THE SCARLET LETTER by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
INTRODUCTORY TO "THE SCARLET LETTER"
It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined
to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs
at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an
autobiographical impulse should twice in my
life have taken possession of me, in addressing
the public. The first time was three or four
years since, when I favoured the reader—inexcusably,
and for no earthly reason that either the
indulgent reader or the intrusive author could
imagine—with a description of my way of
life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse.
And now—because, beyond my deserts, I was
happy enough to find a listener or two on
the former occasion—I again seize the public
by the button, and talk of my three years'
experience in a Custom-House. The example
of the famous "P. P., Clerk of this Parish,"
was never more faithfully followed. The truth
seems to be, however, that when he casts his
leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses,
not the many who will fling aside his volume,
or never take it up, but the few who will
understand him better than most of his schoolmates
or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far
more than this, and indulge themselves in
such confidential depths of revelation as
could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively
to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy;
as if the printed book, thrown at large on
the wide world, were certain to find out the
divided segment of the writer's own nature,
and complete his circle of existence by bringing
him into communion with it. It is scarcely
decorous, however, to speak all, even where
we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are
frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the
speaker stand in some true relation with his
audience, it may be pardonable to imagine
that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though
not the closest friend, is listening to our
talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed
by this genial consciousness, we may prate
of the circumstances that lie around us, and
even of ourself, but still keep the inmost
Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within
these limits, an author, methinks, may be
autobiographical, without violating either
the reader's rights or his own.
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House
sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind
always recognised in literature, as explaining
how a large portion of the following pages
came into my possession, and as offering proofs
of the authenticity of a narrative therein
contained. This, in fact—a desire to put
myself in my true position as editor, or very
little more, of the most prolix among the
tales that make up my volume—this, and no
other, is my true reason for assuming a personal
relation with the public. In accomplishing
the main purpose, it has appeared allowable,
by a few extra touches, to give a faint representation
of a mode of life not heretofore described,
together with some of the characters that
move in it, among whom the author happened
to make one.
In my native town of Salem, at the head of
what, half a century ago, in the days of old
King Derby, was a bustling wharf—but which
is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses,
and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial
life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way
down its melancholy length, discharging hides;
or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner,
pitching out her cargo of firewood—at the
head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which
the tide often overflows, and along which,
at the base and in the rear of the row of
buildings, the track of many languid years
is seen in a border of unthrifty grass—here,
with a view from its front windows adown this
not very enlivening prospect, and thence across
the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of
brick. From the loftiest point of its roof,
during precisely three and a half hours of
each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze
or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead
of horizontally, and thus indicating that
a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle
Sam's government is here established. Its
front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen
wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath
which a flight of wide granite steps descends
towards the street. Over the entrance hovers
an enormous specimen of the American eagle,
with outspread wings, a shield before her
breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch
of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows
in each claw. With the customary infirmity
of temper that characterizes this unhappy
fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her
beak and eye, and the general truculency of
her attitude, to threaten mischief to the
inoffensive community; and especially to warn
all citizens careful of their safety against
intruding on the premises which she overshadows
with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she
looks, many people are seeking at this very
moment to shelter themselves under the wing
of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume,
that her bosom has all the softness and snugness
of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great
tenderness even in her best of moods, and,
sooner or later—oftener soon than late—is
apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch
of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling
wound from her barbed arrows.
The pavement round about the above-described
edifice—which we may as well name at once
as the Custom-House of the port—has grass
enough growing in its chinks to show that
it has not, of late days, been worn by any
multitudinous resort of business. In some
months of the year, however, there often chances
a forenoon when affairs move onward with a
livelier tread. Such occasions might remind
the elderly citizen of that period, before
the last war with England, when Salem was
a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now,
by her own merchants and ship-owners, who
permit her wharves to crumble to ruin while
their ventures go to swell, needlessly and
imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce
at New York or Boston. On some such morning,
when three or four vessels happen to have
arrived at once usually from Africa or South
America—or to be on the verge of their departure
thitherward, there is a sound of frequent
feet passing briskly up and down the granite
steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted
him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master,
just in port, with his vessel's papers under
his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too,
comes his owner, cheerful, sombre, gracious
or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme
of the now accomplished voyage has been realized
in merchandise that will readily be turned
to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of
incommodities such as nobody will care to
rid him of. Here, likewise—the germ of the
wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn
merchant—we have the smart young clerk,
who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub
does of blood, and already sends adventures
in his master's ships, when he had better
be sailing mimic boats upon a mill-pond. Another
figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor,
in quest of a protection; or the recently
arrived one, pale and feeble, seeking a passport
to the hospital. Nor must we forget the captains
of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood
from the British provinces; a rough-looking
set of tarpaulins, without the alertness of
the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item
of no slight importance to our decaying trade.
Cluster all these individuals together, as
they sometimes were, with other miscellaneous
ones to diversify the group, and, for the
time being, it made the Custom-House a stirring
scene. More frequently, however, on ascending
the steps, you would discern— in the entry
if it were summer time, or in their appropriate
rooms if wintry or inclement weathers—a
row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned
chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs
back against the wall. Oftentimes they were
asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking
together, in voices between a speech and a
snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes
the occupants of alms-houses, and all other
human beings who depend for subsistence on
charity, on monopolized labour, or anything
else but their own independent exertions.
These old gentlemen—seated, like Matthew
at the receipt of custom, but not very liable
to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic
errands—were Custom-House officers.
Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter
the front door, is a certain room or office,
about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty
height, with two of its arched windows commanding
a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf,
and the third looking across a narrow lane,
and along a portion of Derby Street. All three
give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers,
slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the
doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing
and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and
such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping
of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed,
and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn
with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere
fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to
conclude, from the general slovenliness of
the place, that this is a sanctuary into which
womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom
and mop, has very infrequent access. In the
way of furniture, there is a stove with a
voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a
three-legged stool beside it; two or three
wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit
and infirm; and—not to forget the library—on
some shelves, a score or two of volumes of
the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of
the Revenue laws. A tin pipe ascends through
the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal communication
with other parts of the edifice. And here,
some six months ago—pacing from corner to
corner, or lounging on the long-legged stool,
with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering
up and down the columns of the morning newspaper—you
might have recognised, honoured reader, the
same individual who welcomed you into his
cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered
so pleasantly through the willow branches
on the western side of the Old Manse. But
now, should you go thither to seek him, you
would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor.
The besom of reform hath swept him out of
office, and a worthier successor wears his
dignity and pockets his emoluments.
This old town of Salem—my native place,
though I have dwelt much away from it both
in boyhood and maturer years—possesses,
or did possess, a hold on my affection, the
force of which I have never realized during
my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed,
so far as its physical aspect is concerned,
with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly
with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend
to architectural beauty—its irregularity,
which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but
only tame—its long and lazy street, lounging
wearisomely through the whole extent of the
peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea
at one end, and a view of the alms-house at
the other—such being the features of my
native town, it would be quite as reasonable
to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
checker-board. And yet, though invariably
happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling
for Old Salem, which, in lack of a better
phrase, I must be content to call affection.
The sentiment is probably assignable to the
deep and aged roots which my family has stuck
into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries
and a quarter since the original Briton, the
earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance
in the wild and forest-bordered settlement
which has since become a city. And here his
descendants have been born and died, and have
mingled their earthly substance with the soil,
until no small portion of it must necessarily
be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for
a little while, I walk the streets. In part,
therefore, the attachment which I speak of
is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for
dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it
is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps
better for the stock, need they consider it
desirable to know.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality.
The figure of that first ancestor, invested
by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur,
was present to my boyish imagination as far
back as I can remember. It still haunts me,
and induces a sort of home-feeling with the
past, which I scarcely claim in reference
to the present phase of the town. I seem to
have a stronger claim to a residence here
on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked,
and steeple-crowned progenitor—who came
so early, with his Bible and his sword, and
trode the unworn street with such a stately
port, and made so large a figure, as a man
of war and peace—a stronger claim than for
myself, whose name is seldom heard and my
face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator,
judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had
all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil.
He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness
the Quakers, who have remembered him in their
histories, and relate an incident of his hard
severity towards a woman of their sect, which
will last longer, it is to be feared, than
any record of his better deeds, although these
were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting
spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in
the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood
may fairly be said to have left a stain upon
him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry
old bones, in the Charter-street burial-ground,
must still retain it, if they have not crumbled
utterly to dust! I know not whether these
ancestors of mine bethought themselves to
repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their
cruelties; or whether they are now groaning
under the heavy consequences of them in another
state of being. At all events, I, the present
writer, as their representative, hereby take
shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray
that any curse incurred by them—as I have
heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous
condition of the race, for many a long year
back, would argue to exist—may be now and
henceforth removed.
Doubtless, however, either of these stern
and black-browed Puritans would have thought
it quite a sufficient retribution for his
sins that, after so long a lapse of years,
the old trunk of the family tree, with so
much venerable moss upon it, should have borne,
as its topmost bough, an idler like myself.
No aim that I have ever cherished would they
recognise as laudable; no success of mine—if
my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever
been brightened by success—would they deem
otherwise than worthless, if not positively
disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one grey
shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A
writer of story books! What kind of business
in life—what mode of glorifying God, or
being serviceable to mankind in his day and
generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate
fellow might as well have been a fiddler!"
Such are the compliments bandied between my
great grandsires and myself, across the gulf
of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they
will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined
themselves with mine.
Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy
and childhood, by these two earnest and energetic
men, the race has ever since subsisted here;
always, too, in respectability; never, so
far as I have known, disgraced by a single
unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the
other hand, after the first two generations,
performing any memorable deed, or so much
as putting forward a claim to public notice.
Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight;
as old houses, here and there about the streets,
get covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation
of new soil. From father to son, for above
a hundred years, they followed the sea; a
grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation,
retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead,
while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary
place before the mast, confronting the salt
spray and the gale which had blustered against
his sire and grandsire. The boy, also in due
time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin,
spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned
from his world-wanderings, to grow old, and
die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth.
This long connexion of a family with one spot,
as its place of birth and burial, creates
a kindred between the human being and the
locality, quite independent of any charm in
the scenery or moral circumstances that surround
him. It is not love but instinct. The new
inhabitant—who came himself from a foreign
land, or whose father or grandfather came—has
little claim to be called a Salemite; he has
no conception of the oyster-like tenacity
with which an old settler, over whom his third
century is creeping, clings to the spot where
his successive generations have been embedded.
It is no matter that the place is joyless
for him; that he is weary of the old wooden
houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of
site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and
the chillest of social atmospheres;—all
these, and whatever faults besides he may
see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose.
The spell survives, and just as powerfully
as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise.
So has it been in my case. I felt it almost
as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that
the mould of features and cast of character
which had all along been familiar here—ever,
as one representative of the race lay down
in the grave, another assuming, as it were,
his sentry-march along the main street—might
still in my little day be seen and recognised
in the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment
is an evidence that the connexion, which has
become an unhealthy one, should at last be
severed. Human nature will not flourish, any
more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted,
for too long a series of generations, in the
same worn-out soil. My children have had other
birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes
may be within my control, shall strike their
roots into unaccustomed earth.
On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly
this strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment
for my native town that brought me to fill
a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when
I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere
else. My doom was on me. It was not the first
time, nor the second, that I had gone away—as
it seemed, permanently—but yet returned,
like the bad halfpenny, or as if Salem were
for me the inevitable centre of the universe.
So, one fine morning I ascended the flight
of granite steps, with the President's commission
in my pocket, and was introduced to the corps
of gentlemen who were to aid me in my weighty
responsibility as chief executive officer
of the Custom-House.
I doubt greatly—or, rather, I do not doubt
at all—whether any public functionary of
the United States, either in the civil or
military line, has ever had such a patriarchal
body of veterans under his orders as myself.
The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was
at once settled when I looked at them. For
upwards of twenty years before this epoch,
the independent position of the Collector
had kept the Salem Custom-House out of the
whirlpool of political vicissitude, which
makes the tenure of office generally so fragile.
A soldier—New England's most distinguished
soldier—he stood firmly on the pedestal
of his gallant services; and, himself secure
in the wise liberality of the successive administrations
through which he had held office, he had been
the safety of his subordinates in many an
hour of danger and heart-quake. General Miller
was radically conservative; a man over whose
kindly nature habit had no slight influence;
attaching himself strongly to familiar faces,
and with difficulty moved to change, even
when change might have brought unquestionable
improvement. Thus, on taking charge of my
department, I found few but aged men. They
were ancient sea-captains, for the most part,
who, after being tossed on every sea, and
standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous
blast, had finally drifted into this quiet
nook, where, with little to disturb them,
except the periodical terrors of a Presidential
election, they one and all acquired a new
lease of existence. Though by no means less
liable than their fellow-men to age and infirmity,
they had evidently some talisman or other
that kept death at bay. Two or three of their
number, as I was assured, being gouty and
rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed
of making their appearance at the Custom-House
during a large part of the year; but, after
a torpid winter, would creep out into the
warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about
what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure
and convenience, betake themselves to bed
again. I must plead guilty to the charge of
abbreviating the official breath of more than
one of these venerable servants of the republic.
They were allowed, on my representation, to
rest from their arduous labours, and soon
afterwards—as if their sole principle of
life had been zeal for their country's service—as
I verily believe it was—withdrew to a better
world. It is a pious consolation to me that,
through my interference, a sufficient space
was allowed them for repentance of the evil
and corrupt practices into which, as a matter
of course, every Custom-House officer must
be supposed to fall. Neither the front nor
the back entrance of the Custom-House opens
on the road to Paradise.
The greater part of my officers were Whigs.
It was well for their venerable brotherhood
that the new Surveyor was not a politician,
and though a faithful Democrat in principle,
neither received nor held his office with
any reference to political services. Had it
been otherwise—had an active politician
been put into this influential post, to assume
the easy task of making head against a Whig
Collector, whose infirmities withheld him
from the personal administration of his office—hardly
a man of the old corps would have drawn the
breath of official life within a month after
the exterminating angel had come up the Custom-House
steps. According to the received code in such
matters, it would have been nothing short
of duty, in a politician, to bring every one
of those white heads under the axe of the
guillotine. It was plain enough to discern
that the old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy
at my hands. It pained, and at the same time
amused me, to behold the terrors that attended
my advent, to see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten
by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale
at the glance of so harmless an individual
as myself; to detect, as one or another addressed
me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past
days, had been wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet,
hoarsely enough to frighten Boreas himself
to silence. They knew, these excellent old
persons, that, by all established rule—and,
as regarded some of them, weighed by their
own lack of efficiency for business—they
ought to have given place to younger men,
more orthodox in politics, and altogether
fitter than themselves to serve our common
Uncle. I knew it, too, but could never quite
find in my heart to act upon the knowledge.
Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore,
and considerably to the detriment of my official
conscience, they continued, during my incumbency,
to creep about the wharves, and loiter up
and down the Custom-House steps. They spent
a good deal of time, also, asleep in their
accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted
back against the walls; awaking, however,
once or twice in the forenoon, to bore one
another with the several thousandth repetition
of old sea-stories and mouldy jokes, that
had grown to be passwords and countersigns
among them.
The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that
the new Surveyor had no great harm in him.
So, with lightsome hearts and the happy consciousness
of being usefully employed—in their own
behalf at least, if not for our beloved country—these
good old gentlemen went through the various
formalities of office. Sagaciously under their
spectacles, did they peep into the holds of
vessels. Mighty was their fuss about little
matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness
that allowed greater ones to slip between
their fingers Whenever such a mischance occurred—when
a waggon-load of valuable merchandise had
been smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps,
and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses—nothing
could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with
which they proceeded to lock, and double-lock,
and secure with tape and sealing-wax, all
the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead
of a reprimand for their previous negligence,
the case seemed rather to require an eulogium
on their praiseworthy caution after the mischief
had happened; a grateful recognition of the
promptitude of their zeal the moment that
there was no longer any remedy.
Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable,
it is my foolish habit to contract a kindness
for them. The better part of my companion's
character, if it have a better part, is that
which usually comes uppermost in my regard,
and forms the type whereby I recognise the
man. As most of these old Custom-House officers
had good traits, and as my position in reference
to them, being paternal and protective, was
favourable to the growth of friendly sentiments,
I soon grew to like them all. It was pleasant
in the summer forenoons—when the fervent
heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the
human family, merely communicated a genial
warmth to their half torpid systems—it was
pleasant to hear them chatting in the back
entry, a row of them all tipped against the
wall, as usual; while the frozen witticisms
of past generations were thawed out, and came
bubbling with laughter from their lips. Externally,
the jollity of aged men has much in common
with the mirth of children; the intellect,
any more than a deep sense of humour, has
little to do with the matter; it is, with
both, a gleam that plays upon the surface,
and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike
to the green branch and grey, mouldering trunk.
In one case, however, it is real sunshine;
in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent
glow of decaying wood.
It would be sad injustice, the reader must
understand, to represent all my excellent
old friends as in their dotage. In the first
place, my coadjutors were not invariably old;
there were men among them in their strength
and prime, of marked ability and energy, and
altogether superior to the sluggish and dependent
mode of life on which their evil stars had
cast them. Then, moreover, the white locks
of age were sometimes found to be the thatch
of an intellectual tenement in good repair.
But, as respects the majority of my corps
of veterans, there will be no wrong done if
I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing
worth preservation from their varied experience
of life. They seemed to have flung away all
the golden grain of practical wisdom, which
they had enjoyed so many opportunities of
harvesting, and most carefully to have stored
their memory with the husks. They spoke with
far more interest and unction of their morning's
breakfast, or yesterday's, to-day's, or tomorrow's
dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or
fifty years ago, and all the world's wonders
which they had witnessed with their youthful
eyes.
The father of the Custom-House—the patriarch,
not only of this little squad of officials,
but, I am bold to say, of the respectable
body of tide-waiters all over the United States—was
a certain permanent Inspector. He might truly
be termed a legitimate son of the revenue
system, dyed in the wool, or rather born in
the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary
colonel, and formerly collector of the port,
had created an office for him, and appointed
him to fill it, at a period of the early ages
which few living men can now remember. This
Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man
of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and certainly
one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green
that you would be likely to discover in a
lifetime's search. With his florid cheek,
his compact figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned
blue coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and
his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he
seemed—not young, indeed—but a kind of
new contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape
of man, whom age and infirmity had no business
to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually
re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing
of the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old
man's utterance; they came strutting out of
his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the
blast of a clarion. Looking at him merely
as an animal—and there was very little else
to look at—he was a most satisfactory object,
from the thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness
of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme
age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights
which he had ever aimed at or conceived of.
The careless security of his life in the Custom-House,
on a regular income, and with but slight and
infrequent apprehensions of removal, had no
doubt contributed to make time pass lightly
over him. The original and more potent causes,
however, lay in the rare perfection of his
animal nature, the moderate proportion of
intellect, and the very trifling admixture
of moral and spiritual ingredients; these
latter qualities, indeed, being in barely
enough measure to keep the old gentleman from
walking on all-fours. He possessed no power
of thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome
sensibilities: nothing, in short, but a few
commonplace instincts, which, aided by the
cheerful temper which grew inevitably out
of his physical well-being, did duty very
respectably, and to general acceptance, in
lieu of a heart. He had been the husband of
three wives, all long since dead; the father
of twenty children, most of whom, at every
age of childhood or maturity, had likewise
returned to dust. Here, one would suppose,
might have been sorrow enough to imbue the
sunniest disposition through and through with
a sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector.
One brief sigh sufficed to carry off the entire
burden of these dismal reminiscences. The
next moment he was as ready for sport as any
unbreeched infant: far readier than the Collector's
junior clerk, who at nineteen years was much
the elder and graver man of the two.
I used to watch and study this patriarchal
personage with, I think, livelier curiosity
than any other form of humanity there presented
to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon;
so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow,
so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute
nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was
that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing,
as I have already said, but instincts; and
yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials
of his character been put together that there
was no painful perception of deficiency, but,
on my part, an entire contentment with what
I found in him. It might be difficult—and
it was so—to conceive how he should exist
hereafter, so earthly and sensuous did he
seem; but surely his existence here, admitting
that it was to terminate with his last breath,
had been not unkindly given; with no higher
moral responsibilities than the beasts of
the field, but with a larger scope of enjoyment
than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity
from the dreariness and duskiness of age.
One point in which he had vastly the advantage
over his four-footed brethren was his ability
to recollect the good dinners which it had
made no small portion of the happiness of
his life to eat. His gourmandism was a highly
agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast
meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster.
As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither
sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment
by devoting all his energies and ingenuities
to subserve the delight and profit of his
maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to
hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's
meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing
them for the table. His reminiscences of good
cheer, however ancient the date of the actual
banquet, seemed to bring the savour of pig
or turkey under one's very nostrils. There
were flavours on his palate that had lingered
there not less than sixty or seventy years,
and were still apparently as fresh as that
of the mutton chop which he had just devoured
for his breakfast. I have heard him smack
his lips over dinners, every guest at which,
except himself, had long been food for worms.
It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts
of bygone meals were continually rising up
before him—not in anger or retribution,
but as if grateful for his former appreciation,
and seeking to reduplicate an endless series
of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual:
a tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal,
a spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken,
or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which
had perhaps adorned his board in the days
of the elder Adams, would be remembered; while
all the subsequent experience of our race,
and all the events that brightened or darkened
his individual career, had gone over him with
as little permanent effect as the passing
breeze. The chief tragic event of the old
man's life, so far as I could judge, was his
mishap with a certain goose, which lived and
died some twenty or forty years ago: a goose
of most promising figure, but which, at table,
proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife
would make no impression on its carcase, and
it could only be divided with an axe and handsaw.
But it is time to quit this sketch; on which,
however, I should be glad to dwell at considerably
more length, because of all men whom I have
ever known, this individual was fittest to
be a Custom-House officer. Most persons, owing
to causes which I may not have space to hint
at, suffer moral detriment from this peculiar
mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable
of it; and, were he to continue in office
to the end of time, would be just as good
as he was then, and sit down to dinner with
just as good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery
of Custom-House portraits would be strangely
incomplete, but which my comparatively few
opportunities for observation enable me to
sketch only in the merest outline. It is that
of the Collector, our gallant old General,
who, after his brilliant military service,
subsequently to which he had ruled over a
wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty
years before, to spend the decline of his
varied and honourable life.
The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly
or quite, his three-score years and ten, and
was pursuing the remainder of his earthly
march, burdened with infirmities which even
the martial music of his own spirit-stirring
recollections could do little towards lightening.
The step was palsied now, that had been foremost
in the charge. It was only with the assistance
of a servant, and by leaning his hand heavily
on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly
and painfully ascend the Custom-House steps,
and, with a toilsome progress across the floor,
attain his customary chair beside the fireplace.
There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat
dim serenity of aspect at the figures that
came and went, amid the rustle of papers,
the administering of oaths, the discussion
of business, and the casual talk of the office;
all which sounds and circumstances seemed
but indistinctly to impress his senses, and
hardly to make their way into his inner sphere
of contemplation. His countenance, in this
repose, was mild and kindly. If his notice
was sought, an expression of courtesy and
interest gleamed out upon his features, proving
that there was light within him, and that
it was only the outward medium of the intellectual
lamp that obstructed the rays in their passage.
The closer you penetrated to the substance
of his mind, the sounder it appeared. When
no longer called upon to speak or listen—either
of which operations cost him an evident effort—his
face would briefly subside into its former
not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful
to behold this look; for, though dim, it had
not the imbecility of decaying age. The framework
of his nature, originally strong and massive,
was not yet crumpled into ruin.
To observe and define his character, however,
under such disadvantages, was as difficult
a task as to trace out and build up anew,
in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga,
from a view of its grey and broken ruins.
Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain
almost complete; but elsewhere may be only
a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very
strength, and overgrown, through long years
of peace and neglect, with grass and alien
weeds.
Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with
affection—for, slight as was the communication
between us, my feeling towards him, like that
of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him,
might not improperly be termed so,—I could
discern the main points of his portrait. It
was marked with the noble and heroic qualities
which showed it to be not a mere accident,
but of good right, that he had won a distinguished
name. His spirit could never, I conceive,
have been characterized by an uneasy activity;
it must, at any period of his life, have required
an impulse to set him in motion; but once
stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and
an adequate object to be attained, it was
not in the man to give out or fail. The heat
that had formerly pervaded his nature, and
which was not yet extinct, was never of the
kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze;
but rather a deep red glow, as of iron in
a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness—this
was the expression of his repose, even in
such decay as had crept untimely over him
at the period of which I speak. But I could
imagine, even then, that, under some excitement
which should go deeply into his consciousness—roused
by a trumpet's peal, loud enough to awaken
all of his energies that were not dead, but
only slumbering—he was yet capable of flinging
off his infirmities like a sick man's gown,
dropping the staff of age to seize a battle-sword,
and starting up once more a warrior. And,
in so intense a moment his demeanour would
have still been calm. Such an exhibition,
however, was but to be pictured in fancy;
not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I
saw in him—as evidently as the indestructible
ramparts of Old Ticonderoga, already cited
as the most appropriate simile—was the features
of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which
might well have amounted to obstinacy in his
earlier days; of integrity, that, like most
of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat
heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable or
unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of
benevolence which, fiercely as he led the
bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take
to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what
actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists
of the age. He had slain men with his own
hand, for aught I know—certainly, they had
fallen like blades of grass at the sweep of
the scythe before the charge to which his
spirit imparted its triumphant energy—but,
be that as it might, there was never in his
heart so much cruelty as would have brushed
the down off a butterfly's wing. I have not
known the man to whose innate kindliness I
would more confidently make an appeal.
Many characteristics—and those, too, which
contribute not the least forcibly to impart
resemblance in a sketch—must have vanished,
or been obscured, before I met the General.
All merely graceful attributes are usually
the most evanescent; nor does nature adorn
the human ruin with blossoms of new beauty,
that have their roots and proper nutriment
only in the chinks and crevices of decay,
as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined fortress
of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of
grace and beauty, there were points well worth
noting. A ray of humour, now and then, would
make its way through the veil of dim obstruction,
and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait
of native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine
character after childhood or early youth,
was shown in the General's fondness for the
sight and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier
might be supposed to prize only the bloody
laurel on his brow; but here was one who seemed
to have a young girl's appreciation of the
floral tribe.
There, beside the fireplace, the brave old
General used to sit; while the Surveyor—though
seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon
himself the difficult task of engaging him
in conversation—was fond of standing at
a distance, and watching his quiet and almost
slumberous countenance. He seemed away from
us, although we saw him but a few yards off;
remote, though we passed close beside his
chair; unattainable, though we might have
stretched forth our hands and touched his
own. It might be that he lived a more real
life within his thoughts than amid the unappropriate
environment of the Collector's office. The
evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the
battle; the flourish of old heroic music,
heard thirty years before—such scenes and
sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his
intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants
and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and uncouth
sailors, entered and departed; the bustle
of his commercial and Custom-House life kept
up its little murmur round about him; and
neither with the men nor their affairs did
the General appear to sustain the most distant
relation. He was as much out of place as an
old sword—now rusty, but which had flashed
once in the battle's front, and showed still
a bright gleam along its blade—would have
been among the inkstands, paper-folders, and
mahogany rulers on the Deputy Collector's
desk.
There was one thing that much aided me in
renewing and re-creating the stalwart soldier
of the Niagara frontier—the man of true
and simple energy. It was the recollection
of those memorable words of his—"I'll try,
Sir"—spoken on the very verge of a desperate
and heroic enterprise, and breathing the soul
and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending
all perils, and encountering all. If, in our
country, valour were rewarded by heraldic
honour, this phrase—which it seems so easy
to speak, but which only he, with such a task
of danger and glory before him, has ever spoken—would
be the best and fittest of all mottoes for
the General's shield of arms.
It contributes greatly towards a man's moral
and intellectual health to be brought into
habits of companionship with individuals unlike
himself, who care little for his pursuits,
and whose sphere and abilities he must go
out of himself to appreciate. The accidents
of my life have often afforded me this advantage,
but never with more fulness and variety than
during my continuance in office. There was
one man, especially, the observation of whose
character gave me a new idea of talent. His
gifts were emphatically those of a man of
business; prompt, acute, clear-minded; with
an eye that saw through all perplexities,
and a faculty of arrangement that made them
vanish as by the waving of an enchanter's
wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House,
it was his proper field of activity; and the
many intricacies of business, so harassing
to the interloper, presented themselves before
him with the regularity of a perfectly comprehended
system. In my contemplation, he stood as the
ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House
in himself; or, at all events, the mainspring
that kept its variously revolving wheels in
motion; for, in an institution like this,
where its officers are appointed to subserve
their own profit and convenience, and seldom
with a leading reference to their fitness
for the duty to be performed, they must perforce
seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not
in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity,
as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did
our man of business draw to himself the difficulties
which everybody met with. With an easy condescension,
and kind forbearance towards our stupidity—which,
to his order of mind, must have seemed little
short of crime—would he forth-with, by the
merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible
as clear as daylight. The merchants valued
him not less than we, his esoteric friends.
His integrity was perfect; it was a law of
nature with him, rather than a choice or a
principle; nor can it be otherwise than the
main condition of an intellect so remarkably
clear and accurate as his to be honest and
regular in the administration of affairs.
A stain on his conscience, as to anything
that came within the range of his vocation,
would trouble such a man very much in the
same way, though to a far greater degree,
than an error in the balance of an account,
or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book
of record. Here, in a word—and it is a rare
instance in my life—I had met with a person
thoroughly adapted to the situation which
he held.
Such were some of the people with whom I now
found myself connected. I took it in good
part, at the hands of Providence, that I was
thrown into a position so little akin to my
past habits; and set myself seriously to gather
from it whatever profit was to be had. After
my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes
with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after
living for three years within the subtle influence
of an intellect like Emerson's; after those
wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging
fantastic speculations, beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after
talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and
Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden;
after growing fastidious by sympathy with
the classic refinement of Hillard's culture;
after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment
at Longfellow's hearthstone—it was time,
at length, that I should exercise other faculties
of my nature, and nourish myself with food
for which I had hitherto had little appetite.
Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a
change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott.
I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure,
of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking
no essential part of a thorough organization,
that, with such associates to remember, I
could mingle at once with men of altogether
different qualities, and never murmur at the
change.
Literature, its exertions and objects, were
now of little moment in my regard. I cared
not at this period for books; they were apart
from me. Nature—except it were human nature—the
nature that is developed in earth and sky,
was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all
the imaginative delight wherewith it had been
spiritualized passed away out of my mind.
A gift, a faculty, if it had not been departed,
was suspended and inanimate within me. There
would have been something sad, unutterably
dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious
that it lay at my own option to recall whatever
was valuable in the past. It might be true,
indeed, that this was a life which could not,
with impunity, be lived too long; else, it
might make me permanently other than I had
been, without transforming me into any shape
which it would be worth my while to take.
But I never considered it as other than a
transitory life. There was always a prophetic
instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that within
no long period, and whenever a new change
of custom should be essential to my good,
change would come.
Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the
Revenue and, so far as I have been able to
understand, as good a Surveyor as need be.
A man of thought, fancy, and sensibility (had
he ten times the Surveyor's proportion of
those qualities), may, at any time, be a man
of affairs, if he will only choose to give
himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and
the merchants and sea-captains with whom my
official duties brought me into any manner
of connection, viewed me in no other light,
and probably knew me in no other character.
None of them, I presume, had ever read a page
of my inditing, or would have cared a fig
the more for me if they had read them all;
nor would it have mended the matter, in the
least, had those same unprofitable pages been
written with a pen like that of Burns or of
Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House officer
in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though
it may often be a hard one—for a man who
has dreamed of literary fame, and of making
for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries
by such means, to step aside out of the narrow
circle in which his claims are recognized
and to find how utterly devoid of significance,
beyond that circle, is all that he achieves,
and all he aims at. I know not that I especially
needed the lesson, either in the way of warning
or rebuke; but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly:
nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did
the truth, as it came home to my perception,
ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown
off in a sigh. In the way of literary talk,
it is true, the Naval Officer—an excellent
fellow, who came into the office with me,
and went out only a little later—would often
engage me in a discussion about one or the
other of his favourite topics, Napoleon or
Shakespeare. The Collector's junior clerk,
too a young gentleman who, it was whispered
occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle Sam's
letter paper with what (at the distance of
a few yards) looked very much like poetry—used
now and then to speak to me of books, as matters
with which I might possibly be conversant.
This was my all of lettered intercourse; and
it was quite sufficient for my necessities.
No longer seeking nor caring that my name
should be blasoned abroad on title-pages,
I smiled to think that it had now another
kind of vogue. The Custom-House marker imprinted
it, with a stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags,
and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and
bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise,
in testimony that these commodities had paid
the impost, and gone regularly through the
office. Borne on such queer vehicle of fame,
a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name
conveys it, was carried where it had never
been before, and, I hope, will never go again.
But the past was not dead. Once in a great
while, the thoughts that had seemed so vital
and so active, yet had been put to rest so
quietly, revived again. One of the most remarkable
occasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke
in me, was that which brings it within the
law of literary propriety to offer the public
the sketch which I am now writing.
In the second storey of the Custom-House there
is a large room, in which the brick-work and
naked rafters have never been covered with
panelling and plaster. The edifice—originally
projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial
enterprise of the port, and with an idea of
subsequent prosperity destined never to be
realized—contains far more space than its
occupants know what to do with. This airy
hall, therefore, over the Collector's apartments,
remains unfinished to this day, and, in spite
of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky
beams, appears still to await the labour of
the carpenter and mason. At one end of the
room, in a recess, were a number of barrels
piled one upon another, containing bundles
of official documents. Large quantities of
similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It
was sorrowful to think how many days, and
weeks, and months, and years of toil had been
wasted on these musty papers, which were now
only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden
away in this forgotten corner, never more
to be glanced at by human eyes. But then,
what reams of other manuscripts—filled,
not with the dulness of official formalities,
but with the thought of inventive brains and
the rich effusion of deep hearts—had gone
equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without
serving a purpose in their day, as these heaped-up
papers had, and—saddest of all—without
purchasing for their writers the comfortable
livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House
had gained by these worthless scratchings
of the pen. Yet not altogether worthless,
perhaps, as materials of local history. Here,
no doubt, statistics of the former commerce
of Salem might be discovered, and memorials
of her princely merchants—old King Derby—old
Billy Gray—old Simon Forrester—and many
another magnate in his day, whose powdered
head, however, was scarcely in the tomb before
his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle.
The founders of the greater part of the families
which now compose the aristocracy of Salem
might here be traced, from the petty and obscure
beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally
much posterior to the Revolution, upward to
what their children look upon as long-established
rank.
Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth
of records; the earlier documents and archives
of the Custom-House having, probably, been
carried off to Halifax, when all the king's
officials accompanied the British army in
its flight from Boston. It has often been
a matter of regret with me; for, going back,
perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate,
those papers must have contained many references
to forgotten or remembered men, and to antique
customs, which would have affected me with
the same pleasure as when I used to pick up
Indian arrow-heads in the field near the Old
Manse.
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune
to make a discovery of some little interest.
Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish
in the corner, unfolding one and another document,
and reading the names of vessels that had
long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the
wharves, and those of merchants never heard
of now on 'Change, nor very readily decipherable
on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such
matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant
interest which we bestow on the corpse of
dead activity—and exerting my fancy, sluggish
with little use, to raise up from these dry
bones an image of the old town's brighter
aspect, when India was a new region, and only
Salem knew the way thither—I chanced to
lay my hand on a small package, carefully
done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment.
This envelope had the air of an official record
of some period long past, when clerks engrossed
their stiff and formal chirography on more
substantial materials than at present. There
was something about it that quickened an instinctive
curiosity, and made me undo the faded red
tape that tied up the package, with the sense
that a treasure would here be brought to light.
Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment
cover, I found it to be a commission, under
the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in
favour of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of
His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem,
in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered
to have read (probably in Felt's "Annals")
a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue,
about fourscore years ago; and likewise, in
a newspaper of recent times, an account of
the digging up of his remains in the little
graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the
renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly
call to mind, was left of my respected predecessor,
save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments
of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle,
which, unlike the head that it once adorned,
was in very satisfactory preservation. But,
on examining the papers which the parchment
commission served to envelop, I found more
traces of Mr. Pue's mental part, and the internal
operations of his head, than the frizzled
wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.
They were documents, in short, not official,
but of a private nature, or, at least, written
in his private capacity, and apparently with
his own hand. I could account for their being
included in the heap of Custom-House lumber
only by the fact that Mr. Pue's death had
happened suddenly, and that these papers,
which he probably kept in his official desk,
had never come to the knowledge of his heirs,
or were supposed to relate to the business
of the revenue. On the transfer of the archives
to Halifax, this package, proving to be of
no public concern, was left behind, and had
remained ever since unopened.
The ancient Surveyor—being little molested,
I suppose, at that early day with business
pertaining to his office—seems to have devoted
some of his many leisure hours to researches
as a local antiquarian, and other inquisitions
of a similar nature. These supplied material
for petty activity to a mind that would otherwise
have been eaten up with rust.
A portion of his facts, by-the-by, did me
good service in the preparation of the article
entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present
volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied
to purposes equally valuable hereafter, or
not impossibly may be worked up, so far as
they go, into a regular history of Salem,
should my veneration for the natal soil ever
impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they
shall be at the command of any gentleman,
inclined and competent, to take the unprofitable
labour off my hands. As a final disposition
I contemplate depositing them with the Essex
Historical Society. But the object that most
drew my attention to the mysterious package
was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much
worn and faded, There were traces about it
of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly
frayed and defaced, so that none, or very
little, of the glitter was left. It had been
wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful
skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I
am assured by ladies conversant with such
mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten
art, not to be discovered even by the process
of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet
cloth—for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious
moth had reduced it to little other than a
rag—on careful examination, assumed the
shape of a letter.
It was the capital letter A. By an accurate
measurement, each limb proved to be precisely
three inches and a quarter in length. It had
been intended, there could be no doubt, as
an ornamental article of dress; but how it
was to be worn, or what rank, honour, and
dignity, in by-past times, were signified
by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are
the fashions of the world in these particulars)
I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely
interested me. My eyes fastened themselves
upon the old scarlet letter, and would not
be turned aside. Certainly there was some
deep meaning in it most worthy of interpretation,
and which, as it were, streamed forth from
the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself
to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis
of my mind.
When thus perplexed—and cogitating, among
other hypotheses, whether the letter might
not have been one of those decorations which
the white men used to contrive in order to
take the eyes of Indians—I happened to place
it on my breast. It seemed to me—the reader
may smile, but must not doubt my word—it
seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation
not altogether physical, yet almost so, as
of burning heat, and as if the letter were
not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered,
and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.
In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet
letter, I had hitherto neglected to examine
a small roll of dingy paper, around which
it had been twisted. This I now opened, and
had the satisfaction to find recorded by the
old Surveyor's pen, a reasonably complete
explanation of the whole affair. There were
several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars
respecting the life and conversation of one
Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been rather
a noteworthy personage in the view of our
ancestors. She had flourished during the period
between the early days of Massachusetts and
the close of the seventeenth century. Aged
persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor
Pue, and from whose oral testimony he had
made up his narrative, remembered her, in
their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit
woman, of a stately and solemn aspect. It
had been her habit, from an almost immemorial
date, to go about the country as a kind of
voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous
good she might; taking upon herself, likewise,
to give advice in all matters, especially
those of the heart, by which means—as a
person of such propensities inevitably must—she
gained from many people the reverence due
to an angel, but, I should imagine, was looked
upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance.
Prying further into the manuscript, I found
the record of other doings and sufferings
of this singular woman, for most of which
the reader is referred to the story entitled
"THE SCARLET LETTER"; and it should be borne
carefully in mind that the main facts of that
story are authorized and authenticated by
the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The original
papers, together with the scarlet letter itself—a
most curious relic—are still in my possession,
and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever,
induced by the great interest of the narrative,
may desire a sight of them. I must not be
understood affirming that, in the dressing
up of the tale, and imagining the motives
and modes of passion that influenced the characters
who figure in it, I have invariably confined
myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's
half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary,
I have allowed myself, as to such points,
nearly, or altogether, as much license as
if the facts had been entirely of my own invention.
