We are apt to
think it inevitable that a man in Marner's position should have
begun to question the validity of an appeal to the divine judgment
by drawing lots; but to him this would have been an effort of
independent thought such as he had never known; and he must have
made the effort at a moment when all his energies were turned into the
anguish of disappointed faith. If there is an angel who records the
sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are
the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.
Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by
despair, without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her
belief in his innocence. The second day he took refuge from
benumbing unbelief, by getting into his loom and working away as
usual; and before many hours were past, the minister and one of the
deacons came to him with the message from Sarah, that she held her
engagement to him at an end. Silas received the message mutely, and
then turned away from the messengers to work at his loom again. In
little more than a month from that time, Sarah was married to
William Dane; and not long afterwards it was known to the brethren
in Lantern Yard that Silas Marner had departed from the town.
CHAPTER TWO
EVEN people whose lives have been made various by learning,
sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views
of life, on their faith in the Invisible- nay, on the sense that their
past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly
transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing
of their history, and share none of their ideas- where their mother
earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those
on which their souls have been nourished.
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