Silas Marner
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 XIX.
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 every one 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. Any
one 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 further 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 ’ud be a great comfort to you in your old age, I
hope, to see her fortune made in that way, after you’ve 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 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.