X


Justice Malam was naturally regarded in Tarley and Raveloe as a man
of capacious mind, seeing that he could draw much wider conclusions
without evidence than could be expected of his neighbours who were
not on the Commission of the Peace.  Such a man was not likely to
neglect the clue of the tinder-box, and an inquiry was set on foot
concerning a pedlar, name unknown, with curly black hair and a
foreign complexion, carrying a box of cutlery and jewellery, and
wearing large rings in his ears.  But either because inquiry was too
slow-footed to overtake him, or because the description applied to
so many pedlars that inquiry did not know how to choose among them,
weeks passed away, and there was no other result concerning the
robbery than a gradual cessation of the excitement it had caused in
Raveloe.  Dunstan Cass's absence was hardly a subject of remark: he
had once before had a quarrel with his father, and had gone off,
nobody knew whither, to return at the end of six weeks, take up his
old quarters unforbidden, and swagger as usual.  His own family, who
equally expected this issue, with the sole difference that the
Squire was determined this time to forbid him the old quarters,
never mentioned his absence; and when his uncle Kimble or Mr. Osgood
noticed it, the story of his having killed Wildfire, and committed
some offence against his father, was enough to prevent surprise.  To
connect the fact of Dunsey's disappearance with that of the robbery
occurring on the same day, lay quite away from the track of every
one's thought--even Godfrey's, who had better reason than any one
else to know what his brother was capable of.  He remembered no
mention of the weaver between them since the time, twelve years ago,
when it was their boyish sport to deride him; and, besides, his
imagination constantly created an _alibi_ for Dunstan: he saw him
continually in some congenial haunt, to which he had walked off on
leaving Wildfire--saw him sponging on chance acquaintances, and
meditating a return home to the old amusement of tormenting his
elder brother.  Even if any brain in Raveloe had put the said two
facts together, I doubt whether a combination so injurious to the
prescriptive respectability of a family with a mural monument and
venerable tankards, would not have been suppressed as of unsound
tendency.  But Christmas puddings, brawn, and abundance of
spirituous liquors, throwing the mental originality into the channel
of nightmare, are great preservatives against a dangerous
spontaneity of waking thought.

When the robbery was talked of at the Rainbow and elsewhere, in good
company, the balance continued to waver between the rational
explanation founded on the tinder-box, and the theory of an
impenetrable mystery that mocked investigation.  The advocates of
the tinder-box-and-pedlar view considered the other side a
muddle-headed and credulous set, who, because they themselves were
wall-eyed, supposed everybody else to have the same blank outlook;
and the adherents of the inexplicable more than hinted that their
antagonists were animals inclined to crow before they had found any
corn--mere skimming-dishes in point of depth--whose
clear-sightedness consisted in supposing there was nothing behind a
barn-door because they couldn't see through it; so that, though
their controversy did not serve to elicit the fact concerning the
robbery, it elicited some true opinions of collateral importance.

But while poor Silas's loss served thus to brush the slow current of
Raveloe conversation, Silas himself was feeling the withering
desolation of that bereavement about which his neighbours were
arguing at their ease.  To any one who had observed him before he
lost his gold, it might have seemed that so withered and shrunken a
life as his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly
endure any subtraction but such as would put an end to it
altogether.  But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with
immediate purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless
unknown.  It had been a clinging life; and though the object round
which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied
the need for clinging.  But now the fence was broken down--the
support was snatched away.  Marner's thoughts could no longer move
in their old round, and were baffled by a blank like that which
meets a plodding ant when the earth has broken away on its homeward
path.  The loom was there, and the weaving, and the growing pattern
in the cloth; but the bright treasure in the hole under his feet was
gone; the prospect of handling and counting it was gone: the evening
had no phantasm of delight to still the poor soul's craving.  The
thought of the money he would get by his actual work could bring no
joy, for its meagre image was only a fresh reminder of his loss; and
hope was too heavily crushed by the sudden blow for his imagination
to dwell on the growth of a new hoard from that small beginning.

He filled up the blank with grief.  As he sat weaving, he every now
and then moaned low, like one in pain: it was the sign that his
thoughts had come round again to the sudden chasm--to the empty
evening-time.  And all the evening, as he sat in his loneliness by
his dull fire, he leaned his elbows on his knees, and clasped his
head with his hands, and moaned very low--not as one who seeks to
be heard.

And yet he was not utterly forsaken in his trouble.  The repulsion
Marner had always created in his neighbours was partly dissipated by
the new light in which this misfortune had shown him.  Instead of a
man who had more cunning than honest folks could come by, and, what
was worse, had not the inclination to use that cunning in a
neighbourly way, it was now apparent that Silas had not cunning
enough to keep his own.  He was generally spoken of as a "poor
mushed creatur"; and that avoidance of his neighbours, which had
before been referred to his ill-will and to a probable addiction to
worse company, was now considered mere craziness.

This change to a kindlier feeling was shown in various ways.  The
odour of Christmas cooking being on the wind, it was the season when
superfluous pork and black puddings are suggestive of charity in
well-to-do families; and Silas's misfortune had brought him
uppermost in the memory of housekeepers like Mrs. Osgood.
Mr. Crackenthorp, too, while he admonished Silas that his money had
probably been taken from him because he thought too much of it and
never came to church, enforced the doctrine by a present of pigs'
pettitoes, well calculated to dissipate unfounded prejudices against
the clerical character.  Neighbours who had nothing but verbal
consolation to give showed a disposition not only to greet Silas and
discuss his misfortune at some length when they encountered him in
the village, but also to take the trouble of calling at his cottage
and getting him to repeat all the details on the very spot; and then
they would try to cheer him by saying, "Well, Master Marner, you're
no worse off nor other poor folks, after all; and if you was to be
crippled, the parish 'ud give you a 'lowance."

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our
neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in
spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips.  We can send black
puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own
egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a
mingled soil.  There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe;
but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape
least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.

Mr. Macey, for example, coming one evening expressly to let Silas
know that recent events had given him the advantage of standing more
favourably in the opinion of a man whose judgment was not formed
lightly, opened the conversation by saying, as soon as he had seated
himself and adjusted his thumbs--

"Come, Master Marner, why, you've no call to sit a-moaning.  You're
a deal better off to ha' lost your money, nor to ha' kep it by foul
means.  I used to think, when you first come into these parts, as
you were no better nor you should be; you were younger a deal than
what you are now; but you were allays a staring, white-faced
creatur, partly like a bald-faced calf, as I may say.  But there's
no knowing: it isn't every queer-looksed thing as Old Harry's had
the making of--I mean, speaking o' toads and such; for they're
often harmless, like, and useful against varmin.  And it's pretty
much the same wi' you, as fur as I can see.  Though as to the yarbs
and stuff to cure the breathing, if you brought that sort o'
knowledge from distant parts, you might ha' been a bit freer of it.
And if the knowledge wasn't well come by, why, you might ha' made up
for it by coming to church reg'lar; for, as for the children as the
Wise Woman charmed, I've been at the christening of 'em again and
again, and they took the water just as well.  And that's reasonable;
for if Old Harry's a mind to do a bit o' kindness for a holiday,
like, who's got anything against it?  That's my thinking; and I've
been clerk o' this parish forty year, and I know, when the parson
and me does the cussing of a Ash Wednesday, there's no cussing o'
folks as have a mind to be cured without a doctor, let Kimble say
what he will.  And so, Master Marner, as I was saying--for there's
windings i' things as they may carry you to the fur end o' the
prayer-book afore you get back to 'em--my advice is, as you keep
up your sperrits; for as for thinking you're a deep un, and ha' got
more inside you nor 'ull bear daylight, I'm not o' that opinion at
all, and so I tell the neighbours.  For, says I, you talk o' Master
Marner making out a tale--why, it's nonsense, that is: it 'ud take
a 'cute man to make a tale like that; and, says I, he looked as
scared as a rabbit."

During this discursive address Silas had continued motionless in his
previous attitude, leaning his elbows on his knees, and pressing his
hands against his head.  Mr. Macey, not doubting that he had been
listened to, paused, in the expectation of some appreciatory reply,
but Marner remained silent.  He had a sense that the old man meant
to be good-natured and neighbourly; but the kindness fell on him as
sunshine falls on the wretched--he had no heart to taste it, and
felt that it was very far off him.

"Come, Master Marner, have you got nothing to say to that?"  said
Mr. Macey at last, with a slight accent of impatience.

"Oh," said Marner, slowly, shaking his head between his hands, "I
thank you--thank you--kindly."

"Aye, aye, to be sure: I thought you would," said Mr. Macey; "and
my advice is--have you got a Sunday suit?"

"No," said Marner.

"I doubted it was so," said Mr. Macey.  "Now, let me advise you
to get a Sunday suit: there's Tookey, he's a poor creatur, but he's
got my tailoring business, and some o' my money in it, and he shall
make a suit at a low price, and give you trust, and then you can
come to church, and be a bit neighbourly.  Why, you've never heared
me say "Amen" since you come into these parts, and I recommend you
to lose no time, for it'll be poor work when Tookey has it all to
himself, for I mayn't be equil to stand i' the desk at all, come
another winter."  Here Mr. Macey paused, perhaps expecting some
sign of emotion in his hearer; but not observing any, he went on.
"And as for the money for the suit o' clothes, why, you get a
matter of a pound a-week at your weaving, Master Marner, and you're
a young man, eh, for all you look so mushed.  Why, you couldn't ha'
been five-and-twenty when you come into these parts, eh?"

Silas started a little at the change to a questioning tone, and
answered mildly, "I don't know; I can't rightly say--it's a long
while since."

After receiving such an answer as this, it is not surprising that
Mr. Macey observed, later on in the evening at the Rainbow, that
Marner's head was "all of a muddle", and that it was to be doubted
if he ever knew when Sunday came round, which showed him a worse
heathen than many a dog.

Another of Silas's comforters, besides Mr. Macey, came to him with a
mind highly charged on the same topic.  This was Mrs. Winthrop, the
wheelwright's wife.  The inhabitants of Raveloe were not severely
regular in their church-going, and perhaps there was hardly a person
in the parish who would not have held that to go to church every
Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand
well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours--
a wish to be better than the "common run", that would have

implied a reflection on those who had had godfathers and godmothers
as well as themselves, and had an equal right to the
burying-service.  At the same time, it was understood to be
requisite for all who were not household servants, or young men, to
take the sacrament at one of the great festivals: Squire Cass
himself took it on Christmas-day; while those who were held to be
"good livers" went to church with greater, though still with
moderate, frequency.

Mrs. Winthrop was one of these: she was in all respects a woman of
scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties that life seemed to offer
them too scantily unless she rose at half-past four, though this
threw a scarcity of work over the more advanced hours of the
morning, which it was a constant problem with her to remove.  Yet
she had not the vixenish temper which is sometimes supposed to be a
necessary condition of such habits: she was a very mild, patient
woman, whose nature it was to seek out all the sadder and more
serious elements of life, and pasture her mind upon them.  She was
the person always first thought of in Raveloe when there was illness
or death in a family, when leeches were to be applied, or there was
a sudden disappointment in a monthly nurse.  She was a "comfortable
woman"--good-looking, fresh-complexioned, having her lips always
slightly screwed, as if she felt herself in a sick-room with the
doctor or the clergyman present.  But she was never whimpering; no
one had seen her shed tears; she was simply grave and inclined to
shake her head and sigh, almost imperceptibly, like a funereal
mourner who is not a relation.  It seemed surprising that Ben
Winthrop, who loved his quart-pot and his joke, got along so well
with Dolly; but she took her husband's jokes and joviality as
patiently as everything else, considering that "men _would_ be
so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it
had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and
turkey-cocks.

This good wholesome woman could hardly fail to have her mind drawn
strongly towards Silas Marner, now that he appeared in the light of
a sufferer; and one Sunday afternoon she took her little boy Aaron
with her, and went to call on Silas, carrying in her hand some small
lard-cakes, flat paste-like articles much esteemed in Raveloe.
Aaron, an apple-cheeked youngster of seven, with a clean starched
frill which looked like a plate for the apples, needed all his
adventurous curiosity to embolden him against the possibility that
the big-eyed weaver might do him some bodily injury; and his dubiety
was much increased when, on arriving at the Stone-pits, they heard
the mysterious sound of the loom.

"Ah, it is as I thought," said Mrs. Winthrop, sadly.

They had to knock loudly before Silas heard them; but when he did
come to the door he showed no impatience, as he would once have
done, at a visit that had been unasked for and unexpected.
Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure
inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken.  Left
groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had
inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if
any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a
slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a
faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.  He opened the
door wide to admit Dolly, but without otherwise returning her
greeting than by moving the armchair a few inches as a sign that she
was to sit down in it.  Dolly, as soon as she was seated, removed
the white cloth that covered her lard-cakes, and said in her gravest
way--

"I'd a baking yisterday, Master Marner, and the lard-cakes turned
out better nor common, and I'd ha' asked you to accept some, if
you'd thought well.  I don't eat such things myself, for a bit o'
bread's what I like from one year's end to the other; but men's
stomichs are made so comical, they want a change--they do, I know,
God help 'em."

Dolly sighed gently as she held out the cakes to Silas, who thanked
her kindly and looked very close at them, absently, being accustomed
to look so at everything he took into his hand--eyed all the while
by the wondering bright orbs of the small Aaron, who had made an
outwork of his mother's chair, and was peeping round from behind it.

"There's letters pricked on 'em," said Dolly.  "I can't read 'em
myself, and there's nobody, not Mr. Macey himself, rightly knows
what they mean; but they've a good meaning, for they're the same as
is on the pulpit-cloth at church.  What are they, Aaron, my dear?"

Aaron retreated completely behind his outwork.

"Oh, go, that's naughty," said his mother, mildly.  "Well,
whativer the letters are, they've a good meaning; and it's a stamp
as has been in our house, Ben says, ever since he was a little un,
and his mother used to put it on the cakes, and I've allays put it
on too; for if there's any good, we've need of it i' this world."

"It's I. H. S.," said Silas, at which proof of learning Aaron
peeped round the chair again.

"Well, to be sure, you can read 'em off," said Dolly.  "Ben's
read 'em to me many and many a time, but they slip out o' my mind
again; the more's the pity, for they're good letters, else they
wouldn't be in the church; and so I prick 'em on all the loaves and
all the cakes, though sometimes they won't hold, because o' the
rising--for, as I said, if there's any good to be got we've need
of it i' this world--that we have; and I hope they'll bring good
to you, Master Marner, for it's wi' that will I brought you the
cakes; and you see the letters have held better nor common."

Silas was as unable to interpret the letters as Dolly, but there was
no possibility of misunderstanding the desire to give comfort that
made itself heard in her quiet tones.  He said, with more feeling
than before--"Thank you--thank you kindly."  But he laid down
the cakes and seated himself absently--drearily unconscious of any
distinct benefit towards which the cakes and the letters, or even
Dolly's kindness, could tend for him.

"Ah, if there's good anywhere, we've need of it," repeated Dolly,
who did not lightly forsake a serviceable phrase.  She looked at
Silas pityingly as she went on.  "But you didn't hear the
church-bells this morning, Master Marner?  I doubt you didn't know
it was Sunday.  Living so lone here, you lose your count, I daresay;
and then, when your loom makes a noise, you can't hear the bells,
more partic'lar now the frost kills the sound."

"Yes, I did; I heard 'em," said Silas, to whom Sunday bells were a
mere accident of the day, and not part of its sacredness.  There had
been no bells in Lantern Yard.

"Dear heart!"  said Dolly, pausing before she spoke again.  "But
what a pity it is you should work of a Sunday, and not clean
yourself--if you _didn't_ go to church; for if you'd a roasting
bit, it might be as you couldn't leave it, being a lone man.  But
there's the bakehus, if you could make up your mind to spend a
twopence on the oven now and then,--not every week, in course--I
shouldn't like to do that myself,--you might carry your bit o'
dinner there, for it's nothing but right to have a bit o' summat hot
of a Sunday, and not to make it as you can't know your dinner from
Saturday.  But now, upo' Christmas-day, this blessed Christmas as is
ever coming, if you was to take your dinner to the bakehus, and go
to church, and see the holly and the yew, and hear the anthim, and
then take the sacramen', you'd be a deal the better, and you'd know
which end you stood on, and you could put your trust i' Them as
knows better nor we do, seein' you'd ha' done what it lies on us all
to do."

Dolly's exhortation, which was an unusually long effort of speech
for her, was uttered in the soothing persuasive tone with which she
would have tried to prevail on a sick man to take his medicine, or a
basin of gruel for which he had no appetite.  Silas had never before
been closely urged on the point of his absence from church, which
had only been thought of as a part of his general queerness; and he
was too direct and simple to evade Dolly's appeal.

"Nay, nay," he said, "I know nothing o' church.  I've never been
to church."

"No!"  said Dolly, in a low tone of wonderment.  Then bethinking
herself of Silas's advent from an unknown country, she said, "Could
it ha' been as they'd no church where you was born?"

"Oh, yes," said Silas, meditatively, sitting in his usual posture
of leaning on his knees, and supporting his head.  "There was
churches--a many--it was a big town.  But I knew nothing of 'em--
I went to chapel."

Dolly was much puzzled at this new word, but she was rather afraid
of inquiring further, lest "chapel" might mean some haunt of
wickedness.  After a little thought, she said--

"Well, Master Marner, it's niver too late to turn over a new leaf,
and if you've niver had no church, there's no telling the good it'll
do you.  For I feel so set up and comfortable as niver was, when
I've been and heard the prayers, and the singing to the praise and
glory o' God, as Mr. Macey gives out--and Mr. Crackenthorp saying
good words, and more partic'lar on Sacramen' Day; and if a bit o'
trouble comes, I feel as I can put up wi' it, for I've looked for
help i' the right quarter, and gev myself up to Them as we must all
give ourselves up to at the last; and if we'n done our part, it
isn't to be believed as Them as are above us 'ull be worse nor we
are, and come short o' Their'n."

Poor Dolly's exposition of her simple Raveloe theology fell rather
unmeaningly on Silas's ears, for there was no word in it that could
rouse a memory of what he had known as religion, and his
comprehension was quite baffled by the plural pronoun, which was no
heresy of Dolly's, but only her way of avoiding a presumptuous
familiarity.  He remained silent, not feeling inclined to assent to
the part of Dolly's speech which he fully understood--her
recommendation that he should go to church.  Indeed, Silas was so
unaccustomed to talk beyond the brief questions and answers
necessary for the transaction of his simple business, that words did
not easily come to him without the urgency of a distinct purpose.

But now, little Aaron, having become used to the weaver's awful
presence, had advanced to his mother's side, and Silas, seeming to
notice him for the first time, tried to return Dolly's signs of
good-will by offering the lad a bit of lard-cake.  Aaron shrank back
a little, and rubbed his head against his mother's shoulder, but
still thought the piece of cake worth the risk of putting his hand
out for it.

"Oh, for shame, Aaron," said his mother, taking him on her lap,
however; "why, you don't want cake again yet awhile.  He's
wonderful hearty," she went on, with a little sigh--"that he is,
God knows.  He's my youngest, and we spoil him sadly, for either me
or the father must allays hev him in our sight--that we must."

She stroked Aaron's brown head, and thought it must do Master Marner
good to see such a "pictur of a child".  But Marner, on the other
side of the hearth, saw the neat-featured rosy face as a mere dim
round, with two dark spots in it.

"And he's got a voice like a bird--you wouldn't think," Dolly
went on; "he can sing a Christmas carril as his father's taught
him; and I take it for a token as he'll come to good, as he can
learn the good tunes so quick.  Come, Aaron, stan' up and sing the
carril to Master Marner, come."

Aaron replied by rubbing his forehead against his mother's shoulder.

"Oh, that's naughty," said Dolly, gently.  "Stan' up, when mother
tells you, and let me hold the cake till you've done."

Aaron was not indisposed to display his talents, even to an ogre,
under protecting circumstances; and after a few more signs of
coyness, consisting chiefly in rubbing the backs of his hands over
his eyes, and then peeping between them at Master Marner, to see if
he looked anxious for the "carril", he at length allowed his head
to be duly adjusted, and standing behind the table, which let him
appear above it only as far as his broad frill, so that he looked
like a cherubic head untroubled with a body, he began with a clear
chirp, and in a melody that had the rhythm of an industrious hammer



"God rest you, merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
For Jesus Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas-day."


