Silas Marner

Silas Marner

George Eliot

When Silas Marner, a linen-weaver, is falsely accused of stealing money in his home town, his fiancee breaks off their engagement and his friends abandon him. He moves to the village of Raveloe, and there, rejected and lonely, spends all his time and energy on his work. He is well paid for his weaving, and gradually the money he earns becomes his only interest in life. Every evening he counts his pile of gold coins, which he keeps under the floor in his cottage.

In this extract, Silas has just returned home and is looking forward to eating some roast meat for his supper, for a change. As soon 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 was 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. 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, 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 around the hole. There was no untried refuge left for a moment’s shelter from the terrible truth.

. . . . .

Silas got up from his knees trembling, and looked around 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.