What I contend for is the authenticity of
the outline.
This incident recalled my mind, in some degree,
to its old track. There seemed to be here
the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me
as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of
a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal
wig—which was buried with him, but did not
perish in the grave—had met me in the deserted
chamber of the Custom-House. In his port was
the dignity of one who had borne His Majesty's
commission, and who was therefore illuminated
by a ray of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly
about the throne. How unlike alas the hangdog
look of a republican official, who, as the
servant of the people, feels himself less
than the least, and below the lowest of his
masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely
seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to
me the scarlet symbol and the little roll
of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly
voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration
of my filial duty and reverence towards him—who
might reasonably regard himself as my official
ancestor—to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten
lucubrations before the public. "Do this,"
said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically
nodding the head that looked so imposing within
its memorable wig; "do this, and the profit
shall be all your own. You will shortly need
it; for it is not in your days as it was in
mine, when a man's office was a life-lease,
and oftentimes an heirloom. But I charge you,
in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give
to your predecessor's memory the credit which
will be rightfully due" And I said to the
ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue—"I will".
On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed
much thought. It was the subject of my meditations
for many an hour, while pacing to and fro
across my room, or traversing, with a hundredfold
repetition, the long extent from the front
door of the Custom-House to the side entrance,
and back again. Great were the weariness and
annoyance of the old Inspector and the Weighers
and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed
by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my
passing and returning footsteps. Remembering
their own former habits, they used to say
that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck.
They probably fancied that my sole object—and,
indeed, the sole object for which a sane man
could ever put himself into voluntary motion—was
to get an appetite for dinner. And, to say
the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east
wind that generally blew along the passage,
was the only valuable result of so much indefatigable
exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere
of a Custom-house to the delicate harvest
of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained
there through ten Presidencies yet to come,
I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter"
would ever have been brought before the public
eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror.
It would not reflect, or only with miserable
dimness, the figures with which I did my best
to people it. The characters of the narrative
would not be warmed and rendered malleable
by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual
forge. They would take neither the glow of
passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but
retained all the rigidity of dead corpses,
and stared me in the face with a fixed and
ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What
have you to do with us?" that expression seemed
to say. "The little power you might have once
possessed over the tribe of unrealities is
gone! You have bartered it for a pittance
of the public gold. Go then, and earn your
wages!" In short, the almost torpid creatures
of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility,
and not without fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and
a half which Uncle Sam claimed as his share
of my daily life that this wretched numbness
held possession of me. It went with me on
my sea-shore walks and rambles into the country,
whenever—which was seldom and reluctantly—I
bestirred myself to seek that invigorating
charm of Nature which used to give me such
freshness and activity of thought, the moment
that I stepped across the threshold of the
Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the
capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied
me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber
which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor
did it quit me when, late at night, I sat
in the deserted parlour, lighted only by the
glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving
to picture forth imaginary scenes, which,
the next day, might flow out on the brightening
page in many-hued description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act
at such an hour, it might well be deemed a
hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room,
falling so white upon the carpet, and showing
all its figures so distinctly—making every
object so minutely visible, yet so unlike
a morning or noontide visibility—is a medium
the most suitable for a romance-writer to
get acquainted with his illusive guests. There
is the little domestic scenery of the well-known
apartment; the chairs, with each its separate
individuality; the centre-table, sustaining
a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished
lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture
on the wall—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual
light, that they seem to lose their actual
substance, and become things of intellect.
Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo
this change, and acquire dignity thereby.
A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little
wicker carriage; the hobby-horse—whatever,
in a word, has been used or played with during
the day is now invested with a quality of
strangeness and remoteness, though still almost
as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore,
the floor of our familiar room has become
a neutral territory, somewhere between the
real world and fairy-land, where the Actual
and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue
itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts
might enter here without affrighting us. It
would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about
us and discover a form, beloved, but gone
hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of
this magic moonshine, with an aspect that
would make us doubt whether it had returned
from afar, or had never once stirred from
our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential
Influence in producing the effect which I
would describe. It throws its unobtrusive
tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness
upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected
gleam upon the polish of the furniture. This
warmer light mingles itself with the cold
spirituality of the moon-beams, and communicates,
as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human
tenderness to the forms which fancy summons
up. It converts them from snow-images into
men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass,
we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the
smouldering glow of the half-extinguished
anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor,
and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow
of the picture, with one remove further from
the actual, and nearer to the imaginative.
Then, at such an hour, and with this scene
before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot
dream strange things, and make them look like
truth, he need never try to write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House
experience, moonlight and sunshine, and the
glow of firelight, were just alike in my regard;
and neither of them was of one whit more avail
than the twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire
class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected
with them—of no great richness or value,
but the best I had—was gone from me.
It is my belief, however, that had I attempted
a different order of composition, my faculties
would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have
contented myself with writing out the narratives
of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors,
whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention,
since scarcely a day passed that he did not
stir me to laughter and admiration by his
marvelous gifts as a story-teller. Could I
have preserved the picturesque force of his
style, and the humourous colouring which nature
taught him how to throw over his descriptions,
the result, I honestly believe, would have
been something new in literature. Or I might
readily have found a more serious task. It
was a folly, with the materiality of this
daily life pressing so intrusively upon me,
to attempt to fling myself back into another
age, or to insist on creating the semblance
of a world out of airy matter, when, at every
moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble
was broken by the rude contact of some actual
circumstance. The wiser effort would have
been to diffuse thought and imagination through
the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to
make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise
the burden that began to weigh so heavily;
to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible
value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome
incidents, and ordinary characters with which
I was now conversant. The fault was mine.
The page of life that was spread out before
me seemed dull and commonplace only because
I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better
book than I shall ever write was there; leaf
after leaf presenting itself to me, just as
it was written out by the reality of the flitting
hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only
because my brain wanted the insight, and my
hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At some
future day, it may be, I shall remember a
few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs,
and write them down, and find the letters
turn to gold upon the page.
These perceptions had come too late. At the
Instant, I was only conscious that what would
have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless
toil. There was no occasion to make much moan
about this state of affairs. I had ceased
to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and
essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor
of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless,
it is anything but agreeable to be haunted
by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling
away, or exhaling, without your consciousness,
like ether out of a phial; so that, at every
glance, you find a smaller and less volatile
residuum. Of the fact there could be no doubt
and, examining myself and others, I was led
to conclusions, in reference to the effect
of public office on the character, not very
favourable to the mode of life in question.
In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter
develop these effects. Suffice it here to
say that a Custom-House officer of long continuance
can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable
personage, for many reasons; one of them,
the tenure by which he holds his situation,
and another, the very nature of his business,
which—though, I trust, an honest one—is
of such a sort that he does not share in the
united effort of mankind.
An effect—which I believe to be observable,
more or less, in every individual who has
occupied the position—is, that while he
leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his
own proper strength departs from him. He loses,
in an extent proportioned to the weakness
or force of his original nature, the capability
of self-support. If he possesses an unusual
share of native energy, or the enervating
magic of place do not operate too long upon
him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable.
The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly
shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle
amid a struggling world—may return to himself,
and become all that he has ever been. But
this seldom happens. He usually keeps his
ground just long enough for his own ruin,
and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung,
to totter along the difficult footpath of
life as he best may. Conscious of his own
infirmity—that his tempered steel and elasticity
are lost—he for ever afterwards looks wistfully
about him in quest of support external to
himself. His pervading and continual hope—a
hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement,
and making light of impossibilities, haunts
him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the
convulsive throes of the cholera, torments
him for a brief space after death—is, that
finally, and in no long time, by some happy
coincidence of circumstances, he shall be
restored to office. This faith, more than
anything else, steals the pith and availability
out of whatever enterprise he may dream of
undertaking. Why should he toil and moil,
and be at so much trouble to pick himself
up out of the mud, when, in a little while
hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise
and support him? Why should he work for his
living here, or go to dig gold in California,
when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly
intervals, with a little pile of glittering
coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly
curious to observe how slight a taste of office
suffices to infect a poor fellow with this
singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold—meaning
no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman—has,
in this respect, a quality of enchantment
like that of the devil's wages. Whoever touches
it should look well to himself, or he may
find the bargain to go hard against him, involving,
if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes;
its sturdy force, its courage and constancy,
its truth, its self-reliance, and all that
gives the emphasis to manly character.
Here was a fine prospect in the distance.
Not that the Surveyor brought the lesson home
to himself, or admitted that he could be so
utterly undone, either by continuance in office
or ejectment. Yet my reflections were not
the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy
and restless; continually prying into my mind,
to discover which of its poor properties were
gone, and what degree of detriment had already
accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to
calculate how much longer I could stay in
the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man.
To confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension—as
it would never be a measure of policy to turn
out so quiet an individual as myself; and
it being hardly in the nature of a public
officer to resign—it was my chief trouble,
therefore, that I was likely to grow grey
and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become
much such another animal as the old Inspector.
Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official
life that lay before me, finally be with me
as it was with this venerable friend—to
make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day,
and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog
spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the
shade? A dreary look-forward, this, for a
man who felt it to be the best definition
of happiness to live throughout the whole
range of his faculties and sensibilities.
But, all this while, I was giving myself very
unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated
better things for me than I could possibly
imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my
Surveyorship—to adopt the tone of "P. P.
"—was the election of General Taylor to
the Presidency. It is essential, in order
to form a complete estimate of the advantages
of official life, to view the incumbent at
the in-coming of a hostile administration.
His position is then one of the most singularly
irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable,
that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy;
with seldom an alternative of good on either
hand, although what presents itself to him
as the worst event may very probably be the
best. But it is a strange experience, to a
man of pride and sensibility, to know that
his interests are within the control of individuals
who neither love nor understand him, and by
whom, since one or the other must needs happen,
he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange,
too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout
the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness
that is developed in the hour of triumph,
and to be conscious that he is himself among
its objects! There are few uglier traits of
human nature than this tendency—which I
now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours—to
grow cruel, merely because they possessed
the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine,
as applied to office-holders, were a literal
fact, instead of one of the most apt of metaphors,
it is my sincere belief that the active members
of the victorious party were sufficiently
excited to have chopped off all our heads,
and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity!
It appears to me—who have been a calm and
curious observer, as well in victory as defeat—that
this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and
revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs
of my own party as it now did that of the
Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as
a general rule, because they need them, and
because the practice of many years has made
it the law of political warfare, which unless
a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness
and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit
of victory has made them generous. They know
how to spare when they see occasion; and when
they strike, the axe may be sharp indeed,
but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will;
nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick
the head which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament,
at best, I saw much reason to congratulate
myself that I was on the losing side rather
than the triumphant one. If, heretofore, I
had been none of the warmest of partisans
I began now, at this season of peril and adversity,
to be pretty acutely sensible with which party
my predilections lay; nor was it without something
like regret and shame that, according to a
reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my
own prospect of retaining office to be better
than those of my democratic brethren. But
who can see an inch into futurity beyond his
nose? My own head was the first that fell.
The moment when a man's head drops off is
seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely
the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless,
like the greater part of our misfortunes,
even so serious a contingency brings its remedy
and consolation with it, if the sufferer will
but make the best rather than the worst, of
the accident which has befallen him. In my
particular case the consolatory topics were
close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested
themselves to my meditations a considerable
time before it was requisite to use them.
In view of my previous weariness of office,
and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune
somewhat resembled that of a person who should
entertain an idea of committing suicide, and
although beyond his hopes, meet with the good
hap to be murdered. In the Custom-House, as
before in the Old Manse, I had spent three
years—a term long enough to rest a weary
brain: long enough to break off old intellectual
habits, and make room for new ones: long enough,
and too long, to have lived in an unnatural
state, doing what was really of no advantage
nor delight to any human being, and withholding
myself from toil that would, at least, have
stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover,
as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, the
late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased
to be recognised by the Whigs as an enemy;
since his inactivity in political affairs—his
tendency to roam, at will, in that broad and
quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather
than confine himself to those narrow paths
where brethren of the same household must
diverge from one another—had sometimes made
it questionable with his brother Democrats
whether he was a friend. Now, after he had
won the crown of martyrdom (though with no
longer a head to wear it on), the point might
be looked upon as settled. Finally, little
heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous
to be overthrown in the downfall of the party
with which he had been content to stand than
to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many
worthier men were falling: and at last, after
subsisting for four years on the mercy of
a hostile administration, to be compelled
then to define his position anew, and claim
the yet more humiliating mercy of a friendly
one.
Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair,
and kept me for a week or two careering through
the public prints, in my decapitated state,
like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and
grim, and longing to be buried, as a political
dead man ought. So much for my figurative
self. The real human being all this time,
with his head safely on his shoulders, had
brought himself to the comfortable conclusion
that everything was for the best; and making
an investment in ink, paper, and steel pens,
had opened his long-disused writing desk,
and was again a literary man.
Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient
predecessor, Mr. Surveyor Pue, came into play.
Rusty through long idleness, some little space
was requisite before my intellectual machinery
could be brought to work upon the tale with
an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much
absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye,
a stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened
by genial sunshine; too little relieved by
the tender and familiar influences which soften
almost every scene of nature and real life,
and undoubtedly should soften every picture
of them. This uncaptivating effect is perhaps
due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution,
and still seething turmoil, in which the story
shaped itself. It is no indication, however,
of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer's
mind: for he was happier while straying through
the gloom of these sunless fantasies than
at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse.
Some of the briefer articles, which contribute
to make up the volume, have likewise been
written since my involuntary withdrawal from
the toils and honours of public life, and
the remainder are gleaned from annuals and
magazines, of such antique date, that they
have gone round the circle, and come back
to novelty again. Keeping up the metaphor
of the political guillotine, the whole may
be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF
A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: and the sketch which
I am now bringing to a close, if too autobiographical
for a modest person to publish in his lifetime,
will readily be excused in a gentleman who
writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with
all the world! My blessing on my friends!
My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in
the realm of quiet!
The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream
behind me. The old Inspector—who, by-the-bye,
I regret to say, was overthrown and killed
by a horse some time ago, else he would certainly
have lived for ever—he, and all those other
venerable personages who sat with him at the
receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view:
white-headed and wrinkled images, which my
fancy used to sport with, and has now flung
aside for ever. The merchants—Pingree, Phillips,
Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt—these
and many other names, which had such classic
familiarity for my ear six months ago,—these
men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important
a position in the world—how little time
has it required to disconnect me from them
all, not merely in act, but recollection!
It is with an effort that I recall the figures
and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise,
my old native town will loom upon me through
the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and
around it; as if it were no portion of the
real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land,
with only imaginary inhabitants to people
its wooden houses and walk its homely lanes,
and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main
street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality
of my life; I am a citizen of somewhere else.
My good townspeople will not much regret me,
for—though it has been as dear an object
as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some
importance in their eyes, and to win myself
a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place
of so many of my forefathers—there has never
been, for me, the genial atmosphere which
a literary man requires in order to ripen
the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better
amongst other faces; and these familiar ones,
it need hardly be said, will do just as well
without me.
It may be, however—oh, transporting and
triumphant thought—that the great-grandchildren
of the present race may sometimes think kindly
of the scribbler of bygone days, when the
antiquary of days to come, among the sites
memorable in the town's history, shall point
out the locality of THE TOWN PUMP.
THE SCARLET LETTER
I. THE PRISON DOOR
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments
and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed
with women, some wearing hoods, and others
bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden
edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered
with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia
of human virtue and happiness they might originally
project, have invariably recognised it among
their earliest practical necessities to allot
a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery,
and another portion as the site of a prison.
In accordance with this rule it may safely
be assumed that the forefathers of Boston
had built the first prison-house somewhere
in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably
as they marked out the first burial-ground,
on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his
grave, which subsequently became the nucleus
of all the congregated sepulchres in the old
churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is
that, some fifteen or twenty years after the
settlement of the town, the wooden jail was
already marked with weather-stains and other
indications of age, which gave a yet darker
aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front.
The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its
oaken door looked more antique than anything
else in the New World. Like all that pertains
to crime, it seemed never to have known a
youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and
between it and the wheel-track of the street,
was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock,
pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation,
which evidently found something congenial
in the soil that had so early borne the black
flower of civilised society, a prison. But
on one side of the portal, and rooted almost
at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered,
in this month of June, with its delicate gems,
which might be imagined to offer their fragrance
and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went
in, and to the condemned criminal as he came
forth to his doom, in token that the deep
heart of Nature could pity and be kind to
him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been
kept alive in history; but whether it had
merely survived out of the stern old wilderness,
so long after the fall of the gigantic pines
and oaks that originally overshadowed it,
or whether, as there is fair authority for
believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps
of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered
the prison-door, we shall not take upon us
to determine. Finding it so directly on the
threshold of our narrative, which is now about
to issue from that inauspicious portal, we
could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of
its flowers, and present it to the reader.
It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some
sweet moral blossom that may be found along
the track, or relieve the darkening close
of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
II. THE MARKET-PLACE
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison
Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less
than two centuries ago, was occupied by a
pretty large number of the inhabitants of
Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened
on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any
other population, or at a later period in
the history of New England, the grim rigidity
that petrified the bearded physiognomies of
these good people would have augured some
awful business in hand. It could have betokened
nothing short of the anticipated execution
of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence
of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the
verdict of public sentiment. But, in that
early severity of the Puritan character, an
inference of this kind could not so indubitably
be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant,
or an undutiful child, whom his parents had
given over to the civil authority, was to
be corrected at the whipping-post. It might
be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other
heterodox religionist, was to be scourged
out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian,
whom the white man's firewater had made riotous
about the streets, was to be driven with stripes
into the shadow of the forest. It might be,
too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins,
the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate,
was to die upon the gallows. In either case,
there was very much the same solemnity of
demeanour on the part of the spectators, as
befitted a people among whom religion and
law were almost identical, and in whose character
both were so thoroughly interfused, that the
mildest and severest acts of public discipline
were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre,
indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a
transgressor might look for, from such bystanders,
at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty
which, in our days, would infer a degree of
mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be
invested with almost as stern a dignity as
the punishment of death itself.
It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer
morning when our story begins its course,
that the women, of whom there were several
in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar
interest in whatever penal infliction might
be expected to ensue. The age had not so much
refinement, that any sense of impropriety
restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale
from stepping forth into the public ways,
and wedging their not unsubstantial persons,
if occasion were, into the throng nearest
to the scaffold at an execution. Morally,
as well as materially, there was a coarser
fibre in those wives and maidens of old English
birth and breeding than in their fair descendants,
separated from them by a series of six or
seven generations; for, throughout that chain
of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted
to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate
and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical
frame, if not character of less force and
solidity than her own. The women who were
now standing about the prison-door stood within
less than half a century of the period when
the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether
unsuitable representative of the sex. They
were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale
of their native land, with a moral diet not
a whit more refined, entered largely into
their composition. The bright morning sun,
therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed
busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that
had ripened in the far-off island, and had
hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere
of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness
and rotundity of speech among these matrons,
as most of them seemed to be, that would startle
us at the present day, whether in respect
to its purport or its volume of tone.
"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of
fifty, "I'll tell ye a piece of my mind. It
would be greatly for the public behoof if
we women, being of mature age and church-members
in good repute, should have the handling of
such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne.
What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood
up for judgment before us five, that are now
here in a knot together, would she come off
with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates
have awarded? Marry, I trow not."
"People say," said another, "that the Reverend
Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes
it very grievously to heart that such a scandal
should have come upon his congregation."
"The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen,
but merciful overmuch—that is a truth,"
added a third autumnal matron. "At the very
least, they should have put the brand of a
hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead. Madame
Hester would have winced at that, I warrant
me. But she—the naughty baggage—little
will she care what they put upon the bodice
of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover
it with a brooch, or such like heathenish
adornment, and so walk the streets as brave
as ever!"
"Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young
wife, holding a child by the hand, "let her
cover the mark as she will, the pang of it
will be always in her heart."
"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether
on the bodice of her gown or the flesh of
her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest
as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted
judges. "This woman has brought shame upon
us all, and ought to die; is there not law
for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture
and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates,
who have made it of no effect, thank themselves
if their own wives and daughters go astray."
"Mercy on us, goodwife!" exclaimed a man in
the crowd, "is there no virtue in woman, save
what springs from a wholesome fear of the
gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush
now, gossips for the lock is turning in the
prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne
herself."
The door of the jail being flung open from
within there appeared, in the first place,
like a black shadow emerging into sunshine,
the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle,
with a sword by his side, and his staff of
office in his hand. This personage prefigured
and represented in his aspect the whole dismal
severity of the Puritanic code of law, which
it was his business to administer in its final
and closest application to the offender. Stretching
forth the official staff in his left hand,
he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young
woman, whom he thus drew forward, until, on
the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled
him, by an action marked with natural dignity
and force of character, and stepped into the
open air as if by her own free will. She bore
in her arms a child, a baby of some three
months old, who winked and turned aside its
little face from the too vivid light of day;
because its existence, heretofore, had brought
it acquaintance only with the grey twilight
of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment
of the prison.
When the young woman—the mother of this
child—stood fully revealed before the crowd,
it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp
the infant closely to her bosom; not so much
by an impulse of motherly affection, as that
she might thereby conceal a certain token,
which was wrought or fastened into her dress.
In a moment, however, wisely judging that
one token of her shame would but poorly serve
to hide another, she took the baby on her
arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty
smile, and a glance that would not be abashed,
looked around at her townspeople and neighbours.
On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth,
surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and
fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared
the letter A. It was so artistically done,
and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance
of fancy, that it had all the effect of a
last and fitting decoration to the apparel
which she wore, and which was of a splendour
in accordance with the taste of the age, but
greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary
regulations of the colony.
The young woman was tall, with a figure of
perfect elegance on a large scale. She had
dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it
threw off the sunshine with a gleam; and a
face which, besides being beautiful from regularity
of feature and richness of complexion, had
the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow
and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too,
after the manner of the feminine gentility
of those days; characterised by a certain
state and dignity, rather than by the delicate,
evanescent, and indescribable grace which
is now recognised as its indication. And never
had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike,
in the antique interpretation of the term,
than as she issued from the prison. Those
who had before known her, and had expected
to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous
cloud, were astonished, and even startled,
to perceive how her beauty shone out, and
made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy
in which she was enveloped. It may be true
that, to a sensitive observer, there was some
thing exquisitely painful in it. Her attire,
which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion
in prison, and had modelled much after her
own fancy, seemed to express the attitude
of her spirit, the desperate recklessness
of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity.
But the point which drew all eyes, and, as
it were, transfigured the wearer—so that
both men and women who had been familiarly
acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed
as if they beheld her for the first time—was
that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered
and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the
effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary
relations with humanity, and enclosing her
in a sphere by herself.
"She hath good skill at her needle, that's
certain," remarked one of her female spectators;
"but did ever a woman, before this brazen
hussy, contrive such a way of showing it?
Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the
faces of our godly magistrates, and make a
pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen,
meant for a punishment?"
"It were well," muttered the most iron-visaged
of the old dames, "if we stripped Madame Hester's
rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as
for the red letter which she hath stitched
so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own
rheumatic flannel to make a fitter one!"
"Oh, peace, neighbours—peace!" whispered
their youngest companion; "do not let her
hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered
letter but she has felt it in her heart."
The grim beadle now made a gesture with his
staff. "Make way, good people—make way,
in the King's name!" cried he. "Open a passage;
and I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be
set where man, woman, and child may have a
fair sight of her brave apparel from this
time till an hour past meridian. A blessing
on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts,
where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine!
Come along, Madame Hester, and show your scarlet
letter in the market-place!"
A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd
of spectators. Preceded by the beadle, and
attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed
men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne
set forth towards the place appointed for
her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious
schoolboys, understanding little of the matter
in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday,
ran before her progress, turning their heads
continually to stare into her face and at
the winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious
letter on her breast. It was no great distance,
in those days, from the prison door to the
market-place. Measured by the prisoner's experience,
however, it might be reckoned a journey of
some length; for haughty as her demeanour
was, she perchance underwent an agony from
every footstep of those that thronged to see
her, as if her heart had been flung into the
street for them all to spurn and trample upon.
In our nature, however, there is a provision,
alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer
should never know the intensity of what he
endures by its present torture, but chiefly
by the pang that rankles after it. With almost
a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne
passed through this portion of her ordeal,
and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western
extremity of the market-place. It stood nearly
beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church,
and appeared to be a fixture there.
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion
of a penal machine, which now, for two or
three generations past, has been merely historical
and traditionary among us, but was held, in
the old time, to be as effectual an agent,
in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever
was the guillotine among the terrorists of
France. It was, in short, the platform of
the pillory; and above it rose the framework
of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned
as to confine the human head in its tight
grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze.
The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and
made manifest in this contrivance of wood
and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks,
against our common nature—whatever be the
delinquencies of the individual—no outrage
more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to
hide his face for shame; as it was the essence
of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne's
instance, however, as not unfrequently in
other cases, her sentence bore that she should
stand a certain time upon the platform, but
without undergoing that gripe about the neck
and confinement of the head, the proneness
to which was the most devilish characteristic
of this ugly engine. Knowing well her part,
she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and
was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude,
at about the height of a man's shoulders above
the street.
Had there been a Papist among the crowd of
Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful
woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien,
and with the infant at her bosom, an object
to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity,
which so many illustrious painters have vied
with one another to represent; something which
should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast,
of that sacred image of sinless motherhood,
whose infant was to redeem the world. Here,
there was the taint of deepest sin in the
most sacred quality of human life, working
such effect, that the world was only the darker
for this woman's beauty, and the more lost
for the infant that she had borne.
The scene was not without a mixture of awe,
such as must always invest the spectacle of
guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before
society shall have grown corrupt enough to
smile, instead of shuddering at it. The witnesses
of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed
beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough
to look upon her death, had that been the
sentence, without a murmur at its severity,
but had none of the heartlessness of another
social state, which would find only a theme
for jest in an exhibition like the present.
Even had there been a disposition to turn
the matter into ridicule, it must have been
repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence
of men no less dignified than the governor,
and several of his counsellors, a judge, a
general, and the ministers of the town, all
of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house,
looking down upon the platform. When such
personages could constitute a part of the
spectacle, without risking the majesty, or
reverence of rank and office, it was safely
to be inferred that the infliction of a legal
sentence would have an earnest and effectual
meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre
and grave. The unhappy culprit sustained herself
as best a woman might, under the heavy weight
of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened
upon her, and concentrated at her bosom. It
was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an
impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified
herself to encounter the stings and venomous
stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself
in every variety of insult; but there was
a quality so much more terrible in the solemn
mood of the popular mind, that she longed
rather to behold all those rigid countenances
contorted with scornful merriment, and herself
the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from
the multitude—each man, each woman, each
little shrill-voiced child, contributing their
individual parts—Hester Prynne might have
repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful
smile. But, under the leaden infliction which
it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments,
as if she must needs shriek out with the full
power of her lungs, and cast herself from
the scaffold down upon the ground, or else
go mad at once.
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene,
in which she was the most conspicuous object,
seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least,
glimmered indistinctly before them, like a
mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images.
Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally
active, and kept bringing up other scenes
than this roughly hewn street of a little
town, on the edge of the western wilderness:
other faces than were lowering upon her from
beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned
hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling and
immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days,
sports, childish quarrels, and the little
domestic traits of her maiden years, came
swarming back upon her, intermingled with
recollections of whatever was gravest in her
subsequent life; one picture precisely as
vivid as another; as if all were of similar
importance, or all alike a play. Possibly,
it was an instinctive device of her spirit
to relieve itself by the exhibition of these
phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight
and hardness of the reality.
Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory
was a point of view that revealed to Hester
Prynne the entire track along which she had
been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing
on that miserable eminence, she saw again
her native village, in Old England, and her
paternal home: a decayed house of grey stone,
with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining
a half obliterated shield of arms over the
portal, in token of antique gentility. She
saw her father's face, with its bold brow,
and reverend white beard that flowed over
the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother's,
too, with the look of heedful and anxious
love which it always wore in her remembrance,
and which, even since her death, had so often
laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance
in her daughter's pathway. She saw her own
face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating
all the interior of the dusky mirror in which
she had been wont to gaze at it. There she
beheld another countenance, of a man well
stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like
visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light
that had served them to pore over many ponderous
books. Yet those same bleared optics had a
strange, penetrating power, when it was their
owner's purpose to read the human soul. This
figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester
Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall,
was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder
a trifle higher than the right. Next rose
before her in memory's picture-gallery, the
intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall,
grey houses, the huge cathedrals, and the
public edifices, ancient in date and quaint
in architecture, of a continental city; where
new life had awaited her, still in connexion
with the misshapen scholar: a new life, but
feeding itself on time-worn materials, like
a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall.
Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes,
came back the rude market-place of the Puritan
settlement, with all the townspeople assembled,
and levelling their stern regards at Hester
Prynne—yes, at herself—who stood on the
scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her
arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically
embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.
Could it be true? She clutched the child so
fiercely to her breast that it sent forth
a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the
scarlet letter, and even touched it with her
finger, to assure herself that the infant
and the shame were real. Yes these were her
realities—all else had vanished!
III. THE RECOGNITION
From this intense consciousness of being the
object of severe and universal observation,
the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length
relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts
of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly
took possession of her thoughts. An Indian
in his native garb was standing there; but
the red men were not so infrequent visitors
of the English settlements that one of them
would have attracted any notice from Hester
Prynne at such a time; much less would he
have excluded all other objects and ideas
from her mind. By the Indian's side, and evidently
sustaining a companionship with him, stood
a white man, clad in a strange disarray of
civilized and savage costume.
He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage,
which as yet could hardly be termed aged.
There was a remarkable intelligence in his
features, as of a person who had so cultivated
his mental part that it could not fail to
mould the physical to itself and become manifest
by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly
careless arrangement of his heterogeneous
garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate
the peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident
to Hester Prynne that one of this man's shoulders
rose higher than the other. Again, at the
first instant of perceiving that thin visage,
and the slight deformity of the figure, she
pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive
a force that the poor babe uttered another
cry of pain. But the mother did not seem to
hear it.
At his arrival in the market-place, and some
time before she saw him, the stranger had
bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly
at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to
look inward, and to whom external matters
are of little value and import, unless they
bear relation to something within his mind.
Very soon, however, his look became keen and
penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself
across his features, like a snake gliding
swiftly over them, and making one little pause,
with all its wreathed intervolutions in open
sight. His face darkened with some powerful
emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instantaneously
controlled by an effort of his will, that,
save at a single moment, its expression might
have passed for calmness. After a brief space,
the convulsion grew almost imperceptible,
and finally subsided into the depths of his
nature. When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne
fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared
to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised
his finger, made a gesture with it in the
air, and laid it on his lips.
Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who
stood near to him, he addressed him in a formal
and courteous manner:
"I pray you, good Sir," said he, "who is this
woman?—and wherefore is she here set up
to public shame?"
"You must needs be a stranger in this region,
friend," answered the townsman, looking curiously
at the questioner and his savage companion,
"else you would surely have heard of Mistress
Hester Prynne and her evil doings. She hath
raised a great scandal, I promise you, in
godly Master Dimmesdale's church."
"You say truly," replied the other; "I am
a stranger, and have been a wanderer, sorely
against my will. I have met with grievous
mishaps by sea and land, and have been long
held in bonds among the heathen-folk to the
southward; and am now brought hither by this
Indian to be redeemed out of my captivity.
Will it please you, therefore, to tell me
of Hester Prynne's—have I her name rightly?—of
this woman's offences, and what has brought
her to yonder scaffold?"
"Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden
your heart, after your troubles and sojourn
in the wilderness," said the townsman, "to
find yourself at length in a land where iniquity
is searched out and punished in the sight
of rulers and people, as here in our godly
New England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know,
was the wife of a certain learned man, English
by birth, but who had long ago dwelt in Amsterdam,
whence some good time agone he was minded
to cross over and cast in his lot with us
of the Massachusetts. To this purpose he sent
his wife before him, remaining himself to
look after some necessary affairs. Marry,
good Sir, in some two years, or less, that
the woman has been a dweller here in Boston,
no tidings have come of this learned gentleman,
Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you,
being left to her own misguidance—"
"Ah!—aha!—I conceive you," said the stranger
with a bitter smile. "So learned a man as
you speak of should have learned this too
in his books. And who, by your favour, Sir,
may be the father of yonder babe—it is some
three or four months old, I should judge—which
Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?"
"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth
a riddle; and the Daniel who shall expound
it is yet a-wanting," answered the townsman.
"Madame Hester absolutely refuseth to speak,
and the magistrates have laid their heads
together in vain. Peradventure the guilty
one stands looking on at this sad spectacle,
unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees
him."
"The learned man," observed the stranger with
another smile, "should come himself to look
into the mystery."
"It behoves him well if he be still in life,"
responded the townsman. "Now, good Sir, our
Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves
that this woman is youthful and fair, and
doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall,
and that, moreover, as is most likely, her
husband may be at the bottom of the sea, they
have not been bold to put in force the extremity
of our righteous law against her. The penalty
thereof is death. But in their great mercy
and tenderness of heart they have doomed Mistress
Prynne to stand only a space of three hours
on the platform of the pillory, and then and
thereafter, for the remainder of her natural
life to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom."
"A wise sentence," remarked the stranger,
gravely, bowing his head. "Thus she will be
a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious
letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It
irks me, nevertheless, that the partner of
her iniquity should not at least, stand on
the scaffold by her side. But he will be known—he
will be known!—he will be known!"
He bowed courteously to the communicative
townsman, and whispering a few words to his
Indian attendant, they both made their way
through the crowd.
While this passed, Hester Prynne had been
standing on her pedestal, still with a fixed
gaze towards the stranger—so fixed a gaze
that, at moments of intense absorption, all
other objects in the visible world seemed
to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such
an interview, perhaps, would have been more
terrible than even to meet him as she now
did, with the hot mid-day sun burning down
upon her face, and lighting up its shame;
with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast;
with the sin-born infant in her arms; with
a whole people, drawn forth as to a festival,
staring at the features that should have been
seen only in the quiet gleam of the fireside,
in the happy shadow of a home, or beneath
a matronly veil at church. Dreadful as it
was, she was conscious of a shelter in the
presence of these thousand witnesses. It was
better to stand thus, with so many betwixt
him and her, than to greet him face to face—they
two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were,
to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment
when its protection should be withdrawn from
her. Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely
heard a voice behind her until it had repeated
her name more than once, in a loud and solemn
tone, audible to the whole multitude.
"Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!" said the
voice.
It has already been noticed that directly
over the platform on which Hester Prynne stood
was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended
to the meeting-house. It was the place whence
proclamations were wont to be made, amidst
an assemblage of the magistracy, with all
the ceremonial that attended such public observances
in those days. Here, to witness the scene
which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham
himself with four sergeants about his chair,
bearing halberds, as a guard of honour. He
wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of
embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet
tunic beneath—a gentleman advanced in years,
with a hard experience written in his wrinkles.
He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative
of a community which owed its origin and progress,
and its present state of development, not
to the impulses of youth, but to the stern
and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre
sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely
because it imagined and hoped so little. The
other eminent characters by whom the chief
ruler was surrounded were distinguished by
a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when
the forms of authority were felt to possess
the sacredness of Divine institutions. They
were, doubtless, good men, just and sage.
But, out of the whole human family, it would
not have been easy to select the same number
of wise and virtuous persons, who should be
less capable of sitting in judgment on an
erring woman's heart, and disentangling its
mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid
aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned
her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that
whatever sympathy she might expect lay in
the larger and warmer heart of the multitude;
for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony,
the unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.
The voice which had called her attention was
that of the reverend and famous John Wilson,
the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar,
like most of his contemporaries in the profession,
and withal a man of kind and genial spirit.
This last attribute, however, had been less
carefully developed than his intellectual
gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter
of shame than self-congratulation with him.
There he stood, with a border of grizzled
locks beneath his skull-cap, while his grey
eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his
study, were winking, like those of Hester's
infant, in the unadulterated sunshine. He
looked like the darkly engraved portraits
which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons,
and had no more right than one of those portraits
would have to step forth, as he now did, and
meddle with a question of human guilt, passion,
and anguish.
"Hester Prynne," said the clergyman, "I have
striven with my young brother here, under
whose preaching of the Word you have been
privileged to sit"—here Mr. Wilson laid
his hand on the shoulder of a pale young man
beside him—"I have sought, I say, to persuade
this godly youth, that he should deal with
you, here in the face of Heaven, and before
these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing
of all the people, as touching the vileness
and blackness of your sin. Knowing your natural
temper better than I, he could the better
judge what arguments to use, whether of tenderness
or terror, such as might prevail over your
hardness and obstinacy, insomuch that you
should no longer hide the name of him who
tempted you to this grievous fall. But he
opposes to me—with a young man's over-softness,
albeit wise beyond his years—that it were
wronging the very nature of woman to force
her to lay open her heart's secrets in such
broad daylight, and in presence of so great
a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince
him, the shame lay in the commission of the
sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What
say you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale?
Must it be thou, or I, that shall deal with
this poor sinner's soul?"
There was a murmur among the dignified and
reverend occupants of the balcony; and Governor
Bellingham gave expression to its purport,
speaking in an authoritative voice, although
tempered with respect towards the youthful
clergyman whom he addressed:
"Good Master Dimmesdale," said he, "the responsibility
of this woman's soul lies greatly with you.
It behoves you; therefore, to exhort her to
repentance and to confession, as a proof and
consequence thereof."
The directness of this appeal drew the eyes
of the whole crowd upon the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—young
clergyman, who had come from one of the great
English universities, bringing all the learning
of the age into our wild forest land. His
eloquence and religious fervour had already
given the earnest of high eminence in his
profession. He was a person of very striking
aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending
brow; large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a
mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed
it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both
nervous sensibility and a vast power of self
restraint. Notwithstanding his high native
gifts and scholar-like attainments, there
was an air about this young minister—an
apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened
look—as of a being who felt himself quite
astray, and at a loss in the pathway of human
existence, and could only be at ease in some
seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as
his duties would permit, he trod in the shadowy
by-paths, and thus kept himself simple and
childlike, coming forth, when occasion was,
with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy
purity of thought, which, as many people said,
affected them like the speech of an angel.
Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr.
Wilson and the Governor had introduced so
openly to the public notice, bidding him speak,
in the hearing of all men, to that mystery
of a woman's soul, so sacred even in its pollution.
The trying nature of his position drove the
blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.
"Speak to the woman, my brother," said Mr.
Wilson. "It is of moment to her soul, and,
therefore, as the worshipful Governor says,
momentous to thine own, in whose charge hers
is. Exhort her to confess the truth!"
The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head,
in silent prayer, as it seemed, and then came
forward.
"Hester Prynne," said he, leaning over the
balcony and looking down steadfastly into
her eyes, "thou hearest what this good man
says, and seest the accountability under which
I labour. If thou feelest it to be for thy
soul's peace, and that thy earthly punishment
will thereby be made more effectual to salvation,
I charge thee to speak out the name of thy
fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not
silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness
for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he
were to step down from a high place, and stand
there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame,
yet better were it so than to hide a guilty
heart through life. What can thy silence do
for him, except it tempt him—yea, compel
him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin?
Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy,
that thereby thou mayest work out an open
triumph over the evil within thee and the
sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest
to him—who, perchance, hath not the courage
to grasp it for himself—the bitter, but
wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy
lips!"
The young pastor's voice was tremulously sweet,
rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that it
so evidently manifested, rather than the direct
purport of the words, caused it to vibrate
within all hearts, and brought the listeners
into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor
baby at Hester's bosom was affected by the
same influence, for it directed its hitherto
vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held
up its little arms with a half-pleased, half-plaintive
murmur. So powerful seemed the minister's
appeal that the people could not believe but
that Hester Prynne would speak out the guilty
name, or else that the guilty one himself
in whatever high or lowly place he stood,
would be drawn forth by an inward and inevitable
necessity, and compelled to ascend the scaffold.
Hester shook her head.
"Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of
Heaven's mercy!" cried the Reverend Mr. Wilson,
more harshly than before. "That little babe
hath been gifted with a voice, to second and
confirm the counsel which thou hast heard.
Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance,
may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy
breast."
"Never," replied Hester Prynne, looking, not
at Mr. Wilson, but into the deep and troubled
eyes of the younger clergyman. "It is too
deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And
would that I might endure his agony as well
as mine!"
"Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly
and sternly, proceeding from the crowd about
the scaffold, "Speak; and give your child
a father!"
"I will not speak!" answered Hester, turning
pale as death, but responding to this voice,
which she too surely recognised. "And my child
must seek a heavenly father; she shall never
know an earthly one!"
"She will not speak!" murmured Mr. Dimmesdale,
who, leaning over the balcony, with his hand
upon his heart, had awaited the result of
his appeal. He now drew back with a long respiration.
"Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman's
heart! She will not speak!"
Discerning the impracticable state of the
poor culprit's mind, the elder clergyman,
who had carefully prepared himself for the
occasion, addressed to the multitude a discourse
on sin, in all its branches, but with continual
reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly
did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour
or more during which his periods were rolling
over the people's heads, that it assumed new
terrors in their imagination, and seemed to
derive its scarlet hue from the flames of
the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile,
kept her place upon the pedestal of shame,
with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference.
She had borne that morning all that nature
could endure; and as her temperament was not
of the order that escapes from too intense
suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only
shelter itself beneath a stony crust of insensibility,
while the faculties of animal life remained
entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher
thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly,
upon her ears. The infant, during the latter
portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with
its wailings and screams; she strove to hush
it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to sympathise
with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour,
she was led back to prison, and vanished from
the public gaze within its iron-clamped portal.
It was whispered by those who peered after
her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid
gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior.
IV. THE INTERVIEW
After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne
was found to be in a state of nervous excitement,
that demanded constant watchfulness, lest
she should perpetrate violence on herself,
or do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor
babe. As night approached, it proving impossible
to quell her insubordination by rebuke or
threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the
jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician.
He described him as a man of skill in all
Christian modes of physical science, and likewise
familiar with whatever the savage people could
teach in respect to medicinal herbs and roots
that grew in the forest. To say the truth,
there was much need of professional assistance,
not merely for Hester herself, but still more
urgently for the child—who, drawing its
sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed
to have drank in with it all the turmoil,
the anguish and despair, which pervaded the
mother's system. It now writhed in convulsions
of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little
frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne
had borne throughout the day.
Closely following the jailer into the dismal
apartment, appeared that individual, of singular
aspect whose presence in the crowd had been
of such deep interest to the wearer of the
scarlet letter. He was lodged in the prison,
not as suspected of any offence, but as the
most convenient and suitable mode of disposing
of him, until the magistrates should have
conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting
his ransom. His name was announced as Roger
Chillingworth. The jailer, after ushering
him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling
at the comparative quiet that followed his
entrance; for Hester Prynne had immediately
become as still as death, although the child
continued to moan.
"Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient,"
said the practitioner. "Trust me, good jailer,
you shall briefly have peace in your house;
and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall
hereafter be more amenable to just authority
than you may have found her heretofore."
"Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,"
answered Master Brackett, "I shall own you
for a man of skill, indeed! Verily, the woman
hath been like a possessed one; and there
lacks little that I should take in hand, to
drive Satan out of her with stripes."
The stranger had entered the room with the
characteristic quietude of the profession
to which he announced himself as belonging.
Nor did his demeanour change when the withdrawal
of the prison keeper left him face to face
with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him,
in the crowd, had intimated so close a relation
between himself and her. His first care was
given to the child, whose cries, indeed, as
she lay writhing on the trundle-bed, made
it of peremptory necessity to postpone all
other business to the task of soothing her.
He examined the infant carefully, and then
proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which
he took from beneath his dress. It appeared
to contain medical preparations, one of which
he mingled with a cup of water.
"My old studies in alchemy," observed he,
"and my sojourn, for above a year past, among
a people well versed in the kindly properties
of simples, have made a better physician of
me than many that claim the medical degree.
Here, woman! The child is yours—she is none
of mine—neither will she recognise my voice
or aspect as a father's. Administer this draught,
therefore, with thine own hand."
Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the
same time gazing with strongly marked apprehension
into his face. "Wouldst thou avenge thyself
on the innocent babe?" whispered she.
"Foolish woman!" responded the physician,
half coldly, half soothingly. "What should
ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable
babe? The medicine is potent for good, and
were it my child—yea, mine own, as well
as thine! I could do no better for it."
As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in
no reasonable state of mind, he took the infant
in his arms, and himself administered the
draught. It soon proved its efficacy, and
redeemed the leech's pledge. The moans of
the little patient subsided; its convulsive
tossings gradually ceased; and in a few moments,
as is the custom of young children after relief
from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy
slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right
to be termed, next bestowed his attention
on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny,
he felt her pulse, looked into her eyes—a
gaze that made her heart shrink and shudder,
because so familiar, and yet so strange and
cold—and, finally, satisfied with his investigation,
proceeded to mingle another draught.
"I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe," remarked
he; "but I have learned many new secrets in
the wilderness, and here is one of them—a
recipe that an Indian taught me, in requital
of some lessons of my own, that were as old
as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing
than a sinless conscience. That I cannot give
thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving
of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves
of a tempestuous sea."
He presented the cup to Hester, who received
it with a slow, earnest look into his face;
not precisely a look of fear, yet full of
doubt and questioning as to what his purposes
might be. She looked also at her slumbering
child.
"I have thought of death," said she—"have
wished for it—would even have prayed for
it, were it fit that such as I should pray
for anything. Yet, if death be in this cup,
I bid thee think again, ere thou beholdest
me quaff it. See! it is even now at my lips."
"Drink, then," replied he, still with the
same cold composure. "Dost thou know me so
little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont
to be so shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme
of vengeance, what could I do better for my
object than to let thee live—than to give
thee medicines against all harm and peril
of life—so that this burning shame may still
blaze upon thy bosom?" As he spoke, he laid
his long fore-finger on the scarlet letter,
which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester's
breast, as if it had been red hot. He noticed
her involuntary gesture, and smiled. "Live,
therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee,
in the eyes of men and women—in the eyes
of him whom thou didst call thy husband—in
the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest
live, take off this draught."
Without further expostulation or delay, Hester
Prynne drained the cup, and, at the motion
of the man of skill, seated herself on the
bed, where the child was sleeping; while he
drew the only chair which the room afforded,
and took his own seat beside her. She could
not but tremble at these preparations; for
she felt that—having now done all that humanity,
or principle, or, if so it were, a refined
cruelty, impelled him to do for the relief
of physical suffering—he was next to treat
with her as the man whom she had most deeply
and irreparably injured.
"Hester," said he, "I ask not wherefore, nor
how thou hast fallen into the pit, or say,
rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal
of infamy on which I found thee. The reason
is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy
weakness. I—a man of thought—the book-worm
of great libraries—a man already in decay,
having given my best years to feed the hungry
dream of knowledge—what had I to do with
youth and beauty like thine own? Misshapen
from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself
with the idea that intellectual gifts might
veil physical deformity in a young girl's
fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages were ever
wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen
all this. I might have known that, as I came
out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered
this settlement of Christian men, the very
first object to meet my eyes would be thyself,
Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy,
before the people. Nay, from the moment when
we came down the old church-steps together,
a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire
of that scarlet letter blazing at the end
of our path!"
"Thou knowest," said Hester—for, depressed
as she was, she could not endure this last
quiet stab at the token of her shame—"thou
knowest that I was frank with thee. I felt
no love, nor feigned any."
"True," replied he. "It was my folly! I have
said it. But, up to that epoch of my life,
I had lived in vain. The world had been so
cheerless! My heart was a habitation large
enough for many guests, but lonely and chill,
and without a household fire. I longed to
kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream—old
as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen
as I was—that the simple bliss, which is
scattered far and wide, for all mankind to
gather up, might yet be mine. And so, Hester,
I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost
chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth
which thy presence made there!"
"I have greatly wronged thee," murmured Hester.
"We have wronged each other," answered he.
"Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed
thy budding youth into a false and unnatural
relation with my decay. Therefore, as a man
who has not thought and philosophised in vain,
I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against
thee. Between thee and me, the scale hangs
fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives
who has wronged us both! Who is he?"
"Ask me not!" replied Hester Prynne, looking
firmly into his face. "That thou shalt never
know!"
"Never, sayest thou?" rejoined he, with a
smile of dark and self-relying intelligence.
"Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there
are few things whether in the outward world,
or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere
of thought—few things hidden from the man
who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly
to the solution of a mystery. Thou mayest
cover up thy secret from the prying multitude.
Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers
and magistrates, even as thou didst this day,
when they sought to wrench the name out of
thy heart, and give thee a partner on thy
pedestal. But, as for me, I come to the inquest
with other senses than they possess. I shall
seek this man, as I have sought truth in books:
as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is
a sympathy that will make me conscious of
him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel
myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner
or later, he must needs be mine."
The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so
intensely upon her, that Hester Prynne clasped
her hand over her heart, dreading lest he
should read the secret there at once.
"Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less
he is mine," resumed he, with a look of confidence,
as if destiny were at one with him. "He bears
no letter of infamy wrought into his garment,
as thou dost, but I shall read it on his heart.
Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall
interfere with Heaven's own method of retribution,
or, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe
of human law. Neither do thou imagine that
I shall contrive aught against his life; no,
nor against his fame, if as I judge, he be
a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him
hide himself in outward honour, if he may!
Not the less he shall be mine!"
"Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered
and appalled; "but thy words interpret thee
as a terror!"
"One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would
enjoin upon thee," continued the scholar.
"Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour.
Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this
land that know me. Breathe not to any human
soul that thou didst ever call me husband!
Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth,
I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer,
and isolated from human interests, I find
here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom
and myself there exist the closest ligaments.
No matter whether of love or hate: no matter
whether of right or wrong! Thou and thine,
Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where
thou art and where he is. But betray me not!"
"Wherefore dost thou desire it?" inquired
Hester, shrinking, she hardly knew why, from
this secret bond. "Why not announce thyself
openly, and cast me off at once?"
"It may be," he replied, "because I will not
encounter the dishonour that besmirches the
husband of a faithless woman. It may be for
other reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to
live and die unknown. Let, therefore, thy
husband be to the world as one already dead,
and of whom no tidings shall ever come. Recognise
me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe
not the secret, above all, to the man thou
wottest of. Shouldst thou fail me in this,
beware! His fame, his position, his life will
be in my hands. Beware!"
"I will keep thy secret, as I have his," said
Hester.
"Swear it!" rejoined he.
And she took the oath.
"And now, Mistress Prynne," said old Roger
Chillingworth, as he was hereafter to be named,
"I leave thee alone: alone with thy infant
and the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester?
Doth thy sentence bind thee to wear the token
in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares
and hideous dreams?"
"Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester,
troubled at the expression of his eyes. "Art
thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest
round about us? Hast thou enticed me into
a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?"
"Not thy soul," he answered, with another
smile. "No, not thine!"
V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE
Hester Prynne's term of confinement was now
at an end. Her prison-door was thrown open,
and she came forth into the sunshine, which,
falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick
and morbid heart, as if meant for no other
purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter
on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real
torture in her first unattended footsteps
from the threshold of the prison than even
in the procession and spectacle that have
been described, where she was made the common
infamy, at which all mankind was summoned
to point its finger. Then, she was supported
by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and
by all the combative energy of her character,
which enabled her to convert the scene into
a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover,
a separate and insulated event, to occur but
once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore,
reckless of economy, she might call up the
vital strength that would have sufficed for
many quiet years. The very law that condemned
her—a giant of stern features but with vigour
to support, as well as to annihilate, in his
iron arm—had held her up through the terrible
ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this
unattended walk from her prison door, began
the daily custom; and she must either sustain
and carry it forward by the ordinary resources
of her nature, or sink beneath it. She could
no longer borrow from the future to help her
through the present grief. Tomorrow would
bring its own trial with it; so would the
next day, and so would the next: each its
own trial, and yet the very same that was
now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The
days of the far-off future would toil onward,
still with the same burden for her to take
up, and bear along with her, but never to
fling down; for the accumulating days and
added years would pile up their misery upon
the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving
up her individuality, she would become the
general symbol at which the preacher and moralist
might point, and in which they might vivify
and embody their images of woman's frailty
and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure
would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet
letter flaming on her breast—at her, the
child of honourable parents—at her, the
mother of a babe that would hereafter be a
woman—at her, who had once been innocent—as
the figure, the body, the reality of sin.
And over her grave, the infamy that she must
carry thither would be her only monument.
It may seem marvellous that, with the world
before her—kept by no restrictive clause
of her condemnation within the limits of the
Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure—free
to return to her birth-place, or to any other
European land, and there hide her character
and identity under a new exterior, as completely
as if emerging into another state of being—and
having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable
forest open to her, where the wildness of
her nature might assimilate itself with a
people whose customs and life were alien from
the law that had condemned her—it may seem
marvellous that this woman should still call
that place her home, where, and where only,
she must needs be the type of shame. But there
is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and
inevitable that it has the force of doom,
which almost invariably compels human beings
to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the
spot where some great and marked event has
given the colour to their lifetime; and, still
the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge
that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were
the roots which she had struck into the soil.
It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations
than the first, had converted the forest-land,
still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim
and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and
dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes
of earth—even that village of rural England,
where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood
seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping,
like garments put off long ago—were foreign
to her, in comparison. The chain that bound
her here was of iron links, and galling to
her inmost soul, but could never be broken.
It might be, too—doubtless it was so, although
she hid the secret from herself, and grew
pale whenever it struggled out of her heart,
like a serpent from its hole—it might be
that another feeling kept her within the scene
and pathway that had been so fatal. There
dwelt, there trode, the feet of one with whom
she deemed herself connected in a union that,
unrecognised on earth, would bring them together
before the bar of final judgment, and make
that their marriage-altar, for a joint futurity
of endless retribution. Over and over again,
the tempter of souls had thrust this idea
upon Hester's contemplation, and laughed at
the passionate and desperate joy with which
she seized, and then strove to cast it from
her. She barely looked the idea in the face,
and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What
she compelled herself to believe—what, finally,
she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing
a resident of New England—was half a truth,
and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to
herself had been the scene of her guilt, and
here should be the scene of her earthly punishment;
and so, perchance, the torture of her daily
shame would at length purge her soul, and
work out another purity than that which she
had lost: more saint-like, because the result
of martyrdom.
Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On
the outskirts of the town, within the verge
of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity
to any other habitation, there was a small
thatched cottage. It had been built by an
earlier settler, and abandoned, because the
soil about it was too sterile for cultivation,
while its comparative remoteness put it out
of the sphere of that social activity which
already marked the habits of the emigrants.
It stood on the shore, looking across a basin
of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards
the west. A clump of scrubby trees, such as
alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much
conceal the cottage from view, as seem to
denote that here was some object which would
fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed.
In this little lonesome dwelling, with some
slender means that she possessed, and by the
licence of the magistrates, who still kept
an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established
herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow
of suspicion immediately attached itself to
the spot. Children, too young to comprehend
wherefore this woman should be shut out from
the sphere of human charities, would creep
nigh enough to behold her plying her needle
at the cottage-window, or standing in the
doorway, or labouring in her little garden,
or coming forth along the pathway that led
townward, and, discerning the scarlet letter
on her breast, would scamper off with a strange
contagious fear.
Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without
a friend on earth who dared to show himself,
she, however, incurred no risk of want. She
possessed an art that sufficed, even in a
land that afforded comparatively little scope
for its exercise, to supply food for her thriving
infant and herself. It was the art, then,
as now, almost the only one within a woman's
grasp—of needle-work. She bore on her breast,
in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen
of her delicate and imaginative skill, of
which the dames of a court might gladly have
availed themselves, to add the richer and
more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity
to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed,
in the sable simplicity that generally characterised
the Puritanic modes of dress, there might
be an infrequent call for the finer productions
of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age,
demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions
of this kind, did not fail to extend its influence
over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind
them so many fashions which it might seem
harder to dispense with.
Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the
installation of magistrates, and all that
could give majesty to the forms in which a
new government manifested itself to the people,
were, as a matter of policy, marked by a stately
and well-conducted ceremonial, and a sombre,
but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs,
painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered
gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official
state of men assuming the reins of power,
and were readily allowed to individuals dignified
by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws
forbade these and similar extravagances to
the plebeian order. In the array of funerals,
too—whether for the apparel of the dead
body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic
devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the
sorrow of the survivors—there was a frequent
and characteristic demand for such labour
as Hester Prynne could supply. Baby-linen—for
babies then wore robes of state—afforded
still another possibility of toil and emolument.
By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork
became what would now be termed the fashion.
Whether from commiseration for a woman of
so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid
curiosity that gives a fictitious value even
to common or worthless things; or by whatever
other intangible circumstance was then, as
now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons,
what others might seek in vain; or because
Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise
have remained vacant; it is certain that she
had ready and fairly requited employment for
as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with
her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify
itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of
pomp and state, the garments that had been
wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle-work
was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military
men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister
on his band; it decked the baby's little cap;
it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder
away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is
not recorded that, in a single instance, her
skill was called in to embroider the white
veil which was to cover the pure blushes of
a bride. The exception indicated the ever
relentless vigour with which society frowned
upon her sin.
Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond
a subsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic
description, for herself, and a simple abundance
for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest
materials and the most sombre hue, with only
that one ornament—the scarlet letter—which
it was her doom to wear. The child's attire,
on the other hand, was distinguished by a
fanciful, or, we may rather say, a fantastic
ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten
the airy charm that early began to develop
itself in the little girl, but which appeared
to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak
further of it hereafter. Except for that small
expenditure in the decoration of her infant,
Hester bestowed all her superfluous means
in charity, on wretches less miserable than
herself, and who not unfrequently insulted
the hand that fed them. Much of the time,
which she might readily have applied to the
better efforts of her art, she employed in
making coarse garments for the poor. It is
probable that there was an idea of penance
in this mode of occupation, and that she offered
up a real sacrifice of enjoyment in devoting
so many hours to such rude handiwork. She
had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental
characteristic—a taste for the gorgeously
beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions
of her needle, found nothing else, in all
the possibilities of her life, to exercise
itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible
to the other sex, from the delicate toil of
the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have
been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing,
the passion of her life. Like all other joys,
she rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling
of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened,
it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast
penitence, but something doubtful, something
that might be deeply wrong beneath.
In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have
a part to perform in the world. With her native
energy of character and rare capacity, it
could not entirely cast her off, although
it had set a mark upon her, more intolerable
to a woman's heart than that which branded
the brow of Cain. In all her intercourse with
society, however, there was nothing that made
her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture,
every word, and even the silence of those
with whom she came in contact, implied, and
often expressed, that she was banished, and
as much alone as if she inhabited another
sphere, or communicated with the common nature
by other organs and senses than the rest of
human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests,
yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits
the familiar fireside, and can no longer make
itself seen or felt; no more smile with the
household joy, nor mourn with the kindred
sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting
its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror
and horrible repugnance. These emotions, in
fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed
to be the sole portion that she retained in
the universal heart. It was not an age of
delicacy; and her position, although she understood
it well, and was in little danger of forgetting
it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception,
like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon
the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have already
said, whom she sought out to be the objects
of her bounty, often reviled the hand that
was stretched forth to succour them. Dames
of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she
entered in the way of her occupation, were
accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into
her heart; sometimes through that alchemy
of quiet malice, by which women can concoct
a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and
sometimes, also, by a coarser expression,
that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless
breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated
wound. Hester had schooled herself long and
well; and she never responded to these attacks,
save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly
over her pale cheek, and again subsided into
the depths of her bosom. She was patient—a
martyr, indeed—but she forebore to pray
for enemies, lest, in spite of her forgiving
aspirations, the words of the blessing should
stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.
Continually, and in a thousand other ways,
did she feel the innumerable throbs of anguish
that had been so cunningly contrived for her
by the undying, the ever-active sentence of
the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen paused in
the streets, to address words of exhortation,
that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin
and frown, around the poor, sinful woman.
If she entered a church, trusting to share
the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father,
it was often her mishap to find herself the
text of the discourse. She grew to have a
dread of children; for they had imbibed from
their parents a vague idea of something horrible
in this dreary woman gliding silently through
the town, with never any companion but one
only child. Therefore, first allowing her
to pass, they pursued her at a distance with
shrill cries, and the utterances of a word
that had no distinct purport to their own
minds, but was none the less terrible to her,
as proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously.
It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of
her shame, that all nature knew of it; it
could have caused her no deeper pang had the
leaves of the trees whispered the dark story
among themselves—had the summer breeze murmured
about it—had the wintry blast shrieked it
aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in
the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked
curiously at the scarlet letter—and none
ever failed to do so—they branded it afresh
in Hester's soul; so that, oftentimes, she
could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain,
from covering the symbol with her hand. But
then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise
its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare
of familiarity was intolerable. From first
to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always
this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye
upon the token; the spot never grew callous;
it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive
with daily torture.
But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance
in many months, she felt an eye—a human
eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed
to give a momentary relief, as if half of
her agony were shared. The next instant, back
it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb
of pain; for, in that brief interval, she
had sinned anew. (Had Hester sinned alone?)
Her imagination was somewhat affected, and,
had she been of a softer moral and intellectual
fibre would have been still more so, by the
strange and solitary anguish of her life.
Walking to and fro, with those lonely footsteps,
in the little world with which she was outwardly
connected, it now and then appeared to Hester—if
altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too
potent to be resisted—she felt or fancied,
then, that the scarlet letter had endowed
her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe,
yet could not help believing, that it gave
her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden
sin in other hearts. She was terror-stricken
by the revelations that were thus made. What
were they? Could they be other than the insidious
whispers of the bad angel, who would fain
have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet
only half his victim, that the outward guise
of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth
were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter
would blaze forth on many a bosom besides
Hester Prynne's? Or, must she receive those
intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as
truth? In all her miserable experience, there
was nothing else so awful and so loathsome
as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked
her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of
the occasions that brought it into vivid action.
Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would
give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near
a venerable minister or magistrate, the model
of piety and justice, to whom that age of
antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal
man in fellowship with angels. "What evil
thing is at hand?" would Hester say to herself.
Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be
nothing human within the scope of view, save
the form of this earthly saint! Again a mystic
sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself,
as she met the sanctified frown of some matron,
who, according to the rumour of all tongues,
had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout
life. That unsunned snow in the matron's bosom,
and the burning shame on Hester Prynne's—what
had the two in common? Or, once more, the
electric thrill would give her warning—"Behold
Hester, here is a companion!" and, looking
up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden
glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and
aside, and quickly averted, with a faint,
chill crimson in her cheeks as if her purity
were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance.
O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol,
wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth
or age, for this poor sinner to revere?—such
loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results
of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all
was not corrupt in this poor victim of her
own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester
Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal
was guilty like herself.
The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times,
were always contributing a grotesque horror
to what interested their imaginations, had
a story about the scarlet letter which we
might readily work up into a terrific legend.
They averred that the symbol was not mere
scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot,
but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could
be seen glowing all alight whenever Hester
Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And
we must needs say it seared Hester's bosom
so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth
in the rumour than our modern incredulity
may be inclined to admit.
VI. PEARL
We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant;
that little creature, whose innocent life
had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence,
a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank
luxuriance of a guilty passion. How strange
it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched
the growth, and the beauty that became every
day more brilliant, and the intelligence that
threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny
features of this child! Her Pearl—for so
had Hester called her; not as a name expressive
of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm,
white, unimpassioned lustre that would be
indicated by the comparison. But she named
the infant "Pearl," as being of great price—purchased
with all she had—her mother's only treasure!
How strange, indeed! Man had marked this woman's
sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent
and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy
could reach her, save it were sinful like
herself. God, as a direct consequence of the
sin which man thus punished, had given her
a lovely child, whose place was on that same
dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for
ever with the race and descent of mortals,
and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven!
Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne
less with hope than apprehension. She knew
that her deed had been evil; she could have
no faith, therefore, that its result would
be good. Day after day she looked fearfully
into the child's expanding nature, ever dreading
to detect some dark and wild peculiarity that
should correspond with the guiltiness to which
she owed her being.
Certainly there was no physical defect. By
its perfect shape, its vigour, and its natural
dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs,
the infant was worthy to have been brought
forth in Eden: worthy to have been left there
to be the plaything of the angels after the
world's first parents were driven out. The
child had a native grace which does not invariably
co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire,
however simple, always impressed the beholder
as if it were the very garb that precisely
became it best. But little Pearl was not clad
in rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid
purpose that may be better understood hereafter,
had bought the richest tissues that could
be procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty
its full play in the arrangement and decoration
of the dresses which the child wore before
the public eye. So magnificent was the small
figure when thus arrayed, and such was the
splendour of Pearl's own proper beauty, shining
through the gorgeous robes which might have
extinguished a paler loveliness, that there
was an absolute circle of radiance around
her on the darksome cottage floor. And yet
a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's
rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect.
Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell of
infinite variety; in this one child there
were many children, comprehending the full
scope between the wild-flower prettiness of
a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of
an infant princess. Throughout all, however,
there was a trait of passion, a certain depth
of hue, which she never lost; and if in any
of her changes, she had grown fainter or paler,
she would have ceased to be herself—it would
have been no longer Pearl!
This outward mutability indicated, and did
not more than fairly express, the various
properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared
to possess depth, too, as well as variety;
but—or else Hester's fears deceived her—it
lacked reference and adaptation to the world
into which she was born. The child could not
be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence
a great law had been broken; and the result
was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful
and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with
an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which
the point of variety and arrangement was difficult
or impossible to be discovered. Hester could
only account for the child's character—and
even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by
recalling what she herself had been during
that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing
her soul from the spiritual world, and her
bodily frame from its material of earth. The
mother's impassioned state had been the medium
through which were transmitted to the unborn
infant the rays of its moral life; and, however
white and clear originally, they had taken
the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery
lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered
light of the intervening substance. Above
all, the warfare of Hester's spirit at that
epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She could
recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood,
the flightiness of her temper, and even some
of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency
that had brooded in her heart. They were now
illuminated by the morning radiance of a young
child's disposition, but, later in the day
of earthly existence, might be prolific of
the storm and whirlwind.
The discipline of the family in those days
was of a far more rigid kind than now. The
frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application
of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority,
were used, not merely in the way of punishment
for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen
for the growth and promotion of all childish
virtues. Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the
loving mother of this one child, ran little
risk of erring on the side of undue severity.
Mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes,
she early sought to impose a tender but strict
control over the infant immortality that was
committed to her charge. But the task was
beyond her skill. After testing both smiles
and frowns, and proving that neither mode
of treatment possessed any calculable influence,
Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside
and permit the child to be swayed by her own
impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint
was effectual, of course, while it lasted.
As to any other kind of discipline, whether
addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl
might or might not be within its reach, in
accordance with the caprice that ruled the
moment. Her mother, while Pearl was yet an
infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar
look, that warned her when it would be labour
thrown away to insist, persuade or plead.
It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable,
perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally
accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that
Hester could not help questioning at such
moments whether Pearl was a human child. She
seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after
playing its fantastic sports for a little
while upon the cottage floor, would flit away
with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared
in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it
invested her with a strange remoteness and
intangibility: it was as if she were hovering
in the air, and might vanish, like a glimmering
light that comes we know not whence and goes
we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester
was constrained to rush towards the child—to
pursue the little elf in the flight which
she invariably began—to snatch her to her
bosom with a close pressure and earnest kisses—not
so much from overflowing love as to assure
herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and
not utterly delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when
she was caught, though full of merriment and
music, made her mother more doubtful than
before.
Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling
spell, that so often came between herself
and her sole treasure, whom she had bought
so dear, and who was all her world, Hester
sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then,
perhaps—for there was no foreseeing how
it might affect her—Pearl would frown, and
clench her little fist, and harden her small
features into a stern, unsympathising look
of discontent. Not seldom she would laugh
anew, and louder than before, like a thing
incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow.
Or—but this more rarely happened—she would
be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out
her love for her mother in broken words, and
seem intent on proving that she had a heart
by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe
in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness:
it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding
over all these matters, the mother felt like
one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some
irregularity in the process of conjuration,
has failed to win the master-word that should
control this new and incomprehensible intelligence.
Her only real comfort was when the child lay
in the placidity of sleep. Then she was sure
of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious
happiness; until—perhaps with that perverse
expression glimmering from beneath her opening
lids—little Pearl awoke!
How soon—with what strange rapidity, indeed—did
Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of
social intercourse beyond the mother's ever-ready
smile and nonsense-words! And then what a
happiness would it have been could Hester
Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice
mingling with the uproar of other childish
voices, and have distinguished and unravelled
her own darling's tones, amid all the entangled
outcry of a group of sportive children. But
this could never be. Pearl was a born outcast
of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem
and product of sin, she had no right among
christened infants. Nothing was more remarkable
than the instinct, as it seemed, with which
the child comprehended her loneliness: the
destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle
round about her: the whole peculiarity, in
short, of her position in respect to other
children. Never since her release from prison
had Hester met the public gaze without her.
In all her walks about the town, Pearl, too,
was there: first as the babe in arms, and
afterwards as the little girl, small companion
of her mother, holding a forefinger with her
whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate
of three or four footsteps to one of Hester's.
She saw the children of the settlement on
the grassy margin of the street, or at the
domestic thresholds, disporting themselves
in such grim fashions as the Puritanic nurture
would permit; playing at going to church,
perchance, or at scourging Quakers; or taking
scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or
scaring one another with freaks of imitative
witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently,
but never sought to make acquaintance. If
spoken to, she would not speak again. If the
children gathered about her, as they sometimes
did, Pearl would grow positively terrible
in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to
fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations,
that made her mother tremble, because they
had so much the sound of a witch's anathemas
in some unknown tongue.
The truth was, that the little Puritans, being
of the most intolerant brood that ever lived,
had got a vague idea of something outlandish,
unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions,
in the mother and child, and therefore scorned
them in their hearts, and not unfrequently
reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt
the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest
hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a
childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce
temper had a kind of value, and even comfort
for the mother; because there was at least
an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead
of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted
her in the child's manifestations. It appalled
her, nevertheless, to discern here, again,
a shadowy reflection of the evil that had
existed in herself. All this enmity and passion
had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right,
out of Hester's heart. Mother and daughter
stood together in the same circle of seclusion
from human society; and in the nature of the
child seemed to be perpetuated those unquiet
elements that had distracted Hester Prynne
before Pearl's birth, but had since begun
to be soothed away by the softening influences
of maternity.
At home, within and around her mother's cottage,
Pearl wanted not a wide and various circle
of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth
from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated
itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles
a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest
materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were
the puppets of Pearl's witchcraft, and, without
undergoing any outward change, became spiritually
adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage
of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served
a multitude of imaginary personages, old and
young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged,
black, and solemn, and flinging groans and
other melancholy utterances on the breeze,
needed little transformation to figure as
Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden
were their children, whom Pearl smote down
and uprooted most unmercifully. It was wonderful,
the vast variety of forms into which she threw
her intellect, with no continuity, indeed,
but darting up and dancing, always in a state
of preternatural activity—soon sinking down,
as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a
tide of life—and succeeded by other shapes
of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing
so much as the phantasmagoric play of the
northern lights. In the mere exercise of the
fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a
growing mind, there might be a little more
than was observable in other children of bright
faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth
of human playmates, was thrown more upon the
visionary throng which she created. The singularity
lay in the hostile feelings with which the
child regarded all these offsprings of her
own heart and mind. She never created a friend,
but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the
dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of
armed enemies, against whom she rushed to
battle. It was inexpressibly sad—then what
depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her
own heart the cause—to observe, in one so
young, this constant recognition of an adverse
world, and so fierce a training of the energies
that were to make good her cause in the contest
that must ensue.
Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped
her work upon her knees, and cried out with
an agony which she would fain have hidden,
but which made utterance for itself betwixt
speech and a groan—"O Father in Heaven—if
Thou art still my Father—what is this being
which I have brought into the world?" And
Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware
through some more subtile channel, of those
throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and
beautiful little face upon her mother, smile
with sprite-like intelligence, and resume
her play.
One peculiarity of the child's deportment
remains yet to be told. The very first thing
which she had noticed in her life, was—what?—not
the mother's smile, responding to it, as other
babies do, by that faint, embryo smile of
the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully
afterwards, and with such fond discussion
whether it were indeed a smile. By no means!
But that first object of which Pearl seemed
to become aware was—shall we say it?—the
scarlet letter on Hester's bosom! One day,
as her mother stooped over the cradle, the
infant's eyes had been caught by the glimmering
of the gold embroidery about the letter; and
putting up her little hand she grasped at
it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided
gleam, that gave her face the look of a much
older child. Then, gasping for breath, did
Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively
endeavouring to tear it away, so infinite
was the torture inflicted by the intelligent
touch of Pearl's baby-hand. Again, as if her
mother's agonised gesture were meant only
to make sport for her, did little Pearl look
into her eyes, and smile. From that epoch,
except when the child was asleep, Hester had
never felt a moment's safety: not a moment's
calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true,
would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl's
gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet
letter; but then, again, it would come at
unawares, like the stroke of sudden death,
and always with that peculiar smile and odd
expression of the eyes.
Once this freakish, elvish cast came into
the child's eyes while Hester was looking
at her own image in them, as mothers are fond
of doing; and suddenly—for women in solitude,
and with troubled hearts, are pestered with
unaccountable delusions—she fancied that
she beheld, not her own miniature portrait,
but another face in the small black mirror
of Pearl's eye. It was a face, fiend-like,
full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance
of features that she had known full well,
though seldom with a smile, and never with
malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit
possessed the child, and had just then peeped
forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had
Hester been tortured, though less vividly,
by the same illusion.
In the afternoon of a certain summer's day,
after Pearl grew big enough to run about,
she amused herself with gathering handfuls
of wild flowers, and flinging them, one by
one, at her mother's bosom; dancing up and
down like a little elf whenever she hit the
scarlet letter. Hester's first motion had
been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands.
But whether from pride or resignation, or
a feeling that her penance might best be wrought
out by this unutterable pain, she resisted
the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death,
looking sadly into little Pearl's wild eyes.
Still came the battery of flowers, almost
invariably hitting the mark, and covering
the mother's breast with hurts for which she
could find no balm in this world, nor knew
how to seek it in another. At last, her shot
being all expended, the child stood still
and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing
image of a fiend peeping out—or, whether
it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it—from
the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
"Child, what art thou?" cried the mother.
"Oh, I am your little Pearl!" answered the
child.
But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and
began to dance up and down with the humoursome
gesticulation of a little imp, whose next
freak might be to fly up the chimney.
"Art thou my child, in very truth?" asked
Hester.
Nor did she put the question altogether idly,
but, for the moment, with a portion of genuine
earnestness; for, such was Pearl's wonderful
intelligence, that her mother half doubted
whether she were not acquainted with the secret
spell of her existence, and might not now
reveal herself.
"Yes; I am little Pearl!" repeated the child,
continuing her antics.
"Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl
of mine!" said the mother half playfully;
for it was often the case that a sportive
impulse came over her in the midst of her
deepest suffering. "Tell me, then, what thou
art, and who sent thee hither?"
"Tell me, mother!" said the child, seriously,
coming up to Hester, and pressing herself
close to her knees. "Do thou tell me!"
"Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!" answered
Hester Prynne.
But she said it with a hesitation that did
not escape the acuteness of the child. Whether
moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or
because an evil spirit prompted her, she put
up her small forefinger and touched the scarlet
letter.
"He did not send me!" cried she, positively.
"I have no Heavenly Father!"
"Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!"
answered the mother, suppressing a groan.
"He sent us all into the world. He sent even
me, thy mother. Then, much more thee! Or,
if not, thou strange and elfish child, whence
didst thou come?"
"Tell me! Tell me!" repeated Pearl, no longer
seriously, but laughing and capering about
the floor. "It is thou that must tell me!"
But Hester could not resolve the query, being
herself in a dismal labyrinth of doubt. She
remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the
talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who,
seeking vainly elsewhere for the child's paternity,
and observing some of her odd attributes,
had given out that poor little Pearl was a
demon offspring: such as, ever since old Catholic
times, had occasionally been seen on earth,
through the agency of their mother's sin,
and to promote some foul and wicked purpose.
Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish
enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed;
nor was Pearl the only child to whom this
inauspicious origin was assigned among the
New England Puritans.
VII. THE 
GOVERNOR'S HALL
Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion
of Governor Bellingham, with a pair of gloves
which she had fringed and embroidered to his
order, and which were to be worn on some great
occasion of state; for, though the chances
of a popular election had caused this former
ruler to descend a step or two from the highest
rank, he still held an honourable and influential
place among the colonial magistracy.
Another and far more important reason than
the delivery of a pair of embroidered gloves,
impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an
interview with a personage of so much power
and activity in the affairs of the settlement.
It had reached her ears that there was a design
on the part of some of the leading inhabitants,
cherishing the more rigid order of principles
in religion and government, to deprive her
of her child. On the supposition that Pearl,
as already hinted, was of demon origin, these
good people not unreasonably argued that a
Christian interest in the mother's soul required
them to remove such a stumbling-block from
her path. If the child, on the other hand,
were really capable of moral and religious
growth, and possessed the elements of ultimate
salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all
the fairer prospect of these advantages by
being transferred to wiser and better guardianship
than Hester Prynne's. Among those who promoted
the design, Governor Bellingham was said to
be one of the most busy. It may appear singular,
and, indeed, not a little ludicrous, that
an affair of this kind, which in later days
would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction
than that of the select men of the town, should
then have been a question publicly discussed,
and on which statesmen of eminence took sides.
At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however,
matters of even slighter public interest,
and of far less intrinsic weight than the
welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely
mixed up with the deliberations of legislators
and acts of state. The period was hardly,
if at all, earlier than that of our story,
when a dispute concerning the right of property
in a pig not only caused a fierce and bitter
contest in the legislative body of the colony,
but resulted in an important modification
of the framework itself of the legislature.
Full of concern, therefore—but so conscious
of her own right that it seemed scarcely an
unequal match between the public on the one
side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies
of nature, on the other—Hester Prynne set
forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl,
of course, was her companion. She was now
of an age to run lightly along by her mother's
side, and, constantly in motion from morn
till sunset, could have accomplished a much
longer journey than that before her. Often,
nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity,
she demanded to be taken up in arms; but was
soon as imperious to be let down again, and
frisked onward before Hester on the grassy
pathway, with many a harmless trip and tumble.
We have spoken of Pearl's rich and luxuriant
beauty—a beauty that shone with deep and
vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes possessing
intensity both of depth and glow, and hair
already of a deep, glossy brown, and which,
in after years, would be nearly akin to black.
There was fire in her and throughout her:
she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of
a passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving
the child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous
tendencies of her imagination their full play,
arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic of
a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in
fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So
much strength of colouring, which must have
given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of
a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to
Pearl's beauty, and made her the very brightest
little jet of flame that ever danced upon
the earth.
But it was a remarkable attribute of this
garb, and indeed, of the child's whole appearance,
that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded
the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne
was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was
the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet
letter endowed with life! The mother herself—as
if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched
into her brain that all her conceptions assumed
its form—had carefully wrought out the similitude,
lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity to
create an analogy between the object of her
affection and the emblem of her guilt and
torture. But, in truth, Pearl was the one
as well as the other; and only in consequence
of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly
to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts
of the town, the children of the Puritans
looked up from their play,—or what passed
for play with those sombre little urchins—and
spoke gravely one to another.
"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the
scarlet letter: and of a truth, moreover,
there is the likeness of the scarlet letter
running along by her side! Come, therefore,
and let us fling mud at them!"
But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after
frowning, stamping her foot, and shaking her
little hand with a variety of threatening
gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot
of her enemies, and put them all to flight.
She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them,
an infant pestilence—the scarlet fever,
or some such half-fledged angel of judgment—whose
mission was to punish the sins of the rising
generation. She screamed and shouted, too,
with a terrific volume of sound, which, doubtless,
caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake
within them. The victory accomplished, Pearl
returned quietly to her mother, and looked
up, smiling, into her face.
