1.5. Chapter 5
WHEN Dunstan Cass turned his back on the cottage,
Silas Marner was not more than a hundred yards away
from it, plodding along from the village with a sack
thrown round his shoulders as an overcoat, and with
a horn lantern in his hand. His legs were weary, but
his mind was at ease, free from the presentiment of
change. The sense of security more frequently springs
from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it
often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might
have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time
during which a given event has not happened, is, in this
logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the
event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is
precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.
A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine
for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he
should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning
to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man
gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing
conception of his own death. This influence of habit
was necessarily strong in a man whose life was so monotonous
as Marner's — who saw no new people and heard of no
new events to keep alive in him the idea of the unexpected
and the changeful; and it explains simply enough, why his
mind could be at ease, though he had left his house and his
treasure more defenceless than usual. Silas was thinking
with double complacency of his supper; first, because it
would be hot and savory; and secondly, because it would
cost him nothing. For the little bit of pork was a present
from that excellent housewife, Miss Priscilla Lammeter,
to whom he had this day carried home a handsome piece of
linen; and it was only on occasion of a present like this,
that Silas indulged himself with roast-meat. Supper was
his favorite meal, because it came at his time of revelry,
when his heart warmed over his gold; whenever he had
roast-meat, he always chose to have it for supper. But
this evening, he had no sooner ingeniously knotted his
string fast round his bit of pork, twisted the string according
to rule over his door-key, passed it through the handle,
and made it fast on the hanger, than he remembered that
a piece of very fine twine was indispensable to his "setting
up" a new piece of work in his loom early in the morning.
It had slipped his memory, because, in coming from Mr.
Lammeter's, he had not had to pass through the village;
but to lose time by going on errands in the morning was
out of the question. It was a nasty fog to turn out into,
but there were things Silas loved better than his own comfort;
so, drawing his pork to the extremity of the hanger,
and arming himself with his lantern and his old sack, he
set out on what, in ordinary weather, would have been a
twenty minutes' errand. He could not have locked his
door without undoing his well-knotted string and retarding
his supper; it was not worth his while to make that
sacrifice. What thief would find his way to the Stone-pits
on such a night as this? and why should he come on this
particular night, when he had never come through all the
fifteen years before? These questions were not distinctly
present in Silas's mind; they merely serve to represent the
vaguely-felt foundation of his freedom from anxiety.
He reached his door in much satisfaction that his errand
was done: he opened it, and to his short-sighted eyes everything
remained as he had left it, except that the fire sent
out a welcome increase of heat. He trod about the floor
while putting by his lantern and throwing aside his hat
and sack, so as to merge the marks of Dunstan's feet on
the sand in the marks of his own nailed boots. Then he
moved his pork nearer to the fire, and sat down to the
agreeable business of tending the meat and warming himself
at the same time.
Any one who had looked at him as the red light
shone upon his pale face, strange straining eyes, and
meager form, would perhaps have understood the mixture
of contemptuous pity, dread, and suspicion with
which he was regarded by his neighbors in Raveloe.
Yet few men could be more really harmless than poor
Marner. In his truthful and simple soul not even the
growing greed and worship of gold could beget any
vice directly injurious to others. The light of his faith
quite put out, and his affections made desolate, he had
clung with all the force of his nature to his work and
his money; and like all objects to which a man devotes
himself, they had fashioned him into correspondence with
themselves. His loom, as he wrought in it without ceasing,
had in its turn wrought on him, and confirmed more
and more the monotonous craving for its monotonous
response. His gold, as he hung over it and saw it grow,
gathered his power of loving together into a hard isolation
like its own.
As soon as he was warm he began to think it would be
a long while to wait till after supper before he drew out
his guineas, and it would be pleasant to see them on the
table before him as he ate his unwonted feast. For joy is
the best of wine, and Silas's guineas were a golden wine of
that sort.