Dolly listened with a devout look, glancing at Marner in some
confidence that this strain would help to allure him to church.

"That's Christmas music," she said, when Aaron had ended, and had
secured his piece of cake again.  "There's no other music equil to
the Christmas music--"Hark the erol angils sing."  And you may
judge what it is at church, Master Marner, with the bassoon and the
voices, as you can't help thinking you've got to a better place
a'ready--for I wouldn't speak ill o' this world, seeing as Them
put us in it as knows best--but what wi' the drink, and the
quarrelling, and the bad illnesses, and the hard dying, as I've seen
times and times, one's thankful to hear of a better.  The boy sings
pretty, don't he, Master Marner?"

"Yes," said Silas, absently, "very pretty."

The Christmas carol, with its hammer-like rhythm, had fallen on his
ears as strange music, quite unlike a hymn, and could have none of
the effect Dolly contemplated.  But he wanted to show her that he
was grateful, and the only mode that occurred to him was to offer
Aaron a bit more cake.

"Oh, no, thank you, Master Marner," said Dolly, holding down
Aaron's willing hands.  "We must be going home now.  And so I wish
you good-bye, Master Marner; and if you ever feel anyways bad in
your inside, as you can't fend for yourself, I'll come and clean up
for you, and get you a bit o' victual, and willing.  But I beg and
pray of you to leave off weaving of a Sunday, for it's bad for soul
and body--and the money as comes i' that way 'ull be a bad bed to
lie down on at the last, if it doesn't fly away, nobody knows where,
like the white frost.  And you'll excuse me being that free with
you, Master Marner, for I wish you well--I do.  Make your bow,
Aaron."

Silas said "Good-bye, and thank you kindly," as he opened the door
for Dolly, but he couldn't help feeling relieved when she was gone--
relieved that he might weave again and moan at his ease.  Her
simple view of life and its comforts, by which she had tried to
cheer him, was only like a report of unknown objects, which his
imagination could not fashion.  The fountains of human love and of
faith in a divine love had not yet been unlocked, and his soul was
still the shrunken rivulet, with only this difference, that its
little groove of sand was blocked up, and it wandered confusedly
against dark obstruction.

And so, notwithstanding the honest persuasions of Mr. Macey and
Dolly Winthrop, Silas spent his Christmas-day in loneliness, eating
his meat in sadness of heart, though the meat had come to him as a
neighbourly present.  In the morning he looked out on the black
frost that seemed to press cruelly on every blade of grass, while
the half-icy red pool shivered under the bitter wind; but towards
evening the snow began to fall, and curtained from him even that
dreary outlook, shutting him close up with his narrow grief.  And he
sat in his robbed home through the livelong evening, not caring to
close his shutters or lock his door, pressing his head between his
hands and moaning, till the cold grasped him and told him that his
fire was grey.

Nobody in this world but himself knew that he was the same Silas
Marner who had once loved his fellow with tender love, and trusted
in an unseen goodness.  Even to himself that past experience had
become dim.

But in Raveloe village the bells rang merrily, and the church was
fuller than all through the rest of the year, with red faces among
the abundant dark-green boughs--faces prepared for a longer
service than usual by an odorous breakfast of toast and ale.  Those
green boughs, the hymn and anthem never heard but at Christmas--
even the Athanasian Creed, which was discriminated from the others
only as being longer and of exceptional virtue, since it was only
read on rare occasions--brought a vague exulting sense, for which
the grown men could as little have found words as the children, that
something great and mysterious had been done for them in heaven
above and in earth below, which they were appropriating by their
presence.  And then the red faces made their way through the black
biting frost to their own homes, feeling themselves free for the
rest of the day to eat, drink, and be merry, and using that
Christian freedom without diffidence.

At Squire Cass's family party that day nobody mentioned Dunstan--
nobody was sorry for his absence, or feared it would be too long.
The doctor and his wife, uncle and aunt Kimble, were there, and the
annual Christmas talk was carried through without any omissions,
rising to the climax of Mr. Kimble's experience when he walked the
London hospitals thirty years back, together with striking
professional anecdotes then gathered.  Whereupon cards followed,
with aunt Kimble's annual failure to follow suit, and uncle Kimble's
irascibility concerning the odd trick which was rarely explicable to
him, when it was not on his side, without a general visitation of
tricks to see that they were formed on sound principles: the whole
being accompanied by a strong steaming odour of spirits-and-water.

But the party on Christmas-day, being a strictly family party, was
not the pre-eminently brilliant celebration of the season at the Red
House.  It was the great dance on New Year's Eve that made the glory
of Squire Cass's hospitality, as of his forefathers', time out of
mind.  This was the occasion when all the society of Raveloe and
Tarley, whether old acquaintances separated by long rutty distances,
or cooled acquaintances separated by misunderstandings concerning
runaway calves, or acquaintances founded on intermittent
condescension, counted on meeting and on comporting themselves with
mutual appropriateness.  This was the occasion on which fair dames
who came on pillions sent their bandboxes before them, supplied with
more than their evening costume; for the feast was not to end with a
single evening, like a paltry town entertainment, where the whole
supply of eatables is put on the table at once, and bedding is
scanty.  The Red House was provisioned as if for a siege; and as for
the spare feather-beds ready to be laid on floors, they were as
plentiful as might naturally be expected in a family that had killed
its own geese for many generations.

Godfrey Cass was looking forward to this New Year's Eve with a
foolish reckless longing, that made him half deaf to his importunate
companion, Anxiety.

"Dunsey will be coming home soon: there will be a great blow-up,
and how will you bribe his spite to silence?"  said Anxiety.

"Oh, he won't come home before New Year's Eve, perhaps," said
Godfrey; "and I shall sit by Nancy then, and dance with her, and
get a kind look from her in spite of herself."

"But money is wanted in another quarter," said Anxiety, in a
louder voice, "and how will you get it without selling your
mother's diamond pin?  And if you don't get it...?"

"Well, but something may happen to make things easier.  At any
rate, there's one pleasure for me close at hand: Nancy is coming."

"Yes, and suppose your father should bring matters to a pass that
will oblige you to decline marrying her--and to give your
reasons?"

"Hold your tongue, and don't worry me.  I can see Nancy's eyes,
just as they will look at me, and feel her hand in mine already."

But Anxiety went on, though in noisy Christmas company; refusing to
be utterly quieted even by much drinking.

XI


Some women, I grant, would not appear to advantage seated on a
pillion, and attired in a drab joseph and a drab beaver-bonnet, with
a crown resembling a small stew-pan; for a garment suggesting a
coachman's greatcoat, cut out under an exiguity of cloth that would
only allow of miniature capes, is not well adapted to conceal
deficiencies of contour, nor is drab a colour that will throw sallow
cheeks into lively contrast.  It was all the greater triumph to Miss
Nancy Lammeter's beauty that she looked thoroughly bewitching in
that costume, as, seated on the pillion behind her tall, erect
father, she held one arm round him, and looked down, with open-eyed
anxiety, at the treacherous snow-covered pools and puddles, which
sent up formidable splashings of mud under the stamp of Dobbin's
foot.  A painter would, perhaps, have preferred her in those moments
when she was free from self-consciousness; but certainly the bloom
on her cheeks was at its highest point of contrast with the
surrounding drab when she arrived at the door of the Red House, and
saw Mr. Godfrey Cass ready to lift her from the pillion.  She wished
her sister Priscilla had come up at the same time behind the
servant, for then she would have contrived that Mr. Godfrey should
have lifted off Priscilla first, and, in the meantime, she would
have persuaded her father to go round to the horse-block instead of
alighting at the door-steps.  It was very painful, when you had made
it quite clear to a young man that you were determined not to marry
him, however much he might wish it, that he would still continue to
pay you marked attentions; besides, why didn't he always show the
same attentions, if he meant them sincerely, instead of being so
strange as Mr. Godfrey Cass was, sometimes behaving as if he didn't
want to speak to her, and taking no notice of her for weeks and
weeks, and then, all on a sudden, almost making love again?
Moreover, it was quite plain he had no real love for her, else he
would not let people have _that_ to say of him which they did say.
Did he suppose that Miss Nancy Lammeter was to be won by any man,
squire or no squire, who led a bad life?  That was not what she had
been used to see in her own father, who was the soberest and best
man in that country-side, only a little hot and hasty now and then,
if things were not done to the minute.

All these thoughts rushed through Miss Nancy's mind, in their
habitual succession, in the moments between her first sight of
Mr. Godfrey Cass standing at the door and her own arrival there.
Happily, the Squire came out too and gave a loud greeting to her
father, so that, somehow, under cover of this noise she seemed to
find concealment for her confusion and neglect of any suitably
formal behaviour, while she was being lifted from the pillion by
strong arms which seemed to find her ridiculously small and light.
And there was the best reason for hastening into the house at once,
since the snow was beginning to fall again, threatening an
unpleasant journey for such guests as were still on the road.  These
were a small minority; for already the afternoon was beginning to
decline, and there would not be too much time for the ladies who
came from a distance to attire themselves in readiness for the early
tea which was to inspirit them for the dance.

There was a buzz of voices through the house, as Miss Nancy entered,
mingled with the scrape of a fiddle preluding in the kitchen; but
the Lammeters were guests whose arrival had evidently been thought
of so much that it had been watched for from the windows, for
Mrs. Kimble, who did the honours at the Red House on these great
occasions, came forward to meet Miss Nancy in the hall, and conduct
her up-stairs.  Mrs. Kimble was the Squire's sister, as well as the
doctor's wife--a double dignity, with which her diameter was in
direct proportion; so that, a journey up-stairs being rather
fatiguing to her, she did not oppose Miss Nancy's request to be
allowed to find her way alone to the Blue Room, where the Miss
Lammeters' bandboxes had been deposited on their arrival in the
morning.

There was hardly a bedroom in the house where feminine compliments
were not passing and feminine toilettes going forward, in various
stages, in space made scanty by extra beds spread upon the floor;
and Miss Nancy, as she entered the Blue Room, had to make her little
formal curtsy to a group of six.  On the one hand, there were ladies
no less important than the two Miss Gunns, the wine merchant's
daughters from Lytherly, dressed in the height of fashion, with the
tightest skirts and the shortest waists, and gazed at by Miss
Ladbrook (of the Old Pastures) with a shyness not unsustained by
inward criticism.  Partly, Miss Ladbrook felt that her own skirt
must be regarded as unduly lax by the Miss Gunns, and partly, that
it was a pity the Miss Gunns did not show that judgment which she
herself would show if she were in their place, by stopping a little
on this side of the fashion.  On the other hand, Mrs. Ladbrook was
standing in skull-cap and front, with her turban in her hand,
curtsying and smiling blandly and saying, "After you, ma'am," to
another lady in similar circumstances, who had politely offered the
precedence at the looking-glass.

But Miss Nancy had no sooner made her curtsy than an elderly lady
came forward, whose full white muslin kerchief, and mob-cap round
her curls of smooth grey hair, were in daring contrast with the
puffed yellow satins and top-knotted caps of her neighbours.  She
approached Miss Nancy with much primness, and said, with a slow,
treble suavity--

"Niece, I hope I see you well in health."  Miss Nancy kissed her
aunt's cheek dutifully, and answered, with the same sort of amiable
primness, "Quite well, I thank you, aunt; and I hope I see you the
same."

"Thank you, niece; I keep my health for the present.  And how is my
brother-in-law?"

These dutiful questions and answers were continued until it was
ascertained in detail that the Lammeters were all as well as usual,
and the Osgoods likewise, also that niece Priscilla must certainly
arrive shortly, and that travelling on pillions in snowy weather was
unpleasant, though a joseph was a great protection.  Then Nancy was
formally introduced to her aunt's visitors, the Miss Gunns, as being
the daughters of a mother known to _their_ mother, though now for
the first time induced to make a journey into these parts; and these
ladies were so taken by surprise at finding such a lovely face and
figure in an out-of-the-way country place, that they began to feel
some curiosity about the dress she would put on when she took off
her joseph.  Miss Nancy, whose thoughts were always conducted with
the propriety and moderation conspicuous in her manners, remarked to
herself that the Miss Gunns were rather hard-featured than
otherwise, and that such very low dresses as they wore might have
been attributed to vanity if their shoulders had been pretty, but
that, being as they were, it was not reasonable to suppose that they
showed their necks from a love of display, but rather from some
obligation not inconsistent with sense and modesty.  She felt
convinced, as she opened her box, that this must be her aunt
Osgood's opinion, for Miss Nancy's mind resembled her aunt's to a
degree that everybody said was surprising, considering the kinship
was on Mr. Osgood's side; and though you might not have supposed it
from the formality of their greeting, there was a devoted attachment
and mutual admiration between aunt and niece.  Even Miss Nancy's
refusal of her cousin Gilbert Osgood (on the ground solely that he
was her cousin), though it had grieved her aunt greatly, had not in
the least cooled the preference which had determined her to leave
Nancy several of her hereditary ornaments, let Gilbert's future wife
be whom she might.

Three of the ladies quickly retired, but the Miss Gunns were quite
content that Mrs. Osgood's inclination to remain with her niece gave
them also a reason for staying to see the rustic beauty's toilette.
And it was really a pleasure--from the first opening of the
bandbox, where everything smelt of lavender and rose-leaves, to the
clasping of the small coral necklace that fitted closely round her
little white neck.  Everything belonging to Miss Nancy was of
delicate purity and nattiness: not a crease was where it had no
business to be, not a bit of her linen professed whiteness without
fulfilling its profession; the very pins on her pincushion were
stuck in after a pattern from which she was careful to allow no
aberration; and as for her own person, it gave the same idea of
perfect unvarying neatness as the body of a little bird.  It is true
that her light-brown hair was cropped behind like a boy's, and was
dressed in front in a number of flat rings, that lay quite away from
her face; but there was no sort of coiffure that could make Miss

Nancy's cheek and neck look otherwise than pretty; and when at last
she stood complete in her silvery twilled silk, her lace tucker, her
coral necklace, and coral ear-drops, the Miss Gunns could see
nothing to criticise except her hands, which bore the traces of
butter-making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work.  But
Miss Nancy was not ashamed of that, for even while she was dressing
she narrated to her aunt how she and Priscilla had packed their
boxes yesterday, because this morning was baking morning, and since
they were leaving home, it was desirable to make a good supply of
meat-pies for the kitchen; and as she concluded this judicious
remark, she turned to the Miss Gunns that she might not commit the
rudeness of not including them in the conversation.  The Miss Gunns
smiled stiffly, and thought what a pity it was that these rich
country people, who could afford to buy such good clothes (really
Miss Nancy's lace and silk were very costly), should be brought up
in utter ignorance and vulgarity.  She actually said "mate" for
"meat", "'appen" for "perhaps", and "oss" for "horse",
which, to young ladies living in good Lytherly society, who
habitually said 'orse, even in domestic privacy, and only said
'appen on the right occasions, was necessarily shocking.  Miss
Nancy, indeed, had never been to any school higher than Dame
Tedman's: her acquaintance with profane literature hardly went
beyond the rhymes she had worked in her large sampler under the lamb
and the shepherdess; and in order to balance an account, she was
obliged to effect her subtraction by removing visible metallic
shillings and sixpences from a visible metallic total.  There is
hardly a servant-maid in these days who is not better informed than
Miss Nancy; yet she had the essential attributes of a lady--high
veracity, delicate honour in her dealings, deference to others, and
refined personal habits,--and lest these should not suffice to
convince grammatical fair ones that her feelings can at all resemble
theirs, I will add that she was slightly proud and exacting, and as
constant in her affection towards a baseless opinion as towards an
erring lover.

The anxiety about sister Priscilla, which had grown rather active by
the time the coral necklace was clasped, was happily ended by the
entrance of that cheerful-looking lady herself, with a face made
blowsy by cold and damp.  After the first questions and greetings,
she turned to Nancy, and surveyed her from head to foot--then
wheeled her round, to ascertain that the back view was equally
faultless.

"What do you think o' _these_ gowns, aunt Osgood?"  said
Priscilla, while Nancy helped her to unrobe.

"Very handsome indeed, niece," said Mrs. Osgood, with a slight
increase of formality.  She always thought niece Priscilla too
rough.

"I'm obliged to have the same as Nancy, you know, for all I'm five
years older, and it makes me look yallow; for she never _will_ have
anything without I have mine just like it, because she wants us to
look like sisters.  And I tell her, folks 'ull think it's my
weakness makes me fancy as I shall look pretty in what she looks
pretty in.  For I _am_ ugly--there's no denying that: I feature my
father's family.  But, law!  I don't mind, do you?"  Priscilla here
turned to the Miss Gunns, rattling on in too much preoccupation with
the delight of talking, to notice that her candour was not
appreciated.  "The pretty uns do for fly-catchers--they keep the
men off us.  I've no opinion o' the men, Miss Gunn--I don't know
what _you_ have.  And as for fretting and stewing about what
_they_'ll think of you from morning till night, and making your life
uneasy about what they're doing when they're out o' your sight--as
I tell Nancy, it's a folly no woman need be guilty of, if she's got
a good father and a good home: let her leave it to them as have got
no fortin, and can't help themselves.  As I say,
Mr. Have-your-own-way is the best husband, and the only one I'd ever
promise to obey.  I know it isn't pleasant, when you've been used to
living in a big way, and managing hogsheads and all that, to go and
put your nose in by somebody else's fireside, or to sit down by
yourself to a scrag or a knuckle; but, thank God!  my father's a
sober man and likely to live; and if you've got a man by the
chimney-corner, it doesn't matter if he's childish--the business
needn't be broke up."

The delicate process of getting her narrow gown over her head
without injury to her smooth curls, obliged Miss Priscilla to pause
in this rapid survey of life, and Mrs. Osgood seized the opportunity
of rising and saying--

"Well, niece, you'll follow us.  The Miss Gunns will like to go
down."

"Sister," said Nancy, when they were alone, "you've offended the
Miss Gunns, I'm sure."

"What have I done, child?"  said Priscilla, in some alarm.

"Why, you asked them if they minded about being ugly--you're so
very blunt."

"Law, did I?  Well, it popped out: it's a mercy I said no more, for
I'm a bad un to live with folks when they don't like the truth.  But
as for being ugly, look at me, child, in this silver-coloured silk--
I told you how it 'ud be--I look as yallow as a daffadil.
Anybody 'ud say you wanted to make a mawkin of me."

"No, Priscy, don't say so.  I begged and prayed of you not to let
us have this silk if you'd like another better.  I was willing to
have _your_ choice, you know I was," said Nancy, in anxious
self-vindication.

"Nonsense, child!  you know you'd set your heart on this; and
reason good, for you're the colour o' cream.  It 'ud be fine doings
for you to dress yourself to suit _my_ skin.  What I find fault
with, is that notion o' yours as I must dress myself just like you.
But you do as you like with me--you always did, from when first
you begun to walk.  If you wanted to go the field's length, the
field's length you'd go; and there was no whipping you, for you
looked as prim and innicent as a daisy all the while."

"Priscy," said Nancy, gently, as she fastened a coral necklace,
exactly like her own, round Priscilla's neck, which was very far
from being like her own, "I'm sure I'm willing to give way as far
as is right, but who shouldn't dress alike if it isn't sisters?
Would you have us go about looking as if we were no kin to one
another--us that have got no mother and not another sister in the
world?  I'd do what was right, if I dressed in a gown dyed with
cheese-colouring; and I'd rather you'd choose, and let me wear what
pleases you."

"There you go again!  You'd come round to the same thing if one
talked to you from Saturday night till Saturday morning.  It'll be
fine fun to see how you'll master your husband and never raise your
voice above the singing o' the kettle all the while.  I like to see
the men mastered!"

"Don't talk _so_, Priscy," said Nancy, blushing.  "You know I
don't mean ever to be married."

