CHAPTER XII

While Godfrey Cass was taking draughts of forgetfulness from the
sweet presence of Nancy, willingly losing all sense of that hidden
bond which at other moments galled and fretted him so as to mingle
irritation with the very sunshine, Godfrey's wife was walking with
slow uncertain steps through the snow-covered Raveloe lanes,
carrying her child in her arms.

This journey on New Year's Eve was a premeditated act of vengeance
which she had kept in her heart ever since Godfrey, in a fit of
passion, had told her he would sooner die than acknowledge her as
his wife. There would be a great party at the Red House on New
Year's Eve, she knew: her husband would be smiling and smiled upon,
hiding _her_ existence in the darkest corner of his heart. But she
would mar his pleasure: she would go in her dingy rags, with her
faded face, once as handsome as the best, with her little child that
had its father's hair and eyes, and disclose herself to the Squire
as his eldest son's wife. It is seldom that the miserable can help
regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less
miserable. Molly knew that the cause of her dingy rags was not her
husband's neglect, but the demon Opium to whom she was enslaved,
body and soul, except in the lingering mother's tenderness that
refused to give him her hungry child. She knew this well; and yet,
in the moments of wretched unbenumbed consciousness, the sense of
her want and degradation transformed itself continually into
bitterness towards Godfrey. _He_ was well off; and if she had her
rights she would be well off too. The belief that he repented his
marriage, and suffered from it, only aggravated her vindictiveness.
Just and self-reproving thoughts do not come to us too thickly, even
in the purest air, and with the best lessons of heaven and earth;
how should those white-winged delicate messengers make their way to
Molly's poisoned chamber, inhabited by no higher memories than those
of a barmaid's paradise of pink ribbons and gentlemen's jokes?

She had set out at an early hour, but had lingered on the road,
inclined by her indolence to believe that if she waited under a warm
shed the snow would cease to fall. She had waited longer than she
knew, and now that she found herself belated in the snow-hidden
ruggedness of the long lanes, even the animation of a vindictive
purpose could not keep her spirit from failing. It was seven
o'clock, and by this time she was not very far from Raveloe, but she
was not familiar enough with those monotonous lanes to know how near
she was to her journey's end. She needed comfort, and she knew but
one comforter--the familiar demon in her bosom; but she hesitated
a moment, after drawing out the black remnant, before she raised it
to her lips. In that moment the mother's love pleaded for painful
consciousness rather than oblivion--pleaded to be left in aching
weariness, rather than to have the encircling arms benumbed so that
they could not feel the dear burden. In another moment Molly had
flung something away, but it was not the black remnant--it was an
empty phial. And she walked on again under the breaking cloud, from
which there came now and then the light of a quickly veiled star,
for a freezing wind had sprung up since the snowing had ceased. But
she walked always more and more drowsily, and clutched more and more
automatically the sleeping child at her bosom.

Slowly the demon was working his will, and cold and weariness were
his helpers. Soon she felt nothing but a supreme immediate longing
that curtained off all futurity--the longing to lie down and
sleep. She had arrived at a spot where her footsteps were no longer
checked by a hedgerow, and she had wandered vaguely, unable to
distinguish any objects, notwithstanding the wide whiteness around
her, and the growing starlight. She sank down against a straggling
furze bush, an easy pillow enough; and the bed of snow, too, was
soft. She did not feel that the bed was cold, and did not heed
whether the child would wake and cry for her. But her arms had not
yet relaxed their instinctive clutch; and the little one slumbered
on as gently as if it had been rocked in a lace-trimmed cradle.

But the complete torpor came at last: the fingers lost their
tension, the arms unbent; then the little head fell away from the
bosom, and the blue eyes opened wide on the cold starlight. At
first there was a little peevish cry of "mammy", and an effort to
regain the pillowing arm and bosom; but mammy's ear was deaf, and
the pillow seemed to be slipping away backward. Suddenly, as the
child rolled downward on its mother's knees, all wet with snow, its
eyes were caught by a bright glancing light on the white ground,
and, with the ready transition of infancy, it was immediately
absorbed in watching the bright living thing running towards it, yet
never arriving. That bright living thing must be caught; and in an
instant the child had slipped on all-fours, and held out one little
hand to catch the gleam. But the gleam would not be caught in that
way, and now the head was held up to see where the cunning gleam
came from. It came from a very bright place; and the little one,
rising on its legs, toddled through the snow, the old grimy shawl in
which it was wrapped trailing behind it, and the queer little bonnet
dangling at its back--toddled on to the open door of Silas
Marner's cottage, and right up to the warm hearth, where there was a
bright fire of logs and sticks, which had thoroughly warmed the old
sack (Silas's greatcoat) spread out on the bricks to dry. The
little one, accustomed to be left to itself for long hours without
notice from its mother, squatted down on the sack, and spread its
tiny hands towards the blaze, in perfect contentment, gurgling and
making many inarticulate communications to the cheerful fire, like a
new-hatched gosling beginning to find itself comfortable. But
presently the warmth had a lulling effect, and the little golden
head sank down on the old sack, and the blue eyes were veiled by
their delicate half-transparent lids.

But where was Silas Marner while this strange visitor had come to
his hearth? He was in the cottage, but he did not see the child.
During the last few weeks, since he had lost his money, he had
contracted the habit of opening his door and looking out from time
to time, as if he thought that his money might be somehow coming
back to him, or that some trace, some news of it, might be
mysteriously on the road, and be caught by the listening ear or the
straining eye. It was chiefly at night, when he was not occupied in
his loom, that he fell into this repetition of an act for which he
could have assigned no definite purpose, and which can hardly be
understood except by those who have undergone a bewildering
separation from a supremely loved object. In the evening twilight,
and later whenever the night was not dark, Silas looked out on that
narrow prospect round the Stone-pits, listening and gazing, not with
hope, but with mere yearning and unrest.

