In half an hour she was clean again, and Silas having turned his back to see what he could do with the linen band, threw it down again, with the reflection that Eppie would be good without fastening for the rest of the morning. He turned round again, and was going to place her in her little chair near the loom, when she peeped out at him with black face and hands again, and said, “Eppie in de toal-hole!”
This total failure of the coal-hole discipline shook Silas’s belief in the efficacy of punishment. “She’d take it all for fun,” he observed to Dolly, “if I didn’t hurt her, and that I can’t do, Mrs. Winthrop. If she makes me a bit o’ trouble I can bear it. And she’s got no tricks but what she’ll grow out of.”
“Well, that’s partly true, Master Marner,” said Dolly sympathetically; “and if you can’t bring your mind to frighten her off touching things, you must do what you can to keep ’em out of her way. That’s what I do wi’ the pups as the lads are allays a-rearing. They will worry and gnaw, worry and gnaw they will, if it was one’s Sunday cap as hung anywhere so as they could drag it. They know no difference, God help ’em; it’s the pushing o’ the teeth as sets ’em on, that’s what it is.”
So Eppie was reared without punishment, the burden of her misdeeds being borne vicariously by father Silas. The stone hut was made a soft nest for her, lined with downy patience; and also in the world that lay beyond the stone hut she knew nothing of frowns and denials.
Notwithstanding the difficulty of carrying her and his yarn or linen at the same time, Silas took her with him in most of his journeys to the farmhouses, unwilling to leave her behind at Dolly Winthrop’s, who was always ready to take care of her; and little curly-headed Eppie, the weaver’s child, became an object of interest at several outlying homesteads, as well as in the village. Hitherto he had been treated very much as if he had been a useful gnome or brownie—a queer and unaccountable creature, who must necessarily be looked at with wondering curiosity and repulsion, and with whom one would be glad to make all greetings and bargains as brief as possible, but who must be dealt with in a propitiatory way, and occasionally have a present of pork or garden stuff to carry home with him, seeing that without him there was no getting the yarn woven. But now Silas met with open smiling faces and cheerful questioning as a person whose satisfactions and difficulties could be understood. Everywhere he must sit a little and talk about the child, and words of interest were always ready for him. “Ah Master Marner, you’ll be lucky if she takes the measles soon and easy!” or, “Why, there isn’t many lone men ’ud ha’ been wishing to take up with a little un like that. But I reckon the weaving makes you handier than men as do outdoor work; you’re partly as handy as a woman, for weaving comes next to spinning.” Elderly masters and mistresses, seated observantly in large kitchen armchairs, shook their heads over the difficulties attendant on rearing children, felt Eppie’s round arms and legs, and pronounced them remarkably firm, and told Silas that if she turned out well (which, however, there was no telling) it would be a fine thing for him to have a steady lass to do for him when he got helpless. Servant maidens were fond of carrying her out to look at the hens and chickens, or to see if any cherries could be shaken down in the orchard; and the small boys and girls approached her slowly, with cautious movement and steady gaze, like little dogs face to face with one of their own kind, till attraction had reached the point at which the soft lips were put out for a kiss. No child was afraid of approaching Silas when Eppie was near him—there was no repulsion around him now, either for young or old; for the little child had come to link him once more with the whole world. There was love between him and the child that blent them into one, and there was love between the child and the world—from men and women with parental looks and tones to the red ladybirds and the round pebbles.
Silas began now to think of Raveloe life entirely in relation to Eppie—she must have everything that was a good in Raveloe; and he listened docilely, that he might come to understand better what this life was, from which for fifteen years he had stood aloof as from a strange thing, wherewith he could have no communion; as some man who has a precious plant, to which he would give a nurturing home in a new soil, thinks of the rain, and the sunshine, and all influences in relation to his nursling, and asks industriously for all knowledge that will help him to satisfy the wants of the searching roots, or to guard leaf and bud from invading harm. The disposition to hoard had been utterly crushed at the very first by the loss of his long-stored gold. The coins he earned afterwards seemed as irrelevant as stones brought