Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (155 page)

CHAPTER 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.