"Oh, you never mean a fiddlestick's end!"  said Priscilla, as she
arranged her discarded dress, and closed her bandbox.  "Who shall
_I_ have to work for when father's gone, if you are to go and take
notions in your head and be an old maid, because some folks are no
better than they should be?  I haven't a bit o' patience with you--
sitting on an addled egg for ever, as if there was never a fresh un
in the world.  One old maid's enough out o' two sisters; and I shall
do credit to a single life, for God A'mighty meant me for it.  Come,
we can go down now.  I'm as ready as a mawkin _can_ be--there's
nothing awanting to frighten the crows, now I've got my ear-droppers
in."

As the two Miss Lammeters walked into the large parlour together,
any one who did not know the character of both might certainly have
supposed that the reason why the square-shouldered, clumsy,
high-featured Priscilla wore a dress the facsimile of her pretty
sister's, was either the mistaken vanity of the one, or the
malicious contrivance of the other in order to set off her own rare
beauty.  But the good-natured self-forgetful cheeriness and
common-sense of Priscilla would soon have dissipated the one
suspicion; and the modest calm of Nancy's speech and manners told
clearly of a mind free from all disavowed devices.

Places of honour had been kept for the Miss Lammeters near the head
of the principal tea-table in the wainscoted parlour, now looking
fresh and pleasant with handsome branches of holly, yew, and laurel,
from the abundant growths of the old garden; and Nancy felt an
inward flutter, that no firmness of purpose could prevent, when she
saw Mr. Godfrey Cass advancing to lead her to a seat between himself
and Mr. Crackenthorp, while Priscilla was called to the opposite
side between her father and the Squire.  It certainly did make some
difference to Nancy that the lover she had given up was the young
man of quite the highest consequence in the parish--at home in a
venerable and unique parlour, which was the extremity of grandeur in
her experience, a parlour where _she_ might one day have been
mistress, with the consciousness that she was spoken of as "Madam
Cass", the Squire's wife.  These circumstances exalted her inward
drama in her own eyes, and deepened the emphasis with which she
declared to herself that not the most dazzling rank should induce
her to marry a man whose conduct showed him careless of his
character, but that, "love once, love always", was the motto of a
true and pure woman, and no man should ever have any right over her
which would be a call on her to destroy the dried flowers that she
treasured, and always would treasure, for Godfrey Cass's sake.  And
Nancy was capable of keeping her word to herself under very trying
conditions.  Nothing but a becoming blush betrayed the moving
thoughts that urged themselves upon her as she accepted the seat
next to Mr. Crackenthorp; for she was so instinctively neat and
adroit in all her actions, and her pretty lips met each other with
such quiet firmness, that it would have been difficult for her to
appear agitated.

It was not the rector's practice to let a charming blush pass
without an appropriate compliment.  He was not in the least lofty or
aristocratic, but simply a merry-eyed, small-featured, grey-haired
man, with his chin propped by an ample, many-creased white neckcloth
which seemed to predominate over every other point in his person,
and somehow to impress its peculiar character on his remarks; so
that to have considered his amenities apart from his cravat would
have been a severe, and perhaps a dangerous, effort of abstraction.

"Ha, Miss Nancy," he said, turning his head within his cravat and
smiling down pleasantly upon her, "when anybody pretends this has
been a severe winter, I shall tell them I saw the roses blooming on
New Year's Eve--eh, Godfrey, what do _you_ say?"

Godfrey made no reply, and avoided looking at Nancy very markedly;
for though these complimentary personalities were held to be in
excellent taste in old-fashioned Raveloe society, reverent love has
a politeness of its own which it teaches to men otherwise of small
schooling.  But the Squire was rather impatient at Godfrey's showing
himself a dull spark in this way.  By this advanced hour of the day,
the Squire was always in higher spirits than we have seen him in at
the breakfast-table, and felt it quite pleasant to fulfil the
hereditary duty of being noisily jovial and patronizing: the large
silver snuff-box was in active service and was offered without fail
to all neighbours from time to time, however often they might have
declined the favour.  At present, the Squire had only given an
express welcome to the heads of families as they appeared; but
always as the evening deepened, his hospitality rayed out more
widely, till he had tapped the youngest guests on the back and shown
a peculiar fondness for their presence, in the full belief that they
must feel their lives made happy by their belonging to a parish
where there was such a hearty man as Squire Cass to invite them and
wish them well.  Even in this early stage of the jovial mood, it was
natural that he should wish to supply his son's deficiencies by
looking and speaking for him.

"Aye, aye," he began, offering his snuff-box to Mr. Lammeter, who
for the second time bowed his head and waved his hand in stiff
rejection of the offer, "us old fellows may wish ourselves young
to-night, when we see the mistletoe-bough in the White Parlour.
It's true, most things are gone back'ard in these last thirty years--
the country's going down since the old king fell ill.  But when I
look at Miss Nancy here, I begin to think the lasses keep up their
quality;--ding me if I remember a sample to match her, not when I
was a fine young fellow, and thought a deal about my pigtail.  No
offence to you, madam," he added, bending to Mrs. Crackenthorp, who
sat by him, "I didn't know _you_ when you were as young as Miss
Nancy here."

Mrs. Crackenthorp--a small blinking woman, who fidgeted
incessantly with her lace, ribbons, and gold chain, turning her head
about and making subdued noises, very much like a guinea-pig that
twitches its nose and soliloquizes in all company indiscriminately--
now blinked and fidgeted towards the Squire, and said, "Oh, no--no offence."

This emphatic compliment of the Squire's to Nancy was felt by others
besides Godfrey to have a diplomatic significance; and her father
gave a slight additional erectness to his back, as he looked across
the table at her with complacent gravity.  That grave and orderly
senior was not going to bate a jot of his dignity by seeming elated
at the notion of a match between his family and the Squire's: he was
gratified by any honour paid to his daughter; but he must see an
alteration in several ways before his consent would be vouchsafed.
His spare but healthy person, and high-featured firm face, that
looked as if it had never been flushed by excess, was in strong
contrast, not only with the Squire's, but with the appearance of the
Raveloe farmers generally--in accordance with a favourite saying
of his own, that "breed was stronger than pasture".

"Miss Nancy's wonderful like what her mother was, though; isn't
she, Kimble?"  said the stout lady of that name, looking round for
her husband.

But Doctor Kimble (country apothecaries in old days enjoyed that
title without authority of diploma), being a thin and agile man, was
flitting about the room with his hands in his pockets, making
himself agreeable to his feminine patients, with medical
impartiality, and being welcomed everywhere as a doctor by
hereditary right--not one of those miserable apothecaries who
canvass for practice in strange neighbourhoods, and spend all their
income in starving their one horse, but a man of substance, able to
keep an extravagant table like the best of his patients.  Time out
of mind the Raveloe doctor had been a Kimble; Kimble was inherently
a doctor's name; and it was difficult to contemplate firmly the
melancholy fact that the actual Kimble had no son, so that his
practice might one day be handed over to a successor with the
incongruous name of Taylor or Johnson.  But in that case the wiser
people in Raveloe would employ Dr. Blick of Flitton--as less
unnatural.

"Did you speak to me, my dear?"  said the authentic doctor, coming
quickly to his wife's side; but, as if foreseeing that she would be
too much out of breath to repeat her remark, he went on immediately--
"Ha, Miss Priscilla, the sight of you revives the taste of that
super-excellent pork-pie.  I hope the batch isn't near an end."

"Yes, indeed, it is, doctor," said Priscilla; "but I'll answer
for it the next shall be as good.  My pork-pies don't turn out well
by chance."

"Not as your doctoring does, eh, Kimble?--because folks forget
to take your physic, eh?"  said the Squire, who regarded physic and
doctors as many loyal churchmen regard the church and the clergy--
tasting a joke against them when he was in health, but impatiently
eager for their aid when anything was the matter with him.  He
tapped his box, and looked round with a triumphant laugh.

"Ah, she has a quick wit, my friend Priscilla has," said the
doctor, choosing to attribute the epigram to a lady rather than
allow a brother-in-law that advantage over him.  "She saves a
little pepper to sprinkle over her talk--that's the reason why she
never puts too much into her pies.  There's my wife now, she never
has an answer at her tongue's end; but if I offend her, she's sure
to scarify my throat with black pepper the next day, or else give me
the colic with watery greens.  That's an awful tit-for-tat."  Here
the vivacious doctor made a pathetic grimace.

"Did you ever hear the like?"  said Mrs. Kimble, laughing above
her double chin with much good-humour, aside to Mrs. Crackenthorp,
who blinked and nodded, and seemed to intend a smile, which, by the
correlation of forces, went off in small twitchings and noises.

"I suppose that's the sort of tit-for-tat adopted in your
profession, Kimble, if you've a grudge against a patient," said the
rector.

"Never do have a grudge against our patients," said Mr. Kimble,
"except when they leave us: and then, you see, we haven't the
chance of prescribing for 'em.  Ha, Miss Nancy," he continued,
suddenly skipping to Nancy's side, "you won't forget your promise?
You're to save a dance for me, you know."

"Come, come, Kimble, don't you be too for'ard," said the Squire.
"Give the young uns fair-play.  There's my son Godfrey'll be
wanting to have a round with you if you run off with Miss Nancy.
He's bespoke her for the first dance, I'll be bound.  Eh, sir!  what
do you say?"  he continued, throwing himself backward, and looking
at Godfrey.  "Haven't you asked Miss Nancy to open the dance with
you?"

Godfrey, sorely uncomfortable under this significant insistence
about Nancy, and afraid to think where it would end by the time his
father had set his usual hospitable example of drinking before and
after supper, saw no course open but to turn to Nancy and say, with
as little awkwardness as possible--

"No; I've not asked her yet, but I hope she'll consent--if
somebody else hasn't been before me."

"No, I've not engaged myself," said Nancy, quietly, though
blushingly.  (If Mr. Godfrey founded any hopes on her consenting to
dance with him, he would soon be undeceived; but there was no need
for her to be uncivil.)

"Then I hope you've no objections to dancing with me," said
Godfrey, beginning to lose the sense that there was anything
uncomfortable in this arrangement.

"No, no objections," said Nancy, in a cold tone.

"Ah, well, you're a lucky fellow, Godfrey," said uncle Kimble;
"but you're my godson, so I won't stand in your way.  Else I'm not
so very old, eh, my dear?"  he went on, skipping to his wife's side
again.  "You wouldn't mind my having a second after you were gone--
not if I cried a good deal first?"

"Come, come, take a cup o' tea and stop your tongue, do," said
good-humoured Mrs. Kimble, feeling some pride in a husband who must
be regarded as so clever and amusing by the company generally.  If
he had only not been irritable at cards!

While safe, well-tested personalities were enlivening the tea in
this way, the sound of the fiddle approaching within a distance at
which it could be heard distinctly, made the young people look at
each other with sympathetic impatience for the end of the meal.

"Why, there's Solomon in the hall," said the Squire, "and playing
my fav'rite tune, _I_ believe--"The flaxen-headed ploughboy"--
he's for giving us a hint as we aren't enough in a hurry to hear him
play.  Bob," he called out to his third long-legged son, who was at
the other end of the room, "open the door, and tell Solomon to come
in.  He shall give us a tune here."

Bob obeyed, and Solomon walked in, fiddling as he walked, for he
would on no account break off in the middle of a tune.

"Here, Solomon," said the Squire, with loud patronage.  "Round
here, my man.  Ah, I knew it was "The flaxen-headed ploughboy":
there's no finer tune."

Solomon Macey, a small hale old man with an abundant crop of long
white hair reaching nearly to his shoulders, advanced to the
indicated spot, bowing reverently while he fiddled, as much as to
say that he respected the company, though he respected the key-note
more.  As soon as he had repeated the tune and lowered his fiddle,
he bowed again to the Squire and the rector, and said, "I hope I
see your honour and your reverence well, and wishing you health and
long life and a happy New Year.  And wishing the same to you,
Mr. Lammeter, sir; and to the other gentlemen, and the madams, and
the young lasses."

As Solomon uttered the last words, he bowed in all directions
solicitously, lest he should be wanting in due respect.  But
thereupon he immediately began to prelude, and fell into the tune
which he knew would be taken as a special compliment by
Mr. Lammeter.

"Thank ye, Solomon, thank ye," said Mr. Lammeter when the fiddle
paused again.  "That's "Over the hills and far away", that is.  My
father used to say to me, whenever we heard that tune, "Ah, lad, _I_
come from over the hills and far away."  There's a many tunes I
don't make head or tail of; but that speaks to me like the
blackbird's whistle.  I suppose it's the name: there's a deal in the
name of a tune."

But Solomon was already impatient to prelude again, and presently
broke with much spirit into "Sir Roger de Coverley", at which
there was a sound of chairs pushed back, and laughing voices.

"Aye, aye, Solomon, we know what that means," said the Squire,
rising.  "It's time to begin the dance, eh?  Lead the way, then,
and we'll all follow you."

So Solomon, holding his white head on one side, and playing
vigorously, marched forward at the head of the gay procession into
the White Parlour, where the mistletoe-bough was hung, and
multitudinous tallow candles made rather a brilliant effect,
gleaming from among the berried holly-boughs, and reflected in the
old-fashioned oval mirrors fastened in the panels of the white
wainscot.  A quaint procession!  Old Solomon, in his seedy clothes
and long white locks, seemed to be luring that decent company by the
magic scream of his fiddle--luring discreet matrons in
turban-shaped caps, nay, Mrs. Crackenthorp herself, the summit of
whose perpendicular feather was on a level with the Squire's
shoulder--luring fair lasses complacently conscious of very short
waists and skirts blameless of front-folds--luring burly fathers
in large variegated waistcoats, and ruddy sons, for the most part
shy and sheepish, in short nether garments and very long coat-tails.

Already Mr. Macey and a few other privileged villagers, who were
allowed to be spectators on these great occasions, were seated on
benches placed for them near the door; and great was the admiration
and satisfaction in that quarter when the couples had formed
themselves for the dance, and the Squire led off with
Mrs. Crackenthorp, joining hands with the rector and Mrs. Osgood.
That was as it should be--that was what everybody had been used to--
and the charter of Raveloe seemed to be renewed by the ceremony.
It was not thought of as an unbecoming levity for the old and
middle-aged people to dance a little before sitting down to cards,
but rather as part of their social duties.  For what were these if
not to be merry at appropriate times, interchanging visits and
poultry with due frequency, paying each other old-established
compliments in sound traditional phrases, passing well-tried
personal jokes, urging your guests to eat and drink too much out of
hospitality, and eating and drinking too much in your neighbour's
house to show that you liked your cheer?  And the parson naturally
set an example in these social duties.  For it would not have been
possible for the Raveloe mind, without a peculiar revelation, to
know that a clergyman should be a pale-faced memento of solemnities,
instead of a reasonably faulty man whose exclusive authority to read
prayers and preach, to christen, marry, and bury you, necessarily
coexisted with the right to sell you the ground to be buried in and
to take tithe in kind; on which last point, of course, there was a
little grumbling, but not to the extent of irreligion--not of
deeper significance than the grumbling at the rain, which was by no
means accompanied with a spirit of impious defiance, but with a
desire that the prayer for fine weather might be read forthwith.

There was no reason, then, why the rector's dancing should not be
received as part of the fitness of things quite as much as the
Squire's, or why, on the other hand, Mr. Macey's official respect
should restrain him from subjecting the parson's performance to that
criticism with which minds of extraordinary acuteness must
necessarily contemplate the doings of their fallible fellow-men.

"The Squire's pretty springe, considering his weight," said
Mr. Macey, "and he stamps uncommon well.  But Mr. Lammeter beats
'em all for shapes: you see he holds his head like a sodger, and he
isn't so cushiony as most o' the oldish gentlefolks--they run fat
in general; and he's got a fine leg.  The parson's nimble enough,
but he hasn't got much of a leg: it's a bit too thick down'ard, and
his knees might be a bit nearer wi'out damage; but he might do
worse, he might do worse.  Though he hasn't that grand way o' waving
his hand as the Squire has."

"Talk o' nimbleness, look at Mrs. Osgood," said Ben Winthrop, who
was holding his son Aaron between his knees.  "She trips along with
her little steps, so as nobody can see how she goes--it's like as
if she had little wheels to her feet.  She doesn't look a day older
nor last year: she's the finest-made woman as is, let the next be
where she will."

"I don't heed how the women are made," said Mr. Macey, with some
contempt.  "They wear nayther coat nor breeches: you can't make
much out o' their shapes."

"Fayder," said Aaron, whose feet were busy beating out the tune,
"how does that big cock's-feather stick in Mrs. Crackenthorp's
yead?  Is there a little hole for it, like in my shuttle-cock?"

"Hush, lad, hush; that's the way the ladies dress theirselves, that
is," said the father, adding, however, in an undertone to
Mr. Macey, "It does make her look funny, though--partly like a
short-necked bottle wi' a long quill in it.  Hey, by jingo, there's
the young Squire leading off now, wi' Miss Nancy for partners!
There's a lass for you!--like a pink-and-white posy--there's
nobody 'ud think as anybody could be so pritty.  I shouldn't wonder
if she's Madam Cass some day, arter all--and nobody more
rightfuller, for they'd make a fine match.  You can find nothing
against Master Godfrey's shapes, Macey, _I_'ll bet a penny."

Mr. Macey screwed up his mouth, leaned his head further on one side,
and twirled his thumbs with a presto movement as his eyes followed
Godfrey up the dance.  At last he summed up his opinion.

"Pretty well down'ard, but a bit too round i' the shoulder-blades.
And as for them coats as he gets from the Flitton tailor, they're a
poor cut to pay double money for."

"Ah, Mr. Macey, you and me are two folks," said Ben, slightly
indignant at this carping.  "When I've got a pot o' good ale, I
like to swaller it, and do my inside good, i'stead o' smelling and
staring at it to see if I can't find faut wi' the brewing.  I should
like you to pick me out a finer-limbed young fellow nor Master
Godfrey--one as 'ud knock you down easier, or 's more
pleasanter-looksed when he's piert and merry."

"Tchuh!"  said Mr. Macey, provoked to increased severity, "he
isn't come to his right colour yet: he's partly like a slack-baked
pie.  And I doubt he's got a soft place in his head, else why should
he be turned round the finger by that offal Dunsey as nobody's seen
o' late, and let him kill that fine hunting hoss as was the talk o'
the country?  And one while he was allays after Miss Nancy, and then
it all went off again, like a smell o' hot porridge, as I may say.
That wasn't my way when _I_ went a-coorting."

"Ah, but mayhap Miss Nancy hung off, like, and your lass didn't,"
said Ben.

"I should say she didn't," said Mr. Macey, significantly.
"Before I said "sniff", I took care to know as she'd say "snaff",
and pretty quick too.  I wasn't a-going to open _my_ mouth, like a
dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller."

"Well, I think Miss Nancy's a-coming round again," said Ben, "for
Master Godfrey doesn't look so down-hearted to-night.  And I see
he's for taking her away to sit down, now they're at the end o' the
dance: that looks like sweethearting, that does."

The reason why Godfrey and Nancy had left the dance was not so
tender as Ben imagined.  In the close press of couples a slight
accident had happened to Nancy's dress, which, while it was short
enough to show her neat ankle in front, was long enough behind to be
caught under the stately stamp of the Squire's foot, so as to rend
certain stitches at the waist, and cause much sisterly agitation in
Priscilla's mind, as well as serious concern in Nancy's.  One's
thoughts may be much occupied with love-struggles, but hardly so as
to be insensible to a disorder in the general framework of things.
Nancy had no sooner completed her duty in the figure they were
dancing than she said to Godfrey, with a deep blush, that she must
go and sit down till Priscilla could come to her; for the sisters
had already exchanged a short whisper and an open-eyed glance full
of meaning.  No reason less urgent than this could have prevailed on
Nancy to give Godfrey this opportunity of sitting apart with her.
As for Godfrey, he was feeling so happy and oblivious under the long
charm of the country-dance with Nancy, that he got rather bold on
the strength of her confusion, and was capable of leading her
straight away, without leave asked, into the adjoining small
parlour, where the card-tables were set.

"Oh no, thank you," said Nancy, coldly, as soon as she perceived
where he was going, "not in there.  I'll wait here till Priscilla's
ready to come to me.  I'm sorry to bring you out of the dance and
make myself troublesome."

