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Title: The Scarlet Letter
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Release Date: February, 1992 [eBook #33]
[Most recently updated: December 20, 2021]
Language: English
Produced by: Dartmouth College
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCARLET LETTER ***
The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Contents
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
THE SCARLET LETTER
I. THE PRISON DOOR
II. THE MARKET-PLACE
III. THE RECOGNITION
IV. THE INTERVIEW
V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE
VI. PEARL
VII. THE GOVERNOR’S HALL
VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER
IX. THE LEECH
X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT
XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART
XII. THE MINISTER’S VIGIL
XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER
XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
XV. HESTER AND PEARL
XVI. A FOREST WALK
XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE
XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE
XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY
XXII. THE PROCESSION
XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER
XXIV. CONCLUSION
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
INTRODUCTORY TO “THE SCARLET LETTER”
It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of
myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an
autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession
of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years
since, when I favoured the reader—inexcusably, and for no earthly
reason that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could
imagine—with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an
Old Manse. And now—because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to
find a listener or two on the former occasion—I again seize the public
by the button, and talk of my three years’ experience in a
Custom-House. The example of the famous “P. P., Clerk of this Parish,”
was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however,
that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author
addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take
it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his
schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this,
and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as
could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and
mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on
the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the
writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing
him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak
all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and
utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with
his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and
apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk;
and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness,
we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of
ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent,
and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical,
without violating either the reader’s rights or his own.
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain
propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how
a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as
offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained.
This, in fact—a desire to put myself in my true position as editor, or
very little more, of the most prolix among the tales that make up my
volume—this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal
relation with the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it has
appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together
with some of the characters that move in it, among whom the author
happened to make one.
In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in
the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf—but which is now
burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no
symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way
down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a
Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood—at the head, I
say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and
along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the
track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty
grass—here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very
enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious
edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely
three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or
calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned
vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil,
and not a military, post of Uncle Sam’s government is here established.
Its front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps
descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous
specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before
her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled
thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary
infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears
by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of
her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and
especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against
intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings.
Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this
very moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle;
imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness
of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her
best of moods, and, sooner or later—oftener soon than late—is apt to
fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak,
or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.
The pavement round about the above-described edifice—which we may as
well name at once as the Custom-House of the port—has grass enough
growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn
by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year,
however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a
livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that
period, before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by
itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and
ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin while their
ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of
commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or
four vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or
South America—or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward,
there is a sound of frequent feet passing briskly up and down the
granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet
the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with his vessel’s papers
under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner,
cheerful, sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme
of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that
will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of
incommodities such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here,
likewise—the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn
merchant—we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic
as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master’s ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a
mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor, in
quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble,
seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the captains of
the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the British
provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the alertness of
the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight importance to
our decaying trade.
Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with
other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time
being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently,
however, on ascending the steps, you would discern— in the entry if it
were summer time, or in their appropriate rooms if wintry or inclement
weathers—a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs,
which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes
they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in
voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that
distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings
who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or
anything else but their own independent exertions. These old
gentlemen—seated, like Matthew at the receipt of custom, but not very
liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands—were
Custom-House officers.
Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain
room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height, with
two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid
dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow lane, and
along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of the shops
of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the
doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping,
clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping
of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint;
its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere
fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general
slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which
womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very
infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a
voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged stool beside
it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm;
and—not to forget the library—on some shelves, a score or two of
volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue
laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of
vocal communication with other parts of the edifice. And here, some six
months ago—pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged
stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down
the columns of the morning newspaper—you might have recognised,
honoured reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery
little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the
willow branches on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should
you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco
Surveyor. The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and a
worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.
This old town of Salem—my native place, though I have dwelt much away
from it both in boyhood and maturer years—possesses, or did possess, a
hold on my affection, the force of which I have never realized during
my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical
aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly
with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural
beauty—its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but
only tame—its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the
whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one
end, and a view of the alms-house at the other—such being the features
of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a
sentimental attachment to a disarranged checker-board. And yet, though
invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for Old
Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call
affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged
roots which my family has stuck into the soil. It is now nearly two
centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest
emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and
forest-bordered settlement which has since become a city. And here his
descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly
substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily
be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the
streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the
mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know
what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the
stock, need they consider it desirable to know.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that
first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky
grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can
remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with
the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of
the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on
account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned
progenitor—who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode
the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure,
as a man of war and peace—a stronger claim than for myself, whose name
is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator,
judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits,
both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the
Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an
incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will
last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds,
although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting
spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the
witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon
him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in the
Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not
crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine
bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their
cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy
consequences of them in another state of being. At all events, I, the
present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself
for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have
heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for
many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth
removed.
Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans
would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that,
after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with
so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost
bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would
they recognise as laudable; no success of mine—if my life, beyond its
domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success—would they deem
otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. “What is he?”
murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. “A writer of
story books! What kind of business in life—what mode of glorifying God,
or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation—may that be?
Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!” Such are
the compliments bandied between my great grandsires and myself, across
the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong
traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.
Planted deep, in the town’s earliest infancy and childhood, by these
two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here;
always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known,
disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the
other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable
deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice.
Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, here and
there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the
accumulation of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred
years, they followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each
generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a
boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting
the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his sire and
grandsire. The boy, also in due time, passed from the forecastle to the
cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the
natal earth. This long connexion of a family with one spot, as its
place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being
and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or
moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love but instinct. The
new inhabitant—who came himself from a foreign land, or whose father or
grandfather came—has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no
conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over
whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been embedded. It is no matter that the
place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses,
the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east
wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;—all these, and whatever
faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The
spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an
earthly paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a
destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast
of character which had all along been familiar here—ever, as one
representative of the race lay down in the grave, another assuming, as
it were, his sentry-march along the main street—might still in my
little day be seen and recognised in the old town. Nevertheless, this
very sentiment is an evidence that the connexion, which has become an
unhealthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature will not
flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for
too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My
children have had other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may
be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent,
unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill a place
in Uncle Sam’s brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have
gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It was not the first time, nor
the second, that I had gone away—as it seemed, permanently—but yet
returned, like the bad halfpenny, or as if Salem were for me the
inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine morning I ascended the
flight of granite steps, with the President’s commission in my pocket,
and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in my
weighty responsibility as chief executive officer of the Custom-House.
I doubt greatly—or, rather, I do not doubt at all—whether any public
functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military line,
has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as
myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled
when I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before this epoch,
the independent position of the Collector had kept the Salem
Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes
the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier—New England’s most
distinguished soldier—he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant
services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive
administrations through which he had held office, he had been the
safety of his subordinates in many an hour of danger and heart-quake.
General Miller was radically conservative; a man over whose kindly
nature habit had no slight influence; attaching himself strongly to
familiar faces, and with difficulty moved to change, even when change
might have brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking charge
of my department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient
sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tossed on every sea,
and standing up sturdily against life’s tempestuous blast, had finally
drifted into this quiet nook, where, with little to disturb them,
except the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and
all acquired a new lease of existence. Though by no means less liable
than their fellow-men to age and infirmity, they had evidently some
talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two or three of their number,
as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden,
never dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House during a
large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out
into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they termed
duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves to
bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the
official breath of more than one of these venerable servants of the
republic. They were allowed, on my representation, to rest from their
arduous labours, and soon afterwards—as if their sole principle of life
had been zeal for their country’s service—as I verily believe it
was—withdrew to a better world. It is a pious consolation to me that,
through my interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for
repentance of the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a matter of
course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall. Neither
the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road
to Paradise.
The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their
venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and
though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his
office with any reference to political services. Had it been
otherwise—had an active politician been put into this influential post,
to assume the easy task of making head against a Whig Collector, whose
infirmities withheld him from the personal administration of his
office—hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of
official life within a month after the exterminating angel had come up
the Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such matters,
it would have been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring
every one of those white heads under the axe of the guillotine. It was
plain enough to discern that the old fellows dreaded some such
discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at the same time amused me, to
behold the terrors that attended my advent, to see a furrowed cheek,
weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance
of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another
addressed me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past days, had been
wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten
Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old persons,
that, by all established rule—and, as regarded some of them, weighed by
their own lack of efficiency for business—they ought to have given
place to younger men, more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter
than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I knew it, too, but could
never quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and
deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the
detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my
incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the
Custom-House steps. They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in
their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the
walls; awaking, however, once or twice in the forenoon, to bore one
another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea-stories and
mouldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords and countersigns among
them.
The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had no
great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts and the happy
consciousness of being usefully employed—in their own behalf at least,
if not for our beloved country—these good old gentlemen went through
the various formalities of office. Sagaciously under their spectacles,
did they peep into the holds of vessels. Mighty was their fuss about
little matters, and marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed
greater ones to slip between their fingers Whenever such a mischance
occurred—when a waggon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled
ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious
noses—nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they
proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and
sealing-wax, all the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of a
reprimand for their previous negligence, the case seemed rather to
require an eulogium on their praiseworthy caution after the mischief
had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal
the moment that there was no longer any remedy.
Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish
habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of my
companion’s character, if it have a better part, is that which usually
comes uppermost in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognise
the man. As most of these old Custom-House officers had good traits,
and as my position in reference to them, being paternal and protective,
was favourable to the growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to
like them all. It was pleasant in the summer forenoons—when the fervent
heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely
communicated a genial warmth to their half torpid systems—it was
pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them all
tipped against the wall, as usual; while the frozen witticisms of past
generations were thawed out, and came bubbling with laughter from their
lips. Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the
mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humour,
has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays
upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the
green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is
real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow
of decaying wood.
It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent all
my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place, my
coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their
strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether
superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their evil
stars had cast them. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were
sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good
repair. But, as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there
will be no wrong done if I characterize them generally as a set of
wearisome old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from
their varied experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all the
golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many
opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their
memory with the husks. They spoke with far more interest and unction of
their morning’s breakfast, or yesterday’s, to-day’s, or tomorrow’s
dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years ago, and all the
world’s wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful eyes.
The father of the Custom-House—the patriarch, not only of this little
squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of
tide-waiters all over the United States—was a certain permanent
Inspector. He might truly be termed a legitimate son of the revenue
system, dyed in the wool, or rather born in the purple; since his sire,
a Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had
created an office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of
the early ages which few living men can now remember. This Inspector,
when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts,
and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green that
you would be likely to discover in a lifetime’s search. With his florid
cheek, his compact figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue
coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect,
altogether he seemed—not young, indeed—but a kind of new contrivance of
Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no
business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed
through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and
cackle of an old man’s utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs,
like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. Looking at him
merely as an animal—and there was very little else to look at—he was a
most satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and
wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that extreme age, to
enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever aimed at or
conceived of. The careless security of his life in the Custom-House, on
a regular income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of
removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him.
The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the rare
perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of intellect,
and the very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients;
these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep
the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of
thought, no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities: nothing, in
short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the cheerful
temper which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did duty
very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He had
been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of
twenty children, most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity,
had likewise returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been
sorrow enough to imbue the sunniest disposition through and through
with a sable tinge. Not so with our old Inspector. One brief sigh
sufficed to carry off the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences.
