Silas Marner
a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge
from a great weariness or a great danger—not to be interfered with by
speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh
enjoyment of repose.
But presently he put out his hand, and as Nancy placed hers within it,
he drew her towards him, and said—
“That’s ended!”
She bent to kiss him, and then said, as she stood by his side, “Yes,
I’m afraid we must give up the hope of having her for a daughter. It
wouldn’t be right to want to force her to come to us against her will.
We can’t alter her bringing up and what’s come of it.”
“No,” said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with
his usually careless and unemphatic speech—“there’s debts we can’t pay
like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by.
While I’ve been putting off and putting off, the trees have been
growing—it’s too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said
about a man’s turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to
somebody else. I wanted to pass for childless once, Nancy—I shall pass
for childless now against my wish.”
Nancy did not speak immediately, but after a little while she
asked—“You won’t make it known, then, about Eppie’s being your
daughter?”
“No: where would be the good to anybody?—only harm. I must do what I
can for her in the state of life she chooses. I must see who it is
she’s thinking of marrying.”
“If it won’t do any good to make the thing known,” said Nancy, who
thought she might now allow herself the relief of entertaining a
feeling which she had tried to silence before, “I should be very
thankful for father and Priscilla never to be troubled with knowing
what was done in the past, more than about Dunsey: it can’t be helped,
their knowing that.”
“I shall put it in my will—I think I shall put it in my will. I
shouldn’t like to leave anything to be found out, like this of Dunsey,”
said Godfrey, meditatively. “But I can’t see anything but difficulties
that ’ud come from telling it now. I must do what I can to make her
happy in her own way. I’ve a notion,” he added, after a moment’s pause,
“it’s Aaron Winthrop she meant she was engaged to. I remember seeing
him with her and Marner going away from church.”
“Well, he’s very sober and industrious,” said Nancy, trying to view the
matter as cheerfully as possible.
Godfrey fell into thoughtfulness again. Presently he looked up at Nancy
sorrowfully, and said—
“She’s a very pretty, nice girl, isn’t she, Nancy?”
“Yes, dear; and with just your hair and eyes: I wondered it had never
struck me before.”
“I think she took a dislike to me at the thought of my being her
father: I could see a change in her manner after that.”
“She couldn’t bear to think of not looking on Marner as her father,”
said Nancy, not wishing to confirm her husband’s painful impression.
“She thinks I did wrong by her mother as well as by her. She thinks me
worse than I am. But she _must_ think it: she can never know all. It’s
part of my punishment, Nancy, for my daughter to dislike me. I should
never have got into that trouble if I’d been true to you—if I hadn’t
been a fool. I’d no right to expect anything but evil could come of
that marriage—and when I shirked doing a father’s part too.”
Nancy was silent: her spirit of rectitude would not let her try to
soften the edge of what she felt to be a just compunction. He spoke
again after a little while, but the tone was rather changed: there was
tenderness mingled with the previous self-reproach.
“And I got _you_, Nancy, in spite of all; and yet I’ve been grumbling
and uneasy because I hadn’t something else—as if I deserved it.”
“You’ve never been wanting to me, Godfrey,” said Nancy, with quiet
sincerity. “My only trouble would be gone if you resigned yourself to
the lot that’s been given us.”
“Well, perhaps it isn’t too late to mend a bit there. Though it _is_
too late to mend some things, say what they will.”
CHAPTER XXI.
The next morning, when Silas and Eppie were seated at their breakfast,
he said to her—
“Eppie, there’s a thing I’ve had on my mind to do this two year, and
now the money’s been brought back to us, we can do it. I’ve been
turning it over and over in the night, and I think we’ll set out
to-morrow, while the fine days last. We’ll leave the house and
everything for your godmother to take care on, and we’ll make a little
bundle o’ things and set out.”
“Where to go, daddy?” said Eppie, in much surprise.
“To my old country—to the town where I was born—up Lantern Yard. I want
to see Mr. Paston, the minister: something may ha’ come out to make ’em
know I was innicent o’ the robbery. And Mr. Paston was a man with a
deal o’ light—I want to speak to him about the drawing o’ the lots. And
I should like to talk to him about the religion o’ this country-side,
for I partly think he doesn’t know on it.”
Eppie was very joyful, for there was the prospect not only of wonder
and delight at seeing a strange country, but also of coming back to
tell Aaron all about it. Aaron was so much wiser than she was about
most things—it would be rather pleasant to have this little advantage
over him. Mrs. Winthrop, though possessed with a dim fear of dangers
attendant on so long a journey, and requiring many assurances that it
would not take them out of the region of carriers’ carts and slow
waggons, was nevertheless well pleased that Silas should revisit his
own country, and find out if he had been cleared from that false
accusation.
“You’d be easier in your mind for the rest o’ your life, Master
Marner,” said Dolly—“that you would. And if there’s any light to be got
up the yard as you talk on, we’ve need of it i’ this world, and I’d be
glad on it myself, if you could bring it back.”
So on the fourth day from that time, Silas and Eppie, in their Sunday
clothes, with a small bundle tied in a blue linen handkerchief, were
making their way through the streets of a great manufacturing town.