Without further adventure, they reached the
dwelling of Governor Bellingham. This was
a large wooden house, built in a fashion of
which there are specimens still extant in
the streets of our older towns now moss-grown,
crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart
with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences,
remembered or forgotten, that have happened
and passed away within their dusky chambers.
Then, however, there was the freshness of
the passing year on its exterior, and the
cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny
windows, of a human habitation, into which
death had never entered. It had, indeed, a
very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread
with a kind of stucco, in which fragments
of broken glass were plentifully intermixed;
so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise
over the front of the edifice, it glittered
and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung
against it by the double handful. The brilliancy
might have be fitted Aladdin's palace rather
than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler.
It was further decorated with strange and
seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams,
suitable to the quaint taste of the age which
had been drawn in the stucco, when newly laid
on, and had now grown hard and durable, for
the admiration of after times.
Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a
house began to caper and dance, and imperatively
required that the whole breadth of sunshine
should be stripped off its front, and given
her to play with.
"No, my little Pearl!" said her mother; "thou
must gather thine own sunshine. I have none
to give thee!"
They approached the door, which was of an
arched form, and flanked on each side by a
narrow tower or projection of the edifice,
in both of which were lattice-windows, the
wooden shutters to close over them at need.
Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal,
Hester Prynne gave a summons, which was answered
by one of the Governor's bond servant—a
free-born Englishman, but now a seven years'
slave. During that term he was to be the property
of his master, and as much a commodity of
bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool.
The serf wore the customary garb of serving-men
at that period, and long before, in the old
hereditary halls of England.
"Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?"
inquired Hester.
"Yea, forsooth," replied the bond-servant,
staring with wide-open eyes at the scarlet
letter, which, being a new-comer in the country,
he had never before seen. "Yea, his honourable
worship is within. But he hath a godly minister
or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye
may not see his worship now."
"Nevertheless, I will enter," answered Hester
Prynne; and the bond-servant, perhaps judging
from the decision of her air, and the glittering
symbol in her bosom, that she was a great
lady in the land, offered no opposition.
So the mother and little Pearl were admitted
into the hall of entrance. With many variations,
suggested by the nature of his building materials,
diversity of climate, and a different mode
of social life, Governor Bellingham had planned
his new habitation after the residences of
gentlemen of fair estate in his native land.
Here, then, was a wide and reasonably lofty
hall, extending through the whole depth of
the house, and forming a medium of general
communication, more or less directly, with
all the other apartments. At one extremity,
this spacious room was lighted by the windows
of the two towers, which formed a small recess
on either side of the portal. At the other
end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it
was more powerfully illuminated by one of
those embowed hall windows which we read of
in old books, and which was provided with
a deep and cushioned seat. Here, on the cushion,
lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles
of England, or other such substantial literature;
even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded
volumes on the centre table, to be turned
over by the casual guest. The furniture of
the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs,
the backs of which were elaborately carved
with wreaths of oaken flowers; and likewise
a table in the same taste, the whole being
of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier,
and heirlooms, transferred hither from the
Governor's paternal home. On the table—in
token that the sentiment of old English hospitality
had not been left behind—stood a large pewter
tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester
or Pearl peeped into it, they might have seen
the frothy remnant of a recent draught of
ale.
On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing
the forefathers of the Bellingham lineage,
some with armour on their breasts, and others
with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All
were characterised by the sternness and severity
which old portraits so invariably put on,
as if they were the ghosts, rather than the
pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing
with harsh and intolerant criticism at the
pursuits and enjoyments of living men.
At about the centre of the oaken panels that
lined the hall was suspended a suit of mail,
not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic,
but of the most modern date; for it had been
manufactured by a skilful armourer in London,
the same year in which Governor Bellingham
came over to New England. There was a steel
head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget and greaves,
with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging
beneath; all, and especially the helmet and
breastplate, so highly burnished as to glow
with white radiance, and scatter an illumination
everywhere about upon the floor. This bright
panoply was not meant for mere idle show,
but had been worn by the Governor on many
a solemn muster and training field, and had
glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment
in the Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer,
and accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye,
and Finch, as his professional associates,
the exigencies of this new country had transformed
Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well
as a statesman and ruler.
Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with
the gleaming armour as she had been with the
glittering frontispiece of the house, spent
some time looking into the polished mirror
of the breastplate.
"Mother," cried she, "I see you here. Look!
Look!"
Hester looked by way of humouring the child;
and she saw that, owing to the peculiar effect
of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter
was represented in exaggerated and gigantic
proportions, so as to be greatly the most
prominent feature of her appearance. In truth,
she seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl
pointed upwards also, at a similar picture
in the head-piece; smiling at her mother,
with the elfish intelligence that was so familiar
an expression on her small physiognomy. That
look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected
in the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity
of effect, that it made Hester Prynne feel
as if it could not be the image of her own
child, but of an imp who was seeking to mould
itself into Pearl's shape.
"Come along, Pearl," said she, drawing her
away, "Come and look into this fair garden.
It may be we shall see flowers there; more
beautiful ones than we find in the woods."
Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at
the further end of the hall, and looked along
the vista of a garden walk, carpeted with
closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some
rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. But
the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished
as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this
side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil, and
amid the close struggle for subsistence, the
native English taste for ornamental gardening.
Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin-vine,
rooted at some distance, had run across the
intervening space, and deposited one of its
gigantic products directly beneath the hall
window, as if to warn the Governor that this
great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an
ornament as New England earth would offer
him. There were a few rose-bushes, however,
and a number of apple-trees, probably the
descendants of those planted by the Reverend
Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula;
that half mythological personage who rides
through our early annals, seated on the back
of a bull.
Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry
for a red rose, and would not be pacified.
"Hush, child—hush!" said her mother, earnestly.
"Do not cry, dear little Pearl! I hear voices
in the garden. The Governor is coming, and
gentlemen along with him."
In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue,
a number of persons were seen approaching
towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of
her mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an
eldritch scream, and then became silent, not
from any notion of obedience, but because
the quick and mobile curiosity of her disposition
was excited by the appearance of those new
personages.
VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER
Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy
cap—such as elderly gentlemen loved to endue
themselves with, in their domestic privacy—walked
foremost, and appeared to be showing off his
estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements.
The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff,
beneath his grey beard, in the antiquated
fashion of King James's reign, caused his
head to look not a little like that of John
the Baptist in a charger. The impression made
by his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frost-bitten
with more than autumnal age, was hardly in
keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment
wherewith he had evidently done his utmost
to surround himself. But it is an error to
suppose that our great forefathers—though
accustomed to speak and think of human existence
as a state merely of trial and warfare, and
though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods
and life at the behest of duty—made it a
matter of conscience to reject such means
of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly
within their grasp. This creed was never taught,
for instance, by the venerable pastor, John
Wilson, whose beard, white as a snow-drift,
was seen over Governor Bellingham's shoulders,
while its wearer suggested that pears and
peaches might yet be naturalised in the New
England climate, and that purple grapes might
possibly be compelled to flourish against
the sunny garden-wall. The old clergyman,
nurtured at the rich bosom of the English
Church, had a long established and legitimate
taste for all good and comfortable things,
and however stern he might show himself in
the pulpit, or in his public reproof of such
transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still,
the genial benevolence of his private life
had won him warmer affection than was accorded
to any of his professional contemporaries.
Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two
other guests—one, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale,
whom the reader may remember as having taken
a brief and reluctant part in the scene of
Hester Prynne's disgrace; and, in close companionship
with him, old Roger Chillingworth, a person
of great skill in physic, who for two or three
years past had been settled in the town. It
was understood that this learned man was the
physician as well as friend of the young minister,
whose health had severely suffered of late
by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the
labours and duties of the pastoral relation.
The Governor, in advance of his visitors,
ascended one or two steps, and, throwing open
the leaves of the great hall window, found
himself close to little Pearl. The shadow
of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne, and
partially concealed her.
"What have we here?" said Governor Bellingham,
looking with surprise at the scarlet little
figure before him. "I profess, I have never
seen the like since my days of vanity, in
old King James's time, when I was wont to
esteem it a high favour to be admitted to
a court mask! There used to be a swarm of
these small apparitions in holiday time, and
we called them children of the Lord of Misrule.
But how gat such a guest into my hall?"
"Ay, indeed!" cried good old Mr. Wilson. "What
little bird of scarlet plumage may this be?
Methinks I have seen just such figures when
the sun has been shining through a richly
painted window, and tracing out the golden
and crimson images across the floor. But that
was in the old land. Prithee, young one, who
art thou, and what has ailed thy mother to
bedizen thee in this strange fashion? Art
thou a Christian child—ha? Dost know thy
catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty
elfs or fairies whom we thought to have left
behind us, with other relics of Papistry,
in merry old England?"
"I am mother's child," answered the scarlet
vision, "and my name is Pearl!"
"Pearl?—Ruby, rather—or Coral!—or Red
Rose, at the very least, judging from thy
hue!" responded the old minister, putting
forth his hand in a vain attempt to pat little
Pearl on the cheek. "But where is this mother
of thine? Ah! I see," he added; and, turning
to Governor Bellingham, whispered, "This is
the selfsame child of whom we have held speech
together; and behold here the unhappy woman,
Hester Prynne, her mother!"
"Sayest thou so?" cried the Governor. "Nay,
we might have judged that such a child's mother
must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy
type of her of Babylon! But she comes at a
good time, and we will look into this matter
forthwith."
Governor Bellingham stepped through the window
into the hall, followed by his three guests.
"Hester Prynne," said he, fixing his naturally
stern regard on the wearer of the scarlet
letter, "there hath been much question concerning
thee of late. The point hath been weightily
discussed, whether we, that are of authority
and influence, do well discharge our consciences
by trusting an immortal soul, such as there
is in yonder child, to the guidance of one
who hath stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls
of this world. Speak thou, the child's own
mother! Were it not, thinkest thou, for thy
little one's temporal and eternal welfare
that she be taken out of thy charge, and clad
soberly, and disciplined strictly, and instructed
in the truths of heaven and earth? What canst
thou do for the child in this kind?"
"I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned
from this!" answered Hester Prynne, laying
her finger on the red token.
"Woman, it is thy badge of shame!" replied
the stern magistrate. "It is because of the
stain which that letter indicates that we
would transfer thy child to other hands."
"Nevertheless," said the mother, calmly, though
growing more pale, "this badge hath taught
me—it daily teaches me—it is teaching
me at this moment—lessons whereof my child
may be the wiser and better, albeit they can
profit nothing to myself."
"We will judge warily," said Bellingham, "and
look well what we
are about to do. Good Master Wilson, I pray
you, examine this
Pearl—since that is her name—and see whether
she hath had such
Christian nurture as befits a child of her
age."
The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair
and made an effort to draw Pearl betwixt his
knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the
touch or familiarity of any but her mother,
escaped through the open window, and stood
on the upper step, looking like a wild tropical
bird of rich plumage, ready to take flight
into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not a little
astonished at this outbreak—for he was a
grandfatherly sort of personage, and usually
a vast favourite with children—essayed,
however, to proceed with the examination.
"Pearl," said he, with great solemnity, "thou
must take heed to instruction, that so, in
due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom
the pearl of great price. Canst thou tell
me, my child, who made thee?"
Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for
Hester Prynne, the daughter of a pious home,
very soon after her talk with the child about
her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her
of those truths which the human spirit, at
whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with
such eager interest. Pearl, therefore—so
large were the attainments of her three years'
lifetime—could have borne a fair examination
in the New England Primer, or the first column
of the Westminster Catechisms, although unacquainted
with the outward form of either of those celebrated
works. But that perversity, which all children
have more or less of, and of which little
Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most
inopportune moment, took thorough possession
of her, and closed her lips, or impelled her
to speak words amiss. After putting her finger
in her mouth, with many ungracious refusals
to answer good Mr. Wilson's question, the
child finally announced that she had not been
made at all, but had been plucked by her mother
off the bush of wild roses that grew by the
prison-door.
This phantasy was probably suggested by the
near proximity of the Governor's red roses,
as Pearl stood outside of the window, together
with her recollection of the prison rose-bush,
which she had passed in coming hither.
Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his
face, whispered something in the young clergyman's
ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of skill,
and even then, with her fate hanging in the
balance, was startled to perceive what a change
had come over his features—how much uglier
they were, how his dark complexion seemed
to have grown duskier, and his figure more
misshapen—since the days when she had familiarly
known him. She met his eyes for an instant,
but was immediately constrained to give all
her attention to the scene now going forward.
"This is awful!" cried the Governor, slowly
recovering from the astonishment into which
Pearl's response had thrown him. "Here is
a child of three years old, and she cannot
tell who made her! Without question, she is
equally in the dark as to her soul, its present
depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen,
we need inquire no further."
Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her
forcibly into her arms, confronting the old
Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression.
Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with
this sole treasure to keep her heart alive,
she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights
against the world, and was ready to defend
them to the death.
"God gave me the child!" cried she. "He gave
her in requital of all things else which ye
had taken from me. She is my happiness—she
is my torture, none the less! Pearl keeps
me here in life! Pearl punishes me, too! See
ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable
of being loved, and so endowed with a millionfold
the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall
not take her! I will die first!"
"My poor woman," said the not unkind old minister,
"the child shall be well cared for—far better
than thou canst do for it."
"God gave her into my keeping!" repeated Hester
Prynne, raising her voice almost to a shriek.
"I will not give her up!" And here by a sudden
impulse, she turned to the young clergyman,
Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment,
she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct
her eyes. "Speak thou for me!" cried she.
"Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of
my soul, and knowest me better than these
men can. I will not lose the child! Speak
for me! Thou knowest—for thou hast sympathies
which these men lack—thou knowest what is
in my heart, and what are a mother's rights,
and how much the stronger they are when that
mother has but her child and the scarlet letter!
Look thou to it! I will not lose the child!
Look to it!"
At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated
that Hester Prynne's situation had provoked
her to little less than madness, the young
minister at once came forward, pale, and holding
his hand over his heart, as was his custom
whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament
was thrown into agitation. He looked now more
careworn and emaciated than as we described
him at the scene of Hester's public ignominy;
and whether it were his failing health, or
whatever the cause might be, his large dark
eyes had a world of pain in their troubled
and melancholy depth.
"There is truth in what she says," began the
minister, with a voice sweet, tremulous, but
powerful, insomuch that the hall re-echoed
and the hollow armour rang with it—"truth
in what Hester says, and in the feeling which
inspires her! God gave her the child, and
gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of
its nature and requirements—both seemingly
so peculiar—which no other mortal being
can possess. And, moreover, is there not a
quality of awful sacredness in the relation
between this mother and this child?"
"Ay—how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?"
interrupted the
Governor. "Make that plain, I pray you!"
"It must be even so," resumed the minister.
"For, if we deem it otherwise, do we not thereby
say that the Heavenly Father, the creator
of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed
of sin, and made of no account the distinction
between unhallowed lust and holy love? This
child of its father's guilt and its mother's
shame has come from the hand of God, to work
in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so
earnestly and with such bitterness of spirit
the right to keep her. It was meant for a
blessing—for the one blessing of her life!
It was meant, doubtless, the mother herself
hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture
to be felt at many an unthought-of moment;
a pang, a sting, an ever-recurring agony,
in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath she not
expressed this thought in the garb of the
poor child, so forcibly reminding us of that
red symbol which sears her bosom?"
"Well said again!" cried good Mr. Wilson.
"I feared the woman had no better thought
than to make a mountebank of her child!"
"Oh, not so!—not so!" continued Mr. Dimmesdale.
"She recognises, believe me, the solemn miracle
which God hath wrought in the existence of
that child. And may she feel, too—what,
methinks, is the very truth—that this boon
was meant, above all things else, to keep
the mother's soul alive, and to preserve her
from blacker depths of sin into which Satan
might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore
it is good for this poor, sinful woman, that
she hath an infant immortality, a being capable
of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her
care—to be trained up by her to righteousness,
to remind her, at every moment, of her fall,
but yet to teach her, as if it were by the
Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring
the child to heaven, the child also will bring
its parents thither! Herein is the sinful
mother happier than the sinful father. For
Hester Prynne's sake, then, and no less for
the poor child's sake, let us leave them as
Providence hath seen fit to place them!"
"You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,"
said old
Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him.
"And there is a weighty import in what my
young brother hath spoken," added the Rev.
Mr. Wilson.
"What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham?
Hath he not pleaded well for the poor woman?"
"Indeed hath he," answered the magistrate;
"and hath adduced such arguments, that we
will even leave the matter as it now stands;
so long, at least, as there shall be no further
scandal in the woman. Care must be had nevertheless,
to put the child to due and stated examination
in the catechism, at thy hands or Master Dimmesdale's.
Moreover, at a proper season, the tithing-men
must take heed that she go both to school
and to meeting."
The young minister, on ceasing to speak had
withdrawn a few steps from the group, and
stood with his face partially concealed in
the heavy folds of the window-curtain; while
the shadow of his figure, which the sunlight
cast upon the floor, was tremulous with the
vehemence of his appeal. Pearl, that wild
and flighty little elf stole softly towards
him, and taking his hand in the grasp of both
her own, laid her cheek against it; a caress
so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that
her mother, who was looking on, asked herself—"Is
that my Pearl?" Yet she knew that there was
love in the child's heart, although it mostly
revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice
in her lifetime had been softened by such
gentleness as now. The minister—for, save
the long-sought regards of woman, nothing
is sweeter than these marks of childish preference,
accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct,
and therefore seeming to imply in us something
truly worthy to be loved—the minister looked
round, laid his hand on the child's head,
hesitated an instant, and then kissed her
brow. Little Pearl's unwonted mood of sentiment
lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering
down the hall so airily, that old Mr. Wilson
raised a question whether even her tiptoes
touched the floor.
"The little baggage hath witchcraft in her,
I profess," said he to Mr. Dimmesdale. "She
needs no old woman's broomstick to fly withal!"
"A strange child!" remarked old Roger Chillingworth.
"It is easy to see the mother's part in her.
Would it be beyond a philosopher's research,
think ye, gentlemen, to analyse that child's
nature, and, from it make a mould, to give
a shrewd guess at the father?"
"Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question,
to follow the clue of profane philosophy,"
said Mr. Wilson. "Better to fast and pray
upon it; and still better, it may be, to leave
the mystery as we find it, unless Providence
reveal it of its own accord. Thereby, every
good Christian man hath a title to show a
father's kindness towards the poor, deserted
babe."
The affair being so satisfactorily concluded,
Hester Prynne, with Pearl, departed from the
house. As they descended the steps, it is
averred that the lattice of a chamber-window
was thrown open, and forth into the sunny
day was thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins,
Governor Bellingham's bitter-tempered sister,
and the same who, a few years later, was executed
as a witch.
"Hist, hist!" said she, while her ill-omened
physiognomy seemed to cast a shadow over the
cheerful newness of the house. "Wilt thou
go with us to-night? There will be a merry
company in the forest; and I well-nigh promised
the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should
make one."
"Make my excuse to him, so please you!" answered
Hester, with a triumphant smile. "I must tarry
at home, and keep watch over my little Pearl.
Had they taken her from me, I would willingly
have gone with thee into the forest, and signed
my name in the Black Man's book too, and that
with mine own blood!"
"We shall have thee there anon!" said the
witch-lady, frowning, as she drew back her
head.
But here—if we suppose this interview betwixt
Mistress Hibbins and Hester Prynne to be authentic,
and not a parable—was already an illustration
of the young minister's argument against sundering
the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring
of her frailty. Even thus early had the child
saved her from Satan's snare.
IX. THE LEECH
Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth,
the reader will remember, was hidden another
name, which its former wearer had resolved
should never more be spoken. It has been related,
how, in the crowd that witnessed Hester Prynne's
ignominious exposure, stood a man, elderly,
travel-worn, who, just emerging from the perilous
wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped
to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness
of home, set up as a type of sin before the
people. Her matronly fame was trodden under
all men's feet. Infamy was babbling around
her in the public market-place. For her kindred,
should the tidings ever reach them, and for
the companions of her unspotted life, there
remained nothing but the contagion of her
dishonour; which would not fail to be distributed
in strict accordance and proportion with the
intimacy and sacredness of their previous
relationship. Then why—since the choice
was with himself—should the individual,
whose connexion with the fallen woman had
been the most intimate and sacred of them
all, come forward to vindicate his claim to
an inheritance so little desirable? He resolved
not to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal
of shame. Unknown to all but Hester Prynne,
and possessing the lock and key of her silence,
he chose to withdraw his name from the roll
of mankind, and, as regarded his former ties
and interest, to vanish out of life as completely
as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean,
whither rumour had long ago consigned him.
This purpose once effected, new interests
would immediately spring up, and likewise
a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty,
but of force enough to engage the full strength
of his faculties.
In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his
residence in the Puritan town as Roger Chillingworth,
without other introduction than the learning
and intelligence of which he possessed more
than a common measure. As his studies, at
a previous period of his life, had made him
extensively acquainted with the medical science
of the day, it was as a physician that he
presented himself and as such was cordially
received. Skilful men, of the medical and
chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence
in the colony. They seldom, it would appear,
partook of the religious zeal that brought
other emigrants across the Atlantic. In their
researches into the human frame, it may be
that the higher and more subtle faculties
of such men were materialised, and that they
lost the spiritual view of existence amid
the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism,
which seemed to involve art enough to comprise
all of life within itself. At all events,
the health of the good town of Boston, so
far as medicine had aught to do with it, had
hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged
deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly
deportment were stronger testimonials in his
favour than any that he could have produced
in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon
was one who combined the occasional exercise
of that noble art with the daily and habitual
flourish of a razor. To such a professional
body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition.
He soon manifested his familiarity with the
ponderous and imposing machinery of antique
physic; in which every remedy contained a
multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous
ingredients, as elaborately compounded as
if the proposed result had been the Elixir
of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover,
he had gained much knowledge of the properties
of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal
from his patients that these simple medicines,
Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had
quite as large a share of his own confidence
as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many
learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.
This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded
at least the outward forms of a religious
life; and early after his arrival, had chosen
for his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.
The young divine, whose scholar-like renown
still lived in Oxford, was considered by his
more fervent admirers as little less than
a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should
he live and labour for the ordinary term of
life, to do as great deeds, for the now feeble
New England Church, as the early Fathers had
achieved for the infancy of the Christian
faith. About this period, however, the health
of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun to fail.
By those best acquainted with his habits,
the paleness of the young minister's cheek
was accounted for by his too earnest devotion
to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial
duty, and more than all, to the fasts and
vigils of which he made a frequent practice,
in order to keep the grossness of this earthly
state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual
lamp. Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale
were really going to die, it was cause enough
that the world was not worthy to be any longer
trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other
hand, with characteristic humility, avowed
his belief that if Providence should see fit
to remove him, it would be because of his
own unworthiness to perform its humblest mission
here on earth. With all this difference of
opinion as to the cause of his decline, there
could be no question of the fact. His form
grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich
and sweet, had a certain melancholy prophecy
of decay in it; he was often observed, on
any slight alarm or other sudden accident,
to put his hand over his heart with first
a flush and then a paleness, indicative of
pain.
Such was the young clergyman's condition,
and so imminent the prospect that his dawning
light would be extinguished, all untimely,
when Roger Chillingworth made his advent to
the town. His first entry on the scene, few
people could tell whence, dropping down as
it were out of the sky or starting from the
nether earth, had an aspect of mystery, which
was easily heightened to the miraculous. He
was now known to be a man of skill; it was
observed that he gathered herbs and the blossoms
of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked
off twigs from the forest-trees like one acquainted
with hidden virtues in what was valueless
to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir
Kenelm Digby and other famous men—whose
scientific attainments were esteemed hardly
less than supernatural—as having been his
correspondents or associates. Why, with such
rank in the learned world, had he come hither?
What, could he, whose sphere was in great
cities, be seeking in the wilderness? In answer
to this query, a rumour gained ground—and
however absurd, was entertained by some very
sensible people—that Heaven had wrought
an absolute miracle, by transporting an eminent
Doctor of Physic from a German university
bodily through the air and setting him down
at the door of Mr. Dimmesdale's study! Individuals
of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven
promotes its purposes without aiming at the
stage-effect of what is called miraculous
interposition, were inclined to see a providential
hand in Roger Chillingworth's so opportune
arrival.
This idea was countenanced by the strong interest
which the physician ever manifested in the
young clergyman; he attached himself to him
as a parishioner, and sought to win a friendly
regard and confidence from his naturally reserved
sensibility. He expressed great alarm at his
pastor's state of health, but was anxious
to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken,
seemed not despondent of a favourable result.
The elders, the deacons, the motherly dames,
and the young and fair maidens of Mr. Dimmesdale's
flock, were alike importunate that he should
make trial of the physician's frankly offered
skill. Mr. Dimmesdale gently repelled their
entreaties.
"I need no medicine," said he.
But how could the young minister say so, when,
with every successive Sabbath, his cheek was
paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous
than before—when it had now become a constant
habit, rather than a casual gesture, to press
his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his
labours? Did he wish to die? These questions
were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale
by the elder ministers of Boston, and the
deacons of his church, who, to use their own
phrase, "dealt with him," on the sin of rejecting
the aid which Providence so manifestly held
out. He listened in silence, and finally promised
to confer with the physician.
"Were it God's will," said the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale, when, in fulfilment of this pledge,
he requested old Roger Chillingworth's professional
advice, "I could be well content that my labours,
and my sorrows, and my sins, and my pains,
should shortly end with me, and what is earthly
of them be buried in my grave, and the spiritual
go with me to my eternal state, rather than
that you should put your skill to the proof
in my behalf."
"Ah," replied Roger Chillingworth, with that
quietness, which, whether imposed or natural,
marked all his deportment, "it is thus that
a young clergyman is apt to speak. Youthful
men, not having taken a deep root, give up
their hold of life so easily! And saintly
men, who walk with God on earth, would fain
be away, to walk with him on the golden pavements
of the New Jerusalem."
"Nay," rejoined the young minister, putting
his hand to his heart, with a flush of pain
flitting over his brow, "were I worthier to
walk there, I could be better content to toil
here."
"Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly,"
said the physician.
In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth
became the medical adviser of the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease interested
the physician, but he was strongly moved to
look into the character and qualities of the
patient, these two men, so different in age,
came gradually to spend much time together.
For the sake of the minister's health, and
to enable the leech to gather plants with
healing balm in them, they took long walks
on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling
various walks with the splash and murmur of
the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among
the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one was the
guest of the other in his place of study and
retirement. There was a fascination for the
minister in the company of the man of science,
in whom he recognised an intellectual cultivation
of no moderate depth or scope; together with
a range and freedom of ideas, that he would
have vainly looked for among the members of
his own profession. In truth, he was startled,
if not shocked, to find this attribute in
the physician. Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest,
a true religionist, with the reverential sentiment
largely developed, and an order of mind that
impelled itself powerfully along the track
of a creed, and wore its passage continually
deeper with the lapse of time. In no state
of society would he have been what is called
a man of liberal views; it would always be
essential to his peace to feel the pressure
of a faith about him, supporting, while it
confined him within its iron framework. Not
the less, however, though with a tremulous
enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief
of looking at the universe through the medium
of another kind of intellect than those with
which he habitually held converse. It was
as if a window were thrown open, admitting
a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled
study, where his life was wasting itself away,
amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams,
and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or
moral, that exhales from books. But the air
was too fresh and chill to be long breathed
with comfort. So the minister, and the physician
with him, withdrew again within the limits
of what their Church defined as orthodox.
Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient
carefully, both as he saw him in his ordinary
life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the
range of thoughts familiar to him, and as
he appeared when thrown amidst other moral
scenery, the novelty of which might call out
something new to the surface of his character.
He deemed it essential, it would seem, to
know the man, before attempting to do him
good. Wherever there is a heart and an intellect,
the diseases of the physical frame are tinged
with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur
Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so
active, and sensibility so intense, that the
bodily infirmity would be likely to have its
groundwork there. So Roger Chillingworth—the
man of skill, the kind and friendly physician—strove
to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving
among his principles, prying into his recollections,
and probing everything with a cautious touch,
like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern. Few
secrets can escape an investigator, who has
opportunity and licence to undertake such
a quest, and skill to follow it up. A man
burdened with a secret should especially avoid
the intimacy of his physician. If the latter
possess native sagacity, and a nameless something
more,—let us call it intuition; if he show
no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable prominent
characteristics of his own; if he have the
power, which must be born with him, to bring
his mind into such affinity with his patient's,
that this last shall unawares have spoken
what he imagines himself only to have thought;
if such revelations be received without tumult,
and acknowledged not so often by an uttered
sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate breath,
and here and there a word to indicate that
all is understood; if to these qualifications
of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded
by his recognised character as a physician;—then,
at some inevitable moment, will the soul of
the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth
in a dark but transparent stream, bringing
all its mysteries into the daylight.
Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most,
of the attributes above enumerated. Nevertheless,
time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have
said, grew up between these two cultivated
minds, which had as wide a field as the whole
sphere of human thought and study to meet
upon; they discussed every topic of ethics
and religion, of public affairs, and private
character; they talked much, on both sides,
of matters that seemed personal to themselves;
and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied
must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's
consciousness into his companion's ear. The
latter had his suspicions, indeed, that even
the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease
had never fairly been revealed to him. It
was a strange reserve!
After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth,
the friends of Mr. Dimmesdale effected an
arrangement by which the two were lodged in
the same house; so that every ebb and flow
of the minister's life-tide might pass under
the eye of his anxious and attached physician.
There was much joy throughout the town when
this greatly desirable object was attained.
It was held to be the best possible measure
for the young clergyman's welfare; unless,
indeed, as often urged by such as felt authorised
to do so, he had selected some one of the
many blooming damsels, spiritually devoted
to him, to become his devoted wife. This latter
step, however, there was no present prospect
that Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed
upon to take; he rejected all suggestions
of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were
one of his articles of Church discipline.
Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr.
Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavoury
morsel always at another's board, and endure
the life-long chill which must be his lot
who seeks to warm himself only at another's
fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious,
experienced, benevolent old physician, with
his concord of paternal and reverential love
for the young pastor, was the very man, of
all mankind, to be constantly within reach
of his voice.
The new abode of the two friends was with
a pious widow, of good social rank, who dwelt
in a house covering pretty nearly the site
on which the venerable structure of King's
Chapel has since been built. It had the graveyard,
originally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on
one side, and so was well adapted to call
up serious reflections, suited to their respective
employments, in both minister and man of physic.
The motherly care of the good widow assigned
to Mr. Dimmesdale a front apartment, with
a sunny exposure, and heavy window-curtains,
to create a noontide shadow when desirable.
The walls were hung round with tapestry, said
to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all
events, representing the Scriptural story
of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet,
in colours still unfaded, but which made the
fair woman of the scene almost as grimly picturesque
as the woe-denouncing seer. Here the pale
clergyman piled up his library, rich with
parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and
the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition,
of which the Protestant divines, even while
they vilified and decried that class of writers,
were yet constrained often to avail themselves.
On the other side of the house, old Roger
Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory:
not such as a modern man of science would
reckon even tolerably complete, but provided
with a distilling apparatus and the means
of compounding drugs and chemicals, which
the practised alchemist knew well how to turn
to purpose. With such commodiousness of situation,
these two learned persons sat themselves down,
each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing
from one apartment to the other, and bestowing
a mutual and not incurious inspection into
one another's business.
And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best
discerning friends, as we have intimated,
very reasonably imagined that the hand of
Providence had done all this for the purpose—besought
in so many public and domestic and secret
prayers—of restoring the young minister
to health. But, it must now be said, another
portion of the community had latterly begun
to take its own view of the relation betwixt
Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician.
When an uninstructed multitude attempts to
see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to
be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment,
as it usually does, on the intuitions of its
great and warm heart, the conclusions thus
attained are often so profound and so unerring
as to possess the character of truth supernaturally
revealed. The people, in the case of which
we speak, could justify its prejudice against
Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument
worthy of serious refutation. There was an
aged handicraftsman, it is true, who had been
a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas
Overbury's murder, now some thirty years agone;
he testified to having seen the physician,
under some other name, which the narrator
of the story had now forgotten, in company
with Dr. Forman, the famous old conjurer,
who was implicated in the affair of Overbury.
Two or three individuals hinted that the man
of skill, during his Indian captivity, had
enlarged his medical attainments by joining
in the incantations of the savage priests,
who were universally acknowledged to be powerful
enchanters, often performing seemingly miraculous
cures by their skill in the black art. A large
number—and many of these were persons of
such sober sense and practical observation
that their opinions would have been valuable
in other matters—affirmed that Roger Chillingworth's
aspect had undergone a remarkable change while
he had dwelt in town, and especially since
his abode with Mr. Dimmesdale. At first, his
expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like.
Now there was something ugly and evil in his
face, which they had not previously noticed,
and which grew still the more obvious to sight
the oftener they looked upon him. According
to the vulgar idea, the fire in his laboratory
had been brought from the lower regions, and
was fed with infernal fuel; and so, as might
be expected, his visage was getting sooty
with the smoke.
To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely
diffused opinion that the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale,
like many other personages of special sanctity,
in all ages of the Christian world, was haunted
either by Satan himself or Satan's emissary,
in the guise of old Roger Chillingworth. This
diabolical agent had the Divine permission,
for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's
intimacy, and plot against his soul. No sensible
man, it was confessed, could doubt on which
side the victory would turn. The people looked,
with an unshaken hope, to see the minister
come forth out of the conflict transfigured
with the glory which he would unquestionably
win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to
think of the perchance mortal agony through
which he must struggle towards his triumph.
Alas! to judge from the gloom and terror in
the depth of the poor minister's eyes, the
battle was a sore one, and the victory anything
but secure.
X. THE LEECH AND 
HIS PATIENT
Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life,
had been calm in temperament, kindly, though
not of warm affections, but ever, and in all
his relations with the world, a pure and upright
man. He had begun an investigation, as he
imagined, with the severe and equal integrity
of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as
if the question involved no more than the
air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical
problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs
inflicted on himself. But, as he proceeded,
a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce,
though still calm, necessity, seized the old
man within its gripe, and never set him free
again until he had done all its bidding. He
now dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like
a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like
a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in
quest of a jewel that had been buried on the
dead man's bosom, but likely to find nothing
save mortality and corruption. Alas, for his
own soul, if these were what he sought!
Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's
eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection
of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of
those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from
Bunyan's awful doorway in the hillside, and
quivered on the pilgrim's face. The soil where
this dark miner was working had perchance
shown indications that encouraged him.
"This man," said he, at one such moment, to
himself, "pure as they deem him—all spiritual
as he seems—hath inherited a strong animal
nature from his father or his mother. Let
us dig a little further in the direction of
this vein!"
Then after long search into the minister's
dim interior, and turning over many precious
materials, in the shape of high aspirations
for the welfare of his race, warm love of
souls, pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened
by thought and study, and illuminated by revelation—all
of which invaluable gold was perhaps no better
than rubbish to the seeker—he would turn
back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards
another point. He groped along as stealthily,
with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook,
as a thief entering a chamber where a man
lies only half asleep—or, it may be, broad
awake—with purpose to steal the very treasure
which this man guards as the apple of his
eye. In spite of his premeditated carefulness,
the floor would now and then creak; his garments
would rustle; the shadow of his presence,
in a forbidden proximity, would be thrown
across his victim. In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale,
whose sensibility of nerve often produced
the effect of spiritual intuition, would become
vaguely aware that something inimical to his
peace had thrust itself into relation with
him. But Old Roger Chillingworth, too, had
perceptions that were almost intuitive; and
when the minister threw his startled eyes
towards him, there the physician sat; his
kind, watchful, sympathising, but never intrusive
friend.
Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen
this individual's character more perfectly,
if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts
are liable, had not rendered him suspicious
of all mankind. Trusting no man as his friend,
he could not recognize his enemy when the
latter actually appeared. He therefore still
kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily
receiving the old physician in his study,
or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation's
sake, watching the processes by which weeds
were converted into drugs of potency.
One day, leaning his forehead on his hand,
and his elbow on the sill of the open window,
that looked towards the grave-yard, he talked
with Roger Chillingworth, while the old man
was examining a bundle of unsightly plants.
"Where," asked he, with a look askance at
them—for it was the clergyman's peculiarity
that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straight
forth at any object, whether human or inanimate,
"where, my kind doctor, did you gather those
herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?"
"Even in the graveyard here at hand," answered
the physician, continuing his employment.
"They are new to me. I found them growing
on a grave, which bore no tombstone, no other
memorial of the dead man, save these ugly
weeds, that have taken upon themselves to
keep him in remembrance. They grew out of
his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous
secret that was buried with him, and which
he had done better to confess during his lifetime."
"Perchance," said Mr. Dimmesdale, "he earnestly
desired it, but could not."
"And wherefore?" rejoined the physician.
"Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature
call so earnestly for the confession of sin,
that these black weeds have sprung up out
of a buried heart, to make manifest, an outspoken
crime?"
"That, good sir, is but a phantasy of yours,"
replied the minister. "There can be, if I
forbode aright, no power, short of the Divine
mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words,
or by type or emblem, the secrets that may
be buried in the human heart. The heart, making
itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce
hold them, until the day when all hidden things
shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted
Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure
of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made,
is intended as a part of the retribution.
That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No;
these revelations, unless I greatly err, are
meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction
of all intelligent beings, who will stand
waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem
of this life made plain. A knowledge of men's
hearts will be needful to the completest solution
of that problem. And, I conceive moreover,
that the hearts holding such miserable secrets
as you speak of, will yield them up, at that
last day, not with reluctance, but with a
joy unutterable."
"Then why not reveal it here?" asked Roger
Chillingworth, glancing quietly aside at the
minister. "Why should not the guilty ones
sooner avail themselves of this unutterable
solace?"
"They mostly do," said the clergyman, griping
hard at his breast, as if afflicted with an
importunate throb of pain. "Many, many a poor
soul hath given its confidence to me, not
only on the death-bed, but while strong in
life, and fair in reputation. And ever, after
such an outpouring, oh, what a relief have
I witnessed in those sinful brethren! even
as in one who at last draws free air, after
a long stifling with his own polluted breath.
How can it be otherwise? Why should a wretched
man—guilty, we will say, of murder—prefer
to keep the dead corpse buried in his own
heart, rather than fling it forth at once,
and let the universe take care of it!"
"Yet some men bury their secrets thus," observed
the calm physician.
"True; there are such men," answered Mr. Dimmesdale.
"But not to suggest more obvious reasons,
it may be that they are kept silent by the
very constitution of their nature. Or—can
we not suppose it?—guilty as they may be,
retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God's
glory and man's welfare, they shrink from
displaying themselves black and filthy in
the view of men; because, thenceforward, no
good can be achieved by them; no evil of the
past be redeemed by better service. So, to
their own unutterable torment, they go about
among their fellow-creatures, looking pure
as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are
all speckled and spotted with iniquity of
which they cannot rid themselves."
"These men deceive themselves," said Roger
Chillingworth, with somewhat more emphasis
than usual, and making a slight gesture with
his forefinger. "They fear to take up the
shame that rightfully belongs to them. Their
love for man, their zeal for God's service—these
holy impulses may or may not coexist in their
hearts with the evil inmates to which their
guilt has unbarred the door, and which must
needs propagate a hellish breed within them.
But, if they seek to glorify God, let them
not lift heavenward their unclean hands! If
they would serve their fellowmen, let them
do it by making manifest the power and reality
of conscience, in constraining them to penitential
self-abasement! Would thou have me to believe,
O wise and pious friend, that a false show
can be better—can be more for God's glory,
or man' welfare—than God's own truth? Trust
me, such men deceive themselves!"
"It may be so," said the young clergyman,
indifferently, as waiving a discussion that
he considered irrelevant or unseasonable.
He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping
from any topic that agitated his too sensitive
and nervous temperament.—"But, now, I would
ask of my well-skilled physician, whether,
in good sooth, he deems me to have profited
by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?"
Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they
heard the clear, wild laughter of a young
child's voice, proceeding from the adjacent
burial-ground. Looking instinctively from
the open window—for it was summer-time—the
minister beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl
passing along the footpath that traversed
the enclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful as
the day, but was in one of those moods of
perverse merriment which, whenever they occurred,
seemed to remove her entirely out of the sphere
of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until
coming to the broad, flat, armorial tombstone
of a departed worthy—perhaps of Isaac Johnson
himself—she began to dance upon it. In reply
to her mother's command and entreaty that
she would behave more decorously, little Pearl
paused to gather the prickly burrs from a
tall burdock which grew beside the tomb. Taking
a handful of these, she arranged them along
the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated
the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as
their nature was, tenaciously adhered. Hester
did not pluck them off.
Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached
the window and smiled grimly down.
"There is no law, nor reverence for authority,
no regard for human ordinances or opinions,
right or wrong, mixed up with that child's
composition," remarked he, as much to himself
as to his companion. "I saw her, the other
day, bespatter the Governor himself with water
at the cattle-trough in Spring Lane. What,
in heaven's name, is she? Is the imp altogether
evil? Hath she affections? Hath she any discoverable
principle of being?"
"None, save the freedom of a broken law,"
answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in a quiet way, as
if he had been discussing the point within
himself, "Whether capable of good, I know
not."
The child probably overheard their voices,
for, looking up to the window with a bright,
but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence,
she threw one of the prickly burrs at the
Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman
shrank, with nervous dread, from the light
missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped
her little hands in the most extravagant ecstacy.
Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily
looked up, and all these four persons, old
and young, regarded one another in silence,
till the child laughed aloud, and shouted—"Come
away, mother! Come away, or yonder old black
man will catch you! He hath got hold of the
minister already. Come away, mother or he
will catch you! But he cannot catch little
Pearl!"
So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing,
and frisking fantastically among the hillocks
of the dead people, like a creature that had
nothing in common with a bygone and buried
generation, nor owned herself akin to it.
It was as if she had been made afresh out
of new elements, and must perforce be permitted
to live her own life, and be a law unto herself
without her eccentricities being reckoned
to her for a crime.
"There goes a woman," resumed Roger Chillingworth,
after a pause, "who, be her demerits what
they may, hath none of that mystery of hidden
sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be
borne. Is Hester Prynne the less miserable,
think you, for that scarlet letter on her
breast?"
"I do verily believe it," answered the clergyman.
"Nevertheless, I cannot answer for her. There
was a look of pain in her face which I would
gladly have been spared the sight of. But
still, methinks, it must needs be better for
the sufferer to be free to show his pain,
as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover
it up in his heart."
There was another pause, and the physician
began anew to examine and arrange the plants
which he had gathered.
"You inquired of me, a little time agone,"
said he, at length, "my judgment as touching
your health."
"I did," answered the clergyman, "and would
gladly learn it.
Speak frankly, I pray you, be it for life
or death."
"Freely then, and plainly," said the physician,
still busy with his plants, but keeping a
wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, "the disorder
is a strange one; not so much in itself nor
as outwardly manifested,—in so far, at least
as the symptoms have been laid open to my
observation. Looking daily at you, my good
sir, and watching the tokens of your aspect
now for months gone by, I should deem you
a man sore sick, it may be, yet not so sick
but that an instructed and watchful physician
might well hope to cure you. But I know not
what to say, the disease is what I seem to
know, yet know it not."
"You speak in riddles, learned sir," said
the pale minister, glancing aside out of the
window.
"Then, to speak more plainly," continued the
physician, "and I crave pardon, sir, should
it seem to require pardon, for this needful
plainness of my speech. Let me ask as your
friend, as one having charge, under Providence,
of your life and physical well being, hath
all the operations of this disorder been fairly
laid open and recounted to me?"
"How can you question it?" asked the minister.
"Surely it were child's play to call in a
physician and then hide the sore!"
"You would tell me, then, that I know all?"
said Roger Chillingworth, deliberately, and
fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated
intelligence, on the minister's face. "Be
it so! But again! He to whom only the outward
and physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes,
but half the evil which he is called upon
to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon
as whole and entire within itself, may, after
all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the
spiritual part. Your pardon once again, good
sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence.
You, sir, of all men whom I have known, are
he whose body is the closest conjoined, and
imbued, and identified, so to speak, with
the spirit whereof it is the instrument."
"Then I need ask no further," said the clergyman,
somewhat hastily rising from his chair. "You
deal not, I take it, in medicine for the soul!"
"Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth,
going on, in an unaltered tone, without heeding
the interruption, but standing up and confronting
the emaciated and white-cheeked minister,
with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,—"a
sickness, a sore place, if we may so call
it, in your spirit hath immediately its appropriate
manifestation in your bodily frame. Would
you, therefore, that your physician heal the
bodily evil? How may this be unless you first
lay open to him the wound or trouble in your
soul?"
"No, not to thee! not to an earthly physician!"
cried Mr. Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning
his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind
of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth.
"Not to thee! But, if it be the soul's disease,
then do I commit myself to the one Physician
of the soul! He, if it stand with His good
pleasure, can cure, or he can kill. Let Him
do with me as, in His justice and wisdom,
He shall see good. But who art thou, that
meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust
himself between the sufferer and his God?"
With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the
room.
"It is as well to have made this step," said
Roger Chillingworth to himself, looking after
the minister, with a grave smile. "There is
nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon.
But see, now, how passion takes hold upon
this man, and hurrieth him out of himself!
As with one passion so with another. He hath
done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master
Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart."
It proved not difficult to re-establish the
intimacy of the two companions, on the same
footing and in the same degree as heretofore.
The young clergyman, after a few hours of
privacy, was sensible that the disorder of
his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly
outbreak of temper, which there had been nothing
in the physician's words to excuse or palliate.
He marvelled, indeed, at the violence with
which he had thrust back the kind old man,
when merely proffering the advice which it
was his duty to bestow, and which the minister
himself had expressly sought. With these remorseful
feelings, he lost no time in making the amplest
apologies, and besought his friend still to
continue the care which, if not successful
in restoring him to health, had, in all probability,
been the means of prolonging his feeble existence
to that hour. Roger Chillingworth readily
assented, and went on with his medical supervision
of the minister; doing his best for him, in
all good faith, but always quitting the patient's
apartment, at the close of the professional
interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile
upon his lips. This expression was invisible
in Mr. Dimmesdale's presence, but grew strongly
evident as the physician crossed the threshold.
"A rare case," he muttered. "I must needs
look deeper into it. A strange sympathy betwixt
soul and body! Were it only for the art's
sake, I must search this matter to the bottom."
It came to pass, not long after the scene
above recorded, that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale,
noon-day, and entirely unawares, fell into
a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair,
with a large black-letter volume open before
him on the table. It must have been a work
of vast ability in the somniferous school
of literature. The profound depth of the minister's
repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as
he was one of those persons whose sleep ordinarily
is as light as fitful, and as easily scared
away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To
such an unwonted remoteness, however, had
his spirit now withdrawn into itself that
he stirred not in his chair when old Roger
Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution,
came into the room. The physician advanced
directly in front of his patient, laid his
hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the
vestment, that hitherto had always covered
it even from the professional eye.
Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and
slightly stirred.
After a brief pause, the physician turned
away.
But with what a wild look of wonder, joy,
and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as
it were, too mighty to be expressed only by
the eye and features, and therefore bursting
forth through the whole ugliness of his figure,
and making itself even riotously manifest
by the extravagant gestures with which he
threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and
stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man
seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment
of his ecstasy, he would have had no need
to ask how Satan comports himself when a precious
human soul is lost to heaven, and won into
his kingdom.
But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy
from Satan's was the trait of wonder 
in it!
XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART
After the incident last described, the intercourse
between the clergyman and the physician, though
externally the same, was really of another
character than it had previously been. The
intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a
sufficiently plain path before it. It was
not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid
out for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless,
as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a
quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but
active now, in this unfortunate old man, which
led him to imagine a more intimate revenge
than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy.
To make himself the one trusted friend, to
whom should be confided all the fear, the
remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance,
the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled
in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from
the world, whose great heart would have pitied
and forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless—to
him, the Unforgiving! All that dark treasure
to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing
else could so adequately pay the debt of vengeance!
The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve
had balked this scheme. Roger Chillingworth,
however, was inclined to be hardly, if at
all, less satisfied with the aspect of affairs,
which Providence—using the avenger and his
victim for its own purposes, and, perchance,
pardoning, where it seemed most to punish—had
substituted for his black devices. A revelation,
he could almost say, had been granted to him.
It mattered little for his object, whether
celestial or from what other region. By its
aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt
him and Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external
presence, but the very inmost soul of the
latter, seemed to be brought out before his
eyes, so that he could see and comprehend
its every movement. He became, thenceforth,
not a spectator only, but a chief actor in
the poor minister's interior world. He could
play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse
him with a throb of agony? The victim was
for ever on the rack; it needed only to know
the spring that controlled the engine: and
the physician knew it well. Would he startle
him with sudden fear? As at the waving of
a magician's wand, up rose a grisly phantom—up
rose a thousand phantoms—in many shapes,
of death, or more awful shame, all flocking
round about the clergyman, and pointing with
their fingers at his breast!
All this was accomplished with a subtlety
so perfect, that the minister, though he had
constantly a dim perception of some evil influence
watching over him, could never gain a knowledge
of its actual nature. True, he looked doubtfully,
fearfully—even, at times, with horror and
the bitterness of hatred—at the deformed
figure of the old physician. His gestures,
his gait, his grizzled beard, his slightest
and most indifferent acts, the very fashion
of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's
sight; a token implicitly to be relied on
of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the
latter than he was willing to acknowledge
to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign
a reason for such distrust and abhorrence,
so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison
of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's
entire substance, attributed all his presentiments
to no other cause. He took himself to task
for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger
Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that
he should have drawn from them, and did his
best to root them out. Unable to accomplish
this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle,
continued his habits of social familiarity
with the old man, and thus gave him constant
opportunities for perfecting the purpose to
which—poor forlorn creature that he was,
and more wretched than his victim—the avenger
had devoted himself.
While thus suffering under bodily disease,
and gnawed and tortured by some black trouble
of the soul, and given over to the machinations
of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
had achieved a brilliant popularity in his
sacred office. He won it indeed, in great
part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts,
his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing
and communicating emotion, were kept in a
state of preternatural activity by the prick
and anguish of his daily life. His fame, though
still on its upward slope, already overshadowed
the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen,
eminent as several of them were. There are
scholars among them, who had spent more years
in acquiring abstruse lore, connected with
the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale
had lived; and who might well, therefore,
be more profoundly versed in such solid and
valuable attainments than their youthful brother.
There were men, too, of a sturdier texture
of mind than his, and endowed with a far greater
share of shrewd, hard iron, or granite understanding;
which, duly mingled with a fair proportion
of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly
respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety
of the clerical species. There were others
again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties
had been elaborated by weary toil among their
books, and by patient thought, and etherealised,
moreover, by spiritual communications with
the better world, into which their purity
of life had almost introduced these holy personages,
with their garments of mortality still clinging
to them. All that they lacked was, the gift
that descended upon the chosen disciples at
Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising,
it would seem, not the power of speech in
foreign and unknown languages, but that of
addressing the whole human brotherhood in
the heart's native language. These fathers,
otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last
and rarest attestation of their office, the
Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought—had
they ever dreamed of seeking—to express
the highest truths through the humblest medium
of familiar words and images. Their voices
came down, afar and indistinctly, from the
upper heights where they habitually dwelt.
Not improbably, it was to this latter class
of men that Mr. Dimmesdale, by many of his
traits of character, naturally belonged. To
the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity
he would have climbed, had not the tendency
been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might
be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it
was his doom to totter. It kept him down on
a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal
attributes, whose voice the angels might else
have listened to and answered! But this very
burden it was that gave him sympathies so
intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind;
so that his heart vibrated in unison with
theirs, and received their pain into itself
and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand
other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive
eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes
terrible! The people knew not the power that
moved them thus. They deemed the young clergyman
a miracle of holiness. They fancied him the
mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom,
and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very
ground on which he trod was sanctified. The
virgins of his church grew pale around him,
victims of a passion so imbued with religious
sentiment, that they imagined it to be all
religion, and brought it openly, in their
white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice
before the altar. The aged members of his
flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale's frame so
feeble, while they were themselves so rugged
in their infirmity, believed that he would
go heavenward before them, and enjoined it
upon their children that their old bones should
be buried close to their young pastor's holy
grave. And all this time, perchance, when
poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave,
he questioned with himself whether the grass
would ever grow on it, because an accursed
thing must there be buried!
It is inconceivable, the agony with which
this public veneration tortured him. It was
his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and
to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly
devoid of weight or value, that had not its
divine essence as the life within their life.
Then what was he?—a substance?—or the
dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak
out from his own pulpit at the full height
of his voice, and tell the people what he
was. "I, whom you behold in these black garments
of the priesthood—I, who ascend the sacred
desk, and turn my pale face heavenward, taking
upon myself to hold communion in your behalf
with the Most High Omniscience—I, in whose
daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch—I,
whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam
along my earthly track, whereby the Pilgrims
that shall come after me may be guided to
the regions of the blest—I, who have laid
the hand of baptism upon your children—I,
who have breathed the parting prayer over
your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded
faintly from a world which they had quitted—I,
your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust,
am utterly a pollution and a lie!"
More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into
the pulpit, with a purpose never to come down
its steps until he should have spoken words
like the above. More than once he had cleared
his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and
tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again,
would come burdened with the black secret
of his soul. More than once—nay, more than
a hundred times—he had actually spoken!
Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that
he was altogether vile, a viler companion
of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination,
a thing of unimaginable iniquity, and that
the only wonder was that they did not see
his wretched body shrivelled up before their
eyes by the burning wrath of the Almighty!
Could there be plainer speech than this? Would
not the people start up in their seats, by
a simultaneous impulse, and tear him down
out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so,
indeed! They heard it all, and did but reverence
him the more. They little guessed what deadly
purport lurked in those self-condemning words.
"The godly youth!" said they among themselves.
"The saint on earth! Alas! if he discern such
sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid
spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!"
The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful
hypocrite that he was!—the light in which
his vague confession would be viewed. He had
striven to put a cheat upon himself by making
the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had
gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged
shame, without the momentary relief of being
self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth,
and transformed it into the veriest falsehood.
And yet, by the constitution of his nature,
he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as
few men ever did. Therefore, above all things
else, he loathed his miserable self!
His inward trouble drove him to practices
more in accordance with the old, corrupted
faith of Rome than with the better light of
the church in which he had been born and bred.
In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock
and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes,
this Protestant and Puritan divine had plied
it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly
at himself the while, and smiting so much
the more pitilessly because of that bitter
laugh. It was his custom, too, as it has been
that of many other pious Puritans, to fast—not
however, like them, in order to purify the
body, and render it the fitter medium of celestial
illumination—but rigorously, and until his
knees trembled beneath him, as an act of penance.
He kept vigils, likewise, night after night,
sometimes in utter darkness, sometimes with
a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing
his own face in a looking-glass, by the most
powerful light which he could throw upon it.
He thus typified the constant introspection
wherewith he tortured, but could not purify
himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain
often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before
him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint
light of their own, in the remote dimness
of the chamber, or more vividly and close
beside him, within the looking-glass. Now
it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned
and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned
him away with them; now a group of shining
angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden,
but grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came
the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded
father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother
turning her face away as she passed by. Ghost
of a mother—thinnest fantasy of a mother—methinks
she might yet have thrown a pitying glance
towards her son! And now, through the chamber
which these spectral thoughts had made so
ghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along
little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing
her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter
on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's
own breast.
None of these visions ever quite deluded him.
At any moment, by an effort of his will, he
could discern substances through their misty
lack of substance, and convince himself that
they were not solid in their nature, like
yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square,
leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of
divinity. But, for all that, they were, in
one sense, the truest and most substantial
things which the poor minister now dealt with.
It is the unspeakable misery of a life so
false as his, that it steals the pith and
substance out of whatever realities there
are around us, and which were meant by Heaven
to be the spirit's joy and nutriment. To the
untrue man, the whole universe is false—it
is impalpable—it shrinks to nothing within
his grasp. And he himself in so far as he
shows himself in a false light, becomes a
shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only
truth that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale
a real existence on this earth was the anguish
in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression
of it in his aspect. Had he once found power
to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there
would have been no such man!
On one of those ugly nights, which we have
faintly hinted at, but forborne to picture
forth, the minister started from his chair.
A new thought had struck him. There might
be a moment's peace in it. Attiring himself
with as much care as if it had been for public
worship, and precisely in the same manner,
he stole softly down the staircase, undid
the door, and issued forth.
XII. THE MINISTER'S VIGIL
Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were,
and perhaps actually under the influence of
a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale
reached the spot where, now so long since,
Hester Prynne had lived through her first
hours of public ignominy. The same platform
or scaffold, black and weather-stained with
the storm or sunshine of seven long years,
and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many
culprits who had since ascended it, remained
standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house.
The minister went up the steps.
It was an obscure night in early May. An unvaried
pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of
sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude
which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester
Prynne sustained her punishment could now
have been summoned forth, they would have
discerned no face above the platform nor hardly
the outline of a human shape, in the dark
grey of the midnight. But the town was all
asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The
minister might stand there, if it so pleased
him, until morning should redden in the east,
without other risk than that the dank and
chill night air would creep into his frame,
and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and
clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby
defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's
prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save
that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in
his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why,
then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery
of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which
his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at
which angels blushed and wept, while fiends
rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been
driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse
which dogged him everywhere, and whose own
sister and closely linked companion was that
Cowardice which invariably drew him back,
with her tremulous gripe, just when the other
impulse had hurried him to the verge of a
disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what right
had infirmity like his to burden itself with
crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have
their choice either to endure it, or, if it
press too hard, to exert their fierce and
savage strength for a good purpose, and fling
it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive
of spirits could do neither, yet continually
did one thing or another, which intertwined,
in the same inextricable knot, the agony of
heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.
And thus, while standing on the scaffold,
in this vain show of expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale
was overcome with a great horror of mind,
as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet
token on his naked breast, right over his
heart. On that spot, in very truth, there
was, and there had long been, the gnawing
and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without
any effort of his will, or power to restrain
himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that
went pealing through the night, and was beaten
back from one house to another, and reverberated
from the hills in the background; as if a
company of devils, detecting so much misery
and terror in it, had made a plaything of
the sound, and were bandying it to and fro.
"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering
his face with his hands. "The whole town will
awake and hurry forth, and find me here!"
But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps
sounded with a far greater power, to his own
startled ears, than it actually possessed.
The town did not awake; or, if it did, the
drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for
something frightful in a dream, or for the
noise of witches, whose voices, at that period,
were often heard to pass over the settlements
or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan
through the air. The clergyman, therefore,
hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered
his eyes and looked about him. At one of the
chamber-windows of Governor Bellingham's mansion,
which stood at some distance, on the line
of another street, he beheld the appearance
of the old magistrate himself with a lamp
in his hand a white night-cap on his head,
and a long white gown enveloping his figure.
He looked like a ghost evoked unseasonably
from the grave. The cry had evidently startled
him. At another window of the same house,
moreover appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the
Governor's sister, also with a lamp, which
even thus far off revealed the expression
of her sour and discontented face. She thrust
forth her head from the lattice, and looked
anxiously upward. Beyond the shadow of a doubt,
this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's
outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous
echoes and reverberations, as the clamour
of the fiends and night-hags, with whom she
was well known to make excursions in the forest.
Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's
lamp, the old lady quickly extinguished her
own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among
the clouds. The minister saw nothing further
of her motions. The magistrate, after a wary
observation of the darkness—into which,
nevertheless, he could see but little further
than he might into a mill-stone—retired
from the window.
The minister grew comparatively calm. His
eyes, however, were soon greeted by a little
glimmering light, which, at first a long way
off was approaching up the street. It threw
a gleam of recognition, on here a post, and
there a garden fence, and here a latticed
window-pane, and there a pump, with its full
trough of water, and here again an arched
door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough
log for the door-step. The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
noted all these minute particulars, even while
firmly convinced that the doom of his existence
was stealing onward, in the footsteps which
he now heard; and that the gleam of the lantern
would fall upon him in a few moments more,
and reveal his long-hidden secret. As the
light drew nearer, he beheld, within its illuminated
circle, his brother clergyman—or, to speak
more accurately, his professional father,
as well as highly valued friend—the Reverend
Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now conjectured,
had been praying at the bedside of some dying
man. And so he had. The good old minister
came freshly from the death-chamber of Governor
Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven
within that very hour. And now surrounded,
like the saint-like personage of olden times,
with a radiant halo, that glorified him amid
this gloomy night of sin—as if the departed
Governor had left him an inheritance of his
glory, or as if he had caught upon himself
the distant shine of the celestial city, while
looking thitherward to see the triumphant
pilgrim pass within its gates—now, in short,
good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding
his footsteps with a lighted lantern! The
glimmer of this luminary suggested the above
conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled—nay,
almost laughed at them—and then wondered
if he was going mad.
As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the
scaffold, closely muffling his Geneva cloak
about him with one arm, and holding the lantern
before his breast with the other, the minister
could hardly restrain himself from speaking—
"A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson.
Come up hither, I pray you, and pass a pleasant
hour with me!"
Good Heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually
spoken? For one instant he believed that these
words had passed his lips. But they were uttered
only within his imagination. The venerable
Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward,
looking carefully at the muddy pathway before
his feet, and never once turning his head
towards the guilty platform. When the light
of the glimmering lantern had faded quite
away, the minister discovered, by the faintness
which came over him, that the last few moments
had been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although
his mind had made an involuntary effort to
relieve itself by a kind of lurid playfulness.
Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense
of the humorous again stole in among the solemn
phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs
growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness
of the night, and doubted whether he should
be able to descend the steps of the scaffold.
Morning would break and find him there. The
neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself.
The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim
twilight, would perceive a vaguely-defined
figure aloft on the place of shame; and half-crazed
betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking
from door to door, summoning all the people
to behold the ghost—as he needs must think
it—of some defunct transgressor. A dusky
tumult would flap its wings from one house
to another. Then—the morning light still
waxing stronger—old patriarchs would rise
up in great haste, each in his flannel gown,
and matronly dames, without pausing to put
off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous
personages, who had never heretofore been
seen with a single hair of their heads awry,
would start into public view with the disorder
of a nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor
Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his
King James' ruff fastened askew, and Mistress
Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging
to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever,
as having hardly got a wink of sleep after
her night ride; and good Father Wilson too,
after spending half the night at a death-bed,
and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early,
out of his dreams about the glorified saints.
Hither, likewise, would come the elders and
deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the
young virgins who so idolized their minister,
and had made a shrine for him in their white
bosoms, which now, by-the-bye, in their hurry
and confusion, they would scantly have given
themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs.
All people, in a word, would come stumbling
over their thresholds, and turning up their
amazed and horror-stricken visages around
the scaffold. Whom would they discern there,
with the red eastern light upon his brow?
Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale,
half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame,
and standing where Hester Prynne had stood!
Carried away by the grotesque horror of this
picture, the minister, unawares, and to his
own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal
of laughter. It was immediately responded
to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which,
with a thrill of the heart—but he knew not
whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as
acute—he recognised the tones of little
Pearl.
"Pearl! Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's
pause; then, suppressing his voice—"Hester!
Hester Prynne! Are you there?"
"Yes; it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in
a tone of surprise; and the minister heard
her footsteps approaching from the side-walk,
along which she had been passing. "It is I,
and my little Pearl."
"Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister.
"What sent you hither?"
"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered
Hester Prynne "at Governor Winthrop's death-bed,
and have taken his measure for a robe, and
am now going homeward to my dwelling."
"Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,"
said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. "Ye have
both been here before, but I was not with
you. Come up hither once again, and we will
stand all three together."
She silently ascended the steps, and stood
on the platform, holding little Pearl by the
hand. The minister felt for the child's other
hand, and took it. The moment that he did
so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush
of new life, other life than his own pouring
like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying
through all his veins, as if the mother and
the child were communicating their vital warmth
to his half-torpid system. The three formed
an electric chain.
"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.
"What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr.
Dimmesdale.
"Wilt thou stand here with mother and me,
to-morrow noontide?" inquired Pearl.
"Nay; not so, my little Pearl," answered the
minister; for, with the new energy of the
moment, all the dread of public exposure,
that had so long been the anguish of his life,
had returned upon him; and he was already
trembling at the conjunction in which—with
a strange joy, nevertheless—he now found
himself—"not so, my child. I shall, indeed,
stand with thy mother and thee one other day,
but not to-morrow."
Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away
her hand. But the minister held it fast.
"A moment longer, my child!" said he.
"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to
take my hand, and mother's hand, to-morrow
noontide?"
"Not then, Pearl," said the minister; "but
another time."
"And what other time?" persisted the child.
"At the great judgment day," whispered the
minister; and, strangely enough, the sense
that he was a professional teacher of the
truth impelled him to answer the child so.
"Then, and there, before the judgment-seat,
thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together.
But the daylight of this world shall not see
our meeting!"
Pearl laughed again.
But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking,
a light gleamed far and wide over all the
muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one
of those meteors, which the night-watcher
may so often observe burning out to waste,
in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So
powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly
illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt
the sky and earth. The great vault brightened,
like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed
the familiar scene of the street with the
distinctness of mid-day, but also with the
awfulness that is always imparted to familiar
objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden
houses, with their jutting storeys and quaint
gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds
with the early grass springing up about them;
the garden-plots, black with freshly-turned
earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and even
in the market-place margined with green on
either side—all were visible, but with a
singularity of aspect that seemed to give
another moral interpretation to the things
of this world than they had ever borne before.
And there stood the minister, with his hand
over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the
embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom;
and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the
connecting link between those two. They stood
in the noon of that strange and solemn splendour,
as if it were the light that is to reveal
all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite
all who belong to one another.
There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes;
and her face, as she glanced upward at the
minister, wore that naughty smile which made
its expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew
her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed
across the street. But he clasped both his
hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards
the zenith.
Nothing was more common, in those days, than
to interpret all meteoric appearances, and
other natural phenomena that occurred with
less regularity than the rise and set of sun
and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural
source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of
flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in
the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare.
Pestilence was known to have been foreboded
by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether
any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell
New England, from its settlement down to revolutionary
times, of which the inhabitants had not been
previously warned by some spectacle of its
nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes.
Oftener, however, its credibility rested on
the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who
beheld the wonder through the coloured, magnifying,
and distorted medium of his imagination, and
shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought.
It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny
of nations should be revealed, in these awful
hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll
so wide might not be deemed too expensive
for Providence to write a people's doom upon.
The belief was a favourite one with our forefathers,
as betokening that their infant commonwealth
was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar
intimacy and strictness. But what shall we
say, when an individual discovers a revelation
addressed to himself alone, on the same vast
sheet of record. In such a case, it could
only be the symptom of a highly disordered
mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly
self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret
pain, had extended his egotism over the whole
expanse of nature, until the firmament itself
should appear no more than a fitting page
for his soul's history and fate.
We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease
in his own eye and heart that the minister,
looking upward to the zenith, beheld there
the appearance of an immense letter—the
letter A—marked out in lines of dull red
light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself
at that point, burning duskily through a veil
of cloud, but with no such shape as his guilty
imagination gave it, or, at least, with so
little definiteness, that another's guilt
might have seen another symbol in it.
There was a singular circumstance that characterised
Mr. Dimmesdale's psychological state at this
moment. All the time that he gazed upward
to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly
aware that little Pearl was pointing her finger
towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood
at no great distance from the scaffold. The
minister appeared to see him, with the same
glance that discerned the miraculous letter.
To his feature as to all other objects, the
meteoric light imparted a new expression;
or it might well be that the physician was
not careful then, as at all other times, to
hide the malevolence with which he looked
upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor
kindled up the sky, and disclosed the earth,
with an awfulness that admonished Hester Prynne
and the clergyman of the day of judgment,
then might Roger Chillingworth have passed
with them for the arch-fiend, standing there
with a smile and scowl, to claim his own.
So vivid was the expression, or so intense
the minister's perception of it, that it seemed
still to remain painted on the darkness after
the meteor had vanished, with an effect as
if the street and all things else were at
once annihilated.
"Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale,
overcome with terror. "I shiver at him! Dost
thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!"
She remembered her oath, and was silent.
"I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!" muttered
the minister again. "Who is he? Who is he?
Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless
horror of the man!"
"Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell
thee who he is!"
"Quickly, then, child!" said the minister,
bending his ear close to her lips. "Quickly,
and as low as thou canst whisper."
Pearl mumbled something into his ear that
sounded, indeed, like human language, but
was only such gibberish as children may be
heard amusing themselves with by the hour
together. At all events, if it involved any
secret information in regard to old Roger
Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown
to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase
the bewilderment of his mind. The elvish child
then laughed aloud.
"Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister.
"Thou wast not bold!—thou wast not true!"
answered the child. "Thou wouldst not promise
to take my hand, and mother's hand, to-morrow
noon-tide!"
"Worthy sir," answered the physician, who
had now advanced to the foot of the platform—"pious
Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well,
well, indeed! We men of study, whose heads
are in our books, have need to be straitly
looked after! We dream in our waking moments,
and walk in our sleep. Come, good sir, and
my dear friend, I pray you let me lead you
home!"
"How knewest thou that I was here?" asked
the minister, fearfully.
"Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger
Chillingworth, "I knew nothing of the matter.
I had spent the better part of the night at
the bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop,
doing what my poor skill might to give him
ease. He, going home to a better world, I,
likewise, was on my way homeward, when this
light shone out. Come with me, I beseech you,
Reverend sir, else you will be poorly able
to do Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see now
how they trouble the brain—these books!—these
books! You should study less, good sir, and
take a little pastime, or these night whimsies
will grow upon you."
"I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.
With a chill despondency, like one awakening,
all nerveless, from an ugly dream, he yielded
himself to the physician, and was led away.
The next day, however, being the Sabbath,
he preached a discourse which was held to
be the richest and most powerful, and the
most replete with heavenly influences, that
had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it
is said, more souls than one, were brought
to the truth by the efficacy of that sermon,
and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy
gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout
the long hereafter. But as he came down the
pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton met
him, holding up a black glove, which the minister
recognised as his own.
"It was found," said the Sexton, "this morning
on the scaffold where evil-doers are set up
to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I
take it, intending a scurrilous jest against
your reverence. But, indeed, he was blind
and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure
hand needs no glove to cover it!"
"Thank you, my good friend," said the minister,
gravely, but startled at heart; for so confused
was his remembrance, that he had almost brought
himself to look at the events of the past
night as visionary.
"Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!"
"And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your
reverence must needs handle him without gloves
henceforward," remarked the old sexton, grimly
smiling. "But did your reverence hear of the
portent that was seen last night? a great
red letter in the sky—the letter A, which
we interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our
good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this
past night, it was doubtless held fit that
there should be some notice thereof!"
"No," answered the minister; "I had not heard
of it."
XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER
In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale,
Hester Prynne was shocked at the condition
to which she found the clergyman reduced.
His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His
moral force was abased into more than childish
weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground,
even while his intellectual faculties retained
their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired
a morbid energy, which disease only could
have given them. With her knowledge of a train
of circumstances hidden from all others, she
could readily infer that, besides the legitimate
action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery
had been brought to bear, and was still operating,
on Mr. Dimmesdale's well-being and repose.
Knowing what this poor fallen man had once
been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering
terror with which he had appealed to her—the
outcast woman—for support against his instinctively
discovered enemy. She decided, moreover, that
he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed,
in her long seclusion from society, to measure
her ideas of right and wrong by any standard
external to herself, Hester saw—or seemed
to see—that there lay a responsibility upon
her in reference to the clergyman, which she
owned to no other, nor to the whole world
besides. The links that united her to the
rest of humankind—links of flowers, or silk,
or gold, or whatever the material—had all
been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual
crime, which neither he nor she could break.
Like all other ties, it brought along with
it its obligations.
Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely
the same position in which we beheld her during
the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years
had come and gone. Pearl was now seven years
old. Her mother, with the scarlet letter on
her breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery,
had long been a familiar object to the townspeople.
As is apt to be the case when a person stands
out in any prominence before the community,
and, at the same time, interferes neither
with public nor individual interests and convenience,
a species of general regard had ultimately
grown up in reference to Hester Prynne. It
is to the credit of human nature that, except
where its selfishness is brought into play,
it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred,
by a gradual and quiet process, will even
be transformed to love, unless the change
be impeded by a continually new irritation
of the original feeling of hostility. In this
matter of Hester Prynne there was neither
irritation nor irksomeness. She never battled
with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly
to its worst usage; she made no claim upon
it in requital for what she suffered; she
did not weigh upon its sympathies. Then, also,
the blameless purity of her life during all
these years in which she had been set apart
to infamy was reckoned largely in her favour.
With nothing now to lose, in the sight of
mankind, and with no hope, and seemingly no
wish, of gaining anything, it could only be
a genuine regard for virtue that had brought
back the poor wanderer to its paths.
It was perceived, too, that while Hester never
put forward even the humblest title to share
in the world's privileges—further than to
breathe the common air and earn daily bread
for little Pearl and herself by the faithful
labour of her hands—she was quick to acknowledge
her sisterhood with the race of man whenever
benefits were to be conferred. None so ready
as she to give of her little substance to
every demand of poverty, even though the bitter-hearted
pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the
food brought regularly to his door, or the
garments wrought for him by the fingers that
could have embroidered a monarch's robe. None
so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence
stalked through the town. In all seasons of
calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals,
the outcast of society at once found her place.
She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful
inmate, into the household that was darkened
by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were
a medium in which she was entitled to hold
intercourse with her fellow-creature. There
glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort
in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token
of sin, it was the taper of the sick chamber.
It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's
hard extremity, across the verge of time.
It had shown him where to set his foot, while
the light of earth was fast becoming dim,
and ere the light of futurity could reach
him. In such emergencies Hester's nature showed
itself warm and rich—a well-spring of human
tenderness, unfailing to every real demand,
and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast,
with its badge of shame, was but the softer
pillow for the head that needed one. She was
self-ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may
rather say, the world's heavy hand had so
ordained her, when neither the world nor she
looked forward to this result. The letter
was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness
was found in her—so much power to do, and
power to sympathise—that many people refused
to interpret the scarlet A by its original
signification. They said that it meant Able,
so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's
strength.
It was only the darkened house that could
contain her. When sunshine came again, she
was not there. Her shadow had faded across
the threshold. The helpful inmate had departed,
without one backward glance to gather up the
meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts
of those whom she had served so zealously.
Meeting them in the street, she never raised
her head to receive their greeting. If they
were resolute to accost her, she laid her
finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on.
This might be pride, but was so like humility,
that it produced all the softening influence
of the latter quality on the public mind.
The public is despotic in its temper; it is
capable of denying common justice when too
strenuously demanded as a right; but quite
as frequently it awards more than justice,
when the appeal is made, as despots love to
have it made, entirely to its generosity.
Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as
an appeal of this nature, society was inclined
to show its former victim a more benign countenance
than she cared to be favoured with, or, perchance,
than she deserved.
The rulers, and the wise and learned men of
the community, were longer in acknowledging
the influence of Hester's good qualities than
the people. The prejudices which they shared
in common with the latter were fortified in
themselves by an iron frame-work of reasoning,
that made it a far tougher labour to expel
them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour
and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something
which, in the due course of years, might grow
to be an expression of almost benevolence.
Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom
their eminent position imposed the guardianship
of the public morals. Individuals in private
life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester
Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had
begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the
token, not of that one sin for which she had
borne so long and dreary a penance, but of
her many good deeds since. "Do you see that
woman with the embroidered badge?" they would
say to strangers. "It is our Hester—the
town's own Hester—who is so kind to the
poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable
to the afflicted!" Then, it is true, the propensity
of human nature to tell the very worst of
itself, when embodied in the person of another,
would constrain them to whisper the black
scandal of bygone years. It was none the less
a fact, however, that in the eyes of the very
men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had
the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom.
It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness,
which enabled her to walk securely amid all
peril. Had she fallen among thieves, it would
have kept her safe. It was reported, and believed
by many, that an Indian had drawn his arrow
against the badge, and that the missile struck
it, and fell harmless to the ground.
The effect of the symbol—or rather, of the
position in respect to society that was indicated
by it—on the mind of Hester Prynne herself
was powerful and peculiar. All the light and
graceful foliage of her character had been
withered up by this red-hot brand, and had
long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh
outline, which might have been repulsive had
she possessed friends or companions to be
repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of
her person had undergone a similar change.
It might be partly owing to the studied austerity
of her dress, and partly to the lack of demonstration
in her manners. It was a sad transformation,
too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had
either been cut off, or was so completely
hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of
it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It
was due in part to all these causes, but still
more to something else, that there seemed
to be no longer anything in Hester's face
for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's
form, though majestic and statue like, that
Passion would ever dream of clasping in its
embrace; nothing in Hester's bosom to make
it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some
attribute had departed from her, the permanence
of which had been essential to keep her a
woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such
the stern development, of the feminine character
and person, when the woman has encountered,
and lived through, an experience of peculiar
severity. If she be all tenderness, she will
die. If she survive, the tenderness will either
be crushed out of her, or—and the outward
semblance is the same—crushed so deeply
into her heart that it can never show itself
more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory.
She who has once been a woman, and ceased
to be so, might at any moment become a woman
again, if there were only the magic touch
to effect the transformation. We shall see
whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards
so touched and so transfigured.
Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression
was to be attributed to the circumstance that
her life had turned, in a great measure, from
passion and feeling to thought. Standing alone
in the world—alone, as to any dependence
on society, and with little Pearl to be guided
and protected—alone, and hopeless of retrieving
her position, even had she not scorned to
consider it desirable—she cast away the
fragment of a broken chain. The world's law
was no law for her mind. It was an age in
which the human intellect, newly emancipated,
had taken a more active and a wider range
than for many centuries before. Men of the
sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men
bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not
actually, but within the sphere of theory,
which was their most real abode—the whole
system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was
linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne
imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom
of speculation, then common enough on the
other side of the Atlantic, but which our
forefathers, had they known it, would have
held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised
by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage,
by the seashore, thoughts visited her such
as dared to enter no other dwelling in New
England; shadowy guests, that would have been
as perilous as demons to their entertainer,
could they have been seen so much as knocking
at her door.
It is remarkable that persons who speculate
the most boldly often conform with the most
perfect quietude to the external regulations
of society. The thought suffices them, without
investing itself in the flesh and blood of
action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet,
had little Pearl never come to her from the
spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise.
Then she might have come down to us in history,
hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress
of a religious sect. She might, in one of
her phases, have been a prophetess. She might,
and not improbably would, have suffered death
from the stern tribunals of the period, for
attempting to undermine the foundations of
the Puritan establishment. But, in the education
of her child, the mother's enthusiasm of thought
had something to wreak itself upon. Providence,
in the person of this little girl, had assigned
to Hester's charge, the germ and blossom of
womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid
a host of difficulties. Everything was against
her. The world was hostile. The child's own
nature had something wrong in it which continually
betokened that she had been born amiss—the
effluence of her mother's lawless passion—and
often impelled Hester to ask, in bitterness
of heart, whether it were for ill or good
that the poor little creature had been born
at all.
Indeed, the same dark question often rose
into her mind with reference to the whole
race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting
even to the happiest among them? As concerned
her own individual existence, she had long
ago decided in the negative, and dismissed
the point as settled. A tendency to speculation,
though it may keep women quiet, as it does
man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may
be, such a hopeless task before her. As a
first step, the whole system of society is
to be torn down and built up anew. Then the
very nature of the opposite sex, or its long
hereditary habit, which has become like nature,
is to be essentially modified before woman
can be allowed to assume what seems a fair
and suitable position. Finally, all other
difficulties being obviated, woman cannot
take advantage of these preliminary reforms
until she herself shall have undergone a still
mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal
essence, wherein she has her truest life,
will be found to have evaporated. A woman
never overcomes these problems by any exercise
of thought. They are not to be solved, or
only in one way. If her heart chance to come
uppermost, they vanish. Thus Hester Prynne,
whose heart had lost its regular and healthy
throb, wandered without a clue in the dark
labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an
insurmountable precipice; now starting back
from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly
scenery all around her, and a home and comfort
nowhere. At times a fearful doubt strove to
possess her soul, whether it were not better
to send Pearl at once to Heaven, and go herself
to such futurity as Eternal Justice should
provide.