The next moment he was as ready for sport as any unbreeched infant: far
readier than the Collector’s junior clerk, who at nineteen years was
much the elder and graver man of the two.
I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think,
livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to
my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one
point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute
nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no
heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and
yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been
put together that there was no painful perception of deficiency, but,
on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him. It might be
difficult—and it was so—to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so
earthly and sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here,
admitting that it was to terminate with his last breath, had been not
unkindly given; with no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts
of the field, but with a larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and
with all their blessed immunity from the dreariness and duskiness of
age.
One point in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed
brethren was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had
made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His
gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast
meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no
higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual
endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the
delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to
hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher’s meat, and the most
eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of
good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to
bring the savour of pig or turkey under one’s very nostrils. There were
flavours on his palate that had lingered there not less than sixty or
seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton
chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him
smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had
long been food for worms. It was marvellous to observe how the ghosts
of bygone meals were continually rising up before him—not in anger or
retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation, and
seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy
and sensual: a tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib
of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey,
which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams,
would be remembered; while all the subsequent experience of our race,
and all the events that brightened or darkened his individual career,
had gone over him with as little permanent effect as the passing
breeze. The chief tragic event of the old man’s life, so far as I could
judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some
twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure, but which,
at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would
make no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with an
axe and handsaw.
But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be glad
to dwell at considerably more length, because of all men whom I have
ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer.
Most persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to hint at,
suffer moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The old
Inspector was incapable of it; and, were he to continue in office to
the end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and sit down to
dinner with just as good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete, but which my comparatively few
opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest
outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General, who,
after his brilliant military service, subsequently to which he had
ruled over a wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty years
before, to spend the decline of his varied and honourable life.
The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his
three-score years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his
earthly march, burdened with infirmities which even the martial music
of his own spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards
lightening. The step was palsied now, that had been foremost in the
charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant, and by leaning
his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and
painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress
across the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace.
There he used to sit, gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at
the figures that came and went, amid the rustle of papers, the
administering of oaths, the discussion of business, and the casual talk
of the office; all which sounds and circumstances seemed but
indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into
his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was
mild and kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy
and interest gleamed out upon his features, proving that there was
light within him, and that it was only the outward medium of the
intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer
you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.
When no longer called upon to speak or listen—either of which
operations cost him an evident effort—his face would briefly subside
into its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold
this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age.
The framework of his nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet
crumpled into ruin.
To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages,
was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in
imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its grey
and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain
almost complete; but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous
with its very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and
neglect, with grass and alien weeds.
Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection—for, slight as
was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of
all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed
so,—I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was marked with
the noble and heroic qualities which showed it to be not a mere
accident, but of good right, that he had won a distinguished name. His
spirit could never, I conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy
activity; it must, at any period of his life, have required an impulse
to set him in motion; but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome,
and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to give
out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which
was not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and flickers in
a blaze; but rather a deep red glow, as of iron in a furnace. Weight,
solidity, firmness—this was the expression of his repose, even in such
decay as had crept untimely over him at the period of which I speak.
But I could imagine, even then, that, under some excitement which
should go deeply into his consciousness—roused by a trumpet’s peal,
loud enough to awaken all of his energies that were not dead, but only
slumbering—he was yet capable of flinging off his infirmities like a
sick man’s gown, dropping the staff of age to seize a battle-sword, and
starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment his
demeanour would have still been calm. Such an exhibition, however, was
but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I
saw in him—as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old
Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile—was the
features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have
amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like
most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was
just as unmalleable or unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of
benevolence which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa or
Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates
any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain men
with his own hand, for aught I know—certainly, they had fallen like
blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe before the charge to which
his spirit imparted its triumphant energy—but, be that as it might,
there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the
down off a butterfly’s wing. I have not known the man to whose innate
kindliness I would more confidently make an appeal.
Many characteristics—and those, too, which contribute not the least
forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch—must have vanished, or been
obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful attributes are
usually the most evanescent; nor does nature adorn the human ruin with
blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and proper nutriment only
in the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the
ruined fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and
beauty, there were points well worth noting. A ray of humour, now and
then, would make its way through the veil of dim obstruction, and
glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom
seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth, was
shown in the General’s fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers.
An old soldier might be supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his
brow; but here was one who seemed to have a young girl’s appreciation
of the floral tribe.
There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while
the Surveyor—though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon
himself the difficult task of engaging him in conversation—was fond of
standing at a distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous
countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few
yards off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair;
unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our hands and
touched his own. It might be that he lived a more real life within his
thoughts than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector’s
office. The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the
flourish of old heroic music, heard thirty years before—such scenes and
sounds, perhaps, were all alive before his intellectual sense.
Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters, the spruce clerks and
uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of his commercial and
Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about him; and
neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to
sustain the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an
old sword—now rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle’s front,
and showed still a bright gleam along its blade—would have been among
the inkstands, paper-folders, and mahogany rulers on the Deputy
Collector’s desk.
There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the
stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier—the man of true and simple
energy. It was the recollection of those memorable words of his—“I’ll
try, Sir”—spoken on the very verge of a desperate and heroic
enterprise, and breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood,
comprehending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our country,
valour were rewarded by heraldic honour, this phrase—which it seems so
easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger and glory
before him, has ever spoken—would be the best and fittest of all
mottoes for the General’s shield of arms.
It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health to
be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike
himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and
abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my
life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fulness
and variety than during my continuance in office. There was one man,
especially, the observation of whose character gave me a new idea of
talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt,
acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all perplexities, and
a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish as by the waving of an
enchanter’s wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House, it was his
proper field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so
harassing to the interloper, presented themselves before him with the
regularity of a perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he
stood as the ideal of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in
himself; or, at all events, the mainspring that kept its variously
revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like this, where its
officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and convenience,
and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the duty to be
performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not
in them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts
steel-filings, so did our man of business draw to himself the
difficulties which everybody met with. With an easy condescension, and
kind forbearance towards our stupidity—which, to his order of mind,
must have seemed little short of crime—would he forth-with, by the
merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as
daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric
friends. His integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him,
rather than a choice or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the
main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and accurate as his
to be honest and regular in the administration of affairs. A stain on
his conscience, as to anything that came within the range of his
vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same way, though to
a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an account, or an
ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word—and it
is a rare instance in my life—I had met with a person thoroughly
adapted to the situation which he held.
Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I
took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown
into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself
seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my
fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren
of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtle influence
of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the
Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen
boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about
pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing
fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s
culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s
hearthstone—it was time, at length, that I should exercise other
faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had
hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as
a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an
evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and
lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether
different qualities, and never murmur at the change.
Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my
regard. I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.
Nature—except it were human nature—the nature that is developed in
earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the
imaginative delight wherewith it had been spiritualized passed away out
of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had not been departed, was
suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been something sad,
unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay
at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might
be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity,
be lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I had
been, without transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my
while to take. But I never considered it as other than a transitory
life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear,
that within no long period, and whenever a new change of custom should
be essential to my good, change would come.
Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as I have
been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of
thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor’s
proportion of those qualities), may, at any time, be a man of affairs,
if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers,
and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought
me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and
probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had
ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for
me if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in
the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen
like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House
officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though it may
often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of
making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means,
to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are
recognized and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that
circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I
especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke;
but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives me pleasure to
reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost me
a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary
talk, it is true, the Naval Officer—an excellent fellow, who came into
the office with me, and went out only a little later—would often engage
me in a discussion about one or the other of his favourite topics,
Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector’s junior clerk, too a young
gentleman who, it was whispered occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle
Sam’s letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards) looked
very much like poetry—used now and then to speak to me of books, as
matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of
lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities.
No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blasoned abroad on
title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue.
The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint,
on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of
all kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities
had paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on
such queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a
name conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I
hope, will never go again.
But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts that had
seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly,
revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of
bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of
literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now
writing.
In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room, in
which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with
panelling and plaster. The edifice—originally projected on a scale
adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea
of subsequent prosperity destined never to be realized—contains far
more space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall,
therefore, over the Collector’s apartments, remains unfinished to this
day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams,
appears still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason. At one
end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one upon
another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of
similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how
many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil had been wasted on
these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and
were hidden away in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at
by human eyes. But then, what reams of other manuscripts—filled, not
with the dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of
inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts—had gone equally
to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their
day, as these heaped-up papers had, and—saddest of all—without
purchasing for their writers the comfortable livelihood which the
clerks of the Custom-House had gained by these worthless scratchings of
the pen. Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local
history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem
might be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants—old King
Derby—old Billy Gray—old Simon Forrester—and many another magnate in
his day, whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb before
his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders of the
greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of Salem
might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their
traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward
to what their children look upon as long-established rank.
Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier
documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been
carried off to Halifax, when all the king’s officials accompanied the
British army in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of
regret with me; for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the
Protectorate, those papers must have contained many references to
forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would have
affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian
arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of
some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish
in the corner, unfolding one and another document, and reading the
names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the
wharves, and those of merchants never heard of now on ’Change, nor very
readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such
matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity—and exerting my fancy, sluggish
with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old
town’s brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem
knew the way thither—I chanced to lay my hand on a small package,
carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope
had the air of an official record of some period long past, when clerks
engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial
materials than at present. There was something about it that quickened
an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the faded red tape that tied
up the package, with the sense that a treasure would here be brought to
light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I found it to
be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in favour
of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of His Majesty’s Customs for the Port
of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have
read (probably in Felt’s “Annals”) a notice of the decease of Mr.
Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper
of recent times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the
little graveyard of St. Peter’s Church, during the renewal of that
edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected
predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel,
and a wig of majestic frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once
adorned, was in very satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the
papers which the parchment commission served to envelop, I found more
traces of Mr. Pue’s mental part, and the internal operations of his
head, than the frizzled wig had contained of the venerable skull
itself.
They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature,
or, at least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his
own hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of
Custom-House lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pue’s death had happened
suddenly, and that these papers, which he probably kept in his official
desk, had never come to the knowledge of his heirs, or were supposed to
relate to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of the archives
to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public concern, was left
behind, and had remained ever since unopened.
The ancient Surveyor—being little molested, I suppose, at that early
day with business pertaining to his office—seems to have devoted some
of his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and
other inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material for
petty activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up with
rust.
A portion of his facts, by-the-by, did me good service in the
preparation of the article entitled “MAIN STREET,” included in the
present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes
equally valuable hereafter, or not impossibly may be worked up, so far
as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for
the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall
be at the command of any gentleman, inclined and competent, to take the
unprofitable labour off my hands. As a final disposition I contemplate
depositing them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that
most drew my attention to the mysterious package was a certain affair
of fine red cloth, much worn and faded, There were traces about it of
gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced, so
that none, or very little, of the glitter was left. It had been
wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework;
and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such
mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be discovered
even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet
cloth—for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to
little other than a rag—on careful examination, assumed the shape of a
letter.
It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb
proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had
been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of
dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honour, and dignity, in
by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent
are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope
of solving. And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened
themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.
Certainly there was some deep meaning in it most worthy of
interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic
symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading
the analysis of my mind.
When thus perplexed—and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the
letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men
used to contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians—I happened to
place it on my breast. It seemed to me—the reader may smile, but must
not doubt my word—it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation
not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if
the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and
involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.
