Silas Marner
to Bramcote, and _you_ told the Squire it wasn’t paid. I’d nothing to
do with that; you chose to be so obliging as to give it me, that was
all. If you don’t want to pay the money, let it alone; it’s all one to
me. But I was willing to accommodate you by undertaking to sell the
horse, seeing it’s not convenient to you to go so far to-morrow.”
Godfrey was silent for some moments. He would have liked to spring on
Dunstan, wrench the whip from his hand, and flog him to within an inch
of his life; and no bodily fear could have deterred him; but he was
mastered by another sort of fear, which was fed by feelings stronger
even than his resentment. When he spoke again, it was in a
half-conciliatory tone.
“Well, you mean no nonsense about the horse, eh? You’ll sell him all
fair, and hand over the money? If you don’t, you know, everything ’ull
go to smash, for I’ve got nothing else to trust to. And you’ll have
less pleasure in pulling the house over my head, when your own skull’s
to be broken too.”
“Aye, aye,” said Dunstan, rising; “all right. I thought you’d come
round. I’m the fellow to bring old Bryce up to the scratch. I’ll get
you a hundred and twenty for him, if I get you a penny.”
“But it’ll perhaps rain cats and dogs to-morrow, as it did yesterday,
and then you can’t go,” said Godfrey, hardly knowing whether he wished
for that obstacle or not.
“Not _it_,” said Dunstan. “I’m always lucky in my weather. It might
rain if you wanted to go yourself. You never hold trumps, you know—I
always do. You’ve got the beauty, you see, and I’ve got the luck, so
you must keep me by you for your crooked sixpence; you’ll _ne_-ver get
along without me.”
“Confound you, hold your tongue!” said Godfrey, impetuously. “And take
care to keep sober to-morrow, else you’ll get pitched on your head
coming home, and Wildfire might be the worse for it.”
“Make your tender heart easy,” said Dunstan, opening the door. “You
never knew me see double when I’d got a bargain to make; it ’ud spoil
the fun. Besides, whenever I fall, I’m warranted to fall on my legs.”
With that, Dunstan slammed the door behind him, and left Godfrey to
that bitter rumination on his personal circumstances which was now
unbroken from day to day save by the excitement of sporting, drinking,
card-playing, or the rarer and less oblivious pleasure of seeing Miss
Nancy Lammeter. The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher
sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable
than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which
leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own
griefs and discontents. The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we
are apt to think very prosaic figures—men whose only work was to ride
round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles, and who
passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification of
senses dulled by monotony—had a certain pathos in them nevertheless.
Calamities came to _them_ too, and their early errors carried hard
consequences: perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of
purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life
in which the days would not seem too long, even without rioting; but
the maiden was lost, and the vision passed away, and then what was left
to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt, or for
carrying a gun over the furrows, but to drink and get merry, or to
drink and get angry, so that they might be independent of variety, and
say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already any
time that twelvemonth? Assuredly, among these flushed and dull-eyed men
there were some whom—thanks to their native human-kindness—even riot
could never drive into brutality; men who, when their cheeks were
fresh, had felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse, had been pierced
by the reeds they leaned on, or had lightly put their limbs in fetters
from which no struggle could loose them; and under these sad
circumstances, common to us all, their thoughts could find no
resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of their own petty
history.
That, at least, was the condition of Godfrey Cass in this
six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction, helped
by those small indefinable influences which every personal relation
exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which
was a blight on his life. It was an ugly story of low passion,
delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from
the privacy of Godfrey’s bitter memory. He had long known that the
delusion was partly due to a trap laid for him by Dunstan, who saw in
his brother’s degrading marriage the means of gratifying at once his
jealous hate and his cupidity. And if Godfrey could have felt himself
simply a victim, the iron bit that destiny had put into his mouth would
have chafed him less intolerably. If the curses he muttered half aloud
when he was alone had had no other object than Dunstan’s diabolical
cunning, he might have shrunk less from the consequences of avowal. But
he had something else to curse—his own vicious folly, which now seemed
as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do
when their promptings have long passed away. For four years he had
thought of Nancy Lammeter, and wooed her with tacit patient worship, as
the woman who made him think of the future with joy: she would be his
wife, and would make home lovely to him, as his father’s home had never
been; and it would be easy, when she was always near, to shake off
those foolish habits that were no pleasures, but only a feverish way of
annulling vacancy. Godfrey’s was an essentially domestic nature, bred
up in a home where the hearth had no smiles, and where the daily habits
were not chastised by the presence of household order. His easy
disposition made him fall in unresistingly with the family courses, but
the need of some tender permanent affection, the longing for some
influence that would make the good he preferred easy to pursue, caused
the neatness, purity, and liberal orderliness of the Lammeter
household, sunned by the smile of Nancy, to seem like those fresh
bright hours of the morning when temptations go to sleep and leave the
ear open to the voice of the good angel, inviting to industry,
sobriety, and peace. And yet the hope of this paradise had not been
enough to save him from a course which shut him out of it for ever.
