Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/BOOKS/Novels/N.Hawthorne/TheScarletLetter.11-24

Text File | 1994-06-03 | 229.7 KB | 5,419 lines

XI



THE INTERIOR OF A HEART





After the incident last described, the intercourse between the
clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was
really of another character than it had previously been.  The
intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain
path before it.  It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had
laid out for himself to tread.  Calm, gentle, passionless, as he
appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice,
hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man,
which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal
had ever wreaked upon an enemy.  To make himself the one trusted
friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the
agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of sinful
thoughts, expelled in vain!  All that guilty sorrow, hidden from
the world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to
be revealed to him, the Pitiless -- to him, the Unforgiving!  All
that dark treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom
nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of vengeance!

The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme
Roger Chillingworth, however,



THE INTERIOR OF A HEART 169



was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less satisfied with the
aspect of affairs, which Providence -- using the avenger and his
victim for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it
seemed most to punish -- had substituted for his black devices A
revelation, he could almost say, had been granted to him.  It
mattered little for his object, whether celestial or from what
other region.  By its aid, in all the subsequent relations
betwixt him and Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external
presence, but the very inmost soul of the latter, seemed to be
brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and comprehend
its every movement.  He became, thenceforth, not a spectator
only, but a chief actor in the poor minister's interior world.
He could play upon him as he chose.  Would he arouse him with a
throb of agony?  The victim was for ever on the rack; it needed
only to know the spring that controlled the engine: and the
physician knew it well.  Would he startle him with sudden fear?
As at the waving of a magician's wand, up rose a grisly phantom
-- up rose a thousand phantoms -- in many shapes, of death, or
more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and
pointing with their fingers at his breast!

All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil
influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its
actual nature.  True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully -- even, at
times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred -- at the
deformed figure of the old physician.  His gestures, his gait,
his grizzled beard, his slightest and



170 THE SCARLET LETTER



most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments, were
odious in the clergyman's sight; a token implicitly to be relied
on of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was
willing to acknowledge to himself.  For, as it was impossible to
assign a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr.
Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was
infecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his
presentiments to no other cause.  He took himself to task for his
bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth, disregarded
the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his best
to root them out.  Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as
a matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity
with the old man, and thus gave him constant opportunities for
perfecting the purpose to which -- poor forlorn creature that he
was, and more wretched than his victim -- the avenger had devoted
himself.

While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and
tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the
machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office.  He won
it indeed, in great part, by his sorrows.  His intellectual
gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and
communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural
activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life.  His fame,
though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed the
soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several
of them were.  There are scholars among them, who had spent more



THE INTERIOR OF A HEART     171



years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine
profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well,
therefore, be more profoundly versed in such solid and valuable
attainments than their youthful brother.  There were men, too, of
a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a far
greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or granite understanding;
which, duly mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal
ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable, efficacious, and
unamiable variety of the clerical species.  There were others
again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated
by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought, and
etherealised, moreover, by spiritual communications with the
better world, into which their purity of life had almost
introduced these holy personages, with their garments of
mortality still clinging to them.  All that they lacked was, the
gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in
tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not the power of
speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing
the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.
These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last and
rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame.  They
would have vainly sought -- had they ever dreamed of seeking --
to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of
familiar words and images.  Their voices came down, afar and
indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt.


Not improbably, it was to this latter class of ms that Mr.
Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of



172 THE SCARLET LETTER



character, naturally belonged.  To the high mountain peaks of
faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the tendency
been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or
anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter.  It kept him
down on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal
attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to
and answered!  But this very burden it was that gave him
sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so
that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their
pain into itself and sent its own throb of pain through a
thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence.
Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible!  The people knew not
the power that moved them thus.  They deemed the young clergyman
a miracle of holiness.  They fancied him the mouth-piece of
Heaven's messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love.  In their
eyes, the very ground on which he trod was sanctified.  The
virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion
so imbued with religious sentiment, that they imagined it to be
all religion, and brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as
their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar.  The aged
members of his flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale's frame so
feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in their infirmity,
believed that he would go heavenward before them, and enjoined it
upon their children that their old bones should be buried close
to their young pastor's holy grave.  And all this time,
perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave,
he questioned with himself whether the grass



THE INTERIOR OF A HEART     173



would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must there be
buried!

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him.  It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and
to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or
value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their
life.  Then what was he?  -- a substance?  -- or the dimmest of
all shadows?  He longed to speak out from his own pulpit at the
full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was.  "I,
whom you behold in these black garments of the priesthood -- I,
who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward,
taking upon myself to hold communion in your behalf with the Most
High Omniscience -- I, in whose daily life you discern the
sanctity of Enoch -- I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a
gleam along my earthly track, whereby the Pilgrims that shall
come after me may be guided to the regions of the blest -- I, who
have laid the hand of baptism upon your children -- I, who have
breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the
Amen sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted -- I,
your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a
pollution and a lie!"

More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a
purpose never to come down its steps until he should have spoken
words like the above.  More than once he had cleared his throat,
and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when
sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of
his soul.  More than once -- nay, more than a hundred times -- he
had actually



174 THE SCARLET LETTER



spoken!  Spoken!  But how?  He had told his hearers that he was
altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of
sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity, and
that the only wonder was that they did not see his wretched body
shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning wrath of the
Almighty!  Could there be plainer speech than this?  Would not
the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse,
and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled?  Not so,
indeed!  They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more.
They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those
self-condemning words.  "The godly youth!" said they among
themselves.  "The saint on earth!  Alas!  if he discern such
sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he
behold in thine or mine!" The minister well knew -- subtle, but
remorseful hypocrite that he was!  -- the light in which his
vague confession would be viewed.  He had striven to put a cheat
upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had
gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without
the momentary relief of being self-deceived.  He had spoken the
very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood.  And
yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and
loathed the lie, as few men ever did.  Therefore, above all
things else, he loathed his miserable self!

His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with
the old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light of
the church in which he had been born and bred.  In Mr.
Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key, there was a
bloody



THE INTERIOR OF A HEART     175



scourge.  Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had
plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself the
while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of that
bitter laugh.  It was his custom, too, as it has been that of
many other pious Puritans, to fast -- not however, like them, in
order to purify the body, and render it the fitter medium of
celestial illumination -- but rigorously, and until his knees
trembled beneath him, as an act of penance.  He kept vigils,
likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness,
sometimes with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own
face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he
could throw upon it.  He thus typified the constant introspection
wherewith he tortured, but could not purify himself.  In these
lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed to
flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light of
their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more vividly
and close beside him, within the looking-glass.  Now it was a
herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale
minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining
angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more
ethereal as they rose.  Now came the dead friends of his youth,
and his white-bearded father, with a saint-like frown, and his
mother turning her face away as she passed by Ghost of a mother
-- thinnest fantasy of a mother -- methinks she might yet have
thrown a pitying glance towards her son!  And now, through the
chamber which these spectral thoughts had made so ghastly, glided
Hester Prynne leading along little



176 THE SCARLET LETTER



Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at
the scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's own
breast.

None of these visions ever quite deluded him.  At any moment, by
an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their
misty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not
solid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that
big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity.
But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most
substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with.  It is
the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals
the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around
us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and
nutriment.  To the untrue man, the whole universe is false -- it
is impalpable -- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp.  And he
himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a
shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.  The only truth that
continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth
was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled
expression of it in his aspect.  Had he once found power to
smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would have been no such
man!

On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but
forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair.
A new thought had struck him.  There might be a moment's peace in
it.  Attiring himself with as much care as if it had been for
public worship, and precisely in the same manner, he stole softly
down the staircase, undid the door, and issued forth.





XII.



THE MINISTER'S VIGIL





Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps
actually under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr.
Dimmesdale reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester
Prynne had lived through her first hours of public ignominy.  The
same platform or scaffold, black and weather-stained with the
storm or sunshine of seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with
the tread of many culprits who had since ascended it, remained
standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house.  The minister
went up the steps.

It was an obscure night in early May.  An unwearied pall of cloud
muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon.  If the
same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester
Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned
forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform nor
hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark grey of the
midnight.  But the town was all asleep.  There was no peril of
discovery.  The minister might stand there, if it so pleased him,
until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than
that the dank and chill night air would creep into his frame, and
stiffen his joints



178 THE SCARLET LETTER



with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and cough;
thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer
and sermon.  No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one
which had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge.
Why, then, had he come hither?  Was it but the mockery of
penitence?  A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with
itself!  A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends
rejoiced with jeering laughter!  He had been driven hither by the
impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose
own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which
invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the
other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.
Poor, miserable man!  what right had infirmity like his to burden
itself with crime?  Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their
choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert
their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it
off at once!  This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do
neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which
intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of
heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of
mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his
naked breast, right over his heart.  On that spot, in very truth,
there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous
tooth of bodily pain.  Without any effort of his will, or power
to restrain himself, he shrieked



THE MINISTER'S VIGIL    I79



aloud: an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was
beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the
hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so
much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound,
and were bandying it to and fro.

"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his
hands.  "The whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me
here!"

But it was not so.  The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far
greater power, to his own startled ears, than it actually
possessed.  The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy
slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in a
dream, or for the noise of witches, whose voices, at that period,
were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely cottages,
as they rode with Satan through the air.  The clergyman,
therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered his eyes
and looked about him.  At one of the chamber-windows of Governor
Bellingham's mansion, which stood at some distance, on the line
of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate
himself with a lamp in his hand a white night-cap on his head,
and a long white gown enveloping his figure.  He looked like a
ghost evoked unseasonably from the grave.  The cry had evidently
startled him.  At another window of the same house, moreover
appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor's sister, also with a
lamp, which even thus far off revealed the expression of her sour
and discontented face.  She thrust forth her head from the
lattice, and looked anxiously upward Beyond the shadow of a
doubt, this venerable



180 THE SCARLET LETTER



witch-lady had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted
it, with its multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the
clamour of the fiends and night-hags, with whom she was well
known to make excursions in the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady
quickly extinguished her own, and vanished.  Possibly, she went
up among the clouds.  The minister saw nothing further of her
motions.  The magistrate, after a wary observation of the
darkness -- into which, nevertheless, he could see but little
further than he might into a mill-stone -- retired from the
window.

The minister grew comparatively calm.  His eyes, however, were
soon greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a long
way off was approaching up the street.  It threw a gleam of
recognition, on here a post, and there a garden fence, and here a
latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full trough of
water, and here again an arched door of oak, with an iron
knocker, and a rough log for the door-step.  The Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly
convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in
the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the
lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal his
long-hidden secret.  As the light drew nearer, be beheld, within
its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman -- or, to speak
more accurately, his professional father, as well as highly
valued friend -- the Reverend Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr. Dimmesdale
now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of



THE MINISTER'S VIGIL    181



some dying man.  And so he had.  The good old minister came
freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had
passed from earth to heaven within that very hour.  And now
surrounded, like the saint-like personage of olden times, with a
radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin --
as if the departed Governor had left him an inheritance of his
glory, or as if he had caught upon himself the distant shine of
the celestial city, while looking thitherward to see the
triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates -- now, in short, good
Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a
lighted lantern!  The glimmer of this luminary suggested the
above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled -- nay, almost
laughed at them -- and then wondered if he was gag mad.

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the
lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could
hardly restrain himself from speaking --

"A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson.  Come up hither,
I pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!"

Good Heavens!  Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken?  For one
instant he believed that these words had passed his lips.  But
they were uttered only within his imagination.  The venerable
Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward, looking carefully
at the muddy pathway before his feet, and never once turning his
head towards the guilty platform.  When the light of the
glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister discovered,
by the



182 THE SCARLET LETTER



faintness which came over him, that the last few moments had been
a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his mind had made an
involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid
playfulness.

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again
stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought.  He felt his
limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the
night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend the steps
of the scaffold.  Morning would break and find him there The
neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself.  The earliest riser,
coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a
vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and
half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from
door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost -- as
he needs must think it -- of some defunct transgressor.  A dusky
tumult would flap its wings from one house to another.  Then --
the morning light still waxing stronger -- old patriarchs would
rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly
dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear.  The whole
tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen
with a single hair of their heads awry, would start into public
view with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects.  Old
Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James'
ruff fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the
forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good
Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed,
and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early,



THE MINISTER'S VIGIL    183



out of his dreams about the glorified saints.  Hither, likewise,
would come the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church,
and the young virgins who so idolized their minister, and had
made a shrine for him in their white bosoms, which now,
by-the-bye, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have
given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs.  All people,
in a word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and
turning up their amazed and horror-stricken visages around the
scaffold.  Whom would they discern there, with the red eastern
light upon his brow?  Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale,
half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where
Hester Prynne had stood

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the
minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a
great peal of laughter.  It was immediately responded to by a
light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart
-- but lie knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as
acute -- he recognised the tones of little Pearl.

"Pearl!  Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's pause; then,
suppressing his voice -- "Hester!  Hester Prynne!  Are you
there?"

"Yes; it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in a tone of surprise;
and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the
side-walk, along which she had been passing.  "It is I, and my
little Pearl. "

"Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister.  "What sent you
hither?"

"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne "at
Governor Winthrop's death-bed,



184 THE SCARLET LETTER



and have taken his measure for a robe, and am now going homeward
to my dwelling. "

"Come up hither, Hester, thou and Little Pearl," said the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.  "Ye have both been here before, but I
was not with you.  Come up hither once again, and we will stand
all three together. "

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform,
holding little Pearl by the hand.  The minister felt for the
child's other hand, and took it.  The moment that he did so,
there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life
than his own pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying
through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were
communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system.  The
three formed an electric chain.

"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.

"What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale.

"`Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?"
inquired Pearl.

"Nay; not so, my little Pearl," answered the minister; for, with
the new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure,
that had so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon
him; and he was already trembling at the conjunction in which --
with a strange joy, nevertheless -- he now found himself -- " not
so, my child.  I shall, indeed, stand with thy mother and thee
one other day, but not to-morrow. "

Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand.  But the
minister held it fast.

A moment longer, my child!" said he.



THE MINISTER'S VIGIL     185



"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and
mother's hand, to-morrow noontide?

"Not then, Pearl," said the minister; "but another time. "

"And what other time?" persisted the child.

"At the great judgment day," whispered the minister; and,
strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of
the truth impelled him to answer the child so.  "Then, and there,
before the judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must stand
together.  But the daylight of this world shall not see our
meeting!''

Pearl laughed again.

But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far
and wide over all the muffled sky.  It was doubtless caused by
one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often
observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the
atmosphere So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly
illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth.
The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp.  It
showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of
mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to
familiar objects by an unaccustomed light The wooden houses, with
their jutting storeys and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and
thresholds with the early grass springing up about them; the
garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track,
little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green on
either side -- all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect
that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of
this world



186 THE SCARLET LETTER



they had ever borne before.  And there stood the minister, with
his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered
letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a
symbol, and the connecting link between those two.  They stood in
the noon of that strange and solemn splendour, as if it were the
light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall
unite all who belong to one another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as she
glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which
made its expression frequently so elvish.  She withdrew her hand
from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street.  But he
clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards
the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all
meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occured
with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so
many revelations from a supernatural source.  Thus, a blazing
spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the
midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare.  Pestilence was known to
have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light.  We doubt
whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New
England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of
which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some
spectacle of its nature.  Not seldom, it had been seen by
multitudes.  Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the
faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through
the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his
imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought.
It



THE MINISTER'S VIGIL 187



was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations should
be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven.
A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for Providence
to write a people's doom upon.  The belief was a favourite one
with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant
commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar
intimacy and strictness.  But what shall we say, when an
individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on
the same vast sheet of record.  In such a case, it could only be
the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man,
rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret
pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature,
until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting
page for his soul's history and fate.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and
heart that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld
there the appearance of an immense letter -- the letter A --
marked out in lines of dull red light.  Not but the meteor may
have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil
of cloud, but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave
it, or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another's
guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr.
Dimmesdale's psychological state at this moment.  All the time
that he gazed upward to the zenith, he was, nevertheless,
perfectly aware that little Pearl was hinting her finger towards
old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the
scaffold.  The minister appeared to see him, with the same glance



188 THE SCARLET LETTER



that discerned the miraculous letter.  To his feature as to all
other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression; or
it might well be that the physician was not careful then, as at
all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked
upon his victim.  Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky,
and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester
Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then might Roger
Chillingworth have passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing
there with a smile and scowl, to claim his own.  So vivid was the
expression, or so intense the minister's perception of it, that
it seemed still to remain painted on the darkness after the
meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the street and all
things else were at once annihilated.

"Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with
terror.  "I shiver at him!  Dost thou know the man?  I hate him,
Hester!"

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

"I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!" muttered the minister
again.  "Who is he?  Who is he?  Canst thou do nothing for me?  I
have a nameless horror of the man!"

"Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!"

"Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close
to her lips.  "Quickly, and as low as thou canst whisper. "

Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, like
human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be
heard amusing themselves with by the hour together.  At all
events, if it involved any secret information in regard to old
Roger



THE MINISTER'S VIGIL    189



Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite
clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind.
The elvish child then laughed aloud.

"Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister.

"Thou wast not bold!  -- thou wast not true!" answered the child.
"Thou wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand,
to-morrow noon-tide!"

"Worthy sir," answered the physician, who had now advanced to the
foot of the platform -- "pious Master Dimmesdale!  can this be
you?  Well, well, indeed!  We men of study, whose heads are in
our books, have need to be straitly looked after!  We dream in
our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.  Come, good sir, and
my dear friend, I pray you let me lead you home!"

"How knewest thou that I was here?" asked the minister,
fearfully.

"Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger Chillingworth, "I
knew nothing of the matter.  I had spent the better part of the
night at the bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing
what my poor skill might to give him ease.  He, going home to a
better world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward, when this
light shone out.  Come with me, I beseech you, Reverend sir, else
you will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty to-morrow.  Aha!  see
now how they trouble the brain -- these books!  -- these books!
You should study less, good sir, and take a little pastime, or
these night whimsies will grow upon you. "

"I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.

With a chill despondency, like one awakening, all nerveless, from
an ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led
away.



I90 THE SCARLET LETTER



The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse
which was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most
replete with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from
his lips.  Souls, it is said, more souls than one, were brought
to the truth by the efficacy of that sermon, and vowed within
themselves to cherish a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale
throughout the long hereafter.  But as he came down the pulpit
steps, the grey-bearded sexton met him, holding up a black glove,
which the minister recognised as his own.

"It was found," said the Sexton, "this morning on the scaffold
where evil-doers are set up to public shame.  Satan dropped it
there, I take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your
reverence.  But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and
always is.  A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!"

"Thank you, my good friend," said the minister, gravely, but
startled at heart; for so confused was his remembrance, that he
had almost brought himself to look at the events of the past
night as visionary.

"Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!"

"And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs
handle him without gloves henceforward," remarked the old sexton,
grimly smiling.  "But did your reverence hear of the portent that
was seen last night?  a great red letter in the sky -- the letter
A, which we interpret to stand for Angel.  For, as our good
Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night, it was
doubtless held fit that there should be some notice thereof!"

"No," answered the minister; "I had not heard of it. "





XIII.



ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER





In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester
Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the
clergyman reduced.  His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed.  His
moral force was abased into more than childish weakness.  It
grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual
faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps
acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given
them.  With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from
all others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate
action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been
brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's
well-being and repose.  Knowing what this poor fallen man had
once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror with
which he had appealed to her -- the outcast woman -- for support
against his instinctively discovered enemy.  She decided,
moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid.  Little
accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her
ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself,
Hester saw -- or seemed to see -- that there lay a responsibility
upon her in



192 THE SCARLET LETTER



reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no other, nor to
the whole world besides.  The links that united her to the rest
of humankind -- links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever
the material -- had all been broken.  Here was the iron link of
mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break.  Like all
other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.

Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in
which we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy.
Years had come and gone.  Pearl was now seven years old.  Her
mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its
fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the
townspeople.  As is apt to be the case when a person stands out
in any prominence before the community, and, at the same time,
interferes neither with public nor individual interests and
convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately grown up
in reference to Hester Prynne.  It is to the credit of human
nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play,
it loves more readily than it hates.  Hatred, by a gradual and
quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the
change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original
feeling of hostility.  In this matter of Hester Prynne there was
neither irritation nor irksomeness.  She never battled with the
public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst usage; she
made no claim upon it in requital for what she suffered; she did
not weigh upon its sympathies.  Then, also, the blameless purity
of her life during all these years in which she had been set
apart to infamy was reckoned



ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER      193



largely in her favour.  With nothing now to lose, in the sight of
mankind, and with no hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining
anything, it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that had
brought back the poor wanderer to its paths.

It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even
the humblest title to share in the world's privileges --
further than to breathe the common air and earn daily bread for
little Pearl and herself by the faithful labour of her hands --
she was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man
whenever benefits were to be conferred.  None so ready as she to
give of her little substance to every demand of poverty, even
though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital of
the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments wrought
for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a monarch's
robe.  None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence stalked
through the town.  In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether
general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found
her place.  She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate,
into the household that was darkened by trouble, as if its gloomy
twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold
intercourse with her fellow-creature There glimmered the
embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray.  Elsewhere
the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick chamber.  It had
even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's bard extremity, across
the verge of time.  It had shown him where to set his foot, while
the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of
futurity could reach him.  In such emergencies Hester's nature



194 THE SCARLET LETTER



showed itself warm and rich -- a well-spring of human tenderness,
unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest.
Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow
for the head that needed one.  She was self-ordained a Sister of
Mercy, or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so
ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to
this result.  The letter was the symbol of her calling.  Such
helpfulness was found in her -- so much power to do, and power to
sympathise -- that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A
by its original signification.  They said that it meant Abel, so
strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.

It was only the darkened house that could contain her.  When
sunshine came again, she was not there.  Her shadow had faded
across the threshold.  The helpful inmate had departed, without
one backward glance to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any
were in the hearts of those whom she had served so zealously.
Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive
their greeting.  If they were resolute to accost her, she laid
her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on.  This might be
pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the
softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind.
The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying
common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but
quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal
is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its
generosity.  Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal
of this nature,



ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER      195



society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign
countenance than she cared to be favoured with, or, perchance,
than she deserved.

The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were
longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester's good qualities
than the people.  The prejudices which they shared in common with
the latter were fortified in themselves by an iron frame-work of
reasoning, that made it a far tougher labour to expel them.  Day
by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing
into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to
be an expression of almost benevolence.  Thus it was with the men
of rank, on whom their eminent position imposed the guardianship
of the public morals.  Individuals in private life, meanwhile,
had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they
had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of
that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a
penance, but of her many good deeds since.  "Do you see that
woman with the embroidered badge?" they would say to strangers.
"It is our Hester -- the town's own Hester -- who is so kind to
the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the
afflicted!" Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to
tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of
another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of
bygone years.  It was none the less a fact, however, that in the
eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the
effect of the cross on a nun's bosom It imparted to the wearer a
kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid all
peril.  Had



196 THE SCARLET LETTER



she fallen among thieves, it would have kept her sale.  It was
reported, and believed by many, that an Indian had drawn his
arrow against the badge, and that the missile struck it, and fell
harmless to the ground.

The effect of the symbol -- or rather, of the position in respect
to society that was indicated by it -- on the mind of Hester
Prynne herself was powerful and peculiar.  All the light and
graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this
red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and
harsh outline, which might have been repulsive had she possessed
friends or companions to be repelled by it Even the
attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change.  It
might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and
partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners.  It was a sad
transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either
been cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a
shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine.  It was
due in part to all these causes, but still more to something
else, that there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester's face
for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though majestic
and statue like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its
embrace; nothing in Hester's bosom to make it ever again the
pillow of Affection.  Some attribute had departed from her, the
permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman.  Such
is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the
feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered,
and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity.  If she be
all tenderness, she will die.  If she survive, the tender-



ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER      197



ness will either be crushed out of her, or -- and the outward
semblance is the same -- crushed so deeply into her heart that it
can never show itself more.  The latter is perhaps the truest
theory.  She who has once been a woman, and ceased to be so,
might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the
magic touch to effect the transformation.  We shall see whether
Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so
transfigured.

Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be
attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a
great measure, from passion and feeling to thought.  Standing
alone in the world -- alone, as to any dependence on society, and
with little Pearl to be guided and protected -- alone, and
hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to
consider it desirable -- she cast away the fragment a broken
chain.  The world's law was no law for her mind.  It was an age
in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more
active and a wider range than for many centuries before.  Men of
the sword had overthrown nobles and kings.  Men bolder than these
had overthrown and rearranged -- not actually, but within the
sphere of theory, which was their most real abode -- the whole
system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient
principle.  Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit.  She assumed a
freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of
the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would
have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised by the
scarlet letter.  In her lonesome cottage, by the seashore,
thoughts visited her such as dared to enter no



198 THE SCARLET LETTER



other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have
been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have
been seen so much as knocking at her door.

It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often
conform with the most perfect quietude to the external
regulations of society.  The thought suffices them, without
investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.  So it seemed
to be with Hester.  Yet, had little Pearl never come to her from
the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise.  Then she
might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Ann
Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect.  She might, in
one of her phases, have been a prophetess.  She might, and not
improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of
the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the
Puritan establishment.  But, in the education of her child, the
mother's enthusiasm thought had something to wreak itself upon.
Providence, in the person of this little girl, had assigned to
Hester's charge, the germ and blossom of womanhood, to be
cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties.  Everything
was against her.  The world was hostile.  The child's own nature
had something wrong in it which continually betokened that she
had been born amiss -- the effluence of her mother's lawless
passion -- and often impelled Hester to ask, in bitterness of
heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor little
creature had been born at all.

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with
reference to the whole race of womanhood.  Was existence worth
accepting even to the



ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER  199



happiest among them?  As concerned her own individual existence,
she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point
as settled.  A tendency to speculation, though it may keep women
quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad.  She discerns, it may
be, such a hopeless task before her.  As a first step, the whole
system of society is to be torn down and built up anew.  Then the
very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit,
which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified
before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and
suitable position.  Finally, all other difficulties being
obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary
reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier
change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has
her truest life, will be found to have evaporated.  A woman never
overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought.  They are
not to be solved, or only in one way.  If her heart chance to
come uppermost, they vanish.  Thus Hester Prynne, whose heart had
lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clue in
the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable
precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm.  There was wild
and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort
nowhere.  At times a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul,
whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to Heaven, and
go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

Now, however, her interview with the Reverend



200 THE SCARLET LETTER



Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his vigil, had given her a new
theme of reflection, and held up to her an object that appeared
worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment.  She had
witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister
struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle.
She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not
already stepped across it.  It was impossible to doubt that,
whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of
remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand
that proffered relief.  A secret enemy had been continually by
his side, under the semblance of a friend and helper, and had
availed himself of the opportunities thus afforded for tampering
with the delicate springs of Mr. Dimmesdale's nature.  Hester
could not but ask herself whether there had not originally been a
defect of truth, courage, and loyalty on her own part, in
allowing the minister to be thrown into position where so much
evil was to be foreboded and nothing auspicious to be hoped.  Her
only justification lay in the fact that she had been able to
discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker ruin than had
overwhelmed herself except by acquiescing in Roger
Chillingworth's scheme of disguise.  Under that impulse she had
made her choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared, the more
wretched alternative of the two.  She determined to redeem her
error so far as it might yet be possible.  Strengthened by years
of hard and solemn trial, she felt herself no longer so
inadequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth as on that night,
abased by sin and half-maddened by the ignominy



ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER      201



that was still new, when they had talked together in the
prison-chamber.  She had climbed her way since then to a higher
point.  The old man, on the other hand, had brought himself
nearer to her level, or, perhaps, below it, by the revenge which
he had stooped for.

In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and
do what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on
whom he had so evidently set his gripe.  The occasion was not
long to seek.  One afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired
part of the peninsula, she beheld the old physician with a basket
on one arm and a staff in the other hand, stooping along the
ground in quest of roots and herbs to concoct his medicine
withal.



XIV



HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN



Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and
play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have
talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs.  So the child flew
away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet went
pattering along the moist margin of the sea.  Here and there she
came to a full stop, ad peeped curiously into a pool, left by the
retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in.  Forth
peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening curls
around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image of a
little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take
her hand and run a race with her.  But the visionary little maid
on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say -- "This is a
better place; come thou into the pool. " And Pearl, stepping in
mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out
of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary
smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician.  "I would speak
a word with you," said she -- "a word that concerns us much. "

"Aha!  and is it Mistress Hester that has a word



HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN    203



for old Roger Chillingworth?" answered he, raising himself from
his stooping posture.  "With all my heart Why, mistress, I hear
good tidings of you on all hands!  No longer ago than yester-eve,
a magistrate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your
affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been
question concerning you in the council.  It was debated whether
or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter might
be taken off your bosom.  On my life, Hester, I made my intreaty
to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith. "

"It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the
badge," calmly replied Hester.  "Were I worthy to be quit of it,
it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into
something that should speak a different purport. "

"Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better," rejoined he, "A
woman must needs follow her own fancy touching the adornment of
her person.  The letter is gaily embroidered, and shows right
bravely on your bosom!"

All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man,
and was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a
change had been wrought upon him within the past seven years.  It
was not so much that he had grown older; for though the traces of
advancing life were visible he bore his age well, and seemed to
retain a wiry vigour and alertness.  But the former aspect of an
intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what she
best remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been
succeeded by a eager, searching, almost fierce, yet



204 THE SCARLET LETTER



carefully guarded look.  It seemed to be his wish and purpose to
mask this expression with a smile, but the latter played him
false, and flickered over his visage so derisively that the
spectator could see his blackness all the better for it.  Ever
and anon, too, there came a glare of red light out of his eyes,
as if the old man's soul were on fire and kept on smouldering
duskily within his breast, until by some casual puff of passion
it was blown into a momentary flame.  This he repressed as
speedily as possible, and strove to look as if nothing of the
kind had happened.

In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of
man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will
only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office.
This unhappy person had effected such a transformation by
devoting himself for seven years to the constant analysis of a
heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and
adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he analysed and gloated
over.

The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's bosom.  Here was
another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to
her.

"What see you in my face," asked the physician, "that you look at
it so earnestly?"

"Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears
bitter enough for it," answered she.  "But let it pass!  It is of
yonder miserable man that I would speak. "

"And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he
loved the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it
with the only person of whom he could make a confidant.  "Not to
hide the



HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN    205



truth, Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy
with the gentleman.  So speak freely and I will make answer. "

"When we last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years ago,
it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as touching
the former relation betwixt yourself and me.  As the life and
good fame of yonder man were in your hands there seemed no choice
to me, save to be silent in accordance with your behest.  Yet it
was not without heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself, for,
having cast off all duty towards other human beings, there
remained a duty towards him, and something whispered me that I
was betraying it in pledging myself to keep your counsel.  Since
that day no man is so near to him as you.   You tread behind his
every footstep.  You are beside him, sleeping and waking.  You
search his thoughts.  You burrow and rankle in his heart!  Your
clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living
death, and still he knows you not.  In permitting this I have
surely acted a false part by the only man to whom the power was
left me to be true!"

