Silas

“ My grey ulster and hat will not be too heavy; it is quite a cool morning, and being up all night, and supperless to bed, makes me feel chilly. How surprised Silas and his sister will be. I know he will want me to marry him at once, but I feel too old and grey; but, as he says, so I have told him for years; and he has waited and waited until the clouds at Broadlawns would lighten, and now they are blacker than ever. Kind Silas, good and true Silas, what will you say to this terrible marriage of poor Mr. Cole to awful Miss Villiers? ”

“ This is the only kindness I ever heard of Master Silas toward his fellow-creatures. Never hold me unjust, Sir Knight, to Master Silas. Could I learn other good of him, I would freely say it; for we do good by speaking it, and none is easier. Even bad men are not bad men while they praise the just. Their first step backward is more troublesome and wrenching to them than the first forward.”
“In God’s name, where did he gather all this?” whispered his worship to the chaplain, by whose side I was sitting. “Why, he talks like a man of forty-seven, or more!” ”

“ They call him with tremulous tenderness, and the heart of Silas breaks with hearing. Bleed, poor heart, but let not those old hearts bleed!
The music of the inviting waves is not so soft as the sound of those feeble voices,—the freedom they promise is not powerful to tempt him; behold the arms that hang powerless yonder, and the hearts whose tides are more wondrous than those of the sea! The halcyon days shall never break through eternal ages on him, if he will walk on now in darkness. ”

“ And so I will, Maud, and to me you shall come—my guest, mind—I should be so delighted; and really if Silas is under a cloud, it has been his own doing, and I don't see that it is your business to fight his battle. He can't live very long. The suspicion, whatever it is dies with him, and what could poor dear Austin prove by his will but what everybody knew quite well before—his own strong belief in Silas's innocence? ”

“ Silas was kinder than ever she had known him, kinder and gentler, also he appeared to be more contented, but she had a terrified suspicion that he was contented only because his mind was occupied, and it seemed horrible to her that she should be the centre of that occupation. She had suddenly become involved in an affair whose existence, she protested to herself, had its being solely as the outcome of Silas’s imagination. ”

“ Silas was making it into something beyond the diapason of their souls.
“Build!” he said passionately, earnestly, “build with your sanity and your health. Leave query and destruction to the tormented spirits; there will always be enough of those; and if you did but know,—oh, world!” he said, clasping his hands, “if you did but know, you would pity the precursor, solitary and bold. Then comes the army of the workers, with honest tools, and their flowing quietness.—Why should you struggle, you two, beside Gregory and me? ”

“ SILAS: A day in the hayfield is a day's hayin'—but a night on the hill—
FELIX: We don't have them often, do we, Uncle Silas?
SILAS: I wouldn't 'a' had that one but for your father, Felix. Thank God they drove you out o' Hungary! And it's all so dog-gone queer. Ain't it queer how things blow from mind to mind—like seeds. Lord A'mighty—you don't know where they'll take hold. ”

“ Silas!” replied the knight, impatiently, “prithee keep to thy divinity, thy strong hold upon Zion; thence none that faces thee can draw thee without being bitten to the bone. Leave poetry to me.”
“With all my heart,” quoth Master Silas, “I will never ask a belt from her, until I see she can afford to give a shirt. She has promised a belt, indeed,—not one, however, that doth much improve the wind,—to this lad here, and will keep her word; but she was forced to borrow the pattern from a Carthusian friar, and somehow it slips above the shoulder.”
“I am by no means sure of that,” quoth Sir Thomas. ”

“ Hereupon did Master Silas jerk me with his indicative joint, the elbow to wit, and did say in my ear,—
“He means deanery. Give me one of those bones so full of marrow, and let my lord bishop have all the meat over it, and welcome. If a dean is not on his stilts, he is not on his stumps; he stands on his own ground; he is a noli-metangeretarian.”
“What art thou saying of those sectaries, good Master Silas?” quoth Sir Thomas, not hearing him distinctly. ”

