“No, he fell in,” said Godfrey, in a low but distinct voice, as if he felt some deep meaning in the fact. Presently he added: “Dunstan was the man that robbed Silas Marner.”
The blood rushed to Nancy’s face and neck at this surprise and shame, for she had been bred up to regard even a distant kinship with crime as a dishonor.
“O Godfrey!” she said, with compassion in her tone, for she had immediately reflected that the dishonor must be felt more keenly by her husband.
“There was money in the pit,” he continued, “all the weaver’s money. Everything’s been gathered up, and they have taken the skeleton to the Rainbow. But I came back to tell you. There was no hindering it; you must know.”
He was silent, looking on the ground for two long minutes. Nancy would have said some words of comfort under this disgrace, but she refrained, from an instinctive sense that there was something behind,—that Godfrey had something else to tell her. Presently he lifted his eyes to her face, and kept them fixed on her, as he said:
“Everything comes to light, Nancy, sooner or later. When God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out. I’ve lived with a secret on my mind, but I’ll keep it from you no longer. I wouldn’t have you know it by somebody else, and not by me—I wouldn’t have you find it out after I’m dead. I’ll tell you now. It’s been ‘I will’ and ‘I won’t’ with me all my life; I’ll make sure of myself now.”
Nancy’s utmost dread had returned. The eyes of the husband and wife met with an awe in them, as at a crisis which suspended affection.
“Nancy,” said Godfrey slowly, “when I married you, I hid something from you,—something I ought to have told you. That woman Marner found dead in the snow—Eppie’s mother—that wretched woman—was my wife; Eppie is my child.”
He paused, dreading the effects of his confession. But Nancy sat quite still, only that her eyes dropped and ceased to meet his. She was pale and quiet as a meditative statue, clasping her hands on her lap.
“You’ll never think the same of me again,” said Godfrey after a little while, with some tremor in his voice. She was silent.