"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth.  "My finger,
pointed at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a
dungeon, thence, peradventure, to the gallows!"

"It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne.

"What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger Chillingworth again.
"I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician
earned from monarch could not have bought such care as I have
wasted on this miserable priest!  But for my aid his



206 THE SCARLET LETTER



life would have burned away in torments within the first two
years after the perpetration of his crime and thine.  For,
Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up,
as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter.  Oh, I
could reveal a goodly secret!  But enough.  What art can do, I
have exhausted on him.  That he now breathes and creeps about on
earth is owing all to me!"

"Better he had died at once!" said Hester Prynne.  "Yea, woman,
thou sayest truly!" cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting the
lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes.  "Better had
he died at once!  Never did mortal suffer what this man has
suffered.  And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy!  He has
been conscious of me.  He has felt an influence dwelling always
upon him like a curse.  He knew, by some spiritual sense -- for
the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this -- he
knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his heartstrings, and
that an eye was looking curiously into him, which sought only
evil, and found it.  But he knew not that the eye and hand were
mine!  With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he
fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with
frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse and
despair of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the
grave.  But it was the constant shadow of my presence, the
closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged,
and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the
direst revenge!  Yea, indeed, he did not err, there was a fiend
at his elbow!  A mortal man, with



HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN    207



once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment.
"

The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his
hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful
shape, which he could not recognise, usurping the place of his
own image in a glass.  It was one of those moments -- which
sometimes occur only at the interval of years -- when a man's
moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye.  Not
improbably he had never before viewed himself as he did now.

"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the
old man's look.  "Has he not paid thee all?"

"No, no!  He has but increased the debt!" answered the physician,
and as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics,
and subsided into gloom.  "Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I
was nine years agone?  Even then I was in the autumn of my days,
nor was it the early autumn.  But all my life had been made up of
earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully
for the increase of mine own knowledge, and faithfully, too,
though this latter object was but casual to the other --
faithfully for the advancement of human welfare.  No life had
been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich with
benefits conferred.  Dost thou remember me?  Was I not, though
you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others,
craving little for himself -- kind, true, just and of constant,
if not warm affections?  Was I not all this?"

"All this, and more," said Hester.



203 THE SCARLET LETTER



"And what am I now?" demanded he, looking into her face, and
permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his
features.  "I have already told thee what I am -- a fiend!  Who
made me so?"

"It was myself," cried Hester, shuddering.  "It was I, not less
than he.  Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?"

"I have left thee to the scarlet letter," replied Roger
Chillingworth.  "If that has not avenged me, I can do no more!"

He laid his finger on it with a smile.

"It has avenged thee," answered Hester Prynne.

"I judged no less," said the physician.  "And now what wouldst
thou with me touching this man?"

"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly.  "He must
discern thee in thy true character.  What may be the result I
know not.  But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him,
whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at length be paid.  So far
as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and
his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in my hands.
Nor do I -- whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth,
though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering into the soul --
nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer a life
of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy.
Do with him as thou wilt!  There is no good for him, no good for
me, no good for thee.  There is no good for little Pearl.  There
is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze. "

"Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee," said Roger Chillingworth,
unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a
quality almost majestic in



HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN    209



the despair which she expressed.  "Thou hadst great elements.
Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than
mine, this evil had not been.  I pity thee, for the good that has
been wasted in thy nature. "

"And I thee," answered Hester Prynne, "for the hatred that has
transformed a wise and just man to a fiend!  Wilt thou yet purge
it out of thee, and be once more human?  If not for his sake,
then doubly for thine own!  Forgive, and leave his further
retribution to the Power that claims it!  I said, but now, that
there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are
here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and
stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn
our path.  It is not so!  There might be good for thee, and thee
alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy
will to pardon.  Wilt thou give up that only privilege?  Wilt
thou reject that priceless benefit?"

"Peace, Hester--peace!" replied the old man, with gloomy
sternness -- "it is not granted me to pardon.  I have no such
power as thou tellest me of.  My old faith, long forgotten, comes
back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer.  By
thy first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since
that moment it has all been a dark necessity.  Ye that have
wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion;
neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from
his hands.  It is our fate.  Let the black flower blossom as it
may!  Now, go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man. "

He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of
gathering herbs.



XV.



HESTER AND PEARL



So Roger Chillingworth -- a deformed old figure with a face that
haunted men's memories longer than they liked -- took leave of
Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth.  He
gathered here and there a herb, or grubbed up a root and put it
into the basket on his arm.  His gray beard almost touched the
ground as he crept onward.  Hester gazed after him a little
while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether the
tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him
and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown,
across its cheerful verdure.  She wondered what sort of herbs
they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather.  Would not
the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his
eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs of species hitherto unknown,
that would start up under his fingers?  Or might it suffice him
that every wholesome growth should be converted into something
deleterious and malignant at his touch?  Did the sun, which shone
so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him?  Or was there,
as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with
his deformity whichever way he turned him-



HESTER AND PEARL    211



self?  And whither was he now going?  Would he not suddenly sink
into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due
course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood,
henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate
could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?  Or would
he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier
the higher he rose towards heaven?

"Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she
gazed after him, "I hate the man!"

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome
or lessen it.  Attempting to do so, she thought of those
long-past days in a distant land, when he used to emerge at
eventide from the seclusion of his study and sit down in the
firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile.
He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that
the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken
off the scholar's heart.  Such scenes had once appeared not
otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal
medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her
ugliest remembrances.  She marvelled how such scenes could have
been!  She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to
marry him!  She deemed in her crime most to be repented of, that
she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his
hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle
and melt into his own.  And it seemed a fouler offence committed
by Roger Chillingworth than any which had since been done him,
that, in



212 THE SCARLET LETTER



the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to
fancy herself happy by his side.

"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before.
"He betrayed me!  He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along
with it the utmost passion of her heart!  Else it may be their
miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some
mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her
sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the
marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her
as the warm reality.  But Hester ought long ago to have done with
this injustice.  What did it betoken?  Had seven long years,
under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of
misery and wrought out no repentance?

The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the
crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on
Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might not
otherwise have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

"Pearl!  Little Pearl!  Where are you?"

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no
loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer
of herbs.  At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully
with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom
forth, and -- as it declined to venture -- seeking a passage for
herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky.
Soon finding, however,



HESTER AND PEARL    213



that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for
better pastime.  She made little boats out of birch-bark, and
freighted them with snailshells, and sent out more ventures on
the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the larger
part of them foundered near the shore.  She seized a live
horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers,
and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun.  Then she took
up the white foam that streaked the line of the advancing tide,
and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it with winged
footsteps to catch the great snowflakes ere they fell.
Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that fed and fluttered along
the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles,
and, creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl,
displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting them.  One little gray
bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost sure had been hit by
a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken wing.  But then the
elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport, because it grieved her
to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the
sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.

Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and
make herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume
the aspect of a little mermaid.  She inherited her mother's gift
for devising drapery and costume.  As the last touch to her
mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and imitated, as best
she could, on her own bosom the decoration with which she was so
familiar on her mother's.  A letter -- the letter A -- but
freshly



214 THE SCARLET LETTER



green instead of scarlet.  The child bent her chin upon her
breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest, even
as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the
world was to make out its hidden import.

"I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?" thought Pearl.

Just then she heard her mother's voice, and, flitting along as
lightly as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester
Prynne dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament
upon her bosom.

"My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's silence, "the
green letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport.  But
dost thou know, my child, what this letter means which thy mother
is doomed to wear?"

"Yes, mother," said the child.  "It is the great letter A.  Thou
hast taught me in the horn-book. "

Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there was
that singular expression which she had so often remarked in her
black eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really
attached any meaning to the symbol.  She felt a morbid desire to
ascertain the point.

"Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?"

"Truly do I!" answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's
face.  "It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his
hand over his heart!"

"And what reason is that?" asked Hester, half smiling at the
absurd incongruity of the child's observation; but on second
thoughts turning pale.



HESTER AND PEARL    215



"What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?"

"Nay, mother, I have told all I know," said Pearl, more seriously
than she was wont to speak.  "Ask yonder old man whom thou hast
been talking with, -- it may be he can tell.  But in good earnest
now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter mean?  -- and why
dost thou wear it on thy bosom?  -- and why does the minister
keep his hand over his heart?"

She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her
eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and
capricious character.  The thought occurred to Hester, that the
child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike
confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she
knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy.  It showed
Pearl in an unwonted aspect Heretofore, the mother, while loving
her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled
herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of
an April breeze, which spends its time in airy sport, and has its
gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of
moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to
your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours it will sometimes,
of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful
tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone
about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your
heart.  And this, moreover, was a mother's estimate of the
child's disposition.  Any other observer might have seen few but
unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker colouring.
But now the idea came



216 THE SCARLET LETTER



strongly into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable
precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age
when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as
much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without
irreverence either to the parent or the child.  In the little
chaos of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging and could
have been from the very first -- the steadfast principles of an
unflinching courage -- an uncontrollable will -- sturdy pride,
which might be disciplined into self-respect -- and a bitter
scorn of many things which, when examined, might be found to have
the taint of falsehood in them.  She possessed affections, too,
though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest
flavours of unripe fruit.  With all these sterling attributes,
thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her mother must
be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this elfish
child.

Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the
scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being.  From the
earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this
as her appointed mission.  Hester had often fancied that
Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing
the child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had
she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with that design,
there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence.
If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a
spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be
her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her
mother's heart, and converted it



HESTER AND PEARL    217



into a tomb?  -- and to help her to overcome the passion, once so
wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned
within the same tomb-like heart?

Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's mind,
with as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been
whispered into her ear.  And there was little Pearl, all this
while, holding her mother's hand in both her own, and turning her
face upward, while she put these searching questions, once and
again, and still a third time.

"What does the letter mean, mother?  and why dost thou wear it?
and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"

"What shall I say?" thought Hester to herself.  "No!  if this be
the price of the child's sympathy, I cannot pay it. "

Then she spoke aloud --

"Silly Pearl," said she, "what questions are these?  There are
many things in this world that a child must not ask about.  What
know I of the minister's heart?  And as for the scarlet letter, I
wear it for the sake of its gold thread. "

In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before
been false to the symbol on her bosom.  It may be that it was the
talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who
now forsook her; as recognising that, in spite of his strict
watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some
old one had never been expelled.  As for little Pearl, the
earnestness soon passed out of her face.

But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop.  Two or
three times, as her mother and she went



218 THE SCARLET LETTER



homeward, and as often at supper-time, and while Hester was
putting her to bed, and once after she seemed to be fairly
asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming in her black
eyes.

"Mother," said she, "what does the scarlet letter mean?"

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of
being awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and
making that other enquiry, which she had so unaccountably
connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter --

"Mother!  Mother Why does the minister keep his hand over his
heart?"

"Hold thy tongue, naughty child!" answered her mother, with an
asperity that she had never permitted to herself before.  "Do not
tease me; else I shall put thee into the dark closet!"



XVI.



A FOREST WALK



Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to
Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior
consequences, the true character of the man who had crept into
his intimacy.  For several days, however, she vainly sought an
opportunity of addressing him in some of the meditative walks
which she knew him to be in the habit of taking along the shores
of the Peninsula, or on the wooded hills of the neighbouring
country.  There would have been no scandal, indeed, nor peril to
the holy whiteness of the clergyman's good fame, had she visited
him in his own study, where many a penitent, ere now, had
confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by
the scarlet letter.  But, partly that she dreaded the secret or
undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly
that her conscious heart imparted suspicion where none could have
been felt, and partly that both the minister and she would need
the whole wide world to breathe in, while they talked together --
for all these reasons Hester never thought of meeting him in any
narrower privacy than beneath the open sky.

At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither the Rev.  Mr.
Dimmesdale had been summoned



220 THE SCARLET LETTER



to make a prayer, she learnt that he had gone, the day before, to
visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian converts.  He would
probably return by a certain hour in the afternoon of the morrow.
Betimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took little Pearl -- who
was necessarily the companion of all her mother's expeditions,
however inconvenient her presence -- and set forth.

The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the Peninsula
to the mainland, was no other than a foot-path.  It straggled
onward into the mystery of the primeval forest.  This hemmed it
in so narrowly, and stood so black and dense on either side, and
disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that, to
Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which
she had so long been wandering.  The day was chill and sombre.
Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly stirred, however,
by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine might now and
then be seen at its solitary play along the path.  This flitting
cheerfulness was always at the further extremity of some long
vista through the forest.  The sportive sunlight -- feebly
sportive, at best, in the predominant pensiveness of the day and
scene -- withdrew itself as they came nigh, and left the spots
where it had danced the drearier, because they had hoped to find
them bright.

"Mother," said little Pearl, the sunshine does not love you.  It
runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on
your bosom.  Now, see!  There it is, playing a good way off.
Stand you here, and let me run and catch it.  I am but a child.
It will not flee from me -- for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!"



A FOREST WALK   221



"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.

"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the
beginning of her race.  "Will not it come of its own accord when
I am a woman grown?"

"Run away, child," answered her mother, "and catch the sunshine.
It will soon be gone. "

Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester smiled to
perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in
the midst of it, all brightened by its splendour, and
scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion.  The
light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a
playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step
into the magic circle too.

"It will go now," said Pearl, shaking her head.

"See!" answered Hester, smiling; now I can stretch out my hand
and grasp some of it. "

As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge
from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl's features,
her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it into
herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about her
path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade.  There was
no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense of new
and untransmitted vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never failing
vivacity of spirits: she had not the disease of sadness, which
almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with the
scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors.  Perhaps this,
too, was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with
which Hester had fought against her sorrows before Pearl's birth.
It was certainly a



222 THE SCARLET LETTER



doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child's
character.  She wanted -- what some people want throughout life
-- a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanise and
make her capable of sympathy.  But there was time enough yet for
little Pearl.

"Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about her from the spot
where Pearl had stood still in the sunshine -- "we will sit down
a little way within the wood, and rest ourselves. "

"I am not aweary, mother," replied the little girl.  "But you may
sit down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile. "

"A story, child!" said Hester.  "And about what?"

"Oh, a story about the Black Man," answered Pearl, taking hold of
her mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half
mischievously, into her face.

"How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big,
heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers
his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among
the trees; and they are to write their names with their own
blood; and then he sets his mark on their bosoms.  Didst thou
ever meet the Black Man, mother?"

"And who told you this story, Pearl," asked her mother,
recognising a common superstition of the period.

"It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where
you watched last night," said the child.  "But she fancied me
asleep while she was talking of it.  She said that a thousand and
a thousand people had met him here, and had written in his



A FOREST WALK   223



book, and have his mark on them.  And that ugly tempered lady,
old Mistress Hibbins, was one.  And, mother, the old dame said
that this scarlet letter was the Black Man's mark on thee, and
that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight,
here in the dark wood.  Is it true, mother?  And dost thou go to
meet him in the nighttime?"

"Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester.

"Not that I remember," said the child.  "If thou fearest to leave
me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee.  I
would very gladly go!  But, mother, tell me now!  Is there such a
Black Man?  And didst thou ever meet him?  And is this his mark?"

"Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?" asked her
mother.

"Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl.

"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother.  This
scarlet letter is his mark!"

Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to
secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger
along the forest track.  Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap
of moss; which at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a
gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade,
and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere It was a little dell
where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising
gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst,
over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves.  The trees impending
over it had flung down great branches from time to time, which
choked up the current, and



224 THE SCARLET LETTER



compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some points;
while, in its swifter and livelier passages there appeared a
channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand.  Letting the
eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the
reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the
forest, but soon lost all traces of it amid the bewilderment of
tree-trunks and underbush, and here and there a huge rock covered
over with gray lichens.  All these giant trees and boulders of
granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this
small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing
loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old
forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth
surface of a pool.  Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the
streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but
melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its
infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among
sad acquaintance and events of sombre hue.

