Silas Marner
pushed him on to take the next step—a very slight impulse suffices for
that on a downward road.
“Why, sir,” he said, trying to speak with careless ease, “it was a
little affair between me and Dunsey; it’s no matter to anybody else.
It’s hardly worth while to pry into young men’s fooleries: it wouldn’t
have made any difference to you, sir, if I’d not had the bad luck to
lose Wildfire. I should have paid you the money.”
“Fooleries! Pshaw! it’s time you’d done with fooleries. And I’d have
you know, sir, you _must_ ha’ done with ’em,” said the Squire, frowning
and casting an angry glance at his son. “Your goings-on are not what I
shall find money for any longer. There’s my grandfather had his stables
full o’ horses, and kept a good house, too, and in worse times, by what
I can make out; and so might I, if I hadn’t four good-for-nothing
fellows to hang on me like horse-leeches. I’ve been too good a father
to you all—that’s what it is. But I shall pull up, sir.”
Godfrey was silent. He was not likely to be very penetrating in his
judgments, but he had always had a sense that his father’s indulgence
had not been kindness, and had had a vague longing for some discipline
that would have checked his own errant weakness and helped his better
will. The Squire ate his bread and meat hastily, took a deep draught of
ale, then turned his chair from the table, and began to speak again.
“It’ll be all the worse for you, you know—you’d need try and help me
keep things together.”
“Well, sir, I’ve often offered to take the management of things, but
you know you’ve taken it ill always, and seemed to think I wanted to
push you out of your place.”
“I know nothing o’ your offering or o’ my taking it ill,” said the
Squire, whose memory consisted in certain strong impressions unmodified
by detail; “but I know, one while you seemed to be thinking o’
marrying, and I didn’t offer to put any obstacles in your way, as some
fathers would. I’d as lieve you married Lammeter’s daughter as anybody.
I suppose, if I’d said you nay, you’d ha’ kept on with it; but, for
want o’ contradiction, you’ve changed your mind. You’re a shilly-shally
fellow: you take after your poor mother. She never had a will of her
own; a woman has no call for one, if she’s got a proper man for her
husband. But _your_ wife had need have one, for you hardly know your
own mind enough to make both your legs walk one way. The lass hasn’t
said downright she won’t have you, has she?”
“No,” said Godfrey, feeling very hot and uncomfortable; “but I don’t
think she will.”
“Think! why haven’t you the courage to ask her? Do you stick to it, you
want to have _her_—that’s the thing?”
“There’s no other woman I want to marry,” said Godfrey, evasively.
“Well, then, let me make the offer for you, that’s all, if you haven’t
the pluck to do it yourself. Lammeter isn’t likely to be loath for his
daughter to marry into _my_ family, I should think. And as for the
pretty lass, she wouldn’t have her cousin—and there’s nobody else, as I
see, could ha’ stood in your way.”
“I’d rather let it be, please sir, at present,” said Godfrey, in alarm.
“I think she’s a little offended with me just now, and I should like to
speak for myself. A man must manage these things for himself.”
“Well, speak, then, and manage it, and see if you can’t turn over a new
leaf. That’s what a man must do when he thinks o’ marrying.”
“I don’t see how I can think of it at present, sir. You wouldn’t like
to settle me on one of the farms, I suppose, and I don’t think she’d
come to live in this house with all my brothers. It’s a different sort
of life to what she’s been used to.”
“Not come to live in this house? Don’t tell me. You ask her, that’s
all,” said the Squire, with a short, scornful laugh.
“I’d rather let the thing be, at present, sir,” said Godfrey. “I hope
you won’t try to hurry it on by saying anything.”
“I shall do what I choose,” said the Squire, “and I shall let you know
I’m master; else you may turn out and find an estate to drop into
somewhere else. Go out and tell Winthrop not to go to Cox’s, but wait
for me. And tell ’em to get my horse saddled. And stop: look out and
get that hack o’ Dunsey’s sold, and hand me the money, will you? He’ll
keep no more hacks at my expense. And if you know where he’s sneaking—I
daresay you do—you may tell him to spare himself the journey o’ coming
back home. Let him turn ostler, and keep himself. He shan’t hang on me
any more.”
“I don’t know where he is, sir; and if I did, it isn’t my place to tell
him to keep away,” said Godfrey, moving towards the door.
“Confound it, sir, don’t stay arguing, but go and order my horse,” said
the Squire, taking up a pipe.