In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto
neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had
been twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find
recorded by the old Surveyor’s pen, a reasonably complete explanation
of the whole affair. There were several foolscap sheets, containing
many particulars respecting the life and conversation of one Hester
Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a noteworthy personage in the
view of our ancestors. She had flourished during the period between the
early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth century.
Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose
oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their
youth, as a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn
aspect. It had been her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go
about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing whatever
miscellaneous good she might; taking upon herself, likewise, to give
advice in all matters, especially those of the heart, by which means—as
a person of such propensities inevitably must—she gained from many
people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was looked
upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying further into the
manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this
singular woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story
entitled “THE SCARLET LETTER”; and it should be borne carefully in mind
that the main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by
the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue. The original papers, together with
the scarlet letter itself—a most curious relic—are still in my
possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever, induced by the
great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them. I must not
be understood affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale, and
imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the
characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within
the limits of the old Surveyor’s half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap. On
the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or
altogether, as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own
invention. What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.
This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track. There
seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if the
ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing
his immortal wig—which was buried with him, but did not perish in the
grave—had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his
port was the dignity of one who had borne His Majesty’s commission, and
who was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so
dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas the hangdog look of a
republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself
less than the least, and below the lowest of his masters. With his own
ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to
me the scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript.
With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred
consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him—who might
reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor—to bring his mouldy
and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. “Do this,” said the
ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so
imposing within its memorable wig; “do this, and the profit shall be
all your own. You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as
it was in mine, when a man’s office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an
heirloom. But I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give
to your predecessor’s memory the credit which will be rightfully due”
And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue—“I will”.
On Hester Prynne’s story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was
the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro
across my room, or traversing, with a hundredfold repetition, the long
extent from the front door of the Custom-House to the side entrance,
and back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the old
Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed
by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning
footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that
the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that
my sole object—and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man could
ever put himself into voluntary motion—was to get an appetite for
dinner. And, to say the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind
that generally blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of
so much indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of
a Custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that,
had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt
whether the tale of “The Scarlet Letter” would ever have been brought
before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would
not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I
did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be
warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my
intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses,
and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous
defiance. “What have you to do with us?” that expression seemed to say.
“The little power you might have once possessed over the tribe of
unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of the public
gold. Go then, and earn your wages!” In short, the almost torpid
creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without
fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched numbness held
possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles
into the country, whenever—which was seldom and reluctantly—I bestirred
myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature which used to give me
such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I stepped
across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the
capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon
me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it
quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted
only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture
forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the
brightening page in many-hued description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility—is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the
little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with
each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that they seem to lose
their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too
small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity
thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker
carriage; the hobby-horse—whatever, in a word, has been used or played
with during the day is now invested with a quality of strangeness and
remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight.
Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral
territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the
Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the
nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here without affrighting us. It
would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we
to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now
sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect
that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had
never once stirred from our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in producing the
effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling,
and a reflected gleam upon the polish of the furniture. This warmer
light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, and
communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness
to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images
into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep
within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished
anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor, and a repetition of all
the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the
actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with
this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream
strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to
write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in
my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the
twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a
gift connected with them—of no great richness or value, but the best I
had—was gone from me.
It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with
writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention, since
scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and
admiration by his marvelous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humourous
colouring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions,
the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in
literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a
folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively
upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist
on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every
moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude
contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been
to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of
to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the
burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true
and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome
incidents, and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The
fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed
dull and commonplace only because I had not fathomed its deeper import.
A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf
presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my
brain wanted the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At
some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments
and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn
to gold upon the page.
These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless
toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of
affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and
essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That
was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted
by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling,
without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at
every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the
fact there could be no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was
led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favourable to the mode of life in question. In some
other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it
here to say that a Custom-House officer of long continuance can hardly
be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one
of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the
very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of
such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.
An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every
individual who has occupied the position—is, that while he leans on the
mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him.
He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his
original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possesses an
unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not
operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The
ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth
betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and
become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually
keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust
out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath
of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity—that his
tempered steel and elasticity are lost—he for ever afterwards looks
wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His
pervading and continual hope—a hallucination, which, in the face of all
discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while
he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera,
torments him for a brief space after death—is, that finally, and in no
long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be
restored to office. This faith, more than anything else, steals the
pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of
undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to
pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the
strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work
for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so
soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of
glittering coin out of his Uncle’s pocket? It is sadly curious to
observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow
with this singular disease. Uncle Sam’s gold—meaning no disrespect to
the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment
like that of the devil’s wages. Whoever touches it should look well to
himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving,
if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force,
its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that
gives the emphasis to manly character.
Here was a fine prospect in the distance. Not that the Surveyor brought
the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly
undone, either by continuance in office or ejectment. Yet my
reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy
and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its
poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already
accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I
could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the
truth, it was my greatest apprehension—as it would never be a measure
of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself; and it being
hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign—it was my chief
trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the
Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector.
Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me,
finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend—to make the
dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an
old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade? A dreary
look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of
happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and
sensibilities. But, all this while, I was giving myself very
unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for me than I
could possibly imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship—to adopt the
tone of “P. P. “—was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency.
It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages
of official life, to view the incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile
administration. His position is then one of the most singularly
irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched
mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on
either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a man
of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the
control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by
whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be
injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness
throughout the contest, to observe the bloodthirstiness that is
developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is
himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature
than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of
inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders, were
a literal fact, instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my
sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were
sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have
thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me—who have been a
calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat—that this
fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished
the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The
Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them,
and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political
warfare, which unless a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness
and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them
generous. They know how to spare when they see occasion; and when they
strike, the axe may be sharp indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned
with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head
which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason
to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side rather than the
triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of
partisans I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be
pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was
it without something like regret and shame that, according to a
reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining
office to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity beyond his nose? My own head was the first
that fell.
The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious
a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the
sufferer will but make the best rather than the worst, of the accident
which has befallen him. In my particular case the consolatory topics
were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested themselves to my
meditations a considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In
view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of
resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should
entertain an idea of committing suicide, and although beyond his hopes,
meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the Custom-House, as before
in the Old Manse, I had spent three years—a term long enough to rest a
weary brain: long enough to break off old intellectual habits, and make
room for new ones: long enough, and too long, to have lived in an
unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor delight to
any human being, and withholding myself from toil that would, at least,
have stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his
unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether
ill-pleased to be recognised by the Whigs as an enemy; since his
inactivity in political affairs—his tendency to roam, at will, in that
broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather than confine
himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same household must
diverge from one another—had sometimes made it questionable with his
brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the
crown of martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it on), the
point might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he
was, it seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the
party with which he had been content to stand than to remain a forlorn
survivor, when so many worthier men were falling: and at last, after
subsisting for four years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to
be compelled then to define his position anew, and claim the yet more
humiliating mercy of a friendly one.
Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a week or
two careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like
Irving’s Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried,
as a political dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real
human being all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had
brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for
the best; and making an investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, had
opened his long-disused writing desk, and was again a literary man.
Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little
space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought
to work upon the tale with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it
wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened by
genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar
influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and
undoubtedly should soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating
effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution,
and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped itself. It is no
indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer’s mind:
for he was happier while straying through the gloom of these sunless
fantasies than at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of
the briefer articles, which contribute to make up the volume, have
likewise been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils
and honours of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from annuals
and magazines, of such antique date, that they have gone round the
circle, and come back to novelty again. Keeping up the metaphor of the
political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS
PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: and the sketch which I am now
bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to
publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who
writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing
on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of
quiet!
The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector—who, by-the-bye, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed
by a horse some time ago, else he would certainly have lived for
ever—he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with him at
the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view: white-headed and
wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung
aside for ever. The merchants—Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton,
Kimball, Bertram, Hunt—these and many other names, which had such
classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,—these men of traffic,
who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world—how little
time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act,
but recollection! It is with an effort that I recall the figures and
appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom
upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it;
as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in
cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses
and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main
street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life; I am a citizen
of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me,
for—though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary
efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a
pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my
forefathers—there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a
literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I
shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need
hardly be said, will do just as well without me.
It may be, however—oh, transporting and triumphant thought—that the
great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of
the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among
the sites memorable in the town’s history, shall point out the locality
of THE TOWN PUMP.
THE SCARLET LETTER
I.
THE PRISON DOOR
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and
others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door
of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it
among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the
virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the
forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the
Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first
burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which
subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in
the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen
or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was
already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which
gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The
rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique
than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime,
it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice,
and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot,
much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly
vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that
had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But
on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a
wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,
which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to
the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came
forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity
and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;
but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so
long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally
overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing,
it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as
she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine.
Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do
otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader.
It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that
may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale
of human frailty and sorrow.
II.
THE MARKET-PLACE
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer
morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty
large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently
fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population,
or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity
that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would
have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened
nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on
whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of
public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character,
an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might
be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his
parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at
the whipping-post. It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other
heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle
or vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s firewater had made riotous
about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the
forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the
bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.
In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on
the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion
and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so
thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public
discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and
cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such
bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our
days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then
be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death
itself.
It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story
begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the
crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal
infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much
refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of
petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and
wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the
throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as
materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old
English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated
from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that
chain of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child
a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter
physical frame, if not character of less force and solidity than her
own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within
less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had
been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were
her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native land, with a
moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their
composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad
shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that
had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or
thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a
boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them
seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in
respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
“Goodwives,” said a hard-featured dame of fifty, “I’ll tell ye a piece
of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof if we women,
being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the
handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye,
gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are
now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as
the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not.”
“People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her
godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal
should have come upon his congregation.”
“The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch—that
is a truth,” added a third autumnal matron. “At the very least, they
should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead.
Madame Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she—the
naughty baggage—little will she care what they put upon the bodice of
her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like
heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!”
“Ah, but,” interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by
the hand, “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be
always in her heart.”
“What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown
or the flesh of her forehead?” cried another female, the ugliest as
well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. “This woman
has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die; is there not law for
it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then
let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if
their own wives and daughters go astray.”
“Mercy on us, goodwife!” exclaimed a man in the crowd, “is there no
virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the
gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush now, gossips for the lock
is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself.”
The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared, in
the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim
and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and
his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and
represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic
code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and
closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official
staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young
woman, whom he thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the
prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity
and force of character, and stepped into the open air as if by her own
free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months
old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid
light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it
acquaintance only with the grey twilight of a dungeon, or other
darksome apartment of the prison.
When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed
before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant
closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection,
as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or
fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one
token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the
baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and
a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople
and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth,
surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of
gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and
with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had
all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which
she wore, and which was of a splendour in accordance with the taste of
the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary
regulations of the colony.
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large
scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the
sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from
regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the
impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was
ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those
days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the
delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised
as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike,
in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the
prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her
dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even
startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the
misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true
that, to a sensitive observer, there was some thing exquisitely painful
in it. Her attire, which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion in
prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express
the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by
its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all
eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer—so that both men and
women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now
impressed as if they beheld her for the first time—was that SCARLET
LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It
had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations
with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
“She hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain,” remarked one of
her female spectators; “but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy,
contrive such a way of showing it? Why, gossips, what is it but to
laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of
what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?”
