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                            THE SCARLET LETTER

THIS ELECTRONIC EDITION WAS
PREPARED AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
FROM THE EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY EDITION, 1906
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
LONDON & TORONTO:  J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
NEW YORK, E. P. DUTTON & CO.


EDITOR'S NOTE

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was already a man of forty-six, and a tale
writer of some twenty-four years' standing, when "The Scarlet
Letter" appeared. He was born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804,
son of a sea-captain. He led there a shy and rather sombre life;
of few artistic encouragements, yet not wholly uncongenial, his
moody, intensely meditative temperament being considered. Its
colours and shadows are marvelously reflected in his "Twice-Told
Tales" and other short stories, the product of his first literary
period. Even his college days at Bowdoin did not quite break
through his acquired and inherited reserve; but beneath it all,
his faculty of divining men and women was exercised with almost
uncanny prescience and subtlety. "The Scarlet Letter," which
explains as much of this unique imaginative art, as is to be
gathered from reading his highest single achievement, yet needs
to be ranged with his other writings, early and late, to have its
last effect. In the year that saw it published, he began "The
House of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of
the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it -
defrauded of art and the joy of life, "starving for symbols" as
Emerson has it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New
Hampshire, on May 18th, 1864.

The following is the table of his romances,
stories, and other works:

Fanshawe, published anonymously, 1826; Twice-Told Tales, 1st
Series, 1837; 2nd Series, 1842; Grandfather's Chair, a history
for youth, 1845: Famous Old People (Grandfather's Chair), 1841
Liberty Tree: with the last words of Grandfather's Chair, 1842;
Biographical Stories for Children, 1842; Mosses from an Old
Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House of the Seven
Gables, 1851: True Stories from History and Biography (the whole
History of Grandfather's Chair), 1851 A Wonder Book for Girls and
Boys, 1851; The Snow Image and other Tales, 1851: The Blithedale
Romance, 1852; Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852; Tanglewood Tales
(2nd Series of the Wonder Book), 1853; A Rill from the Town-Pump,
with remarks, by Telba, 1857; The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of
Monte Beni (4 EDITOR'S NOTE) (published in England under the
title of "Transformation"), 1860, Our Old Home, 1863; Dolliver
Romance (1st Part in "Atlantic Monthly"), 1864; in 3 Parts, 1876;
Pansie, a fragment, Hawthorne' last literary effort, 1864;
American Note-Books, 1868; English Note Books, edited by Sophia
Hawthorne, 1870; French and Italian Note Books, 1871; Septimius
Felton; or, the Elixir of Life (from the "Atlantic Monthly"),
1872; Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, with Preface and Notes by
Julian Hawthorne, 1882.

Tales of the White Hills, Legends of New England, Legends of the
Province House, 1877, contain tales which had already been
printed in book form in "Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses"
"Sketched and Studies," 1883.

Hawthorne's contributions to magazines were numerous, and most of
his tales appeared first in periodicals, chiefly in "The Token,"
1831-1838, "New England Magazine," 1834,1835; "Knickerbocker,"
1837-1839; "Democratic Review," 1838-1846; "Atlantic Monthly,"
1860-1872 (scenes from the Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton,
and passages from Hawthorne's Note-Books).

Works: in 24 volumes, 1879; in 12 volumes, with introductory
notes by Lathrop, Riverside Edition, 1883.

Biography, etc. ; A. H. Japp (pseud. H. A. Page), Memoir of N.
Hawthorne, 1872; J. T. Field's "Yesterdays with Authors," 1873 G.
P. Lathrop, "A Study of Hawthorne," 1876; Henry James English Men
of Letters, 1879; Julian Hawthorne, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his
wife," 1885; Moncure D. Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
1891; Analytical Index of Hawthorne's Works, by E. M. O'Connor
1882.

CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTORY    page
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    *   *   *   *   *   7


    CHAPTER l.
THE PRISON-DOOR     *   *   *   *   *   59


    CHAPTER II.
THE MARKET-PLACE    *   *   *   *   *   62


    CHAPTER III.
THE RECOGNITION *   *   *   *   *   *   75


    CHAPTER IV.
THE INTERVIEW   *   *   *   *   *   *   87


    CHAPTER V.
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE *  *   *   *   *   96


    CHAPTER VI.
PEARL   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  109

    CHAPTER VII.
THE GOVERNOR'S HALL *   *   *   *   *  122


    CHAPTER VIII.
THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER  *   *  131


    CHAPTER IX
THE LEECH   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  143


    CHAPTER X
THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT   *   *   *  156


    CHAPTER XI.
THE INTERIOR OF A HEART *   *   *   *  168


    CHAPTER XII.
THE MINISTER'S VIGIL    *   *   *   *  177


    CHAPTER XIII.
ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER  *   *   *   *  191


    CHAPTER XIV.
HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN    *   *   *  203


    CHAPTER XV.
HESTER AND PEARL    *   *   *   *   *  250


    CHAPTER XVI.
A FOREST WALK   *   *   *   *   *   *  219


    CHAPTER XVII.
THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER  *   *  228


    CHAPTER XVIII.
A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE *   *   *   *   *  240


    CHAPTER XIX
THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE *   *   *  248


    CHAPTER XX
THE MINISTER IN A MAZE  *   *   *   *  258


    CHAPTER XXI.
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY *   *   *   *  273


    CHAPTER XXII.
THE PROCESSION *    *   *   *   *   *  285


    CHAPTER XXIII.
THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER * 299


    CHAPTER XXIV.
CONCLUSION  *   *   *   *   *   *   *  315




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



8   THE SCARLET LETTER



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.