"Why, you'll be more comfortable here by yourself," said the
artful Godfrey: "I'll leave you here till your sister can come."
He spoke in an indifferent tone.

That was an agreeable proposition, and just what Nancy desired; why,
then, was she a little hurt that Mr. Godfrey should make it?  They
entered, and she seated herself on a chair against one of the
card-tables, as the stiffest and most unapproachable position she
could choose.

"Thank you, sir," she said immediately.  "I needn't give you any
more trouble.  I'm sorry you've had such an unlucky partner."

"That's very ill-natured of you," said Godfrey, standing by her
without any sign of intended departure, "to be sorry you've danced
with me."

"Oh, no, sir, I don't mean to say what's ill-natured at all," said
Nancy, looking distractingly prim and pretty.  "When gentlemen have
so many pleasures, one dance can matter but very little."

"You know that isn't true.  You know one dance with you matters
more to me than all the other pleasures in the world."

It was a long, long while since Godfrey had said anything so direct
as that, and Nancy was startled.  But her instinctive dignity and
repugnance to any show of emotion made her sit perfectly still, and
only throw a little more decision into her voice, as she said--

"No, indeed, Mr. Godfrey, that's not known to me, and I have very
good reasons for thinking different.  But if it's true, I don't wish
to hear it."

"Would you never forgive me, then, Nancy--never think well of me,
let what would happen--would you never think the present made
amends for the past?  Not if I turned a good fellow, and gave up
everything you didn't like?"

Godfrey was half conscious that this sudden opportunity of speaking
to Nancy alone had driven him beside himself; but blind feeling had
got the mastery of his tongue.  Nancy really felt much agitated by
the possibility Godfrey's words suggested, but this very pressure of
emotion that she was in danger of finding too strong for her roused
all her power of self-command.

"I should be glad to see a good change in anybody, Mr. Godfrey,"
she answered, with the slightest discernible difference of tone,
"but it 'ud be better if no change was wanted."

"You're very hard-hearted, Nancy," said Godfrey, pettishly.  "You
might encourage me to be a better fellow.  I'm very miserable--but
you've no feeling."

"I think those have the least feeling that act wrong to begin
with," said Nancy, sending out a flash in spite of herself.
Godfrey was delighted with that little flash, and would have liked
to go on and make her quarrel with him; Nancy was so exasperatingly
quiet and firm.  But she was not indifferent to him _yet_, though--

The entrance of Priscilla, bustling forward and saying, "Dear heart
alive, child, let us look at this gown," cut off Godfrey's hopes of
a quarrel.

"I suppose I must go now," he said to Priscilla.

"It's no matter to me whether you go or stay," said that frank
lady, searching for something in her pocket, with a preoccupied
brow.

"Do _you_ want me to go?"  said Godfrey, looking at Nancy, who was
now standing up by Priscilla's order.

"As you like," said Nancy, trying to recover all her former
coldness, and looking down carefully at the hem of her gown.

"Then I like to stay," said Godfrey, with a reckless determination
to get as much of this joy as he could to-night, and think nothing
of the morrow.

XII


While Godfrey Cass was taking draughts of forgetfulness from the
sweet presence of Nancy, willingly losing all sense of that hidden
bond which at other moments galled and fretted him so as to mingle
irritation with the very sunshine, Godfrey's wife was walking with
slow uncertain steps through the snow-covered Raveloe lanes,
carrying her child in her arms.

This journey on New Year's Eve was a premeditated act of vengeance
which she had kept in her heart ever since Godfrey, in a fit of
passion, had told her he would sooner die than acknowledge her as
his wife.  There would be a great party at the Red House on New
Year's Eve, she knew: her husband would be smiling and smiled upon,
hiding _her_ existence in the darkest corner of his heart.  But she
would mar his pleasure: she would go in her dingy rags, with her
faded face, once as handsome as the best, with her little child that
had its father's hair and eyes, and disclose herself to the Squire
as his eldest son's wife.  It is seldom that the miserable can help
regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less
miserable.  Molly knew that the cause of her dingy rags was not her
husband's neglect, but the demon Opium to whom she was enslaved,
body and soul, except in the lingering mother's tenderness that
refused to give him her hungry child.  She knew this well; and yet,
in the moments of wretched unbenumbed consciousness, the sense of
her want and degradation transformed itself continually into
bitterness towards Godfrey.  _He_ was well off; and if she had her
rights she would be well off too.  The belief that he repented his
marriage, and suffered from it, only aggravated her vindictiveness.
Just and self-reproving thoughts do not come to us too thickly, even
in the purest air, and with the best lessons of heaven and earth;
how should those white-winged delicate messengers make their way to
Molly's poisoned chamber, inhabited by no higher memories than those
of a barmaid's paradise of pink ribbons and gentlemen's jokes?

She had set out at an early hour, but had lingered on the road,
inclined by her indolence to believe that if she waited under a warm
shed the snow would cease to fall.  She had waited longer than she
knew, and now that she found herself belated in the snow-hidden
ruggedness of the long lanes, even the animation of a vindictive
purpose could not keep her spirit from failing.  It was seven
o'clock, and by this time she was not very far from Raveloe, but she
was not familiar enough with those monotonous lanes to know how near
she was to her journey's end.  She needed comfort, and she knew but
one comforter--the familiar demon in her bosom; but she hesitated
a moment, after drawing out the black remnant, before she raised it
to her lips.  In that moment the mother's love pleaded for painful
consciousness rather than oblivion--pleaded to be left in aching
weariness, rather than to have the encircling arms benumbed so that
they could not feel the dear burden.  In another moment Molly had
flung something away, but it was not the black remnant--it was an
empty phial.  And she walked on again under the breaking cloud, from
which there came now and then the light of a quickly veiled star,
for a freezing wind had sprung up since the snowing had ceased.  But
she walked always more and more drowsily, and clutched more and more
automatically the sleeping child at her bosom.

Slowly the demon was working his will, and cold and weariness were
his helpers.  Soon she felt nothing but a supreme immediate longing
that curtained off all futurity--the longing to lie down and
sleep.  She had arrived at a spot where her footsteps were no longer
checked by a hedgerow, and she had wandered vaguely, unable to
distinguish any objects, notwithstanding the wide whiteness around
her, and the growing starlight.  She sank down against a straggling
furze bush, an easy pillow enough; and the bed of snow, too, was
soft.  She did not feel that the bed was cold, and did not heed
whether the child would wake and cry for her.  But her arms had not
yet relaxed their instinctive clutch; and the little one slumbered
on as gently as if it had been rocked in a lace-trimmed cradle.

But the complete torpor came at last: the fingers lost their
tension, the arms unbent; then the little head fell away from the
bosom, and the blue eyes opened wide on the cold starlight.  At
first there was a little peevish cry of "mammy", and an effort to
regain the pillowing arm and bosom; but mammy's ear was deaf, and
the pillow seemed to be slipping away backward.  Suddenly, as the
child rolled downward on its mother's knees, all wet with snow, its
eyes were caught by a bright glancing light on the white ground,
and, with the ready transition of infancy, it was immediately
absorbed in watching the bright living thing running towards it, yet
never arriving.  That bright living thing must be caught; and in an
instant the child had slipped on all-fours, and held out one little
hand to catch the gleam.  But the gleam would not be caught in that
way, and now the head was held up to see where the cunning gleam
came from.  It came from a very bright place; and the little one,
rising on its legs, toddled through the snow, the old grimy shawl in
which it was wrapped trailing behind it, and the queer little bonnet
dangling at its back--toddled on to the open door of Silas
Marner's cottage, and right up to the warm hearth, where there was a
bright fire of logs and sticks, which had thoroughly warmed the old
sack (Silas's greatcoat) spread out on the bricks to dry.  The
little one, accustomed to be left to itself for long hours without
notice from its mother, squatted down on the sack, and spread its
tiny hands towards the blaze, in perfect contentment, gurgling and
making many inarticulate communications to the cheerful fire, like a
new-hatched gosling beginning to find itself comfortable.  But
presently the warmth had a lulling effect, and the little golden
head sank down on the old sack, and the blue eyes were veiled by
their delicate half-transparent lids.

But where was Silas Marner while this strange visitor had come to
his hearth?  He was in the cottage, but he did not see the child.
During the last few weeks, since he had lost his money, he had
contracted the habit of opening his door and looking out from time
to time, as if he thought that his money might be somehow coming
back to him, or that some trace, some news of it, might be
mysteriously on the road, and be caught by the listening ear or the
straining eye.  It was chiefly at night, when he was not occupied in
his loom, that he fell into this repetition of an act for which he
could have assigned no definite purpose, and which can hardly be
understood except by those who have undergone a bewildering
separation from a supremely loved object.  In the evening twilight,
and later whenever the night was not dark, Silas looked out on that
narrow prospect round the Stone-pits, listening and gazing, not with
hope, but with mere yearning and unrest.

This morning he had been told by some of his neighbours that it was
New Year's Eve, and that he must sit up and hear the old year rung
out and the new rung in, because that was good luck, and might bring
his money back again.  This was only a friendly Raveloe-way of
jesting with the half-crazy oddities of a miser, but it had perhaps
helped to throw Silas into a more than usually excited state.  Since
the on-coming of twilight he had opened his door again and again,
though only to shut it immediately at seeing all distance veiled by
the falling snow.  But the last time he opened it the snow had
ceased, and the clouds were parting here and there.  He stood and
listened, and gazed for a long while--there was really something
on the road coming towards him then, but he caught no sign of it;
and the stillness and the wide trackless snow seemed to narrow his
solitude, and touched his yearning with the chill of despair.  He
went in again, and put his right hand on the latch of the door to
close it--but he did not close it: he was arrested, as he had been
already since his loss, by the invisible wand of catalepsy, and
stood like a graven image, with wide but sightless eyes, holding
open his door, powerless to resist either the good or the evil that
might enter there.

When Marner's sensibility returned, he continued the action which
had been arrested, and closed his door, unaware of the chasm in his
consciousness, unaware of any intermediate change, except that the
light had grown dim, and that he was chilled and faint.  He thought
he had been too long standing at the door and looking out.  Turning
towards the hearth, where the two logs had fallen apart, and sent
forth only a red uncertain glimmer, he seated himself on his
fireside chair, and was stooping to push his logs together, when, to
his blurred vision, it seemed as if there were gold on the floor in
front of the hearth.  Gold!--his own gold--brought back to him
as mysteriously as it had been taken away!  He felt his heart begin
to beat violently, and for a few moments he was unable to stretch
out his hand and grasp the restored treasure.  The heap of gold
seemed to glow and get larger beneath his agitated gaze.  He leaned
forward at last, and stretched forth his hand; but instead of the
hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his fingers
encountered soft warm curls.  In utter amazement, Silas fell on his
knees and bent his head low to examine the marvel: it was a sleeping
child--a round, fair thing, with soft yellow rings all over its
head.  Could this be his little sister come back to him in a dream--
his little sister whom he had carried about in his arms for a
year before she died, when he was a small boy without shoes or
stockings?  That was the first thought that darted across Silas's
blank wonderment.  _Was_ it a dream?  He rose to his feet again,
pushed his logs together, and, throwing on some dried leaves and
sticks, raised a flame; but the flame did not disperse the vision--
it only lit up more distinctly the little round form of the child,
and its shabby clothing.  It was very much like his little sister.
Silas sank into his chair powerless, under the double presence of an
inexplicable surprise and a hurrying influx of memories.  How and
when had the child come in without his knowledge?  He had never been
beyond the door.  But along with that question, and almost thrusting
it away, there was a vision of the old home and the old streets
leading to Lantern Yard--and within that vision another, of the
thoughts which had been present with him in those far-off scenes.
The thoughts were strange to him now, like old friendships
impossible to revive; and yet he had a dreamy feeling that this
child was somehow a message come to him from that far-off life: it
stirred fibres that had never been moved in Raveloe--old
quiverings of tenderness--old impressions of awe at the
presentiment of some Power presiding over his life; for his
imagination had not yet extricated itself from the sense of mystery
in the child's sudden presence, and had formed no conjectures of
ordinary natural means by which the event could have been brought
about.

But there was a cry on the hearth: the child had awaked, and Marner
stooped to lift it on his knee.  It clung round his neck, and burst
louder and louder into that mingling of inarticulate cries with
"mammy" by which little children express the bewilderment of
waking.  Silas pressed it to him, and almost unconsciously uttered
sounds of hushing tenderness, while he bethought himself that some
of his porridge, which had got cool by the dying fire, would do to
feed the child with if it were only warmed up a little.

He had plenty to do through the next hour.  The porridge, sweetened
with some dry brown sugar from an old store which he had refrained
from using for himself, stopped the cries of the little one, and
made her lift her blue eyes with a wide quiet gaze at Silas, as he
put the spoon into her mouth.  Presently she slipped from his knee
and began to toddle about, but with a pretty stagger that made Silas
jump up and follow her lest she should fall against anything that
would hurt her.  But she only fell in a sitting posture on the
ground, and began to pull at her boots, looking up at him with a
crying face as if the boots hurt her.  He took her on his knee
again, but it was some time before it occurred to Silas's dull
bachelor mind that the wet boots were the grievance, pressing on her
warm ankles.  He got them off with difficulty, and baby was at once
happily occupied with the primary mystery of her own toes, inviting
Silas, with much chuckling, to consider the mystery too.  But the
wet boots had at last suggested to Silas that the child had been
walking on the snow, and this roused him from his entire oblivion of
any ordinary means by which it could have entered or been brought
into his house.  Under the prompting of this new idea, and without
waiting to form conjectures, he raised the child in his arms, and
went to the door.  As soon as he had opened it, there was the cry of
"mammy" again, which Silas had not heard since the child's first
hungry waking.  Bending forward, he could just discern the marks
made by the little feet on the virgin snow, and he followed their
track to the furze bushes.  "Mammy!"  the little one cried again
and again, stretching itself forward so as almost to escape from
Silas's arms, before he himself was aware that there was something
more than the bush before him--that there was a human body, with
the head sunk low in the furze, and half-covered with the shaken
snow.

XIII


It was after the early supper-time at the Red House, and the
entertainment was in that stage when bashfulness itself had passed
into easy jollity, when gentlemen, conscious of unusual
accomplishments, could at length be prevailed on to dance a
hornpipe, and when the Squire preferred talking loudly, scattering
snuff, and patting his visitors' backs, to sitting longer at the
whist-table--a choice exasperating to uncle Kimble, who, being
always volatile in sober business hours, became intense and bitter
over cards and brandy, shuffled before his adversary's deal with a
glare of suspicion, and turned up a mean trump-card with an air of
inexpressible disgust, as if in a world where such things could
happen one might as well enter on a course of reckless profligacy.
When the evening had advanced to this pitch of freedom and
enjoyment, it was usual for the servants, the heavy duties of supper
being well over, to get their share of amusement by coming to look
on at the dancing; so that the back regions of the house were left
in solitude.

There were two doors by which the White Parlour was entered from the
hall, and they were both standing open for the sake of air; but the
lower one was crowded with the servants and villagers, and only the
upper doorway was left free.  Bob Cass was figuring in a hornpipe,
and his father, very proud of this lithe son, whom he repeatedly
declared to be just like himself in his young days in a tone that
implied this to be the very highest stamp of juvenile merit, was the
centre of a group who had placed themselves opposite the performer,
not far from the upper door.  Godfrey was standing a little way off,
not to admire his brother's dancing, but to keep sight of Nancy, who
was seated in the group, near her father.  He stood aloof, because
he wished to avoid suggesting himself as a subject for the Squire's
fatherly jokes in connection with matrimony and Miss Nancy
Lammeter's beauty, which were likely to become more and more
explicit.  But he had the prospect of dancing with her again when
the hornpipe was concluded, and in the meanwhile it was very
pleasant to get long glances at her quite unobserved.

But when Godfrey was lifting his eyes from one of those long
glances, they encountered an object as startling to him at that
moment as if it had been an apparition from the dead.  It _was_ an
apparition from that hidden life which lies, like a dark by-street,
behind the goodly ornamented facade that meets the sunlight and the
gaze of respectable admirers.  It was his own child, carried in
Silas Marner's arms.  That was his instantaneous impression,
unaccompanied by doubt, though he had not seen the child for months
past; and when the hope was rising that he might possibly be
mistaken, Mr. Crackenthorp and Mr. Lammeter had already advanced to
Silas, in astonishment at this strange advent.  Godfrey joined them
immediately, unable to rest without hearing every word--trying to
control himself, but conscious that if any one noticed him, they
must see that he was white-lipped and trembling.

But now all eyes at that end of the room were bent on Silas Marner;
the Squire himself had risen, and asked angrily, "How's this?--
what's this?--what do you do coming in here in this way?"

"I'm come for the doctor--I want the doctor," Silas had said, in
the first moment, to Mr. Crackenthorp.

"Why, what's the matter, Marner?"  said the rector.  "The
doctor's here; but say quietly what you want him for."

"It's a woman," said Silas, speaking low, and half-breathlessly,
just as Godfrey came up.  "She's dead, I think--dead in the snow
at the Stone-pits--not far from my door."

Godfrey felt a great throb: there was one terror in his mind at that
moment: it was, that the woman might _not_ be dead.  That was an
evil terror--an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in
Godfrey's kindly disposition; but no disposition is a security from
evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity.

"Hush, hush!"  said Mr. Crackenthorp.  "Go out into the hall
there.  I'll fetch the doctor to you.  Found a woman in the snow--
and thinks she's dead," he added, speaking low to the Squire.
"Better say as little about it as possible: it will shock the
ladies.  Just tell them a poor woman is ill from cold and hunger.
I'll go and fetch Kimble."

By this time, however, the ladies had pressed forward, curious to
know what could have brought the solitary linen-weaver there under
such strange circumstances, and interested in the pretty child, who,
half alarmed and half attracted by the brightness and the numerous
company, now frowned and hid her face, now lifted up her head again
and looked round placably, until a touch or a coaxing word brought
back the frown, and made her bury her face with new determination.

"What child is it?"  said several ladies at once, and, among the
rest, Nancy Lammeter, addressing Godfrey.

"I don't know--some poor woman's who has been found in the snow,
I believe," was the answer Godfrey wrung from himself with a
terrible effort.  ("After all, _am_ I certain?"  he hastened to
add, silently, in anticipation of his own conscience.)

"Why, you'd better leave the child here, then, Master Marner,"
said good-natured Mrs. Kimble, hesitating, however, to take those
dingy clothes into contact with her own ornamented satin bodice.
"I'll tell one o' the girls to fetch it."

"No--no--I can't part with it, I can't let it go," said Silas,
abruptly.  "It's come to me--I've a right to keep it."

The proposition to take the child from him had come to Silas quite
unexpectedly, and his speech, uttered under a strong sudden impulse,
was almost like a revelation to himself: a minute before, he had no
distinct intention about the child.

"Did you ever hear the like?"  said Mrs. Kimble, in mild surprise,
to her neighbour.

"Now, ladies, I must trouble you to stand aside," said Mr. Kimble,
coming from the card-room, in some bitterness at the interruption,
but drilled by the long habit of his profession into obedience to
unpleasant calls, even when he was hardly sober.

"It's a nasty business turning out now, eh, Kimble?"  said the
Squire.  "He might ha' gone for your young fellow--the 'prentice,
there--what's his name?"

"Might?  aye--what's the use of talking about might?"  growled
uncle Kimble, hastening out with Marner, and followed by
Mr. Crackenthorp and Godfrey.  "Get me a pair of thick boots,
Godfrey, will you?  And stay, let somebody run to Winthrop's and
fetch Dolly--she's the best woman to get.  Ben was here himself
before supper; is he gone?"

"Yes, sir, I met him," said Marner; "but I couldn't stop to tell
him anything, only I said I was going for the doctor, and he said
the doctor was at the Squire's.  And I made haste and ran, and there
was nobody to be seen at the back o' the house, and so I went in to
where the company was."

The child, no longer distracted by the bright light and the smiling
women's faces, began to cry and call for "mammy", though always
clinging to Marner, who had apparently won her thorough confidence.
Godfrey had come back with the boots, and felt the cry as if some
fibre were drawn tight within him.