“It were well,” muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, “if we
stripped Madame Hester’s rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for
the red letter which she hath stitched so curiously, I’ll bestow a rag
of mine own rheumatic flannel to make a fitter one!”
“Oh, peace, neighbours—peace!” whispered their youngest companion; “do
not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she
has felt it in her heart.”
The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff. “Make way, good
people—make way, in the King’s name!” cried he. “Open a passage; and I
promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child
may have a fair sight of her brave apparel from this time till an hour
past meridian. A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts,
where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madame
Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place!”
A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded
by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed
men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the
place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious
schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it
gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads
continually to stare into her face and at the winking baby in her arms,
and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance,
in those days, from the prison door to the market-place. Measured by
the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of
some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent
an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if
her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and
trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike
marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the
intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the
pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore,
Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a
sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It
stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston’s earliest church, and
appeared to be a fixture there.
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which
now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and
traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as
effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was
the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the
platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that
instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in
its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal
of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood
and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common
nature—whatever be the delinquencies of the individual—no outrage more
flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it
was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne’s instance,
however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore that she
should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing
that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to
which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing
well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus
displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man’s
shoulders above the street.
Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen
in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and
with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of
Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one
another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but
only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose
infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest
sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that
the world was only the darker for this woman’s beauty, and the more
lost for the infant that she had borne.
The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest
the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society
shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it.
The witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet passed beyond
their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had
that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none
of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a
theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a
disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been
repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less
dignified than the governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a
general, and the ministers of the town, all of whom sat or stood in a
balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such
personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking
the majesty, or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be
inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest
and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The
unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the
heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and
concentrated at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an
impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter
the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in
every variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible
in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to
behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment,
and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the
multitude—each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child,
contributing their individual parts—Hester Prynne might have repaid
them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden
infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if
she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast
herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the
most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least,
glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped
and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was
preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this
roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the western
wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the
brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling
and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish
quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came
swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was
gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as
another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play.
Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself
by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight
and hardness of the reality.
Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view
that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had
been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable
eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her
paternal home: a decayed house of grey stone, with a poverty-stricken
aspect, but retaining a half obliterated shield of arms over the
portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father’s face, with
its bold brow, and reverend white beard that flowed over the
old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother’s, too, with the look of
heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and
which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a
gentle remonstrance in her daughter’s pathway. She saw her own face,
glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the
dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she beheld
another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin,
scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp-light that
had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same
bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their
owner’s purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and
the cloister, as Hester Prynne’s womanly fancy failed not to recall,
was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the
right. Next rose before her in memory’s picture-gallery, the intricate
and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge cathedrals,
and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of
a continental city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion
with the misshapen scholar: a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn
materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in
lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the
Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and levelling
their stern regards at Hester Prynne—yes, at herself—who stood on the
scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in
scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.
Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that
it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet
letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the
infant and the shame were real. Yes these were her realities—all else
had vanished!
III.
THE RECOGNITION
From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and
universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length
relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which
irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian in his native
garb was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent
visitors of the English settlements that one of them would have
attracted any notice from Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would
he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the
Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood
a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage
costume.
He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which as yet could
hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his
features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it
could not fail to mould the physical to itself and become manifest by
unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of
his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate the
peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of
this man’s shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first
instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the
figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a force
that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not
seem to hear it.
At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him,
the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly at
first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom
external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear
relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look
became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across
his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one
little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His
face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so
instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a
single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a
brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally
subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of
Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to
recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture
with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.
Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him, he
addressed him in a formal and courteous manner:
“I pray you, good Sir,” said he, “who is this woman?—and wherefore is
she here set up to public shame?”
“You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,” answered the
townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion,
“else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne and her
evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly
Master Dimmesdale’s church.”
“You say truly,” replied the other; “I am a stranger, and have been a
wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by
sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk
to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian to be
redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me
of Hester Prynne’s—have I her name rightly?—of this woman’s offences,
and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?”
“Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your
troubles and sojourn in the wilderness,” said the townsman, “to find
yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched out and
punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly New
England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain
learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago dwelt in Amsterdam,
whence some good time agone he was minded to cross over and cast in his
lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose he sent his wife
before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs.
Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a
dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman,
Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own
misguidance—”
“Ah!—aha!—I conceive you,” said the stranger with a bitter smile. “So
learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his
books. And who, by your favour, Sir, may be the father of yonder
babe—it is some three or four months old, I should judge—which Mistress
Prynne is holding in her arms?”
“Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who
shall expound it is yet a-wanting,” answered the townsman. “Madame
Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid
their heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands
looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that
God sees him.”
“The learned man,” observed the stranger with another smile, “should
come himself to look into the mystery.”
“It behoves him well if he be still in life,” responded the townsman.
“Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves
that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly
tempted to her fall, and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband
may be at the bottom of the sea, they have not been bold to put in
force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty
thereof is death. But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart they
have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the
platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of
her natural life to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.”
“A wise sentence,” remarked the stranger, gravely, bowing his head.
“Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious
letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that
the partner of her iniquity should not at least, stand on the scaffold
by her side. But he will be known—he will be known!—he will be known!”
He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and whispering a
few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the
crowd.
While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal,
still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger—so fixed a gaze that, at
moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world
seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps,
would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did,
with the hot mid-day sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up
its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the
sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a
festival, staring at the features that should have been seen only in
the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or
beneath a matronly veil at church. Dreadful as it was, she was
conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses. It
was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him and her, than to
greet him face to face—they two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were,
to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when its protection
should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely
heard a voice behind her until it had repeated her name more than once,
in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.
“Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!” said the voice.
It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on which
Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to
the meeting-house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to
be made, amidst an assemblage of the magistracy, with all the
ceremonial that attended such public observances in those days. Here,
to witness the scene which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham
himself with four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a
guard of honour. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of
embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath—a gentleman
advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He
was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community
which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of
development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and
tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age;
accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so
little. The other eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was
surrounded were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a
period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness
of Divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage.
But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to
select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less
capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and
disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect
towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious,
indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and
warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the
balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.
The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and
famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar,
like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of
kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less
carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth,
rather a matter of shame than self-congratulation with him. There he
stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap, while his
grey eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking,
like those of Hester’s infant, in the unadulterated sunshine. He looked
like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes
of sermons, and had no more right than one of those portraits would
have to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human
guilt, passion, and anguish.
“Hester Prynne,” said the clergyman, “I have striven with my young
brother here, under whose preaching of the Word you have been
privileged to sit”—here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a
pale young man beside him—“I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly
youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and
before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the people,
as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing your
natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what arguments
to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over
your hardness and obstinacy, insomuch that you should no longer hide
the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes
to me—with a young man’s over-softness, albeit wise beyond his
years—that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to
lay open her heart’s secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of
so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay
in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What
say you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou, or I,
that shall deal with this poor sinner’s soul?”
There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the
balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport,
speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered with respect
towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed:
“Good Master Dimmesdale,” said he, “the responsibility of this woman’s
soul lies greatly with you. It behoves you; therefore, to exhort her to
repentance and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof.”
The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—young clergyman, who had come from one of the
great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into
our wild forest land. His eloquence and religious fervour had already
given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person
of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow;
large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he
forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both
nervous sensibility and a vast power of self restraint. Notwithstanding
his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air
about this young minister—an apprehensive, a startled, a
half-frightened look—as of a being who felt himself quite astray, and
at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease
in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as his duties would
permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself simple
and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness, and
fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said,
affected them like the speech of an angel.
Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor
had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in
the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman’s soul, so sacred
even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the
blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.
“Speak to the woman, my brother,” said Mr. Wilson. “It is of moment to
her soul, and, therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to
thine own, in whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!”
The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it
seemed, and then came forward.
“Hester Prynne,” said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down
steadfastly into her eyes, “thou hearest what this good man says, and
seest the accountability under which I labour. If thou feelest it to be
for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be
made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name
of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any
mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though
he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on
thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty
heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt
him—yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath
granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an
open triumph over the evil within thee and the sorrow without. Take
heed how thou deniest to him—who, perchance, hath not the courage to
grasp it for himself—the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now
presented to thy lips!”
The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken.
The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct
purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and
brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby
at Hester’s bosom was affected by the same influence, for it directed
its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little
arms with a half-pleased, half-plaintive murmur. So powerful seemed the
minister’s appeal that the people could not believe but that Hester
Prynne would speak out the guilty name, or else that the guilty one
himself in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth
by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the
scaffold.
Hester shook her head.
“Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!” cried the
Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. “That little babe hath
been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou
hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to
take the scarlet letter off thy breast.”
“Never,” replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into
the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. “It is too deeply
branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony
as well as mine!”
“Speak, woman!” said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from
the crowd about the scaffold, “Speak; and give your child a father!”
“I will not speak!” answered Hester, turning pale as death, but
responding to this voice, which she too surely recognised. “And my
child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an earthly
one!”
“She will not speak!” murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the
balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his
appeal. He now drew back with a long respiration. “Wondrous strength
and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!”
Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit’s mind, the
elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion,
addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but
with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he
dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods
were rolling over the people’s heads, that it assumed new terrors in
their imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames
of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the
pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference.
She had borne that morning all that nature could endure; and as her
temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense
suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a
stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal life
remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher thundered
remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the
latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and
screams; she strove to hush it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to
sympathise with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was led
back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its
iron-clamped portal. It was whispered by those who peered after her
that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way
of the interior.
IV.
THE INTERVIEW
After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a
state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant watchfulness, lest
she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied
mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving impossible
to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master
Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He
described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical
science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could
teach in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest.
To say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not
merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the child—who,
drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in
with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the
mother’s system. It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a
forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester
Prynne had borne throughout the day.
Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that
individual, of singular aspect whose presence in the crowd had been of
such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was lodged
in the prison, not as suspected of any offence, but as the most
convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrates
should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom.
His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer, after
ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the
comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had
immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to
moan.
“Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient,” said the
practitioner. “Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in
your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more
amenable to just authority than you may have found her heretofore.”
“Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,” answered Master Brackett,
“I shall own you for a man of skill, indeed! Verily, the woman hath
been like a possessed one; and there lacks little that I should take in
hand, to drive Satan out of her with stripes.”
The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of
the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his
demeanour change when the withdrawal of the prison keeper left him face
to face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had
intimated so close a relation between himself and her. His first care
was given to the child, whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the
trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all other
business to the task of soothing her. He examined the infant carefully,
and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which he took from
beneath his dress. It appeared to contain medical preparations, one of
which he mingled with a cup of water.
“My old studies in alchemy,” observed he, “and my sojourn, for above a
year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of
simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the
medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours—she is none of
mine—neither will she recognise my voice or aspect as a father’s.
Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand.”
Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with
strongly marked apprehension into his face. “Wouldst thou avenge
thyself on the innocent babe?” whispered she.
“Foolish woman!” responded the physician, half coldly, half soothingly.
“What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The
medicine is potent for good, and were it my child—yea, mine own, as
well as thine! I could do no better for it.”
As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind,
he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the draught.
It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech’s pledge. The moans
of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually
ceased; and in a few moments, as is the custom of young children after
relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The
physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his
attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her
pulse, looked into her eyes—a gaze that made her heart shrink and
shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold—and, finally,
satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught.