The scarlet letter had not done its office.
Now, however, her interview with the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his vigil,
had given her a new theme of reflection, and
held up to her an object that appeared worthy
of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment.
She had witnessed the intense misery beneath
which the minister struggled, or, to speak
more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She
saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy,
if he had not already stepped across it. It
was impossible to doubt that, whatever painful
efficacy there might be in the secret sting
of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused
into it by the hand that proffered relief.
A secret enemy had been continually by his
side, under the semblance of a friend and
helper, and had availed himself of the opportunities
thus afforded for tampering with the delicate
springs of Mr. Dimmesdale's nature. Hester
could not but ask herself whether there had
not originally been a defect of truth, courage,
and loyalty on her own part, in allowing the
minister to be thrown into a position where
so much evil was to be foreboded and nothing
auspicious to be hoped. Her only justification
lay in the fact that she had been able to
discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker
ruin than had overwhelmed herself except by
acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth's scheme
of disguise. Under that impulse she had made
her choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared,
the more wretched alternative of the two.
She determined to redeem her error so far
as it might yet be possible. Strengthened
by years of hard and solemn trial, she felt
herself no longer so inadequate to cope with
Roger Chillingworth as on that night, abased
by sin and half-maddened by the ignominy that
was still new, when they had talked together
in the prison-chamber. She had climbed her
way since then to a higher point. The old
man, on the other hand, had brought himself
nearer to her level, or, perhaps, below it,
by the revenge which he had stooped for.
In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her
former husband, and do what might be in her
power for the rescue of the victim on whom
he had so evidently set his gripe. The occasion
was not long to seek. One afternoon, walking
with Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula,
she beheld the old physician with a basket
on one arm and a staff in the other hand,
stooping along the ground in quest of roots
and herbs to concoct his medicine withal.
XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin
of the water, and play with the shells and
tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked
awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the
child flew away like a bird, and, making bare
her small white feet went pattering along
the moist margin of the sea. Here and there
she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously
into a pool, left by the retiring tide as
a mirror for Pearl to see her face in. Forth
peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark,
glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile
in her eyes, the image of a little maid whom
Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to
take her hand and run a race with her. But
the visionary little maid on her part, beckoned
likewise, as if to say—"This is a better
place; come thou into the pool." And Pearl,
stepping in mid-leg deep, beheld her own white
feet at the bottom; while, out of a still
lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary
smile, floating to and fro in the agitated
water.
Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician.
"I would speak a word with you," said she—"a
word that concerns us much."
"Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a
word for old Roger Chillingworth?" answered
he, raising himself from his stooping posture.
"With all my heart! Why, mistress, I hear
good tidings of you on all hands! No longer
ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise
and godly man, was discoursing of your affairs,
Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there
had been question concerning you in the council.
It was debated whether or no, with safety
to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter might
be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester,
I made my intreaty to the worshipful magistrate
that it might be done forthwith."
"It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates
to take off the badge," calmly replied Hester.
"Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would
fall away of its own nature, or be transformed
into something that should speak a different
purport."
"Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better,"
rejoined he, "A woman must needs follow her
own fancy touching the adornment of her person.
The letter is gaily embroidered, and shows
right bravely on your bosom!"
All this while Hester had been looking steadily
at the old man, and was shocked, as well as
wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had
been wrought upon him within the past seven
years. It was not so much that he had grown
older; for though the traces of advancing
life were visible he bore his age well, and
seemed to retain a wiry vigour and alertness.
But the former aspect of an intellectual and
studious man, calm and quiet, which was what
she best remembered in him, had altogether
vanished, and been succeeded by an eager,
searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded
look. It seemed to be his wish and purpose
to mask this expression with a smile, but
the latter played him false, and flickered
over his visage so derisively that the spectator
could see his blackness all the better for
it. Ever and anon, too, there came a glare
of red light out of his eyes, as if the old
man's soul were on fire and kept on smouldering
duskily within his breast, until by some casual
puff of passion it was blown into a momentary
flame. This he repressed as speedily as possible,
and strove to look as if nothing of the kind
had happened.
In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking
evidence of man's faculty of transforming
himself into a devil, if he will only, for
a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's
office. This unhappy person had effected such
a transformation by devoting himself for seven
years to the constant analysis of a heart
full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment
thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures
which he analysed and gloated over.
The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's
bosom. Here was another ruin, the responsibility
of which came partly home to her.
"What see you in my face," asked the physician,
"that you look at it so earnestly?"
"Something that would make me weep, if there
were any tears bitter enough for it," answered
she. "But let it pass! It is of yonder miserable
man that I would speak."
"And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth,
eagerly, as if he loved the topic, and were
glad of an opportunity to discuss it with
the only person of whom he could make a confidant.
"Not to hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my
thoughts happen just now to be busy with the
gentleman. So speak freely and I will make
answer."
"When we last spake together," said Hester,
"now seven years ago, it was your pleasure
to extort a promise of secrecy as touching
the former relation betwixt yourself and me.
As the life and good fame of yonder man were
in your hands there seemed no choice to me,
save to be silent in accordance with your
behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings
that I thus bound myself, for, having cast
off all duty towards other human beings, there
remained a duty towards him, and something
whispered me that I was betraying it in pledging
myself to keep your counsel. Since that day
no man is so near to him as you. You tread
behind his every footstep. You are beside
him, sleeping and waking. You search his thoughts.
You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch
is on his life, and you cause him to die daily
a living death, and still he knows you not.
In permitting this I have surely acted a false
part by the only man to whom the power was
left me to be true!"
"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth.
"My finger, pointed at this man, would have
hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon,
thence, peradventure, to the gallows!"
"It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne.
"What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger
Chillingworth again. "I tell thee, Hester
Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician
earned from monarch could not have bought
such care as I have wasted on this miserable
priest! But for my aid his life would have
burned away in torments within the first two
years after the perpetration of his crime
and thine. For, Hester, his spirit lacked
the strength that could have borne up, as
thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet
letter. Oh, I could reveal a goodly secret!
But enough. What art can do, I have exhausted
on him. That he now breathes and creeps about
on earth is owing all to me!"
"Better he had died at once!" said Hester
Prynne.
"Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!" cried old
Roger Chillingworth, letting the lurid fire
of his heart blaze out before her eyes. "Better
had he died at once! Never did mortal suffer
what this man has suffered. And all, all,
in the sight of his worst enemy! He has been
conscious of me. He has felt an influence
dwelling always upon him like a curse. He
knew, by some spiritual sense—for the Creator
never made another being so sensitive as this—he
knew that no friendly hand was pulling at
his heartstrings, and that an eye was looking
curiously into him, which sought only evil,
and found it. But he knew not that the eye
and hand were mine! With the superstition
common to his brotherhood, he fancied himself
given over to a fiend, to be tortured with
frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the
sting of remorse and despair of pardon, as
a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the
grave. But it was the constant shadow of my
presence, the closest propinquity of the man
whom he had most vilely wronged, and who had
grown to exist only by this perpetual poison
of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed, he did
not err, there was a fiend at his elbow! A
mortal man, with once a human heart, has become
a fiend for his especial torment."
The unfortunate physician, while uttering
these words, lifted his hands with a look
of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful
shape, which he could not recognise, usurping
the place of his own image in a glass. It
was one of those moments—which sometimes
occur only at the interval of years—when
a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed
to his mind's eye. Not improbably he had never
before viewed himself as he did now.
"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said
Hester, noticing the old man's look. "Has
he not paid thee all?"
"No, no! He has but increased the debt!" answered
the physician, and as he proceeded, his manner
lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided
into gloom. "Dost thou remember me, Hester,
as I was nine years agone? Even then I was
in the autumn of my days, nor was it the early
autumn. But all my life had been made up of
earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years,
bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine
own knowledge, and faithfully, too, though
this latter object was but casual to the other—faithfully
for the advancement of human welfare. No life
had been more peaceful and innocent than mine;
few lives so rich with benefits conferred.
Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you
might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful
for others, craving little for himself—kind,
true, just and of constant, if not warm affections?
Was I not all this?"
"All this, and more," said Hester.
"And what am I now?" demanded he, looking
into her face, and permitting the whole evil
within him to be written on his features.
"I have already told thee what I am—a fiend!
Who made me so?"
"It was myself," cried Hester, shuddering.
"It was I, not less than he. Why hast thou
not avenged thyself on me?"
"I have left thee to the scarlet letter,"
replied Roger
Chillingworth. "If that has not avenged me,
I can do no more!"
He laid his finger on it with a smile.
"It has avenged thee," answered Hester Prynne.
"I judged no less," said the physician. "And
now what wouldst thou with me touching this
man?"
"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester,
firmly. "He must discern thee in thy true
character. What may be the result I know not.
But this long debt of confidence, due from
me to him, whose bane and ruin I have been,
shall at length be paid. So far as concerns
the overthrow or preservation of his fair
fame and his earthly state, and perchance
his life, he is in my hands. Nor do I—whom
the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth,
though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering
into the soul—nor do I perceive such advantage
in his living any longer a life of ghastly
emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy
mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is
no good for him, no good for me, no good for
thee. There is no good for little Pearl. There
is no path to guide us out of this dismal
maze."
"Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee," said
Roger Chillingworth, unable to restrain a
thrill of admiration too, for there was a
quality almost majestic in the despair which
she expressed. "Thou hadst great elements.
Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with
a better love than mine, this evil had not
been. I pity thee, for the good that has been
wasted in thy nature."
"And I thee," answered Hester Prynne, "for
the hatred that has transformed a wise and
just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it
out of thee, and be once more human? If not
for his sake, then doubly for thine own! Forgive,
and leave his further retribution to the Power
that claims it! I said, but now, that there
could be no good event for him, or thee, or
me, who are here wandering together in this
gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every
step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn
our path. It is not so! There might be good
for thee, and thee alone, since thou hast
been deeply wronged and hast it at thy will
to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege?
Wilt thou reject that priceless benefit?"
"Peace, Hester—peace!" replied the old man,
with gloomy sternness—"it is not granted
me to pardon. I have no such power as thou
tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten,
comes back to me, and explains all that we
do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry,
thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since
that moment it has all been a dark necessity.
Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save
in a kind of typical illusion; neither am
I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's
office from his hands. It is our fate. Let
the black flower blossom as it may! Now, go
thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder
man."
He waved his hand, and betook himself again
to his employment of gathering herbs.
XV. HESTER AND PEARL
So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure
with a face that haunted men's memories longer
than they liked—took leave of Hester Prynne,
and went stooping away along the earth. He
gathered here and there a herb, or grubbed
up a root and put it into the basket on his
arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground
as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him
a little while, looking with a half fantastic
curiosity to see whether the tender grass
of early spring would not be blighted beneath
him and show the wavering track of his footsteps,
sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure.
She wondered what sort of herbs they were
which the old man was so sedulous to gather.
Would not the earth, quickened to an evil
purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet
him with poisonous shrubs of species hitherto
unknown, that would start up under his fingers?
Or might it suffice him that every wholesome
growth should be converted into something
deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did
the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere
else, really fall upon him? Or was there,
as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow
moving along with his deformity whichever
way he turned himself? And whither was he
now going? Would he not suddenly sink into
the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot,
where, in due course of time, would be seen
deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever
else of vegetable wickedness the climate could
produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?
Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away,
looking so much the uglier the higher he rose
towards heaven?
"Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne, bitterly,
as still she gazed after him, "I hate the
man!"
She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but
could not overcome or lessen it. Attempting
to do so, she thought of those long-past days
in a distant land, when he used to emerge
at eventide from the seclusion of his study
and sit down in the firelight of their home,
and in the light of her nuptial smile. He
needed to bask himself in that smile, he said,
in order that the chill of so many lonely
hours among his books might be taken off the
scholar's heart. Such scenes had once appeared
not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed
through the dismal medium of her subsequent
life, they classed themselves among her ugliest
remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes
could have been! She marvelled how she could
ever have been wrought upon to marry him!
She deemed it her crime most to be repented
of, that she had ever endured and reciprocated
the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered
the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and
melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler
offence committed by Roger Chillingworth than
any which had since been done him, that, in
the time when her heart knew no better, he
had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by
his side.
"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly
than before.
"He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong
than I did him!"
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman,
unless they win along with it the utmost passion
of her heart! Else it may be their miserable
fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's,
when some mightier touch than their own may
have awakened all her sensibilities, to be
reproached even for the calm content, the
marble image of happiness, which they will
have imposed upon her as the warm reality.
But Hester ought long ago to have done with
this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven
long years, under the torture of the scarlet
letter, inflicted so much of misery and wrought
out no repentance?
The emotion of that brief space, while she
stood gazing after the crooked figure of old
Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on
Hester's state of mind, revealing much that
she might not otherwise have acknowledged
to herself.
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"
Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged,
had been at no loss for amusement while her
mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs.
At first, as already told, she had flirted
fancifully with her own image in a pool of
water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as
it declined to venture—seeking a passage
for herself into its sphere of impalpable
earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding,
however, that either she or the image was
unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.
She made little boats out of birch-bark, and
freighted them with snailshells, and sent
out more ventures on the mighty deep than
any merchant in New England; but the larger
part of them foundered near the shore. She
seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and
made prize of several five-fingers, and laid
out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun.
Then she took up the white foam that streaked
the line of the advancing tide, and threw
it upon the breeze, scampering after it with
winged footsteps to catch the great snowflakes
ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds
that fed and fluttered along the shore, the
naughty child picked up her apron full of
pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after
these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable
dexterity in pelting them. One little gray
bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost
sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered
away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child
sighed, and gave up her sport, because it
grieved her to have done harm to a little
being that was as wild as the sea-breeze,
or as wild as Pearl herself.
Her final employment was to gather seaweed
of various kinds, and make herself a scarf
or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume
the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited
her mother's gift for devising drapery and
costume. As the last touch to her mermaid's
garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and imitated,
as best she could, on her own bosom the decoration
with which she was so familiar on her mother's.
A letter—the letter A—but freshly green
instead of scarlet. The child bent her chin
upon her breast, and contemplated this device
with strange interest, even as if the one
only thing for which she had been sent into
the world was to make out its hidden import.
"I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?"
thought Pearl.
Just then she heard her mother's voice, and,
flitting along as lightly as one of the little
sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne dancing,
laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament
upon her bosom.
"My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's
silence, "the green letter, and on thy childish
bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know,
my child, what this letter means which thy
mother is doomed to wear?"
"Yes, mother," said the child. "It is the
great letter A. Thou hast taught me in the
horn-book."
Hester looked steadily into her little face;
but though there was that singular expression
which she had so often remarked in her black
eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether
Pearl really attached any meaning to the symbol.
She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the
point.
"Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother
wears this letter?"
"Truly do I!" answered Pearl, looking brightly
into her mother's face. "It is for the same
reason that the minister keeps his hand over
his heart!"
"And what reason is that?" asked Hester, half
smiling at the absurd incongruity of the child's
observation; but on second thoughts turning
pale.
"What has the letter to do with any heart
save mine?"
"Nay, mother, I have told all I know," said
Pearl, more seriously than she was wont to
speak. "Ask yonder old man whom thou hast
been talking with,—it may be he can tell.
But in good earnest now, mother dear, what
does this scarlet letter mean?—and why dost
thou wear it on thy bosom?—and why does
the minister keep his hand over his heart?"
She took her mother's hand in both her own,
and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness
that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious
character. The thought occurred to Hester,
that the child might really be seeking to
approach her with childlike confidence, and
doing what she could, and as intelligently
as she knew how, to establish a meeting-point
of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted
aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving
her child with the intensity of a sole affection,
had schooled herself to hope for little other
return than the waywardness of an April breeze,
which spends its time in airy sport, and has
its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is
petulant in its best of moods, and chills
oftener than caresses you, when you take it
to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours
it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose,
kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness,
and play gently with your hair, and then be
gone about its other idle business, leaving
a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this,
moreover, was a mother's estimate of the child's
disposition. Any other observer might have
seen few but unamiable traits, and have given
them a far darker colouring. But now the idea
came strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl,
with her remarkable precocity and acuteness,
might already have approached the age when
she could have been made a friend, and intrusted
with as much of her mother's sorrows as could
be imparted, without irreverence either to
the parent or the child. In the little chaos
of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging
and could have been from the very first—the
steadfast principles of an unflinching courage—an
uncontrollable will—sturdy pride, which
might be disciplined into self-respect—and
a bitter scorn of many things which, when
examined, might be found to have the taint
of falsehood in them. She possessed affections,
too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable,
as are the richest flavours of unripe fruit.
With all these sterling attributes, thought
Hester, the evil which she inherited from
her mother must be great indeed, if a noble
woman do not grow out of this elfish child.
Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about
the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an
innate quality of her being. From the earliest
epoch of her conscious life, she had entered
upon this as her appointed mission. Hester
had often fancied that Providence had a design
of justice and retribution, in endowing the
child with this marked propensity; but never,
until now, had she bethought herself to ask,
whether, linked with that design, there might
not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence.
If little Pearl were entertained with faith
and trust, as a spirit messenger no less than
an earthly child, might it not be her errand
to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in
her mother's heart, and converted it into
a tomb?—and to help her to overcome the
passion, once so wild, and even yet neither
dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within
the same tomb-like heart?
Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred
in Hester's mind, with as much vivacity of
impression as if they had actually been whispered
into her ear. And there was little Pearl,
all this while, holding her mother's hand
in both her own, and turning her face upward,
while she put these searching questions, once
and again, and still a third time.
"What does the letter mean, mother? and why
dost thou wear it? and why does the minister
keep his hand over his heart?"
"What shall I say?" thought Hester to herself.
"No! if this be the price of the child's sympathy,
I cannot pay it."
Then she spoke aloud—
"Silly Pearl," said she, "what questions are
these? There are many things in this world
that a child must not ask about. What know
I of the minister's heart? And as for the
scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of
its gold thread."
In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne
had never before been false to the symbol
on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman
of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian
spirit, who now forsook her; as recognising
that, in spite of his strict watch over her
heart, some new evil had crept into it, or
some old one had never been expelled. As for
little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed
out of her face.
But the child did not see fit to let the matter
drop. Two or three times, as her mother and
she went homeward, and as often at supper-time,
and while Hester was putting her to bed, and
once after she seemed to be fairly asleep,
Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming in
her black eyes.
"Mother," said she, "what does the scarlet
letter mean?"
And the next morning, the first indication
the child gave of being awake was by popping
up her head from the pillow, and making that
other enquiry, which she had so unaccountably
connected with her investigations about the
scarlet letter—
"Mother!—Mother!—Why does the minister
keep his hand over his heart?"
"Hold thy tongue, naughty child!" answered
her mother, with an asperity that she had
never permitted to herself before. "Do not
tease me; else I shall put thee into the dark
closet!"
XVI. A 
FOREST WALK
Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve
to make known to Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever
risk of present pain or ulterior consequences,
the true character of the man who had crept
into his intimacy. For several days, however,
she vainly sought an opportunity of addressing
him in some of the meditative walks which
she knew him to be in the habit of taking
along the shores of the Peninsula, or on the
wooded hills of the neighbouring country.
There would have been no scandal, indeed,
nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman's
good fame, had she visited him in his own
study, where many a penitent, ere now, had
confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as
the one betokened by the scarlet letter. But,
partly that she dreaded the secret or undisguised
interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and
partly that her conscious heart imparted suspicion
where none could have been felt, and partly
that both the minister and she would need
the whole wide world to breathe in, while
they talked together—for all these reasons
Hester never thought of meeting him in any
narrower privacy than beneath the open sky.
At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither
the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale had been summoned
to make a prayer, she learnt that he had gone,
the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot,
among his Indian converts. He would probably
return by a certain hour in the afternoon
of the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the next
day, Hester took little Pearl—who was necessarily
the companion of all her mother's expeditions,
however inconvenient her presence—and set
forth.
The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed
from the Peninsula to the mainland, was no
other than a foot-path. It straggled onward
into the mystery of the primeval forest. This
hemmed it in so narrowly, and stood so black
and dense on either side, and disclosed such
imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that,
to Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the
moral wilderness in which she had so long
been wandering. The day was chill and sombre.
Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly
stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam
of flickering sunshine might now and then
be seen at its solitary play along the path.
This flitting cheerfulness was always at the
further extremity of some long vista through
the forest. The sportive sunlight—feebly
sportive, at best, in the predominant pensiveness
of the day and scene—withdrew itself as
they came nigh, and left the spots where it
had danced the drearier, because they had
hoped to find them bright.
"Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine
does not love you.
It runs away and hides itself, because it
is afraid of something
on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing
a good way off.
Stand you here, and let me run and catch it.
I am but a child.
It will not flee from me—for I wear nothing
on my bosom yet!"
"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.
"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping
short, just at the beginning of her race.
"Will not it come of its own accord when I
am a woman grown?"
"Run away, child," answered her mother, "and
catch the sunshine.
It will soon be gone."
Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester
smiled to perceive, did actually catch the
sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst
of it, all brightened by its splendour, and
scintillating with the vivacity excited by
rapid motion. The light lingered about the
lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate,
until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough
to step into the magic circle too.
"It will go now," said Pearl, shaking her
head.
"See!" answered Hester, smiling; "now I can
stretch out my hand and grasp some of it."
As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished;
or, to judge from the bright expression that
was dancing on Pearl's features, her mother
could have fancied that the child had absorbed
it into herself, and would give it forth again,
with a gleam about her path, as they should
plunge into some gloomier shade. There was
no other attribute that so much impressed
her with a sense of new and untransmitted
vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never failing
vivacity of spirits: she had not the disease
of sadness, which almost all children, in
these latter days, inherit, with the scrofula,
from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps
this, too, was a disease, and but the reflex
of the wild energy with which Hester had fought
against her sorrows before Pearl's birth.
It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting
a hard, metallic lustre to the child's character.
She wanted—what some people want throughout
life—a grief that should deeply touch her,
and thus humanise and make her capable of
sympathy. But there was time enough yet for
little Pearl.
"Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about
her from the spot where Pearl had stood still
in the sunshine—"we will sit down a little
way within the wood, and rest ourselves."
"I am not aweary, mother," replied the little
girl. "But you may sit down, if you will tell
me a story meanwhile."
"A story, child!" said Hester. "And about
what?"
"Oh, a story about the Black Man," answered
Pearl, taking hold of her mother's gown, and
looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously,
into her face.
"How he haunts this forest, and carries a
book with him a big, heavy book, with iron
clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers
his book and an iron pen to everybody that
meets him here among the trees; and they are
to write their names with their own blood;
and then he sets his mark on their bosoms.
Didst thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?"
"And who told you this story, Pearl," asked
her mother, recognising a common superstition
of the period.
"It was the old dame in the chimney corner,
at the house where you watched last night,"
said the child. "But she fancied me asleep
while she was talking of it. She said that
a thousand and a thousand people had met him
here, and had written in his book, and have
his mark on them. And that ugly tempered lady,
old Mistress Hibbins, was one. And, mother,
the old dame said that this scarlet letter
was the Black Man's mark on thee, and that
it glows like a red flame when thou meetest
him at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is
it true, mother? And dost thou go to meet
him in the nighttime?"
"Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother
gone?" asked Hester. "Not that I remember,"
said the child. "If thou fearest to leave
me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along
with thee. I would very gladly go! But, mother,
tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And
didst thou ever meet him? And is this his
mark?"
"Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell
thee?" asked her mother.
"Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl.
"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said
her mother. "This scarlet letter is his mark!"
Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently
deep into the wood to secure themselves from
the observation of any casual passenger along
the forest track. Here they sat down on a
luxuriant heap of moss; which at some epoch
of the preceding century, had been a gigantic
pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome
shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere.
It was a little dell where they had seated
themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising
gently on either side, and a brook flowing
through the midst, over a bed of fallen and
drowned leaves. The trees impending over it
had flung down great branches from time to
time, which choked up the current, and compelled
it to form eddies and black depths at some
points; while, in its swifter and livelier
passages there appeared a channel-way of pebbles,
and brown, sparkling sand. Letting the eyes
follow along the course of the stream, they
could catch the reflected light from its water,
at some short distance within the forest,
but soon lost all traces of it amid the bewilderment
of tree-trunks and underbrush, and here and
there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens.
All these giant trees and boulders of granite
seemed intent on making a mystery of the course
of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that,
with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should
whisper tales out of the heart of the old
forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations
on the smooth surface of a pool. Continually,
indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet
kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but
melancholy, like the voice of a young child
that was spending its infancy without playfulness,
and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance
and events of sombre hue.
"Oh, brook! Oh, foolish and tiresome little
brook!" cried
Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk,
"Why art thou so sad?
Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time
sighing and
murmuring!"
But the brook, in the course of its little
lifetime among the forest trees, had gone
through so solemn an experience that it could
not help talking about it, and seemed to have
nothing else to say. Pearl resembled the brook,
inasmuch as the current of her life gushed
from a well-spring as mysterious, and had
flowed through scenes shadowed as heavily
with gloom. But, unlike the little stream,
she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily
along her course.
"What does this sad little brook say, mother?"
inquired she.
"If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the
brook might tell thee of it," answered her
mother, "even as it is telling me of mine.
But now, Pearl, I hear a footstep along the
path, and the noise of one putting aside the
branches. I would have thee betake thyself
to play, and leave me to speak with him that
comes yonder."
"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.
"Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her
mother, "But do not stray far into the wood.
And take heed that thou come at my first call."
"Yes, mother," answered Pearl, "But if it
be the Black Man, wilt thou not let me stay
a moment, and look at him, with his big book
under his arm?"
"Go, silly child!" said her mother impatiently.
"It is no Black Man! Thou canst see him now,
through the trees. It is the minister!"
"And so it is!" said the child. "And, mother,
he has his hand over his heart! Is it because,
when the minister wrote his name in the book,
the Black Man set his mark in that place?
But why does he not wear it outside his bosom,
as thou dost, mother?"
"Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as
thou wilt another time," cried Hester Prynne.
"But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst
hear the babble of the brook."
The child went singing away, following up
the current of the brook, and striving to
mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy
voice. But the little stream would not be
comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible
secret of some very mournful mystery that
had happened—or making a prophetic lamentation
about something that was yet to happen—within
the verge of the dismal forest. So Pearl,
who had enough of shadow in her own little
life, chose to break off all acquaintance
with this repining brook. She set herself,
therefore, to gathering violets and wood-anemones,
and some scarlet columbines that she found
growing in the crevice of a high rock.
When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne
made a step or two towards the track that
led through the forest, but still remained
under the deep shadow of the trees. She beheld
the minister advancing along the path entirely
alone, and leaning on a staff which he had
cut by the wayside. He looked haggard and
feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency
in his air, which had never so remarkably
characterised him in his walks about the settlement,
nor in any other situation where he deemed
himself liable to notice. Here it was wofully
visible, in this intense seclusion of the
forest, which of itself would have been a
heavy trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness
in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking
one step further, nor felt any desire to do
so, but would have been glad, could he be
glad of anything, to fling himself down at
the root of the nearest tree, and lie there
passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew
him, and the soil gradually accumulate and
form a little hillock over his frame, no matter
whether there were life in it or no. Death
was too definite an object to be wished for
or avoided.
To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
exhibited no symptom of positive and vivacious
suffering, except that, as little Pearl had
remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.
XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost
gone by before Hester Prynne could gather
voice enough to attract his observation. At
length she succeeded.
"Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at
first, then louder, but hoarsely—"Arthur
Dimmesdale!"
"Who speaks?" answered the minister. Gathering
himself quickly up, he stood more erect, like
a man taken by surprise in a mood to which
he was reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing
his eyes anxiously in the direction of the
voice, he indistinctly beheld a form under
the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and
so little relieved from the gray twilight
into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage
had darkened the noontide, that he knew not
whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may
be that his pathway through life was haunted
thus by a spectre that had stolen out from
among his thoughts.
He made a step nigher, and discovered the
scarlet letter.
"Hester! Hester Prynne!", said he; "is it
thou? Art thou in life?"
"Even so." she answered. "In such life as
has been mine these seven years past! And
thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?"
It was no wonder that they thus questioned
one another's actual and bodily existence,
and even doubted of their own. So strangely
did they meet in the dim wood that it was
like the first encounter in the world beyond
the grave of two spirits who had been intimately
connected in their former life, but now stood
coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not
yet familiar with their state, nor wonted
to the companionship of disembodied beings.
Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other
ghost. They were awe-stricken likewise at
themselves, because the crisis flung back
to them their consciousness, and revealed
to each heart its history and experience,
as life never does, except at such breathless
epochs. The soul beheld its features in the
mirror of the passing moment. It was with
fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by
a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale
put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched
the chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp,
cold as it was, took away what was dreariest
in the interview. They now felt themselves,
at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.
Without a word more spoken—neither he nor
she assuming the guidance, but with an unexpressed
consent—they glided back into the shadow
of the woods whence Hester had emerged, and
sat down on the heap of moss where she and
Pearl had before been sitting. When they found
voice to speak, it was at first only to utter
remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintances
might have made, about the gloomy sky, the
threatening storm, and, next, the health of
each. Thus they went onward, not boldly, but
step by step, into the themes that were brooding
deepest in their hearts. So long estranged
by fate and circumstances, they needed something
slight and casual to run before and throw
open the doors of intercourse, so that their
real thoughts might be led across the threshold.
After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes
on Hester Prynne's.
"Hester," said he, "hast thou found peace?"
She smiled drearily, looking down upon her
bosom.
"Hast thou?" she asked.
"None—nothing but despair!" he answered.
"What else could I look for, being what I
am, and leading such a life as mine? Were
I an atheist—a man devoid of conscience—a
wretch with coarse and brutal instincts—I
might have found peace long ere now. Nay,
I never should have lost it. But, as matters
stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity
there originally was in me, all of God's gifts
that were the choicest have become the ministers
of spiritual torment. Hester, I am most miserable!"
"The people reverence thee," said Hester.
"And surely thou workest good among them!
Doth this bring thee no comfort?"
"More misery, Hester!—Only the more misery!"
answered the clergyman with a bitter smile.
"As concerns the good which I may appear to
do, I have no faith in it. It must needs be
a delusion. What can a ruined soul like mine
effect towards the redemption of other souls?—or
a polluted soul towards their purification?
And as for the people's reverence, would that
it were turned to scorn and hatred! Canst
thou deem it, Hester, a consolation that I
must stand up in my pulpit, and meet so many
eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light
of heaven were beaming from it!—must see
my flock hungry for the truth, and listening
to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were
speaking!—and then look inward, and discern
the black reality of what they idolise? I
have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart,
at the contrast between what I seem and what
I am! And Satan laughs at it!"
"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester
gently. "You have deeply and sorely repented.
Your sin is left behind you in the days long
past. Your present life is not less holy,
in very truth, than it seems in people's eyes.
Is there no reality in the penitence thus
sealed and witnessed by good works? And wherefore
should it not bring you peace?"
"No, Hester—no!" replied the clergyman.
"There is no substance in it! It is cold and
dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance,
I have had enough! Of penitence, there has
been none! Else, I should long ago have thrown
off these garments of mock holiness, and have
shown myself to mankind as they will see me
at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester,
that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your
bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest
what a relief it is, after the torment of
a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye
that recognises me for what I am! Had I one
friend—or were it my worst enemy!—to whom,
when sickened with the praises of all other
men, I could daily betake myself, and be known
as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my
soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even
thus much of truth would save me! But now,
it is all falsehood!—all emptiness!—all
death!"
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated
to speak. Yet, uttering his long-restrained
emotions so vehemently as he did, his words
here offered her the very point of circumstances
in which to interpose what she came to say.
She conquered her fears, and spoke:
"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished
for," said she, "with whom to weep over thy
sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!"
Again she hesitated, but brought out the words
with an effort.—"Thou hast long had such
an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the
same roof!"
The minister started to his feet, gasping
for breath, and clutching at his heart, as
if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
"Ha! What sayest thou?" cried he. "An enemy!
And under mine own roof! What mean you?"
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the
deep injury for which she was responsible
to this unhappy man, in permitting him to
lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single
moment, at the mercy of one whose purposes
could not be other than malevolent. The very
contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever
mask the latter might conceal himself, was
enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a
being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale. There
had been a period when Hester was less alive
to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the
misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the
minister to bear what she might picture to
herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late,
since the night of his vigil, all her sympathies
towards him had been both softened and invigorated.
She now read his heart more accurately. She
doubted not that the continual presence of
Roger Chillingworth—the secret poison of
his malignity, infecting all the air about
him—and his authorised interference, as
a physician, with the minister's physical
and spiritual infirmities—that these bad
opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose.
By means of them, the sufferer's conscience
had been kept in an irritated state, the tendency
of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain,
but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual
being. Its result, on earth, could hardly
fail to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal
alienation from the Good and True, of which
madness is perhaps the earthly type.
Such was the ruin to which she had brought
the man, once—nay, why should we not speak
it?—still so passionately loved! Hester
felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman's
good name, and death itself, as she had already
told Roger Chillingworth, would have been
infinitely preferable to the alternative which
she had taken upon herself to choose. And
now, rather than have had this grievous wrong
to confess, she would gladly have laid down
on the forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur
Dimmesdale's feet.
"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me! In all
things else, I have striven to be true! Truth
was the one virtue which I might have held
fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity;
save when thy good—thy life—thy fame—were
put in question! Then I consented to a deception.
But a lie is never good, even though death
threaten on the other side! Dost thou not
see what I would say? That old man!—the
physician!—he whom they call Roger Chillingworth!—he
was my husband!"
The minister looked at her for an instant,
with all that violence of passion, which—intermixed
in more shapes than one with his higher, purer,
softer qualities—was, in fact, the portion
of him which the devil claimed, and through
which he sought to win the rest. Never was
there a blacker or a fiercer frown than Hester
now encountered. For the brief space that
it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration.
But his character had been so much enfeebled
by suffering, that even its lower energies
were incapable of more than a temporary struggle.
He sank down on the ground, and buried his
face in his hands.
"I might have known it," murmured he—"I
did know it! Was not the secret told me, in
the natural recoil of my heart at the first
sight of him, and as often as I have seen
him since? Why did I not understand? Oh, Hester
Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the
horror of this thing! And the shame!—the
indelicacy!—the horrible ugliness of this
exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the
very eye that would gloat over it! Woman,
woman, thou art accountable for this!—I
cannot forgive thee!"
"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging
herself on the fallen leaves beside him. "Let
God punish! Thou shalt forgive!"
With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw
her arms around him, and pressed his head
against her bosom, little caring though his
cheek rested on the scarlet letter. He would
have released himself, but strove in vain
to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest
he should look her sternly in the face. All
the world had frowned on her—for seven long
years had it frowned upon this lonely woman—and
still she bore it all, nor ever once turned
away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven, likewise,
had frowned upon her, and she had not died.
But the frown of this pale, weak, sinful,
and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could
not bear, and live!
"Wilt thou yet forgive me?" she repeated,
over and over again.
"Wilt thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?"
"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister
at length, with a deep utterance, out of an
abyss of sadness, but no anger. "I freely
forgive you now. May God forgive us both.
We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the
world. There is one worse than even the polluted
priest! That old man's revenge has been blacker
than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood,
the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I,
Hester, never did so!"
"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did
had a consecration of its own. We felt it
so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten
it?"
"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising
from the ground.
"No; I have not forgotten!"
They sat down again, side by side, and hand
clasped in hand, on the mossy trunk of the
fallen tree. Life had never brought them a
gloomier hour; it was the point whither their
pathway had so long been tending, and darkening
ever, as it stole along—and yet it unclosed
a charm that made them linger upon it, and
claim another, and another, and, after all,
another moment. The forest was obscure around
them, and creaked with a blast that was passing
through it. The boughs were tossing heavily
above their heads; while one solemn old tree
groaned dolefully to another, as if telling
the sad story of the pair that sat beneath,
or constrained to forbode evil to come.
And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the
forest-track that led backward to the settlement,
where Hester Prynne must take up again the
burden of her ignominy and the minister the
hollow mockery of his good name! So they lingered
an instant longer. No golden light had ever
been so precious as the gloom of this dark
forest. Here seen only by his eyes, the scarlet
letter need not burn into the bosom of the
fallen woman! Here seen only by her eyes,
Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might
be, for one moment true!
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred
to him.
"Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror!
Roger Chillingworth knows your purpose to
reveal his true character. Will he continue,
then, to keep our secret? What will now be
the course of his revenge?"
"There is a strange secrecy in his nature,"
replied Hester, thoughtfully; "and it has
grown upon him by the hidden practices of
his revenge. I deem it not likely that he
will betray the secret. He will doubtless
seek other means of satiating his dark passion."
"And I!—how am I to live longer, breathing
the same air with this deadly enemy?" exclaimed
Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself,
and pressing his hand nervously against his
heart—a gesture that had grown involuntary
with him. "Think for me, Hester! Thou art
strong. Resolve for me!"
"Thou must dwell no longer with this man,"
said Hester, slowly and firmly. "Thy heart
must be no longer under his evil eye!"
"It were far worse than death!" replied the
minister. "But how to avoid it? What choice
remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these
withered leaves, where I cast myself when
thou didst tell me what he was? Must I sink
down there, and die at once?"
"Alas! what a ruin has befallen thee!" said
Hester, with the tears gushing into her eyes.
"Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is
no other cause!"
"The judgment of God is on me," answered the
conscience-stricken priest. "It is too mighty
for me to struggle with!"
"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester,
"hadst thou but the strength to take advantage
of it."
"Be thou strong for me!" answered he. "Advise
me what to do."
"Is the world, then, so narrow?" exclaimed
Hester Prynne, fixing her deep eyes on the
minister's, and instinctively exercising a
magnetic power over a spirit so shattered
and subdued that it could hardly hold itself
erect. "Doth the universe lie within the compass
of yonder town, which only a little time ago
was but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as
this around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track?
Backward to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes;
but, onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper
into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen
at every step; until some few miles hence
the yellow leaves will show no vestige of
the white man's tread. There thou art free!
So brief a journey would bring thee from a
world where thou hast been most wretched,
to one where thou mayest still be happy! Is
there not shade enough in all this boundless
forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of
Roger Chillingworth?"
"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!"
replied the minister, with a sad smile.
"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!"
continued Hester. "It brought thee hither.
If thou so choose, it will bear thee back
again. In our native land, whether in some
remote rural village, or in vast London—or,
surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant
Italy—thou wouldst be beyond his power and
knowledge! And what hast thou to do with all
these iron men, and their opinions? They have
kept thy better part in bondage too long already!"
"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening
as if he were called upon to realise a dream.
"I am powerless to go. Wretched and sinful
as I am, I have had no other thought than
to drag on my earthly existence in the sphere
where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my
own soul is, I would still do what I may for
other human souls! I dare not quit my post,
though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure
reward is death and dishonour, when his dreary
watch shall come to an end!"
"Thou art crushed under this seven years'
weight of misery," replied Hester, fervently
resolved to buoy him up with her own energy.
"But thou shalt leave it all behind thee!
It shall not cumber thy steps, as thou treadest
along the forest-path: neither shalt thou
freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to
cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here
where it hath happened. Meddle no more with
it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility
in the failure of this one trial? Not so!
The future is yet full of trial and success.
There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is
good to be done! Exchange this false life
of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit
summon thee to such a mission, the teacher
and apostle of the red men. Or, as is more
thy nature, be a scholar and a sage among
the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated
world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save
to lie down and die! Give up this name of
Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another,
and a high one, such as thou canst wear without
fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so
much as one other day in the torments that
have so gnawed into thy life? that have made
thee feeble to will and to do? that will leave
thee powerless even to repent? Up, and away!"
"Oh, Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in
whose eyes a fitful light, kindled by her
enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou
tellest of running a race to a man whose knees
are tottering beneath him! I must die here!
There is not the strength or courage left
me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult
world alone!"
It was the last expression of the despondency
of a broken spirit. He lacked energy to grasp
the better fortune that seemed within his
reach.
He repeated the word—"Alone, Hester!"
"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in
a deep whisper.
Then, all was spoken!
XVIII. A FLOOD OF 
SUNSHINE
Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face
with a look in which hope and joy shone out,
indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a
kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken
what he vaguely hinted at, but dared not speak.
