Silas Marner
there when he had found Eppie? The gods of the hearth exist for us
still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it
bruise its own roots.
Silas ate his dinner more silently than usual, soon laying down his
knife and fork, and watching half-abstractedly Eppie’s play with Snap
and the cat, by which her own dining was made rather a lengthy
business. Yet it was a sight that might well arrest wandering thoughts:
Eppie, with the rippling radiance of her hair and the whiteness of her
rounded chin and throat set off by the dark-blue cotton gown, laughing
merrily as the kitten held on with her four claws to one shoulder, like
a design for a jug-handle, while Snap on the right hand and Puss on the
other put up their paws towards a morsel which she held out of the
reach of both—Snap occasionally desisting in order to remonstrate with
the cat by a cogent worrying growl on the greediness and futility of
her conduct; till Eppie relented, caressed them both, and divided the
morsel between them.
But at last Eppie, glancing at the clock, checked the play, and said,
“O daddy, you’re wanting to go into the sunshine to smoke your pipe.
But I must clear away first, so as the house may be tidy when godmother
comes. I’ll make haste—I won’t be long.”
Silas had taken to smoking a pipe daily during the last two years,
having been strongly urged to it by the sages of Raveloe, as a practice
“good for the fits”; and this advice was sanctioned by Dr. Kimble, on
the ground that it was as well to try what could do no harm—a principle
which was made to answer for a great deal of work in that gentleman’s
medical practice. Silas did not highly enjoy smoking, and often
wondered how his neighbours could be so fond of it; but a humble sort
of acquiescence in what was held to be good, had become a strong habit
of that new self which had been developed in him since he had found
Eppie on his hearth: it had been the only clew his bewildered mind
could hold by in cherishing this young life that had been sent to him
out of the darkness into which his gold had departed. By seeking what
was needful for Eppie, by sharing the effect that everything produced
on her, he had himself come to appropriate the forms of custom and
belief which were the mould of Raveloe life; and as, with reawakening
sensibilities, memory also reawakened, he had begun to ponder over the
elements of his old faith, and blend them with his new impressions,
till he recovered a consciousness of unity between his past and
present. The sense of presiding goodness and the human trust which come
with all pure peace and joy, had given him a dim impression that there
had been some error, some mistake, which had thrown that dark shadow
over the days of his best years; and as it grew more and more easy to
him to open his mind to Dolly Winthrop, he gradually communicated to
her all he could describe of his early life. The communication was
necessarily a slow and difficult process, for Silas’s meagre power of
explanation was not aided by any readiness of interpretation in Dolly,
whose narrow outward experience gave her no key to strange customs, and
made every novelty a source of wonder that arrested them at every step
of the narrative. It was only by fragments, and at intervals which left
Dolly time to revolve what she had heard till it acquired some
familiarity for her, that Silas at last arrived at the climax of the
sad story—the drawing of lots, and its false testimony concerning him;
and this had to be repeated in several interviews, under new questions
on her part as to the nature of this plan for detecting the guilty and
clearing the innocent.
“And yourn’s the same Bible, you’re sure o’ that, Master Marner—the
Bible as you brought wi’ you from that country—it’s the same as what
they’ve got at church, and what Eppie’s a-learning to read in?”
“Yes,” said Silas, “every bit the same; and there’s drawing o’ lots in
the Bible, mind you,” he added in a lower tone.
“Oh, dear, dear,” said Dolly in a grieved voice, as if she were hearing
an unfavourable report of a sick man’s case. She was silent for some
minutes; at last she said—
“There’s wise folks, happen, as know how it all is; the parson knows,
I’ll be bound; but it takes big words to tell them things, and such as
poor folks can’t make much out on. I can never rightly know the meaning
o’ what I hear at church, only a bit here and there, but I know it’s
good words—I do. But what lies upo’ your mind—it’s this, Master Marner:
as, if Them above had done the right thing by you, They’d never ha’ let
you be turned out for a wicked thief when you was innicent.”
“Ah!” said Silas, who had now come to understand Dolly’s phraseology,
“that was what fell on me like as if it had been red-hot iron; because,
you see, there was nobody as cared for me or clave to me above nor
below. And him as I’d gone out and in wi’ for ten year and more, since
when we was lads and went halves—mine own familiar friend in whom I
trusted, had lifted up his heel again’ me, and worked to ruin me.”
“Eh, but he was a bad un—I can’t think as there’s another such,” said
Dolly. “But I’m o’ercome, Master Marner; I’m like as if I’d waked and
didn’t know whether it was night or morning. I feel somehow as sure as
I do when I’ve laid something up though I can’t justly put my hand on
it, as there was a rights in what happened to you, if one could but
make it out; and you’d no call to lose heart as you did. But we’ll talk
on it again; for sometimes things come into my head when I’m leeching
or poulticing, or such, as I could never think on when I was sitting
still.”
Dolly was too useful a woman not to have many opportunities of
illumination of the kind she alluded to, and she was not long before
she recurred to the subject.