"I'll go," he said, hastily, eager for some movement; "I'll go
and fetch the woman--Mrs. Winthrop."

"Oh, pooh--send somebody else," said uncle Kimble, hurrying away
with Marner.

"You'll let me know if I can be of any use, Kimble," said
Mr. Crackenthorp.  But the doctor was out of hearing.

Godfrey, too, had disappeared: he was gone to snatch his hat and
coat, having just reflection enough to remember that he must not
look like a madman; but he rushed out of the house into the snow
without heeding his thin shoes.

In a few minutes he was on his rapid way to the Stone-pits by the
side of Dolly, who, though feeling that she was entirely in her
place in encountering cold and snow on an errand of mercy, was much
concerned at a young gentleman's getting his feet wet under a like
impulse.

"You'd a deal better go back, sir," said Dolly, with respectful
compassion.  "You've no call to catch cold; and I'd ask you if
you'd be so good as tell my husband to come, on your way back--
he's at the Rainbow, I doubt--if you found him anyway sober enough
to be o' use.  Or else, there's Mrs. Snell 'ud happen send the boy
up to fetch and carry, for there may be things wanted from the
doctor's."

"No, I'll stay, now I'm once out--I'll stay outside here," said
Godfrey, when they came opposite Marner's cottage.  "You can come
and tell me if I can do anything."

"Well, sir, you're very good: you've a tender heart," said Dolly,
going to the door.

Godfrey was too painfully preoccupied to feel a twinge of
self-reproach at this undeserved praise.  He walked up and down,
unconscious that he was plunging ankle-deep in snow, unconscious of
everything but trembling suspense about what was going on in the
cottage, and the effect of each alternative on his future lot.  No,
not quite unconscious of everything else.  Deeper down, and
half-smothered by passionate desire and dread, there was the sense
that he ought not to be waiting on these alternatives; that he ought
to accept the consequences of his deeds, own the miserable wife, and
fulfil the claims of the helpless child.  But he had not moral
courage enough to contemplate that active renunciation of Nancy as
possible for him: he had only conscience and heart enough to make
him for ever uneasy under the weakness that forbade the
renunciation.  And at this moment his mind leaped away from all
restraint toward the sudden prospect of deliverance from his long
bondage.

"Is she dead?"  said the voice that predominated over every other
within him.  "If she is, I may marry Nancy; and then I shall be a
good fellow in future, and have no secrets, and the child--shall
be taken care of somehow."  But across that vision came the other
possibility--"She may live, and then it's all up with me."

Godfrey never knew how long it was before the door of the cottage
opened and Mr. Kimble came out.  He went forward to meet his uncle,
prepared to suppress the agitation he must feel, whatever news he
was to hear.

"I waited for you, as I'd come so far," he said, speaking first.

"Pooh, it was nonsense for you to come out: why didn't you send one
of the men?  There's nothing to be done.  She's dead--has been
dead for hours, I should say."

"What sort of woman is she?"  said Godfrey, feeling the blood rush
to his face.

"A young woman, but emaciated, with long black hair.  Some vagrant--
quite in rags.  She's got a wedding-ring on, however.  They must
fetch her away to the workhouse to-morrow.  Come, come along."

"I want to look at her," said Godfrey.  "I think I saw such a
woman yesterday.  I'll overtake you in a minute or two."

Mr. Kimble went on, and Godfrey turned back to the cottage.  He cast
only one glance at the dead face on the pillow, which Dolly had
smoothed with decent care; but he remembered that last look at his
unhappy hated wife so well, that at the end of sixteen years every
line in the worn face was present to him when he told the full story
of this night.

He turned immediately towards the hearth, where Silas Marner sat
lulling the child.  She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep--
only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm
which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a
certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel
before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky--before a
steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending
trees over a silent pathway.  The wide-open blue eyes looked up at
Godfrey's without any uneasiness or sign of recognition: the child
could make no visible audible claim on its father; and the father
felt a strange mixture of feelings, a conflict of regret and joy,
that the pulse of that little heart had no response for the
half-jealous yearning in his own, when the blue eyes turned away
from him slowly, and fixed themselves on the weaver's queer face,
which was bent low down to look at them, while the small hand began
to pull Marner's withered cheek with loving disfiguration.

"You'll take the child to the parish to-morrow?"  asked Godfrey,
speaking as indifferently as he could.

"Who says so?"  said Marner, sharply.  "Will they make me take
her?"

"Why, you wouldn't like to keep her, should you--an old bachelor
like you?"

"Till anybody shows they've a right to take her away from me,"
said Marner.  "The mother's dead, and I reckon it's got no father:
it's a lone thing--and I'm a lone thing.  My money's gone, I don't
know where--and this is come from I don't know where.  I know
nothing--I'm partly mazed."

"Poor little thing!"  said Godfrey.  "Let me give something
towards finding it clothes."

He had put his hand in his pocket and found half-a-guinea, and,
thrusting it into Silas's hand, he hurried out of the cottage to
overtake Mr. Kimble.

"Ah, I see it's not the same woman I saw," he said, as he came up.
"It's a pretty little child: the old fellow seems to want to keep
it; that's strange for a miser like him.  But I gave him a trifle to
help him out: the parish isn't likely to quarrel with him for the
right to keep the child."

"No; but I've seen the time when I might have quarrelled with him
for it myself.  It's too late now, though.  If the child ran into
the fire, your aunt's too fat to overtake it: she could only sit and
grunt like an alarmed sow.  But what a fool you are, Godfrey, to
come out in your dancing shoes and stockings in this way--and you
one of the beaux of the evening, and at your own house!  What do you
mean by such freaks, young fellow?  Has Miss Nancy been cruel, and
do you want to spite her by spoiling your pumps?"

"Oh, everything has been disagreeable to-night.  I was tired to
death of jigging and gallanting, and that bother about the
hornpipes.  And I'd got to dance with the other Miss Gunn," said
Godfrey, glad of the subterfuge his uncle had suggested to him.

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself
ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the
false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly
as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

Godfrey reappeared in the White Parlour with dry feet, and, since
the truth must be told, with a sense of relief and gladness that was
too strong for painful thoughts to struggle with.  For could he not
venture now, whenever opportunity offered, to say the tenderest
things to Nancy Lammeter--to promise her and himself that he would
always be just what she would desire to see him?  There was no
danger that his dead wife would be recognized: those were not days
of active inquiry and wide report; and as for the registry of their
marriage, that was a long way off, buried in unturned pages, away
from every one's interest but his own.  Dunsey might betray him if
he came back; but Dunsey might be won to silence.

And when events turn out so much better for a man than he has had
reason to dread, is it not a proof that his conduct has been less
foolish and blameworthy than it might otherwise have appeared?  When
we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not
altogether unmeritorious, and that it is only just we should treat
ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune.  Where, after all,
would be the use of his confessing the past to Nancy Lammeter, and
throwing away his happiness?--nay, hers?  for he felt some
confidence that she loved him.  As for the child, he would see that
it was cared for: he would never forsake it; he would do everything
but own it.  Perhaps it would be just as happy in life without being
owned by its father, seeing that nobody could tell how things would
turn out, and that--is there any other reason wanted?--well,
then, that the father would be much happier without owning the
child.

XIV


There was a pauper's burial that week in Raveloe, and up Kench Yard
at Batherley it was known that the dark-haired woman with the fair
child, who had lately come to lodge there, was gone away again.
That was all the express note taken that Molly had disappeared from
the eyes of men.  But the unwept death which, to the general lot,
seemed as trivial as the summer-shed leaf, was charged with the
force of destiny to certain human lives that we know of, shaping
their joys and sorrows even to the end.

Silas Marner's determination to keep the "tramp's child" was
matter of hardly less surprise and iterated talk in the village than
the robbery of his money.  That softening of feeling towards him
which dated from his misfortune, that merging of suspicion and
dislike in a rather contemptuous pity for him as lone and crazy, was
now accompanied with a more active sympathy, especially amongst the
women.  Notable mothers, who knew what it was to keep children
"whole and sweet"; lazy mothers, who knew what it was to be
interrupted in folding their arms and scratching their elbows by the
mischievous propensities of children just firm on their legs, were
equally interested in conjecturing how a lone man would manage with
a two-year-old child on his hands, and were equally ready with their
suggestions: the notable chiefly telling him what he had better do,
and the lazy ones being emphatic in telling him what he would never
be able to do.

Among the notable mothers, Dolly Winthrop was the one whose
neighbourly offices were the most acceptable to Marner, for they
were rendered without any show of bustling instruction.  Silas had
shown her the half-guinea given to him by Godfrey, and had asked her
what he should do about getting some clothes for the child.

"Eh, Master Marner," said Dolly, "there's no call to buy, no more
nor a pair o' shoes; for I've got the little petticoats as Aaron
wore five years ago, and it's ill spending the money on them
baby-clothes, for the child 'ull grow like grass i' May, bless it--
that it will."

And the same day Dolly brought her bundle, and displayed to Marner,
one by one, the tiny garments in their due order of succession, most
of them patched and darned, but clean and neat as fresh-sprung
herbs.  This was the introduction to a great ceremony with soap and
water, from which Baby came out in new beauty, and sat on Dolly's
knee, handling her toes and chuckling and patting her palms together
with an air of having made several discoveries about herself, which
she communicated by alternate sounds of "gug-gug-gug", and
"mammy".  The "mammy" was not a cry of need or uneasiness: Baby
had been used to utter it without expecting either tender sound or
touch to follow.

"Anybody 'ud think the angils in heaven couldn't be prettier,"
said Dolly, rubbing the golden curls and kissing them.  "And to
think of its being covered wi' them dirty rags--and the poor
mother--froze to death; but there's Them as took care of it, and
brought it to your door, Master Marner.  The door was open, and it
walked in over the snow, like as if it had been a little starved
robin.  Didn't you say the door was open?"

"Yes," said Silas, meditatively.  "Yes--the door was open.  The
money's gone I don't know where, and this is come from I don't know
where."

He had not mentioned to any one his unconsciousness of the child's
entrance, shrinking from questions which might lead to the fact he
himself suspected--namely, that he had been in one of his trances.

"Ah," said Dolly, with soothing gravity, "it's like the night and
the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the
harvest--one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor
where.  We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's little we can do
arter all--the big things come and go wi' no striving o' our'n--
they do, that they do; and I think you're in the right on it to keep
the little un, Master Marner, seeing as it's been sent to you,
though there's folks as thinks different.  You'll happen be a bit
moithered with it while it's so little; but I'll come, and welcome,
and see to it for you: I've a bit o' time to spare most days, for
when one gets up betimes i' the morning, the clock seems to stan'
still tow'rt ten, afore it's time to go about the victual.  So, as I
say, I'll come and see to the child for you, and welcome."

"Thank you... kindly," said Silas, hesitating a little.  "I'll be
glad if you'll tell me things.  But," he added, uneasily, leaning
forward to look at Baby with some jealousy, as she was resting her
head backward against Dolly's arm, and eyeing him contentedly from a
distance--"But I want to do things for it myself, else it may get
fond o' somebody else, and not fond o' me.  I've been used to
fending for myself in the house--I can learn, I can learn."

"Eh, to be sure," said Dolly, gently.  "I've seen men as are
wonderful handy wi' children.  The men are awk'ard and contrairy
mostly, God help 'em--but when the drink's out of 'em, they aren't
unsensible, though they're bad for leeching and bandaging--so
fiery and unpatient.  You see this goes first, next the skin,"
proceeded Dolly, taking up the little shirt, and putting it on.

"Yes," said Marner, docilely, bringing his eyes very close, that
they might be initiated in the mysteries; whereupon Baby seized his
head with both her small arms, and put her lips against his face
with purring noises.

"See there," said Dolly, with a woman's tender tact, "she's
fondest o' you.  She wants to go o' your lap, I'll be bound.  Go,
then: take her, Master Marner; you can put the things on, and then
you can say as you've done for her from the first of her coming to
you."

Marner took her on his lap, trembling with an emotion mysterious to
himself, at something unknown dawning on his life.  Thought and
feeling were so confused within him, that if he had tried to give
them utterance, he could only have said that the child was come
instead of the gold--that the gold had turned into the child.  He
took the garments from Dolly, and put them on under her teaching;
interrupted, of course, by Baby's gymnastics.

"There, then!  why, you take to it quite easy, Master Marner,"
said Dolly; "but what shall you do when you're forced to sit in
your loom?  For she'll get busier and mischievouser every day--she
will, bless her.  It's lucky as you've got that high hearth i'stead
of a grate, for that keeps the fire more out of her reach: but if
you've got anything as can be spilt or broke, or as is fit to cut
her fingers off, she'll be at it--and it is but right you should
know."

Silas meditated a little while in some perplexity.  "I'll tie her
to the leg o' the loom," he said at last--"tie her with a good
long strip o' something."

"Well, mayhap that'll do, as it's a little gell, for they're easier
persuaded to sit i' one place nor the lads.  I know what the lads
are; for I've had four--four I've had, God knows--and if you was
to take and tie 'em up, they'd make a fighting and a crying as if
you was ringing the pigs.  But I'll bring you my little chair, and
some bits o' red rag and things for her to play wi'; an' she'll sit
and chatter to 'em as if they was alive.  Eh, if it wasn't a sin to
the lads to wish 'em made different, bless 'em, I should ha' been
glad for one of 'em to be a little gell; and to think as I could ha'
taught her to scour, and mend, and the knitting, and everything.
But I can teach 'em this little un, Master Marner, when she gets old
enough."

"But she'll be _my_ little un," said Marner, rather hastily.
"She'll be nobody else's."

"No, to be sure; you'll have a right to her, if you're a father to
her, and bring her up according.  But," added Dolly, coming to a
point which she had determined beforehand to touch upon, "you must
bring her up like christened folks's children, and take her to
church, and let her learn her catechise, as my little Aaron can say
off--the "I believe", and everything, and "hurt nobody by word or
deed",--as well as if he was the clerk.  That's what you must do,
Master Marner, if you'd do the right thing by the orphin child."

Marner's pale face flushed suddenly under a new anxiety.  His mind
was too busy trying to give some definite bearing to Dolly's words
for him to think of answering her.

"And it's my belief," she went on, "as the poor little creatur
has never been christened, and it's nothing but right as the parson
should be spoke to; and if you was noways unwilling, I'd talk to
Mr. Macey about it this very day.  For if the child ever went
anyways wrong, and you hadn't done your part by it, Master Marner--
'noculation, and everything to save it from harm--it 'ud be a
thorn i' your bed for ever o' this side the grave; and I can't think
as it 'ud be easy lying down for anybody when they'd got to another
world, if they hadn't done their part by the helpless children as
come wi'out their own asking."

Dolly herself was disposed to be silent for some time now, for she
had spoken from the depths of her own simple belief, and was much
concerned to know whether her words would produce the desired effect
on Silas.  He was puzzled and anxious, for Dolly's word
"christened" conveyed no distinct meaning to him.  He had only
heard of baptism, and had only seen the baptism of grown-up men and
women.

"What is it as you mean by "christened"?"  he said at last,
timidly.  "Won't folks be good to her without it?"

"Dear, dear!  Master Marner," said Dolly, with gentle distress and
compassion.  "Had you never no father nor mother as taught you to
say your prayers, and as there's good words and good things to keep
us from harm?"

"Yes," said Silas, in a low voice; "I know a deal about that--
used to, used to.  But your ways are different: my country was a
good way off."  He paused a few moments, and then added, more
decidedly, "But I want to do everything as can be done for the
child.  And whatever's right for it i' this country, and you think
'ull do it good, I'll act according, if you'll tell me."

"Well, then, Master Marner," said Dolly, inwardly rejoiced, "I'll
ask Mr. Macey to speak to the parson about it; and you must fix on a
name for it, because it must have a name giv' it when it's
christened."

"My mother's name was Hephzibah," said Silas, "and my little
sister was named after her."

"Eh, that's a hard name," said Dolly.  "I partly think it isn't a
christened name."

"It's a Bible name," said Silas, old ideas recurring.

"Then I've no call to speak again' it," said Dolly, rather
startled by Silas's knowledge on this head; "but you see I'm no
scholard, and I'm slow at catching the words.  My husband says I'm
allays like as if I was putting the haft for the handle--that's
what he says--for he's very sharp, God help him.  But it was
awk'ard calling your little sister by such a hard name, when you'd
got nothing big to say, like--wasn't it, Master Marner?"

"We called her Eppie," said Silas.

"Well, if it was noways wrong to shorten the name, it 'ud be a deal
handier.  And so I'll go now, Master Marner, and I'll speak about
the christening afore dark; and I wish you the best o' luck, and
it's my belief as it'll come to you, if you do what's right by the
orphin child;--and there's the 'noculation to be seen to; and as
to washing its bits o' things, you need look to nobody but me, for I
can do 'em wi' one hand when I've got my suds about.  Eh, the
blessed angil!  You'll let me bring my Aaron one o' these days, and
he'll show her his little cart as his father's made for him, and the
black-and-white pup as he's got a-rearing."

Baby _was_ christened, the rector deciding that a double baptism was
the lesser risk to incur; and on this occasion Silas, making himself
as clean and tidy as he could, appeared for the first time within
the church, and shared in the observances held sacred by his
neighbours.  He was quite unable, by means of anything he heard or
saw, to identify the Raveloe religion with his old faith; if he
could at any time in his previous life have done so, it must have
been by the aid of a strong feeling ready to vibrate with sympathy,
rather than by a comparison of phrases and ideas: and now for long
years that feeling had been dormant.  He had no distinct idea about
the baptism and the church-going, except that Dolly had said it was
for the good of the child; and in this way, as the weeks grew to
months, the child created fresh and fresh links between his life and
the lives from which he had hitherto shrunk continually into
narrower isolation.  Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must
be worshipped in close-locked solitude--which was hidden away from
the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human
tones--Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing
desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living
movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and
stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her.  The
gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to
nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes
and hopes that forced his thoughts onward, and carried them far away
from their old eager pacing towards the same blank limit--carried
them away to the new things that would come with the coming years,
when Eppie would have learned to understand how her father Silas
cared for her; and made him look for images of that time in the ties
and charities that bound together the families of his neighbours.
The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer,
deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony
of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away
from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday,
reawakening his senses with her fresh life, even to the old
winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early spring sunshine,
and warming him into joy because _she_ had joy.

And when the sunshine grew strong and lasting, so that the
buttercups were thick in the meadows, Silas might be seen in the
sunny midday, or in the late afternoon when the shadows were
lengthening under the hedgerows, strolling out with uncovered head
to carry Eppie beyond the Stone-pits to where the flowers grew, till
they reached some favourite bank where he could sit down, while
Eppie toddled to pluck the flowers, and make remarks to the winged
things that murmured happily above the bright petals, calling
"Dad-dad's" attention continually by bringing him the flowers.
Then she would turn her ear to some sudden bird-note, and Silas
learned to please her by making signs of hushed stillness, that they
might listen for the note to come again: so that when it came, she
set up her small back and laughed with gurgling triumph.  Sitting on
the banks in this way, Silas began to look for the once familiar
herbs again; and as the leaves, with their unchanged outline and
markings, lay on his palm, there was a sense of crowding
remembrances from which he turned away timidly, taking refuge in
Eppie's little world, that lay lightly on his enfeebled spirit.

As the child's mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing
into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a
cold narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into
full consciousness.

It was an influence which must gather force with every new year: the
tones that stirred Silas's heart grew articulate, and called for
more distinct answers; shapes and sounds grew clearer for Eppie's
eyes and ears, and there was more that "Dad-dad" was imperatively
required to notice and account for.  Also, by the time Eppie was
three years old, she developed a fine capacity for mischief, and for
devising ingenious ways of being troublesome, which found much
exercise, not only for Silas's patience, but for his watchfulness
and penetration.  Sorely was poor Silas puzzled on such occasions by
the incompatible demands of love.  Dolly Winthrop told him that
punishment was good for Eppie, and that, as for rearing a child
without making it tingle a little in soft and safe places now and
then, it was not to be done.

