put it down there and covered it up, and when I came back it was gone. … I don’t know what I felt until I found that the baby was gone. And when I put it there, I thought I should like somebody to find it and save it from dying, but when I saw it was gone, I was struck like a stone, with fear. I never thought o’ stirring, I felt so weak. I knew I couldn’t run away, and everybody as saw me ’ud know about the baby. My heart went like stone; I couldn’t wish or try for anything; it seemed like as if I should stay there forever, and nothing ’ud ever change. But they came and took me away.” Hetty was silent, but she shuddered again, as if there was still something behind: and Dinah waited, for her heart was so full that tears must come before words. At last Hetty burst out with a sob. “Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place in the wood, now I’ve told everything?” “Let us pray, poor sinner: let us fall on our knees again, and pray to the God of all mercy.”
I have not done justice to this scene, because I have had to cut it, and it is on her massiveness that George Eliot depends—she has no nicety of style. The scene is sincere, solid, pathetic, and penetrated with Christianity. The god whom Dinah summons is a living force to the authoress also: he is not brought in to work up the reader’s feelings; he is the natural accompaniment of human error and suffering.
Now contrast with it the following scene from The Brothers Karamazov (Mitya is being accused of the murder of his father, of which he is indeed spiritually though not technically guilty).