“Only the garden, father,” said Eppie, blushing up to the ears the moment after.
“You love a garden, do you, my dear?” said Nancy, thinking that this turn in the point of view might help her husband. “We should agree in that: I give a deal of time to the garden.”
“Ah, there’s plenty of gardening at the Red House,” said Godfrey, surprised at the difficulty he found in approaching a proposition which had seemed so easy to him in the distance. “You’ve done a good part by Eppie, Marner, for sixteen years. It ’ud be a great comfort to you to see her well provided for, wouldn’t it? She looks blooming and healthy, but not fit for any hardships: she doesn’t look like a strapping girl come of working parents. You’d like to see her taken care of by those who can leave her well off, and make a lady of her; she’s more fit for it than for a rough life, such as she might come to have in a few years’ time.”
A slight flush came over Marner’s face, and disappeared, like a passing gleam. Eppie was simply wondering Mr. Cass should talk so about things that seemed to have nothing to do with reality; but Silas was hurt and uneasy.
“I don’t take your meaning, sir,” he answered, not having words at command to express the mingled feelings with which he had heard Mr. Cass’s words.
“Well, my meaning is this, Marner,” said Godfrey, determined to come to the point. “Mrs. Cass and I, you know, have no children—nobody to benefit by our good home and everything else we have—more than enough for ourselves. And we should like to have somebody in the place of a daughter to us—we should like to have Eppie, and treat her in every way as our own child. It ’ud be a great comfort to you in your old age, I hope, to see her fortune made in that way, after you’ve been at the trouble of bringing her up so well. And it’s right you should have every reward for that. And Eppie, I’m sure, will always love you and be grateful to you: she’d come and see you very often, and we should all be on the look-out to do everything we could towards making you comfortable.”
A plain man like Godfrey Cass, speaking under some embarrassment, necessarily blunders on words that are coarser than his intentions, and that are likely to fall gratingly on susceptible feelings. While he had been speaking, Eppie had quietly passed her arm behind Silas’s head, and let her hand rest against it caressingly: she felt him trembling violently. He was silent for some moments when Mr. Cass had ended—powerless under the conflict of emotions, all alike painful. Eppie’s heart was swelling at the sense that her father was in distress; and she was just going to lean down and speak to him, when one struggling dread at last gained the mastery over every other in Silas, and he said, faintly—
“Eppie, my child, speak. I won’t stand in your way. Thank Mr. and Mrs. Cass.”
Eppie took her hand from her father’s head, and came forward a step. Her cheeks were flushed, but not with shyness this time: the sense that her father was in doubt and suffering banished that sort of self-consciousness. She dropped a low curtsy, first to Mrs. Cass and then to Mr. Cass, and said—
“Thank you, ma’am—thank you, sir. But I can’t leave my father, nor own anybody nearer than him. And I don’t want to be a lady—thank you all the same” (here Eppie dropped another curtsy). “I couldn’t give up the folks I’ve been used to.”