“ He now looks out for a humble companion—an assistant: he finds one in Silas: that Silas, whom, with Judas Barsabas, we have seen come to Antioch, deputed by the Apostles and their disciples, to conclude, in that second metropolis, the negotiation, commenced in the first metropolis of the new Christian world. Deserter from the service in which he was sent, Silas enlists in that of the daring and indefatigable adventurer. ”

“ The repetition of this so frequently seemed to reproach the king, insomuch that he took this ungovernable liberty of talking very ill at his hands. For the commemoration of times when men have been under ignominy, is by no means agreeable to them; and he is a very silly man who is perpetually relating to a person what kindness he had done him. At last, therefore, Silas had so thoroughly provoked the king's indignation, that he acted rather out of passion than good consideration, and did not only turn Silas out of his place, as general of his horse, but sent him in bonds into his own country. ”

“ I tell you, Silas, folks are too busy.
SILAS: Too busy!' Too busy bein' nothin'? If it's true that we created ourselves out of the thoughts that came, then thought is not something outside the business of life. Thought— (with his gift for wonder) why, thought's our chance. I know now. Why I can't forget the Indians. We killed their joy before we killed them. We made them less, (to FEJEVARY, and as if sure he is now making it clear) I got to give it back—their hill. ”

“ Seeing him over there, looking down on the town which to him is accursed, we have often thought how weary God must be looking at the world and knowing so much better than Silas the weakness and iniquity of men. Sometimes we have wondered if sin is really as important as Silas thinks it is, for with Silas sin is a blot that effaces a man's soul. ”

“ In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. And poor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike the feeling of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness, from the face of an unpropitious deity. ”

“ Can't you see, Silas, that we're all against you?
SILAS: All against me? (to FEJEVARY) But how can you be? Look at the land we walked in and took! Was there ever such a chance to make life more? Why, the buffalo here before us was more than we if we do nothing but prosper! God damn us if we sit here rich and fat and forget man's in the makin'. (affirming against this) There will one day be a college in these cornfields by the Mississippi because long ago a great dream was fought for in Hungary. And I say to that old dream, Wake up, old dream! Wake up and fight! You say rich men. ”

“ Not a syllable that Silas ever said is recorded in Scripture. He had been a chief man among the brethren when he was in Jerusalem, but, like some other chief men in little spheres, he came to be anything but a chief man when he got alongside of Paul, and found his proper work. ”

“ Silas traveled in a carriage with the valets, for Prince Florizel chose to be alone with his Master of the Horse. On board the steamer, however, Silas attracted his Highness's attention by the melancholy of his air and attitude as he stood gazing at the pile of baggage; for he was still full of disquietude about the future.
"There is a young man," observed the Prince, "who must have some cause for sorrow."
"That," replied Geraldine, "is the American for whom I obtained permission to travel with your suite." ”

“ She was not afraid of Silas in the least, but his tricks of an overgrown boy did not please her; it seemed to her sometimes as though his irresponsibility was less an inheritance from youth, than from some ancestor 191 ill-balanced to the point of craziness. If any other man of his age had acted and spoken to her as he had done she would have smacked his face, but Silas was Silas, and his good looks and seeming innocence, and something really charming that lay away at the back of his character and gave colour to this personality, managed, somehow, to condone his queerness of conduct. ”

“ Silas was overwhelmed by the size and attractions of his correspondent and the suddenness with which she had fallen upon him. But she soon set him at his ease. She was very towardly and lenient in her behavior; she led him on to make pleasantries, and then applauded him to the echo; and in a very short time, between blandishments and a liberal exhibition of warm brandy, she had not only induced him to fancy himself in love, but to declare his passion with the greatest vehemence. ”