"To be sure, there's another thing you might do, Master Marner,"
added Dolly, meditatively: "you might shut her up once i' the
coal-hole.  That was what I did wi' Aaron; for I was that silly wi'
the youngest lad, as I could never bear to smack him.  Not as I
could find i' my heart to let him stay i' the coal-hole more nor a
minute, but it was enough to colly him all over, so as he must be
new washed and dressed, and it was as good as a rod to him--that
was.  But I put it upo' your conscience, Master Marner, as there's
one of 'em you must choose--ayther smacking or the coal-hole--
else she'll get so masterful, there'll be no holding her."

Silas was impressed with the melancholy truth of this last remark;
but his force of mind failed before the only two penal methods open
to him, not only because it was painful to him to hurt Eppie, but
because he trembled at a moment's contention with her, lest she
should love him the less for it.  Let even an affectionate Goliath
get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by
pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the
two, pray, will be master?  It was clear that Eppie, with her short
toddling steps, must lead father Silas a pretty dance on any fine
morning when circumstances favoured mischief.

For example.  He had wisely chosen a broad strip of linen as a means
of fastening her to his loom when he was busy: it made a broad belt
round her waist, and was long enough to allow of her reaching the
truckle-bed and sitting down on it, but not long enough for her to
attempt any dangerous climbing.  One bright summer's morning Silas
had been more engrossed than usual in "setting up" a new piece of
work, an occasion on which his scissors were in requisition.  These
scissors, owing to an especial warning of Dolly's, had been kept
carefully out of Eppie's reach; but the click of them had had a
peculiar attraction for her ear, and watching the results of that
click, she had derived the philosophic lesson that the same cause
would produce the same effect.  Silas had seated himself in his
loom, and the noise of weaving had begun; but he had left his
scissors on a ledge which Eppie's arm was long enough to reach; and
now, like a small mouse, watching her opportunity, she stole quietly
from her corner, secured the scissors, and toddled to the bed again,
setting up her back as a mode of concealing the fact.  She had a
distinct intention as to the use of the scissors; and having cut the
linen strip in a jagged but effectual manner, in two moments she had
run out at the open door where the sunshine was inviting her, while
poor Silas believed her to be a better child than usual.  It was not
until he happened to need his scissors that the terrible fact burst
upon him: Eppie had run out by herself--had perhaps fallen into
the Stone-pit.  Silas, shaken by the worst fear that could have
befallen him, rushed out, calling "Eppie!"  and ran eagerly about
the unenclosed space, exploring the dry cavities into which she
might have fallen, and then gazing with questioning dread at the
smooth red surface of the water.  The cold drops stood on his brow.
How long had she been out?  There was one hope--that she had crept
through the stile and got into the fields, where he habitually took
her to stroll.  But the grass was high in the meadow, and there was
no descrying her, if she were there, except by a close search that
would be a trespass on Mr. Osgood's crop.  Still, that misdemeanour
must be committed; and poor Silas, after peering all round the
hedgerows, traversed the grass, beginning with perturbed vision to
see Eppie behind every group of red sorrel, and to see her moving
always farther off as he approached.  The meadow was searched in
vain; and he got over the stile into the next field, looking with
dying hope towards a small pond which was now reduced to its summer
shallowness, so as to leave a wide margin of good adhesive mud.
Here, however, sat Eppie, discoursing cheerfully to her own small
boot, which she was using as a bucket to convey the water into a
deep hoof-mark, while her little naked foot was planted comfortably
on a cushion of olive-green mud.  A red-headed calf was observing
her with alarmed doubt through the opposite hedge.

Here was clearly a case of aberration in a christened child which
demanded severe treatment; but Silas, overcome with convulsive joy
at finding his treasure again, could do nothing but snatch her up,
and cover her with half-sobbing kisses.  It was not until he had
carried her home, and had begun to think of the necessary washing,
that he recollected the need that he should punish Eppie, and "make
her remember".  The idea that she might run away again and come to
harm, gave him unusual resolution, and for the first time he
determined to try the coal-hole--a small closet near the hearth.

"Naughty, naughty Eppie," he suddenly began, holding her on his
knee, and pointing to her muddy feet and clothes--"naughty to cut
with the scissors and run away.  Eppie must go into the coal-hole
for being naughty.  Daddy must put her in the coal-hole."

He half-expected that this would be shock enough, and that Eppie
would begin to cry.  But instead of that, she began to shake herself
on his knee, as if the proposition opened a pleasing novelty.
Seeing that he must proceed to extremities, he put her into the
coal-hole, and held the door closed, with a trembling sense that he
was using a strong measure.  For a moment there was silence, but
then came a little cry, "Opy, opy!"  and Silas let her out again,
saying, "Now Eppie 'ull never be naughty again, else she must go in
the coal-hole--a black naughty place."

The weaving must stand still a long while this morning, for now
Eppie must be washed, and have clean clothes on; but it was to be
hoped that this punishment would have a lasting effect, and save
time in future--though, perhaps, it would have been better if
Eppie had cried more.

In half an hour she was clean again, and Silas having turned his
back to see what he could do with the linen band, threw it down
again, with the reflection that Eppie would be good without
fastening for the rest of the morning.  He turned round again, and
was going to place her in her little chair near the loom, when she
peeped out at him with black face and hands again, and said, "Eppie
in de toal-hole!"

This total failure of the coal-hole discipline shook Silas's belief
in the efficacy of punishment.  "She'd take it all for fun," he
observed to Dolly, "if I didn't hurt her, and that I can't do,
Mrs. Winthrop.  If she makes me a bit o' trouble, I can bear it.
And she's got no tricks but what she'll grow out of."

"Well, that's partly true, Master Marner," said Dolly,
sympathetically; "and if you can't bring your mind to frighten her
off touching things, you must do what you can to keep 'em out of her
way.  That's what I do wi' the pups as the lads are allays
a-rearing.  They _will_ worry and gnaw--worry and gnaw they will,
if it was one's Sunday cap as hung anywhere so as they could drag
it.  They know no difference, God help 'em: it's the pushing o' the
teeth as sets 'em on, that's what it is."

So Eppie was reared without punishment, the burden of her misdeeds
being borne vicariously by father Silas.  The stone hut was made a
soft nest for her, lined with downy patience: and also in the world
that lay beyond the stone hut she knew nothing of frowns and
denials.

Notwithstanding the difficulty of carrying her and his yarn or linen
at the same time, Silas took her with him in most of his journeys to
the farmhouses, unwilling to leave her behind at Dolly Winthrop's,
who was always ready to take care of her; and little curly-headed
Eppie, the weaver's child, became an object of interest at several
outlying homesteads, as well as in the village.  Hitherto he had
been treated very much as if he had been a useful gnome or brownie--
a queer and unaccountable creature, who must necessarily be
looked at with wondering curiosity and repulsion, and with whom one
would be glad to make all greetings and bargains as brief as
possible, but who must be dealt with in a propitiatory way, and
occasionally have a present of pork or garden stuff to carry home
with him, seeing that without him there was no getting the yarn
woven.  But now Silas met with open smiling faces and cheerful
questioning, as a person whose satisfactions and difficulties could
be understood.  Everywhere he must sit a little and talk about the
child, and words of interest were always ready for him: "Ah, Master
Marner, you'll be lucky if she takes the measles soon and easy!"--
or, "Why, there isn't many lone men 'ud ha' been wishing to take
up with a little un like that: but I reckon the weaving makes you
handier than men as do out-door work--you're partly as handy as a
woman, for weaving comes next to spinning."  Elderly masters and
mistresses, seated observantly in large kitchen arm-chairs, shook
their heads over the difficulties attendant on rearing children,
felt Eppie's round arms and legs, and pronounced them remarkably
firm, and told Silas that, if she turned out well (which, however,
there was no telling), it would be a fine thing for him to have a
steady lass to do for him when he got helpless.  Servant maidens
were fond of carrying her out to look at the hens and chickens, or
to see if any cherries could be shaken down in the orchard; and the
small boys and girls approached her slowly, with cautious movement
and steady gaze, like little dogs face to face with one of their own
kind, till attraction had reached the point at which the soft lips
were put out for a kiss.  No child was afraid of approaching Silas
when Eppie was near him: there was no repulsion around him now,
either for young or old; for the little child had come to link him
once more with the whole world.  There was love between him and the
child that blent them into one, and there was love between the child
and the world--from men and women with parental looks and tones,
to the red lady-birds and the round pebbles.

Silas began now to think of Raveloe life entirely in relation to
Eppie: she must have everything that was a good in Raveloe; and he
listened docilely, that he might come to understand better what this
life was, from which, for fifteen years, he had stood aloof as from
a strange thing, with which he could have no communion: as some man
who has a precious plant to which he would give a nurturing home in
a new soil, thinks of the rain, and the sunshine, and all
influences, in relation to his nursling, and asks industriously for
all knowledge that will help him to satisfy the wants of the
searching roots, or to guard leaf and bud from invading harm.  The
disposition to hoard had been utterly crushed at the very first by
the loss of his long-stored gold: the coins he earned afterwards
seemed as irrelevant as stones brought to complete a house suddenly
buried by an earthquake; the sense of bereavement was too heavy upon
him for the old thrill of satisfaction to arise again at the touch
of the newly-earned coin.  And now something had come to replace his
hoard which gave a growing purpose to the earnings, drawing his hope
and joy continually onward beyond the money.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and
led them away from the city of destruction.  We see no white-winged
angels now.  But yet men are led away from threatening destruction:
a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a
calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the
hand may be a little child's.

XV


There was one person, as you will believe, who watched with keener
though more hidden interest than any other, the prosperous growth of
Eppie under the weaver's care.  He dared not do anything that would
imply a stronger interest in a poor man's adopted child than could
be expected from the kindliness of the young Squire, when a chance
meeting suggested a little present to a simple old fellow whom
others noticed with goodwill; but he told himself that the time
would come when he might do something towards furthering the welfare
of his daughter without incurring suspicion.  Was he very uneasy in
the meantime at his inability to give his daughter her birthright?
I cannot say that he was.  The child was being taken care of, and
would very likely be happy, as people in humble stations often were--
happier, perhaps, than those brought up in luxury.


That famous ring that pricked its owner when he forgot duty and
followed desire--I wonder if it pricked very hard when he set out
on the chase, or whether it pricked but lightly then, and only
pierced to the quick when the chase had long been ended, and hope,
folding her wings, looked backward and became regret?

Godfrey Cass's cheek and eye were brighter than ever now.  He was so
undivided in his aims, that he seemed like a man of firmness.  No
Dunsey had come back: people had made up their minds that he was
gone for a soldier, or gone "out of the country", and no one cared
to be specific in their inquiries on a subject delicate to a
respectable family.  Godfrey had ceased to see the shadow of Dunsey
across his path; and the path now lay straight forward to the
accomplishment of his best, longest-cherished wishes.  Everybody
said Mr. Godfrey had taken the right turn; and it was pretty clear
what would be the end of things, for there were not many days in the
week that he was not seen riding to the Warrens.  Godfrey himself,
when he was asked jocosely if the day had been fixed, smiled with
the pleasant consciousness of a lover who could say "yes", if he
liked.  He felt a reformed man, delivered from temptation; and the
vision of his future life seemed to him as a promised land for which
he had no cause to fight.  He saw himself with all his happiness
centred on his own hearth, while Nancy would smile on him as he

played with the children.

And that other child--not on the hearth--he would not forget it;
he would see that it was well provided for.  That was a father's
duty.

Part Two


XVI


It was a bright autumn Sunday, sixteen years after Silas Marner had
found his new treasure on the hearth.  The bells of the old Raveloe
church were ringing the cheerful peal which told that the morning
service was ended; and out of the arched doorway in the tower came
slowly, retarded by friendly greetings and questions, the richer
parishioners who had chosen this bright Sunday morning as eligible
for church-going.  It was the rural fashion of that time for the
more important members of the congregation to depart first, while
their humbler neighbours waited and looked on, stroking their bent
heads or dropping their curtsies to any large ratepayer who turned
to notice them.

Foremost among these advancing groups of well-clad people, there are
some whom we shall recognize, in spite of Time, who has laid his
hand on them all.  The tall blond man of forty is not much changed
in feature from the Godfrey Cass of six-and-twenty: he is only
fuller in flesh, and has only lost the indefinable look of youth--
a loss which is marked even when the eye is undulled and the
wrinkles are not yet come.  Perhaps the pretty woman, not much
younger than he, who is leaning on his arm, is more changed than her
husband: the lovely bloom that used to be always on her cheek now
comes but fitfully, with the fresh morning air or with some strong
surprise; yet to all who love human faces best for what they tell of
human experience, Nancy's beauty has a heightened interest.  Often
the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an
ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of
the fruit.  But the years have not been so cruel to Nancy.  The firm
yet placid mouth, the clear veracious glance of the brown eyes,
speak now of a nature that has been tested and has kept its highest
qualities; and even the costume, with its dainty neatness and
purity, has more significance now the coquetries of youth can have
nothing to do with it.

Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey Cass (any higher title has died away from
Raveloe lips since the old Squire was gathered to his fathers and
his inheritance was divided) have turned round to look for the tall
aged man and the plainly dressed woman who are a little behind--
Nancy having observed that they must wait for "father and
Priscilla"--and now they all turn into a narrower path leading
across the churchyard to a small gate opposite the Red House.  We
will not follow them now; for may there not be some others in this
departing congregation whom we should like to see again--some of
those who are not likely to be handsomely clad, and whom we may not
recognize so easily as the master and mistress of the Red House?

But it is impossible to mistake Silas Marner.  His large brown eyes
seem to have gathered a longer vision, as is the way with eyes that
have been short-sighted in early life, and they have a less vague, a
more answering gaze; but in everything else one sees signs of a
frame much enfeebled by the lapse of the sixteen years.  The
weaver's bent shoulders and white hair give him almost the look of
advanced age, though he is not more than five-and-fifty; but there
is the freshest blossom of youth close by his side--a blonde
dimpled girl of eighteen, who has vainly tried to chastise her curly
auburn hair into smoothness under her brown bonnet: the hair ripples
as obstinately as a brooklet under the March breeze, and the little
ringlets burst away from the restraining comb behind and show
themselves below the bonnet-crown.  Eppie cannot help being rather
vexed about her hair, for there is no other girl in Raveloe who has
hair at all like it, and she thinks hair ought to be smooth.  She
does not like to be blameworthy even in small things: you see how
neatly her prayer-book is folded in her spotted handkerchief.

That good-looking young fellow, in a new fustian suit, who walks
behind her, is not quite sure upon the question of hair in the
abstract, when Eppie puts it to him, and thinks that perhaps
straight hair is the best in general, but he doesn't want Eppie's
hair to be different.  She surely divines that there is some one
behind her who is thinking about her very particularly, and
mustering courage to come to her side as soon as they are out in the
lane, else why should she look rather shy, and take care not to turn
away her head from her father Silas, to whom she keeps murmuring
little sentences as to who was at church and who was not at church,
and how pretty the red mountain-ash is over the Rectory wall?

"I wish _we_ had a little garden, father, with double daisies in,
like Mrs. Winthrop's," said Eppie, when they were out in the lane;
"only they say it 'ud take a deal of digging and bringing fresh
soil--and you couldn't do that, could you, father?  Anyhow, I
shouldn't like you to do it, for it 'ud be too hard work for you."

"Yes, I could do it, child, if you want a bit o' garden: these long
evenings, I could work at taking in a little bit o' the waste, just
enough for a root or two o' flowers for you; and again, i' the
morning, I could have a turn wi' the spade before I sat down to the
loom.  Why didn't you tell me before as you wanted a bit o'
garden?"

"_I_ can dig it for you, Master Marner," said the young man in
fustian, who was now by Eppie's side, entering into the conversation
without the trouble of formalities.  "It'll be play to me after
I've done my day's work, or any odd bits o' time when the work's
slack.  And I'll bring you some soil from Mr. Cass's garden--he'll
let me, and willing."

"Eh, Aaron, my lad, are you there?"  said Silas; "I wasn't aware
of you; for when Eppie's talking o' things, I see nothing but what
she's a-saying.  Well, if you could help me with the digging, we
might get her a bit o' garden all the sooner."

"Then, if you think well and good," said Aaron, "I'll come to the
Stone-pits this afternoon, and we'll settle what land's to be taken
in, and I'll get up an hour earlier i' the morning, and begin on
it."

"But not if you don't promise me not to work at the hard digging,
father," said Eppie.  "For I shouldn't ha' said anything about
it," she added, half-bashfully, half-roguishly, "only
Mrs. Winthrop said as Aaron 'ud be so good, and --"

"And you might ha' known it without mother telling you," said
Aaron.  "And Master Marner knows too, I hope, as I'm able and
willing to do a turn o' work for him, and he won't do me the
unkindness to anyways take it out o' my hands."

"There, now, father, you won't work in it till it's all easy,"
said Eppie, "and you and me can mark out the beds, and make holes
and plant the roots.  It'll be a deal livelier at the Stone-pits
when we've got some flowers, for I always think the flowers can see
us and know what we're talking about.  And I'll have a bit o'
rosemary, and bergamot, and thyme, because they're so
sweet-smelling; but there's no lavender only in the gentlefolks'
gardens, I think."

"That's no reason why you shouldn't have some," said Aaron, "for
I can bring you slips of anything; I'm forced to cut no end of 'em
when I'm gardening, and throw 'em away mostly.  There's a big bed o'
lavender at the Red House: the missis is very fond of it."

"Well," said Silas, gravely, "so as you don't make free for us,
or ask for anything as is worth much at the Red House: for
Mr. Cass's been so good to us, and built us up the new end o' the
cottage, and given us beds and things, as I couldn't abide to be
imposin' for garden-stuff or anything else."

"No, no, there's no imposin'," said Aaron; "there's never a
garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for
want o' somebody as could use everything up.  It's what I think to
myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the
land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what
could find its way to a mouth.  It sets one thinking o' that--
gardening does.  But I must go back now, else mother 'ull be in
trouble as I aren't there."

"Bring her with you this afternoon, Aaron," said Eppie; "I
shouldn't like to fix about the garden, and her not know everything
from the first--should _you_, father?"

"Aye, bring her if you can, Aaron," said Silas; "she's sure to
have a word to say as'll help us to set things on their right end."

Aaron turned back up the village, while Silas and Eppie went on up
the lonely sheltered lane.

"O daddy!"  she began, when they were in privacy, clasping and
squeezing Silas's arm, and skipping round to give him an energetic
kiss.  "My little old daddy!  I'm so glad.  I don't think I shall
want anything else when we've got a little garden; and I knew Aaron
would dig it for us," she went on with roguish triumph--"I knew
that very well."

"You're a deep little puss, you are," said Silas, with the mild
passive happiness of love-crowned age in his face; "but you'll make
yourself fine and beholden to Aaron."

"Oh, no, I shan't," said Eppie, laughing and frisking; "he likes
it."

"Come, come, let me carry your prayer-book, else you'll be dropping
it, jumping i' that way."

Eppie was now aware that her behaviour was under observation, but it
was only the observation of a friendly donkey, browsing with a log
fastened to his foot--a meek donkey, not scornfully critical of
human trivialities, but thankful to share in them, if possible, by
getting his nose scratched; and Eppie did not fail to gratify him
with her usual notice, though it was attended with the inconvenience
of his following them, painfully, up to the very door of their home.

But the sound of a sharp bark inside, as Eppie put the key in the
door, modified the donkey's views, and he limped away again without
bidding.  The sharp bark was the sign of an excited welcome that was
awaiting them from a knowing brown terrier, who, after dancing at
their legs in a hysterical manner, rushed with a worrying noise at a
tortoise-shell kitten under the loom, and then rushed back with a
sharp bark again, as much as to say, "I have done my duty by this
feeble creature, you perceive"; while the lady-mother of the kitten
sat sunning her white bosom in the window, and looked round with a
sleepy air of expecting caresses, though she was not going to take
any trouble for them.

