“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.
Silas Marner @ Project Gutenberg
Listening to Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, and not knowing anything else by Eliot, I can imagine critics slighting her for being overly sentimental and romantic about poor English country folk, weavers and millers and the like, and unfairly stereotyping the oblivious cruelty of the dynastic landlord families and their rich estates, around which nearly all rural life revolved in the 19th century. But it's a convincing enough portrait for me and no denying Eliot's eye for social realist detail or her ability to dramatize sympathetic feelings and affections in common rural people. There are classical story telling echoes in this that I am not learned enough to identify specifically but the scenario goes like this: illegitimate child of wealthy father (rich landlord or nobility) is abandoned and raised by a poor peasant or peasants. Such stories were particularly common in Europe's Middle Ages, 500-1500. Eliot turns it into a fable about a simple weaver betrayed by his church goes on an odyssey in the rural English countryside, toiling away as a weaver, saving up a bag of gold, gets ripped off by local Duke's even worse rich rake brother, and Silas the Weaver finally finds redemption in fatherhood and the parenting of an orphaned girl. Eliot's writerly observational powers are undeniable, she illuminates social life in early 19th century rural England, the habits and gestures of the classes with sympathy and the philosophical voice of romantics like Wordsworth. Great supporting characters, like Marner's neighbor, Dolly, who gives him advice about how to care for a baby and raise a kid. Silas is always anxious at first. It takes him awhile to settle into being a parent. Plus, as I think is evidenced in the above passage, Eliot can just rip your heart out with the familial love. Eppie putting the familial bond with Silas the poor parent that raised her over Godfrey's family blood claims and especially over access to wealth and social status. I've kept putting off Middlemarch as one of those doorstop size novels that require so much commitment. Dominating my snail-pace reading schedule for months. But Silas Marner says I have to read more George Eliot soon. Wiki search: pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, later Mary Ann Cross, 19th c English novelist, largely autodidactic education, religious skeptic, broke with marriage customs of the day, mocked for her looks but happily married twice, and hung out with Robert Owen and Ralph Waldo Emerson and people like that. On first glance it would appear Eliot was in her way unstoppable. Apparently an early literary giant of the English novel I need to get to know better.
