Silas Marner
“I don’t pretend to be a good fellow,” he said to himself; “but I’m not
a scoundrel—at least, I’ll stop short somewhere. I’ll bear the
consequences of what I _have_ done sooner than make believe I’ve done
what I never would have done. I’d never have spent the money for my own
pleasure—I was tortured into it.”
Through the remainder of this day Godfrey, with only occasional
fluctuations, kept his will bent in the direction of a complete avowal
to his father, and he withheld the story of Wildfire’s loss till the
next morning, that it might serve him as an introduction to heavier
matter. The old Squire was accustomed to his son’s frequent absence
from home, and thought neither Dunstan’s nor Wildfire’s non-appearance
a matter calling for remark. Godfrey said to himself again and again,
that if he let slip this one opportunity of confession, he might never
have another; the revelation might be made even in a more odious way
than by Dunstan’s malignity: _she_ might come as she had threatened to
do. And then he tried to make the scene easier to himself by rehearsal:
he made up his mind how he would pass from the admission of his
weakness in letting Dunstan have the money to the fact that Dunstan had
a hold on him which he had been unable to shake off, and how he would
work up his father to expect something very bad before he told him the
fact. The old Squire was an implacable man: he made resolutions in
violent anger, and he was not to be moved from them after his anger had
subsided—as fiery volcanic matters cool and harden into rock. Like many
violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of
his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating
force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became
unrelentingly hard. This was his system with his tenants: he allowed
them to get into arrears, neglect their fences, reduce their stock,
sell their straw, and otherwise go the wrong way,—and then, when he
became short of money in consequence of this indulgence, he took the
hardest measures and would listen to no appeal. Godfrey knew all this,
and felt it with the greater force because he had constantly suffered
annoyance from witnessing his father’s sudden fits of unrelentingness,
for which his own habitual irresolution deprived him of all sympathy.
(He was not critical on the faulty indulgence which preceded these
fits; _that_ seemed to him natural enough.) Still there was just the
chance, Godfrey thought, that his father’s pride might see this
marriage in a light that would induce him to hush it up, rather than
turn his son out and make the family the talk of the country for ten
miles round.
This was the view of the case that Godfrey managed to keep before him
pretty closely till midnight, and he went to sleep thinking that he had
done with inward debating. But when he awoke in the still morning
darkness he found it impossible to reawaken his evening thoughts; it
was as if they had been tired out and were not to be roused to further
work. Instead of arguments for confession, he could now feel the
presence of nothing but its evil consequences: the old dread of
disgrace came back—the old shrinking from the thought of raising a
hopeless barrier between himself and Nancy—the old disposition to rely
on chances which might be favourable to him, and save him from
betrayal. Why, after all, should he cut off the hope of them by his own
act? He had seen the matter in a wrong light yesterday. He had been in
a rage with Dunstan, and had thought of nothing but a thorough break-up
of their mutual understanding; but what it would be really wisest for
him to do, was to try and soften his father’s anger against Dunsey, and
keep things as nearly as possible in their old condition. If Dunsey did
not come back for a few days (and Godfrey did not know but that the
rascal had enough money in his pocket to enable him to keep away still
longer), everything might blow over.
CHAPTER IX.
Godfrey rose and took his own breakfast earlier than usual, but
lingered in the wainscoted parlour till his younger brothers had
finished their meal and gone out, awaiting his father, who always took
a walk with his managing-man before breakfast. Every one breakfasted at
a different hour in the Red House, and the Squire was always the
latest, giving a long chance to a rather feeble morning appetite before
he tried it. The table had been spread with substantial eatables nearly
two hours before he presented himself—a tall, stout man of sixty, with
a face in which the knit brow and rather hard glance seemed
contradicted by the slack and feeble mouth. His person showed marks of
habitual neglect, his dress was slovenly; and yet there was something
in the presence of the old Squire distinguishable from that of the
ordinary farmers in the parish, who were perhaps every whit as refined
as he, but, having slouched their way through life with a consciousness
of being in the vicinity of their “betters,” wanted that
self-possession and authoritativeness of voice and carriage which
belonged to a man who thought of superiors as remote existences with
whom he had personally little more to do than with America or the
stars. The Squire had been used to parish homage all his life, used to
the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that
was his, were the oldest and best; and as he never associated with any
gentry higher than himself, his opinion was not disturbed by
comparison.
He glanced at his son as he entered the room, and said, “What, sir!
haven’t _you_ had your breakfast yet?” but there was no pleasant
morning greeting between them; not because of any unfriendliness, but
because the sweet flower of courtesy is not a growth of such homes as
the Red House.
“Yes, sir,” said Godfrey, “I’ve had my breakfast, but I was waiting to
speak to you.”
“Ah! well,” said the Squire, throwing himself indifferently into his
chair, and speaking in a ponderous coughing fashion, which was felt in
Raveloe to be a sort of privilege of his rank, while he cut a piece of
beef, and held it up before the deer-hound that had come in with him.
