Second Half

Second Half Chapter Sixteen (Chapters Characters First Sec)

Part Two of Silas Marner returns to the village after sixteen years, just as a Sunday service is ending. Godfrey Cass looks fuller in the flesh but still handsome, and his wife, Nancy, has lost the bloom (beauty) of youth and looks somewhat vexed(worried), though she is still quite beautiful and visibly firm in her principles. Silas Marner is much older now, though his large brown eyes seem capable of longer vision, and they strike one with more force than their former vagueness (blurriness). Beside Marner, Eppie is blond (fair or pale yellow.), dimpled and ravishing (wonderful, gorgeous), with untamed (wild) curly auburn (of hair) of a reddish-brown colour.

 

) hair. A young man seated behind Marner and Eppie, Aaron Winthrop, is especially attentive to the young lady, and he rushes out to meet them and walk them back to their cottage (a small house, typically one in the country.

) by the stone-pits.

Eppie, Marner and Aaron decide, at Eppie's request, to build a garden by Marner's cottage. Aaron promises to return with Mrs. Winthrop later to begin planning, and Marner and Eppie continue on to their stone cottage, which is much changed since sixteen years ago. Life is everywhere, featuring a limping donkey (walking with difficulty walking with difficulty), a wildly yapping terrier, and a pair of sleepy cats. The cottage is immaculately clean and charming, and it has been outfitted with splendid furnishings donated by Godfrey Cass, who has done his superficial part in assisting the old weaver in raising Eppie. The villagers, for their part, see Marner as well deserving of assistance, since he has done a wonderful job raising a happy, pretty, courteous young woman. Old Mr. Macey, now a veritable ancient of eighty-six years, predicts that Marner deserves and one day will indeed recover his long-lost gold.

Marner has grown close to Mrs. Winthrop. He has shared his history with her, and in a series of talks they both decided that though it is certainly a mystery that Marner was found guilty of theft, it was wrong of Marner to abandon faith and society. There is a power working for their betterment, they agree, which one must always trust, even in the face of miserable times.

As they plan their new garden, Eppie suggests that they build a stone fence to keep the animals out. Aaron is strong enough to carry the stones, she says, and she and Marner can help. Marner turns their conversation toward marriage, and Eppie says that Aaron has proposed to her. She accepts him on the condition that Marner and she always remain together.

Chapter Seventeen

While Eppie and Marner plan their new garden, Godfrey Cass and his wife, Nancy, host the still-unmarried Priscilla and Mr. Lammeter at the Red House. The manor is no longer the bachelor's castle that it was under the Squire's rule. Now, evidence of femininity is everywhere, although there is no evidence of children. Godfrey and Nancy have had no children in their years of marriage together, which is a point of great regret especially for Godfrey and is a source of sadness between them.

Priscilla and her father, whom she takes care of in his old age, leave for their own manor at the Warrens, and Nancy and Godfrey settle in for a typical Sunday afternoon. Godfrey decides to walk over to the stone-pits in order to check the progress of his latest project: the draining of some land for a new dairy.

With her husband and her family gone, Nancy sits down with her Bible to read, but her thoughts stray from the page and she finds herself contemplating her marriage. Godfrey, apparently, had been very eager to have children with her, but all they had been able to produce together was one child who died in infancy. Godfrey was so desperate to have a child of his own that he suggested that they adopt a child together, namely Eppie. Always firm in her principles, Nancy believed that to adopt a child would be to defy fate, so she refused, still unaware that Godfrey is Eppie's father by blood.

As Nancy ponders this unhappy history, Jane, servant to the Casses, bursts into Nancy's sitting room with a tea tray. There has been a happening in the village; Jane has seen much of the town rushing in one direction. Nancy wishes her husband would hurry back.

Analysis

Chapter 16 updates readers on the development of the Marner household since we last saw them, about fifteen years before. Basically, the situation could not be happier. Eppie has grown up to be an absolute delight: a young woman who loves life, animals, the cottage by the stone-pits, and--most of all--her adopted father.

