Silas Marner
towards falsity, and he drove one after another away with growing
irritation, for the news of him as a wise man had spread even to
Tarley, and it was long before people ceased to take long walks for the
sake of asking his aid. But the hope in his wisdom was at length
changed into dread, for no one believed him when he said he knew no
charms and could work no cures, and every man and woman who had an
accident or a new attack after applying to him, set the misfortune down
to Master Marner’s ill-will and irritated glances. Thus it came to pass
that his movement of pity towards Sally Oates, which had given him a
transient sense of brotherhood, heightened the repulsion between him
and his neighbours, and made his isolation more complete.
Gradually the guineas, the crowns, and the half-crowns grew to a heap,
and Marner drew less and less for his own wants, trying to solve the
problem of keeping himself strong enough to work sixteen hours a-day on
as small an outlay as possible. Have not men, shut up in solitary
imprisonment, found an interest in marking the moments by straight
strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of
straight strokes, arranged in triangles, has become a mastering
purpose? Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by
repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred
a want, which is incipient habit? That will help us to understand how
the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose
imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no
purpose beyond it. Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a
square, and then into a larger square; and every added guinea, while it
was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire. In this strange world,
made a hopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intense
nature, have sat weaving, weaving—looking towards the end of his
pattern, or towards the end of his web, till he forgot the riddle, and
everything else but his immediate sensations; but the money had come to
mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not only grew, but it
remained with him. He began to think it was conscious of him, as his
loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which
had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces. He
handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the
satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his
work was done, that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship. He
had taken up some bricks in his floor underneath his loom, and here he
had made a hole in which he set the iron pot that contained his guineas
and silver coins, covering the bricks with sand whenever he replaced
them. Not that the idea of being robbed presented itself often or
strongly to his mind: hoarding was common in country districts in those
days; there were old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known
to have their savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but
their rustic neighbours, though not all of them as honest as their
ancestors in the days of King Alfred, had not imaginations bold enough
to lay a plan of burglary. How could they have spent the money in their
own village without betraying themselves? They would be obliged to “run
away”—a course as dark and dubious as a balloon journey.
So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his
guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening
itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction
that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to
the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an
end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has
perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from
faith and love—only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have
had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit
theory. Strangely Marner’s face and figure shrank and bent themselves
into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that
he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube,
which has no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to
look trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see
only one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for which
they hunted everywhere: and he was so withered and yellow, that, though
he was not yet forty, the children always called him “Old Master
Marner”.
Yet even in this stage of withering a little incident happened, which
showed that the sap of affection was not all gone. It was one of his
daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields off, and
for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had had a brown
earthenware pot, which he held as his most precious utensil among the
very few conveniences he had granted himself. It had been his companion
for twelve years, always standing on the same spot, always lending its
handle to him in the early morning, so that its form had an expression
for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his
palm gave a satisfaction mingled with that of having the fresh clear
water. One day as he was returning from the well, he stumbled against
the step of the stile, and his brown pot, falling with force against
the stones that overarched the ditch below him, was broken in three
pieces. Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in
his heart. The brown pot could never be of use to him any more, but he
stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in its old place for a
memorial.
This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year after he
came to Raveloe. The livelong day he sat in his loom, his ear filled
with its monotony, his eyes bent close down on the slow growth of
sameness in the brownish web, his muscles moving with such even
repetition that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint as the
holding of his breath. But at night came his revelry: at night he
closed his shutters, and made fast his doors, and drew forth his gold.
Long ago the heap of coins had become too large for the iron pot to
hold them, and he had made for them two thick leather bags, which
wasted no room in their resting-place, but lent themselves flexibly to
every corner. How the guineas shone as they came pouring out of the
dark leather mouths! The silver bore no large proportion in amount to
the gold, because the long pieces of linen which formed his chief work
were always partly paid for in gold, and out of the silver he supplied
his own bodily wants, choosing always the shillings and sixpences to
spend in this way. He loved the guineas best, but he would not change
the silver—the crowns and half-crowns that were his own earnings,
begotten by his labour; he loved them all. He spread them out in heaps
and bathed his hands in them; then he counted them and set them up in
regular piles, and felt their rounded outline between his thumb and
fingers, and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earned
by the work in his loom, as if they had been unborn children—thought of
the guineas that were coming slowly through the coming years, through
all his life, which spread far away before him, the end quite hidden by
countless days of weaving. No wonder his thoughts were still with his
loom and his money when he made his journeys through the fields and the
lanes to fetch and carry home his work, so that his steps never
wandered to the hedge-banks and the lane-side in search of the once
familiar herbs: these too belonged to the past, from which his life had
shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy
fringe of its old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a
groove for itself in the barren sand.
But about the Christmas of that fifteenth year, a second great change
came over Marner’s life, and his history became blent in a singular
manner with the life of his neighbours.
CHAPTER III.
The greatest man in Raveloe was Squire Cass, who lived in the large red
house with the handsome flight of stone steps in front and the high
stables behind it, nearly opposite the church. He was only one among
several landed parishioners, but he alone was honoured with the title
of Squire; for though Mr. Osgood’s family was also understood to be of
timeless origin—the Raveloe imagination having never ventured back to
that fearful blank when there were no Osgoods—still, he merely owned
the farm he occupied; whereas Squire Cass had a tenant or two, who
complained of the game to him quite as if he had been a lord.
It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar
favour of Providence towards the landed interest, and the fall of
prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen
down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry
were plentifully anointing their wheels. I am speaking now in relation
to Raveloe and the parishes that resembled it; for our old-fashioned
country life had many different aspects, as all life must have when it
is spread over a various surface, and breathed on variously by
multitudinous currents, from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of
men, which are for ever moving and crossing each other with
incalculable results. Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the
rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan
earnestness: the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy
as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor
thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly
life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which
were the heirlooms of the poor. Betty Jay scented the boiling of Squire
Cass’s hams, but her longing was arrested by the unctuous liquor in
which they were boiled; and when the seasons brought round the great
merry-makings, they were regarded on all hands as a fine thing for the
poor. For the Raveloe feasts were like the rounds of beef and the
barrels of ale—they were on a large scale, and lasted a good while,
especially in the winter-time. After ladies had packed up their best
gowns and top-knots in bandboxes, and had incurred the risk of fording
streams on pillions with the precious burden in rainy or snowy weather,
when there was no knowing how high the water would rise, it was not to
be supposed that they looked forward to a brief pleasure. On this
ground it was always contrived in the dark seasons, when there was
little work to be done, and the hours were long, that several
neighbours should keep open house in succession. So soon as Squire
Cass’s standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests
had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr.
Osgood’s, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut,
pork-pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all its
freshness—everything, in fact, that appetites at leisure could desire,
in perhaps greater perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at
Squire Cass’s.
For the Squire’s wife had died long ago, and the Red House was without
that presence of the wife and mother which is the fountain of wholesome
love and fear in parlour and kitchen; and this helped to account not
only for there being more profusion than finished excellence in the
holiday provisions, but also for the frequency with which the proud
Squire condescended to preside in the parlour of the Rainbow rather
than under the shadow of his own dark wainscot; perhaps, also, for the
fact that his sons had turned out rather ill. Raveloe was not a place