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Book online «Silas Marner by George Eliot (popular books to read .TXT) đŸ“–Â». Author George Eliot



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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.

CHAPTER 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

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