GEORGE ELIOR , Silas Marner. Part- 1, Chapter 2

 

GEORGE ELIOR , Silas Marner. Part- 1, Chapter 2 

lie therein. Silas was evidently a brother selected for a peculiar discipline; and though the effort to interpret this discipline was discouraged by the absence, on his was seen in an accession of light and fervour. 

A less yet it was believed by himself and others that its effect part, of any spiritual vision during his outward trance, truthful man than he might have been tempted into the resurgent subsequent creation of a vision in the form of as memory; a less sane man might have believed in such a with many honest and fervent men, culture had not creation; but Silas was both sane and honest, though, defined any channels for his sense of mystery, and so it spread itself over the proper pathway of inquiry and knowledge. 

He had inherited from his mother some acquaintance with medicinal herbs and their preparation a little store of wisdom which she had imparted to him as a solemn bequest - but of late years he had had doubts about the lawfulness of applying this knowledge, believing that herbs could have no efficacy without prayer, and that prayer might suffice without herbs; so that his inherited delight to wander through the fields in search of foxglove and dandelion and coltsfoot, began to wear to him the character of a temptation.

Among the members of his church there was one young man, a little older than himself, with whom he had long lived in such close friendship that it was the custom of their Lantern Yard brethren to call them David and Jonathan. 

The real name of the friend was William Dane, and he, too, was regarded as a shining instance of youthful piety, though somewhat given to over-severity towards weaker brethren, and to be so dazzled by his own light as to hold himself wiser than his teachers. 

But whatever blemishes others might discern in William, to his friend's mind he was faultless; for Marner had one of those impressible self-doubting natures which, at an inexperienced age, admire imperativeness and lean on contradiction. 

The express- ion of trusting simplicity in Mamer's face, heightened by that absence of special observation, that defenceless, deer-like gaze which belongs to large prominent eyes, was strongly contrasted by the self-complacent supp ression of inward triumph that lurked in the narrow slanting eyes and compressed lips of William Dane. 

One of the most frequent topics of conversation between the two friends was Assurance of salvation: Silas confessed that he could never arrive at anything higher than hope mingled with fear, and listened with longing wonder when William declared that he had possessed unshaken assurance ever since, in the period of his conversion, he had dreamed that he saw the words calling and election sure' standing by themselves on a white page in the open Bible. Such colloquies have occupied many a pair of pale-faced weavers, whose unnurtured souls have been like young winged things, fluttering forsaken in the twilight.

It had seemed to the unsuspecting Silas that the friendship had suffered no chill even from his formation of another attachment of a closer kind. For some months he had been engaged to a young servant-woman, war ting only for a little increase to their mutual savings in order to [announce] their marriage, and it was a great delight to him that Sarah did not object to William's occasional presence in their Sunday interviews.

It was at this point in their history that Silas's cataleptic fit occu rred during the prayer-meeting; and amidst the various queries and expressions of interest addressed to him by his fellow-members, William's suggestion alone jarred with the general sympathy towards a brother thus singled out for special dealings. 

He observed that, to him, this trance looked more like a visitation of Satan than a proof of divine favour, and exhorted his friend to see that he hid no accursed thing within his soul.

 Silas, feeling bound to accept rebuke and admonition as a brotherly office, felt no resentment, but only pain, at his friend's doubts concerning him; and to this was soon added some anxiety at the perception that Sarah's manner towards him began to exhibit a strange fluctuation between an effort at an increased manif estation of regard and involuntary signs of shrinking and dislike. 

He asked her if she wished to break off their engagement; but she denied this: their engagement was known to the church, and had been recognised in the prayer meetings; it could not be broken off without strict investigation, and Sarah could render no reason that would be sanctioned by the feeling of the community. 

At this time the senior deacon was taken dangerously ill, and, being a childless widower, he was tended night and day by some of the younger brethren or sisters. Silas frequently took his turn in the night-watching with William, the one relieving the other at two in the morning. The old man, contrary to expectation, seemed to be on the way to recovery, when one night Silas, sitting up by his bedside, observed that his usual audible breathing had ceased. The candle was burning low, and he had to lift it to see the patient's face distinctly.

Examination convinced him that the deacon was dead had been dead some time, for the limbs were rigid. Silas asked himself if he had been asleep, and looked at the clock: it was already four in the morning. How was it that William had not come? In much anxiety he went to seek for help, and soon there were several friends assembled in the house, the minister among them, while She went away to his work, wishing he could have met William to know the reason of his non-appearance. 

But at six o'clock, as he was thinking of going to seek his mend, William came, and with him the minister. They came to summon him to Lantern Yard, to meet the church members there; 

and to his inquiry concerning the use of the summons the only reply was, 'You will hear Nothing further was said until Silas was seated in the vestry, in front of the minister, with the eyes of those who to him represented God's people fixed solemnly upon him. 

Then the minister, taking out a pocket-knife. showed it to Silas, and asked him if he knew where he had left that knife? Silas said, he did not know that he had left it anywhere out of his own pocket - but he was trembling at this strange interrogation. 

He was then exhorted not to hide his sin, but to confess and repent.

The knife had been found in the bureau by the departed found in the place where the little deacon's bedside bag of church money had lain, which the minister himself had seen the day before. Some hand had removed that bag; and whose hand could it be, if not that of the man to whom the knife belonged? For some time Silas was mute with astonishment: then he said.

