Silas Marner by George Eliot (free children's online books .txt) 📕

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 everyone 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. Anyone 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 armchair 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