Eliot makes a few clear allusions to the symbols of Marner's past in the first paragraph of the chapter. For instance, she begins the chapter with Marner and Eppie in attendance at church, and she later notes that over the years Marner has been able to understand the sympathies of his old Puritan upbringing with the Anglican religion of Raveloe. She also mentions the church bells, which contrast Marner's newfound happiness with his old lonely misery. Marner was waiting for the New Year's Eve bell when he froze in his doorway, allowing Eppie to enter his life sixteen years before, and there were no bells in Lantern Yard. Eliot also alludes to Marner's eyes, which are no longer the near-sighted, blurry, huge orbs of his past; now they are longer-visioned and sharper, showing purpose rather than vagueness. In every case Marner is portrayed as more articulate, understanding, sociable and happy.

Meanwhile, Godfrey has held to his resolution to do what he could for Eppie. He has donated furniture and other nice things to their abode. But Marner and Eppie would probably be just as happy without Godfrey's charity, which is strictly oriented around artifice and appearance, while their love and happiness transcends such things. Godfrey's aid has been almost thoroughly artificial. Mainly his fulfillment of fatherly virtue is overshadowed by the motive of quelling his own conscience. He has not been an important influence on Eppie's development.

Mrs. Winthrop, on the other hand, has been everywhere in Marner's thoughts, and her influence has been very good for him. Together, they have tried to make sense of Marner's past. This coming to terms with the unknowable is another gesture toward Job (building on Chapter 9). Dolly and Marner arrive at the Jobian conclusion that although Marner's misery was generally unjust, a guiding hand of ultimate justice redeemed it all. Marner's friend gets it right as Job's friends did not. Thus, Eliot suggests a kind of divine justice that becomes apparent through human communication and sociality.

One thing Dolly and Marner do not discuss is the loss of Marner's gold. He has come to regard that whole miserly episode of his life as a mere distraction, following from the crushing of his faith at Lantern Yard. Through his parenting of Eppie and his friendship with Mrs. Winthrop, Marner has been able to develop his memory and his self-understanding to the point that he recognizes that the true turning points in his life have been his loss of faith at Lantern Yard and his gaining of Eppie at Raveloe. His intermittent love affair with gold, and the attendant shriveling of his soul, is no longer significant to Marner, except to remind him how forgetful and dreary a man he had become.

Eppie, for her part, has a rich and mysterious relationship with her past. Marner has told her again and again the story of her coming to him on the snowy night, of her mother lying dead against the bush. This story reads like a fairy-tale or a fable. Marner has saved her mother's wedding ring as a symbol of Epee's mysterious origin, and for Eppie, the ring provides a link to her unknown father, a shadowy man who must have existed once but on whom she spares little thought. More significantly, it stands for her future marriage with Aaron, and she imagines using it in her own wedding. Readers know, however, that her father is not so uninterested in her as she imagines.

In basic function, Chapter 17 is almost an exact mirror image of Chapter 16. Whereas the earlier chapter brought us up to date on the history of the Marner household since Part One, Chapter 17 performs the same function for the Casses. Surely things are not all bad for them; Nancy and Godfrey have proved to be quite compatible. But while the presence of a child in Marner's life has made him perhaps the happiest, most contented man in Raveloe, the absence of children in Godfrey's life has made him one of the most regretful men there.

The key difference between Marner's story and that of the Casses is that Marner's character has evolved enormously over the sixteen years, while the Casses are essentially the same people they were in Chapter 15. They look older and are saddened by their disappointment, but inwardly they are the same. Godfrey has continued to live with his secret, creating alienation not unlike Silas Marner's when his only joy was gold. Marner, too, in his dark days, was a man without a past. Eliot stresses powerfully here that burying one's failures is a very unsuccessful way of moving forward.

Godfrey's attempt to adopt Eppie is particularly telling. He does not yet realize that it is not enough to "have" a child. One must develop with a child and learn with her in order to achieve the lasting happiness that Silas Marner has experienced. Godfrey seems to think that he can once again short-circuit the logic of fate and retribution by simply adopting a child who is biologically his. This is a glimpse into Godfrey's intense privacy: he believes that it is enough that he knows he is Eppie's father and that no one else ever needs to know his dirty secret. He is not trying to recover the past in adopting Epee so much as he is trying to keep her identity a secret while he fulfills his present needs.