“I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe,” remarked he; “but I have learned many
new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them—a recipe that an
Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as
old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless
conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and
heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous
sea.”
He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest
look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and
questioning as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at her
slumbering child.
“I have thought of death,” said she—“have wished for it—would even have
prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything.
Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou
beholdest me quaff it. See! it is even now at my lips.”
“Drink, then,” replied he, still with the same cold composure. “Dost
thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so
shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do
better for my object than to let thee live—than to give thee medicines
against all harm and peril of life—so that this burning shame may still
blaze upon thy bosom?” As he spoke, he laid his long fore-finger on the
scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester’s breast,
as if it had been red hot. He noticed her involuntary gesture, and
smiled. “Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the
eyes of men and women—in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy
husband—in the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest live, take
off this draught.”
Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the cup,
and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed,
where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the
room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not but
tremble at these preparations; for she felt that—having now done all
that humanity, or principle, or, if so it were, a refined cruelty,
impelled him to do for the relief of physical suffering—he was next to
treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably
injured.
“Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how thou hast fallen into
the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy
on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly,
and thy weakness. I—a man of thought—the book-worm of great libraries—a
man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry
dream of knowledge—what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine
own? Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the
idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young
girl’s fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own
behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I
came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of
Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself,
Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people.
Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a
married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter
blazing at the end of our path!”
“Thou knowest,” said Hester—for, depressed as she was, she could not
endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame—“thou knowest
that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any.”
“True,” replied he. “It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that
epoch of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless!
My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and
chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed
not so wild a dream—old as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as
I was—that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all
mankind to gather up, might yet be mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee
into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by
the warmth which thy presence made there!”
“I have greatly wronged thee,” murmured Hester.
“We have wronged each other,” answered he. “Mine was the first wrong,
when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation
with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and
philosophised in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee.
Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the
man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?”
“Ask me not!” replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face.
“That thou shalt never know!”
“Never, sayest thou?” rejoined he, with a smile of dark and
self-relying intelligence. “Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there
are few things whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in
the invisible sphere of thought—few things hidden from the man who
devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a
mystery. Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the prying multitude.
Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even
as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name out of thy
heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come
to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this
man, as I have sought truth in books: as I have sought gold in alchemy.
There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him
tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or
later, he must needs be mine.”
The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that
Hester Prynne clasped her hand over her heart, dreading lest he should
read the secret there at once.
“Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,” resumed he,
with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. “He
bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost, but I
shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I
shall interfere with Heaven’s own method of retribution, or, to my own
loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine
that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame,
if as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide
himself in outward honour, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!”
“Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled; “but
thy words interpret thee as a terror!”
“One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,”
continued the scholar. “Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour.
Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe
not to any human soul that thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on
this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere
a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a
man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest
ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate: no matter whether of
right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is
where thou art and where he is. But betray me not!”
“Wherefore dost thou desire it?” inquired Hester, shrinking, she hardly
knew why, from this secret bond. “Why not announce thyself openly, and
cast me off at once?”
“It may be,” he replied, “because I will not encounter the dishonour
that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other
reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let,
therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom
no tidings shall ever come. Recognise me not, by word, by sign, by
look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of.
Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his life
will be in my hands. Beware!”
“I will keep thy secret, as I have his,” said Hester.
“Swear it!” rejoined he.
And she took the oath.
“And now, Mistress Prynne,” said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was
hereafter to be named, “I leave thee alone: alone with thy infant and
the scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to
wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and
hideous dreams?”
“Why dost thou smile so at me?” inquired Hester, troubled at the
expression of his eyes. “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the
forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove
the ruin of my soul?”
“Not thy soul,” he answered, with another smile. “No, not thine!”
V.
HESTER AT HER NEEDLE
Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door
was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling
on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no
other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps
there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from
the threshold of the prison than even in the procession and spectacle
that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at
which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was
supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the
combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the
scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and
insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which,
therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength
that would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that
condemned her—a giant of stern features but with vigour to support, as
well as to annihilate, in his iron arm—had held her up through the
terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk
from her prison door, began the daily custom; and she must either
sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature,
or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help
her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with
it; so would the next day, and so would the next: each its own trial,
and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne.
The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same
burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling
down; for the accumulating days and added years would pile up their
misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her
individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the
preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and
embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the
young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter
flaming on her breast—at her, the child of honourable parents—at her,
the mother of a babe that would hereafter be a woman—at her, who had
once been innocent—as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And
over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her
only monument.
It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her—kept by no
restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan
settlement, so remote and so obscure—free to return to her birth-place,
or to any other European land, and there hide her character and
identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into
another state of being—and having also the passes of the dark,
inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might
assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from
the law that had condemned her—it may seem marvellous that this woman
should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must
needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so
irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost
invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like,
the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to
their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge
that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had
struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger
assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so
uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s
wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even
that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless
maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother’s keeping, like garments put
off long ago—were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound
her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could
never be broken.
It might be, too—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from
herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a
serpent from its hole—it might be that another feeling kept her within
the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode,
the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union that,
unrecognised on earth, would bring them together before the bar of
final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint
futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of
souls had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and laughed at
the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove
to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and
hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to
believe—what, finally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing a
resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a self-delusion.
Here, she said to herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here
should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the
torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out
another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because
the result of martyrdom.
Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town,
within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any
other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been built
by an earlier settler, and abandoned, because the soil about it was too
sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put it out of
the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of
the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea
at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby
trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the
cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which
would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this
little lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed,
and by the licence of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial
watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A
mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.
Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut
out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to
behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or standing in the
doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or coming forth along the
pathway that led townward, and, discerning the scarlet letter on her
breast, would scamper off with a strange contagious fear.
Lonely as was Hester’s situation, and without a friend on earth who
dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She
possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded
comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her
thriving infant and herself. It was the art, then, as now, almost the
only one within a woman’s grasp—of needle-work. She bore on her breast,
in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and
imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have
availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of
human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the
sable simplicity that generally characterised the Puritanic modes of
dress, there might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of
her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age, demanding whatever was
elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail to extend its
influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many
fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with.
Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of
magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a
new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of
policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a
sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully wrought
bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to
the official state of men assuming the reins of power, and were readily
allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while
sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian
order. In the array of funerals, too—whether for the apparel of the
dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth
and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors—there was a frequent and
characteristic demand for such labour as Hester Prynne could supply.
Baby-linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still another
possibility of toil and emolument.
By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be
termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so
miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a
fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever
other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow,
on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester
really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is
certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many
hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be,
chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and
state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her
needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it
on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s
little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the
coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance,
her skill was called in to embroider the white veil which was to cover
the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever
relentless vigour with which society frowned upon her sin.
Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the
plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple
abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials
and the most sombre hue, with only that one ornament—the scarlet
letter—which it was her doom to wear. The child’s attire, on the other
hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we may rather say, a
fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm
that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which
appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it
hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her
infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on
wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently insulted
the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might readily have
applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse
garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance
in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of
enjoyment in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in
her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic—a taste for the
gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her
needle, found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life, to
exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the
other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it
might have been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the
passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This
morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it
is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something
doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong beneath.
In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the
world. With her native energy of character and rare capacity, it could
not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more
intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow of
Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing
that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word,
and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied,
and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she
inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by
other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart
from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that
revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or
felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred
sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy,
awakening only terror and horrible repugnance. These emotions, in fact,
and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she
retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy; and her
position, although she understood it well, and was in little danger of
forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like
a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor,
as we have already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her
bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succour
them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the
way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness
into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by
which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and
sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s
defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester
had schooled herself long and well; and she never responded to these
attacks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her
pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was
patient—a martyr, indeed—but she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in
spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should
stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.
Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable
throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the
undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen
paused in the streets, to address words of exhortation, that brought a
crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman.
If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the
Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of
the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had
imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this
dreary woman gliding silently through the town, with never any
companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass,
they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterances of
a word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but was none
the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it
unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame,
that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang had
the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves—had
the summer breeze murmured about it—had the wintry blast shrieked it
aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When
strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter—and none ever failed
to do so—they branded it afresh in Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes,
she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the
symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise
its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was
intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always
this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot
never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive
with daily torture.
But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt
an eye—a human eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a
momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next
instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain;
for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. (Had Hester sinned
alone?)
Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer
moral and intellectual fibre would have been still more so, by the
strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with
those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was
outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester—if altogether
fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted—she felt or
fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new
sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it
gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She
was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were
they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel,
who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half
his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that,
if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze
forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s? Or, must she receive
those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as truth? In all her
miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome
as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent
inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action.
Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic
throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model
of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up,
as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. “What evil thing is at
hand?” would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there
would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this
earthly saint! Again a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert
itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according
to the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom
throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron’s bosom, and the
burning shame on Hester Prynne’s—what had the two in common? Or, once
more, the electric thrill would give her warning—“Behold Hester, here
is a companion!” and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young
maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly
averted, with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks as if her purity
were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman
was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or
age, for this poor sinner to revere?—such loss of faith is ever one of
the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not
corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man’s hard law,
that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was
guilty like herself.
The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a
grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story
about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific
legend. They averred that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged
in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be
seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the
night-time. And we must needs say it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply,
that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than our modern
incredulity may be inclined to admit.
VI.
PEARL
We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose
innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a
lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty
passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the
growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and the
intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features
of this child! Her Pearl—for so had Hester called her; not as a name
expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white,
unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she
named the infant “Pearl,” as being of great price—purchased with all
she had—her mother’s only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked
this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and
disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it
were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which
man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on
that same dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the
race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in
heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than
apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no
faith, therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day she
looked fearfully into the child’s expanding nature, ever dreading to
detect some dark and wild peculiarity that should correspond with the
guiltiness to which she owed her being.
Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its
vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs,
the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to
have been left there to be the plaything of the angels after the
world’s first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace
which does not invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire,
however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very
garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in
rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better
understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be
procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the
arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore before
the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure when thus arrayed,
and such was the splendour of Pearl’s own proper beauty, shining
through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler
loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her on
the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with
the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl’s
aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child
there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the
wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of
an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of
passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of
her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to
be herself—it would have been no longer Pearl!
This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared
to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears
deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which
she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving
her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being
whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in
disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the
point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be
discovered. Hester could only account for the child’s character—and
even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by recalling what she herself
had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul
from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of
earth. The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which
were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and,
however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of
crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the
untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare
of Hester’s spirit at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She could
recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her
temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency
that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning
radiance of a young child’s disposition, but, later in the day of
earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.
The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid kind
than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the
rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the way
of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the
growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne,
nevertheless, the loving mother of this one child, ran little risk of
erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own
errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict
control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge.
But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and
frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any
calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside
and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical
compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As
to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or
heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in
accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while
Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look,
that warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist, persuade
or plead.
It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so
malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that
Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a
human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its
fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit
away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild,
bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness
and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might
vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes
we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush
towards the child—to pursue the little elf in the flight which she
invariably began—to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and
earnest kisses—not so much from overflowing love as to assure herself
that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl’s
laugh, when she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made
her mother more doubtful than before.
Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often
came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so
dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate
tears. Then, perhaps—for there was no foreseeing how it might affect
her—Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and harden her small
features into a stern, unsympathising look of discontent. Not seldom
she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable
and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or—but this more rarely happened—she
would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out her love for her
mother in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart
by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that
gusty tenderness: it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all
these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but,
by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win
the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible
intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the
placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of
quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until—perhaps with that perverse
expression glimmering from beneath her opening lids—little Pearl awoke!
How soon—with what strange rapidity, indeed—did Pearl arrive at an age
that was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother’s ever-ready
smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would it have been
could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with
the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and
unravelled her own darling’s tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a
group of sportive children. But this could never be. Pearl was a born
outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of
sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more
remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child
comprehended her loneliness: the destiny that had drawn an inviolable
circle round about her: the whole peculiarity, in short, of her
position in respect to other children. Never since her release from
prison had Hester met the public gaze without her. In all her walks
about the town, Pearl, too, was there: first as the babe in arms, and
afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a
forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of
three or four footsteps to one of Hester’s. She saw the children of the
settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic
thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the
Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance,
or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham fight with the
Indians, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft.
Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance.
If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about
her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her
puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill,
incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had
so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue.
The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant
brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish,
unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and
child, and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently
reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited
it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a
childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value,
and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an
intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice
that so often thwarted her in the child’s manifestations. It appalled
her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the
evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl
inherited, by inalienable right, out of Hester’s heart. Mother and
daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human
society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those
unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl’s
birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening
influences of maternity.
At home, within and around her mother’s cottage, Pearl wanted not a
wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth
from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand
objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The
unlikeliest materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were the
puppets of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward
change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage
of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary
personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged, black,
and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the
breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the
ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down
and uprooted most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of
forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed,
but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural
activity—soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a
tide of life—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It
was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern
lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the
sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more than was
observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in
the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary
throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings
with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and
mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing
broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies,
against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad—then what
depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause—to
observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse
world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good
her cause in the contest that must ensue.
Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees,
and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which
made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a groan—“O Father in
Heaven—if Thou art still my Father—what is this being which I have
brought into the world?” And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or
aware through some more subtile channel, of those throbs of anguish,
would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon her mother, smile
with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play.
One peculiarity of the child’s deportment remains yet to be told. The
very first thing which she had noticed in her life, was—what?—not the
mother’s smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint,
embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards,
and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile. By no
means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware
was—shall we say it?—the scarlet letter on Hester’s bosom! One day, as
her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant’s eyes had been caught
by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter; and putting
up her little hand she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with
a decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a much older child.
Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token,
instinctively endeavouring to tear it away, so infinite was the torture
inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl’s baby-hand. Again, as if
her mother’s agonised gesture were meant only to make sport for her,
did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile. From that epoch, except
when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment’s safety: not
a moment’s calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes
elapse, during which Pearl’s gaze might never once be fixed upon the
scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the
stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile and odd
expression of the eyes.
Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child’s eyes while Hester
was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and
suddenly—for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered
with unaccountable delusions—she fancied that she beheld, not her own
miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of
Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet
bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though
seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an
evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in
mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less
vividly, by the same illusion.
In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big enough
to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild
flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom; dancing
up and down like a little elf whenever she hit the scarlet letter.
Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped
hands. But whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her
penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she
resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into
little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost
invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast with
hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to
seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child
stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing image of a
fiend peeping out—or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined
it—from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
“Child, what art thou?” cried the mother.
“Oh, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.
But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down
with the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak
might be to fly up the chimney.
“Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester.
Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with
a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl’s wonderful
intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not
acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now
reveal herself.
“Yes; I am little Pearl!” repeated the child, continuing her antics.
“Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!” said the mother
half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came
over her in the midst of her deepest suffering. “Tell me, then, what
thou art, and who sent thee hither?”
“Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and
pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell me!”
“Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!” answered Hester Prynne.
But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of
the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because
an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger and
touched the scarlet letter.
“He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no Heavenly
Father!”
“Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!” answered the mother,
suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into the world. He sent even me,
thy mother. Then, much more thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish
child, whence didst thou come?”
“Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing
and capering about the floor. “It is thou that must tell me!”
But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal
labyrinth of doubt. She remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the
talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly elsewhere for
the child’s paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had
given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring: such as, ever
since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth, through
the agency of their mother’s sin, and to promote some foul and wicked
purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a
brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this
inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England Puritans.
VII.
THE GOVERNOR’S HALL
Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion of Governor Bellingham, with
a pair of gloves which she had fringed and embroidered to his order,
and which were to be worn on some great occasion of state; for, though
the chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler to
descend a step or two from the highest rank, he still held an
honourable and influential place among the colonial magistracy.
Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of
embroidered gloves, impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview
with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the
settlement. It had reached her ears that there was a design on the part
of some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of
principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her child. On
the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin,
these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in
the mother’s soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from
her path. If the child, on the other hand, were really capable of moral
and religious growth, and possessed the elements of ultimate salvation,
then, surely, it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these
advantages by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than
Hester Prynne’s. Among those who promoted the design, Governor
Bellingham was said to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular,
and, indeed, not a little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which
in later days would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than
that of the select men of the town, should then have been a question
publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of eminence took sides. At
that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter
public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight than the welfare of
Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of
legislators and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all,
earlier than that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of
property in a pig not only caused a fierce and bitter contest in the
legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important
modification of the framework itself of the legislature.
Full of concern, therefore—but so conscious of her own right that it
seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on the one side,
and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the
other—Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl,
of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly
along by her mother’s side, and, constantly in motion from morn till
sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than that before
her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she
demanded to be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be let
down again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway,
with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl’s rich
and luxuriant beauty—a beauty that shone with deep and vivid tints, a
bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both of depth and glow,
and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and which, in after years,
would be nearly akin to black. There was fire in her and throughout
her: she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment. Her
mother, in contriving the child’s garb, had allowed the gorgeous
tendencies of her imagination their full play, arraying her in a
crimson velvet tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in
fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of colouring,
which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter
bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl’s beauty, and made her the very
brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth.
But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the
child’s whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded
the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon
her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet
letter endowed with life! The mother herself—as if the red ignominy
were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed
its form—had carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many hours
of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between the object of her
affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl
was the one as well as the other; and only in consequence of that
identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet
letter in her appearance.
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their play,—or what passed for
play with those sombre little urchins—and spoke gravely one to another.
“Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and of a
truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running
along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!”
But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her
foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening
gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them
all to flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant
pestilence—the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of
judgment—whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation.
She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which,
doubtless, caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The
victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked
up, smiling, into her face.
Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor
Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which
there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns now
moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many
sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have
happened and passed away within their dusky chambers. Then, however,
there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the
cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human
habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed, a very
cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in
which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that,
when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it
glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the
double handful. The brilliancy might have be fitted Aladdin’s palace
rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further
decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams,
suitable to the quaint taste of the age which had been drawn in the
stucco, when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the
admiration of after times.
Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house began to caper and
dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine
should be stripped off its front, and given her to play with.
“No, my little Pearl!” said her mother; “thou must gather thine own
sunshine. I have none to give thee!”
They approached the door, which was of an arched form, and flanked on
each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of
which were lattice-windows, the wooden shutters to close over them at
need. Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne
gave a summons, which was answered by one of the Governor’s bond
servant—a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years’ slave. During
that term he was to be the property of his master, and as much a
commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf wore
the customary garb of serving-men at that period, and long before, in
the old hereditary halls of England.
“Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?” inquired Hester.
“Yea, forsooth,” replied the bond-servant, staring with wide-open eyes
at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had
never before seen. “Yea, his honourable worship is within. But he hath
a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see
his worship now.”
“Nevertheless, I will enter,” answered Hester Prynne; and the
bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and the
glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land,
offered no opposition.
So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of entrance.
With many variations, suggested by the nature of his building
materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode of social life,
Governor Bellingham had planned his new habitation after the residences
of gentlemen of fair estate in his native land. Here, then, was a wide
and reasonably lofty hall, extending through the whole depth of the
house, and forming a medium of general communication, more or less
directly, with all the other apartments. At one extremity, this
spacious room was lighted by the windows of the two towers, which
formed a small recess on either side of the portal. At the other end,
though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more powerfully illuminated
by one of those embowed hall windows which we read of in old books, and
which was provided with a deep and cushioned seat. Here, on the
cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or
other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter
gilded volumes on the centre table, to be turned over by the casual
guest. The furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs,
the backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken
flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste, the whole being of the
Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms, transferred hither
from the Governor’s paternal home. On the table—in token that the
sentiment of old English hospitality had not been left behind—stood a
large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl
peeped into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a recent
draught of ale.
On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of
the Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their breasts, and others
with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterised by the
sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on, as if
they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies,
and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and
enjoyments of living men.
At about the centre of the oaken panels that lined the hall was
suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic,
but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured by a skilful
armourer in London, the same year in which Governor Bellingham came
over to New England. There was a steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget
and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all,
and especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to
glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about
upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show,
but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training
field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the
Pequod war. For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of
Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his professional associates, the
exigencies of this new country had transformed Governor Bellingham into
a soldier, as well as a statesman and ruler.
Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as
she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house, spent some
time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate.
“Mother,” cried she, “I see you here. Look! Look!”
Hester looked by way of humouring the child; and she saw that, owing to
the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was
represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be
greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she
seemed absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upwards also, at a
similar picture in the head-piece; smiling at her mother, with the
elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expression on her small
physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in
the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made
Hester Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child,
but of an imp who was seeking to mould itself into Pearl’s shape.
“Come along, Pearl,” said she, drawing her away, “Come and look into
this fair garden. It may be we shall see flowers there; more beautiful
ones than we find in the woods.”
Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of the
hall, and looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted with
closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt
at shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished
as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in
a hard soil, and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native
English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight;
and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the
intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly
beneath the hall window, as if to warn the Governor that this great
lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth
would offer him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of
apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend
Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula; that half
mythological personage who rides through our early annals, seated on
the back of a bull.
Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would
not be pacified.
“Hush, child—hush!” said her mother, earnestly. “Do not cry, dear
little Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and
gentlemen along with him.”
In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue, a number of persons were
seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her
mother’s attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became
silent, not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick and
mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of
those new personages.
VIII.
THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER
Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap—such as elderly
gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their domestic
privacy—walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and
expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an
elaborate ruff, beneath his grey beard, in the antiquated fashion of
King James’s reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of
John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his aspect, so
rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was
hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he
had evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error
to suppose that our great forefathers—though accustomed to speak and
think of human existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and
though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest
of duty—made it a matter of conscience to reject such means of comfort,
or even luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp. This creed was never
taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose
beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham’s
shoulders, while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet
be naturalised in the New England climate, and that purple grapes might
possibly be compelled to flourish against the sunny garden-wall. The
old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a
long established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable
things, and however stern he might show himself in the pulpit, or in
his public reproof of such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne,
still, the genial benevolence of his private life had won him warmer
affection than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.
Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests—one, the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as having
taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne’s
disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old Roger
Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who for two or three
years past had been settled in the town. It was understood that this
learned man was the physician as well as friend of the young minister,
whose health had severely suffered of late by his too unreserved
self-sacrifice to the labours and duties of the pastoral relation.