"Oh, brook!  Oh, foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried Pearl,
after listening awhile to its talk, "Why art thou so sad?  Pluck
up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!"

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the
forest trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it
could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else
to say.  Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of
her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed
through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom.  But, unlike the
little stream, she



A FOREST WALK   225



danced and sparkled, and prattled airily along her course.

"What does this sad little brook say, mother?  inquired she.

"If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee
of it," answered her mother, "even as it is telling me of mine.
But now, Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise
of one putting aside the branches.  I would have thee betake
thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that comes
yonder,"

"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.

"Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her mother, "But do not
stray far into the wood.  And take heed that thou come at my
first call. "

"Yes, mother," answered Pearl, "But if it be the Black Man, wilt
thou not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book
under his arm?"

"Go, silly child!" said her mother impatiently.  "It is no Black
Man!  Thou canst see him now, through the trees.  It is the
minister!"

"And so it is!" said the child.  "And, mother, he has his hand
over his heart!  Is it because, when the minister wrote his name
in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place?  But why
does he not wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?"

"Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another
time," cried Hester Prynne.  "But do not stray far.  Keep where
thou canst hear the babble of the brook. "

The child went singing away, following up the current of the
brook, and striving to mingle a more



226 THE SCARLET LETTER



lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice.  But the little
stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its
unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had
happened -- or making a prophetic lamentation about something
that was yet to happen -- within the verge of the dismal forest.
So Pearl, who had enough of shadow in her own little life, chose
to break off all acquaintance with this repining brook.  She set
herself, therefore, to gathering violets and wood-anemones, and
some scarlet columbines that she found growing in the crevice of
a high rock.

When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two
towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained
under the deep shadow of the trees.  She beheld the minister
advancing along the path entirely alone, and leaning on a staff
which he had cut by the wayside.  He looked haggard and feeble,
and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air, which had never
so remarkably characterised him in his walks about the
settlement, nor in any other situation where he deemed himself
liable to notice.  Here it was wofully visible, in this intense
seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy
trial to the spirits.  There was a listlessness in his gait, as
if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any
desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of
anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree,
and lie there passive for evermore.  The leaves might bestrew
him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock
over his frame, no matter



A FOREST WALK   227



whether there were life in it or no.  Death was too definite an
object to be wished for or avoided.

To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no
symptom of positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as
little Pearl had remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.



XVII.





THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER





Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before
Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his
observation.  At length she succeeded.

"Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at first, then louder,
but hoarsely -- "Arthur Dimmesdale!"

"Who speaks?" answered the minister.  Gathering himself quickly
up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood
to which he was reluctant to have witnesses.  Throwing his eyes
anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld a
form under the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and so little
relieved from the gray twilight into which the clouded sky and
the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he knew not
whether it were a woman or a shadow.  It may be that his pathway
through life was haunted thus by a spectre that had stolen out
from among his thoughts.

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.

"Hester!  Hester Prynne!', said he; "is it thou?  Art thou in
life?"

"Even so. " she answered.  "In such life as has



THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER  229



been mine these seven years past!  And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale,
dost thou yet live?"

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual
and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own.  So
strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the
first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who
had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood
coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their
state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings.
Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.  They were
awe-stricken likewise at themselves, because the crisis flung
back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its
history and experience, as life never does, except at such
breathless epochs.  The soul beheld its features in the mirror of
the passing moment.  It was with fear, and tremulously, and, as
it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale
put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of
Hester Prynne.  The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was
dreariest in the interview.  They now felt themselves, at least,
inhabitants of the same sphere.

Without a word more spoken -- neither he nor she assuming the
guidance, but with an unexpressed consent -- they glided back
into the shadow of the woods whence Hester had emerged, and sat
down on the heap of moss where she and Pearl had before been
sitting.  When they found voice to speak, it was at first only to
utter remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintances might
have made, about the gloomy sky, the threatening storm, and,
next,



230 THE SCARLET LETTER



the health of each.  Thus they went onward, not boldly, but step
by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in their
hearts.  So long estranged by fate and circumstances, they needed
something slight and casual to run before and throw open the
doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led
across the threshold.

After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's.

"Hester," said he, "hast thou found peace?"

She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.

"Hast thou?" she asked.

"None -- nothing but despair!" he answered.  "What else could I
look for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine?  Were
I an atheist -- a man devoid of conscience -- a wretch with
coarse and brutal instincts -- I might have found peace long ere
now.  Nay, I never should have lost it.  But, as matters stand
with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in
me, all of God's gifts that were the choicest have become the
ministers of spiritual torment.  Hester, I am most miserable!"

"The people reverence thee," said Hester.  "And surely thou
workest good among them!  Doth this bring thee no comfort?"

"More misery, Hester!  -- Only the more misery!" answered the
clergyman with a bitter smile.  "As concerns the good which I may
appear to do, I have no faith in it.  It must needs be a
delusion.  What can a ruined soul like mine effect towards the
redemption of other souls?  -- or a polluted soul



THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 231



towards their purification?  And as for the people's reverence,
would that it were turned to scorn and hatred!  Canst thou deem
it, Hester, a consolation that I must stand up in my pulpit, and
meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of
heaven were beaming from it!  -- must see my flock hungry for the
truth, and listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were
speaking!  -- and then look inward, and discern the black reality
of what they idolise?  I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of
heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!  And
Satan laughs at it!"

"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester gently.

"You have deeply and sorely repented.  Your sin is left behind
you in the days long past.  Your present life is not less holy,
in very truth, than it seems in people's eyes.  Is there no
reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?
And wherefore should it not bring you peace?"

"No, Hester -- no!" replied the clergyman.  "There is no
substance in it] It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me!
Of penance, I have had enough!  Of penitence, there has been
none!  Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of
mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see
me at the judgment-seat.  Happy are you, Hester, that wear the
scarlet letter openly upon your bosom!  Mine burns in secret!
Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a
seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for
what I am!  Had I one friend -- or were it my worst enemy!  -- to
whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could
daily betake myself, and



232 THE SCARLET LETTER



known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep
itself alive thereby.  Even thus much of truth would save me!
But now, it is all falsehood!  -- all emptiness!  -- all death!"

Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak.  Yet,
uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did,
his words here offered her the very point of circumstances in
which to interpose what she came to say.  She conquered her
fears, and spoke:

"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she, "with
whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!"
Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort
"Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under
the same roof!"

The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and
clutching at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his
bosom.

"Ha!  What sayest thou?" cried he.  "An enemy!  And under mine
own roof!  What mean you?"

Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which
she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie
for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy
of one whose purposes could not be other than malevolent.  The
very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter
might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere
of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale.  There had been a
period when Hester was less alive to this consideration; or,
perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the
minister to bear what she might picture to



THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 233



herself as a more tolerable doom.  But of late, since the night
of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both
softened and invigorated.  She now read his heart more
accurately.  She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger
Chillingworth -- the secret poison of his malignity, infecting
all the air about him -- and his authorised interference, as a
physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual infirmities
-- that these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel
purpose.  By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had been
kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to
cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his
spiritual being.  Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be
insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good
and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.

Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once -- nay,
why should we not speak it?  -- still so passionately loved!
Hester felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and
death itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would
have been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had
taken upon herself to choose.  And now, rather than have had this
grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on the
forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet

"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me!  In all things else, I have
striven to be true!  Truth was the one virtue which I might have
held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save when
thy good -- thy life -- thy fame -- were put in question!



234 THE SCARLET LETTER



Then I consented to a deception.  But a lie is never good, even
though death threaten on the other side!  Dost thou not see what
I would say?  That old man!  -- the physician!  -- he whom they
call Roger Chillingworth!  -- he was my husband!"

The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that violence
of passion, which -- intermixed in more shapes than one with his
higher, purer, softer qualities -- was, in fact, the portion of
him which the devil claimed, and through which he sought to win
the rest.  Never was there a blacker or a fiercer frown than
Hester now encountered.  For the brief space that it lasted, it
was a dark transfiguration.  But his character had been so much
enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower energies were
incapable of more than a temporary struggle.  He sank down on the
ground, and buried his face in his hands.

"I might have known it," murmured he -- "I did know it!  Was not
the secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart at the
first sight of him, and as often as I have seen him since?  Why
did I not understand?  Oh, Hester Prynne, thou little, little
knowest all the horror of this thing!  And the shame!  -- the
indelicacy!  -- the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick
and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!
Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!  -I cannot forgive
thee!"

"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, Singing herself on the
fallen leaves beside him.  "Let God punish!  Thou shalt forgive!"

With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around
him, and pressed his head against her bosom, little caring though
his cheek rested on



THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 235



the scarlet letter.  He would have released himself, but strove
in vain to do so.  Hester would not set him free, lest he should
look her sternly in the face.  All the world had frowned on her
-- for seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman --
and still she bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm,
sad eyes.  Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had
not died.  But the frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and
sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear, and live!

"Wilt thou yet forgive me?" she repeated, over and over again.
"Wilt thou not frown?  Wilt thou forgive?"

"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister at length, with
a deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger.  "I
freely forgive you now.  May God forgive us both.  We are not,
Hester, the worst sinners in the world.  There is one worse than
even the polluted priest!  That old man's revenge has been
blacker than my sin.  He has violated, in cold blood, the
sanctity of a human heart.  Thou and I, Hester, never did so!"

"Never, never!" whispered she.  "What we did had a consecration
of its own.  We felt it so!  We said so to each other.  Hast thou
forgotten it?"

"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground.
"No; I have not forgotten!"

They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on
the mossy trunk of the fallen tree.  Life had never brought them
a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so
long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along -- and
yet it unclosed a charm that made them linger



236 THE SCARLET LETTER



upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another
moment.  The forest was obscure around them, and creaked with a
blast that was passing through it.  The boughs were tossing
heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned
dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair
that sat beneath, or constrained to forbode evil to come.

And yet they lingered.  How dreary looked the forest-track that
led backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up
again the burden of her ignominy and the minister the hollow
mockery of his good name!  So they lingered an instant longer.
No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this
dark forest.  Here seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need
not burn into the bosom of the fallen woman!  Here seen only by
her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for
one moment true!

He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.

"Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror!  Roger Chillingworth
knows your purpose to reveal his true character.  Will he
continue, then, to keep our secret?  What will now be the course
of his revenge?"

"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester,
thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices
of his revenge.  I deem it not likely that he will betray the
secret.  He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark
passion. "

"And I!  -- how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with
this deadly enemy?" exclaimed Arthur



THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 237



Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself, and pressing his hand
nervously against his heart -- a gesture that had grown
involuntary with him.  "Think for me, Hester!  Thou art strong.
Resolve for me!"

"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly
and firmly.  "Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!"

"It were far worse than death!" replied the minister.  "But how
to avoid it?  What choice remains to me?  Shall I lie down again
on these withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst
tell me what he was?  Must I sink down there, and die at once?"

"Alas!  what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the
tears gushing into her eyes.  "Wilt thou die for very weakness?
There is no other cause!"

"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken
priest.  "It is too mighty for me to struggle with!"

"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it. "

"Be thou strong for me!" answered he.  "Advise me what to do. "

"Is the world, then, so narrow?" exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing
her deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a
magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it
could hardly hold itself erect.  "Doth the universe lie within
the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but
a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us?  Whither leads
yonder forest-track?  Backward to the settlement, thou sayest!
Yes; but, onward, too!  Deeper it goes, and deeper into the
wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until some few



238 THE SCARLET LETTER



miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white
man's tread.  There thou art free!  So brief a journey would
bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to
one where thou mayest still be happy!  Is there not shade enough
in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of
Roger Chillingworth?"

"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the
minister, with a sad smile.

"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!" continued Hester.
"It brought thee hither.  If thou so choose, it will bear thee
back again.  In our native land, whether in some remote rural
village, or in vast London -- or, surely, in Germany, in France,
in pleasant Italy -- thou wouldst be beyond his power and
knowledge!  And what hast thou to do with all these iron men, and
their opinions?  They have kept thy better part in bondage too
long already!"

"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were
called upon to realise a dream.  "I am powerless to go.  Wretched
and sinful as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on
my earthly existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed
me.  Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for
other human souls!  I dare not quit my post, though an unfaithful
sentinel, whose sure reward is death and dishonour, when his
dreary watch shall come to an end!"

"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery,"
replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own
energy.  "But thou shalt leave it all behind thee!  It shall not
cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path: neither
shalt



THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISSIONER 239



thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea.
Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened.  Meddle no
more with it!  Begin all anew!  Hast thou exhausted possibility
in the failure of this one trial?  Not so!  The future is yet
full of trial and success.  There is happiness to be enjoyed!
There is good to be done!  Exchange this false life of thine for
a true one.  Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the
teacher and apostle of the red men.  Or, as is more thy nature,
be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of
the cultivated world.  Preach!  Write!  Act!  Do anything, save
to lie down and die!  Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and
make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear
without fear or shame.  Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one
other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life?
that have made thee feeble to will and to do?  that will leave
thee powerless even to repent?  Up, and away!"

"Oh, Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful
light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou
tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are tottering
beneath him!  I must die here!  There is not the strength or
courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult
world alone!"

It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit.
He lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within
his reach.

He repeated the word -- "Alone, Hester!"

"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper.
Then, all was spoken!



XVIII





A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE





Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which
hope and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a
kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely
hinted at, but dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity,
and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from
society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation
as was altogether foreign to the clergyman.  She had wandered,
without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as
intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of
which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their
fate.  Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in
desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in
his woods.  For years past she had looked from this estranged
point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or
legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more
reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the
judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the
church.  The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set
her flee.  The scarlet letter was her passport into regions



A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 141



where other women dared not tread.  Shame, Despair, Solitude!
These had been her teachers -- stern and wild ones -- and they
had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an
experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally
received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so
fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them.  But this
had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.
Since that wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and
minuteness, not his acts -- for those it was easy to arrange --
but each breath of emotion, and his every thought.  At the head
of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was
only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and
even its prejudices.  As a priest, the framework of his order
inevitably hemmed him in.  As a man who had once sinned, but who
kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the
fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer
within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole
seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a
preparation for this very hour.  But Arthur Dimmesdale!  Were
such a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in
extenuation of his crime?  None; unless it avail him somewhat
that he was broker, down by long and exquisite suffering; that
his mind was darkened and confused by the very remorse which
harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and
remaining



242 THE SCARLET LETTER



as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard to strike the
balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death and
infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that,
finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path,
faint, sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human
affection and sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange
for the heavy doom which he was now expiating.  And be the stern
and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made
into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired.  It
may be watched and guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his
way again into the citadel, and might even in his subsequent
assaults, select some other avenue, in preference to that where
he had formerly succeeded.  But there is still the ruined wall,
and near it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over
again his unforgotten triumph.

The struggle, if there were one, need not be described.  Let it
suffice that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.

"If in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall
one instant of peace or hope, 1 would yet endure, for the sake of
that earnest of Heaven's mercy.  But now -- since I am
irrevocably doomed -- wherefore should I not snatch the solace
allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution?  Or, if
this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me, I
surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it!  Neither can I
any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she to
sustain -- so tender to soothe!  O Thou to whom I dare not lift
mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me?"



A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 243



"Thou wilt go!" said Hester calmly, as he met her glance.

The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast.  It was the
exhilarating effect -- upon a prisoner just escaped from the
dungeon of his own heart -- of breathing the wild, free
atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianised, lawless region His
spirit rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer
prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had
kept him grovelling on the earth.  Of a deeply religious
temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in
his mood.