“Master Marner,” she said, one day that she came to bring home Eppie’s
washing, “I’ve been sore puzzled for a good bit wi’ that trouble o’
yourn and the drawing o’ lots; and it got twisted back’ards and
for’ards, as I didn’t know which end to lay hold on. But it come to me
all clear like, that night when I was sitting up wi’ poor Bessy Fawkes,
as is dead and left her children behind, God help ’em—it come to me as
clear as daylight; but whether I’ve got hold on it now, or can anyways
bring it to my tongue’s end, that I don’t know. For I’ve often a deal
inside me as’ll never come out; and for what you talk o’ your folks in
your old country niver saying prayers by heart nor saying ’em out of a
book, they must be wonderful cliver; for if I didn’t know ‘Our Father,’
and little bits o’ good words as I can carry out o’ church wi’ me, I
might down o’ my knees every night, but nothing could I say.”
“But you can mostly say something as I can make sense on, Mrs.
Winthrop,” said Silas.
“Well, then, Master Marner, it come to me summat like this: I can make
nothing o’ the drawing o’ lots and the answer coming wrong; it ’ud
mayhap take the parson to tell that, and he could only tell us i’ big
words. But what come to me as clear as the daylight, it was when I was
troubling over poor Bessy Fawkes, and it allays comes into my head when
I’m sorry for folks, and feel as I can’t do a power to help ’em, not if
I was to get up i’ the middle o’ the night—it comes into my head as
Them above has got a deal tenderer heart nor what I’ve got—for I can’t
be anyways better nor Them as made me; and if anything looks hard to
me, it’s because there’s things I don’t know on; and for the matter o’
that, there may be plenty o’ things I don’t know on, for it’s little as
I know—that it is. And so, while I was thinking o’ that, you come into
my mind, Master Marner, and it all come pouring in:—if _I_ felt i’ my
inside what was the right and just thing by you, and them as prayed and
drawed the lots, all but that wicked un, if _they_’d ha’ done the right
thing by you if they could, isn’t there Them as was at the making on
us, and knows better and has a better will? And that’s all as ever I
can be sure on, and everything else is a big puzzle to me when I think
on it. For there was the fever come and took off them as were
full-growed, and left the helpless children; and there’s the breaking
o’ limbs; and them as ’ud do right and be sober have to suffer by them
as are contrairy—eh, there’s trouble i’ this world, and there’s things
as we can niver make out the rights on. And all as we’ve got to do is
to trusten, Master Marner—to do the right thing as fur as we know, and
to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o’ good and
rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what
we can know—I feel it i’ my own inside as it must be so. And if you
could but ha’ gone on trustening, Master Marner, you wouldn’t ha’ run
away from your fellow-creaturs and been so lone.”
“Ah, but that ’ud ha’ been hard,” said Silas, in an under-tone; “it ’ud
ha’ been hard to trusten then.”
“And so it would,” said Dolly, almost with compunction; “them things
are easier said nor done; and I’m partly ashamed o’ talking.”
“Nay, nay,” said Silas, “you’re i’ the right, Mrs. Winthrop—you’re i’
the right. There’s good i’ this world—I’ve a feeling o’ that now; and
it makes a man feel as there’s a good more nor he can see, i’ spite o’
the trouble and the wickedness. That drawing o’ the lots is dark; but
the child was sent to me: there’s dealings with us—there’s dealings.”
This dialogue took place in Eppie’s earlier years, when Silas had to
part with her for two hours every day, that she might learn to read at
the dame school, after he had vainly tried himself to guide her in that
first step to learning. Now that she was grown up, Silas had often been
led, in those moments of quiet outpouring which come to people who live
together in perfect love, to talk with _her_ too of the past, and how
and why he had lived a lonely man until she had been sent to him. For
it would have been impossible for him to hide from Eppie that she was
not his own child: even if the most delicate reticence on the point
could have been expected from Raveloe gossips in her presence, her own
questions about her mother could not have been parried, as she grew up,
without that complete shrouding of the past which would have made a
painful barrier between their minds. So Eppie had long known how her
mother had died on the snowy ground, and how she herself had been found
on the hearth by father Silas, who had taken her golden curls for his
lost guineas brought back to him. The tender and peculiar love with
which Silas had reared her in almost inseparable companionship with
himself, aided by the seclusion of their dwelling, had preserved her
from the lowering influences of the village talk and habits, and had
kept her mind in that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to
be an invariable attribute of rusticity. Perfect love has a breath of
poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human
beings; and this breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie from the time
when she had followed the bright gleam that beckoned her to Silas’s
hearth; so that it is not surprising if, in other things besides her
delicate prettiness, she was not quite a common village maiden, but had
a touch of refinement and fervour which came from no other teaching
than that of tenderly-nurtured unvitiated feeling. She was too childish
and simple for her imagination to rove into questions about her unknown
father; for a long while it did not even occur to her that she must
have had a father; and the first time that the idea of her mother
having had a husband presented itself to her, was when Silas showed her
the wedding-ring which had been taken from the wasted finger, and had
been carefully preserved by him in a little lackered box shaped like a