The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps,
and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall window, found himself
close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne,
and partially concealed her.
“What have we here?” said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise at
the scarlet little figure before him. “I profess, I have never seen the
like since my days of vanity, in old King James’s time, when I was wont
to esteem it a high favour to be admitted to a court mask! There used
to be a swarm of these small apparitions in holiday time, and we called
them children of the Lord of Misrule. But how gat such a guest into my
hall?”
“Ay, indeed!” cried good old Mr. Wilson. “What little bird of scarlet
plumage may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures when the
sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out
the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old
land. Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother
to bedizen thee in this strange fashion? Art thou a Christian child—ha?
Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or
fairies whom we thought to have left behind us, with other relics of
Papistry, in merry old England?”
“I am mother’s child,” answered the scarlet vision, “and my name is
Pearl!”
“Pearl?—Ruby, rather—or Coral!—or Red Rose, at the very least, judging
from thy hue!” responded the old minister, putting forth his hand in a
vain attempt to pat little Pearl on the cheek. “But where is this
mother of thine? Ah! I see,” he added; and, turning to Governor
Bellingham, whispered, “This is the selfsame child of whom we have held
speech together; and behold here the unhappy woman, Hester Prynne, her
mother!”
“Sayest thou so?” cried the Governor. “Nay, we might have judged that
such a child’s mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type
of her of Babylon! But she comes at a good time, and we will look into
this matter forthwith.”
Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall, followed
by his three guests.
“Hester Prynne,” said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on the
wearer of the scarlet letter, “there hath been much question concerning
thee of late. The point hath been weightily discussed, whether we, that
are of authority and influence, do well discharge our consciences by
trusting an immortal soul, such as there is in yonder child, to the
guidance of one who hath stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls of this
world. Speak thou, the child’s own mother! Were it not, thinkest thou,
for thy little one’s temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken out
of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly, and
instructed in the truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for
the child in this kind?”
“I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!” answered
Hester Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.
“Woman, it is thy badge of shame!” replied the stern magistrate. “It is
because of the stain which that letter indicates that we would transfer
thy child to other hands.”
“Nevertheless,” said the mother, calmly, though growing more pale,
“this badge hath taught me—it daily teaches me—it is teaching me at
this moment—lessons whereof my child may be the wiser and better,
albeit they can profit nothing to myself.”
“We will judge warily,” said Bellingham, “and look well what we are
about to do. Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this Pearl—since
that is her name—and see whether she hath had such Christian nurture as
befits a child of her age.”
The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair and made an effort to
draw Pearl betwixt his knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the touch
or familiarity of any but her mother, escaped through the open window,
and stood on the upper step, looking like a wild tropical bird of rich
plumage, ready to take flight into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not a
little astonished at this outbreak—for he was a grandfatherly sort of
personage, and usually a vast favourite with children—essayed, however,
to proceed with the examination.
“Pearl,” said he, with great solemnity, “thou must take heed to
instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom the
pearl of great price. Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?”
Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the
daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child about
her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of those truths which the
human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager
interest. Pearl, therefore—so large were the attainments of her three
years’ lifetime—could have borne a fair examination in the New England
Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms, although
unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works.
But that perversity, which all children have more or less of, and of
which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune
moment, took thorough possession of her, and closed her lips, or
impelled her to speak words amiss. After putting her finger in her
mouth, with many ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson’s
question, the child finally announced that she had not been made at
all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that
grew by the prison-door.
This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the
Governor’s red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window, together
with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in
coming hither.
Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered something
in the young clergyman’s ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of skill,
and even then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was startled to
perceive what a change had come over his features—how much uglier they
were, how his dark complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his
figure more misshapen—since the days when she had familiarly known him.
She met his eyes for an instant, but was immediately constrained to
give all her attention to the scene now going forward.
“This is awful!” cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the
astonishment into which Pearl’s response had thrown him. “Here is a
child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her! Without
question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present
depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, we need inquire no
further.”
Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms,
confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression.
Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep
her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights
against the world, and was ready to defend them to the death.
“God gave me the child!” cried she. “He gave her in requital of all
things else which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness—she is my
torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me,
too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being
loved, and so endowed with a millionfold the power of retribution for
my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!”
“My poor woman,” said the not unkind old minister, “the child shall be
well cared for—far better than thou canst do for it.”
“God gave her into my keeping!” repeated Hester Prynne, raising her
voice almost to a shriek. “I will not give her up!” And here by a
sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at
whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to
direct her eyes. “Speak thou for me!” cried she. “Thou wast my pastor,
and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men can.
I will not lose the child! Speak for me! Thou knowest—for thou hast
sympathies which these men lack—thou knowest what is in my heart, and
what are a mother’s rights, and how much the stronger they are when
that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter! Look thou to it!
I will not lose the child! Look to it!”
At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester Prynne’s
situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the young
minister at once came forward, pale, and holding his hand over his
heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament
was thrown into agitation. He looked now more careworn and emaciated
than as we described him at the scene of Hester’s public ignominy; and
whether it were his failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his
large dark eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy
depth.
“There is truth in what she says,” began the minister, with a voice
sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall re-echoed and
the hollow armour rang with it—“truth in what Hester says, and in the
feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too,
an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements—both seemingly
so peculiar—which no other mortal being can possess. And, moreover, is
there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this
mother and this child?”
“Ay—how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?” interrupted the Governor.
“Make that plain, I pray you!”
“It must be even so,” resumed the minister. “For, if we deem it
otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the creator
of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin, and made of no
account the distinction between unhallowed lust and holy love? This
child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame has come from the
hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so
earnestly and with such bitterness of spirit the right to keep her. It
was meant for a blessing—for the one blessing of her life! It was
meant, doubtless, the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution,
too; a torture to be felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a
sting, an ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath
she not expressed this thought in the garb of the poor child, so
forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her bosom?”
“Well said again!” cried good Mr. Wilson. “I feared the woman had no
better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!”
“Oh, not so!—not so!” continued Mr. Dimmesdale. “She recognises,
believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought in the existence
of that child. And may she feel, too—what, methinks, is the very
truth—that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the
mother’s soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin
into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is
good for this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality,
a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care—to be
trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of
her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the Creator’s sacred
pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will
bring its parents thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the
sinful father. For Hester Prynne’s sake, then, and no less for the poor
child’s sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place
them!”
“You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,” said old Roger
Chillingworth, smiling at him.
“And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken,”
added the Rev. Mr. Wilson.
“What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham? Hath he not pleaded well
for the poor woman?”
“Indeed hath he,” answered the magistrate; “and hath adduced such
arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so
long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal in the woman. Care
must be had nevertheless, to put the child to due and stated
examination in the catechism, at thy hands or Master Dimmesdale’s.
Moreover, at a proper season, the tithing-men must take heed that she
go both to school and to meeting.”
The young minister, on ceasing to speak had withdrawn a few steps from
the group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the heavy
folds of the window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure, which the
sunlight cast upon the floor, was tremulous with the vehemence of his
appeal. Pearl, that wild and flighty little elf stole softly towards
him, and taking his hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek
against it; a caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her
mother, who was looking on, asked herself—“Is that my Pearl?” Yet she
knew that there was love in the child’s heart, although it mostly
revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her lifetime had been
softened by such gentleness as now. The minister—for, save the
long-sought regards of woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of
childish preference, accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct,
and therefore seeming to imply in us something truly worthy to be
loved—the minister looked round, laid his hand on the child’s head,
hesitated an instant, and then kissed her brow. Little Pearl’s unwonted
mood of sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering down
the hall so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question whether even
her tiptoes touched the floor.
“The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess,” said he to Mr.
Dimmesdale. “She needs no old woman’s broomstick to fly withal!”
“A strange child!” remarked old Roger Chillingworth. “It is easy to see
the mother’s part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher’s research,
think ye, gentlemen, to analyse that child’s nature, and, from it make
a mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father?”
“Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clue of
profane philosophy,” said Mr. Wilson. “Better to fast and pray upon it;
and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless
Providence reveal it of its own accord. Thereby, every good Christian
man hath a title to show a father’s kindness towards the poor, deserted
babe.”
The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with
Pearl, departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is
averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and forth
into the sunny day was thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins, Governor
Bellingham’s bitter-tempered sister, and the same who, a few years
later, was executed as a witch.
“Hist, hist!” said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to cast
a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. “Wilt thou go with us
to-night? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I well-nigh
promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one.”
“Make my excuse to him, so please you!” answered Hester, with a
triumphant smile. “I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little
Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with
thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man’s book too,
and that with mine own blood!”
“We shall have thee there anon!” said the witch-lady, frowning, as she
drew back her head.
But here—if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and
Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable—was already an
illustration of the young minister’s argument against sundering the
relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus
early had the child saved her from Satan’s snare.
IX.
THE LEECH
Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will remember,
was hidden another name, which its former wearer had resolved should
never more be spoken. It has been related, how, in the crowd that
witnessed Hester Prynne’s ignominious exposure, stood a man, elderly,
travel-worn, who, just emerging from the perilous wilderness, beheld
the woman, in whom he hoped to find embodied the warmth and
cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin before the people. Her
matronly fame was trodden under all men’s feet. Infamy was babbling
around her in the public market-place. For her kindred, should the
tidings ever reach them, and for the companions of her unspotted life,
there remained nothing but the contagion of her dishonour; which would
not fail to be distributed in strict accordance and proportion with the
intimacy and sacredness of their previous relationship. Then why—since
the choice was with himself—should the individual, whose connexion with
the fallen woman had been the most intimate and sacred of them all,
come forward to vindicate his claim to an inheritance so little
desirable? He resolved not to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal
of shame. Unknown to all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and
key of her silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of
mankind, and, as regarded his former ties and interest, to vanish out
of life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean,
whither rumour had long ago consigned him. This purpose once effected,
new interests would immediately spring up, and likewise a new purpose;
dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of force enough to engage the full
strength of his faculties.
In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan
town as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the
learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common
measure. As his studies, at a previous period of his life, had made him
extensively acquainted with the medical science of the day, it was as a
physician that he presented himself and as such was cordially received.
Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare
occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the
religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In
their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and
more subtle faculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost
the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous
mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life
within itself. At all events, the health of the good town of Boston, so
far as medicine had aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the
guardianship of an aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly
deportment were stronger testimonials in his favour than any that he
could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon was one
who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the daily
and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger
Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his
familiarity with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique
physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and
heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed
result had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover,
he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and
roots; nor did he conceal from his patients that these simple
medicines, Nature’s boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a
share of his own confidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so
many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.
This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded at least the outward
forms of a religious life; and early after his arrival, had chosen for
his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine,
whose scholar-like renown still lived in Oxford, was considered by his
more fervent admirers as little less than a heavenly ordained apostle,
destined, should he live and labour for the ordinary term of life, to
do as great deeds, for the now feeble New England Church, as the early
Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith. About this
period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun to
fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the
young minister’s cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to
study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and more than all,
to the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order
to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring
his spiritual lamp. Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale were really
going to die, it was cause enough that the world was not worthy to be
any longer trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with
characteristic humility, avowed his belief that if Providence should
see fit to remove him, it would be because of his own unworthiness to
perform its humblest mission here on earth. With all this difference of
opinion as to the cause of his decline, there could be no question of
the fact. His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and
sweet, had a certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often
observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand
over his heart with first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of
pain.
