But while poor Silas's loss served thus to brush the slow current
of Raveloe conversation, Silas himself was feeling the withering
desolation of that bereavement, about which his neighbours were
arguing at their ease. To anyone who had observed him before he lost
his gold, it might have seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as
his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any
subtraction but such as would put an end to it altogether. But in
reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose,
which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a
clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had
clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for
clinging. But now the fence was broken down- the support was
snatched away. Marner's thoughts could no longer move in their old
round, and were baffled by a blank like that which meets a plodding
ant when the earth has broken away on its homeward path. The loom
was there, and the weaving, and the growing pattern in the cloth;
but the bright treasure in the hole under his feet was gone; the
prospect of handling and counting it was gone: the evening had no
phantasm of delight to still the poor soul's craving. The thought of
the money he would get by his actual work could bring no joy, for
its meagre image was only a fresh reminder of his loss; and hope was
too heavily crushed by the sudden blow for his imagination to dwell on
the growth of a new hoard from that small beginning.
Pages:
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120