Nancy, too, is the same woman as before. She is still virtuous and fiercely honest. Unlike Godfrey, whose key characteristic is to shirk the moral principles that would force difficult sacrifices upon him, Nancy is constitutionally unable to forget her principles, even for a minute and even they lead to tensions in her life. She accepts sacrifice as her due and strives to be the best, most selfless woman she can be, while still holding true to her principles. Selflessness and sacrifice are probably Nancy's chief values. Yet Nancy's adherence to principles has made her rigid and judgmental, and not in an entirely good way. Eliot reminds us of her insistence, sixteen years earlier, of wearing the same dress as her sister in a show of solidarity, apparently unaware that her sister would look hideous in the dress while she would look ravishing. This is an example of Nancy's unjust tenacity: she gets a notion (sometimes a trivial one, as in the instance of the dress, sometimes profound, as in her superstitious abhorrence of adoption) and, whatever the consequences, she adheres to it utterly.

Nancy's selfless devotion to her husband leads to some other problems for Nancy. Nancy says that she is unhappy because Godfrey is unhappy, expressing the fact that her happiness and unhappiness are bound to those of her husband. Yet her identity, as described above, is not primarily dependent on her husband's. She does not adopt a child with him, despite his strong desire to do so.

Priscilla is still unmarried and still espousing subversive opinions about men. Although her continued solitude lends bittersweetness to her opinions, Priscilla's primary role is to provide a stronger critique than Nancy's version of good wifely duties. Nancy's continuing friendship with Priscilla, and her participation in conversations with Priscilla, speaks to Nancy's openness to a more complex vision of marriage than what she normally expresses. Priscilla's relationship to her father, by the way, echoes Eppie's taking care of Silas; both are a joy to their fathers, without whom the elderly gentlemen would be quite at a loss.

The decline of the Casses as forecast in Chapters 3 and 9 has become a reality. Meanwhile, the Napoleonic Wars, which provided much of the wealth and stature of the landed classes, have ended, and with them history has moved forward to a new age of middle-class supremacy (contemporary with Eliot). The failure of the Casses to adapt along with history reflects their inadequacy to the changes going on elsewhere. Ultimately, Chapter 17 is a bitter account of the Casses' fortune and the fortune of others of their class.

Silas Marner Chapters 18-20

Chapter Eighteen

Godfrey, having returned from his walk, tells Nancy some truly shocking news: Dunstan's remains have been found at the bottom of the drained stone-pits. With Dunstan's body, Marner's gold has been recovered. Godfrey also makes another painful revelation. He finally tells Nancy that the woman found dead in the snow outside of Marner's cottage sixteen years before was his own wife, and that Eppie is his biological child.

Nancy hears this news with surprising calmness. She tells Godfrey that if he had only worked up the courage to tell her this news six years ago, when he was so eager to adopt Eppie, she would have supported him wholeheartedly. Better yet, she could have married him knowing that Godfrey had a daughter, and she could have raised Eppie as her own child. Thus Godfrey finally feels the full weight of his error. In failing to trust his wife, not only did he live without Eppie, he lived without ever knowing the woman he married.

Shaken but with Godfrey's moral quandary finally revealed, they decide that although they cannot raise Eppie as their own child, they can at least take her into their home and provide for her as they feel they ought to. They determine to approach Marner and Eppie about the subject that very evening, after the hubbub has subsided at the stone-pits.

Chapter Nineteen

While they sit before his pile of gold, Marner tells Eppie how he once loved it so completely, how his loss of it had been so devastating, and how she had come to replace it in his life. He says that the money has lost its hold upon him. Now Eppie is his life's devotion, and he tells her that if he came to lose her, he might once again feel forsaken by God and lose faith in the world.

Just then the Casses arrive at Marner's cottage. Marner and Eppie are nervous, but they make their guests welcome. Godfrey attempts to broach the subject of adopting Eppie in a number of ways, first saying that his family owes Marner a great debt, and then that Marner seems too old to work at the loom. When these approaches fail, Godfrey states plainly and coarsely that they are offering to take Eppie into their care as their own child. Marner is crushed, but he will not make Eppie's decision for her. Eppie politely but firmly declines the offer.

Godfrey, who had not expected Eppie to refuse, replies by revealing that he is Eppie's true father. Marner, emboldened at Eppie's response to the Casses' offer, becomes quite pointed in his reply, asking why Godfrey has waited sixteen years to take Eppie back. He says, "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!" Godfrey tries to explain that he has repented of his error, and Marner replies that this repentance does not make Eppie rightfully his. Eppie reaffirms that she is happy with Marner and mindful of her part in his happiness. She will not leave him. Moreover, she is promised to marry Aaron, a workingman, and she is committed to her future with him and with Marner, the only father she will ever know. Godfrey turns and exits Marner's cottage, flushed and stifled. Nancy covers for his exit with some gentle words as she follows him out.