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    9



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 thunder- bolts 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 com-



10  THE SCARLET LETTER



munity; 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-



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    11



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 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, ill



12  THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    13



tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal
communication with other parts of be edifice.  And here, some six
months ago -- pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the
long-legged tool, 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 be 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



14  THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    15



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



16  THE SCARLET LETTER



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


THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    17



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 least 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



18  THE SCARLET LETTER



within my control, shall strike their roots into accustomed
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 con-



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    19



servative; 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 off 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



20  THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    11



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



22  THE SCARLET LETTER



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.



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    23



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



24  THE SCARLET LETTER



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 sensi-



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    25



bilities: 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



26  THE SCARLET LETTER



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 repudiate an endless series of
enjoyment.  at once shadowy and sensual, A tender loin of beef, a
hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken,
or a remarkably



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    27



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 tile 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.



28  THE SCARLET LETTER



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.



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    29



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 trumpets real, loud
enough to awaken all of his energies that



30  THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    31



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



32  THE SCARLET LETTER



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;



33  THE CUSTOM-HOUSE



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



34  THE SCARLET LETTER



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.



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    35



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



36  THE SCARLET LETTER



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 l
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 or caring that my name should



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    37



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



38  THE SCARLET LETTER



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 CUSTOM-HOUSE    39



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
towns 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



40  THE SCARLET LETTER



it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor
Shirley, in favour of one Jonathan Pine, 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. Pine'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 CUSTOM-HOUSE    41



The ancient Surveyor -- being little molested, 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.



42  THE SCARLET 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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    43



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 Pine, 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 Pine.  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



44  THE SCARLET LETTER



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 bet 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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    45



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



46  THE SCARLET LETTER



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.



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    47



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



48  THE SCARLET LETTER



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 tip.  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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    49



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
marvel loins 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



50  THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    51



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



52  THE SCARLET LETTER



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 CUSTOM-HOUSE    53



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 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



54  THE SCARLET LETTER



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, l 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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    55



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



56  THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE CUSTOM-HOUSE    57



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, l 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,



58          THE SCARLET LETTER



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 I
-- 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



60          THE SCARLET LETTER



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-hush, 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 far
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



THE PRISON-DOOR                 61



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 rioted 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,



THE MARKET-PLACE                63



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 he 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



64          THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE MARKET-PLACE                65



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 gristly presence of the town-beadle, with
a sword by his side, and his



66  THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE MARKET-PLACE               67



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



68          THE SCARLET LETTER



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!"



THE MARKET-PLACE               69



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
citizen-



70 THE SCARLET LETTER



ship, 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,



THE MARKET-PLACE               7I



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



72 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 louring
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



THE MARKET-PLACE               73



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 tile 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 mis-shapen scholar: a
new life, but feeding itself on



74   THE SCARLET LETTER



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



76          THE SCARLET LETTER



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?"



THE RECOGNITION              77



"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
-- "



78          THE SCARLET LETTER



"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.



THE RECOGNITION                 79



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



80 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 he less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring
woman's heart, and



THE RECOGNITION                 81



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



82          THE SCARLET LETTER



your sin.  Knowing your natural temper better than l, 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



THE RECOGNITION                 83



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 tile 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, ill whose charge hers is.  Exhort
her to confess the truth!"

The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, 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



84 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE RECOGNITION                 85



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 arid 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



86 THE SCARLET LETTER



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


88 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE INTERVIEW                 89



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,



90                              THE SCARLET LETTER



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-



THE INTERVIEW                  91



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



92                             THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE INTERVIEW                 93



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



94                           THE SCARLET LETTER



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, l 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



THE INTERVIEW                 95



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 stem
featured 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



HESTER AT HER NEEDLE              97



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



98 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



HESTER AT HER NEEDLE               99



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



100 THE SCARLET LETTER



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.



HESTER AT HER NEEDLE              101



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
equited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy
with her needle.  Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by
putting



102                             THE SCARLET LETTER



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



HESTER AT HER NEEDLE             103



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 matter, 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 moral 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



104     THE SCARLET LETTER



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,



HESTER AT HER NEEDLE             105



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



106 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



HESTER AT HER NEEDLE             107



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



108 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



110 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



PEARL   111



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



112 THE SCARLET LETTER



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.



PEARL   113



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



114 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



PEARL   115



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;



116 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 preter-



PEARL   117



natural 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.



118 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 food
of doing; and



PEARL   119



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.



120 THE SCARLET LETTER



"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



PEARL   121



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, using 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



THE GOVERNOR'S HALL 123



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 he let down
again, and frisked onward before Hester



124 THE SCARLET LETTER



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.



THE GOVERNOR'S HALL 125



As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their player 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



126 THE SCARLET LETTER



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,



THE GOVERNOR'S HALL 137



"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 cushion 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



128 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE GOVERNOR'S HALL                 129



worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and draining 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 exigenties 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



130 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 motion 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



132 THE SCARLET LETTER



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.  "MI profess I
have never seen the like since my days of vanity, in old King
James's time, when I was



THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER   133



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. "



134 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER 135



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



136 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 in-



THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER 137



defeasible 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



138 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 hereby 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;



THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER 139



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.  "l 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.



140 THE SCARLET LETTER



"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;



THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER 141



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. "



141 THE SCARLET LETTER



"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 arid 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



144 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE LEECH   145



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



146 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE LEECH   147



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,



148 THE SCARLET LETTER



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. "



THE LEECH   149



"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,



150 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE LEECH   151



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.



152 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 the graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson's home-



THE LEECH   153



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



154 THE SCARLET LEVER



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



THE LEECH   155



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



THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT   157



face.  The soil where this dark miner was working bad 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.



158 THE SCARLET LETTER



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 he 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.



THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT   159



"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,



160 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT 161



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



162 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT   163



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. "



164 THE SCARLET LETTER



"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



THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT   165



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



166 THE SCARLET LETTER



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



THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT   167



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 honor!  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!