The presence of this happy animal life was not the only change which
had come over the interior of the stone cottage.  There was no bed
now in the living-room, and the small space was well filled with
decent furniture, all bright and clean enough to satisfy Dolly
Winthrop's eye.  The oaken table and three-cornered oaken chair were
hardly what was likely to be seen in so poor a cottage: they had
come, with the beds and other things, from the Red House; for
Mr. Godfrey Cass, as every one said in the village, did very kindly
by the weaver; and it was nothing but right a man should be looked
on and helped by those who could afford it, when he had brought up
an orphan child, and been father and mother to her--and had lost
his money too, so as he had nothing but what he worked for week by
week, and when the weaving was going down too--for there was less
and less flax spun--and Master Marner was none so young.  Nobody
was jealous of the weaver, for he was regarded as an exceptional
person, whose claims on neighbourly help were not to be matched in
Raveloe.  Any superstition that remained concerning him had taken an
entirely new colour; and Mr. Macey, now a very feeble old man of
fourscore and six, never seen except in his chimney-corner or
sitting in the sunshine at his door-sill, was of opinion that when a
man had done what Silas had done by an orphan child, it was a sign
that his money would come to light again, or leastwise that the
robber would be made to answer for it--for, as Mr. Macey observed
of himself, his faculties were as strong as ever.

Silas sat down now and watched Eppie with a satisfied gaze as she
spread the clean cloth, and set on it the potato-pie, warmed up
slowly in a safe Sunday fashion, by being put into a dry pot over a
slowly-dying fire, as the best substitute for an oven.  For Silas
would not consent to have a grate and oven added to his
conveniences: he loved the old brick hearth as he had loved his
brown pot--and was it not there when he had found Eppie?  The gods
of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant
of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots.

Silas ate his dinner more silently than usual, soon laying down his
knife and fork, and watching half-abstractedly Eppie's play with
Snap and the cat, by which her own dining was made rather a lengthy
business.  Yet it was a sight that might well arrest wandering
thoughts: Eppie, with the rippling radiance of her hair and the
whiteness of her rounded chin and throat set off by the dark-blue
cotton gown, laughing merrily as the kitten held on with her four
claws to one shoulder, like a design for a jug-handle, while Snap on
the right hand and Puss on the other put up their paws towards a
morsel which she held out of the reach of both--Snap occasionally
desisting in order to remonstrate with the cat by a cogent worrying
growl on the greediness and futility of her conduct; till Eppie
relented, caressed them both, and divided the morsel between them.

But at last Eppie, glancing at the clock, checked the play, and
said, "O daddy, you're wanting to go into the sunshine to smoke
your pipe.  But I must clear away first, so as the house may be tidy
when godmother comes.  I'll make haste--I won't be long."

Silas had taken to smoking a pipe daily during the last two years,
having been strongly urged to it by the sages of Raveloe, as a
practice "good for the fits"; and this advice was sanctioned by
Dr. Kimble, on the ground that it was as well to try what could do
no harm--a principle which was made to answer for a great deal of
work in that gentleman's medical practice.  Silas did not highly
enjoy smoking, and often wondered how his neighbours could be so
fond of it; but a humble sort of acquiescence in what was held to be
good, had become a strong habit of that new self which had been
developed in him since he had found Eppie on his hearth: it had been
the only clew his bewildered mind could hold by in cherishing this
young life that had been sent to him out of the darkness into which
his gold had departed.  By seeking what was needful for Eppie, by
sharing the effect that everything produced on her, he had himself
come to appropriate the forms of custom and belief which were the
mould of Raveloe life; and as, with reawakening sensibilities,
memory also reawakened, he had begun to ponder over the elements of
his old faith, and blend them with his new impressions, till he
recovered a consciousness of unity between his past and present.
The sense of presiding goodness and the human trust which come with
all pure peace and joy, had given him a dim impression that there
had been some error, some mistake, which had thrown that dark shadow
over the days of his best years; and as it grew more and more easy
to him to open his mind to Dolly Winthrop, he gradually communicated
to her all he could describe of his early life.  The communication
was necessarily a slow and difficult process, for Silas's meagre
power of explanation was not aided by any readiness of
interpretation in Dolly, whose narrow outward experience gave her no
key to strange customs, and made every novelty a source of wonder
that arrested them at every step of the narrative.  It was only by
fragments, and at intervals which left Dolly time to revolve what
she had heard till it acquired some familiarity for her, that Silas
at last arrived at the climax of the sad story--the drawing of
lots, and its false testimony concerning him; and this had to be
repeated in several interviews, under new questions on her part as
to the nature of this plan for detecting the guilty and clearing the
innocent.

"And yourn's the same Bible, you're sure o' that, Master Marner--
the Bible as you brought wi' you from that country--it's the same
as what they've got at church, and what Eppie's a-learning to read
in?"

"Yes," said Silas, "every bit the same; and there's drawing o'
lots in the Bible, mind you," he added in a lower tone.

"Oh, dear, dear," said Dolly in a grieved voice, as if she were
hearing an unfavourable report of a sick man's case.  She was silent
for some minutes; at last she said--

"There's wise folks, happen, as know how it all is; the parson
knows, I'll be bound; but it takes big words to tell them things,
and such as poor folks can't make much out on.  I can never rightly
know the meaning o' what I hear at church, only a bit here and
there, but I know it's good words--I do.  But what lies upo' your
mind--it's this, Master Marner: as, if Them above had done the
right thing by you, They'd never ha' let you be turned out for a
wicked thief when you was innicent."

"Ah!"  said Silas, who had now come to understand Dolly's
phraseology, "that was what fell on me like as if it had been
red-hot iron; because, you see, there was nobody as cared for me or
clave to me above nor below.  And him as I'd gone out and in wi' for
ten year and more, since when we was lads and went halves--mine
own familiar friend in whom I trusted, had lifted up his heel again'
me, and worked to ruin me."

"Eh, but he was a bad un--I can't think as there's another
such," said Dolly.  "But I'm o'ercome, Master Marner; I'm like as
if I'd waked and didn't know whether it was night or morning.
I feel somehow as sure as I do when I've laid something up though I
can't justly put my hand on it, as there was a rights in what
happened to you, if one could but make it out; and you'd no call to
lose heart as you did.  But we'll talk on it again; for sometimes
things come into my head when I'm leeching or poulticing, or such,
as I could never think on when I was sitting still."

Dolly was too useful a woman not to have many opportunities of
illumination of the kind she alluded to, and she was not long before
she recurred to the subject.

"Master Marner," she said, one day that she came to bring home
Eppie's washing, "I've been sore puzzled for a good bit wi' that
trouble o' yourn and the drawing o' lots; and it got twisted
back'ards and for'ards, as I didn't know which end to lay hold on.
But it come to me all clear like, that night when I was sitting up
wi' poor Bessy Fawkes, as is dead and left her children behind, God
help 'em--it come to me as clear as daylight; but whether I've got
hold on it now, or can anyways bring it to my tongue's end, that I
don't know.  For I've often a deal inside me as'll never come out;
and for what you talk o' your folks in your old country niver saying
prayers by heart nor saying 'em out of a book, they must be
wonderful cliver; for if I didn't know "Our Father", and little bits
o' good words as I can carry out o' church wi' me, I might down o'
my knees every night, but nothing could I say."

"But you can mostly say something as I can make sense on,
Mrs. Winthrop," said Silas.

"Well, then, Master Marner, it come to me summat like this: I can
make nothing o' the drawing o' lots and the answer coming wrong; it
'ud mayhap take the parson to tell that, and he could only tell us
i' big words.  But what come to me as clear as the daylight, it was
when I was troubling over poor Bessy Fawkes, and it allays comes
into my head when I'm sorry for folks, and feel as I can't do a
power to help 'em, not if I was to get up i' the middle o' the night--
it comes into my head as Them above has got a deal tenderer heart
nor what I've got--for I can't be anyways better nor Them as made
me; and if anything looks hard to me, it's because there's things I
don't know on; and for the matter o' that, there may be plenty o'
things I don't know on, for it's little as I know--that it is.
And so, while I was thinking o' that, you come into my mind, Master
Marner, and it all come pouring in:--if _I_ felt i' my inside what
was the right and just thing by you, and them as prayed and drawed
the lots, all but that wicked un, if _they_'d ha' done the right
thing by you if they could, isn't there Them as was at the making on
us, and knows better and has a better will?  And that's all as ever
I can be sure on, and everything else is a big puzzle to me when I
think on it.  For there was the fever come and took off them as were
full-growed, and left the helpless children; and there's the
breaking o' limbs; and them as 'ud do right and be sober have to
suffer by them as are contrairy--eh, there's trouble i' this
world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on.
And all as we've got to do is to trusten, Master Marner--to do the
right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten.  For if us as knows
so little can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as
there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know--I feel it
i' my own inside as it must be so.  And if you could but ha' gone on
trustening, Master Marner, you wouldn't ha' run away from your
fellow-creaturs and been so lone."

"Ah, but that 'ud ha' been hard," said Silas, in an under-tone;
"it 'ud ha' been hard to trusten then."

"And so it would," said Dolly, almost with compunction; "them
things are easier said nor done; and I'm partly ashamed o'
talking."

"Nay, nay," said Silas, "you're i' the right, Mrs. Winthrop--
you're i' the right.  There's good i' this world--I've a feeling
o' that now; and it makes a man feel as there's a good more nor he
can see, i' spite o' the trouble and the wickedness.  That drawing
o' the lots is dark; but the child was sent to me: there's dealings
with us--there's dealings."

This dialogue took place in Eppie's earlier years, when Silas had to
part with her for two hours every day, that she might learn to read
at the dame school, after he had vainly tried himself to guide her
in that first step to learning.  Now that she was grown up, Silas
had often been led, in those moments of quiet outpouring which come
to people who live together in perfect love, to talk with _her_ too
of the past, and how and why he had lived a lonely man until she had
been sent to him.  For it would have been impossible for him to hide
from Eppie that she was not his own child: even if the most delicate
reticence on the point could have been expected from Raveloe gossips
in her presence, her own questions about her mother could not have
been parried, as she grew up, without that complete shrouding of the
past which would have made a painful barrier between their minds.
So Eppie had long known how her mother had died on the snowy ground,
and how she herself had been found on the hearth by father Silas,
who had taken her golden curls for his lost guineas brought back to
him.  The tender and peculiar love with which Silas had reared her
in almost inseparable companionship with himself, aided by the
seclusion of their dwelling, had preserved her from the lowering
influences of the village talk and habits, and had kept her mind in
that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to be an
invariable attribute of rusticity.  Perfect love has a breath of
poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human
beings; and this breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie from the time
when she had followed the bright gleam that beckoned her to Silas's
hearth; so that it is not surprising if, in other things besides her
delicate prettiness, she was not quite a common village maiden, but
had a touch of refinement and fervour which came from no other
teaching than that of tenderly-nurtured unvitiated feeling.  She was
too childish and simple for her imagination to rove into questions
about her unknown father; for a long while it did not even occur to
her that she must have had a father; and the first time that the
idea of her mother having had a husband presented itself to her, was
when Silas showed her the wedding-ring which had been taken from the
wasted finger, and had been carefully preserved by him in a little
lackered box shaped like a shoe.  He delivered this box into Eppie's
charge when she had grown up, and she often opened it to look at the
ring: but still she thought hardly at all about the father of whom
it was the symbol.  Had she not a father very close to her, who
loved her better than any real fathers in the village seemed to love
their daughters?  On the contrary, who her mother was, and how she
came to die in that forlornness, were questions that often pressed
on Eppie's mind.  Her knowledge of Mrs. Winthrop, who was her
nearest friend next to Silas, made her feel that a mother must be
very precious; and she had again and again asked Silas to tell her
how her mother looked, whom she was like, and how he had found her
against the furze bush, led towards it by the little footsteps and
the outstretched arms.  The furze bush was there still; and this
afternoon, when Eppie came out with Silas into the sunshine, it was
the first object that arrested her eyes and thoughts.

"Father," she said, in a tone of gentle gravity, which sometimes
came like a sadder, slower cadence across her playfulness, "we
shall take the furze bush into the garden; it'll come into the
corner, and just against it I'll put snowdrops and crocuses, 'cause
Aaron says they won't die out, but'll always get more and more."

"Ah, child," said Silas, always ready to talk when he had his pipe
in his hand, apparently enjoying the pauses more than the puffs,
"it wouldn't do to leave out the furze bush; and there's nothing
prettier, to my thinking, when it's yallow with flowers.  But it's
just come into my head what we're to do for a fence--mayhap Aaron
can help us to a thought; but a fence we must have, else the donkeys
and things 'ull come and trample everything down.  And fencing's
hard to be got at, by what I can make out."

"Oh, I'll tell you, daddy," said Eppie, clasping her hands
suddenly, after a minute's thought.  "There's lots o' loose stones
about, some of 'em not big, and we might lay 'em atop of one
another, and make a wall.  You and me could carry the smallest, and
Aaron 'ud carry the rest--I know he would."

"Eh, my precious un," said Silas, "there isn't enough stones to
go all round; and as for you carrying, why, wi' your little arms you
couldn't carry a stone no bigger than a turnip.  You're dillicate
made, my dear," he added, with a tender intonation--"that's what
Mrs. Winthrop says."

"Oh, I'm stronger than you think, daddy," said Eppie; "and if
there wasn't stones enough to go all round, why they'll go part o'
the way, and then it'll be easier to get sticks and things for the
rest.  See here, round the big pit, what a many stones!"

She skipped forward to the pit, meaning to lift one of the stones
and exhibit her strength, but she started back in surprise.

"Oh, father, just come and look here," she exclaimed--"come and
see how the water's gone down since yesterday.  Why, yesterday the
pit was ever so full!"

"Well, to be sure," said Silas, coming to her side.  "Why, that's
the draining they've begun on, since harvest, i' Mr. Osgood's
fields, I reckon.  The foreman said to me the other day, when I
passed by 'em, "Master Marner," he said, "I shouldn't wonder if we
lay your bit o' waste as dry as a bone."  It was Mr. Godfrey Cass,
he said, had gone into the draining: he'd been taking these fields
o' Mr. Osgood."

"How odd it'll seem to have the old pit dried up!"  said Eppie,
turning away, and stooping to lift rather a large stone.  "See,
daddy, I can carry this quite well," she said, going along with
much energy for a few steps, but presently letting it fall.

"Ah, you're fine and strong, aren't you?"  said Silas, while Eppie
shook her aching arms and laughed.  "Come, come, let us go and sit
down on the bank against the stile there, and have no more lifting.
You might hurt yourself, child.  You'd need have somebody to work
for you--and my arm isn't over strong."

Silas uttered the last sentence slowly, as if it implied more than
met the ear; and Eppie, when they sat down on the bank, nestled
close to his side, and, taking hold caressingly of the arm that was
not over strong, held it on her lap, while Silas puffed again
dutifully at the pipe, which occupied his other arm.  An ash in the
hedgerow behind made a fretted screen from the sun, and threw happy
playful shadows all about them.

"Father," said Eppie, very gently, after they had been sitting in
silence a little while, "if I was to be married, ought I to be
married with my mother's ring?"

Silas gave an almost imperceptible start, though the question fell
in with the under-current of thought in his own mind, and then said,
in a subdued tone, "Why, Eppie, have you been a-thinking on it?"

"Only this last week, father," said Eppie, ingenuously, "since
Aaron talked to me about it."

"And what did he say?"  said Silas, still in the same subdued way,
as if he were anxious lest he should fall into the slightest tone
that was not for Eppie's good.

"He said he should like to be married, because he was a-going in
four-and-twenty, and had got a deal of gardening work, now
Mr. Mott's given up; and he goes twice a-week regular to Mr. Cass's,
and once to Mr. Osgood's, and they're going to take him on at the
Rectory."

"And who is it as he's wanting to marry?"  said Silas, with rather
a sad smile.

"Why, me, to be sure, daddy," said Eppie, with dimpling laughter,
kissing her father's cheek; "as if he'd want to marry anybody
else!"

"And you mean to have him, do you?"  said Silas.

"Yes, some time," said Eppie, "I don't know when.  Everybody's
married some time, Aaron says.  But I told him that wasn't true:
for, I said, look at father--he's never been married."

"No, child," said Silas, "your father was a lone man till you was
sent to him."

"But you'll never be lone again, father," said Eppie, tenderly.
"That was what Aaron said--"I could never think o' taking you
away from Master Marner, Eppie."  And I said, "It 'ud be no use if
you did, Aaron."  And he wants us all to live together, so as you
needn't work a bit, father, only what's for your own pleasure; and
he'd be as good as a son to you--that was what he said."

"And should you like that, Eppie?"  said Silas, looking at her.

"I shouldn't mind it, father," said Eppie, quite simply.  "And I
should like things to be so as you needn't work much.  But if it
wasn't for that, I'd sooner things didn't change.  I'm very happy: I
like Aaron to be fond of me, and come and see us often, and behave
pretty to you--he always _does_ behave pretty to you, doesn't he,
father?"

"Yes, child, nobody could behave better," said Silas,
emphatically.  "He's his mother's lad."

"But I don't want any change," said Eppie.  "I should like to go
on a long, long while, just as we are.  Only Aaron does want a
change; and he made me cry a bit--only a bit--because he said I
didn't care for him, for if I cared for him I should want us to be
married, as he did."

"Eh, my blessed child," said Silas, laying down his pipe as if it
were useless to pretend to smoke any longer, "you're o'er young to
be married.  We'll ask Mrs. Winthrop--we'll ask Aaron's mother
what _she_ thinks: if there's a right thing to do, she'll come at
it.  But there's this to be thought on, Eppie: things _will_ change,
whether we like it or no; things won't go on for a long while just
as they are and no difference.  I shall get older and helplesser,
and be a burden on you, belike, if I don't go away from you
altogether.  Not as I mean you'd think me a burden--I know you
wouldn't--but it 'ud be hard upon you; and when I look for'ard to
that, I like to think as you'd have somebody else besides me--
somebody young and strong, as'll outlast your own life, and take
care on you to the end."  Silas paused, and, resting his wrists on
his knees, lifted his hands up and down meditatively as he looked on
the ground.

"Then, would you like me to be married, father?"  said Eppie, with
a little trembling in her voice.

"I'll not be the man to say no, Eppie," said Silas, emphatically;
"but we'll ask your godmother.  She'll wish the right thing by you
and her son too."

"There they come, then," said Eppie.  "Let us go and meet 'em.
Oh, the pipe!  won't you have it lit again, father?"  said Eppie,
lifting that medicinal appliance from the ground.

"Nay, child," said Silas, "I've done enough for to-day.  I think,
mayhap, a little of it does me more good than so much at once."

XVII


While Silas and Eppie were seated on the bank discoursing in the
fleckered shade of the ash tree, Miss Priscilla Lammeter was
resisting her sister's arguments, that it would be better to take
tea at the Red House, and let her father have a long nap, than drive
home to the Warrens so soon after dinner.  The family party (of four
only) were seated round the table in the dark wainscoted parlour,
with the Sunday dessert before them, of fresh filberts, apples, and
pears, duly ornamented with leaves by Nancy's own hand before the
bells had rung for church.

A great change has come over the dark wainscoted parlour since we
saw it in Godfrey's bachelor days, and under the wifeless reign of
the old Squire.  Now all is polish, on which no yesterday's dust is
ever allowed to rest, from the yard's width of oaken boards round
the carpet, to the old Squire's gun and whips and walking-sticks,
ranged on the stag's antlers above the mantelpiece.  All other signs
of sporting and outdoor occupation Nancy has removed to another
room; but she has brought into the Red House the habit of filial
reverence, and preserves sacredly in a place of honour these relics
of her husband's departed father.  The tankards are on the
side-table still, but the bossed silver is undimmed by handling, and
there are no dregs to send forth unpleasant suggestions: the only
prevailing scent is of the lavender and rose-leaves that fill the
vases of Derbyshire spar.  All is purity and order in this once
dreary room, for, fifteen years ago, it was entered by a new
presiding spirit.

"Now, father," said Nancy, "_is_ there any call for you to go
home to tea?  Mayn't you just as well stay with us?--such a
beautiful evening as it's likely to be."

The old gentleman had been talking with Godfrey about the increasing
poor-rate and the ruinous times, and had not heard the dialogue
between his daughters.