"Do I feel joy again?" cried he, wondering at himself.
"Methought the germ of it was dead in me!  Oh, Hester, thou art
my better angel!  I seem to have flung myself -- sick,
sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened -- down upon these forest
leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new powers
to glorify Him that hath been merciful!  This is already the
better life!  Why did we not find it sooner?"

"Let us not lock back," answered Hester Prynne.  "The past is
gone!  Wherefore should we linger upon it now?  See!  With this
symbol I undo it all, and make it as if it had never been!"

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet
letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance
among the withered leaves.  The mystic token alighted on the
hither verge of the stream.  With a hand's-breadth further
flight, it would have fallen into the water, and have give, the
little brook another woe to carry onward, besides



244 THE SCARLET LETTER



the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about.  But
there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel,
which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be
haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and
unaccountable misfortune.

The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the
burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit.  O
exquisite relief!  She had not known the weight until she felt
the freedom!  By another impulse, she took off the formal cap
that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark
and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and
imparting the charm of softness to her features.  There played
around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and
tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of
womanhood.  A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had
been long so pale.  Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of
her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past,
and clustered themselves with her maiden hope, and a happiness
before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour.  And, as if
the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of
these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow.  All at
once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine,
pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each
green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and
gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees.  The objects
that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now.
The course of the little brook might be traced



A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 245



by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which
had become a mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature -- that wild, heathen Nature of
the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by
higher truth -- with the bliss of these two spirits!  Love,
whether newly-born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must
always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance,
that it overflows upon the outward world.  Had the forest still
kept its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester's eyes, and
bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!

Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.

"Thou must know Pearl!" said she.  "Our little Pearl!  Thou hast
seen her -- yes, I know it!  -- but thou wilt see her now with
other eyes.  She is a strange child!  I hardly comprehend her!
But thou wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to
deal with her!"

"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?" asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily.  "I have long shrunk from children,
because they often show a distrust -- a backwardness to be
familiar with me.  I have even been afraid of little Pearl!"

"Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother.  "But she will love thee
dearly, and thou her.  She is not far off.  I will call her.
Pearl!  Pearl!"

"I see the child," observed the minister.  "Yonder she is,
standing in a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other
side of the brook.  So thou thinkest the child will love me?"

Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at some
distance, as the minister had described



246 THE SCARLET LETTER



her, like a bright-apparelled vision in a sunbeam, which fell
down upon her through an arch of boughs.  The ray quivered to and
fro, making her figure dim or distinct -- now like a real child,
now like a child's spirit -- as the splendour went and came
again.  She heard her mother's voice, and approached slowly
through the forest.

Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely while her mother
sat talking with the clergyman.  The great black forest -- stern
as it showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles
of the world into its bosom -- became the playmate of the lonely
infant, as well as it knew how.  Sombre as it was, it put on the
kindest of its moods to welcome her.  It offered her the
partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding autumn, but
ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood upon
the withered leaves These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with
their wild flavour.  The small denizens of the wilderness hardly
took pains to move out of her path.  A partridge, indeed, with a
brood of ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon
repented of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to
be afraid.  A pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to
come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm.
A squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered
either in anger or merriment -- for the squirrel is such a
choleric and humorous little personage, that it is hard to
distinguish between his moods -- so he chattered at the child,
and flung down a nut upon her bead.  It was a last year's nut,
and already gnawed by his sharp tooth.  A fox, startled from his
sleep



A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE 247



by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively at
Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or renew
his nap on the same spot.  A wolf, it is said -- but here the
tale has surely lapsed into the improbable -- came up and smelt
of Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her
hand.  The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest,
and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a
kindred wilderness in the human child.

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of
the settlement, or in her mother's cottage.  The Bowers appeared
to know it, and one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn
thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!"
-- and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and
anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green,
which the old trees held down before her eyes.  With these she
decorated her hair and her young waist, and became a nymph child,
or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with
the antique wood.  In such guise had Pearl adorned herself, when
she heard her mother's voice, and came slowly back

Slowly -- for she saw the clergyman.



XIX.





THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE





"Thou will love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and
the minister sat watching little Pearl.  "Dost thou not think her
beautiful?  And see with what natural skill she has made those
simple flowers adorn her!  Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds,
and rubies in the wood, they could not have become her better!
She is a splendid child!  But I know whose brow she has!"

"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet
smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side,
hath caused me many an alarm?  Methought -- oh, Hester, what a
thought is that, and how terrible to dread it!  -- that my own
features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly that
the world might see them!  But she is mostly thine!"

"No, no!  Not mostly!" answered the mother, with a tender smile.
"A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace
whose child she is.  But how strangely beautiful she looks with
those wild flowers in her hair!  It is as if one of the fairies,
whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet us.
"

It was with a feeling which neither of them had



THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE  249



ever before experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow
advance.  In her was visible the tie that united them.  She had
been offered to the world, these seven past years, as the living
hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly
sought to hide -- all written in this symbol -- all plainly
manifest -- had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read
the character of flame!  And Pearl was the oneness of their
being.  Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt
that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined when
they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual idea,
in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together; thoughts
like these -- and perhaps other thoughts, which they did not
acknowledge or define -- threw an awe about the child as she came
onward.

"Let her see nothing strange -- no passion or eagerness -- in thy
way of accosting her," whispered Hester.  "Our Pearl is a fitful
and fantastic little elf sometimes.  Especially she is generally
intolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the why
and wherefore.  But the child hath strong affections!  She loves
me, and will love thee!"

"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at
Hester Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns
for it!  But, in truth, as I already told thee, children are not
readily won to be familiar with me.  They will not climb my knee,
nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile, but stand apart,
and eye me strangely.  Even little babes, when I take them in my
arms, weep bitterly.  Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime,
hath been kind to me!



250 THE SCARLET LETTER



The first time -- thou knowest it well!  The last was when thou
ledst her with thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor. "

"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!"
answered the mother.  "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl.
Fear nothing.  She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon
learn to love thee!"

By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood
on the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman,
who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk waiting to receive
her.  Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool
so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her
little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her
beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but
more refined and spiritualized than the reality.  This image, so
nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate
somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child
herself.  It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking
so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest
gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine,
that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy.  In the
brook beneath stood another child -- another and the same -- with
likewise its ray of golden light.  Hester felt herself, in some
indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl, as if
the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed
out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and
was now vainly seeking to return to it.



THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 351



There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and
mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's.
Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been
admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so
modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning
wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where
she was.

"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that
this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou
canst never meet thy Pearl again.  Or is she an elfish spirit,
who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to
cross a running stream?  Pray hasten her, for this delay has
already imparted a tremor to my nerves. "

"Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly, and stretching
out both her arms.  "How slow thou art!  When hast thou been so
sluggish before now?  Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy
friend also.  Thou wilt have twice as much love henceforward as
thy mother alone could give thee!  Leap across the brook and come
to us.  Thou canst leap like a young deer!"

Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook.  Now she
fixed her bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister,
and now included them both in the same glance, as if to detect
and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one
another.  For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale
felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand -- with that gesture
so habitual as to have



653 THE SCARLET LETTER



become involuntary -- stole over his heart.  At length, assuming
a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched out her hand, with
the small forefinger extended, and pointing evidently towards her
mother's breast.  And beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there
was the flower-girdled and sunny image of little Pearl, pointing
her small forefinger too.

"Thou strange child!  why dost thou not come to me?" exclaimed
Hester.

Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on
her brow -- the more impressive from the childish, the almost
baby-like aspect of the features that conveyed it.  As her mother
still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday
suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a
yet more imperious look and gesture.  In the brook, again, was
the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its
pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the
aspect of little Pearl.

"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!" cried Hester
Prynne, who, however, inured to such behaviour on the elf-child's
part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly
deportment now.  "Leap across the brook, naughty child, and run
hither!  Else I must come to thee!"

But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats any more
than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit
of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small
figure into the most extravagant contortions She accompanied this
wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated
on all sides, so that, alone as she was



THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 253



in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden
multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement.
Seen in the brook once more was the shadowy wrath of Pearl's
image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot,
wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing
its small forefinger at Hester's bosom.

"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman,
and turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her
trouble and annoyance, "Children will not abide any, the
slightest, change in the accustomed aspect of things that are
daily before their eyes.  Pearl misses something that she has
always seen me wear!"

"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of
pacifying the child, do it forthwith!  Save it were the cankered
wrath of an old witch like Mistress Hibbins," added he,
attempting to smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner
encounter than this passion in a child.  In Pearl's young beauty,
as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect.  Pacify
her if thou lovest me!"

Hester turned again towards Pearl with a crimson blush upon her
cheek, a conscious glance aside clergyman, and then a heavy sigh,
while, even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a
deadly pallor.

"Pearl," said she sadly, "look down at thy feet!  There!  --
before thee!  -- on the hither side of the brook!"

The child turned her eyes to the point indicated, and there lay
the scarlet letter so close upon the



254 THE SCARLET LETTER



margin of the stream that the gold embroidery was reflected in
it.

"Bring it hither!" said Hester.

"Come thou and take it up!" answered Pearl.

"Was ever such a child!" observed Hester aside to the minister.
"Oh, I have much to tell thee about her!  But, in very truth, she
is right as regards this hateful token.  I must bear its torture
yet a little longer -- only a few days longer -- until we shall
have left this region, and look back hither as to a land which we
have dreamed of.  The forest cannot hide it!  The mid-ocean shall
take it from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!"

With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up
the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom.
Hopefully, but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it
in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her as
she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate.
She had flung it into infinite space!  she had drawn an hour's
free breath!  and here again was the scarlet misery glittering on
the old spot!  So it ever is, whether thus typified or no, that
an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom.  Hester
next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and confined them
beneath her cap.  As if there were a withering spell in the sad
letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her womanhood,
departed like fading sunshine, and a gray shadow seemed to fall
across her.

When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to
Pearl



THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 255



"Dost thou know thy mother now, child?", asked she,
reproachfully, but with a subdued tone.  "Wilt thou come across
the brook, and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon
her -- now that she is sad?"

"Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding across the
brook, and clasping Hester in her arms "Now thou art my mother
indeed!  and I am thy little Pearl!"

In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew
down her mother's head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks.
But then -- by a kind of necessity that always impelled this
child to alloy whatever comfort she might chance to give with a
throb of anguish -- Pearl put up her mouth and kissed the scarlet
letter, too

"That was not kind!" said Hester.  "When thou hast shown me a
little love, thou mockest me!"

"Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked Pearl.

"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother.  "Come thou, and
entreat his blessing!  He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves
thy mother, too.  Wilt thou not love him?  Come he longs to greet
thee!"

"Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up with acute intelligence
into her mother's face.  "Will he go back with us, hand in hand,
we three together, into the town?"

"Not now, my child," answered Hester.  "But in days to come he
will walk hand in hand with us.  We will have a home and fireside
of our own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach
thee many



256 THE SCARLET LETTER



things, and love thee dearly.  Thou wilt love him -- wilt thou
not?"

"And will he always keep his hand over his heart?" inquired
Pearl.

"Foolish child, what a question is that!" exclaimed her mother.
"Come, and ask his blessing!"

But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive
with every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from
whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no
favour to the clergyman.  It was only by an exertion of force
that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back, and
manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which, ever since
her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and could
transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different
aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all.  The minister
-- painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a
talisman to admit him into the child's kindlier regards -- bent
forward, and impressed one on her brow.  Hereupon, Pearl broke
away from her mother, and, running to the brook, stooped over it,
and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was quite
washed off and diffused through a long lapse of the gliding
water.  She then remained apart, silently watching Hester and the
clergyman; while they talked together and made such arrangements
as were suggested by their new position and the purposes soon to
be fulfilled.

And now this fateful interview had come to a close.  The dell was
to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with
their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had
passed there, and no



THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE 257



mortal be the wiser.  And the melancholy brook would add this
other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already
overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble,
with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages
heretofore.





THE MINISTER IN A MAZE





As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little
Pearl, he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should
discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the
mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the
woods.  So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be
received as real.  But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe,
still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast had
overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since
been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with
earth's heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together,
and find a single hour's rest and solace.  And there was Pearl,
too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook -- now that the
intrusive third person was gone -- and taking her old place by
her mother's side.  So the minister had not fallen asleep and
dreamed!

In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity
of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he
recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and
himself had sketched for their departure.  It had been determined
between them that the Old World, with its crowds



THE MINISTER IN A MAZE      259



and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment
than the wilds of New England or all America, with its
alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of
Europeans scattered thinly along the sea-board.  Not to speak of
the clergyman's health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of
a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire
development would secure him a home only in the midst of
civilization and refinement; the higher the state the more
delicately adapted to it the man.  In futherance of this choice,
it so happened that a ship lay in the harbour; one of those
unquestionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without
being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface
with a remarkable irresponsibility of character.  This vessel had
recently arrived from the Spanish Main, and within three days'
time would sail for Bristol.  Hester Prynne -- whose vocation, as
a self-enlisted Sister of Charity, had brought her acquainted
with the captain and crew -- could take upon herself to secure
the passage of two individuals and a child with all the secrecy
which circumstances rendered more than desirable.

The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the
precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart.  It
would probably be on the fourth day from the present.  "This is
most fortunate!" he had then said to himself.  Now, why the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate we
hesitate to reveal.  Nevertheless -- to hold nothing back from
the reader -- it was because, on the third day from the present,
he was to preach the Election Sermon; and, as such an occasion
formed



260 THE SCARLET LETTER



an honourable epoch in the life of a New England Clergyman, he
could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of
terminating his professional career.  "At least, they shall say
of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no public duty
unperformed or ill-performed!" Sad, indeed, that an introspection
so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so
miserably deceived!  We have had, and may still have, worse
things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak;
no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle
disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance
of his character.  No man, for any considerable period, can wear
one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally
getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings as he returned from
his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy,
and hurried him townward at a rapid pace.  The pathway among the
woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural
obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he
remembered it on his outward journey.  But he leaped across the
plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbush,
climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in
short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable
activity that astonished him.  He could not but recall how
feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled
over the same ground, only two days before.  As he drew near the
town, he took an impression of change from the series of familiar
objects that presented themselves.  It seemed not yesterday,



THE MINISTER IN A MAZE  261



not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had
quitted them.  There, indeed, was each former trace of the
street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of the
houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a weather-cock
at every point where his memory suggested one.  Not the less,
however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of change.  The
same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all
the well-known shapes of human life, about the little town.  They
looked neither older nor younger now; the beards of the aged were
no whiter, nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his
feet to-day; it was impossible to describe in what respect they
differed from the individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed
a parting glance; and yet the minister's deepest sense seemed to
inform him of their mutability.  A similar impression struck him
most remarkably a he passed under the walls of his own church.
The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect,
that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either
that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was
merely dreaming about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed,
indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a
change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the
intervening space of a single day had operated on his
consciousness like the lapse of years.  The minister's own will,
and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation.  It was the same town as heretofore,
but the same minister returned not from the



262 THE SCARLET LETTER



forest.  He might have said to the friends who greeted him -- "I
am not the man for whom you take me!  I left him yonder in the
forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and
near a melancholy brook!  Go, seek your minister, and see if his
emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled
brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off garment!" His
friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him -- "Thou
art thyself the man!" but the error would have been their own,
not his.

