Silas Marner - Extract 1

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“Sit down Nancy, — there,” he said, pointing to a chair opposite him. “I came back as soon as I could, to hinder anybody’s telling you but me. I’ve had a great shock — but I care most about the shock it’ll be to you.”

“It isn’t father and Priscilla?” said Nancy, with quivering lips, clasping her hands tightly together on her lap.

“No, it’s nobody living,” said Godfrey, unequal to the considerate skill with which he would have wished to make his revelation. “It’s Dunstan — my brother Dunstan, that we lost sight of sixteen years ago. We’ve found him — found his body — his skeleton.”

The deep dread Godfrey’s look had created in Nancy made her feel these words a relief. She sat in comparative calmness to hear what else he had to tell. He went on:

“The Stone-pit has gone dry suddenly — from the draining, I suppose; and there he lies — has lain for sixteen years, wedged between two great stones. There’s his watch and seals, and there’s my gold-handled hunting-whip, with my name on: he took it away, without my knowing, the day he went hunting on Wildfire, the last time he was seen.”

Godfrey paused: it was not so easy to say what came next. “Do you think he drowned himself?” said Nancy, almost wondering that her husband should be so deeply shaken by what had happened all those years ago to an unloved brother, of whom worse things had been augured.

“No, he fell in,” said Godfrey, in a low but distinct voice, as if he felt some deep meaning in the fact. Presently he added: “Dunstan was the man that robbed Silas Marner.”

The blood rushed to Nancy’s face and neck at this surprise and shame, for she had been bred up to regard even a distant kinship with crime as a dishonour.

“O Godfrey!” she said, with compassion in her tone, for she had immediately reflected that the dishonour must be felt still more keenly by her husband.

“There was money in the pit,” he continued — “all the weaver’s money. Everything’s been gathered up and they’re taking the skeleton to the Rainbow. But I came back to tell you: there was no hindering it; you must know.”

He was silent, looking on the ground for two long minutes. Nancy would have said some words of comfort under this disgrace, but she refrained, from an instinctive sense that there was something behind — that Godfrey had something else to tell her.

George Eliot, Silas Marner (Penguin, 1967)