Silas Marner | Page 9

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
whitewashed 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 doctrine, and swayed to and fro,
and handled the book in a 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 the channel of divine
influences to Marner--they were the fostering home of his religious
emotions--they were Christianity and God's kingdom upon earth. A
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 unlike 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; homesteads, 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 a sense of pain. In the early ages of the
world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and
ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering
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
something 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 prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in 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 light he possessed spread its beams so narrowly,
that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him 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.
But at last Mrs. Osgood's table-linen was finished, and Silas was paid
in gold. His earnings in his native town, where he worked for a
wholesale dealer, had been after a lower rate; he had been paid weekly,
and of