Chapter Twenty

As Godfrey and Nancy leave Marner's cottage, Godfrey lets out an unexpected sigh of relief. "That's ended," he says. Realizing the rightness of the outcome of the debate in the last chapter, Godfrey agrees that there are debts that cannot be paid as one pays money debts. He cannot reinsert himself into Eppie's life. Because he had tried to appear childless once, he will remain childless forever, against his wish.

After her husband's statements, Nancy asks if he will tell others about his parentage of Eppie. Godfrey says that, eventually, in his will, he will make it known, but until then he will keep the secret, not out of a guilty conscience, but to protect those whom such news would harm. He says that he will not get in the way of Eppie's marriage, and Nancy is relieved that she will not have to explain the whole ordeal to her father and Priscilla.

Despite this setback, Godfrey says that he is glad he still has Nancy. He has spent sixteen years regretting his lack of children, when he really had more than he deserved in his relationship with his wife, and he says that he now realizes this fact. Nancy says that her only trouble would be gone if he truly resigned himself to his lot. Godfrey says that he will try.

Analysis

In Chapter 18, Eliot concisely balances folktale elements with a very sophisticated study of character. In the same chapter that contains the grisly, fairy-tale revelation of Dunstan's skeleton, Godfrey finally accepts responsibility for his past. Thus a folktale plot twist leads to a profound examination of human social character.

The plot development in Chapter 18 is reminiscent of a ballad, a form of folk music very popular in the English Midlands during the nineteenth century. There were many kinds of ballads, one of which was known as the murder ballad. Typically in a murder ballad, a man would murder his sweetheart, only to have the crime revealed by supernatural forces. A line often used to describe this phenomenon was "Murder will out," meaning that you one cannot keep a crime like murder hidden for long; it will become known somehow. A famous title expressing this theme is that of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart." In Silas Marner, the robbery of Marner's gold cannot remain a secret forever. It will out. Dunstan's disappearance, too, will out. His famous luck, it seems, ran out sixteen years ago. Poetic justice commands that injustice will not go unpunished, and the same divine force eventually redeems Marner in his innocence after suffering from unjust accusations.

Godfrey Cass's shining moment in the novel is when he understands the principle behind the revelation of his brother's body--and abides by it. Godfrey himself outs his own secret in an act of belated but true courage, even though he expects to lose his wife. For Godfrey, his confession is the deepest if not the first true sacrifice in his life. He has finally adhered to a principle. Thus he extracts a complex, human lesson from a folktale experience.

Nancy's reaction demonstrates wisdom as well. She draws the key, paradoxical lesson that "nothing is worth doing wrong for," because nothing is ever so good as it seems. In other words, even their marriage, which Godfrey once considered perfection, and for which Godfrey justified lying, has not been worth doing wrong for. It has not been as good as it seemed it would be. Godfrey should have adhered to the principle of doing right despite the possible bad consequences, not to his cowardly motivation to do wrong because of the possibility of good consequences.

This is basically the same lesson that Marner and Mrs. Winthrop arrive at. Marner expected too much from William and the people of Lantern Yard. He expected perfection, so when they disappointed him, his despair swallowed up all hope. He did wrong by sheltering himself from humanity-nothing, not even the religious ideal of Lantern Yard, is worth doing wrong for.

Chapter 19 is the climax for Godfrey and Nancy if not for the whole novel. Marner's redemption had already been pretty much a sure thing since he found Eppie at his hearth, and Eppie, too, has had no inclination to change the course of her happy, fairy-tale life with Marner. Godfrey and Nancy, though, are at a turning point. Their claim to Eppie has been rejected. Godfrey's conscience, though it cannot be fully satisfied, is at least fully known, and nothing can be the same for them hereafter.

The chapter begins with Marner meditating on his recovered gold. He had been lost in his devotion to it, but his love for Eppie replaced his love for the gold. He is soon offered the chance to choose gold again: Godfrey suggests that he can provide Marner with more wealth than his table can hold, enough to dwarf the pile he has recovered, if only he will support Godfrey's claim to Eppie. But gold is no longer a primary goal for Marner. He sees it properly as a means for improving the wellbeing of those he loves, Eppie in particular. He would never trade his human bond with Eppie for a return to the cold love of unthinking gold.

