Nathaniel Hawthorne/Nathaniel Hawthorne.iso/pc/articles/a1/t0014

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                                                         XII                                                   167
                                             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 hour 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 of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled
the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude
which had stood as eyewitnesses 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 gray of the midnight. But the town was all asleep. There
was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so pleased
him, until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than that the
dank and chill night-air would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints
with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby
defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon. No
eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his
closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it
but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul
trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while
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fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the
impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own
sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably
drew him back, with her tremulous, gripe just when the other impulse had
hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what right
had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-
nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to
exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at
once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet
continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same
inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.
     And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation,
Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the
universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his
heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the
gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort of his will,
or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing
through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and
reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils,
detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the
sound, and were bandying it to and fro.
     "It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands.
"The whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!"
     But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater
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power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town did not
awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for
something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches; whose voices, at
that period, were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely cottages,
as they rode with Satan through the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing
no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At
one of the chamber-windows of Governor Bellingham's mansion, which
stood at some distance, on the line of another street, he beheld the
appearance of the old magistrate himself, with a lamp in his hand, a white
night-cap on his head, and a long white gown enveloping his figure. He
looked like a ghost, evoked unseasonably from the grave. The cry had
evidently startled him. At another window of the same house, moreover,
appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor's sister, also with a lamp,
which, even thus far off, revealed the expression of her sour and
discontented face. She thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked
anxiously upward. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-
lady had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its
multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the clamor of the fiends and
night-hags, with whom she was well known to make excursions into 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,
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nevertheless, he could see but little farther than he might into a mill-stone--
retired from the window.
     The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon
greeted by a little, glimmering light, which, at first a long way off, was
approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition on here a post,
and there a garden-fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and there a
pump, with its full trough of water, and here, again, an arched door of oak,
with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the door-step. The Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly convinced
that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in the footsteps which
he now heard; and that the gleam of the lantern would fall upon him, in a
few moments more, and reveal his long-hidden secret. As the light drew
nearer, he beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman,--or,
to speak more accurately, his professional father, as well as highly valued
friend,--the Reverend Mr. Wilson; who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now
conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some dying man. And so he
had. The good old minister came freshly from the death-chamber of
Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within that very
hour. And now, surrounded, like the saint-like personages 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
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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 were going mad.
     As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern
before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly restrain himself
from speaking.
     "A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson! Come up hither, I
pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me?"
     Good heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant,
he believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered only
within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to step
slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before ins feet, and
never once turning his head towards the guilty platform. When the light of
the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister discovered, by
the faintness which came over him, that the last few moments had been a
crisis of terrible anxiety; although his mind had made an involuntary effort
to relieve itself by a kind of lurid playfulness.
     Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole in
among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing stiff
with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether he
should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break,
and find him there. The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself. The
earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely
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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's ruff fastened askew; and Mistress Hibbins, with some
twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father
Wilson, too, after spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be
disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither,
likewise, would come the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church,
and the young virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine
for him in their white bosoms; which, now, by the by, 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
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stood!
     Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,
unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of laughter.
It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which,
with a thrill of the heart,--but he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or
pleasure as acute,--he recognized 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 sidewalk, along which
she had been passing.--"It is I, and my little Pearl."
     "Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister. "What sent you
hither?"
     "I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne;--"at
Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe,
and am now going homeward to my dwelling."
     "Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl," said the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale. "Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you.
Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together!"
     She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding little
Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's other hand, and took it.
The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of
new life, other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and
hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were
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communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three
formed an electric chain.
     "Minister!" whispered little Pearl.
     "What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale.
     "Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?"
inquired Pearl.
     "Nay; not so, my little Pearl!" answered the minister; for, with the new
energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so long
been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was already
trembling at the conjunction in which--with a strange joy, nevertheless--he
now found himself. "Not so, my child. I shall, indeed, stand with thy
mother and thee one other day, but not to-morrow!"
     Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister
held it fast.
     "A moment longer, my child!" said he.
     "But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and mother's
hand, to-morrow noontide?"
     "Not then, Pearl," said the minister, "but another time!"
     "And what other time?" persisted the child.
     "At the great judgment day!" whispered the minister,--and, strangely
enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth impelled
him to answer the child so. "Then, and there, before the judgment-seat, thy
mother, and thou, and I, must stand together! But the daylight of this world
shall not see our meeting!"
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     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
stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early
grass springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned
earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined
with green on either side;--all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect
that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world
than they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with his hand
over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering
on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link
between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn
splendor, 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 elfish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and
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pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and
cast his eyes towards the zenith.
     Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less
regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations
from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a
bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian
warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of
crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever
befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of
which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of
this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however,
its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eyewitness, who beheld the
wonder through the colored, magnifying, and distorting medium of his
imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was,
indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in
these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might
not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people's doom upon.
The belief was a favorite 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,
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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 characterized Mr. Dimmesdale's
psychological state, at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward to the
zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl was pointing
her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance
from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him, with the same glance
that discerned the miraculous letter. To his features, 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
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painted on the darkness, after the meteor had vanished, with an effect as if
the street and all things else were at once annihilated.
     "Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with
terror. "I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!"
     She remembered her oath, and was silent.
     "I tell thee, my soul shivers at him," muttered the minister again. "Who
is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless horror
of the man."
     "Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!"
     "Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close to her
lips. "Quickly!--and as low as thou canst whisper."
     Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human
language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing
themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any secret
information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue
unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of
his mind. The elfish 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
noontide!"
     "Worthy Sir," said 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
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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 strange 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-whimseys will grow upon you!"
     "I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.
     With a chill despondency, like one awaking, all nerveless, from an ugly
dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.
     The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse
which was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete
with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it is
said, more souls than one, were brought to the truth by the efficacy of that
sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude towards
Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter. But, as he came down the
pulpit-steps, the gray-bearded sexton met him, holding up a black glove,
which the minister recognized as his own.
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     "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."