But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage
and activity, and for so long a period not
merely estranged, but outlawed from society,
had habituated herself to such latitude of
speculation as was altogether foreign to the
clergyman. She had wandered, without rule
or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast,
as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest,
amid the gloom of which they were now holding
a colloquy that was to decide their fate.
Her intellect and heart had their home, as
it were, in desert places, where she roamed
as freely as the wild Indian in his woods.
For years past she had looked from this estranged
point of view at human institutions, and whatever
priests or legislators had established; criticising
all with hardly more reverence than the Indian
would feel for the clerical band, the judicial
robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside,
or the church. The tendency of her fate and
fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet
letter was her passport into regions where
other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair,
Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern
and wild ones—and they had made her strong,
but taught her much amiss.
The minister, on the other hand, had never
gone through an experience calculated to lead
him beyond the scope of generally received
laws; although, in a single instance, he had
so fearfully transgressed one of the most
sacred of them. But this had been a sin of
passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.
Since that wretched epoch, he had watched
with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts—for
those it was easy to arrange—but each breath
of emotion, and his every thought. At the
head of the social system, as the clergymen
of that day stood, he was only the more trammelled
by its regulations, its principles, and even
its prejudices. As a priest, the framework
of his order inevitably hemmed him in. As
a man who had once sinned, but who kept his
conscience all alive and painfully sensitive
by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he might
have been supposed safer within the line of
virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester
Prynne, the whole seven years of outlaw and
ignominy had been little other than a preparation
for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale!
Were such a man once more to fall, what plea
could be urged in extenuation of his crime?
None; unless it avail him somewhat that he
was broken down by long and exquisite suffering;
that his mind was darkened and confused by
the very remorse which harrowed it; that,
between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and
remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might
find it hard to strike the balance; that it
was human to avoid the peril of death and
infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of
an enemy; that, finally, to this poor pilgrim,
on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick,
miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human
affection and sympathy, a new life, and a
true one, in exchange for the heavy doom which
he was now expiating. And be the stern and
sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt
has once made into the human soul is never,
in this mortal state, repaired. It may be
watched and guarded, so that the enemy shall
not force his way again into the citadel,
and might even in his subsequent assaults,
select some other avenue, in preference to
that where he had formerly succeeded. But
there is still the ruined wall, and near it
the stealthy tread of the foe that would win
over again his unforgotten triumph.
The struggle, if there were one, need not
be described. Let it suffice that the clergyman
resolved to flee, and not alone.
"If in all these past seven years," thought
he, "I could recall one instant of peace or
hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of
that earnest of Heaven's mercy. But now—since
I am irrevocably doomed—wherefore should
I not snatch the solace allowed to the condemned
culprit before his execution? Or, if this
be the path to a better life, as Hester would
persuade me, I surely give up no fairer prospect
by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live
without her companionship; so powerful is
she to sustain—so tender to soothe! O Thou
to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou
yet pardon me?"
"Thou wilt go!" said Hester calmly, as he
met her glance.
The decision once made, a glow of strange
enjoyment threw its flickering brightness
over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just
escaped from the dungeon of his own heart—of
breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an
unredeemed, unchristianised, lawless region.
His spirit rose, as it were, with a bound,
and attained a nearer prospect of the sky,
than throughout all the misery which had kept
him grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply religious
temperament, there was inevitably a tinge
of the devotional in his mood.
"Do I feel joy again?" cried he, wondering
at himself. "Methought the germ of it was
dead in me! Oh, Hester, thou art my better
angel! I seem to have flung myself—sick,
sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—down upon
these forest leaves, and to have risen up
all made anew, and with new powers to glorify
Him that hath been merciful! This is already
the better life! Why did we not find it sooner?"
"Let us not look back," answered Hester Prynne.
"The past is gone! Wherefore should we linger
upon it now? See! With this symbol I undo
it all, and make it as if it had never been!"
So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened
the scarlet letter, and, taking it from her
bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered
leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither
verge of the stream. With a hand's-breadth
further flight, it would have fallen into
the water, and have given the little brook
another woe to carry onward, besides the unintelligible
tale which it still kept murmuring about.
But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering
like a lost jewel, which some ill-fated wanderer
might pick up, and thenceforth be haunted
by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of
the heart, and unaccountable misfortune.
The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep
sigh, in which the burden of shame and anguish
departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief!
She had not known the weight until she felt
the freedom! By another impulse, she took
off the formal cap that confined her hair,
and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark
and rich, with at once a shadow and a light
in its abundance, and imparting the charm
of softness to her features. There played
around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes,
a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing
from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson
flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been
long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the
whole richness of her beauty, came back from
what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered
themselves with her maiden hope, and a happiness
before unknown, within the magic circle of
this hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth
and sky had been but the effluence of these
two mortal hearts, it vanished with their
sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile
of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring
a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening
each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen
ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray
trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that
had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness
now. The course of the little brook might
be traced by its merry gleam afar into the
wood's heart of mystery, which had become
a mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild,
heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated
by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with
the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether
newly-born, or aroused from a death-like slumber,
must always create a sunshine, filling the
heart so full of radiance, that it overflows
upon the outward world. Had the forest still
kept its gloom, it would have been bright
in Hester's eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!
Hester looked at him with a thrill of another
joy.
"Thou must know Pearl!" said she. "Our little
Pearl! Thou hast seen her—yes, I know it!—but
thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She
is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her!
But thou wilt love her dearly, as I do, and
wilt advise me how to deal with her!"
"Dost thou think the child will be glad to
know me?" asked the minister, somewhat uneasily.
"I have long shrunk from children, because
they often show a distrust—a backwardness
to be familiar with me. I have even been afraid
of little Pearl!"
"Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother. "But
she will love thee dearly, and thou her. She
is not far off. I will call her. Pearl! Pearl!"
"I see the child," observed the minister.
"Yonder she is, standing in a streak of sunshine,
a good way off, on the other side of the brook.
So thou thinkest the child will love me?"
Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl,
who was visible at some distance, as the minister
had described her, like a bright-apparelled
vision in a sunbeam, which fell down upon
her through an arch of boughs. The ray quivered
to and fro, making her figure dim or distinct—now
like a real child, now like a child's spirit—as
the splendour went and came again. She heard
her mother's voice, and approached slowly
through the forest.
Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely
while her mother sat talking with the clergyman.
The great black forest—stern as it showed
itself to those who brought the guilt and
troubles of the world into its bosom—became
the playmate of the lonely infant, as well
as it knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on
the kindest of its moods to welcome her. It
offered her the partridge-berries, the growth
of the preceding autumn, but ripening only
in the spring, and now red as drops of blood
upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered,
and was pleased with their wild flavour. The
small denizens of the wilderness hardly took
pains to move out of her path. A partridge,
indeed, with a brood of ten behind her, ran
forward threateningly, but soon repented of
her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones
not to be afraid. A pigeon, alone on a low
branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and
uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm.
A squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic
tree, chattered either in anger or merriment—for
the squirrel is such a choleric and humorous
little personage, that it is hard to distinguish
between his moods—so he chattered at the
child, and flung down a nut upon her head.
It was a last year's nut, and already gnawed
by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from his
sleep by her light footstep on the leaves,
looked inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting
whether it were better to steal off, or renew
his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said—but
here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable—came
up and smelt of Pearl's robe, and offered
his savage head to be patted by her hand.
The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest,
and these wild things which it nourished,
all recognised a kindred wilderness in the
human child.
And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined
streets of the settlement, or in her mother's
cottage. The Bowers appeared to know it, and
one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn
thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn
thyself with me!"—and, to please them, Pearl
gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines,
and some twigs of the freshest green, which
the old trees held down before her eyes. With
these she decorated her hair and her young
waist, and became a nymph child, or an infant
dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy
with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl
adorned herself, when she heard her mother's
voice, and came slowly back.
Slowly—for she saw the clergyman!
XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE
"Thou wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester
Prynne, as she and the minister sat watching
little Pearl. "Dost thou not think her beautiful?
And see with what natural skill she has made
those simple flowers adorn her! Had she gathered
pearls, and diamonds, and rubies in the wood,
they could not have become her better! She
is a splendid child! But I know whose brow
she has!"
"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale,
with an unquiet smile, "that this dear child,
tripping about always at thy side, hath caused
me many an alarm? Methought—oh, Hester,
what a thought is that, and how terrible to
dread it!—that my own features were partly
repeated in her face, and so strikingly that
the world might see them! But she is mostly
thine!"
"No, no! Not mostly!" answered the mother,
with a tender smile. "A little longer, and
thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose
child she is. But how strangely beautiful
she looks with those wild flowers in her hair!
It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left
in dear old England, had decked her out to
meet us."
It was with a feeling which neither of them
had ever before experienced, that they sat
and watched Pearl's slow advance. In her was
visible the tie that united them. She had
been offered to the world, these seven past
years, as the living hieroglyphic, in which
was revealed the secret they so darkly sought
to hide—all written in this symbol—all
plainly manifest—had there been a prophet
or magician skilled to read the character
of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of their
being. Be the foregone evil what it might,
how could they doubt that their earthly lives
and future destinies were conjoined when they
beheld at once the material union, and the
spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were
to dwell immortally together; thoughts like
these—and perhaps other thoughts, which
they did not acknowledge or define—threw
an awe about the child as she came onward.
"Let her see nothing strange—no passion
or eagerness—in thy way of accosting her,"
whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a fitful and
fantastic little elf sometimes. Especially
she is generally intolerant of emotion, when
she does not fully comprehend the why and
wherefore. But the child hath strong affections!
She loves me, and will love thee!"
"Thou canst not think," said the minister,
glancing aside at Hester Prynne, "how my heart
dreads this interview, and yearns for it!
But, in truth, as I already told thee, children
are not readily won to be familiar with me.
They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in
my ear, nor answer to my smile, but stand
apart, and eye me strangely. Even little babes,
when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly.
Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime, hath
been kind to me! The first time—thou knowest
it well! The last was when thou ledst her
with thee to the house of yonder stern old
Governor."
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf
and mine!" answered the mother. "I remember
it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing.
She may be strange and shy at first, but will
soon learn to love thee!"
By this time Pearl had reached the margin
of the brook, and stood on the further side,
gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman,
who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk
waiting to receive her. Just where she had
paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so
smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect
image of her little figure, with all the brilliant
picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment
of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more
refined and spiritualized than the reality.
This image, so nearly identical with the living
Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its
own shadowy and intangible quality to the
child herself. It was strange, the way in
which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly
at them through the dim medium of the forest
gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified with
a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward
as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath
stood another child—another and the same—with
likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt
herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing
manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the child,
in her lonely ramble through the forest, had
strayed out of the sphere in which she and
her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly
seeking to return to it.
There were both truth and error in the impression;
the child and mother were estranged, but through
Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since the latter
rambled from her side, another inmate had
been admitted within the circle of the mother's
feelings, and so modified the aspect of them
all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could
not find her wonted place, and hardly knew
where she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive
minister, "that this brook is the boundary
between two worlds, and that thou canst never
meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish
spirit, who, as the legends of our childhood
taught us, is forbidden to cross a running
stream? Pray hasten her, for this delay has
already imparted a tremor to my nerves."
"Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly,
and stretching out both her arms. "How slow
thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish
before now? Here is a friend of mine, who
must be thy friend also. Thou wilt have twice
as much love henceforward as thy mother alone
could give thee! Leap across the brook and
come to us. Thou canst leap like a young deer!"
Pearl, without responding in any manner to
these honey-sweet expressions, remained on
the other side of the brook. Now she fixed
her bright wild eyes on her mother, now on
the minister, and now included them both in
the same glance, as if to detect and explain
to herself the relation which they bore to
one another. For some unaccountable reason,
as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child's eyes
upon himself, his hand—with that gesture
so habitual as to have become involuntary—stole
over his heart. At length, assuming a singular
air of authority, Pearl stretched out her
hand, with the small forefinger extended,
and pointing evidently towards her mother's
breast. And beneath, in the mirror of the
brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny
image of little Pearl, pointing her small
forefinger too.
"Thou strange child! why dost thou not come
to me?" exclaimed
Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and
a frown gathered on her brow—the more impressive
from the childish, the almost baby-like aspect
of the features that conveyed it. As her mother
still kept beckoning to her, and arraying
her face in a holiday suit of unaccustomed
smiles, the child stamped her foot with a
yet more imperious look and gesture. In the
brook, again, was the fantastic beauty of
the image, with its reflected frown, its pointed
finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis
to the aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!"
cried Hester Prynne, who, however, inured
to such behaviour on the elf-child's part
at other seasons, was naturally anxious for
a more seemly deportment now. "Leap across
the brook, naughty child, and run hither!
Else I must come to thee!"
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's
threats any more than mollified by her entreaties,
now suddenly burst into a fit of passion,
gesticulating violently, and throwing her
small figure into the most extravagant contortions.
She accompanied this wild outbreak with piercing
shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all
sides, so that, alone as she was in her childish
and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a
hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy
and encouragement. Seen in the brook once
more was the shadowy wrath of Pearl's image,
crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping
its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the
midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger
at Hester's bosom.
"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester
to the clergyman, and turning pale in spite
of a strong effort to conceal her trouble
and annoyance, "Children will not abide any,
the slightest, change in the accustomed aspect
of things that are daily before their eyes.
Pearl misses something that she has always
seen me wear!"
"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou
hast any means of pacifying the child, do
it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath
of an old witch like Mistress Hibbins," added
he, attempting to smile, "I know nothing that
I would not sooner encounter than this passion
in a child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in
the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural
effect. Pacify her if thou lovest me!"
Hester turned again towards Pearl with a crimson
blush upon her cheek, a conscious glance aside
clergyman, and then a heavy sigh, while, even
before she had time to speak, the blush yielded
to a deadly pallor.
"Pearl," said she sadly, "look down at thy
feet! There!—before thee!—on the hither
side of the brook!"
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated,
and there lay the scarlet letter so close
upon the margin of the stream that the gold
embroidery was reflected in it.
"Bring it hither!" said Hester.
"Come thou and take it up!" answered Pearl.
"Was ever such a child!" observed Hester aside
to the minister. "Oh, I have much to tell
thee about her! But, in very truth, she is
right as regards this hateful token. I must
bear its torture yet a little longer—only
a few days longer—until we shall have left
this region, and look back hither as to a
land which we have dreamed of. The forest
cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it
from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!"
With these words she advanced to the margin
of the brook, took up the scarlet letter,
and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully,
but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of
drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense
of inevitable doom upon her as she thus received
back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate.
She had flung it into infinite space! she
had drawn an hour's free breath! and here
again was the scarlet misery glittering on
the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus
typified or no, that an evil deed invests
itself with the character of doom. Hester
next gathered up the heavy tresses of her
hair and confined them beneath her cap. As
if there were a withering spell in the sad
letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness
of her womanhood, departed like fading sunshine,
and a gray shadow seemed to fall across her.
When the dreary change was wrought, she extended
her hand to
Pearl.
"Dost thou know thy mother now, child?", asked
she, reproachfully, but with a subdued tone.
"Wilt thou come across the brook, and own
thy mother, now that she has her shame upon
her—now that she is sad?"
"Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding
across the brook, and clasping Hester in her
arms "Now thou art my mother indeed! and I
am thy little Pearl!"
In a mood of tenderness that was not usual
with her, she drew down her mother's head,
and kissed her brow and both her cheeks. But
then—by a kind of necessity that always
impelled this child to alloy whatever comfort
she might chance to give with a throb of anguish—Pearl
put up her mouth and kissed the scarlet letter,
too.
"That was not kind!" said Hester. "When thou
hast shown me a little love, thou mockest
me!"
"Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked
Pearl.
"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother.
"Come thou, and entreat his blessing! He loves
thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy mother,
too. Wilt thou not love him? Come he longs
to greet thee!"
"Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up
with acute intelligence into her mother's
face. "Will he go back with us, hand in hand,
we three together, into the town?"
"Not now, my child," answered Hester. "But
in days to come he will walk hand in hand
with us. We will have a home and fireside
of our own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee;
and he will teach thee many things, and love
thee dearly. Thou wilt love him—wilt thou
not?"
"And will he always keep his hand over his
heart?" inquired
Pearl.
"Foolish child, what a question is that!"
exclaimed her mother.
"Come, and ask his blessing!"
But, whether influenced by the jealousy that
seems instinctive with every petted child
towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever
caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would
show no favour to the clergyman. It was only
by an exertion of force that her mother brought
her up to him, hanging back, and manifesting
her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which,
ever since her babyhood, she had possessed
a singular variety, and could transform her
mobile physiognomy into a series of different
aspects, with a new mischief in them, each
and all. The minister—painfully embarrassed,
but hoping that a kiss might prove a talisman
to admit him into the child's kindlier regards—bent
forward, and impressed one on her brow. Hereupon,
Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running
to the brook, stooped over it, and bathed
her forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was
quite washed off and diffused through a long
lapse of the gliding water. She then remained
apart, silently watching Hester and the clergyman;
while they talked together and made such arrangements
as were suggested by their new position and
the purposes soon to be fulfilled.
And now this fateful interview had come to
a close. The dell was to be left in solitude
among its dark, old trees, which, with their
multitudinous tongues, would whisper long
of what had passed there, and no mortal be
the wiser. And the melancholy brook would
add this other tale to the mystery with which
its little heart was already overburdened,
and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble,
with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone
than for ages heretofore.
XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
As the minister departed, in advance of Hester
Prynne and little Pearl, he threw a backward
glance, half expecting that he should discover
only some faintly traced features or outline
of the mother and the child, slowly fading
into the twilight of the woods. So great a
vicissitude in his life could not at once
be received as real. But there was Hester,
clad in her gray robe, still standing beside
the tree-trunk, which some blast had overthrown
a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever
since been covering with moss, so that these
two fated ones, with earth's heaviest burden
on them, might there sit down together, and
find a single hour's rest and solace. And
there was Pearl, too, lightly dancing from
the margin of the brook—now that the intrusive
third person was gone—and taking her old
place by her mother's side. So the minister
had not fallen asleep and dreamed!
In order to free his mind from this indistinctness
and duplicity of impression, which vexed it
with a strange disquietude, he recalled and
more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester
and himself had sketched for their departure.
It had been determined between them that the
Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered
them a more eligible shelter and concealment
than the wilds of New England or all America,
with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam,
or the few settlements of Europeans scattered
thinly along the sea-board. Not to speak of
the clergyman's health, so inadequate to sustain
the hardships of a forest life, his native
gifts, his culture, and his entire development
would secure him a home only in the midst
of civilization and refinement; the higher
the state the more delicately adapted to it
the man. In furtherance of this choice, it
so happened that a ship lay in the harbour;
one of those unquestionable cruisers, frequent
at that day, which, without being absolutely
outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface
with a remarkable irresponsibility of character.
This vessel had recently arrived from the
Spanish Main, and within three days' time
would sail for Bristol. Hester Prynne—whose
vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of Charity,
had brought her acquainted with the captain
and crew—could take upon herself to secure
the passage of two individuals and a child
with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered
more than desirable.
The minister had inquired of Hester, with
no little interest, the precise time at which
the vessel might be expected to depart. It
would probably be on the fourth day from the
present. "This is most fortunate!" he had
then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate
we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless—to hold
nothing back from the reader—it was because,
on the third day from the present, he was
to preach the Election Sermon; and, as such
an occasion formed an honourable epoch in
the life of a New England Clergyman, he could
not have chanced upon a more suitable mode
and time of terminating his professional career.
"At least, they shall say of me," thought
this exemplary man, "that I leave no public
duty unperformed or ill-performed!" Sad, indeed,
that an introspection so profound and acute
as this poor minister's should be so miserably
deceived! We have had, and may still have,
worse things to tell of him; but none, we
apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence,
at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle
disease that had long since begun to eat into
the real substance of his character. No man,
for any considerable period, can wear one
face to himself and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered as to which
may be the true.
The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings
as he returned from his interview with Hester,
lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and
hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The
pathway among the woods seemed wilder, more
uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and
less trodden by the foot of man, than he remembered
it on his outward journey. But he leaped across
the plashy places, thrust himself through
the clinging underbrush, climbed the ascent,
plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in
short, all the difficulties of the track,
with an unweariable activity that astonished
him. He could not but recall how feebly, and
with what frequent pauses for breath he had
toiled over the same ground, only two days
before. As he drew near the town, he took
an impression of change from the series of
familiar objects that presented themselves.
It seemed not yesterday, not one, not two,
but many days, or even years ago, since he
had quitted them. There, indeed, was each
former trace of the street, as he remembered
it, and all the peculiarities of the houses,
with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and
a weather-cock at every point where his memory
suggested one. Not the less, however, came
this importunately obtrusive sense of change.
The same was true as regarded the acquaintances
whom he met, and all the well-known shapes
of human life, about the little town. They
looked neither older nor younger now; the
beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could
the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his
feet to-day; it was impossible to describe
in what respect they differed from the individuals
on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting
glance; and yet the minister's deepest sense
seemed to inform him of their mutability.
A similar impression struck him most remarkably
as he passed under the walls of his own church.
The edifice had so very strange, and yet so
familiar an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's
mind vibrated between two ideas; either that
he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or
that he was merely dreaming about it now.
This phenomenon, in the various shapes which
it assumed, indicated no external change,
but so sudden and important a change in the
spectator of the familiar scene, that the
intervening space of a single day had operated
on his consciousness like the lapse of years.
The minister's own will, and Hester's will,
and the fate that grew between them, had wrought
this transformation. It was the same town
as heretofore, but the same minister returned
not from the forest. He might have said to
the friends who greeted him—"I am not the
man for whom you take me! I left him yonder
in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell,
by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy
brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if
his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his
white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung
down there, like a cast-off garment!" His
friends, no doubt, would still have insisted
with him—"Thou art thyself the man!" but
the error would have been their own, not his.
Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner
man gave him other evidences of a revolution
in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth,
nothing short of a total change of dynasty
and moral code, in that interior kingdom,
was adequate to account for the impulses now
communicated to the unfortunate and startled
minister. At every step he was incited to
do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other,
with a sense that it would be at once involuntary
and intentional, in spite of himself, yet
growing out of a profounder self than that
which opposed the impulse. For instance, he
met one of his own deacons. The good old man
addressed him with the paternal affection
and patriarchal privilege which his venerable
age, his upright and holy character, and his
station in the church, entitled him to use
and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost
worshipping respect, which the minister's
professional and private claims alike demanded.
Never was there a more beautiful example of
how the majesty of age and wisdom may comport
with the obeisance and respect enjoined upon
it, as from a lower social rank, and inferior
order of endowment, towards a higher. Now,
during a conversation of some two or three
moments between the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
and this excellent and hoary-bearded deacon,
it was only by the most careful self-control
that the former could refrain from uttering
certain blasphemous suggestions that rose
into his mind, respecting the communion-supper.
He absolutely trembled and turned pale as
ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself in
utterance of these horrible matters, and plead
his own consent for so doing, without his
having fairly given it. And, even with this
terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid
laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old
patriarchal deacon would have been petrified
by his minister's impiety.
Again, another incident of the same nature.
Hurrying along the street, the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member
of his church, a most pious and exemplary
old dame, poor, widowed, lonely, and with
a heart as full of reminiscences about her
dead husband and children, and her dead friends
of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of
storied gravestones. Yet all this, which would
else have been such heavy sorrow, was made
almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul,
by religious consolations and the truths of
Scripture, wherewith she had fed herself continually
for more than thirty years. And since Mr.
Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good
grandam's chief earthly comfort—which, unless
it had been likewise a heavenly comfort, could
have been none at all—was to meet her pastor,
whether casually, or of set purpose, and be
refreshed with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing
Gospel truth, from his beloved lips, into
her dulled, but rapturously attentive ear.
But, on this occasion, up to the moment of
putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr.
Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would
have it, could recall no text of Scripture,
nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and,
as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument
against the immortality of the human soul.
The instilment thereof into her mind would
probably have caused this aged sister to drop
down dead, at once, as by the effect of an
intensely poisonous infusion. What he really
did whisper, the minister could never afterwards
recollect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate
disorder in his utterance, which failed to
impart any distinct idea to the good widows
comprehension, or which Providence interpreted
after a method of its own. Assuredly, as the
minister looked back, he beheld an expression
of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed
like the shine of the celestial city on her
face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.
Again, a third instance. After parting from
the old church member, he met the youngest
sister of them all. It was a maiden newly-won—and
won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon,
on the Sabbath after his vigil—to barter
the transitory pleasures of the world for
the heavenly hope that was to assume brighter
substance as life grew dark around her, and
which would gild the utter gloom with final
glory. She was fair and pure as a lily that
had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew
well that he was himself enshrined within
the stainless sanctity of her heart, which
hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting
to religion the warmth of love, and to love
a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon,
had surely led the poor young girl away from
her mother's side, and thrown her into the
pathway of this sorely tempted, or—shall
we not rather say?—this lost and desperate
man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered
him to condense into small compass, and drop
into her tender bosom a germ of evil that
would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and
bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense
of power over this virgin soul, trusting him
as she did, that the minister felt potent
to blight all the field of innocence with
but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite
with but a word. So—with a mightier struggle
than he had yet sustained—he held his Geneva
cloak before his face, and hurried onward,
making no sign of recognition, and leaving
the young sister to digest his rudeness as
she might. She ransacked her conscience—which
was full of harmless little matters, like
her pocket or her work-bag—and took herself
to task, poor thing! for a thousand imaginary
faults, and went about her household duties
with swollen eyelids the next morning.
Before the minister had time to celebrate
his victory over this last temptation, he
was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous,
and almost as horrible. It was—we blush
to tell it—it was to stop short in the road,
and teach some very wicked words to a knot
of little Puritan children who were playing
there, and had but just begun to talk. Denying
himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth,
he met a drunken seaman, one of the ship's
crew from the Spanish Main. And here, since
he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness,
poor Mr. Dimmesdale longed at least to shake
hands with the tarry black-guard, and recreate
himself with a few improper jests, such as
dissolute sailors so abound with, and a volley
of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying
oaths! It was not so much a better principle,
as partly his natural good taste, and still
more his buckramed habit of clerical decorum,
that carried him safely through the latter
crisis.
"What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?"
cried the minister to himself, at length,
pausing in the street, and striking his hand
against his forehead.
"Am I mad? or am I given over utterly to the
fiend? Did I make a contract with him in the
forest, and sign it with my blood? And does
he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting
the performance of every wickedness which
his most foul imagination can conceive?"
At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
thus communed with himself, and struck his
forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins,
the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been
passing by. She made a very grand appearance,
having on a high head-dress, a rich gown of
velvet, and a ruff done up with the famous
yellow starch, of which Anne Turner, her especial
friend, had taught her the secret, before
this last good lady had been hanged for Sir
Thomas Overbury's murder. Whether the witch
had read the minister's thoughts or no, she
came to a full stop, looked shrewdly into
his face, smiled craftily, and—though little
given to converse with clergymen—began a
conversation.
"So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into
the forest," observed the witch-lady, nodding
her high head-dress at him. "The next time
I pray you to allow me only a fair warning,
and I shall be proud to bear you company.
Without taking overmuch upon myself my good
word will go far towards gaining any strange
gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate
you wot of."
"I profess, madam," answered the clergyman,
with a grave obeisance, such as the lady's
rank demanded, and his own good breeding made
imperative—"I profess, on my conscience
and character, that I am utterly bewildered
as touching the purport of your words! I went
not into the forest to seek a potentate, neither
do I, at any future time, design a visit thither,
with a view to gaining the favour of such
personage. My one sufficient object was to
greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle
Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many
precious souls he hath won from heathendom!"
"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady,
still nodding her high head-dress at the minister.
"Well, well! we must needs talk thus in the
daytime! You carry it off like an old hand!
But at midnight, and in the forest, we shall
have other talk together!"
She passed on with her aged stateliness, but
often turning back her head and smiling at
him, like one willing to recognise a secret
intimacy of connexion.
"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister,
"to the fiend whom, if men say true, this
yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen
for her prince and master?"
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain
very like it! Tempted by a dream of happiness,
he had yielded himself with deliberate choice,
as he had never done before, to what he knew
was deadly sin. And the infectious poison
of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused
throughout his moral system. It had stupefied
all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid
life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn,
bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous
desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good
and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they
frightened him. And his encounter with old
Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident,
did but show its sympathy and fellowship with
wicked mortals, and the world of perverted
spirits.
He had by this time reached his dwelling on
the edge of the burial ground, and, hastening
up the stairs, took refuge in his study. The
minister was glad to have reached this shelter,
without first betraying himself to the world
by any of those strange and wicked eccentricities
to which he had been continually impelled
while passing through the streets. He entered
the accustomed room, and looked around him
on its books, its windows, its fireplace,
and the tapestried comfort of the walls, with
the same perception of strangeness that had
haunted him throughout his walk from the forest
dell into the town and thitherward. Here he
had studied and written; here gone through
fast and vigil, and come forth half alive;
here striven to pray; here borne a hundred
thousand agonies! There was the Bible, in
its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets
speaking to him, and God's voice through all.
There on the table, with the inky pen beside
it, was an unfinished sermon, with a sentence
broken in the midst, where his thoughts had
ceased to gush out upon the page two days
before. He knew that it was himself, the thin
and white-cheeked minister, who had done and
suffered these things, and written thus far
into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to
stand apart, and eye this former self with
scornful pitying, but half-envious curiosity.
That self was gone. Another man had returned
out of the forest—a wiser one—with a knowledge
of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of
the former never could have reached. A bitter
kind of knowledge that!
While occupied with these reflections, a knock
came at the door of the study, and the minister
said, "Come in!"—not wholly devoid of an
idea that he might behold an evil spirit.
And so he did! It was old Roger Chillingworth
that entered. The minister stood white and
speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew Scriptures,
and the other spread upon his breast.
"Welcome home, reverend sir," said the physician
"And how found you that godly man, the Apostle
Eliot? But methinks, dear sir, you look pale,
as if the travel through the wilderness had
been too sore for you. Will not my aid be
requisite to put you in heart and strength
to preach your Election Sermon?"
"Nay, I think not so," rejoined the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale. "My journey, and the sight
of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free air
which I have breathed have done me good, after
so long confinement in my study. I think to
need no more of your drugs, my kind physician,
good though they be, and administered by a
friendly hand."
All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking
at the minister with the grave and intent
regard of a physician towards his patient.
But, in spite of this outward show, the latter
was almost convinced of the old man's knowledge,
or, at least, his confident suspicion, with
respect to his own interview with Hester Prynne.
The physician knew then that in the minister's
regard he was no longer a trusted friend,
but his bitterest enemy. So much being known,
it would appear natural that a part of it
should be expressed. It is singular, however,
how long a time often passes before words
embody things; and with what security two
persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject,
may approach its very verge, and retire without
disturbing it. Thus the minister felt no apprehension
that Roger Chillingworth would touch, in express
words, upon the real position which they sustained
towards one another. Yet did the physician,
in his dark way, creep frightfully near the
secret.
"Were it not better," said he, "that you use
my poor skill tonight? Verily, dear sir, we
must take pains to make you strong and vigorous
for this occasion of the Election discourse.
The people look for great things from you,
apprehending that another year may come about
and find their pastor gone."
"Yes, to another world," replied the minister
with pious resignation. "Heaven grant it be
a better one; for, in good sooth, I hardly
think to tarry with my flock through the flitting
seasons of another year! But touching your
medicine, kind sir, in my present frame of
body I need it not."
"I joy to hear it," answered the physician.
"It may be that my remedies, so long administered
in vain, begin now to take due effect. Happy
man were I, and well deserving of New England's
gratitude, could I achieve this cure!"
"I thank you from my heart, most watchful
friend," said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
with a solemn smile. "I thank you, and can
but requite your good deeds with my prayers."
"A good man's prayers are golden recompense!"
rejoined old Roger Chillingworth, as he took
his leave. "Yea, they are the current gold
coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King's
own mint mark on them!"
Left alone, the minister summoned a servant
of the house, and requested food, which, being
set before him, he ate with ravenous appetite.
Then flinging the already written pages of
the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith
began another, which he wrote with such an
impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that
he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered
that Heaven should see fit to transmit the
grand and solemn music of its oracles through
so foul an organ pipe as he. However, leaving
that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved
for ever, he drove his task onward with earnest
haste and ecstasy.
Thus the night fled away, as if it were a
winged steed, and he careering on it; morning
came, and peeped, blushing, through the curtains;
and at last sunrise threw a golden beam into
the study, and laid it right across the minister's
bedazzled eyes. There he was, with the pen
still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable
tract of written space behind him!
XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY
Betimes in the morning of the day on which
the new Governor was to receive his office
at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne
and little Pearl came into the market-place.
It was already thronged with the craftsmen
and other plebeian inhabitants of the town,
in considerable numbers, among whom, likewise,
were many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins
marked them as belonging to some of the forest
settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis
of the colony.
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions
for seven years past, Hester was clad in a
garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by
its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity
in its fashion, it had the effect of making
her fade personally out of sight and outline;
while again the scarlet letter brought her
back from this twilight indistinctness, and
revealed her under the moral aspect of its
own illumination. Her face, so long familiar
to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude
which they were accustomed to behold there.
It was like a mask; or, rather like the frozen
calmness of a dead woman's features; owing
this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester
was actually dead, in respect to any claim
of sympathy, and had departed out of the world
with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was
an expression unseen before, nor, indeed,
vivid enough to be detected now; unless some
preternaturally gifted observer should have
first read the heart, and have afterwards
sought a corresponding development in the
countenance and mien. Such a spiritual seer
might have conceived, that, after sustaining
the gaze of the multitude through several
miserable years as a necessity, a penance,
and something which it was a stern religion
to endure, she now, for one last time more,
encountered it freely and voluntarily, in
order to convert what had so long been agony
into a kind of triumph. "Look your last on
the scarlet letter and its wearer!"—the
people's victim and lifelong bond-slave, as
they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet
a little while, and she will be beyond your
reach! A few hours longer and the deep, mysterious
ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol
which ye have caused to burn on her bosom!"
Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable
to be assigned to human nature, should we
suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind,
at the moment when she was about to win her
freedom from the pain which had been thus
deeply incorporated with her being. Might
there not be an irresistible desire to quaff
a last, long, breathless draught of the cup
of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all
her years of womanhood had been perpetually
flavoured. The wine of life, henceforth to
be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich,
delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased
and golden beaker, or else leave an inevitable
and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness
wherewith she had been drugged, as with a
cordial of intensest potency.
Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety. It
would have been impossible to guess that this
bright and sunny apparition owed its existence
to the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy,
at once so gorgeous and so delicate as must
have been requisite to contrive the child's
apparel, was the same that had achieved a
task perhaps more difficult, in imparting
so distinct a peculiarity to Hester's simple
robe. The dress, so proper was it to little
Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable
development and outward manifestation of her
character, no more to be separated from her
than the many-hued brilliancy from a butterfly's
wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of
a bright flower. As with these, so with the
child; her garb was all of one idea with her
nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there
was a certain singular inquietude and excitement
in her mood, resembling nothing so much as
the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and
flashes with the varied throbbings of the
breast on which it is displayed. Children
have always a sympathy in the agitations of
those connected with them: always, especially,
a sense of any trouble or impending revolution,
of whatever kind, in domestic circumstances;
and therefore Pearl, who was the gem on her
mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very
dance of her spirits, the emotions which none
could detect in the marble passiveness of
Hester's brow.
This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like
movement, rather than walk by her mother's
side.
She broke continually into shouts of a wild,
inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music.
When they reached the market-place, she became
still more restless, on perceiving the stir
and bustle that enlivened the spot; for it
was usually more like the broad and lonesome
green before a village meeting-house, than
the centre of a town's business.
"Why, what is this, mother?" cried she. "Wherefore
have all the people left their work to-day?
Is it a play-day for the whole world? See,
there is the blacksmith! He has washed his
sooty face, and put on his Sabbath-day clothes,
and looks as if he would gladly be merry,
if any kind body would only teach him how!
And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer,
nodding and smiling at me. Why does he do
so, mother?"
"He remembers thee a little babe, my child,"
answered Hester.
"He should not nod and smile at me, for all
that—the black, grim, ugly-eyed old man!"
said Pearl. "He may nod at thee, if he will;
for thou art clad in gray, and wearest the
scarlet letter. But see, mother, how many
faces of strange people, and Indians among
them, and sailors! What have they all come
to do, here in the market-place?"
"They wait to see the procession pass," said
Hester. "For the Governor and the magistrates
are to go by, and the ministers, and all the
great people and good people, with the music
and the soldiers marching before them."
"And will the minister be there?" asked Pearl.
"And will he hold out both his hands to me,
as when thou ledst me to him from the brook-side?"
"He will be there, child," answered her mother,
"but he will not greet thee to-day, nor must
thou greet him."
"What a strange, sad man is he!" said the
child, as if speaking partly to herself. "In
the dark nighttime he calls us to him, and
holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood
with him on the scaffold yonder! And in the
deep forest, where only the old trees can
hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks
with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And
he kisses my forehead, too, so that the little
brook would hardly wash it off! But, here,
in the sunny day, and among all the people,
he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange,
sad man is he, with his hand always over his
heart!"
"Be quiet, Pearl—thou understandest not
these things," said her mother. "Think not
now of the minister, but look about thee,
and see how cheery is everybody's face to-day.
The children have come from their schools,
and the grown people from their workshops
and their fields, on purpose to be happy,
for, to-day, a new man is beginning to rule
over them; and so—as has been the custom
of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered—they
make merry and rejoice: as if a good and golden
year were at length to pass over the poor
old world!"
It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted
jollity that brightened the faces of the people.
Into this festal season of the year—as it
already was, and continued to be during the
greater part of two centuries—the Puritans
compressed whatever mirth and public joy they
deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby
so far dispelling the customary cloud, that,
for the space of a single holiday, they appeared
scarcely more grave than most other communities
at a period of general affliction.
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable
tinge, which undoubtedly characterized the
mood and manners of the age. The persons now
in the market-place of Boston had not been
born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom.
They were native Englishmen, whose fathers
had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan
epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed
as one great mass, would appear to have been
as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the
world has ever witnessed. Had they followed
their hereditary taste, the New England settlers
would have illustrated all events of public
importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries,
and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable,
in the observance of majestic ceremonies,
to combine mirthful recreation with solemnity,
and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant
embroidery to the great robe of state, which
a nation, at such festivals, puts on. There
was some shadow of an attempt of this kind
in the mode of celebrating the day on which
the political year of the colony commenced.
The dim reflection of a remembered splendour,
a colourless and manifold diluted repetition
of what they had beheld in proud old London—we
will not say at a royal coronation, but at
a Lord Mayor's show—might be traced in the
customs which our forefathers instituted,
with reference to the annual installation
of magistrates. The fathers and founders of
the commonwealth—the statesman, the priest,
and the soldier—seemed it a duty then to
assume the outward state and majesty, which,
in accordance with antique style, was looked
upon as the proper garb of public and social
eminence. All came forth to move in procession
before the people's eye, and thus impart a
needed dignity to the simple framework of
a government so newly constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if
not encouraged, in relaxing the severe and
close application to their various modes of
rugged industry, which at all other times,
seemed of the same piece and material with
their religion. Here, it is true, were none
of the appliances which popular merriment
would so readily have found in the England
of Elizabeth's time, or that of James—no
rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel,
with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman
with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler,
with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry
Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests,
perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective,
by their appeals to the very broadest sources
of mirthful sympathy. All such professors
of the several branches of jocularity would
have been sternly repressed, not only by the
rigid discipline of law, but by the general
sentiment which give law its vitality. Not
the less, however, the great, honest face
of the people smiled—grimly, perhaps, but
widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such
as the colonists had witnessed, and shared
in, long ago, at the country fairs and on
the village-greens of England; and which it
was thought well to keep alive on this new
soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness
that were essential in them. Wrestling matches,
in the different fashions of Cornwall and
Devonshire, were seen here and there about
the market-place; in one corner, there was
a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and—what
attracted most interest of all—on the platform
of the pillory, already so noted in our pages,
two masters of defence were commencing an
exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.
