Chapter 12
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."