“Ring the bell for my ale, will you? You youngsters’ business is your
own pleasure, mostly. There’s no hurry about it for anybody but
yourselves.”
The Squire’s life was quite as idle as his sons,’ but it was a fiction
kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was
exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was
constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm. Godfrey
waited, before he spoke again, until the ale had been brought and the
door closed—an interval during which Fleet, the deer-hound, had
consumed enough bits of beef to make a poor man’s holiday dinner.
“There’s been a cursed piece of ill-luck with Wildfire,” he began;
“happened the day before yesterday.”
“What! broke his knees?” said the Squire, after taking a draught of
ale. “I thought you knew how to ride better than that, sir. I never
threw a horse down in my life. If I had, I might ha’ whistled for
another, for _my_ father wasn’t quite so ready to unstring as some
other fathers I know of. But they must turn over a new leaf—_they_
must. What with mortgages and arrears, I’m as short o’ cash as a
roadside pauper. And that fool Kimble says the newspaper’s talking
about peace. Why, the country wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Prices
’ud run down like a jack, and I should never get my arrears, not if I
sold all the fellows up. And there’s that damned Fowler, I won’t put up
with him any longer; I’ve told Winthrop to go to Cox this very day. The
lying scoundrel told me he’d be sure to pay me a hundred last month. He
takes advantage because he’s on that outlying farm, and thinks I shall
forget him.”
The Squire had delivered this speech in a coughing and interrupted
manner, but with no pause long enough for Godfrey to make it a pretext
for taking up the word again. He felt that his father meant to ward off
any request for money on the ground of the misfortune with Wildfire,
and that the emphasis he had thus been led to lay on his shortness of
cash and his arrears was likely to produce an attitude of mind the
utmost unfavourable for his own disclosure. But he must go on, now he
had begun.
“It’s worse than breaking the horse’s knees—he’s been staked and
killed,” he said, as soon as his father was silent, and had begun to
cut his meat. “But I wasn’t thinking of asking you to buy me another
horse; I was only thinking I’d lost the means of paying you with the
price of Wildfire, as I’d meant to do. Dunsey took him to the hunt to
sell him for me the other day, and after he’d made a bargain for a
hundred and twenty with Bryce, he went after the hounds, and took some
fool’s leap or other that did for the horse at once. If it hadn’t been
for that, I should have paid you a hundred pounds this morning.”
The Squire had laid down his knife and fork, and was staring at his son
in amazement, not being sufficiently quick of brain to form a probable
guess as to what could have caused so strange an inversion of the
paternal and filial relations as this proposition of his son to pay him
a hundred pounds.
“The truth is, sir—I’m very sorry—I was quite to blame,” said Godfrey.
“Fowler did pay that hundred pounds. He paid it to me, when I was over
there one day last month. And Dunsey bothered me for the money, and I
let him have it, because I hoped I should be able to pay it you before
this.”
The Squire was purple with anger before his son had done speaking, and
found utterance difficult. “You let Dunsey have it, sir? And how long
have you been so thick with Dunsey that you must _collogue_ with him to
embezzle my money? Are you turning out a scamp? I tell you I won’t have
it. I’ll turn the whole pack of you out of the house together, and
marry again. I’d have you to remember, sir, my property’s got no entail
on it;—since my grandfather’s time the Casses can do as they like with
their land. Remember that, sir. Let Dunsey have the money! Why should
you let Dunsey have the money? There’s some lie at the bottom of it.”
“There’s no lie, sir,” said Godfrey. “I wouldn’t have spent the money
myself, but Dunsey bothered me, and I was a fool, and let him have it.
But I meant to pay it, whether he did or not. That’s the whole story. I
never meant to embezzle money, and I’m not the man to do it. You never
knew me do a dishonest trick, sir.”
“Where’s Dunsey, then? What do you stand talking there for? Go and
fetch Dunsey, as I tell you, and let him give account of what he wanted
the money for, and what he’s done with it. He shall repent it. I’ll
turn him out. I said I would, and I’ll do it. He shan’t brave me. Go
and fetch him.”
“Dunsey isn’t come back, sir.”
“What! did he break his own neck, then?” said the Squire, with some
disgust at the idea that, in that case, he could not fulfil his threat.
“No, he wasn’t hurt, I believe, for the horse was found dead, and
Dunsey must have walked off. I daresay we shall see him again
by-and-by. I don’t know where he is.”
“And what must you be letting him have my money for? Answer me that,”
said the Squire, attacking Godfrey again, since Dunsey was not within
reach.
“Well, sir, I don’t know,” said Godfrey, hesitatingly. That was a
feeble evasion, but Godfrey was not fond of lying, and, not being
sufficiently aware that no sort of duplicity can long flourish without
the help of vocal falsehoods, he was quite unprepared with invented
motives.
“You don’t know? I tell you what it is, sir. You’ve been up to some
trick, and you’ve been bribing him not to tell,” said the Squire, with
a sudden acuteness which startled Godfrey, who felt his heart beat
violently at the nearness of his father’s guess. The sudden alarm