CHAPTER VII

Yet the next moment there seemed to be some evidence that ghosts had
a more condescending disposition than Mr. Macey attributed to them;
for the pale thin figure of Silas Marner was suddenly seen standing
in the warm light, uttering no word, but looking round at the
company with his strange unearthly eyes. The long pipes gave a
simultaneous movement, like the antennae of startled insects, and
every man present, not excepting even the sceptical farrier, had an
impression that he saw, not Silas Marner in the flesh, but an
apparition; for the door by which Silas had entered was hidden by
the high-screened seats, and no one had noticed his approach.
Mr. Macey, sitting a long way off the ghost, might be supposed to
have felt an argumentative triumph, which would tend to neutralize
his share of the general alarm. Had he not always said that when
Silas Marner was in that strange trance of his, his soul went loose
from his body? Here was the demonstration: nevertheless, on the
whole, he would have been as well contented without it. For a few
moments there was a dead silence, Marner's want of breath and
agitation not allowing him to speak. The landlord, under the
habitual sense that he was bound to keep his house open to all
company, and confident in the protection of his unbroken neutrality,
at last took on himself the task of adjuring the ghost.

"Master Marner," he said, in a conciliatory tone, "what's lacking
to you? What's your business here?"

"Robbed!" said Silas, gaspingly. "I've been robbed! I want the
constable--and the Justice--and Squire Cass--and
Mr. Crackenthorp."

"Lay hold on him, Jem Rodney," said the landlord, the idea of a
ghost subsiding; "he's off his head, I doubt. He's wet through."

Jem Rodney was the outermost man, and sat conveniently near Marner's
standing-place; but he declined to give his services.

"Come and lay hold on him yourself, Mr. Snell, if you've a mind,"
said Jem, rather sullenly. "He's been robbed, and murdered too,
for what I know," he added, in a muttering tone.

"Jem Rodney!" said Silas, turning and fixing his strange eyes on
the suspected man.

"Aye, Master Marner, what do you want wi' me?" said Jem,
trembling a little, and seizing his drinking-can as a defensive
weapon.

"If it was you stole my money," said Silas, clasping his hands
entreatingly, and raising his voice to a cry, "give it me back--
and I won't meddle with you. I won't set the constable on you.
Give it me back, and I'll let you--I'll let you have a guinea."

"Me stole your money!" said Jem, angrily. "I'll pitch this can
at your eye if you talk o' _my_ stealing your money."

"Come, come, Master Marner," said the landlord, now rising
resolutely, and seizing Marner by the shoulder, "if you've got any
information to lay, speak it out sensible, and show as you're in
your right mind, if you expect anybody to listen to you. You're as
wet as a drownded rat. Sit down and dry yourself, and speak
straight forrard."

"Ah, to be sure, man," said the farrier, who began to feel that he
had not been quite on a par with himself and the occasion. "Let's
have no more staring and screaming, else we'll have you strapped for
a madman. That was why I didn't speak at the first--thinks I, the
man's run mad."

"Aye, aye, make him sit down," said several voices at once, well
pleased that the reality of ghosts remained still an open question.

The landlord forced Marner to take off his coat, and then to sit
down on a chair aloof from every one else, in the centre of the
circle and in the direct rays of the fire. The weaver, too feeble
to have any distinct purpose beyond that of getting help to recover
his money, submitted unresistingly. The transient fears of the
company were now forgotten in their strong curiosity, and all faces
were turned towards Silas, when the landlord, having seated himself
again, said--

"Now then, Master Marner, what's this you've got to say--as
you've been robbed? Speak out."

"He'd better not say again as it was me robbed him," cried Jem
Rodney, hastily. "What could I ha' done with his money? I could
as easy steal the parson's surplice, and wear it."

"Hold your tongue, Jem, and let's hear what he's got to say," said
the landlord. "Now then, Master Marner."

Silas now told his story, under frequent questioning as the
mysterious character of the robbery became evident.

This strangely novel situation of opening his trouble to his Raveloe
neighbours, of sitting in the warmth of a hearth not his own, and
feeling the presence of faces and voices which were his nearest
promise of help, had doubtless its influence on Marner, in spite of
his passionate preoccupation with his loss. Our consciousness
rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than
without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we
detect the smallest sign of the bud.

The slight suspicion with which his hearers at first listened to
him, gradually melted away before the convincing simplicity of his
distress: it was impossible for the neighbours to doubt that Marner
was telling the truth, not because they were capable of arguing at
once from the nature of his statements to the absence of any motive
for making them falsely, but because, as Mr. Macey observed, "Folks
as had the devil to back 'em were not likely to be so mushed" as
poor Silas was. Rather, from the strange fact that the robber had
left no traces, and had happened to know the nick of time, utterly
incalculable by mortal agents, when Silas would go away from home
without locking his door, the more probable conclusion seemed to be,
that his disreputable intimacy in that quarter, if it ever existed,
had been broken up, and that, in consequence, this ill turn had been
done to Marner by somebody it was quite in vain to set the constable
after. Why this preternatural felon should be obliged to wait till
the door was left unlocked, was a question which did not present
itself.

