaken parlour, Godfrey threw himself into his chair, while
Nancy laid down her bonnet and shawl, and stood on the hearth near her
husband, unwilling to leave him even for a few minutes, and yet fearing
to utter any word lest it might jar on his feeling. At last Godfrey
turned his head towards her, and their eyes met, dwelling in that
meeting without any movement on either side. That quiet mutual gaze of a
trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge
from a great weariness or a great danger- not to be interfered with by
speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh
enjoyment of repose.

But presently he put out his hand, and as Nancy placed hers within it,
he drew her towards him, and said:

'That's ended!'

She bent to kiss him, and then said, as she stood by his side, 'Yes, I'm
afraid we must give up the hope of having her for a daughter. It
wouldn't be right to want to force her to come to us against her will.
We can't alter her bringing up and what's come of it.'

'No,' said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with
his usually careless and unemphatic speech- 'there's debts we can't pay
like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by.
While I've been putting off, and putting off, the trees have been
growing- it's too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said
about a man's turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to
somebody else. I wanted to pass for childless once, Nancy- I shall pass
for childless now against my wish.'

Nancy did not speak immediately, but after a little while she asked-
'You won't make it known, then, about Eppie's being your daughter?'

'No- where would be the good to anybody?- only harm. I must do what I
can for her in the state of life she chooses. I must see who it is she's
thinking of marrying.'

'If it won't do any good to make the thing known,' said Nancy, who
thought she might now allow herself the relief of entertaining a feeling
which she had tried to silence before, 'I should be very thankful for
father and Priscilla never to be troubled with knowing what was done in
the past, more than about Dunsey: it can't be helped, their knowing
that.'

'I shall put it in my will- I think I shall put it in my will. I
shouldn't like to leave anything to be found out, like this of Dunsey,'
said Godfrey, meditatively. 'But I can't see anything but difficulties
that 'ud come from telling it now. I must do what I can to make her
happy in her own way. I've a notion,' he added after a moment's pause,
'it's Aaron Winthrop she meant she was engaged to. I remember seeing him
with her and Marner going away from church.'

'Well, he's very sober and industrious,' said Nancy, trying to view the
matter as cheerfully as possible.

Godfrey fell into thoughtfulness again. Presently he looked up at Nancy
sorrowfully, and said:

'She's a very pretty, nice girl, isn't she, Nancy?'

'Yes, dear; and with just your hair and eyes: I wondered it had never
struck me before.'

'I think she took a dislike to me at the thought of my being her father:
I could see a change in her manner after that.'

'She couldn't bear to think of not looking on Marner as her father,'
said Nancy, not wishing to confirm her husband's painful impression.

'She thinks I did wrong by her mother as well as by her. She thinks me
worse than I am. But she must think it: she can never know all. It's
part of my punishment, Nancy, for my daughter to dislike me. I should
never have got into that trouble if I'd been true to you- if I hadn't
been a fool. I'd no right to expect anything but evil could come of that
marriage- and when I shirked doing a father's part too.'

Nancy was silent: her spirit of rectitude would not let her try to
soften the edge of what she felt to be a just compunction. He spoke
again after a little while, but the tone was rather changed: there was
tenderness mingled with the previous self-reproach.

'And I got you, Nancy, in spite of all; and yet I've been grumbling and
uneasy because I hadn't something else- as if I deserved it.'

'You've never been wanting to me, Godfrey,' said Nancy, with quiet
sincerity. 'My only trouble would be gone if you resigned yourself to
the lot that's been given us.'

'Well, perhaps, it isn't too late to mend a bit there. Though it is too
late to mend some things, say what they will.'

                    CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE next morning, when Silas and Eppie were seated at their breakfast,
he said to her:

'Eppie, there's a thing I've had on my mind to do this two year, and now
the money's been brought back to us, we can do it. I've been turning it
over and over in the night, and I think we'll set out tomorrow, while
the fine days last. We'll leave the house and everything for your
godmother to take care on, and we'll make a little bundle o' things and
set out.'

'Where to go, daddy?' said Eppie, in much surprise.

'To my old country- to the town where I was born- up Lantern Yard. I
want to see Mr Paston, the minister: something may ha' come out to make
'em know I was innicent o' the robbery. And Mr Paston was a man with a
deal o' light- I want to speak to him about the drawing o' the lots. And
I should like to talk to him about the religion o' this country-side,
for I partly think he doesn't know on it.'

Eppie was very joyful, for there was the prospect not only of wonder and
delight at seeing a strange country, but also of coming back to tell
Aaron all about it. Aaron was so much wiser than she was about most
things- it would be rather pleasant to have this little advantage over
him. Mrs Winthrop, though possessed with a dim fear of dangers attendant
on so long a journey, and requiring many assurances that it would not
take them out of the region of carrier's carts and slow waggons, was
nevertheless well pleased that Silas should revisit his own country, and
find out if he had been cleared from that false accusation.