Instead of keeping fast hold of the strong silken rope by which Nancy
would have drawn him safe to the green banks where it was easy to step
firmly, he had let himself be dragged back into mud and slime, in which
it was useless to struggle. He had made ties for himself which robbed
him of all wholesome motive, and were a constant exasperation.
Still, there was one position worse than the present: it was the
position he would be in when the ugly secret was disclosed; and the
desire that continually triumphed over every other was that of warding
off the evil day, when he would have to bear the consequences of his
father’s violent resentment for the wound inflicted on his family
pride—would have, perhaps, to turn his back on that hereditary ease and
dignity which, after all, was a sort of reason for living, and would
carry with him the certainty that he was banished for ever from the
sight and esteem of Nancy Lammeter. The longer the interval, the more
chance there was of deliverance from some, at least, of the hateful
consequences to which he had sold himself; the more opportunities
remained for him to snatch the strange gratification of seeing Nancy,
and gathering some faint indications of her lingering regard. Towards
this gratification he was impelled, fitfully, every now and then, after
having passed weeks in which he had avoided her as the far-off
bright-winged prize that only made him spring forward and find his
chain all the more galling. One of those fits of yearning was on him
now, and it would have been strong enough to have persuaded him to
trust Wildfire to Dunstan rather than disappoint the yearning, even if
he had not had another reason for his disinclination towards the
morrow’s hunt. That other reason was the fact that the morning’s meet
was near Batherley, the market-town where the unhappy woman lived,
whose image became more odious to him every day; and to his thought the
whole vicinage was haunted by her. The yoke a man creates for himself
by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature; and the
good-humoured, affectionate-hearted Godfrey Cass was fast becoming a
bitter man, visited by cruel wishes, that seemed to enter, and depart,
and enter again, like demons who had found in him a ready-garnished
home.
What was he to do this evening to pass the time? He might as well go to
the Rainbow, and hear the talk about the cock-fighting: everybody was
there, and what else was there to be done? Though, for his own part, he
did not care a button for cock-fighting. Snuff, the brown spaniel, who
had placed herself in front of him, and had been watching him for some
time, now jumped up in impatience for the expected caress. But Godfrey
thrust her away without looking at her, and left the room, followed
humbly by the unresenting Snuff—perhaps because she saw no other career
open to her.
CHAPTER IV.
Dunstan Cass, setting off in the raw morning, at the judiciously quiet
pace of a man who is obliged to ride to cover on his hunter, had to
take his way along the lane which, at its farther extremity, passed by
the piece of unenclosed ground called the Stone-pit, where stood the
cottage, once a stone-cutter’s shed, now for fifteen years inhabited by
Silas Marner. The spot looked very dreary at this season, with the
moist trodden clay about it, and the red, muddy water high up in the
deserted quarry. That was Dunstan’s first thought as he approached it;
the second was, that the old fool of a weaver, whose loom he heard
rattling already, had a great deal of money hidden somewhere. How was
it that he, Dunstan Cass, who had often heard talk of Marner’s
miserliness, had never thought of suggesting to Godfrey that he should
frighten or persuade the old fellow into lending the money on the
excellent security of the young Squire’s prospects? The resource
occurred to him now as so easy and agreeable, especially as Marner’s
hoard was likely to be large enough to leave Godfrey a handsome surplus
beyond his immediate needs, and enable him to accommodate his faithful
brother, that he had almost turned the horse’s head towards home again.
Godfrey would be ready enough to accept the suggestion: he would snatch
eagerly at a plan that might save him from parting with Wildfire. But
when Dunstan’s meditation reached this point, the inclination to go on
grew strong and prevailed. He didn’t want to give Godfrey that
pleasure: he preferred that Master Godfrey should be vexed. Moreover,
Dunstan enjoyed the self-important consciousness of having a horse to
sell, and the opportunity of driving a bargain, swaggering, and
possibly taking somebody in. He might have all the satisfaction
attendant on selling his brother’s horse, and not the less have the
further satisfaction of setting Godfrey to borrow Marner’s money. So he
rode on to cover.
Bryce and Keating were there, as Dunstan was quite sure they would
be—he was such a lucky fellow.
“Heyday!” said Bryce, who had long had his eye on Wildfire, “you’re on
your brother’s horse to-day: how’s that?”
“Oh, I’ve swopped with him,” said Dunstan, whose delight in lying,
grandly independent of utility, was not to be diminished by the
likelihood that his hearer would not believe him—“Wildfire’s mine now.”
“What! has he swopped with you for that big-boned hack of yours?” said