“ The storm had a little subsided, and I took a less agitated and more confident view of Uncle Silas than I had at an earlier hour of that evening.
'And what do you think of him?' I asked.
Lady Knollys drummed on the table with her finger points as she looked into the fire.
'I don't understand metaphysics, my dear, nor witchcraft. I sometimes believe in the supernatural, and sometimes I don't. Silas Ruthyn is himself alone, and I can't define him, because I don't understand him. Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in flesh. ”

“ Morgan’s like a son to Silas already,” she went on; “he’s gay with him, and he’s as gentle as a woman. He’s never put out by Silas’s ways—never seems to notice them, in fact. And Silas likes him because he can talk to him by the hour about all the things he thinks about and reads about.” ”

“ Silas was writing; he wrote and chuckled, and handed the sheet to Nan.
153“Then man turned and said: ‘All these things are true.’
“But look again within my heart; thou shalt find charity there, and pity like a healing ointment; reverence before strength, and courage as an archangel in bright armour.
“Blow but upon the embers of truth which thou shalt find, and they shall leap as a flame; truly, thou shalt re-kindle the spark of thy breath in man. ”

“ To teach him how to build a load of hay——"
"I know, that's Silas' one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like big birds' nests.
You never see him standing on the hay
He's trying to lift, straining to lift himself."
"He thinks if he could teach him that, he'd be
Some good perhaps to someone in the world.
He hates to see a boy the fool of books. ”

“ Silas confounded himself in explanations and apologies; in the middle of these she looked up at the clock and clapped her hands together with a suppressed scream.
"Heavens!" she cried, "is it so late? I have not an instant to lose. Alas, we poor women, what slaves we are! ”

“ Silas knows all men's weaknesses, forgets their strength, and looking down from the window hates his fellow-creatures for the wrong they have done him, or the wickedness that he knows of them. He has never given our reporters a kindly item of news since he was turned down, but if there is a discreditable story on any citizen going around we hear it first from Silas, and if we do not print it he says we have taken hush money. ”

“ Silas bridled some and snorted soft.
“Charity,” says he, “charity, Calliope Marsh, is doin’ nice things for folks.”
“Doin’ nice things for folks,” I says over—and I wanted to remember them words of Silas and I longed to feed ’em to him some time. But I just took up my pound of prunes and went out the post-office store, thoughtful. ”

“ So he was blind, as blind as Silas himself; the more honourable because, despite his blindness, he still wrought undeterred.
How various were his pursuits, his methods of conquest! to maintain and advance himself in the supreme captaincy; so diverse the images of vigour which the labourer in his activity was too simple to suspect. There were men who wrested from the earth the last guarded secrets, pitting their limbs against forest, mountain, ice, or waterless plain; only their soft limbs against the giant sentries of unhandseled nature ”

“ Any misgiving about Uncle Silas was, in my mind, a questioning the foundations of my faith, and in itself an impiety. And yet I am not sure that some such misgiving, faint, perhaps, and intermittent, may not have been at the bottom of my tribulation.
I was not very well. Lady Knollys had gone out for a walk. She was not easily tired, and sometimes made a long excursion. The sun was setting now, when Mary Quince brought me a letter which had just arrived by the post. My heart throbbed violently. I was afraid to break the broad black seal. It was from Uncle Silas. ”

“ So God sometimes lightens the sufferings of his servants by the communion of saints, the sweet fellowship they have one with another in their bonds. Never more enjoyment of God have they found than when suffering together for God. So Paul and Silas, when their feet were fast in the stocks, had their tongues set at liberty, and their hearts tuned for the praises of God.— Marcus, Aristarchus, Demas, Lucas, my fellow-labourers. ”

“ Silas attacked a bargee pretending to be a seaman, and under a purser's name. But his method of attack struck at the roots of the British code the honor of the sportsman who plays the game to the death, but neither explains, nor complains, nor carries tales. Anybody is liable to lose his temper, and in the heat of anger, without the least intent of homicide, to kill. Silas himself had but this moment attempted a comrade's life. So much was readily forgiven, but he had sneaked to the mate, and for that there could be no pardon. ”