'You'd be easier in your mind for the rest o' your life, Master Marner,'
said Dolly- 'that you would. And if there's any light to be got up the
yard as you talk on, we've need of it i' this world, and I'd be glad on
it myself, if you could bring it back.'

So, on the fourth day from that time, Silas and Eppie, in their Sunday
clothes, with a small bundle tied in a blue linen handkerchief, were
making their way through the streets of a great manufacturing town.
Silas, bewildered by the changes thirty years had brought over his
native place, had stopped several persons in succession to ask them the
name of this town, that he might be sure he was not under a mistake
about it.

'Ask for Lantern Yard, father- ask this gentleman with the tassels on
his shoulders a-standing at the shop-door; he isn't in a hurry like the
rest,' said Eppie, in some distress at her father's bewilderment, and
ill at ease, besides, amidst the noise, the movement, and the multitude
of strange indifferent faces.

'Eh, my child, he won't know anything about it,' said Silas;
'gentlefolks didn't ever go up the Yard. But happen somebody can tell me
which is the way to Prison Street, where the jail is. I know the way out
o' that as if I'd seen it yesterday.'

With some difficulty, after many turnings and new inquiries, they
reached Prison Street: and the grim walls of the jail, the first object
that answered to any image in Silas's memory, cheered him with the
certitude, which no assurance of the town's name had hitherto given him,
that he was in his native place.

'Ah,' he said, drawing a long breath, 'there's the jail, Eppie; that's
just the same: I arn't afraid now. It's the third turning on the left
hand from the jail doors, that's the way we must go.'

'Oh, what a dark ugly place!' said Eppie. 'How it hides the sky! It's
worse than the Workhouse. I'm glad you don't live in this town now,
father. Is Lantern Yard like this street?'

'My precious child,' said Silas, smiling, 'it isn't a big street like
this. I never was easy i' this street myself, but I was fond o' Lantern
Yard. The shops here are all altered, I think- I can't make 'em out; but
I shall know the turning, because it's the third.'

'Here it is,' he said, in a tone of satisfaction, as they came to a
narrow alley. 'And then we must go to the left again, and then straight
for'ard for a bit, up Shoe Lane; and then we shall be at the entry next
to the o'erhanging window, where there's the nick in the road for the
water to run. Eh, I can see it all.'

'Oh, father, I'm like as if I was stifled,' said Eppie. 'I couldn't have
thought as any folks lived i' this way, so close together. How pretty
the Stone-pits 'ull look when we get back!

'It looks comical to me, child, now- and smells bad. I can't think as it
usened to smell so.'

Here and there a sallow, begrimed face looked out from a gloomy doorway
at the strangers, and increased Eppie's uneasiness, so that it was a
longed-for relief when they issued from the alleys into Shoe Lane, where
there was a broader strip of sky.

'Dear heart!' said Silas, 'why, there's people coming out o' the Yard as
if they'd been to chapel at this time o' day- a weekday noon!'

Suddenly he started and stood still with a look of distressed amazement,
that alarmed Eppie. They were before an opening in front of a large
factory, from which men and women were streaming for their midday meal.

'Father,' said Eppie, clasping his arm, 'what's the matter?'

But she had to speak again and again before Silas could answer her.

'It's gone, child,' he said, at last, in strong agitation- 'Lantern
Yard's gone. It must ha' been here, because here's the house with the
o'erhanging window- I know that- it's just the same; but they've made
this new opening; and see that big factory! It's all gone- chapel and
all.'

'Come into that little brush-shop and sit down, father- they'll let you
sit down,' said Eppie, always on the watch lest one of her father's
strange attacks should come on. 'Perhaps the people can tell you all
about it.'

But neither from the brush-maker, who had come to Shoe Lane only ten
years ago, when the factory was already built, nor from any other source
within his reach, could Silas learn anything of the old Lantern Yard
friends, or of Mr Paston, the minister.

'The old place is all swep' away,' Silas said to Dolly Winthrop on the
night of his return- 'the little graveyard and everything. The old
home's gone; I've no home but this now. I shall never know whether they
got at the truth o' the robbery, nor whether Mr Paston could ha' given
me any light about the drawing o' the lots. It's dark to me, Mrs
Winthrop, that is; I doubt it'll be dark to the last.'

'Well, yes, Master Marner,' said Dolly, who sat with a placid listening
face, now bordered by grey hairs; 'I doubt it may. It's the will o' Them
above as a many things should be dark to us; but there's some things as
I've never felt i' the dark about, and they're mostly what comes i' the
day's work. You were hard done by that once, Master Marner, and it seems
as you'll never know the rights of it; but that doesn't hinder there
being a rights, Master Marner, for all it's dark to you and me.'