This morning he had been told by some of his neighbours that it was
New Year's Eve, and that he must sit up and hear the old year rung
out and the new rung in, because that was good luck, and might bring
his money back again. This was only a friendly Raveloe-way of
jesting with the half-crazy oddities of a miser, but it had perhaps
helped to throw Silas into a more than usually excited state. Since
the on-coming of twilight he had opened his door again and again,
though only to shut it immediately at seeing all distance veiled by
the falling snow. But the last time he opened it the snow had
ceased, and the clouds were parting here and there. He stood and
listened, and gazed for a long while--there was really something
on the road coming towards him then, but he caught no sign of it;
and the stillness and the wide trackless snow seemed to narrow his
solitude, and touched his yearning with the chill of despair. He
went in again, and put his right hand on the latch of the door to
close it--but he did not close it: he was arrested, as he had been
already since his loss, by the invisible wand of catalepsy, and
stood like a graven image, with wide but sightless eyes, holding
open his door, powerless to resist either the good or the evil that
might enter there.

When Marner's sensibility returned, he continued the action which
had been arrested, and closed his door, unaware of the chasm in his
consciousness, unaware of any intermediate change, except that the
light had grown dim, and that he was chilled and faint. He thought
he had been too long standing at the door and looking out. Turning
towards the hearth, where the two logs had fallen apart, and sent
forth only a red uncertain glimmer, he seated himself on his
fireside chair, and was stooping to push his logs together, when, to
his blurred vision, it seemed as if there were gold on the floor in
front of the hearth. Gold!--his own gold--brought back to him
as mysteriously as it had been taken away! He felt his heart begin
to beat violently, and for a few moments he was unable to stretch
out his hand and grasp the restored treasure. The heap of gold
seemed to glow and get larger beneath his agitated gaze. He leaned
forward at last, and stretched forth his hand; but instead of the
hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his fingers
encountered soft warm curls. In utter amazement, Silas fell on his
knees and bent his head low to examine the marvel: it was a sleeping
child--a round, fair thing, with soft yellow rings all over its
head. Could this be his little sister come back to him in a dream--
his little sister whom he had carried about in his arms for a
year before she died, when he was a small boy without shoes or
stockings? That was the first thought that darted across Silas's
blank wonderment. _Was_ it a dream? He rose to his feet again,
pushed his logs together, and, throwing on some dried leaves and
sticks, raised a flame; but the flame did not disperse the vision--
it only lit up more distinctly the little round form of the child,
and its shabby clothing. It was very much like his little sister.
Silas sank into his chair powerless, under the double presence of an
inexplicable surprise and a hurrying influx of memories. How and
when had the child come in without his knowledge? He had never been
beyond the door. But along with that question, and almost thrusting
it away, there was a vision of the old home and the old streets
leading to Lantern Yard--and within that vision another, of the
thoughts which had been present with him in those far-off scenes.
The thoughts were strange to him now, like old friendships
impossible to revive; and yet he had a dreamy feeling that this
child was somehow a message come to him from that far-off life: it
stirred fibres that had never been moved in Raveloe--old
quiverings of tenderness--old impressions of awe at the
presentiment of some Power presiding over his life; for his
imagination had not yet extricated itself from the sense of mystery
in the child's sudden presence, and had formed no conjectures of
ordinary natural means by which the event could have been brought
about.

But there was a cry on the hearth: the child had awaked, and Marner
stooped to lift it on his knee. It clung round his neck, and burst
louder and louder into that mingling of inarticulate cries with
"mammy" by which little children express the bewilderment of
waking. Silas pressed it to him, and almost unconsciously uttered
sounds of hushing tenderness, while he bethought himself that some
of his porridge, which had got cool by the dying fire, would do to
feed the child with if it were only warmed up a little.

He had plenty to do through the next hour. The porridge, sweetened
with some dry brown sugar from an old store which he had refrained
from using for himself, stopped the cries of the little one, and
made her lift her blue eyes with a wide quiet gaze at Silas, as he
put the spoon into her mouth. Presently she slipped from his knee
and began to toddle about, but with a pretty stagger that made Silas
jump up and follow her lest she should fall against anything that
would hurt her. But she only fell in a sitting posture on the
ground, and began to pull at her boots, looking up at him with a
crying face as if the boots hurt her. He took her on his knee
again, but it was some time before it occurred to Silas's dull
bachelor mind that the wet boots were the grievance, pressing on her
warm ankles. He got them off with difficulty, and baby was at once
happily occupied with the primary mystery of her own toes, inviting
Silas, with much chuckling, to consider the mystery too. But the
wet boots had at last suggested to Silas that the child had been
walking on the snow, and this roused him from his entire oblivion of
any ordinary means by which it could have entered or been brought
into his house. Under the prompting of this new idea, and without
waiting to form conjectures, he raised the child in his arms, and
went to the door. As soon as he had opened it, there was the cry of
"mammy" again, which Silas had not heard since the child's first
hungry waking. Bending forward, he could just discern the marks
made by the little feet on the virgin snow, and he followed their
track to the furze bushes. "Mammy!" the little one cried again
and again, stretching itself forward so as almost to escape from
Silas's arms, before he himself was aware that there was something
more than the bush before him--that there was a human body, with
the head sunk low in the furze, and half-covered with the shaken
snow.