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling.
In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral
code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the
impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled
minister.  At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild,
wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once
involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing out
of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse.  For
instance, he met one of his own deacons.  The good old man
addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal
privilege which his venerable age, his upright and holy
character, and his station in the church, entitled him to use
and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect,
which the minister's professional and private claims alike
demanded.  Never was there a more beautiful example of how the
majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and
respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank, and



THE MINISTER IN A MAZE   263



inferior order of endowment, towards a higher.  Now, during a
conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary-bearded deacon, it
was only by the most careful self-control that the former could
refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose
into his mind, respecting the communion-supper.  He absolutely
trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag
itself in utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own
consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it.  And,
even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid
laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon
would have been petrified by his minister's impiety.

Again, another incident of the same nature.  Hurrying along the
street, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest
female member of his church, a most pious and exemplary old dame,
poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart as full of reminiscences
about her dead husband and children, and her dead friends of long
ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied gravestones.  Yet all
this, which would else have been such heavy sorrow, was made
almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul, by religious
consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith she had fed
herself continually for more than thirty years.  And since Mr.
Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam's chief
earthly comfort  -- which, unless it had been likewise a heavenly
comfort, could have been none at all -- was to meet her pastor,
whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed with a word
of warm, fragrant, heaven-



264 THE SCARLET LETTER



breathing Gospel truth, from his beloved lips, into her dulled,
but rapturously attentive ear.  But, on this occasion, up to the
moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr.
Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could
recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief,
pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument
against the immortality of the human soul.  The instilment
thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged sister
to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely
poisonous infusion.  What he really did whisper, the minister
could never afterwards recollect.  There was, perhaps, a
fortunate disorder in his utterance, which failed to impart any
distinct idea to the good widows comprehension, or which
Providence interpreted after a method of its own.  Assuredly, as
the minister looked back, he beheld an expression of divine
gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of the celestial
city on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.

Again, a third instance.  After parting from the old church
member, he met the youngest sister of them all.  It was a maiden
newly-won -- and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own
sermon, on the Sabbath after his vigil -- to barter the
transitory pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope that was
to assume brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and
which would gild the utter gloom with final glory.  She was fair
and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise.  The minister
knew well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless
sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy



THE MINISTER IN A MAZE     265



curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of
love, and to love a religious purity.  Satan, that afternoon, had
surely led the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and
thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or -- shall
we not rather say?  -- this lost and desperate man.  As she drew
nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small
compass, and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would
be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes.
Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him
as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field
of innocence with but one wicked look, and develop all its
opposite with but a word.  So -- with a mightier struggle than he
had yet sustained -- he held his Geneva cloak before his face,
and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving
the young sister to digest his rudeness as she might.  She
ransacked her conscience -- which was full of harmless little
matters, like her pocket or her work-bag -- and took herself to
task, poor thing!  for a thousand imaginary faults, and went
about her household duties with swollen eyelids the next morning.


Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this
last temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more
ludicrous, and almost as horrible.  It was -- we blush to tell it
-- it was to stop short in the road, and teach some very wicked
words to a knot of little Puritan children who were playing
there, and had but just begun to talk.  Denying himself this
freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken seaman, one of
the ship's crew from the



266 THE SCARLET LETTER



Spanish Main.  And here, since he had so valiantly forborne all
other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale longed at least to shake
hands with the tarry black-guard, and recreate himself with a few
improper jests, such as dissolute sailors so abound with, and a
volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying
oaths!  It was not so much a better principle, as partly his
natural good taste, and still more his buckramed habit of
clerical decorum, that carried him safely through the latter
crisis.

"What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?" cried the minister
to himself, at length, pausing in the street, and striking his
hand against his forehead.

"Am I mad?  or am I given over utterly to the fiend?  Did I make
a contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood?
And does he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the
performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination
can conceive?"

At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed
with himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress
Hibbins, the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been passing by.
She made a very grand appearance, having on a high head-dress, a
rich gown of velvet, and a ruff done up with the famous yellow
starch, of which Anne Turner, her especial friend, had taught her
the secret, before this last good lady had been hanged for Sir
Thomas Overbury's murder.  Whether the witch had read the
minister's thoughts or no, she came to a full stop, looked
shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and -- though little
given to converse with clergymen -- began a conversation.



THE MINISTER IN A MAZE    267



"So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into the forest,"
observed the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him.
"The next time I pray you to allow me only a fair warning, and I
shall be proud to bear you company.  Without taking overmuch upon
myself my good word will go far towards gaining any strange
gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of. "

"I profess, madam," answered the clergyman, with a grave
obeisance, such as the lady's rank demanded, and his own good
breeding made imperative -- " I profess, on my conscience and
character, that I am utterly bewildered as touching the purport
of your words!  I went not into the forest to seek a potentate,
neither do I, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a
view to gaining the favour of such personage.  My one sufficient
object was to greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle Eliot,
and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath won
from heathendom!"

"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high
head-dress at the minister.  "Well, well!  we must needs talk
thus in the daytime!  You carry it off like an old hand!  But at
midnight, and in the forest, we shall have other talk together!"

She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back
her head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognise a
secret intimacy of connexion.

"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend
whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag
has chosen for her prince and master?"



268 THE SCARLET LETTER



The wretched minister!  He had made a bargain very like it!
Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with
deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew
was deadly sin.  And the infectious poison of that sin had been
thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system.  It bad
stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the
whole brotherhood of bad ones.  Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked
malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was
good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened
him.  And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a
real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with
wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.

He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the
burial ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his
study.  The minister was glad to have reached this shelter,
without first betraying himself to the world by any of those
strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been
continually impelled while passing through the streets.  He
entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books,
its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the
walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted
him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and
thitherward.  Here he had studied and written; here gone through
fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here striven to pray;
here borne a hundred thousand agonies!  There was the Bible, in
its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to him,
and God's voice through all



THE MINISTER IN A MAZE   269



There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an
unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his
thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days before.
He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister,
who had done and suffered these things, and written thus far into
the Election Sermon!  But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this
former self with scornful pitying, but half-envious curiosity.
That self was gone.  Another man had returned out of the forest
-- a wiser one -- with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the
simplicity of the former never could have reached.  A bitter kind
of knowledge that!

While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door
of the study, and the minister said, "Come in!" -- not wholly
devoid of an idea that he might behold an evil spirit.  And so he
did!  It was old Roger Chillingworth that entered.  The minister
stood white and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew
Scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast.

"Welcome home, reverend sir," said the physician "And how found
you that godly man, the Apostle Eliot?  But methinks, dear sir,
you look pale, as if the travel through the wilderness had been
too sore for you.  Will not my aid be requisite to put you in
heart and strength to preach your Election Sermon?"

"Nay, I think not so," rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.
"My journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the
free air which I have breathed have done me good, after so long



270 THE SCARLET LETTER



confinement in my study.  I think to need no more of your drugs,
my kind physician, good though they be, and administered by a
friendly hand. "

All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister
with the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his
patient.  But, in spite of this outward show, the latter was
almost convinced of the old man's knowledge, or, at least, his
confident suspicion, with respect to his own interview with
Hester Prynne.  The physician knew then that in the minister's
regard he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest
enemy.  So much being known, it would appear natural that a part
of it should he expressed.  It is singular, however, how long a
time often passes before words embody things; and with what
security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may
approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it.  Thus
the minister felt no apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would
touch, in express words, upon the real position which they
sustained towards one another.  Yet did the physician, in his
dark way, creep frightfully near the secret.

"Were it not better," said he, "that you use my poor skill
tonight?  Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong
and vigorous for this occasion of the Election discourse.  The
people look for great things from you, apprehending that another
year may come about and find their pastor gone. "

"Yes, to another world," replied the minister with pious
resignation.  "Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good
sooth, I hardly think to tarry with my



THE MINISTER IN A MAZE     271



flock through the flitting seasons of another year!  But touching
your medicine, kind sir, in my present frame of body I need it
not. "

"I joy to hear it," answered the physician.  "It may be that my
remedies, so long administered in vain, begin now to take due
effect.  Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England's
gratitude, could I achieve this cure!"

"I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend," said the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale with a solemn smile.  "I thank you, and
can but requite your good deeds with my prayers. "

"A good man's prayers are golden recompense!" rejoined old Roger
Chillingworth, as he took his leave.  "Yea, they are the current
gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King's own mint mark on
them!"

Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and
requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with ravenous
appetite.  Then flinging the already written pages of the
Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another, which
he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that
he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should
see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles
through so foul an organ pipe as he.  However, leaving that
mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved for ever, he drove his
task onward with earnest haste and ecstasy.

Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he
careering on it; morning came, and peeped, blushing, through the
curtains; and at



272 THE SCARLET LETTER



last sunrise threw a golden beam into the study, and laid it
right across the minister's bedazzled eyes.  There he was, with
the pen still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable tract
of written space behind him!



XXI





THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY





Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was
to receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne
and little Pearl came into the market-place.  It was already
thronged with the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the
town, in considerable numbers, among whom, likewise, were many
rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins marked them as
belonging to some of the forest settlements, which surrounded the
little metropolis of the colony.

On this public holiday, as on all other occasions for seven years
past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth.  Not
more by its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its
fashion, it had the effect of making her fade personally out of
sight and outline; while again the scarlet letter brought her
back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under
the moral aspect of its own illumination.  Her face, so long
familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which
they were accustomed to behold there.  It was like a mask; or,
rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features; owing
this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually
dead, in respect to any

273



274    THE SCARLET LETTER



claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which
she still seemed to mingle.

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen
before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some
preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart,
and have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the
countenance and mien.  Such a spiritual sneer might have
conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude
through several miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and
something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for
one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in
order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of
triumph.  "Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"
-- the people's victim and lifelong bond-slave, as they fancied
her, might say to them.  "Yet a little while, and she will be
beyond your reach!  A few hours longer and the deep, mysterious
ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have
caused to burn on her bosom!" Nor were it an inconsistency too
improbable to be assigned to human nature, should we suppose a
feeling of regret in Hester's mind, at the moment when she was
about to win her freedom from the pain which had been thus deeply
incorporated with her being.  Might there not be an irresistible
desire to quaff a last, long, breathless draught of the cup of
wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood
had been perpetually flavoured.  The wine of life, henceforth to
be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and
exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker, or else leave an
inevitable and



THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 275



weary languor, after the lees of bitterness wherewith she had
been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest potency.

Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety.  It would have been
impossible to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed
its existence to the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at
once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to
contrive the child's apparel, was the same that had achieved a
task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a
peculiarity to Hester's simple robe.  The dress, so proper was it
to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable development
and outward manifestation of her character, no more to be
separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a
butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright
flower.  As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of
one idea with her nature.  On this eventful day, moreover, there
was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood,
resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that
sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on
which it is displayed.  Children have always a sympathy in the
agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a
sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever kind,
in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem
on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of her
spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble
passiveness of Hester's brow.

This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement,
rather than walk by her mother's side.



276 THE SCARLET LETTER



She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and
sometimes piercing music.  When they reached the market-place,
she became still more restless, on perceiving the stir and bustle
that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like the broad
and lonesome green before a village meeting-house, than the
centre of a town's business

"Why, what is this, mother?" cried she.  "Wherefore have all the
people left their work to-day?  Is it a play-day for the whole
world?  See, there is the blacksmith!  He has washed his sooty
face, and put on his Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he
would gladly be merry, if any kind body would only teach him how!
And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and
smiling at me.  Why does he do so, mother?"

"He remembers thee a little babe, my child," answered Hester.

"He should not nod and smile at me, for all that -- the black,
grim, ugly-eyed old man!" said Pearl.

"He may nod at thee, if he will; for thou art clad in gray, and
wearest the scarlet letter.  But see, mother, how many faces of
strange people, and Indians among them, and sailors!  What have
they all come to do, here in the market-place?"

"They wait to see the procession pass," said Hester.  "For the
Governor and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and
all the great people and good people, with the music and the
soldiers marching before them. "

"And will the minister be there?" asked Pearl.  "And will he hold
out both his hands to me, as when thou led'st me to him from the
brook-side?"



THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 277



"He will be there, child," answered her mother, "but he will not
greet thee to-day, nor must thou greet him. "

"What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking
partly to herself.  "In the dark nighttime he calls us to him,
and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the
scaffold yonder!  And in the deep forest, where only the old
trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee,
sitting on a heap of moss!  And he kisses my forehead, too, so
that the little brook would hardly wash it off!  But, here, in
the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor
must we know him!  A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always
over his heart!"

"Be quiet, Pearl -- thou understandest not these things," said
her mother.  "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee,
and see how cheery is everybody's face to-day.  The children have
come from their schools, and the grown people from their
workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy, for, to-day,
a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so -- as has been
the custom of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered --
they make merry and rejoice: as if a good and golden year were at
length to pass over the poor old world!"

It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that
brightened the faces of the people.  Into this festal season of
the year -- as it already was, and continued to be during the
greater part of two centuries -- the Puritans compressed whatever
mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human



278 THE SCARLET LETTER



infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that,
for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more
grave than most other communities at a period of general
affliction.

But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which
undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age.  The
persons now in the market-place of Boston had not been born to an
inheritance of Puritanic gloom.  They were native Englishmen,
whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan
epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass,
would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as
the world has ever witnessed.  Had they followed their hereditary
taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events
of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and
processions.  Nor would it have been impracticable, in the
observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation
with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant
embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation, at such
festivals, puts on.  There was some shadow of an attempt of this
kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political
year of the colony commenced.  The dim reflection of a remembered
splendour, a colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what
they had beheld in proud old London -- we will not say at a royal
coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's show -- might be traced in the
customs which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the
annual installation of magistrates.  The fathers and founders of
the commonwealth -- the statesman, the priest, and the soldier --
seemed it a duty then to assume the



THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 279



outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique
style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public and social
eminence.  All came forth to move in procession before the
people's eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple
framework of a government so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes
of rugged industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same
piece and material with their religion.  Here, it is true, were
none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily
have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James
-- no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp
and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to his
music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry
Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred
years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very
broadest sources of mirthful sympathy.  All such professors of
the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly
repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which give law its vitality.  Not the less,
however, the great, honest face of the people smiled -- grimly,
perhaps, but widely too.  Nor were sports wanting, such as the
colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country
fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was
thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the
courage and manliness that were essential in them.  Wrestling
matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire,
were seen here



280 THE SCARLET LETTER



and there about the market-place; in one corner, there was a
friendly bout at quarterstaff; and -- what attracted most
interest of all -- on the platform of the pillory, already so
noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an
exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.  But, much to the
disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off
by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of
permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse
of one of its consecrated places.

It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being
then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring
of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day), that they
would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping, with their
descendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves.  Their
immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants,
wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the
national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not
sufficed to clear it up.  We have yet to learn again the
forgotten art of gaiety.

The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general
tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants,
was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue.  A party of Indians
-- in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deerskin
robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and
armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear -- stood
apart with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what even
the Puritan aspect could attain.  Nor, wild as were these painted



THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 281



barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene.  This
distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners -- a
part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main -- who had
come ashore to see the humours of Election Day.  They were
rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an
immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were confined about
the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and
sustaining always a long knife, and in some instances, a sword.
From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes
which, even in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal
ferocity.  They transgressed without fear or scruple, the rules
of behaviour that were binding on all others: smoking tobacco
under the beadle's very nose, although each whiff would have cost
a townsman a shilling; and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts
of wine or aqua-vitae from pocket flasks, which they freely
tendered to the gaping crowd around them.  It remarkably
characterised the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we
call it, that a licence was allowed the seafaring class, not
merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate
deeds on their proper element.  The sailor of that day would go
near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own.  There could be
little doubt, for instance, that this very ship's crew, though no
unfavourable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been
guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish
commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern
court of justice.