'No,' said Silas, 'no; that doesn't hinder. Since the time the child was
sent to me and I've come to love her as myself, I've had light enough to
trusten by; and, now she says she'll never leave me, I think I shall
trusten till I die.' CONCLUSION

                    CONCLUSION

THERE was one time of the year which was held in Raveloe to be
especially suitable for a wedding. It was when the great lilacs and
laburnums in the old-fashioned gardens showed their purple and golden
wealth above the lichen-tinted walls, and when there were calves still
young enough to want bucketfuls of fragrant milk. People were not so
busy then as they must become when the full cheese-making and the mowing
had set in; and besides, it was a time when a light bridal dress could
be worn with comfort and seen to advantage.

Happily the sunshine fell more warmly than usual on the lilac tufts the
morning that Eppie was married, for her dress was a very light one. She
had often thought, though with a feeling of renunciation, that the
perfection of a wedding-dress would be a white cotton, with the tiniest
pink sprig at wide intervals; so that when Mrs Godfrey Cass begged to
provide one, and asked Eppie to choose what it should be, previous
meditation had enabled her to give a decided answer at once.

Seen at a little distance as she walked across the churchyard and down
the village, she seemed to be attired in pure white, and her hair looked
like the dash of gold on a lily. One hand was on her husband's arm, and
with the other she clasped the hand of her father Silas.

'You won't be giving me away, father,' she had said before they went to
church; 'you'll only be taking Aaron to be a son to you.'

Dolly Winthrop walked behind with her husband; and there ended the
little bridal procession.

There were many eyes to look at it, and Miss Priscilla Lammeter was glad
that she and her father had happened to drive up to the door of the Red
House just in time to see this pretty sight. They had come to keep Nancy
company today, because Mr Cass had had to go away to Lytherly, for
special reasons. That seemed to be a pity, for otherwise he might have
gone, as Mr Crackenthorp and Mr Osgood certainly would, to look on at
the wedding-feast which he had ordered at the Rainbow, naturally feeling
a great interest in the weaver who had been wronged by one of his own
family.

'I could ha' wished Nancy had had the luck to find a child like that and
bring her up,' said Priscilla to her father, as they sat in the gig; 'I
should ha' had something young to think of then, besides the lambs and
the calves.'

'Yes, my dear, yes,' said Mr Lammeter; 'one feels that as one gets
older. Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes
about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.'

Nancy came out now to welcome her father and sister; and the wedding
group had passed on beyond the Red House to the humbler part of the
village.

Dolly Winthrop was the first to divine that old Mr Macey, who had been
set in his arm-chair outside his own door, would expect some special
notice as they passed, since he was too old to be at the wedding-feast.

'Mr Macey's looking for a word from us,' said Dolly; 'he'll be hurt if
we pass him and say nothing- and him so racked with rheumatiz.'

So they turned aside to shake hands with the old man. He had looked
forward to the occasion, and had his premeditated speech.

'Well, Master Marner,' he said, in a voice that quavered a good deal,
'I've lived to see my words come true. I was the first to say there was
no harm in you, though your looks might be again' you; and I was the
first to say you'd get your money back. And it's nothing but rightful as
you should. And I'd ha' said the "Amens", and willing, at the holy
matrimony; but Tookey's done it a good while now, and I hope you'll have
none the worse luck.'

In the open yard before the Rainbow, the party of guests were already
assembled, though it was still nearly an hour before the appointed
feast-time. But by this means they could not only enjoy the slow advent
of their pleasure; they had also ample leisure to talk of Silas Marner's
strange history, and arrive by due degrees at the conclusion that he had
brought a blessing on himself by acting like a father to a lone
motherless child. Even the farrier did not negative this sentiment: on
the contrary, he took it up as peculiarly his own, and invited any hardy
person present to contradict him. But he met with no contradiction; and
all differences among the company were merged in a general agreement
with Mr Snell's sentiment, that when a man had deserved his good luck,
it was the part of his neighbours to wish him joy.

As the bridal group approached, a hearty cheer was raised in the Rainbow
yard; and Ben Winthrop, whose jokes had retained their acceptable
flavour, found it agreeable to turn in there and receive
congratulations; not requiring the proposed interval of quiet at the
Stone-pits before joining the company.

Eppie had a larger garden than she had ever expected there now; and in
other ways there had been alterations at the expense of Mr Cass, the
landlord, to suit Silas's larger family. For he and Eppie had declared
that they would rather stay at the Stone-pits than go to any new home.
The garden was fenced with stones on two sides, but in front there was
an open fence, through which the flowers shone with answering gladness,
as the four united people came within sight of them.

'Oh, father,' said Eppie, 'what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody
could be happier than we are.'



                          THE END