GEORGE ELIOR , Silas Marner. Part- 12, Chapter 12 the story

 

 GEORGE ELIOR , Silas Marner. Part- 12, Chapter 12 the story

seeing it's not convenient to you to go so far to-morrow.' Godfrey was silent for some moments. He would I have liked to spring on Dunstan, wrench the whip from his hand, and flog him to within an inch of his life; and no bodily fear could have deterred him; but he was mastered by another sort of fear, which was fed by feelings stronger even than his resentment. 

When he spoke again it was in a half-conciliatory tone. 'Well, you mean no nonsense about the horse, eh? You'll sell him all fair, and hand over the money? If you don't, you know, everything 'ull go to smash, for I've got nothing else to trust to. And you'll have less pleasure in pulling the house over my head, when your own skull's to be broken too.

'Ay, ay,' said Dunstan, rising; ‘all right. I thought you'd come round. I'm the fellow to bring old Bryce up to the scratch. I'll get you a hundred and twenty for him, if I get you a penny." But it'll perhaps rain cats and dogs to-morrow, as it did yesterday, and then you can't go,' said Godfrey, hardly knowing whether he wished for that obstacle or not.

'Not it,' said Dunstan. I'm always lucky in my weather. It might rain if you wanted to go yourself. You never hold trumps, you know I always do. You've got the beauty, you see, and I've got the luck, so you must keep me by you for your crooked sixpence; you'll ne-ver get along without me.' Confound you, hold your tongue!" said Godfrey. impetuously. 

And take care to keep sober to-morrow, else you'll get pitched on your head coming home, and Wildfire might be the worse for it.' Make your tender heart easy,' said Dunstan. opening the door. 'You never knew me see double when I'd got a bargain to make; it 'ud spoil the fun. Besides, wever fall, I'm warranted to fall on my legs.

with that, Dunstan slammed the door behind him, kot Gathey to that bitter rumination on his al circumstances which was now unbroken from day save by the excitement of sporting, drinking. playing or the rarer and less oblivious pleasure of Miss Nancy Lammeter. The subtle and varied yoringing from the higher sensibility that accom- her culture, are perhaps less pitiable than that absence of impersonal enjoyment and consola- which Ares ruder minds to the perpetual urgent panionship of their own griefs and discontents. 

The es of those rural forefathers, whom we are apt to think men whose only work was to wo prosaic figures ne round their land, getting heavier and heavier in ir saddles, and who passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by had a certain pathos in them nevertheless.

Calamities came to them too, and their early errors med hard consequences: perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life in which the days would not seem too long, even without rioting; but the anden was lost, and the vision passed away, and then what was left to them, especially when they had become to heavy for the hunt, or for carrying a gun over the arrows, but to drink and get merry, or to drink and get  gry, so that they might be independent of variety, and over again with eager emphasis the things they had ad already any time that twelvemonth? 

Assuredly, among these flushed and dull-eyed men there were some whom thanks to their native human-kindness even riot could never drive into brutality; men who, when their cheeks were fresh, had felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse, had been pierced by the reeds they leaned on, or had lightly put their limbs in fetters from which no struggle could loose them; and under these sad circumstances, common to us all, their thoughts could find no resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of their own petty history.

That, at least, was the condition of Godfrey Cass in this six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction, helped by those small indefinable influe nces which every personal relation exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which was a blight on his life. 

It was an ugly story of low passion, delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from the privacy of Godfrey's bitter memory. He had long known that the delusion was partly due to a trap laid for him by Dunstan, who saw in his brother's degrading marriage the means of gratifying at once his jealous hate and his cupidity. And if Godfrey could have felt himself simply a victim, the iron bit that destiny had put into his mouth would have chafed him less intolerably. 

If the curses he muttered half aloud when he was alone had had no other object than Dunstan's diabolical cunning, he might have shrunk less from the consequences of avowal. But he had something else to curse - his own vicious folly, which now seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do when their promptings have long passed away.

For four years he had thought of Nancy Lammeter, and wooed her with tacit patient worship, as the woman who made him think of the future with joy: she would be his wife, and would make home lovely to him, as his father's home had never been; and it would be easy, when she was always near, to shake off those foolish habits that were no pleasures, but only a feverish way of annulling