Eppie’s lips began to tremble a little at the last words. She retreated to her father’s chair again, and held him round the neck: while Silas, with a subdued sob, put up his hand to grasp hers.
The tears were in Nancy’s eyes, but her sympathy with Eppie was, naturally, divided with distress on her husband’s account. She dared not speak, wondering what was going on in her husband’s mind.
Godfrey felt an irritation inevitable to almost all of us when we encounter an unexpected obstacle. He had been full of his own penitence and resolution to retrieve his error as far as the time was left to him; he was possessed with all-important feelings, that were to lead to a predetermined course of action which he had fixed on as the right, and he was not prepared to enter with lively appreciation into other people’s feelings counteracting his virtuous resolves. The agitation with which he spoke again was not quite unmixed with anger.
“But I’ve a claim on you, Eppie—the strongest of all claims. It’s my duty, Marner, to own Eppie as my child, and provide for her. She is my own child—her mother was my wife. I’ve a natural claim on her that must stand before every other.”
Eppie had given a violent start, and turned quite pale. Silas, on the contrary, who had been relieved, by Eppie’s answer, from the dread lest his mind should be in opposition to hers, felt the spirit of resistance in him set free, not without a touch of parental fierceness. “Then, sir,” he answered, with an accent of bitterness that had been silent in him since the memorable day when his youthful hope had perished—“then, sir, why didn’t you say so sixteen year ago, and claim her before I’d come to love her, i’stead o’ coming to take her from me now, when you might as well take the heart out o’ my body? God gave her to me because you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you’ve no right to her! When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in.”
“I know that, Marner. I was wrong. I’ve repented of my conduct in that matter,” said Godfrey, who could not help feeling the edge of Silas’s words.
“I’m glad to hear it, sir,” said Marner, with gathering excitement; “but repentance doesn’t alter what’s been going on for sixteen year. Your coming now and saying ‘I’m her father’ doesn’t alter the feelings inside us. It’s me she’s been calling her father ever since she could say the word.”
“But I think you might look at the thing more reasonably, Marner,” said Godfrey, unexpectedly awed by the weaver’s direct truth-speaking. “It isn’t as if she was to be taken quite away from you, so that you’d never see her again. She’ll be very near you, and come to see you very often. She’ll feel just the same towards you.”
“Just the same?” said Marner, more bitterly than ever. “How’ll she feel just the same for me as she does now, when we eat o’ the same bit, and drink o’ the same cup, and think o’ the same things from one day’s end to another? Just the same? that’s idle talk. You’d cut us i’ two.”
Godfrey, unqualified by experience to discern the pregnancy of Marner’s simple words, felt rather angry again. It seemed to him that the weaver was very selfish (a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice) to oppose what was undoubtedly for Eppie’s welfare; and he felt himself called upon, for her sake, to assert his authority.