"My dear, you must ask Priscilla," he said, in the once firm
voice, now become rather broken.  "She manages me and the farm
too."

"And reason good as I should manage you, father," said Priscilla,
"else you'd be giving yourself your death with rheumatism.  And as
for the farm, if anything turns out wrong, as it can't but do in
these times, there's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to
find fault with but himself.  It's a deal the best way o' being
master, to let somebody else do the ordering, and keep the blaming
in your own hands.  It 'ud save many a man a stroke, _I_ believe."

"Well, well, my dear," said her father, with a quiet laugh, "I
didn't say you don't manage for everybody's good."

"Then manage so as you may stay tea, Priscilla," said Nancy,
putting her hand on her sister's arm affectionately.  "Come now;
and we'll go round the garden while father has his nap."

"My dear child, he'll have a beautiful nap in the gig, for I shall
drive.  And as for staying tea, I can't hear of it; for there's this
dairymaid, now she knows she's to be married, turned Michaelmas,
she'd as lief pour the new milk into the pig-trough as into the
pans.  That's the way with 'em all: it's as if they thought the
world 'ud be new-made because they're to be married.  So come and
let me put my bonnet on, and there'll be time for us to walk round
the garden while the horse is being put in."

When the sisters were treading the neatly-swept garden-walks,
between the bright turf that contrasted pleasantly with the dark
cones and arches and wall-like hedges of yew, Priscilla said--

"I'm as glad as anything at your husband's making that exchange o'
land with cousin Osgood, and beginning the dairying.  It's a
thousand pities you didn't do it before; for it'll give you
something to fill your mind.  There's nothing like a dairy if folks
want a bit o' worrit to make the days pass.  For as for rubbing
furniture, when you can once see your face in a table there's
nothing else to look for; but there's always something fresh with
the dairy; for even in the depths o' winter there's some pleasure in
conquering the butter, and making it come whether or no.  My dear,"
added Priscilla, pressing her sister's hand affectionately as they
walked side by side, "you'll never be low when you've got a
dairy."

"Ah, Priscilla," said Nancy, returning the pressure with a
grateful glance of her clear eyes, "but it won't make up to
Godfrey: a dairy's not so much to a man.  And it's only what he
cares for that ever makes me low.  I'm contented with the blessings
we have, if he could be contented."

"It drives me past patience," said Priscilla, impetuously, "that
way o' the men--always wanting and wanting, and never easy with
what they've got: they can't sit comfortable in their chairs when
they've neither ache nor pain, but either they must stick a pipe in
their mouths, to make 'em better than well, or else they must be
swallowing something strong, though they're forced to make haste
before the next meal comes in.  But joyful be it spoken, our father
was never that sort o' man.  And if it had pleased God to make you
ugly, like me, so as the men wouldn't ha' run after you, we might
have kept to our own family, and had nothing to do with folks as
have got uneasy blood in their veins."

"Oh, don't say so, Priscilla," said Nancy, repenting that she had
called forth this outburst; "nobody has any occasion to find fault
with Godfrey.  It's natural he should be disappointed at not having
any children: every man likes to have somebody to work for and lay
by for, and he always counted so on making a fuss with 'em when they
were little.  There's many another man 'ud hanker more than he does.
He's the best of husbands."

"Oh, I know," said Priscilla, smiling sarcastically, "I know the
way o' wives; they set one on to abuse their husbands, and then they
turn round on one and praise 'em as if they wanted to sell 'em.  But
father'll be waiting for me; we must turn now."

The large gig with the steady old grey was at the front door, and
Mr. Lammeter was already on the stone steps, passing the time in
recalling to Godfrey what very fine points Speckle had when his
master used to ride him.

"I always _would_ have a good horse, you know," said the old
gentleman, not liking that spirited time to be quite effaced from
the memory of his juniors.

"Mind you bring Nancy to the Warrens before the week's out,
Mr. Cass," was Priscilla's parting injunction, as she took the
reins, and shook them gently, by way of friendly incitement to
Speckle.

"I shall just take a turn to the fields against the Stone-pits,
Nancy, and look at the draining," said Godfrey.

"You'll be in again by tea-time, dear?"

"Oh, yes, I shall be back in an hour."

It was Godfrey's custom on a Sunday afternoon to do a little
contemplative farming in a leisurely walk.  Nancy seldom accompanied
him; for the women of her generation--unless, like Priscilla, they
took to outdoor management--were not given to much walking beyond
their own house and garden, finding sufficient exercise in domestic
duties.  So, when Priscilla was not with her, she usually sat with
Mant's Bible before her, and after following the text with her eyes
for a little while, she would gradually permit them to wander as her
thoughts had already insisted on wandering.

But Nancy's Sunday thoughts were rarely quite out of keeping with
the devout and reverential intention implied by the book spread open
before her.  She was not theologically instructed enough to discern
very clearly the relation between the sacred documents of the past
which she opened without method, and her own obscure, simple life;
but the spirit of rectitude, and the sense of responsibility for the
effect of her conduct on others, which were strong elements in
Nancy's character, had made it a habit with her to scrutinize her
past feelings and actions with self-questioning solicitude.  Her
mind not being courted by a great variety of subjects, she filled
the vacant moments by living inwardly, again and again, through all
her remembered experience, especially through the fifteen years of
her married time, in which her life and its significance had been
doubled.  She recalled the small details, the words, tones, and
looks, in the critical scenes which had opened a new epoch for her
by giving her a deeper insight into the relations and trials of
life, or which had called on her for some little effort of
forbearance, or of painful adherence to an imagined or real duty--
asking herself continually whether she had been in any respect
blamable.  This excessive rumination and self-questioning is perhaps
a morbid habit inevitable to a mind of much moral sensibility when
shut out from its due share of outward activity and of practical
claims on its affections--inevitable to a noble-hearted, childless
woman, when her lot is narrow.  "I can do so little--have I done
it all well?"  is the perpetually recurring thought; and there are
no voices calling her away from that soliloquy, no peremptory
demands to divert energy from vain regret or superfluous scruple.

There was one main thread of painful experience in Nancy's married
life, and on it hung certain deeply-felt scenes, which were the
oftenest revived in retrospect.  The short dialogue with Priscilla
in the garden had determined the current of retrospect in that
frequent direction this particular Sunday afternoon.  The first
wandering of her thought from the text, which she still attempted
dutifully to follow with her eyes and silent lips, was into an
imaginary enlargement of the defence she had set up for her husband
against Priscilla's implied blame.  The vindication of the loved
object is the best balm affection can find for its wounds:--"A
man must have so much on his mind," is the belief by which a wife
often supports a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling
words.  And Nancy's deepest wounds had all come from the perception
that the absence of children from their hearth was dwelt on in her
husband's mind as a privation to which he could not reconcile
himself.

Yet sweet Nancy might have been expected to feel still more keenly
the denial of a blessing to which she had looked forward with all
the varied expectations and preparations, solemn and prettily
trivial, which fill the mind of a loving woman when she expects to
become a mother.  Was there not a drawer filled with the neat work
of her hands, all unworn and untouched, just as she had arranged it
there fourteen years ago--just, but for one little dress, which
had been made the burial-dress?  But under this immediate personal
trial Nancy was so firmly unmurmuring, that years ago she had
suddenly renounced the habit of visiting this drawer, lest she
should in this way be cherishing a longing for what was not given.

Perhaps it was this very severity towards any indulgence of what she
held to be sinful regret in herself, that made her shrink from
applying her own standard to her husband.  "It is very different--
it is much worse for a man to be disappointed in that way: a woman
can always be satisfied with devoting herself to her husband, but a
man wants something that will make him look forward more--and
sitting by the fire is so much duller to him than to a woman."  And
always, when Nancy reached this point in her meditations--trying,
with predetermined sympathy, to see everything as Godfrey saw it--
there came a renewal of self-questioning.  _Had_ she done everything
in her power to lighten Godfrey's privation?  Had she really been
right in the resistance which had cost her so much pain six years
ago, and again four years ago--the resistance to her husband's
wish that they should adopt a child?  Adoption was more remote from
the ideas and habits of that time than of our own; still Nancy had
her opinion on it.  It was as necessary to her mind to have an
opinion on all topics, not exclusively masculine, that had come
under her notice, as for her to have a precisely marked place for
every article of her personal property: and her opinions were always
principles to be unwaveringly acted on.  They were firm, not because
of their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity
inseparable from her mental action.  On all the duties and
proprieties of life, from filial behaviour to the arrangements of
the evening toilette, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was
three-and-twenty, had her unalterable little code, and had formed
every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code.  She
carried these decided judgments within her in the most unobtrusive
way: they rooted themselves in her mind, and grew there as quietly
as grass.  Years ago, we know, she insisted on dressing like
Priscilla, because "it was right for sisters to dress alike", and
because "she would do what was right if she wore a gown dyed with
cheese-colouring".  That was a trivial but typical instance of the
mode in which Nancy's life was regulated.

It was one of those rigid principles, and no petty egoistic feeling,
which had been the ground of Nancy's difficult resistance to her
husband's wish.  To adopt a child, because children of your own had
been denied you, was to try and choose your lot in spite of
Providence: the adopted child, she was convinced, would never turn
out well, and would be a curse to those who had wilfully and
rebelliously sought what it was clear that, for some high reason,
they were better without.  When you saw a thing was not meant to be,
said Nancy, it was a bounden duty to leave off so much as wishing
for it.  And so far, perhaps, the wisest of men could scarcely make
more than a verbal improvement in her principle.  But the conditions
under which she held it apparent that a thing was not meant to be,
depended on a more peculiar mode of thinking.  She would have given
up making a purchase at a particular place if, on three successive
times, rain, or some other cause of Heaven's sending, had formed an
obstacle; and she would have anticipated a broken limb or other
heavy misfortune to any one who persisted in spite of such
indications.

"But why should you think the child would turn out ill?"  said
Godfrey, in his remonstrances.  "She has thriven as well as child
can do with the weaver; and _he_ adopted her.  There isn't such a
pretty little girl anywhere else in the parish, or one fitter for
the station we could give her.  Where can be the likelihood of her
being a curse to anybody?"

"Yes, my dear Godfrey," said Nancy, who was sitting with her hands
tightly clasped together, and with yearning, regretful affection in
her eyes.  "The child may not turn out ill with the weaver.  But,
then, he didn't go to seek her, as we should be doing.  It will be
wrong: I feel sure it will.  Don't you remember what that lady we
met at the Royston Baths told us about the child her sister adopted?
That was the only adopting I ever heard of: and the child was
transported when it was twenty-three.  Dear Godfrey, don't ask me to
do what I know is wrong: I should never be happy again.  I know it's
very hard for _you_--it's easier for me--but it's the will of
Providence."

It might seem singular that Nancy--with her religious theory
pieced together out of narrow social traditions, fragments of church
doctrine imperfectly understood, and girlish reasonings on her small
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.

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 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."

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.  Eppie's heart was swelling at the sense that her
father was in distress; and she was just going to lean down and
speak to him, when one struggling dread at last gained the mastery
over every other in Silas, and he said, faintly--

"Eppie, my child, speak.  I won't stand in your way.  Thank Mr. and
Mrs. Cass."

Eppie took her hand from her father's head, and came forward a step.
Her cheeks were flushed, but not with shyness this time: the sense
that her father was in doubt and suffering banished that sort of
self-consciousness.  She dropped a low curtsy, first to Mrs. Cass
and then to Mr. Cass, and said--

"Thank you, ma'am--thank you, sir.  But I can't leave my father,
nor own anybody nearer than him.  And I don't want to be a lady--
thank you all the same" (here Eppie dropped another curtsy).  "I
couldn't give up the folks I've been used to."

Eppie's lips began to tremble a little at the last words.  She
retreated to her father's chair again, and held him round the neck:
while Silas, with a subdued sob, put up his hand to grasp hers.

The tears were in Nancy's eyes, but her sympathy with Eppie was,
naturally, divided with distress on her husband's account.  She
dared not speak, wondering what was going on in her husband's mind.

Godfrey felt an irritation inevitable to almost all of us when we
encounter an unexpected obstacle.  He had been full of his own
penitence and resolution to retrieve his error as far as the time
was left to him; he was possessed with all-important feelings, that
were to lead to a predetermined course of action which he had fixed
on as the right, and he was not prepared to enter with lively
appreciation into other people's feelings counteracting his virtuous
resolves.  The agitation with which he spoke again was not quite
unmixed with anger.

"But I've a claim on you, Eppie--the strongest of all claims.
It's my duty, Marner, to own Eppie as my child, and provide for her.
She is my own child--her mother was my wife.  I've a natural claim
on her that must stand before every other."

Eppie had given a violent start, and turned quite pale.  Silas, on
the contrary, who had been relieved, by Eppie's answer, from the
dread lest his mind should be in opposition to hers, felt the spirit
of resistance in him set free, not without a touch of parental
fierceness.  "Then, sir," he answered, with an accent of
bitterness that had been silent in him since the memorable day when
his youthful hope had perished--"then, sir, why didn't you say so
sixteen year ago, and claim her before I'd come to love her, i'stead
o' coming to take her from me now, when you might as well take the
heart out o' my body?  God gave her to me because you turned your
back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you've no right to
her!  When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as
take it in."

"I know that, Marner.  I was wrong.  I've repented of my conduct in
that matter," said Godfrey, who could not help feeling the edge of
Silas's words.

"I'm glad to hear it, sir," said Marner, with gathering
excitement; "but repentance doesn't alter what's been going on for
sixteen year.  Your coming now and saying "I'm her father" doesn't
alter the feelings inside us.  It's me she's been calling her father
ever since she could say the word."

"But I think you might look at the thing more reasonably, Marner,"
said Godfrey, unexpectedly awed by the weaver's direct
truth-speaking.  "It isn't as if she was to be taken quite away
from you, so that you'd never see her again.  She'll be very near
you, and come to see you very often.  She'll feel just the same
towards you."

"Just the same?"  said Marner, more bitterly than ever.  "How'll
she feel just the same for me as she does now, when we eat o' the
same bit, and drink o' the same cup, and think o' the same things
from one day's end to another?  Just the same?  that's idle talk.
You'd cut us i' two."

Godfrey, unqualified by experience to discern the pregnancy of
Marner's simple words, felt rather angry again.  It seemed to him
that the weaver was very selfish (a judgment readily passed by those
who have never tested their own power of sacrifice) to oppose what
was undoubtedly for Eppie's welfare; and he felt himself called
upon, for her sake, to assert his authority.

"I should have thought, Marner," he said, severely--"I should
have thought your affection for Eppie would make you rejoice in what
was for her good, even if it did call upon you to give up something.
You ought to remember your own life's uncertain, and she's at an age
now when her lot may soon be fixed in a way very different from what
it would be in her father's home: she may marry some low
working-man, and then, whatever I might do for her, I couldn't make
her well-off.  You're putting yourself in the way of her welfare;
and though I'm sorry to hurt you after what you've done, and what
I've left undone, I feel now it's my duty to insist on taking care
of my own daughter.  I want to do my duty."

It would be difficult to say whether it were Silas or Eppie that was
more deeply stirred by this last speech of Godfrey's.  Thought had
been very busy in Eppie as she listened to the contest between her
old long-loved father and this new unfamiliar father who had
suddenly come to fill the place of that black featureless shadow
which had held the ring and placed it on her mother's finger.  Her
imagination had darted backward in conjectures, and forward in
previsions, of what this revealed fatherhood implied; and there were
words in Godfrey's last speech which helped to make the previsions
especially definite.  Not that these thoughts, either of past or
future, determined her resolution--_that_ was determined by the
feelings which vibrated to every word Silas had uttered; but they
raised, even apart from these feelings, a repulsion towards the
offered lot and the newly-revealed father.

Silas, on the other hand, was again stricken in conscience, and
alarmed lest Godfrey's accusation should be true--lest he should
be raising his own will as an obstacle to Eppie's good.  For many
moments he was mute, struggling for the self-conquest necessary to
the uttering of the difficult words.  They came out tremulously.

"I'll say no more.  Let it be as you will.  Speak to the child.
I'll hinder nothing."

Even Nancy, with all the acute sensibility of her own affections,
shared her husband's view, that Marner was not justifiable in his
wish to retain Eppie, after her real father had avowed himself.  She
felt that it was a very hard trial for the poor weaver, but her code
allowed no question that a father by blood must have a claim above
that of any foster-father.  Besides, Nancy, used all her life to
plenteous circumstances and the privileges of "respectability",
could not enter into the pleasures which early nurture and habit
connect with all the little aims and efforts of the poor who are
born poor: to her mind, Eppie, in being restored to her birthright,
was entering on a too long withheld but unquestionable good.  Hence
she heard Silas's last words with relief, and thought, as Godfrey
did, that their wish was achieved.

"Eppie, my dear," said Godfrey, looking at his daughter, not
without some embarrassment, under the sense that she was old enough
to judge him, "it'll always be our wish that you should show your
love and gratitude to one who's been a father to you so many years,
and we shall want to help you to make him comfortable in every way.
But we hope you'll come to love us as well; and though I haven't
been what a father should ha' been to you all these years, I wish to
do the utmost in my power for you for the rest of my life, and
provide for you as my only child.  And you'll have the best of
mothers in my wife--that'll be a blessing you haven't known since
you were old enough to know it."

"My dear, you'll be a treasure to me," said Nancy, in her gentle
voice.  "We shall want for nothing when we have our daughter."

Eppie did not come forward and curtsy, as she had done before.  She
held Silas's hand in hers, and grasped it firmly--it was a
weaver's hand, with a palm and finger-tips that were sensitive to
such pressure--while she spoke with colder decision than before.

"Thank you, ma'am--thank you, sir, for your offers--they're
very great, and far above my wish.  For I should have no delight i'
life any more if I was forced to go away from my father, and knew he
was sitting at home, a-thinking of me and feeling lone.  We've been
used to be happy together every day, and I can't think o' no
happiness without him.  And he says he'd nobody i' the world till I
was sent to him, and he'd have nothing when I was gone.  And he's
took care of me and loved me from the first, and I'll cleave to him
as long as he lives, and nobody shall ever come between him and
me."

"But you must make sure, Eppie," said Silas, in a low voice--
"you must make sure as you won't ever be sorry, because you've made
your choice to stay among poor folks, and with poor clothes and
things, when you might ha' had everything o' the best."

His sensitiveness on this point had increased as he listened to
Eppie's words of faithful affection.

"I can never be sorry, father," said Eppie.  "I shouldn't know
what to think on or to wish for with fine things about me, as I
haven't been used to.  And it 'ud be poor work for me to put on
things, and ride in a gig, and sit in a place at church, as 'ud make
them as I'm fond of think me unfitting company for 'em.  What could
_I_ care for then?"

Nancy looked at Godfrey with a pained questioning glance.  But his
eyes were fixed on the floor, where he was moving the end of his
stick, as if he were pondering on something absently.  She thought
there was a word which might perhaps come better from her lips than
from his.

"What you say is natural, my dear child--it's natural you should
cling to those who've brought you up," she said, mildly; "but
there's a duty you owe to your lawful father.  There's perhaps
something to be given up on more sides than one.  When your father
opens his home to you, I think it's right you shouldn't turn your
back on it."

"I can't feel as I've got any father but one," said Eppie,
impetuously, while the tears gathered.  "I've always thought of a
little home where he'd sit i' the corner, and I should fend and do
everything for him: I can't think o' no other home.  I wasn't
brought up to be a lady, and I can't turn my mind to it.  I like the
working-folks, and their victuals, and their ways.  And," she ended
passionately, while the tears fell, "I'm promised to marry a
working-man, as'll live with father, and help me to take care of
him."

Godfrey looked up at Nancy with a flushed face and smarting dilated
eyes.  This frustration of a purpose towards which he had set out
under the exalted consciousness that he was about to compensate in
some degree for the greatest demerit of his life, made him feel the
air of the room stifling.

"Let us go," he said, in an under-tone.

"We won't talk of this any longer now," said Nancy, rising.
"We're your well-wishers, my dear--and yours too, Marner.  We
shall come and see you again.  It's getting late now."

In this way she covered her husband's abrupt departure, for Godfrey
had gone straight to the door, unable to say more.