Themes of class more broadly inform the argument between Godfrey and Marner over who has a right to call Eppie his own. Godfrey and Nancy both believe very firmly that the bond between a biological parent and his child is inevitably stronger than that of a foster parent with the child. In their view, because Eppie is, by blood, a lady, Eppie is by right a lady, and no weaver, however good he has been to her, can keep her from this destiny. On top of this, both Nancy and Godfrey cannot understand how anyone could refuse the life they have to offer, which is the "finest," the most high-status life, available in the region. Marner and Eppie have a different view. They understand that Eppie's biological origin has nothing to do with her development. She owes her happiness and her personality to Marner's love, to her friendships with Mrs. Winthrop and Aaron, and to her simple upbringing in the natural, secluded setting of the cottage. To suddenly turn from this nurturing past would be as wrong as all the other denials of the past in the novel. Thus it is more important to Eppie to affirm her self-history than to seek conventional improvement through class and status. The identity she has cultivated with Marner places importance not on the facts of one's blood, but upon the un-classed heritage of one's social development.

In Chapter 20, Godfrey has tried to make amends for his past failures, has owned his errors, and has been refused as a father by his own child. Although he must be hurt and somewhat astonished by this turn of events, he finally does not feel the weight of conscience. That part of life is over, he says. Both Dunstan and the pressing horror of his past that Dunstan represented have left his life forever. He can live, now, being true to his memory and principles.

Nancy and Godfrey recognize the harmony of the events that have transpired as though they themselves are readers of the story. Godfrey, who wanted nothing more than to appear childless sixteen years ago, will appear childless for the rest of his life. His faith in Chance has led him to a disappointment that he cannot repair with money or status. Rather, he should have been cultivating a faith in human beings-in his daughter, his wife, his family, his community.

But this is not a wholly sad ending for Godfrey and Nancy. Though he will have no progeny, Godfrey will at last have peace. Like Marner, he has learned that nothing in this world is wholly good or bad. Marner's disappointment in the supposedly righteous and pure Lantern Yard led him to utter misery, while Godfrey's idealized vision of life with Nancy led him to a bittersweet, childless marriage. But even in the depths of his solitary life, Marner has been redeemed. And even though Godfrey's secret appeared to him an unforgivable outrage, his confession leads him to a new honesty with Nancy, and perhaps, at last, he has earned a clean conscience.

Thus with the tidy, close work of a weaver and as the agent of fate, George Eliot has entwined and balanced the destinies of Marner, Eppie, Godfrey and Nancy.

Chapter Twenty-One

The next morning, having dodged Godfrey's challenge to Eppie, Marner tells his daughter about a plan he has been hatching for some time: to return to Lantern Yard for a visit with Mr. Paston, the minister of his old faith. Marner wants to know whether anything turned up in the years since he left Lantern Yard to prove his innocence in the theft of the deacon's money. He also wants to discuss with Mr. Paston, whom he still holds to be a wise and learned man, the differences between the religion of his native land and that of Raveloe.

They leave the next morning. Four days later they arrive at a manufacturing town to the north in which Lantern Yard must be located. Marner navigates his way through the sooty, unfamiliar streets from the prison, which is recognizable. When Marner finds the spot where Lantern Yard once stood he is horrified: a massive factory building stands in his old community's stead. Marner turns to Eppie and says, "It's gone, child." He and Eppie spend the rest of their visit asking around town whether anyone remembers the days before the factory went up, but no one can tell him of Mr. Paston or any of the old congregation at Lantern Yard.

Back in Raveloe, Marner tells Dolly that he will never get at the truth about the robbery and the drawing of the lots that found him guilty. Dolly says that though he will never know the "rights" of what befell him at Lantern Yard, there still may be a right explanation. Marner agrees that though he will never know the truth, he has been given enough hope through his relationship with Eppie to accept his ignorance about the fate of Lantern Yard.

Conclusion

Summer is in the air at Raveloe, and Eppie is getting married at the Red House. She wears a pure white dress of light cotton with a tiny pink sprig provided by Nancy Cass. Most of Raveloe is in attendance, including Miss Priscilla and the old Mr. Cass, who have come to keep Nancy company. Godfrey, however, was called to Lytherly on business and became unable attend the wedding or the feast (which he had paid for) to be held afterwards at the Rainbow.