But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very
much at its own will, or subject only



282 THE SCARLET LETTER



to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation
by human law.  The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his
calling and become at once if he chose, a man of probity and
piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his reckless life,
was he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to
traffic or casually associate.  Thus the Puritan elders in their
black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled
not unbenignantly at the clamour and rude deportment of these
jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor
animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old Roger
Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place
in close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable
vessel.

The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far
as apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude.  He
wore a profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his
hat, which was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted
with a feather.  There was a sword at his side and a sword-cut on
his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed
anxious rather to display than hide.  A landsman could hardly
have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them
both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern question
before a magistrate, and probably incurring a fine or
imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks.  As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as
pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.

After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol
ship strolled idly through the market-



THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY 283



place; until happening to approach the spot where Hester Prynne
was standing, he appeared to recognise, and did not hesitate to
address her.  As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a
small vacant area -- a sort of magic circle -- had formed itself
about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one
another at a little distance, none ventured or felt disposed to
intrude.  It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which
the scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own
reserve, and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so
unkindly, withdrawal of her fellow-creatures.  Now, if never
before, it answered a good purpose by enabling Hester and the
seaman to speak together without risk of being overheard; and so
changed was Hester Prynne's repute before the public, that the
matron in town, most eminent for rigid morality, could not have
held such intercourse with less result of scandal than herself.

"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make
ready one more berth than you bargained for!  No fear of scurvy
or ship fever this voyage.  What with the ship's surgeon and this
other doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by
token, as there is a lot of apothecary's stuff aboard, which I
traded for with a Spanish vessel. "

"What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she
permitted to appear.  "Have you another passenger?

"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician
here -- Chillingworth he calls himself -- is minded to try my
cabin-fare with you?  Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he
tells me he



284 THE SCARLET LETTER



is of your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke
of -- he that is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers. "

"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien
of calmness, though in the utmost consternation.  "They have long
dwelt together. "

Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne.
But at that instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself,
standing in the remotest comer of the market-place and smiling on
her; a smile which -- across the wide and bustling square, and
through all the talk and laughter, and various thoughts, moods,
and interests of the crowd -- conveyed secret and fearful
meaning.

XXII



THE PROCESSION



Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and
consider what was practicable to be done in this new and
startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was
heard approaching along a contiguous street.  It denoted the
advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens on its way
towards the meeting-house: where, in compliance with a custom
thus early established, and ever since observed, the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election Sermon.

Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and
stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the
market-place.  First came the music.  It comprised a variety of
instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and
played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object
for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the
multitude -- that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to
the scene of life that passes before the eye.  Little Pearl at
first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the
restless agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence
throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed to be
borne upward like a



286 THE SCARLET LETTER



floating sea-bird on the long heaves and swells of sound.  But
she was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer of the
sunshine on the weapons and bright armour of the military
company, which followed after the music, and formed the honorary
escort of the procession.  This body of soldiery -- which still
sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages
with an ancient and honourable fame -- was composed of no
mercenary materials.  Its ranks were filled with gentlemen who
felt the stirrings of martial impulse, and sought to establish a
kind of College of Arms, where, as in an association of Knights
Templars, they might learn the science, and, so far as peaceful
exercise would teach them, the practices of war.  The high
estimation then placed upon the military character might be seen
in the lofty port of each individual member of the company.  Some
of them, indeed, by their services in the Low Countries and on
other fields of European warfare, had fairly won their title to
assume the name and pomp of soldiership.  The entire array,
moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding over
their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern
display can aspire to equal.

And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind
the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's
eye.  Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty
that made the warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not
absurd.  It was an age when what we call talent had far less
consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce
stability and dignity of character a great deal more.  The people
possessed



THE PROCESSION  287



by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which, in their
descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion,
and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate
of public men.  The change may be for good or ill, and is partly,
perhaps, for both.  In that old day the English settler on these
rude shores -- having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful
rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence
was strong in him -- bestowed it on the white hair and venerable
brow of age -- on long-tried integrity -- on solid wisdom and
sad-coloured experience -- on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gave the idea of permanence, and comes under
the general definition of respectability.  These primitive
statesmen, therefore -- Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham,
and their compeers -- who were elevated to power by the early
choice of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but
distinguished by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of
intellect.  They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of
difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a
line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide.  The traits of
character here indicated were well represented in the square cast
of countenance and large physical development of the new colonial
magistrates.  So far as a demeanour of natural authority was
concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see
these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House
of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.

Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips



188 THE SCARLET LETTER

the religious discourse of the anniversary was expected.  His was
the profession at that era in which intellectual ability
displayed itself far more than in political life; for -- leaving
a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements
powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the
community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service.
Even political power -- as in the case of Increase Mather -- was
within the grasp of a successful priest.

It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never,
since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England
shore, had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and
air with which he kept his pace in the procession.  There was no
feebleness of step as at other times; his frame was not bent, nor
did his hand rest ominously upon his heart.  Yet, if the
clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the
body.  It might be spiritual and imparted to him by angelical
ministrations.  It might be the exhilaration of that potent
cordial which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest
and long-continued thought.  Or perchance his sensitive
temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music that
swelled heaven-ward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave.
Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned
whether Mr. Dimmesdale ever heard the music.  There was his
body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force.  But where
was his mind?  Far and deep in its own region, busying itself,
with preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately
thoughts that were soon to



THE PROCESSION  289



issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing
of what was around him; but the spiritual element took up the
feeble frame and carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and
converting it to spirit like itself.  Men of uncommon intellect,
who have grown morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty
effort, into which they throw the life of many days and then are
lifeless for as many more.

Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary
influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not,
unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly
beyond her reach.  One glance of recognition she had imagined
must needs pass between them.  She thought of the dim forest,
with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and the
mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand-in-hand, they had mingled
their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the
brook.  How deeply had they known each other then!  And was this
the man?  She hardly knew him now!  He, moving proudly past,
enveloped as it were, in the rich music, with the procession of
majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his
worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him!  Her
spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and
that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond
betwixt the clergyman and herself.  And thus much of woman was
there in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him -- least of
all now, when the heavy footstep of their



290     THE SCARLET LETTER



approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!  -- for
being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual
world -- while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold
hands, and found him not.

Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or
herself felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen
around the minister.  While the procession passed, the child was
uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of
taking flight.  When the whole had gone by, she looked up into
Hester's face --

"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by
the brook?"

"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother.  "We
must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in
the forest. "

"I could not be sure that it was he -- so strange he looked,"
continued the child.  "Else I would have run to him, and bid him
kiss me now, before all the people, even as he did yonder among
the dark old trees.  What would the minister have said, mother?
Would he have clapped his hand over his heart, and scowled on me,
and bid me begone?"

"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was
no time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the
market-place?  Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not
speak to him!"

Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr.
Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person whose eccentricities --
insanity, as we should term



THE PROCESSION  291



it -- led her to do what few of the townspeople would have
ventured on -- to begin a conversation with the wearer of the
scarlet letter in public.  It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed
in great magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher,
a gown of rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to
see the procession.  As this ancient lady had the renown (which
subsequently cost her no less a price than her life) of being a
principal actor in all the works of necromancy that were
continually going forward, the crowd gave way before her, and
seemed to fear the touch of her garment, as if it carried the
plague among its gorgeous folds.  Seen in conjunction with Hester
Prynne -- kindly as so many now felt towards the latter -- the
dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins had doubled, and caused a
general movement from that part of the market-place in which the
two women stood.

"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?" whispered the
old lady confidentially to Hester.  "Yonder divine man!  That
saint on earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as -- I must
needs say -- he really looks!  Who, now, that saw him pass in the
procession, would think how little while it is since he went
forth out of his study -- chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in
his mouth, I warrant -- to take an airing in the forest!  Aha!
we know what that means, Hester Prynne!  But truly, forsooth, I
find it hard to believe him the same man.  Many a church member
saw I, walking behind the music, that has danced in the same
measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an
Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with



291   THE SCARLET LETTER



us!  That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the world.  But
this minister.  Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he was
the same man that encountered thee on the forest path?"

"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne,
feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely
startled and awe-stricken by the confidence with which she
affirmed a personal connexion between so many persons (herself
among them) and the Evil One.  "It is not for me to talk lightly
of a learned and pious minister of the Word, like the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale. "

"Fie, woman -- fie!" cried the old lady, shaking her finger at
Hester.  "Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many
times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there?
Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands which they wore while
they danced be left in their hair!  I know thee, Hester, for I
behold the token.  We may all see it in the sunshine!  and it
glows like a red flame in the dark.  Thou wearest it openly, so
there need be no question about that.  But this minister!  Let me
tell thee in thine ear!  When the Black Man sees one of his own
servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters
so that the mark shall be disclosed, in open daylight, to the
eyes of all the world!  What is that the minister seeks to hide,
with his hand always over his heart?  Ha, Hester Prynne?"

"What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?" eagerly asked little Pearl.
"Hast thou seen it?"



THE PROCESSION  293



"No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence.  "Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or
another.  They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince
of Air!  Wilt thou ride with me some fine night to see thy
father?  Then thou shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his
hand over his heart!"

Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the
weird old gentlewoman took her departure.

By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
were heard commencing his discourse.  An irresistible feeling
kept Hester near the spot.  As the sacred edifice was too much
thronged to admit another auditor, she took up her position close
beside the scaffold of the pillory.  It was in sufficient
proximity to bring the whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of
an indistinct but varied murmur and flow of the minister's very
peculiar voice.

This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the
preacher spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the
mere tone and cadence.  Like all other music, it breathed passion
and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to
the human heart, wherever educated.  Muffled as the sound was by
its passage through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened with
such intenseness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon
had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its
indistinguishable



294 THE SCARLET LETTER



words.  These, perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been
only a grosser medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense.  Now
she caught the low undertone, as of the wind sinking down to
repose itself; then ascended with it, as it rose through
progressive gradations of sweetness and power, until its volume
seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and solemn
grandeur.  And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there
was for ever in it an essential character of plaintiveness.  A
loud or low expression of anguish -- the whisper, or the shriek,
as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a
sensibility in every bosom!  At times this deep strain of pathos
was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard sighing amid a
desolate silence.  But even when the minister's voice grew high
and commanding -- when it gushed irrepressibly upward -- when it
assumed its utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church
as to burst its way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself
in the open air -- still, if the auditor listened intently, and
for the purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain.  What was
it?  The complaint of a human heart, sorrow-laden, perchance
guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the
great heart of mankind; beseeching its sympathy or forgiveness,
-- at every moment, -- in each accent, -- and never in vain!  It
was this profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman
his most appropriate power.

During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of
the scaffold.  If the minister's voice had not kept her there,
there would, nevertheless, have



THE PROCESSION  295



been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the
first hour of her life of ignominy.  There was a sense within her
-- too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on
her mind -- that her whole orb of life, both before and after,
was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it
unity.

Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place.  She made the
sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as
a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky
foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid
the twilight of the clustering leaves.  She had an undulating,
but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement.  It indicated the
restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly
indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon
and vibrated with her mother's disquietude.  Whenever Pearl saw
anything to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she
flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or
thing as her own property, so far as she desired it, but without
yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in
requital.  The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none
the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from
the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone
through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity.  She
ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew conscious
of a nature wilder than his own.  Thence, with native audacity,
but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew into the



296 THE SCARLET LETTER



midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild men of the
ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they gazed
wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the
sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted
with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in the
night-time.

One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had spoken
to Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that he
attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss.
Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a humming-bird
in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain that was twisted
about it, and threw it to the child.  Pearl immediately twined it
around her neck and waist with such happy skill, that, once seen
there, it became a part of her, and it was difficult to imagine
her without it.

"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the
seaman, "Wilt thou carry her a message from me?"

"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.

"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the
black-a-visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to
bring his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him.  So
let thy mother take no thought, save for herself and thee.  Wilt
thou tell her this, thou witch-baby?"

"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!" cried
Pearl, with a naughty smile.  "If thou callest me that ill-name,
I shall tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship with a
tempest!"



THE PROCESSION   297



Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child
returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had
said.  Hester's strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost
sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an
inevitable doom, which at the moment when a passage seemed to
open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of
misery -- showed itself with an unrelenting smile, right in the
midst of their path.

With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to
another trial.  There were many people present from the country
round about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to
whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated
rumours, but who had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes.
These, after exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged
about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness.
Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not bring them nearer
than a circuit of several yards.  At that distance they
accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal force of the
repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired.  The whole gang of
sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and
learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their
sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring.  Even the
Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's
curiosity and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their
snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom, conceiving, perhaps,
that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered badge must



298 THE SCARLET LETTER



needs be a personage of high dignity among her people Lastly, the
inhabitants of the town (their own interest in this worn-out
subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what they saw
others feel) lounged idly to the same quarter, and tormented
Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool,
well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame.  Hester saw and
recognized the selfsame faces of that group of matrons, who had
awaited her forthcoming from the prison-door seven years ago; all
save one, the youngest and only compassionate among them, whose
burial-robe she had since made.  At the final hour, when she was
so soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had strangely
become the centre of more remark and excitement, and was thus
made to sear her breast more painfully, than at any time since
the first day she put it on.

While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the
cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for
ever, the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred
pulpit upon an audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to
his control.  The sainted minister in the church!  The woman of
the scarlet letter in the marketplace!  What imagination would
have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching
stigma was on them both!

XXIII.





THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET



LETTER





The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience
had been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at
length came to a pause.  There was a momentary silence, profound
as what should follow the utterance of oracles.  Then ensued a
murmur and half-hushed tumult, as if the auditors, released from
the high spell that had transported them into the region of
another's mind, were returning into themselves, with all their
awe and wonder still heavy on them.  In a moment more the crowd
began to gush forth from the doors of the church.  Now that there
was an end, they needed more breath, more fit to support the
gross and earthly life into which they relapsed, than that
atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame,
and had burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought.

In the open air their rapture broke into speech.  The street and
the market-place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with
applauses of the minister.  His hearers could not rest until they
had told one another of what each knew better than he could tell
or hear.



300 THE SCARLET LETTER



According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so
wise, so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day;
nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more
evidently than it did through his.  Its influence could be seen,
as it were, descending upon him, and possessing him, and
continually lifting him out of the written discourse that lay
before him, and filling him with ideas that must have been as
marvellous to himself as to his audience, His subject, it
appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the
communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New
England which they were here planting in the wilderness.  And, as
he drew towards the close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon
him, constraining him to its purpose as mightily as the old
prophets of Israel were constrained, only with this difference,
that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin
on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and
glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord.  But,
throughout it all, and through the whole discourse, there had
been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could not be
interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to
pass away.  Yes; their minister whom they so loved -- and who so
loved them all, that he could not depart heavenward without a
sigh -- had the foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would
soon leave them in their tears.  This idea of his transitory stay
on earth gave the last emphasis to the effect which the preacher
had produced; it was if an angel, in his passage to the skies,
had shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant -- at
once a shadow and a



THE REVELATION  301



splendour -- and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon
them.

Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale -- as to
most men, in their various spheres, though seldom recognised
until they see it far behind them -- an epoch of life more
brilliant and full of triumph than any previous one, or than any
which could hereafter be.  He stood, at this moment, on the very
proudest eminence of superiority, to which the gifts or
intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of
whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England's
earliest days, when the professional character was of itself a
lofty pedestal.  Such was the position which the minister
occupied, as he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the
pulpit at the close of his Election Sermon.  Meanwhile Hester
Prynne was standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the
scarlet letter still burning on her breast!

Now was heard again the clamour of the music, and the measured
tramp of the military escort issuing from the church door.  The
procession was to be marshalled thence to the town hall, where a
solemn banquet would complete the ceremonies of the day.

Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers
were seen moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew
back reverently, on either side, as the Governor and magistrates,
the old and wise men, the holy ministers, and all that were
eminent and renowned, advanced into the midst of them.  When they
were fairly in the marketplace, their presence was greeted by a
shout.  This -- though doubtless it might acquire additional
force and



302  THE SCARLET LETTER



volume from the child-like loyalty which the age awarded to its
rulers -- was felt to be an irrepressible outburst of enthusiasm
kindled in the auditors by that high strain of eloquence which
was yet reverberating in their ears.  Each felt the impulse in
himself, and in the same breath, caught it from his neighbour.
Within the church, it had hardly been kept down; beneath the sky
it pealed upward to the zenith.  There were human beings enough,
and enough of highly wrought and symphonious feeling to produce
that more impressive sound than the organ tones of the blast, or
the thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that mighty swell of
many voices, blended into one great voice by the universal
impulse which makes likewise one vast heart out of the many.
Never, from the soil of New England had gone up such a shout!
Never, on New England soil had stood the man so honoured by his
mortal brethren as the preacher!

How fared it with him, then?  Were there not the brilliant
particles of a halo in the air about his head?  So etherealised
by spirit as he was, and so apotheosised by worshipping admirers,
did his footsteps, in the procession, really tread upon the dust
of earth?

As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all
eyes were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to
approach among them.  The shout died into a murmur, as one
portion of the crowd after another obtained a glimpse of him.
How feeble and pale he looked, amid all his triumph!  The energy
-- or say, rather, the inspiration which had held him up, until
he should have



THE REVELATION  303



delivered the sacred message that had brought its own strength
along with it from heaven -- was withdrawn, now that it had so
faithfully performed its office.  The glow, which they had just
before beheld burning on his cheek, was extinguished, like a
flame that sinks down hopelessly among the late decaying embers.
It seemed hardly the face of a man alive, with such a death-like
hue: it was hardly a man with life in him, that tottered on his
path so nervously, yet tottered, and did not fall!

One of his clerical brethren -- it was the venerable John Wilson
-- observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the
retiring wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward
hastily to offer his support.  The minister tremulously, but
decidedly, repelled the old man's arm.  He still walked onward,
if that movement could be so described, which rather resembled
the wavering effort of an infant, with its mother's arms in view,
outstretched to tempt him forward.  And now, almost imperceptible
as were the latter steps of his progress, he had come opposite
the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold, where, long
since, with all that dreary lapse of time between, Hester Prynne
had encountered the world's ignominious stare.  There stood
Hester, holding little Pearl by the hand!  And there was the
scarlet letter on her breast!  The minister here made a pause;
although the music still played the stately and rejoicing march
to which the procession moved.  It summoned him onward -- inward
to the festival!  -- but here he made a pause.

Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye
upon him.  He now left his own place in





304 THE SCARLET LETTER



the procession, and advanced to give assistance judging, from Mr.
Dimmesdale's aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall.  But
there was something in the latter's expression that warned back
the magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the vague
intimations that pass from one spirit to another.  The crowd,
meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder.  This earthly
faintness, was, in their view, only another phase of the
minister's celestial strength; nor would it have seemed a miracle
too high to be wrought for one so holy, had he ascended before
their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading at last into
the light of heaven!

He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms.

"Hester," said he, "come hither!  Come, my little Pearl!"

It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was
something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it.  The
child, with the bird-like motion, which was one of her
characteristics, flew to him, and clasped her arms about his
knees.  Hester Prynne -- slowly, as if impelled by inevitable
fate, and against her strongest will -- likewise drew near, but
paused before she reached him.  At this instant old Roger
Chillingworth thrust himself through the crowd -- or, perhaps, so
dark, disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of some
nether region -- to snatch back his victim from what he sought to
do!  Be that as it might, the old man rushed forward, and caught
the minister by the arm.

"Madman, hold!  what is your purpose?" whispered



THE REVELATION  305



he.  "Wave back that woman!  Cast off this child All shall be
well!  Do not blacken your fame, and perish in dishonour!  I can
yet save you!  Would you bring infamy on your sacred profession?"

"Ha, tempter!  Methinks thou art too late!" answered the
minister, encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly.  "Thy
power is not what it was!  With God's help, I shall escape thee
now!"

He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.

"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the
name of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at
this last moment, to do what -- for my own heavy sin and
miserable agony -- I withheld myself from doing seven years ago,
come hither now, and twine thy strength about me!  Thy strength,
Hester; but let it be guided by the will which God hath granted
me!  This wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all
his might!  -- with all his own might, and the fiend's!  Come,
Hester -- come!  Support me up yonder scaffold. "

The crowd was in a tumult.  The men of rank and dignity, who
stood more immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by
surprise, and so perplexed as to the purport of what they saw --
unable to receive the explanation which most readily presented
itself, or to imagine any other -- that they remained silent and
inactive spectators of the judgement which Providence seemed
about to work.  They beheld the minister, leaning on Hester's
shoulder, and supported by her arm around him, approach the
scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the little



306 THE SCARLET LETTER



hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his.  Old Roger
Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the
drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and
well entitled, therefore to be present at its closing scene.

"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he looking darkly
at the clergyman, "there was no one place so secret -- no high
place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me -- save
on this very scaffold!"

"Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!" answered the minister.


Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester, with an expression of
doubt and anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed,
that there was a feeble smile upon his lips.

"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in
the forest?"

I know not!  I know not!" she hurriedly replied "Better?  Yea; so
we may both die, and little Pearl die with us!"

"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the
minister; "and God is merciful!  Let me now do the will which He
hath made plain before my sight.  For, Hester, I am a dying man.
So let me make haste to take my shame upon me!"

Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of little
Pearl's, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and
venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his brethren;
to the people, whose great heart was thoroughly appalled yet
overflowing with tearful sympathy, as knowing that some deep
life-matter -- which, if full of sin, was



THE REVELATION  307



full of anguish and repentance likewise -- was now to be laid
open to them.  The sun, but little past its meridian, shone down
upon the clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he
stood out from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the
bar of Eternal Justice.

"People of New England!" cried he, with a voice that rose over
them, high, solemn, and majestic -- yet had always a tremor
through it, and sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a
fathomless depth of remorse and woe -- "ye, that have loved me!
-- ye, that have deemed me holy!  -- behold me here, the one
sinner of the world!  At last -- at last!  -- I stand upon the
spot where, seven years since, I should have stood, here, with
this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I
have crept hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful moment, from
grovelling down upon my face!  Lo, the scarlet letter which
Hester wears!  Ye have all shuddered at it!  Wherever her walk
hath been -- wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hoped
to find repose -- it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible
repugnance round about her.  But there stood one in the midst of
you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!"

It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the
remainder of his secret undisclosed.  But he fought back the
bodily weakness -- and, still more, the faintness of heart --
that was striving for the mastery with him.  He threw off all
assistance, and stepped passionately forward a pace before the
woman and the children.

"It was on him!" he continued, with a kind of



308 THE SCARLET LETTER



fierceness; so determined was he to speak out tile whole.  "God's
eye beheld it!  The angels were for ever pointing at it!  (The
Devil knew it well, and fretted it continually with the touch of
his burning finger!) But he hid it cunningly from men, and walked
among you with the mien of a spirit, mournful, because so pure in
a sinful world!  -- and sad, because he missed his heavenly
kindred!  Now, at the death-hour, he stands up before you!  He
bids you look again at Hester's scarlet letter!  He tells you,
that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of
what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red
stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost
heart!  Stand any here that question God's judgment on a sinner!
Behold!  Behold, a dreadful witness of it!"

With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from
before his breast.  It was revealed!  But it were irreverent to
describe that revelation.  For an instant, the gaze of the
horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly
miracle; while the minister stood, with a flush of triumph in his
face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a
victory.  Then, down he sank upon the scaffold!  Hester partly
raised him, and supported his head against her bosom.  Old Roger
Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull
countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed,

"Thou hast escaped me!" he repeated more than once.  "Thou hast
escaped me!"

"May God forgive thee!" said the minister.  "Thou, too, hast
deeply sinned!"



THE REVELATION    309



He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on
the woman and the child.

"My little Pearl," said he, feebly and there was a sweet and
gentle smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep
repose; nay, now that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as
if he would be sportive with the child -- "dear little Pearl,
wilt thou kiss me now?  Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest!
But now thou wilt?"

Pearl kissed his lips.  A spell was broken.  The great scene of
grief, in which the wild infant bore a part had developed all her
sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they
were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow,
nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it.
Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish
was fulfilled.

"Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell!"

"Shall we not meet again?" whispered she, bending her face down
close to his.  "Shall we not spend our immortal life together?
Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!
Thou lookest far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes!
Then tell me what thou seest!"

"Hush, Hester -- hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity.  "The
law we broke I -- the sin here awfully revealed!  -- let these
alone be in thy thoughts!  I fear!  I fear!  It may be, that,
when we forgot our God -- when we violated our reverence each for
the other's soul -- it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could
meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion.  God knows;
and He is merciful!  He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my
afflictions.  By



310 THE SCARLET LETTER



giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast!  By
sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture
always at red-heat!  By bringing me hither, to die this death of
triumphant ignominy before the people!  Had either of these
agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever!  Praised be His
name!  His will be done!  Farewell!"

That final word came forth with the minister's expiring breath.
The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep
voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance,
save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed
spirit.

XXIV.





CONCLUSION





After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange
their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was
more than one account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.


Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of
the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER -- the very semblance of
that worn by Hester Prynne -- imprinted in the flesh.  As
regarded its origin there were various explanations, all of which
must necessarily have been conjectural.  Some affirmed that the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne
first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance
-- which he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out
-- by inflicting a hideous torture on himself.  Others contended
that the stigma had not been produced until a long time
subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent
necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic
and poisonous drugs.  Others, again and those best able to
appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful
operation of his spirit upon the body -- whispered their belief,
that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active



312    THE SCARLET LETTER



tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at
last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible
presence of the letter.  The reader may choose among these
theories.  We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the
portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase
its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation has
fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were
spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have
removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that
there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a
new-born infant's.  Neither, by their report, had his dying words
acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any -- the slightest --
connexion on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had
so long worn the scarlet letter.  According to these
highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was
dying -- conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude
placed him already among saints and angels -- had desired, by
yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to
express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of
man's own righteousness.  After exhausting life in his efforts
for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death
a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and
mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are
sinners all alike.  It was to teach them, that the holiest
amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as to
discern more clearly the Mercy which



CONCLUSION  313



looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human
merit, which would look aspiringly upward.  Without disputing a
truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version
of Mr. Dimmesdale's story as only an instance of that stubborn
fidelity with which a man's friends -- and especially a
clergyman's -- will sometimes uphold his character, when proofs,
clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish
him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.

The authority which we have chiefly followed -- a manuscript of
old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some
of whom had known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the tale
from contemporary witnesses fully confirms the view taken in the
foregoing pages.  Among many morals which press upon us from the
poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a
sentence: -- "Be true!  Be true!  Be true!  Show freely to the
world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be
inferred!"

Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place,
almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale's death, in the
appearance and demeanour of the old man known as Roger
Chillingworth.  All his strength and energy -- all his vital and
intellectual force -- seemed at once to desert him, insomuch that
he positively withered up, shrivelled away and almost vanished
from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the
sun.  This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to
consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise revenge; and when,
by its completest triumph



314 THE SCARLET LETTER



consummation that evil principle was left with no further
material to support it -- when, in short, there was no more
Devil's work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the
unhumanised mortal to betake himself whither his master would
find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly.  But, to all
these shadowy beings, so long our near acquaintances -- as well
Roger Chillingworth as his companions we would fain be merciful.
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether
hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.  Each, in its
utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and
heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the
food of his affections and spiritual fife upon another: each
leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater,
forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his subject.
Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem
essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a
celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow.  In
the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister -- mutual
victims as they have been -- may, unawares, have found their
earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden
love.

Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to
communicate to the reader.  At old Roger Chillingworth's decease,
(which took place within the year), and by his last will and
testament, of which Governor Bellingham and the Reverend Mr.
Wilson were executors, he bequeathed a very considerable amount
of property, both here and in England to little Pearl, the
daughter of Hester Prynne.



CONCLUSION  315



So Pearl -- the elf child -- the demon offspring, as some people
up to that epoch persisted in considering her -- became the
richest heiress of her day in the New World.  Not improbably this
circumstance wrought a very material change in the public
estimation; and had the mother and child remained here, little
Pearl at a marriageable period of life might have mingled her
wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among them
all.  But, in no long time after the physician's death, the
wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with
her.  For many years, though a vague report would now and then
find its way across the sea -- like a shapeless piece of
driftwood tossed ashore with the initials of a name upon it --
yet no tidings of them unquestionably authentic were received.
The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend.  Its spell,
however, was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the
poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the sea-shore
where Hester Prynne had dwelt.  Near this latter spot, one
afternoon some children were at play, when they beheld a tall
woman in a gray robe approach the cottage-door.  In all those
years it had never once been opened; but either she unlocked it
or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she glided
shadow-like through these impediments -- and, at all events, went
in.

On the threshold she paused -- turned partly round -- for
perchance the idea of entering alone and all so changed, the home
of so intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than
even she could bear.  But her hesitation was only for an instant,
though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast.



316 THE SCARLET LETTER



And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken
shame!  But where was little Pearl?  If still alive she must now
have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood.  None knew
-- nor ever learned with the fulness of perfect certainty --
whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave;
or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued
and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness.  But through the
remainder of Hester's life there were indications that the
recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest
with some inhabitant of another land.  Letters came, with
armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English
heraldry.  In the cottage there were articles of comfort and
luxury such as Hester never cared to use, but which only wealth
could have purchased and affection have imagined for her.  There
were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a
continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate
fingers at the impulse of a fond heart And once Hester was seen
embroidering a baby-garment with such a lavish richness of golden
fancy as would have raised a public tumult had any infant thus
apparelled, been shown to our sober-hued community.

In fine, the gossips of that day believed -- and Mr. Surveyor
Pue, who made investigations a century later, believed -- and one
of his recent successors in office, moreover, faithfully believes
-- that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy, and
mindful of her mother; and that she would most joyfully have
entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.



CONCLUSION  317



But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New
England, that in that unknown region where Pearl had found a
home.  Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet
to be her penitence.  She had returned, therefore, and resumed of
her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron
period would have imposed it -- resumed the symbol of which we
have related so dark a tale.  Never afterwards did it quit her
bosom.  But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and
self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet letter
ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and
bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over,
and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too.  And, as Hester
Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own
profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and
perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself
gone through a mighty trouble.  Women, more especially -- in the
continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged,
misplaced, or erring and sinful passion -- or with the dreary
burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought came
to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and
what the remedy!  Hester comforted and counselled them, as best
she might.  She assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at
some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for
it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order
to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer
ground of mutual happiness.  Earlier in life, Hester had vainly
imagined that she herself might be the destined



318 THE SCARLET LETTER

prophetess, but had long since recognised the impossibility that
any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to
a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened
with a life-long sorrow.  The angel and apostle of the coming
revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and
beautiful, and wise; moreover, not through dusky grief, but the
ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make
us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end.


So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the
scarlet letter.  And, after many, many years, a new grave was
delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside
which King's Chapel has since been built.  It was near that old
and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the
two sleepers had no right to mingle.  Yet one tomb-stone served
for both.  All around, there were monuments carved with armorial
bearings; and on this simple slab of slate -- as the curious
investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the
purport -- there appeared the semblance of an engraved
escutcheon.  It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may
serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded
legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing
point of light gloomier than the shadow: --



"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"