Silas Marner | Page 4

so ill that he would descend from his loom, and,
opening the door, would fix on them a gaze that was always enough to
make them take to their legs in terror. For how was it possible to
believe that those large brown protuberant eyes in Silas Marner's pale
face really saw nothing very distinctly that was not close to them, and
not rather that their dreadful stare could dart cramp, or rickets, or a wry
mouth at any boy who happened to be in the rear? They had, perhaps,
heard their fathers and mothers hint that Silas Marner could cure folks'
rheumatism if he had a mind, and add, still more darkly, that if you
could only speak the devil fair enough, he might save you the cost of
the doctor. Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship
might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the
grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the
ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by
much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the
shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of
men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to
whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic
religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of
possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost
barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by
recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear. "Is there anything you

can fancy that you would like to eat?" I once said to an old labouring
man, who was in his last illness, and who had refused all the food his
wife had offered him. "No," he answered, "I've never been used to
nothing but common victual, and I can't eat that." Experience had bred
no fancies in him that could raise the phantasm of appetite.
And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered,
undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren parishes
lying on the outskirts of civilization--inhabited by meagre sheep and
thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central
plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and held farms
which, speaking from a spiritual point of view, paid highly-desirable
tithes. But it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour's
journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by
the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion. It was an
important-looking village, with a fine old church and large churchyard
in the heart of it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads,
with well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing close
upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory, which
peeped from among the trees on the other side of the churchyard:--a
village which showed at once the summits of its social life, and told the
practised eye that there was no great park and manor-house in the
vicinity, but that there were several chiefs in Raveloe who could farm
badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money from their bad
farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking fashion, and keep a
jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter tide.
It was fifteen years since Silas Marner had first come to Raveloe; he
was then simply a pallid young man, with prominent short-sighted
brown eyes, whose appearance would have had nothing strange for
people of average culture and experience, but for the villagers near
whom he had come to settle it had mysterious peculiarities which
corresponded with the exceptional nature of his occupation, and his
advent from an unknown region called "North'ard". So had his way of
life:--he invited no comer to step across his door-sill, and he never
strolled into the village to drink a pint at the Rainbow, or to gossip at
the wheelwright's: he sought no man or woman, save for the purposes

of his calling, or in order to supply himself with necessaries; and it was
soon clear to the Raveloe lasses that he would never urge one of them
to accept him against her will--quite as if he had heard them declare
that they would never marry a dead man come to life again. This view
of Marner's personality was not without another ground than his pale
face and unexampled eyes; for Jem Rodney, the mole-catcher, averred
that one evening as he was returning homeward, he saw Silas Marner
leaning against a stile with a heavy bag on his back, instead of resting
the bag on the stile as a man in his senses would have done; and that,
on