Godfrey left the room, hardly knowing whether he were more relieved by
the sense that the interview was ended without having made any change
in his position, or more uneasy that he had entangled himself still
further in prevarication and deceit. What had passed about his
proposing to Nancy had raised a new alarm, lest by some after-dinner
words of his father’s to Mr. Lammeter he should be thrown into the
embarrassment of being obliged absolutely to decline her when she
seemed to be within his reach. He fled to his usual refuge, that of
hoping for some unforeseen turn of fortune, some favourable chance
which would save him from unpleasant consequences—perhaps even justify
his insincerity by manifesting its prudence. And in this point of
trusting to some throw of fortune’s dice, Godfrey can hardly be called
specially old-fashioned. Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all
men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe
in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is
ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues
that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let
him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that
brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible
benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his
interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet
forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he
will inevitably anchor himself on the chance that the thing left undone
may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his
friend’s confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity
called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never
know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities
of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will
infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in
as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that
religion is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop
after its kind.
CHAPTER X.
Justice Malam was naturally regarded in Tarley and Raveloe as a man of
capacious mind, seeing that he could draw much wider conclusions
without evidence than could be expected of his neighbours who were not
on the Commission of the Peace. Such a man was not likely to neglect
the clue of the tinder-box, and an inquiry was set on foot concerning a
pedlar, name unknown, with curly black hair and a foreign complexion,
carrying a box of cutlery and jewellery, and wearing large rings in his
ears. But either because inquiry was too slow-footed to overtake him,
or because the description applied to so many pedlars that inquiry did
not know how to choose among them, weeks passed away, and there was no
other result concerning the robbery than a gradual cessation of the
excitement it had caused in Raveloe. Dunstan Cass’s absence was hardly
a subject of remark: he had once before had a quarrel with his father,
and had gone off, nobody knew whither, to return at the end of six
weeks, take up his old quarters unforbidden, and swagger as usual. His
own family, who equally expected this issue, with the sole difference
that the Squire was determined this time to forbid him the old
quarters, never mentioned his absence; and when his uncle Kimble or Mr.
Osgood noticed it, the story of his having killed Wildfire, and
committed some offence against his father, was enough to prevent
surprise. To connect the fact of Dunsey’s disappearance with that of
the robbery occurring on the same day, lay quite away from the track of
every one’s thought—even Godfrey’s, who had better reason than any one
else to know what his brother was capable of. He remembered no mention
of the weaver between them since the time, twelve years ago, when it
was their boyish sport to deride him; and, besides, his imagination
constantly created an _alibi_ for Dunstan: he saw him continually in
some congenial haunt, to which he had walked off on leaving
Wildfire—saw him sponging on chance acquaintances, and meditating a
return home to the old amusement of tormenting his elder brother. Even
if any brain in Raveloe had put the said two facts together, I doubt
whether a combination so injurious to the prescriptive respectability
of a family with a mural monument and venerable tankards, would not
have been suppressed as of unsound tendency. But Christmas puddings,
brawn, and abundance of spirituous liquors, throwing the mental
originality into the channel of nightmare, are great preservatives
against a dangerous spontaneity of waking thought.
When the robbery was talked of at the Rainbow and elsewhere, in good
company, the balance continued to waver between the rational
explanation founded on the tinder-box, and the theory of an
impenetrable mystery that mocked investigation. The advocates of the
tinder-box-and-pedlar view considered the other side a muddle-headed
and credulous set, who, because they themselves were wall-eyed,
supposed everybody else to have the same blank outlook; and the
adherents of the inexplicable more than hinted that their antagonists
were animals inclined to crow before they had found any corn—mere
skimming-dishes in point of depth—whose clear-sightedness consisted in
supposing there was nothing behind a barn-door because they couldn’t
see through it; so that, though their controversy did not serve to
elicit the fact concerning the robbery, it elicited some true opinions
of collateral importance.
But while poor Silas’s loss served thus to brush the slow current of
Raveloe conversation, Silas himself was feeling the withering
desolation of that bereavement about which his neighbours were arguing
at their ease. To any one who had observed him before he lost his gold,
it might have seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as his could
hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any subtraction
but such as would put an end to it altogether. But in reality it had
been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which fenced him in
from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a clinging life; and
though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted
thing, it satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence was broken
down—the support was snatched away. Marner’s thoughts could no longer
move in their old round, and were baffled by a blank like that which
meets a plodding ant when the earth has broken away on its homeward
path. The loom was there, and the weaving, and the growing pattern in
the cloth; but the bright treasure in the hole under his feet was gone;
the prospect of handling and counting it was gone: the evening had no
phantasm of delight to still the poor soul’s craving. The thought of
the money he would get by his actual work could bring no joy, for its
meagre image was only a fresh reminder of his loss; and hope was too
heavily crushed by the sudden blow for his imagination to dwell on the