He rose and placed his candle unsuspectingly on the
floor near his loom, swept away the sand without noticing
any change, and removed the bricks. The sight of the
empty hole made his heart leap violently, but the belief
that his gold was gone could not come at once — only terror,
and the eager effort to put an end to the terror. He
passed his trembling hand all about the hole, trying to
think it possible that his eyes had deceived him; then he
held the candle in the hole and examined it curiously,
trembling more and more. At last he shook so violently
that he let fall the candle, and lifted his hands to his
head, trying to steady himself that he might think. Had
he put his gold somewhere else, by a sudden resolution last
night, and then forgotten it? A man falling into dark
waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones;
and Silas, by acting as if he believed in false hopes, warded
off the moment of despair. He searched in every corner,
he turned his bed over, and shook it, and kneaded it; he
looked in his brick oven where he laid his sticks. When
there was no other place to be searched, he kneeled down
again and felt once more all round the hole. There was
no untried refuge left for a moment's shelter from the
terrible truth.
Yes, there was a sort of refuge which always comes with
the prostration of thought under an overpowering passion:
it was that expectation of impossibilities, that belief in
contradictory images, which is still distinct from madness,
because it is capable of being dissipated by the external
fact. Silas got up from his knees trembling, and looked
round at the table: didn't the gold lie there after all? The
table was bare. Then he turned and looked behind him —
looked all round his dwelling, seeming to strain his brown
eyes after some possible appearance of the bags where he
had already sought them in vain. He could see every
object in his cottage — and his gold was not there.
Again he put his trembling hands to his head, and gave
a wild ringing scream, the cry of desolation. For a few
moments after, he stood motionless; but the cry had
relieved him from the first maddening pressure of the
truth. He turned, and tottered toward his loom, and got
into the seat where he worked, instinctively seeking this
as the strongest assurance of reality.
And now that all the false hopes had vanished, and the
first shock of certainty was past, the idea of a thief began
to present itself, and he entertained it eagerly, because a
thief might be caught and made to restore the gold. The
thought brought some new strength with it, and he started
from his loom to the door. As he opened it the rain beat
in upon him, for it was falling more and more heavily.
There were no footsteps to be tracked on such a night —
footsteps? When had the thief come? During Silas's
absence in the daytime the door had been locked, and
there had been no marks of any inroad on his return by
daylight. And in the evening, too, he said to himself,
everything was the same as when he had left it. The sand
and bricks looked as if they had not been moved.
Was it
a thief who had taken the bags? or was it a cruel power
that no hands could reach which had delighted in making
him a second time desolate? He shrank from this vaguer
dread, and fixed his mind with struggling effort on the
robber with hands, who could be reached by hands. His
thoughts glanced at all the neighbors who had made any
remarks, or asked any questions which he might now regard
as a ground of suspicion. There was Jem Rodney, a known
poacher, and otherwise disreputable: he had often met
Marner in his journeys across the fields, and had said something
jestingly about the weaver's money; nay, he had once
irritated Marner, by lingering at the fire when he called to
light his pipe, instead of going about his business. Jem
Rodney was the man — there was ease in the thought. Jem
could be found and made to restore the money: Marner did
not want to punish him, but only to get back his gold
which had gone from him, and left his soul like a forlorn
traveler on an unknown desert. The robber must be laid
hold of. Marner's ideas of legal authority were confused,
but he felt that he must go and proclaim his loss; and the
great people in the village — the clergyman, the constable,
and Squire Cass — would make Jem Rodney, or somebody
else, deliver up the stolen money. He rushed out in the
rain, under the stimulus of this hope, forgetting to cover
his head, not caring to fasten his door; for he felt as if he
had nothing left to lose. He ran swiftly, till want of
breath compelled him to slacken his pace as he was entering
the village at the turning close to the Rainbow.
The Rainbow, in Marner's view, was a place of luxurious
resort for rich and stout husbands, whose wives had
superfluous stores of linen; it was the place where he was
likely to find the powers and dignities of Raveloe, and
where he could most speedily make his loss public. He
lifted the latch, and turned into the bright bar or kitchen
on the right hand, where the less lofty customers of the
house were in the habit of assembling, the parlor on the
left being reserved for the more select society in which
Squire Cass frequently enjoyed the double pleasure of conviviality
and condescension. But the parlor was dark to-night, the personages who ornamented its circle being all at
Mrs. Osgood's birthday dance, as Godfrey Cass was. And in
consequence of this, the party on the high-screened seats
in the kitchen was more numerous than usual; several
personages, who would otherwise have been admitted into
the parlor and enlarged the opportunity of hectoring and
condescension for their betters, being content this evening
to vary their enjoyment by taking their spirits-and-water
where they could themselves hector and condescend in
company that called for beer.