Silas Marner
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 against 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 XVIII.
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.
“O 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 been 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