CHAPTER V

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 savoury; 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 favourite 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 meagre form, would perhaps have
understood the mixture of contemptuous pity, dread, and suspicion
with which he was regarded by his neighbours in Raveloe. Yet few
men could be more harmless than poor Marner. In his truthful 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 towards
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 neighbours 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 traveller 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 parlour 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 parlour was dark to-night, the chief 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
parlour 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.