Silas, bewildered by the changes thirty years had brought over his
native place, had stopped several persons in succession to ask them the
name of this town, that he might be sure he was not under a mistake
about it.
“Ask for Lantern Yard, father—ask this gentleman with the tassels on
his shoulders a-standing at the shop door; he isn’t in a hurry like the
rest,” said Eppie, in some distress at her father’s bewilderment, and
ill at ease, besides, amidst the noise, the movement, and the multitude
of strange indifferent faces.
“Eh, my child, he won’t know anything about it,” said Silas;
“gentlefolks didn’t ever go up the Yard. But happen somebody can tell
me which is the way to Prison Street, where the jail is. I know the way
out o’ that as if I’d seen it yesterday.”
With some difficulty, after many turnings and new inquiries, they
reached Prison Street; and the grim walls of the jail, the first object
that answered to any image in Silas’s memory, cheered him with the
certitude, which no assurance of the town’s name had hitherto given
him, that he was in his native place.
“Ah,” he said, drawing a long breath, “there’s the jail, Eppie; that’s
just the same: I aren’t afraid now. It’s the third turning on the left
hand from the jail doors—that’s the way we must go.”
“Oh, what a dark ugly place!” said Eppie. “How it hides the sky! It’s
worse than the Workhouse. I’m glad you don’t live in this town now,
father. Is Lantern Yard like this street?”
“My precious child,” said Silas, smiling, “it isn’t a big street like
this. I never was easy i’ this street myself, but I was fond o’ Lantern
Yard. The shops here are all altered, I think—I can’t make ’em out; but
I shall know the turning, because it’s the third.”
“Here it is,” he said, in a tone of satisfaction, as they came to a
narrow alley. “And then we must go to the left again, and then straight
for’ard for a bit, up Shoe Lane: and then we shall be at the entry next
to the o’erhanging window, where there’s the nick in the road for the
water to run. Eh, I can see it all.”
“O father, I’m like as if I was stifled,” said Eppie. “I couldn’t ha’
thought as any folks lived i’ this way, so close together. How pretty
the Stone-pits ’ull look when we get back!”
“It looks comical to _me_, child, now—and smells bad. I can’t think as
it usened to smell so.”
Here and there a sallow, begrimed face looked out from a gloomy doorway
at the strangers, and increased Eppie’s uneasiness, so that it was a
longed-for relief when they issued from the alleys into Shoe Lane,
where there was a broader strip of sky.
“Dear heart!” said Silas, “why, there’s people coming out o’ the Yard
as if they’d been to chapel at this time o’ day—a weekday noon!”
Suddenly he started and stood still with a look of distressed
amazement, that alarmed Eppie. They were before an opening in front of
a large factory, from which men and women were streaming for their
midday meal.
“Father,” said Eppie, clasping his arm, “what’s the matter?”
But she had to speak again and again before Silas could answer her.
“It’s gone, child,” he said, at last, in strong agitation—“Lantern
Yard’s gone. It must ha’ been here, because here’s the house with the
o’erhanging window—I know that—it’s just the same; but they’ve made
this new opening; and see that big factory! It’s all gone—chapel and
all.”
“Come into that little brush-shop and sit down, father—they’ll let you
sit down,” said Eppie, always on the watch lest one of her father’s
strange attacks should come on. “Perhaps the people can tell you all
about it.”
But neither from the brush-maker, who had come to Shoe Lane only ten
years ago, when the factory was already built, nor from any other
source within his reach, could Silas learn anything of the old Lantern
Yard friends, or of Mr. Paston the minister.
“The old place is all swep’ away,” Silas said to Dolly Winthrop on the
night of his return—“the little graveyard and everything. The old
home’s gone; I’ve no home but this now. I shall never know whether they
got at the truth o’ the robbery, nor whether Mr. Paston could ha’ given
me any light about the drawing o’ the lots. It’s dark to me, Mrs.
Winthrop, that is; I doubt it’ll be dark to the last.”
“Well, yes, Master Marner,” said Dolly, who sat with a placid listening
face, now bordered by grey hairs; “I doubt it may. It’s the will o’
Them above as a many things should be dark to us; but there’s some
things as I’ve never felt i’ the dark about, and they’re mostly what
comes i’ the day’s work. You were hard done by that once, Master
Marner, and it seems as you’ll never know the rights of it; but that
doesn’t hinder there _being_ a rights, Master Marner, for all it’s dark
to you and me.”
“No,” said Silas, “no; that doesn’t hinder. Since the time the child
was sent to me and I’ve come to love her as myself, I’ve had light
enough to trusten by; and now she says she’ll never leave me, I think I
shall trusten till I die.”
CONCLUSION
There was one time of the year which was held in Raveloe to be
especially suitable for a wedding. It was when the great lilacs and
laburnums in the old-fashioned gardens showed their golden and purple
wealth above the lichen-tinted walls, and when there were calves still
young enough to want bucketfuls of fragrant milk. People were not so
busy then as they must become when the full cheese-making and the
mowing had set in; and besides, it was a time when a light bridal dress
could be worn with comfort and seen to advantage.
Happily the sunshine fell more warmly than usual on the lilac tufts the
morning that Eppie was married, for her dress was a very light one. She
had often thought, though with a feeling of renunciation, that the