After the wedding, the guests make their way into the humbler part of the village. As the procession passes, old Mr. Macey says, "I've lived to see my words come true." He explains that he was the first to say that there was no harm in Marner, and that he was the first to say Marner would get his money back someday. Indeed, Mr. Macey has proved a sage.

During the party in front of the Rainbow, the guests discuss Marner's strange history, the good turn he did for a lone motherless child, and the blessing that he was given because of his goodness. They all wish him joy and good luck, which they know he well deserves.

Marner, Eppie, Aaron and Mrs. Winthrop, meanwhile, have decided to visit the cottage at the stone-pits before continuing on to the feast. They admire the new garden-now much larger than Eppie had hoped, and installed at the expense of Mr. Cass, their new landlord. Eppie says the last words of the book: "Oh father, what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody could be happier than we are."

Analysis

The very complicated final chapter of the book, the last numbered chapter, puts into play some of the most ambiguous themes in Eliot's novel. It is almost a short fable of its own, describing the journey of a man and his daughter to the land of his birth, only to find that his history has vanished, having been swallowed into the greater history of his country. The fable memorializes the turn from rural England to industrialized England.

Marner's journey is a religious pilgrimage. He, like Eliot, realizes that there is still a loose thread in this otherwise tight and completed tapestry; what has happened to Lantern Yard? Poetic justice requires that we know how the Puritan society turned out. Marner needs to know whether his innocence, just as Dunstan's crime and Godfrey's marriage, also have come to light. His decision, coming directly after those major revelations, places the journey within the work's ending pattern of closure.

The unnamed "manufacturing town" that has arisen around Lantern Yard is truly unlike anything else in the novel. Even the earlier depictions of "darkness"-including the stone-pits, Molly Farren's opium bottle, and so on-are always rural, befitting the fairy-tale tone of the story. The factory town, on the other hand, is the antithesis of the setting so far. It shows us human life gone wrong-of people mechanized instead of nurtured. Eliot gleaned much of her aesthetic philosophy from the poet William Wordsworth (whose verse appears as the novel's epigraph and is alluded to throughout the work). Like him, she sees the coming of factories to England as an indication of the death of the old, beautiful rhythms of life-of sadness and redemption, of hope and despair, and of the cultural patterns that follow the seasons.

Eppie, naturally, finds the factory town horrific. It reminds her, first of all, of the future she nearly missed of being raised in the workhouse. And the factory town in general is the opposite of Eppie, being dark and bleak whereas she is light and joyful. It is bereft of natural growth, while she is the embodiment of natural humanity.

Thus, this chapter tends to evoke the mystery of the unknown in the form of the manufacturing town. It encourages the faithful to trust by the natural light they are given. Lantern Yard, despite its name, is not Marner's light. Nor are the city lights his. Eppie is his lamp. That means that Marner will reckon the questions of his past by means of the love and meaning he has developed with Eppie. Their lives are woven together, and their happiness fortifies Marner's trust in an unknown but ultimately just power that is greater than himself.

Eliot manages the tone of the conclusion to portray the outcome of the strange events at Raveloe. Eppie's "very light" wedding dress accentuates her role as a bringer of hope-not just for Marner but for the community at large. The Lammeters and the Casses, though they play host to the happy occasion, do not partake in it themselves except as witnesses. Their day has come and gone, at least in terms of regeneration.

This final section shows us, at last, the garden that Eppie requested at the beginning of Part Two. The garden certainly represents the life, regeneration and spirit of nature that seems to be affirmed in the novel despite the ills of the world it also presents. Gardens express people's organic nature and development, and this garden underlines Eppie's own association with generation and growth. This connection is noted again with the tiny pink sprig on her wedding dress.

The only one not in attendance in the conclusion is Godfrey Cass, though it is through his generosity that the feast has been provided, that the wedding has taken place at the Red House, and that Marner's cottage has been fitted with such a charming garden. There can be no doubt that Cass's absence was scheduled intentionally, and his choice to be absent bespeaks his many remaining regrets. Money and property are his only legacy, whereas Marner's legacy involves these kinds of things and much more: a daughter associated with growth, youth and hope.