God will clear me: I know nothing about the knife being there, or the money being gone. Search me and my dwelling; you will find nothing but three pound five of my own savings, which William Dane knows I have had these six months. At this William groaned, but the minister said, 'The proof is heavy against you.

Marner. The money was taken in the night last past, and no man was with our departed brother but you, for William Dane declares to us that he was hindered by sudden sickness from going to take his place as usual, brother and you yourself said that he had not come; and.

moreover, you neglected the dead body  must have clept/ said biles The added, "Oy I must have had another w which you have all seme under, so have come and gone while I was not in the body of the body. But, I say appin, search dwelling, for I have been nowhere s The search was made, and it ended W Dane's finding the well-known bay, empty, tak behind the chest of drawers in Siles's chember On William exhorted his friend to confess, and not to d his sin any longer, Silas turned a look of keen on him, and said, "William, for nine years that we keys gone in and out together, have you ever known me lie? But God will clear me

Brother,' said William, how do i know what you may have done in the secret chambers of your heart, so give Satan an advantage over you?! bilas was still looking at his friend, Suddenily & deep flush came over his face, and he was about to speak impetuously, when he seemed checked again by some inward shock, that sent the flush back and made kim remble. 

But at last he spoke feebly, looking at William 'I remember now the knife wasn't in my pocket! William said, 'I know nothing of what you mean: The other persons present, however, began to inquire where Silas meant to say that the knife was, but he would give no further explanations he only said, 1 am sore stricken; I can say nothing, God will clear me?

On their return to the vestry there was further deliberation. Any resort to legal measures for ascer taining the culprit was contrary, to the principles of the church in Lantern Yard, according to which prosecution was forbidden to Christians, even had the case held less  scandal to the community. 

But the members were bound to take other measures for finding out the truth, and they resolved on praying and drawing lots. This resolus tion can be à ground of surprise only to those who are unacquainted with that obscure religious life which has gone on in the alleys of our towns. Silas knelt with his brethren, relying on his own innocence being certified by immediate divine interference, but feeling that there was sorrow and mourning behind for him even then that his trust in man had been cruelly bruised. The lots declared that Silas Marmer was guilty. 

He was solemnly. suspended from church membership, and called upon to render up the stolen money: only on confession, as the sign of repentance, could he be received once more within the fold of the church. Marner listened in silence.

At last, when every one rose to depart, he went towards William Dane and said, in a voice shaken by agitation-The last time I remember using my knife, was when I took it out to cut a strap for you. I don't remember putting it in my pocket again. 

You stole the money, and you have woven a plot to lay the sin at my door. But you may prosper, for all that there is no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against the innocent.' There was a general shudder at this blasphemy. 

William said meekly, 'I leave our brethren to judge whether this is the voice of Satan or not. I can do nothing but pray for you, Silas. Poor Marner went out with that despair in his soul- that shaken trust in God and man, which is little short of madness to a loving nature. In the bitterness of his wounded spirit, he said to himself, 'She will cast me off too.

And he reflected that, if she did not believe the testimony against him, her whole faith must be upset as  As was 70 people accustomed to reason about the oms in which their religious feeling has incorporated se of mind in which the form and the feeling have sel, it is hifficult to enter into that simple, untaugh ve been severed by an act of reflection. 

We are apt to think mevitable that a man in Marner's position should have begun to question the validity of an appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him this would have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith. If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.

Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair, without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in his innocence. The second day he took refuge from benumbing unbelief, by getting into his loom and working away as usual; and before many hours were past, the minister and one of the deacons came to him with the message from Sarah.

that she held her engagement to him at an end. Silas received the message mutely, and then turned away from the messengers to work at his loom again. In little more than a month from that time, Sarah was married to William Dane; and not long afterwards it was known to the brethren in Lantern Yard that Silas Marner had departed from the town.

EVEN PEOPLE whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible. nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. 

But even their experience may hardly enable them thoroughly to imagine what was the effect on a simple weaver like Silas Marner, when he left his own country and people and came to settle in Raveloe.

Nothing could be more unlike his native town, set within sight of the widespread hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt hidden even from the heavens by the screening trees and hedgerows. There was nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and looked out on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to have any relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had once been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. 

The white-washed walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the  pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned trine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book ins long-accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had been they wer the channel of divine influences to Marner they the fostering home of his religious emotions were Christianity and God's kingdom upon earth.

weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.

And what could be more urlike that Lantern Yard world than the world in Raveloe? - orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the large church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at their own doors in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging along the lanes or turning in at the Rainbow; homes teads, where men supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to come. There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fall that would stir Silas Marner's benumbed faith to pain. 

In the early ages of the world, we know, it was sense of believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bord- ering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. And poor Silas was vaguely conscious of some thing not unlike the feeling of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness, from the face of an unpropitious deity. 

It seemed to him that the Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the was very far away from this land in prayer-meetings, which he had taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to bitterness. The little ght he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create forhim the blackness of night.

His first movement after the shock had been to work in his loom; and he went on with this unremittingly, never asking himself why, now he was come to Raveloe, he worked far on into the night to finish the tale of Mrs Osgood's table-linen sooner than she expected without contemplating beforehand the money she would put into his hand for the work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection.

Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. 

Then there were the calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate-promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect.

He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him. Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, now its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves.