Silas Marner: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Godfrey Cass returns home from Mrs. Osgood’s party to find Dunstan has not returned. His thoughts are too occupied with having seen Miss Nancy Lammeter, and despair that he cannot free himself from his secret wife, in order to dwell on Dunstan’s absence. The next day, the whole of Raveloe is fascinated by the story of Silas Marner’s robbery. A close examination of the area near Marner’s cottage produces a tinderbox found in the mud. Many of the villagers are convinced that the tinderbox is connected with the robbery, while others maintain that Marner is fabricating his story or partly crazy. Mr. Macey is convinced of supernatural intervention in Silas Marner’s robbery.

At the Rainbow, Mr. Crackenthorp (the rector). Squire Cass, and several others carry out an investigation of the tinderbox. The landlord Mr. Snell, now appointed deputy constable, recalls a peddler who stopped in for a drink a month earlier and who stated that he carried a tinderbox to light his pipe. Upon further reflection, Mr. Snell recalls his foreignness and a certain look in his eye, which he had disliked.

Mr. Crackenthorp asks if the peddler wore earrings. Mr. Snell can’t recall, but as the peddler stopped at nearly every house in town, the question is posed to the villagers of Raveloe. Through the power of this suggestive question being passed among the villagers, there are at least two who are quickly able to declare, with certainty, that they noticed earrings in the peddler’s ears.

Silas Marner’s memory of the peddler is generally disappointing: he recalls the man turning away at once and not entering his house when Marner wasn’t interested in buying anything. The villagers wondered that the peddler didn’t murder Marner because earring-wearing individuals have been known to resort to murder. Godfrey Cass treats the matter lightly. He recalls that the peddler was rather a merry fellow, but his opinion is dismissed as the talk of youth.

By afternoon, Godfrey’s concern about Dunstan’s absence has grown and he leaves for Batherley. He worries that perhaps Dunstan has vanished with the money from selling Wildfire, only to return at the end of the month having gambled away everything. On the road, he runs into Bryce. Bryce reports that he’d been planning to purchase Wildfire only to have learned that he was found dead after Dunstan rode him on the hunt. Godfrey and Bryce suppose that Dunstan is unlikely to return home immediately with such a bad piece of news.

Godfrey is convinced that he must now tell his father the whole story of loaning Dunstan the money and why he did so, or else face Dunstan’s anger if he returns to find himself blamed by their father. Godfrey thinks that he could take the blame for spending the money himself, and so secure Dunstan’s continued silence, but he feels he cannot lie this much. Godfrey is familiar with the Squire’s unforgiving nature, but he hopes that his confession will cause the Squire to want to hide his secret marriage rather than turn Godfrey out of his house and expose him.

Despite Godfrey’s conviction, he awakes the next morning unable to persuade himself that he should tell the Squire everything. He feels again the inclination to rely on the chance of not being betrayed rather than to betray the secret fully himself. What would be wisest, he decides, would to be try and soften his father’s anger at Dunstan and to try to keep everything as it had been before the loss of Wildfire and the money.