"It isn't Jem Rodney as has done this work, Master Marner," said
the landlord. "You mustn't be a-casting your eye at poor Jem.
There may be a bit of a reckoning against Jem for the matter of a
hare or so, if anybody was bound to keep their eyes staring open,
and niver to wink; but Jem's been a-sitting here drinking his can,
like the decentest man i' the parish, since before you left your
house, Master Marner, by your own account."

"Aye, aye," said Mr. Macey; "let's have no accusing o' the
innicent. That isn't the law. There must be folks to swear again'
a man before he can be ta'en up. Let's have no accusing o' the
innicent, Master Marner."

Memory was not so utterly torpid in Silas that it could not be
awakened by these words. With a movement of compunction as new and
strange to him as everything else within the last hour, he started
from his chair and went close up to Jem, looking at him as if he
wanted to assure himself of the expression in his face.

"I was wrong," he said--"yes, yes--I ought to have thought.
There's nothing to witness against you, Jem. Only you'd been into
my house oftener than anybody else, and so you came into my head.
I don't accuse you--I won't accuse anybody--only," he added,
lifting up his hands to his head, and turning away with bewildered
misery, "I try--I try to think where my guineas can be."

"Aye, aye, they're gone where it's hot enough to melt 'em, I
doubt," said Mr. Macey.

"Tchuh!" said the farrier. And then he asked, with a
cross-examining air, "How much money might there be in the bags,
Master Marner?"

"Two hundred and seventy-two pounds, twelve and sixpence, last
night when I counted it," said Silas, seating himself again, with a
groan.

"Pooh! why, they'd be none so heavy to carry. Some tramp's been
in, that's all; and as for the no footmarks, and the bricks and the
sand being all right--why, your eyes are pretty much like a
insect's, Master Marner; they're obliged to look so close, you can't
see much at a time. It's my opinion as, if I'd been you, or you'd
been me--for it comes to the same thing--you wouldn't have
thought you'd found everything as you left it. But what I vote is,
as two of the sensiblest o' the company should go with you to Master
Kench, the constable's--he's ill i' bed, I know that much--and
get him to appoint one of us his deppity; for that's the law, and I
don't think anybody 'ull take upon him to contradick me there. It
isn't much of a walk to Kench's; and then, if it's me as is deppity,
I'll go back with you, Master Marner, and examine your premises; and
if anybody's got any fault to find with that, I'll thank him to
stand up and say it out like a man."

By this pregnant speech the farrier had re-established his
self-complacency, and waited with confidence to hear himself named
as one of the superlatively sensible men.

"Let us see how the night is, though," said the landlord, who also
considered himself personally concerned in this proposition. "Why,
it rains heavy still," he said, returning from the door.

"Well, I'm not the man to be afraid o' the rain," said the
farrier. "For it'll look bad when Justice Malam hears as
respectable men like us had a information laid before 'em and took
no steps."

The landlord agreed with this view, and after taking the sense of
the company, and duly rehearsing a small ceremony known in high
ecclesiastical life as the _nolo episcopari_, he consented to take
on himself the chill dignity of going to Kench's. But to the
farrier's strong disgust, Mr. Macey now started an objection to his
proposing himself as a deputy-constable; for that oracular old
gentleman, claiming to know the law, stated, as a fact delivered to
him by his father, that no doctor could be a constable.

"And you're a doctor, I reckon, though you're only a cow-doctor--
for a fly's a fly, though it may be a hoss-fly," concluded
Mr. Macey, wondering a little at his own "'cuteness".

There was a hot debate upon this, the farrier being of course
indisposed to renounce the quality of doctor, but contending that a
doctor could be a constable if he liked--the law meant, he needn't
be one if he didn't like. Mr. Macey thought this was nonsense,
since the law was not likely to be fonder of doctors than of other
folks. Moreover, if it was in the nature of doctors more than of
other men not to like being constables, how came Mr. Dowlas to be so
eager to act in that capacity?

"_I_ don't want to act the constable," said the farrier, driven
into a corner by this merciless reasoning; "and there's no man can
say it of me, if he'd tell the truth. But if there's to be any
jealousy and en_vy_ing about going to Kench's in the rain, let them
go as like it--you won't get me to go, I can tell you."

By the landlord's intervention, however, the dispute was
accommodated. Mr. Dowlas consented to go as a second person
disinclined to act officially; and so poor Silas, furnished with
some old coverings, turned out with his two companions into the rain
again, thinking of the long night-hours before him, not as those do
who long to rest, but as those who expect to "watch for the
morning".