“A young woman, but emaciated, with long black hair. Some vagrant—quite in rags. She’s got a wedding-ring on, however. They must fetch her away to the workhouse to-morrow. Come, come along.”
“I want to look at her,” said Godfrey. “I think I saw such a woman yesterday. I’ll overtake you in a minute or two.”
Mr. Kimble went on, and Godfrey turned back to the cottage. He cast only one glance at the dead face on the pillow, which Dolly had smoothed with decent care; but he remembered that last look at his unhappy hated wife so well, that at the end of sixteen years every line in the worn face was present to him when he told the full story of this night.
He turned immediately towards the hearth, where Silas Marner sat lulling the child. She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep—only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky—before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway. The wide-open blue eyes looked up at Godfrey’s without any uneasiness or sign of recognition: the child could make no visible audible claim on its father; and the father felt a strange mixture of feelings, a conflict of regret and joy, that the pulse of that little heart had no response for the half-jealous yearning in his own, when the blue eyes turned away from him slowly, and fixed themselves on the weaver’s queer face, which was bent low down to look at them, while the small hand began to pull Marner’s withered cheek with loving disfiguration.
“You’ll take the child to the parish to-morrow?” asked Godfrey, speaking as indifferently as he could.
“Who says so?” said Marner, sharply. “Will they make me take her?”
“Why, you wouldn’t like to keep her, should you—an old bachelor like you?”
“Till anybody shows they’ve a right to take her away from me,” said Marner. “The mother’s dead, and I reckon it’s got no father: it’s a lone thing—and I’m a lone thing. My money’s gone, I don’t know where—and this is come from I don’t know where. I know nothing—I’m partly mazed.”
“Poor little thing!” said Godfrey. “Let me give something towards finding it clothes.”
He had put his hand in his pocket and found half-a-guinea, and, thrusting it into Silas’s hand, he hurried out of the cottage to overtake Mr. Kimble.