But, much to the disappointment of the crowd,
this latter business was broken off by the
interposition of the town beadle, who had
no idea of permitting the majesty of the law
to be violated by such an abuse of one of
its consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole,
(the people being then in the first stages
of joyless deportment, and the offspring of
sires who had known how to be merry, in their
day), that they would compare favourably,
in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants,
even at so long an interval as ourselves.
Their immediate posterity, the generation
next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest
shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national
visage with it, that all the subsequent years
have not sufficed to clear it up. We have
yet to learn again the forgotten art of gaiety.
The picture of human life in the market-place,
though its general tint was the sad gray,
brown, or black of the English emigrants,
was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue.
A party of Indians—in their savage finery
of curiously embroidered deerskin robes, wampum-belts,
red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed
with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear—stood
apart with countenances of inflexible gravity,
beyond what even the Puritan aspect could
attain. Nor, wild as were these painted barbarians,
were they the wildest feature of the scene.
This distinction could more justly be claimed
by some mariners—a part of the crew of the
vessel from the Spanish Main—who had come
ashore to see the humours of Election Day.
They were rough-looking desperadoes, with
sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard;
their wide short trousers were confined about
the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough
plate of gold, and sustaining always a long
knife, and in some instances, a sword. From
beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf,
gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and
merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity.
They transgressed without fear or scruple,
the rules of behaviour that were binding on
all others: smoking tobacco under the beadle's
very nose, although each whiff would have
cost a townsman a shilling; and quaffing at
their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae
from pocket flasks, which they freely tendered
to the gaping crowd around them. It remarkably
characterised the incomplete morality of the
age, rigid as we call it, that a licence was
allowed the seafaring class, not merely for
their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate
deeds on their proper element. The sailor
of that day would go near to be arraigned
as a pirate in our own. There could be little
doubt, for instance, that this very ship's
crew, though no unfavourable specimens of
the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty,
as we should phrase it, of depredations on
the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled
all their necks in a modern court of justice.
But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled,
and foamed very much at its own will, or subject
only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly
any attempts at regulation by human law. The
buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his
calling and become at once if he chose, a
man of probity and piety on land; nor, even
in the full career of his reckless life, was
he regarded as a personage with whom it was
disreputable to traffic or casually associate.
Thus the Puritan elders in their black cloaks,
starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats,
smiled not unbenignantly at the clamour and
rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men;
and it excited neither surprise nor animadversion
when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth,
the physician, was seen to enter the market-place
in close and familiar talk with the commander
of the questionable vessel.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant
figure, so far as apparel went, anywhere to
be seen among the multitude. He wore a profusion
of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on
his hat, which was also encircled by a gold
chain, and surmounted with a feather. There
was a sword at his side and a sword-cut on
his forehead, which, by the arrangement of
his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display
than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn
this garb and shown this face, and worn and
shown them both with such a galliard air,
without undergoing stern question before a
magistrate, and probably incurring a fine
or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition
in the stocks. As regarded the shipmaster,
however, all was looked upon as pertaining
to the character, as to a fish his glistening
scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander
of the Bristol ship strolled idly through
the market-place; until happening to approach
the spot where Hester Prynne was standing,
he appeared to recognise, and did not hesitate
to address her. As was usually the case wherever
Hester stood, a small vacant area—a sort
of magic circle—had formed itself about
her, into which, though the people were elbowing
one another at a little distance, none ventured
or felt disposed to intrude. It was a forcible
type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet
letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly
by her own reserve, and partly by the instinctive,
though no longer so unkindly, withdrawal of
her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before,
it answered a good purpose by enabling Hester
and the seaman to speak together without risk
of being overheard; and so changed was Hester
Prynne's repute before the public, that the
matron in town, most eminent for rigid morality,
could not have held such intercourse with
less result of scandal than herself.
"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must
bid the steward make ready one more berth
than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy
or ship fever this voyage. What with the ship's
surgeon and this other doctor, our only danger
will be from drug or pill; more by token,
as there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard,
which I traded for with a Spanish vessel."
"What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled
more than she permitted to appear. "Have you
another passenger?"
"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster,
"that this physician here—Chillingworth
he calls himself—is minded to try my cabin-fare
with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it;
for he tells me he is of your party, and a
close friend to the gentleman you spoke of—he
that is in peril from these sour old Puritan
rulers."
"They know each other well, indeed," replied
Hester, with a mien of calmness, though in
the utmost consternation. "They have long
dwelt together."
Nothing further passed between the mariner
and Hester Prynne. But at that instant she
beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing
in the remotest corner of the market-place
and smiling on her; a smile which—across
the wide and bustling square, and through
all the talk and laughter, and various thoughts,
moods, and interests of the crowd—conveyed
secret and fearful meaning.
XXII. THE PROCESSION
Before Hester Prynne could call together her
thoughts, and consider what was practicable
to be done in this new and startling aspect
of affairs, the sound of military music was
heard approaching along a contiguous street.
It denoted the advance of the procession of
magistrates and citizens on its way towards
the meeting-house: where, in compliance with
a custom thus early established, and ever
since observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
was to deliver an Election Sermon.
Soon the head of the procession showed itself,
with a slow and stately march, turning a corner,
and making its way across the market-place.
First came the music. It comprised a variety
of instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted
to one another, and played with no great skill;
but yet attaining the great object for which
the harmony of drum and clarion addresses
itself to the multitude—that of imparting
a higher and more heroic air to the scene
of life that passes before the eye. Little
Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then
lost for an instant the restless agitation
that had kept her in a continual effervescence
throughout the morning; she gazed silently,
and seemed to be borne upward like a floating
sea-bird on the long heaves and swells of
sound. But she was brought back to her former
mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the
weapons and bright armour of the military
company, which followed after the music, and
formed the honorary escort of the procession.
This body of soldiery—which still sustains
a corporate existence, and marches down from
past ages with an ancient and honourable fame—was
composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks
were filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings
of martial impulse, and sought to establish
a kind of College of Arms, where, as in an
association of Knights Templars, they might
learn the science, and, so far as peaceful
exercise would teach them, the practices of
war. The high estimation then placed upon
the military character might be seen in the
lofty port of each individual member of the
company. Some of them, indeed, by their services
in the Low Countries and on other fields of
European warfare, had fairly won their title
to assume the name and pomp of soldiership.
The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished
steel, and with plumage nodding over their
bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect
which no modern display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came
immediately behind the military escort, were
better worth a thoughtful observer's eye.
Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp
of majesty that made the warrior's haughty
stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was
an age when what we call talent had far less
consideration than now, but the massive materials
which produce stability and dignity of character
a great deal more. The people possessed by
hereditary right the quality of reverence,
which, in their descendants, if it survive
at all, exists in smaller proportion, and
with a vastly diminished force in the selection
and estimate of public men. The change may
be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps,
for both. In that old day the English settler
on these rude shores—having left king, nobles,
and all degrees of awful rank behind, while
still the faculty and necessity of reverence
was strong in him—bestowed it on the white
hair and venerable brow of age—on long-tried
integrity—on solid wisdom and sad-coloured
experience—on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gave the idea of permanence,
and comes under the general definition of
respectability. These primitive statesmen,
therefore—Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley,
Bellingham, and their compeers—who were
elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant,
but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety,
rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of
difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare
of the state like a line of cliffs against
a tempestuous tide. The traits of character
here indicated were well represented in the
square cast of countenance and large physical
development of the new colonial magistrates.
So far as a demeanour of natural authority
was concerned, the mother country need not
have been ashamed to see these foremost men
of an actual democracy adopted into the House
of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the
Sovereign.
Next in order to the magistrates came the
young and eminently distinguished divine,
from whose lips the religious discourse of
the anniversary was expected. His was the
profession at that era in which intellectual
ability displayed itself far more than in
political life; for—leaving a higher motive
out of the question it offered inducements
powerful enough in the almost worshipping
respect of the community, to win the most
aspiring ambition into its service. Even political
power—as in the case of Increase Mather—was
within the grasp of a successful priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld
him now, that never, since Mr. Dimmesdale
first set his foot on the New England shore,
had he exhibited such energy as was seen in
the gait and air with which he kept his pace
in the procession. There was no feebleness
of step as at other times; his frame was not
bent, nor did his hand rest ominously upon
his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly
viewed, his strength seemed not of the body.
It might be spiritual and imparted to him
by angelical ministrations. It might be the
exhilaration of that potent cordial which
is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest
and long-continued thought. Or perchance his
sensitive temperament was invigorated by the
loud and piercing music that swelled heaven-ward,
and uplifted him on its ascending wave. Nevertheless,
so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music.
There was his body, moving onward, and with
an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind?
Far and deep in its own region, busying itself,
with preternatural activity, to marshal a
procession of stately thoughts that were soon
to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard
nothing, knew nothing of what was around him;
but the spiritual element took up the feeble
frame and carried it along, unconscious of
the burden, and converting it to spirit like
itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have
grown morbid, possess this occasional power
of mighty effort, into which they throw the
life of many days and then are lifeless for
as many more.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman,
felt a dreary influence come over her, but
wherefore or whence she knew not, unless that
he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and
utterly beyond her reach. One glance of recognition
she had imagined must needs pass between them.
She thought of the dim forest, with its little
dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and
the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand-in-hand,
they had mingled their sad and passionate
talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook.
How deeply had they known each other then!
And was this the man? She hardly knew him
now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped as
it were, in the rich music, with the procession
of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so
unattainable in his worldly position, and
still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing
thoughts, through which she now beheld him!
Her spirit sank with the idea that all must
have been a delusion, and that, vividly as
she had dreamed it, there could be no real
bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And
thus much of woman was there in Hester, that
she could scarcely forgive him—least of
all now, when the heavy footstep of their
approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer,
nearer!—for being able so completely to
withdraw himself from their mutual world—while
she groped darkly, and stretched forth her
cold hands, and found him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's
feelings, or herself felt the remoteness and
intangibility that had fallen around the minister.
While the procession passed, the child was
uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird
on the point of taking flight. When the whole
had gone by, she looked up into Hester's face—
"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister
that kissed me by the brook?"
"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered
her mother. "We must not always talk in the
marketplace of what happens to us in the forest."
"I could not be sure that it was he—so strange
he looked," continued the child. "Else I would
have run to him, and bid him kiss me now,
before all the people, even as he did yonder
among the dark old trees. What would the minister
have said, mother? Would he have clapped his
hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and
bid me begone?"
"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester,
"save that it was no time to kiss, and that
kisses are not to be given in the market-place?
Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst
not speak to him!"
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference
to Mr. Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person
whose eccentricities—insanity, as we should
term it—led her to do what few of the townspeople
would have ventured on—to begin a conversation
with the wearer of the scarlet letter in public.
It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great
magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered
stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a gold-headed
cane, had come forth to see the procession.
As this ancient lady had the renown (which
subsequently cost her no less a price than
her life) of being a principal actor in all
the works of necromancy that were continually
going forward, the crowd gave way before her,
and seemed to fear the touch of her garment,
as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous
folds. Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne—kindly
as so many now felt towards the latter—the
dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins had doubled,
and caused a general movement from that part
of the market-place in which the two women
stood.
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive
it?" whispered the old lady confidentially
to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint
on earth, as the people uphold him to be,
and as—I must needs say—he really looks!
Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession,
would think how little while it is since he
went forth out of his study—chewing a Hebrew
text of Scripture in his mouth, I warrant—to
take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know
what that means, Hester Prynne! But truly,
forsooth, I find it hard to believe him the
same man. Many a church member saw I, walking
behind the music, that has danced in the same
measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler,
and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland
wizard changing hands with us! That is but
a trifle, when a woman knows the world. But
this minister. Couldst thou surely tell, Hester,
whether he was the same man that encountered
thee on the forest path?"
"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered
Hester Prynne, feeling Mistress Hibbins to
be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled
and awe-stricken by the confidence with which
she affirmed a personal connexion between
so many persons (herself among them) and the
Evil One. "It is not for me to talk lightly
of a learned and pious minister of the Word,
like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale."
"Fie, woman—fie!" cried the old lady, shaking
her finger at Hester. "Dost thou think I have
been to the forest so many times, and have
yet no skill to judge who else has been there?
Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands which
they wore while they danced be left in their
hair! I know thee, Hester, for I behold the
token. We may all see it in the sunshine!
and it glows like a red flame in the dark.
Thou wearest it openly, so there need be no
question about that. But this minister! Let
me tell thee in thine ear! When the Black
Man sees one of his own servants, signed and
sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way
of ordering matters so that the mark shall
be disclosed, in open daylight, to the eyes
of all the world! What is that the minister
seeks to hide, with his hand always over his
heart? Ha, Hester Prynne?"
"What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?" eagerly
asked little Pearl.
"Hast thou seen it?"
"No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins,
making Pearl a profound reverence. "Thou thyself
wilt see it, one time or another. They say,
child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince
of Air! Wilt thou ride with me some fine night
to see thy father? Then thou shalt know wherefore
the minister keeps his hand over his heart!"
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place
could hear her, the weird old gentlewoman
took her departure.
By this time the preliminary prayer had been
offered in the meeting-house, and the accents
of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were heard
commencing his discourse. An irresistible
feeling kept Hester near the spot. As the
sacred edifice was too much thronged to admit
another auditor, she took up her position
close beside the scaffold of the pillory.
It was in sufficient proximity to bring the
whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of
an indistinct but varied murmur and flow of
the minister's very peculiar voice.
This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment,
insomuch that a listener, comprehending nothing
of the language in which the preacher spoke,
might still have been swayed to and fro by
the mere tone and cadence. Like all other
music, it breathed passion and pathos, and
emotions high or tender, in a tongue native
to the human heart, wherever educated. Muffled
as the sound was by its passage through the
church walls, Hester Prynne listened with
such intenseness, and sympathized so intimately,
that the sermon had throughout a meaning for
her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable
words. These, perhaps, if more distinctly
heard, might have been only a grosser medium,
and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now
she caught the low undertone, as of the wind
sinking down to repose itself; then ascended
with it, as it rose through progressive gradations
of sweetness and power, until its volume seemed
to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and
solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the
voice sometimes became, there was for ever
in it an essential character of plaintiveness.
A loud or low expression of anguish—the
whisper, or the shriek, as it might be conceived,
of suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility
in every bosom! At times this deep strain
of pathos was all that could be heard, and
scarcely heard sighing amid a desolate silence.
But even when the minister's voice grew high
and commanding—when it gushed irrepressibly
upward—when it assumed its utmost breadth
and power, so overfilling the church as to
burst its way through the solid walls, and
diffuse itself in the open air—still, if
the auditor listened intently, and for the
purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain.
What was it? The complaint of a human heart,
sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its
secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the
great heart of mankind; beseeching its sympathy
or forgiveness,—at every moment,—in each
accent,—and never in vain! It was this profound
and continual undertone that gave the clergyman
his most appropriate power.
During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like,
at the foot of the scaffold. If the minister's
voice had not kept her there, there would,
nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism
in that spot, whence she dated the first hour
of her life of ignominy. There was a sense
within her—too ill-defined to be made a
thought, but weighing heavily on her mind—that
her whole orb of life, both before and after,
was connected with this spot, as with the
one point that gave it unity.
Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's
side, and was playing at her own will about
the market-place. She made the sombre crowd
cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray,
even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates
a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to
and fro, half seen and half concealed amid
the twilight of the clustering leaves. She
had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp
and irregular movement. It indicated the restless
vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly
indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because
it was played upon and vibrated with her mother's
disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw anything to
excite her ever active and wandering curiosity,
she flew thitherward, and, as we might say,
seized upon that man or thing as her own property,
so far as she desired it, but without yielding
the minutest degree of control over her motions
in requital. The Puritans looked on, and,
if they smiled, were none the less inclined
to pronounce the child a demon offspring,
from the indescribable charm of beauty and
eccentricity that shone through her little
figure, and sparkled with its activity. She
ran and looked the wild Indian in the face,
and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than
his own. Thence, with native audacity, but
still with a reserve as characteristic, she
flew into the midst of a group of mariners,
the swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean,
as the Indians were of the land; and they
gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl,
as if a flake of the sea-foam had taken the
shape of a little maid, and were gifted with
a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath
the prow in the night-time.
One of these seafaring men the shipmaster,
indeed, who had spoken to Hester Prynne was
so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that he attempted
to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch
a kiss. Finding it as impossible to touch
her as to catch a humming-bird in the air,
he took from his hat the gold chain that was
twisted about it, and threw it to the child.
Pearl immediately twined it around her neck
and waist with such happy skill, that, once
seen there, it became a part of her, and it
was difficult to imagine her without it.
"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet
letter," said the seaman, "Wilt thou carry
her a message from me?"
"If the message pleases me, I will," answered
Pearl.
"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake
again with the black-a-visaged, hump shouldered
old doctor, and he engages to bring his friend,
the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him.
So let thy mother take no thought, save for
herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her this,
thou witch-baby?"
"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince
of the Air!" cried Pearl, with a naughty smile.
"If thou callest me that ill-name, I shall
tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship
with a tempest!"
Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace,
the child returned to her mother, and communicated
what the mariner had said. Hester's strong,
calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost sank,
at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance
of an inevitable doom, which at the moment
when a passage seemed to open for the minister
and herself out of their labyrinth of misery—showed
itself with an unrelenting smile, right in
the midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity
in which the shipmaster's intelligence involved
her, she was also subjected to another trial.
There were many people present from the country
round about, who had often heard of the scarlet
letter, and to whom it had been made terrific
by a hundred false or exaggerated rumours,
but who had never beheld it with their own
bodily eyes. These, after exhausting other
modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester
Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness.
Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could
not bring them nearer than a circuit of several
yards. At that distance they accordingly stood,
fixed there by the centrifugal force of the
repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired.
The whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing
the press of spectators, and learning the
purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust
their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces
into the ring. Even the Indians were affected
by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's
curiosity and, gliding through the crowd,
fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's
bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer
of this brilliantly embroidered badge must
needs be a personage of high dignity among
her people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the
town (their own interest in this worn-out
subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy
with what they saw others feel) lounged idly
to the same quarter, and tormented Hester
Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with
their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar
shame. Hester saw and recognized the selfsame
faces of that group of matrons, who had awaited
her forthcoming from the prison-door seven
years ago; all save one, the youngest and
only compassionate among them, whose burial-robe
she had since made. At the final hour, when
she was so soon to fling aside the burning
letter, it had strangely become the centre
of more remark and excitement, and was thus
made to sear her breast more painfully, than
at any time since the first day she put it
on.
While Hester stood in that magic circle of
ignominy, where the cunning cruelty of her
sentence seemed to have fixed her for ever,
the admirable preacher was looking down from
the sacred pulpit upon an audience whose very
inmost spirits had yielded to his control.
The sainted minister in the church! The woman
of the scarlet letter in the marketplace!
What imagination would have been irreverent
enough to surmise that the same scorching
stigma was on them both!
XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER
The eloquent voice, on which the souls of
the listening audience had been borne aloft
as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length
came to a pause. There was a momentary silence,
profound as what should follow the utterance
of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed
tumult, as if the auditors, released from
the high spell that had transported them into
the region of another's mind, were returning
into themselves, with all their awe and wonder
still heavy on them. In a moment more the
crowd began to gush forth from the doors of
the church. Now that there was an end, they
needed more breath, more fit to support the
gross and earthly life into which they relapsed,
than that atmosphere which the preacher had
converted into words of flame, and had burdened
with the rich fragrance of his thought.
In the open air their rapture broke into speech.
The street and the market-place absolutely
babbled, from side to side, with applauses
of the minister. His hearers could not rest
until they had told one another of what each
knew better than he could tell or hear.
According to their united testimony, never
had man spoken in so wise, so high, and so
holy a spirit, as he that spake this day;
nor had inspiration ever breathed through
mortal lips more evidently than it did through
his. Its influence could be seen, as it were,
descending upon him, and possessing him, and
continually lifting him out of the written
discourse that lay before him, and filling
him with ideas that must have been as marvellous
to himself as to his audience. His subject,
it appeared, had been the relation between
the Deity and the communities of mankind,
with a special reference to the New England
which they were here planting in the wilderness.
And, as he drew towards the close, a spirit
as of prophecy had come upon him, constraining
him to its purpose as mightily as the old
prophets of Israel were constrained, only
with this difference, that, whereas the Jewish
seers had denounced judgments and ruin on
their country, it was his mission to foretell
a high and glorious destiny for the newly
gathered people of the Lord. But, throughout
it all, and through the whole discourse, there
had been a certain deep, sad undertone of
pathos, which could not be interpreted otherwise
than as the natural regret of one soon to
pass away. Yes; their minister whom they so
loved—and who so loved them all, that he
could not depart heavenward without a sigh—had
the foreboding of untimely death upon him,
and would soon leave them in their tears.
This idea of his transitory stay on earth
gave the last emphasis to the effect which
the preacher had produced; it was as if an
angel, in his passage to the skies, had shaken
his bright wings over the people for an instant—at
once a shadow and a splendour—and had shed
down a shower of golden truths upon them.
Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—as
to most men, in their various spheres, though
seldom recognised until they see it far behind
them—an epoch of life more brilliant and
full of triumph than any previous one, or
than any which could hereafter be. He stood,
at this moment, on the very proudest eminence
of superiority, to which the gifts or intellect,
rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation
of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman
in New England's earliest days, when the professional
character was of itself a lofty pedestal.
Such was the position which the minister occupied,
as he bowed his head forward on the cushions
of the pulpit at the close of his Election
Sermon. Meanwhile Hester Prynne was standing
beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the
scarlet letter still burning on her breast!
Now was heard again the clamour of the music,
and the measured tramp of the military escort
issuing from the church door. The procession
was to be marshalled thence to the town hall,
where a solemn banquet would complete the
ceremonies of the day.
Once more, therefore, the train of venerable
and majestic fathers were seen moving through
a broad pathway of the people, who drew back
reverently, on either side, as the Governor
and magistrates, the old and wise men, the
holy ministers, and all that were eminent
and renowned, advanced into the midst of them.
When they were fairly in the marketplace,
their presence was greeted by a shout. This—though
doubtless it might acquire additional force
and volume from the child-like loyalty which
the age awarded to its rulers—was felt to
be an irrepressible outburst of enthusiasm
kindled in the auditors by that high strain
of eloquence which was yet reverberating in
their ears. Each felt the impulse in himself,
and in the same breath, caught it from his
neighbour. Within the church, it had hardly
been kept down; beneath the sky it pealed
upward to the zenith. There were human beings
enough, and enough of highly wrought and symphonious
feeling to produce that more impressive sound
than the organ tones of the blast, or the
thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that
mighty swell of many voices, blended into
one great voice by the universal impulse which
makes likewise one vast heart out of the many.
Never, from the soil of New England had gone
up such a shout! Never, on New England soil
had stood the man so honoured by his mortal
brethren as the preacher!
How fared it with him, then? Were there not
the brilliant particles of a halo in the air
about his head? So etherealised by spirit
as he was, and so apotheosised by worshipping
admirers, did his footsteps, in the procession,
really tread upon the dust of earth?
As the ranks of military men and civil fathers
moved onward, all eyes were turned towards
the point where the minister was seen to approach
among them. The shout died into a murmur,
as one portion of the crowd after another
obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and
pale he looked, amid all his triumph! The
energy—or say, rather, the inspiration which
had held him up, until he should have delivered
the sacred message that had brought its own
strength along with it from heaven—was withdrawn,
now that it had so faithfully performed its
office. The glow, which they had just before
beheld burning on his cheek, was extinguished,
like a flame that sinks down hopelessly among
the late decaying embers. It seemed hardly
the face of a man alive, with such a death-like
hue: it was hardly a man with life in him,
that tottered on his path so nervously, yet
tottered, and did not fall!
One of his clerical brethren—it was the
venerable John Wilson—observing the state
in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the retiring
wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped
forward hastily to offer his support. The
minister tremulously, but decidedly, repelled
the old man's arm. He still walked onward,
if that movement could be so described, which
rather resembled the wavering effort of an
infant, with its mother's arms in view, outstretched
to tempt him forward. And now, almost imperceptible
as were the latter steps of his progress,
he had come opposite the well-remembered and
weather-darkened scaffold, where, long since,
with all that dreary lapse of time between,
Hester Prynne had encountered the world's
ignominious stare. There stood Hester, holding
little Pearl by the hand! And there was the
scarlet letter on her breast! The minister
here made a pause; although the music still
played the stately and rejoicing march to
which the procession moved. It summoned him
onward—inward to the festival!—but here
he made a pause.
Bellingham, for the last few moments, had
kept an anxious eye upon him. He now left
his own place in the procession, and advanced
to give assistance judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale's
aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall.
But there was something in the latter's expression
that warned back the magistrate, although
a man not readily obeying the vague intimations
that pass from one spirit to another. The
crowd, meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder.
This earthly faintness, was, in their view,
only another phase of the minister's celestial
strength; nor would it have seemed a miracle
too high to be wrought for one so holy, had
he ascended before their eyes, waxing dimmer
and brighter, and fading at last into the
light of heaven!
He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched
forth his arms.
"Hester," said he, "come hither! Come, my
little Pearl!"
It was a ghastly look with which he regarded
them; but there was something at once tender
and strangely triumphant in it. The child,
with the bird-like motion, which was one of
her characteristics, flew to him, and clasped
her arms about his knees. Hester Prynne—slowly,
as if impelled by inevitable fate, and against
her strongest will—likewise drew near, but
paused before she reached him. At this instant
old Roger Chillingworth thrust himself through
the crowd—or, perhaps, so dark, disturbed,
and evil was his look, he rose up out of some
nether region—to snatch back his victim
from what he sought to do! Be that as it might,
the old man rushed forward, and caught the
minister by the arm.
"Madman, hold! what is your purpose?" whispered
he. "Wave back that woman! Cast off this child!
All shall be well! Do not blacken your fame,
and perish in dishonour! I can yet save you!
Would you bring infamy on your sacred profession?"
"Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late!"
answered the minister, encountering his eye,
fearfully, but firmly. "Thy power is not what
it was! With God's help, I shall escape thee
now!"
He again extended his hand to the woman of
the scarlet letter.
"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing
earnestness, "in the name of Him, so terrible
and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this
last moment, to do what—for my own heavy
sin and miserable agony—I withheld myself
from doing seven years ago, come hither now,
and twine thy strength about me! Thy strength,
Hester; but let it be guided by the will which
God hath granted me! This wretched and wronged
old man is opposing it with all his might!—with
all his own might, and the fiend's! Come,
Hester—come! Support me up yonder scaffold."
The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank
and dignity, who stood more immediately around
the clergyman, were so taken by surprise,
and so perplexed as to the purport of what
they saw—unable to receive the explanation
which most readily presented itself, or to
imagine any other—that they remained silent
and inactive spectators of the judgement which
Providence seemed about to work. They beheld
the minister, leaning on Hester's shoulder,
and supported by her arm around him, approach
the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while
still the little hand of the sin-born child
was clasped in his. Old Roger Chillingworth
followed, as one intimately connected with
the drama of guilt and sorrow in which they
had all been actors, and well entitled, therefore
to be present at its closing scene.
"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,"
said he looking darkly at the clergyman, "there
was no one place so secret—no high place
nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped
me—save on this very scaffold!"
"Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!"
answered the minister.
Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester, with
an expression of doubt and anxiety in his
eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that
there was a feeble smile upon his lips.
"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what
we dreamed of in the forest?"
"I know not! I know not!" she hurriedly replied.
"Better? Yea; so we may both die, and little
Pearl die with us!"
"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order,"
said the minister; "and God is merciful! Let
me now do the will which He hath made plain
before my sight. For, Hester, I am a dying
man. So let me make haste to take my shame
upon me!"
Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding
one hand of little Pearl's, the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and venerable
rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his
brethren; to the people, whose great heart
was thoroughly appalled yet overflowing with
tearful sympathy, as knowing that some deep
life-matter—which, if full of sin, was full
of anguish and repentance likewise—was now
to be laid open to them. The sun, but little
past its meridian, shone down upon the clergyman,
and gave a distinctness to his figure, as
he stood out from all the earth, to put in
his plea of guilty at the bar of Eternal Justice.
"People of New England!" cried he, with a
voice that rose over them, high, solemn, and
majestic—yet had always a tremor through
it, and sometimes a shriek, struggling up
out of a fathomless depth of remorse and woe—"ye,
that have loved me!—ye, that have deemed
me holy!—behold me here, the one sinner
of the world! At last—at last!—I stand
upon the spot where, seven years since, I
should have stood, here, with this woman,
whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith
I have crept hitherward, sustains me at this
dreadful moment, from grovelling down upon
my face! Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester
wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever
her walk hath been—wherever, so miserably
burdened, she may have hoped to find repose—it
hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible
repugnance round about her. But there stood
one in the midst of you, at whose brand of
sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!"
It seemed, at this point, as if the minister
must leave the remainder of his secret undisclosed.
But he fought back the bodily weakness—and,
still more, the faintness of heart—that
was striving for the mastery with him. He
threw off all assistance, and stepped passionately
forward a pace before the woman and the children.
"It was on him!" he continued, with a kind
of fierceness; so determined was he to speak
out the whole. "God's eye beheld it! The angels
were for ever pointing at it! (The Devil knew
it well, and fretted it continually with the
touch of his burning finger!) But he hid it
cunningly from men, and walked among you with
the mien of a spirit, mournful, because so
pure in a sinful world!—and sad, because
he missed his heavenly kindred! Now, at the
death-hour, he stands up before you! He bids
you look again at Hester's scarlet letter!
He tells you, that, with all its mysterious
horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears
on his own breast, and that even this, his
own red stigma, is no more than the type of
what has seared his inmost heart! Stand any
here that question God's judgment on a sinner!
Behold! Behold, a dreadful witness of it!"
With a convulsive motion, he tore away the
ministerial band from before his breast. It
was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe
that revelation. For an instant, the gaze
of the horror-stricken multitude was concentrated
on the ghastly miracle; while the minister
stood, with a flush of triumph in his face,
as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain,
had won a victory. Then, down he sank upon
the scaffold! Hester partly raised him, and
supported his head against her bosom. Old
Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him,
with a blank, dull countenance, out of which
the life seemed to have departed.
"Thou hast escaped me!" he repeated more than
once. "Thou hast escaped me!"
"May God forgive thee!" said the minister.
"Thou, too, hast deeply sinned!"
He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man,
and fixed them on the woman and the child.
"My little Pearl," said he, feebly and there
was a sweet and gentle smile over his face,
as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay,
now that the burden was removed, it seemed
almost as if he would be sportive with the
child—"dear little Pearl, wilt thou kiss
me now? Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest!
But now thou wilt?"
Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken.
The great scene of grief, in which the wild
infant bore a part had developed all her sympathies;
and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek,
they were the pledge that she would grow up
amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do
battle with the world, but be a woman in it.
Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as
a messenger of anguish was fulfilled.
"Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell!"
"Shall we not meet again?" whispered she,
bending her face down
close to his. "Shall we not spend our immortal
life together?
Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another,
with all this woe!
Thou lookest far into eternity, with those
bright dying eyes!
Then tell me what thou seest!"
"Hush, Hester—hush!" said he, with tremulous
solemnity. "The law we broke!—the sin here
awfully revealed!—let these alone be in
thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that,
when we forgot our God—when we violated
our reverence each for the other's soul—it
was thenceforth vain to hope that we could
meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure
reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He
hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my
afflictions. By giving me this burning torture
to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder
dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture
always at red-heat! By bringing me hither,
to die this death of triumphant ignominy before
the people! Had either of these agonies been
wanting, I had been lost for ever! Praised
be His name! His will be done! Farewell!"
That final word came forth with the minister's
expiring breath. The multitude, silent till
then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of
awe and wonder, which could not as yet find
utterance, save in this murmur that rolled
so heavily after the departed spirit.
XXIV. CONCLUSION
After many days, when time sufficed for the
people to arrange their thoughts in reference
to the foregoing scene, there was more than
one account of what had been witnessed on
the scaffold.
Most of the spectators testified to having
seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister,
a SCARLET LETTER—the very semblance of that
worn by Hester Prynne—imprinted in the flesh.
As regarded its origin there were various
explanations, all of which must necessarily
have been conjectural. Some affirmed that
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day
when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious
badge, had begun a course of penance—which
he afterwards, in so many futile methods,
followed out—by inflicting a hideous torture
on himself. Others contended that the stigma
had not been produced until a long time subsequent,
when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent
necromancer, had caused it to appear, through
the agency of magic and poisonous drugs. Others,
again and those best able to appreciate the
minister's peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful
operation of his spirit upon the body—whispered
their belief, that the awful symbol was the
effect of the ever-active tooth of remorse,
gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and
at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment
by the visible presence of the letter. The
reader may choose among these theories. We
have thrown all the light we could acquire
upon the portent, and would gladly, now that
it has done its office, erase its deep print
out of our own brain, where long meditation
has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.
It is singular, nevertheless, that certain
persons, who were spectators of the whole
scene, and professed never once to have removed
their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale,
denied that there was any mark whatever on
his breast, more than on a new-born infant's.
Neither, by their report, had his dying words
acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any—the
slightest—connexion on his part, with the
guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long
worn the scarlet letter. According to these
highly-respectable witnesses, the minister,
conscious that he was dying—conscious, also,
that the reverence of the multitude placed
him already among saints and angels—had
desired, by yielding up his breath in the
arms of that fallen woman, to express to the
world how utterly nugatory is the choicest
of man's own righteousness. After exhausting
life in his efforts for mankind's spiritual
good, he had made the manner of his death
a parable, in order to impress on his admirers
the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the
view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all
alike. It was to teach them, that the holiest
amongst us has but attained so far above his
fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy
which looks down, and repudiate more utterly
the phantom of human merit, which would look
aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth
so momentous, we must be allowed to consider
this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's story as
only an instance of that stubborn fidelity
with which a man's friends—and especially
a clergyman's—will sometimes uphold his
character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day
sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish
him a false and sin-stained creature of the
dust.
The authority which we have chiefly followed—a
manuscript of old date, drawn up from the
verbal testimony of individuals, some of whom
had known Hester Prynne, while others had
heard the tale from contemporary witnesses
fully confirms the view taken in the foregoing
pages. Among many morals which press upon
us from the poor minister's miserable experience,
we put only this into a sentence:—"Be true!
Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world,
if not your worst, yet some trait whereby
the worst may be inferred!"
Nothing was more remarkable than the change
which took place, almost immediately after
Mr. Dimmesdale's death, in the appearance
and demeanour of the old man known as Roger
Chillingworth. All his strength and energy—all
his vital and intellectual force—seemed
at once to desert him, insomuch that he positively
withered up, shrivelled away and almost vanished
from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that
lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man
had made the very principle of his life to
consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise
of revenge; and when, by its completest triumph
consummation that evil principle was left
with no further material to support it—when,
in short, there was no more Devil's work on
earth for him to do, it only remained for
the unhumanised mortal to betake himself whither
his master would find him tasks enough, and
pay him his wages duly. But, to all these
shadowy beings, so long our near acquaintances—as
well Roger Chillingworth as his companions
we would fain be merciful. It is a curious
subject of observation and inquiry, whether
hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.
Each, in its utmost development, supposes
a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge;
each renders one individual dependent for
the food of his affections and spiritual fife
upon another: each leaves the passionate lover,
or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and
desolate by the withdrawal of his subject.
Philosophically considered, therefore, the
two passions seem essentially the same, except
that one happens to be seen in a celestial
radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid
glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician
and the minister—mutual victims as they
have been—may, unawares, have found their
earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted
into golden love.
Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter
of business to communicate to the reader.
At old Roger Chillingworth's decease, (which
took place within the year), and by his last
will and testament, of which Governor Bellingham
and the Reverend Mr. Wilson were executors,
he bequeathed a very considerable amount of
property, both here and in England to little
Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne.
So Pearl—the elf child—the demon offspring,
as some people up to that epoch persisted
in considering her—became the richest heiress
of her day in the New World. Not improbably
this circumstance wrought a very material
change in the public estimation; and had the
mother and child remained here, little Pearl
at a marriageable period of life might have
mingled her wild blood with the lineage of
the devoutest Puritan among them all. But,
in no long time after the physician's death,
the wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared,
and Pearl along with her. For many years,
though a vague report would now and then find
its way across the sea—like a shapeless
piece of driftwood tossed ashore with the
initials of a name upon it—yet no tidings
of them unquestionably authentic were received.
The story of the scarlet letter grew into
a legend. Its spell, however, was still potent,
and kept the scaffold awful where the poor
minister had died, and likewise the cottage
by the sea-shore where Hester Prynne had dwelt.
Near this latter spot, one afternoon some
children were at play, when they beheld a
tall woman in a gray robe approach the cottage-door.
In all those years it had never once been
opened; but either she unlocked it or the
decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand,
or she glided shadow-like through these impediments—and,
at all events, went in.
On the threshold she paused—turned partly
round—for perchance the idea of entering
alone and all so changed, the home of so intense
a former life, was more dreary and desolate
than even she could bear. But her hesitation
was only for an instant, though long enough
to display a scarlet letter on her breast.
And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken
up her long-forsaken shame! But where was
little Pearl? If still alive she must now
have been in the flush and bloom of early
womanhood. None knew—nor ever learned with
the fulness of perfect certainty—whether
the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a
maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature
had been softened and subdued and made capable
of a woman's gentle happiness. But through
the remainder of Hester's life there were
indications that the recluse of the scarlet
letter was the object of love and interest
with some inhabitant of another land. Letters
came, with armorial seals upon them, though
of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In
the cottage there were articles of comfort
and luxury such as Hester never cared to use,
but which only wealth could have purchased
and affection have imagined for her. There
were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful
tokens of a continual remembrance, that must
have been wrought by delicate fingers at the
impulse of a fond heart. And once Hester was
seen embroidering a baby-garment with such
a lavish richness of golden fancy as would
have raised a public tumult had any infant
thus apparelled, been shown to our sober-hued
community.
In fine, the gossips of that day believed—and
Mr. Surveyor Pue, who made investigations
a century later, believed—and one of his
recent successors in office, moreover, faithfully
believes—that Pearl was not only alive,
but married, and happy, and mindful of her
mother; and that she would most joyfully have
entertained that sad and lonely mother at
her fireside.
But there was a more real life for Hester
Prynne, here, in New England, than in that
unknown region where Pearl had found a home.
Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and
here was yet to be her penitence. She had
returned, therefore, and resumed—of her
own free will, for not the sternest magistrate
of that iron period would have imposed it—resumed
the symbol of which we have related so dark
a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom.
But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful,
and self-devoted years that made up Hester's
life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma
which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness,
and became a type of something to be sorrowed
over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence
too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish
ends, nor lived in any measure for her own
profit and enjoyment, people brought all their
sorrows and perplexities, and besought her
counsel, as one who had herself gone through
a mighty trouble. Women, more especially—in
the continually recurring trials of wounded,
wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and
sinful passion—or with the dreary burden
of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and
unsought came to Hester's cottage, demanding
why they were so wretched, and what the remedy!
Hester comforted and counselled them, as best
she might. She assured them, too, of her firm
belief that, at some brighter period, when
the world should have grown ripe for it, in
Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed,
in order to establish the whole relation between
man and woman on a surer ground of mutual
happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly
imagined that she herself might be the destined
prophetess, but had long since recognised
the impossibility that any mission of divine
and mysterious truth should be confided to
a woman stained with sin, bowed down with
shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow.
The angel and apostle of the coming revelation
must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure,
and beautiful, and wise; moreover, not through
dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy;
and showing how sacred love should make us
happy, by the truest test of a life successful
to such an end.
So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad
eyes downward at the scarlet letter. And,
after many, many years, a new grave was delved,
near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground
beside which King's Chapel has since been
built. It was near that old and sunken grave,
yet with a space between, as if the dust of
the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet
one tomb-stone served for both. All around,
there were monuments carved with armorial
bearings; and on this simple slab of slate—as
the curious investigator may still discern,
and perplex himself with the purport—there
appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon.
It bore a device, a herald's wording of which
may serve for a motto and brief description
of our now concluded legend; so sombre is
it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing
point of light gloomier than the shadow:—
"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"