Such was the young clergyman’s condition, and so imminent the prospect
that his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when Roger
Chillingworth made his advent to the town. His first entry on the
scene, few people could tell whence, dropping down as it were out of
the sky or starting from the nether earth, had an aspect of mystery,
which was easily heightened to the miraculous. He was now known to be a
man of skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs and the blossoms
of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the
forest-trees like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was
valueless to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby and
other famous men—whose scientific attainments were esteemed hardly less
than supernatural—as having been his correspondents or associates. Why,
with such rank in the learned world, had he come hither? What, could
he, whose sphere was in great cities, be seeking in the wilderness? In
answer to this query, a rumour gained ground—and however absurd, was
entertained by some very sensible people—that Heaven had wrought an
absolute miracle, by transporting an eminent Doctor of Physic from a
German university bodily through the air and setting him down at the
door of Mr. Dimmesdale’s study! Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who
knew that Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the
stage-effect of what is called miraculous interposition, were inclined
to see a providential hand in Roger Chillingworth’s so opportune
arrival.
This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician
ever manifested in the young clergyman; he attached himself to him as a
parishioner, and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from
his naturally reserved sensibility. He expressed great alarm at his
pastor’s state of health, but was anxious to attempt the cure, and, if
early undertaken, seemed not despondent of a favourable result. The
elders, the deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens
of Mr. Dimmesdale’s flock, were alike importunate that he should make
trial of the physician’s frankly offered skill. Mr. Dimmesdale gently
repelled their entreaties.
“I need no medicine,” said he.
But how could the young minister say so, when, with every successive
Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous
than before—when it had now become a constant habit, rather than a
casual gesture, to press his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his
labours? Did he wish to die? These questions were solemnly propounded
to Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder ministers of Boston, and the deacons of
his church, who, to use their own phrase, “dealt with him,” on the sin
of rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly held out. He
listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with the physician.
“Were it God’s will,” said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in
fulfilment of this pledge, he requested old Roger Chillingworth’s
professional advice, “I could be well content that my labours, and my
sorrows, and my sins, and my pains, should shortly end with me, and
what is earthly of them be buried in my grave, and the spiritual go
with me to my eternal state, rather than that you should put your skill
to the proof in my behalf.”
“Ah,” replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness, which, whether
imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, “it is thus that a young
clergyman is apt to speak. Youthful men, not having taken a deep root,
give up their hold of life so easily! And saintly men, who walk with
God on earth, would fain be away, to walk with him on the golden
pavements of the New Jerusalem.”
“Nay,” rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his heart, with
a flush of pain flitting over his brow, “were I worthier to walk there,
I could be better content to toil here.”
“Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly,” said the physician.
In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the
medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease
interested the physician, but he was strongly moved to look into the
character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so different in
age, came gradually to spend much time together. For the sake of the
minister’s health, and to enable the leech to gather plants with
healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore, or in the
forest; mingling various walks with the splash and murmur of the waves,
and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one
was the guest of the other in his place of study and retirement. There
was a fascination for the minister in the company of the man of
science, in whom he recognised an intellectual cultivation of no
moderate depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of ideas,
that he would have vainly looked for among the members of his own
profession. In truth, he was startled, if not shocked, to find this
attribute in the physician. Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true
religionist, with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and an
order of mind that impelled itself powerfully along the track of a
creed, and wore its passage continually deeper with the lapse of time.
In no state of society would he have been what is called a man of
liberal views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the
pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within
its iron framework. Not the less, however, though with a tremulous
enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe
through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with which
he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open,
admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where
his life was wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed
day-beams, and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that
exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and chill to be long
breathed with comfort. So the minister, and the physician with him,
withdrew again within the limits of what their Church defined as
orthodox.
Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, both as he
saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the
range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown
amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out
something new to the surface of his character. He deemed it essential,
it would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do him good.
Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the
physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur
Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so
intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its
groundwork there. So Roger Chillingworth—the man of skill, the kind and
friendly physician—strove to go deep into his patient’s bosom, delving
among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing
everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark
cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator, who has opportunity and
licence to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow it up. A man
burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his
physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless
something more,—let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive
egotism, nor disagreeable prominent characteristics of his own; if he
have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into
such affinity with his patient’s, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often
by an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here
and there a word to indicate that all is understood; if to these
qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his
recognised character as a physician;—then, at some inevitable moment,
will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark
but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight.
Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes above
enumerated. Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have
said, grew up between these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a
field as the whole sphere of human thought and study to meet upon; they
discussed every topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and
private character; they talked much, on both sides, of matters that
seemed personal to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the physician
fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the minister’s
consciousness into his companion’s ear. The latter had his suspicions,
indeed, that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale’s bodily disease had
never fairly been revealed to him. It was a strange reserve!
After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr.
Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were lodged in the
same house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister’s life-tide
might pass under the eye of his anxious and attached physician. There
was much joy throughout the town when this greatly desirable object was
attained. It was held to be the best possible measure for the young
clergyman’s welfare; unless, indeed, as often urged by such as felt
authorised to do so, he had selected some one of the many blooming
damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. This
latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur
Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions
of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his articles of Church
discipline. Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so
evidently was, to eat his unsavoury morsel always at another’s board,
and endure the life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm
himself only at another’s fireside, it truly seemed that this
sagacious, experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of
paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very man,
of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.
The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good social
rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on which the
venerable structure of King’s Chapel has since been built. It had the
graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson’s home-field, on one side, and so
was well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited to their
respective employments, in both minister and man of physic. The
motherly care of the good widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front
apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy window-curtains, to create
a noontide shadow when desirable. The walls were hung round with
tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events,
representing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan
the Prophet, in colours still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of
the scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here
the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound
folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition,
of which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried
that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves.
On the other side of the house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his
study and laboratory: not such as a modern man of science would reckon
even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus and
the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practised
alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of
situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his
own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and
bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one another’s
business.
And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s best discerning friends, as we
have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence
had done all this for the purpose—besought in so many public and
domestic and secret prayers—of restoring the young minister to health.
But, it must now be said, another portion of the community had latterly
begun to take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and
the mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed multitude attempts
to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When,
however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions
of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so
profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truth
supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case of which we speak,
could justify its prejudice against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or
argument worthy of serious refutation. There was an aged
handicraftsman, it is true, who had been a citizen of London at the
period of Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder, now some thirty years agone; he
testified to having seen the physician, under some other name, which
the narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Dr.
Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the affair of
Overbury. Two or three individuals hinted that the man of skill, during
his Indian captivity, had enlarged his medical attainments by joining
in the incantations of the savage priests, who were universally
acknowledged to be powerful enchanters, often performing seemingly
miraculous cures by their skill in the black art. A large number—and
many of these were persons of such sober sense and practical
observation that their opinions would have been valuable in other
matters—affirmed that Roger Chillingworth’s aspect had undergone a
remarkable change while he had dwelt in town, and especially since his
abode with Mr. Dimmesdale. At first, his expression had been calm,
meditative, scholar-like. Now there was something ugly and evil in his
face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the
more obvious to sight the oftener they looked upon him. According to
the vulgar idea, the fire in his laboratory had been brought from the
lower regions, and was fed with infernal fuel; and so, as might be
expected, his visage was getting sooty with the smoke.
To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion that the
Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of special sanctity,
in all ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by Satan himself
or Satan’s emissary, in the guise of old Roger Chillingworth. This
diabolical agent had the Divine permission, for a season, to burrow
into the clergyman’s intimacy, and plot against his soul. No sensible
man, it was confessed, could doubt on which side the victory would
turn. The people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see the minister
come forth out of the conflict transfigured with the glory which he
would unquestionably win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to think
of the perchance mortal agony through which he must struggle towards
his triumph.
Alas! to judge from the gloom and terror in the depth of the poor
minister’s eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory anything
but secure.
X.
THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT
Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament,
kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in all his
relations with the world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an
investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a
judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more
than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead
of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself. But, as he
proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm,
necessity, seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free
again until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor
clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a
sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been
buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save
mortality and corruption. Alas, for his own soul, if these were what he
sought!
Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician’s eyes, burning blue
and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one
of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan’s awful doorway
in the hillside, and quivered on the pilgrim’s face. The soil where
this dark miner was working had perchance shown indications that
encouraged him.
“This man,” said he, at one such moment, to himself, “pure as they deem
him—all spiritual as he seems—hath inherited a strong animal nature
from his father or his mother. Let us dig a little further in the
direction of this vein!”
Then after long search into the minister’s dim interior, and turning
over many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the
welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural
piety, strengthened by thought and study, and illuminated by
revelation—all of which invaluable gold was perhaps no better than
rubbish to the seeker—he would turn back, discouraged, and begin his
quest towards another point. He groped along as stealthily, with as
cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber
where a man lies only half asleep—or, it may be, broad awake—with
purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the apple
of his eye. In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the floor would
now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the shadow of his
presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be thrown across his victim.
In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often
produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely aware
that something inimical to his peace had thrust itself into relation
with him. But Old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were
almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards
him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathising, but
never intrusive friend.
Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual’s character
more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts are
liable, had not rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no man
as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter
actually appeared. He therefore still kept up a familiar intercourse
with him, daily receiving the old physician in his study, or visiting
the laboratory, and, for recreation’s sake, watching the processes by
which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.
One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of
the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he talked with
Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of
unsightly plants.
“Where,” asked he, with a look askance at them—for it was the
clergyman’s peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straight
forth at any object, whether human or inanimate, “where, my kind
doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?”
“Even in the graveyard here at hand,” answered the physician,
continuing his employment. “They are new to me. I found them growing on
a grave, which bore no tombstone, no other memorial of the dead man,
save these ugly weeds, that have taken upon themselves to keep him in
remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some
hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better
to confess during his lifetime.”
“Perchance,” said Mr. Dimmesdale, “he earnestly desired it, but could
not.”
“And wherefore?” rejoined the physician.
“Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for
the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a
buried heart, to make manifest, an outspoken crime?”
“That, good sir, is but a phantasy of yours,” replied the minister.
“There can be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of the Divine
mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the
secrets that may be buried in the human heart. The heart, making itself
guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all
hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy
Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds,
then to be made, is intended as a part of the retribution. That,
surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I
greatly err, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction
of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see
the dark problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men’s hearts
will be needful to the completest solution of that problem. And, I
conceive moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable secrets as
you speak of, will yield them up, at that last day, not with
reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.”
“Then why not reveal it here?” asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing
quietly aside at the minister. “Why should not the guilty ones sooner
avail themselves of this unutterable solace?”
“They mostly do,” said the clergyman, griping hard at his breast, as if
afflicted with an importunate throb of pain. “Many, many a poor soul
hath given its confidence to me, not only on the death-bed, but while
strong in life, and fair in reputation. And ever, after such an
outpouring, oh, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful
brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air, after a long
stifling with his own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why
should a wretched man—guilty, we will say, of murder—prefer to keep the
dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at
once, and let the universe take care of it!”
“Yet some men bury their secrets thus,” observed the calm physician.
“True; there are such men,” answered Mr. Dimmesdale. “But not to
suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by
the very constitution of their nature. Or—can we not suppose it?—guilty
as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God’s glory and
man’s welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy
in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by
them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service. So, to their
own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures,
looking pure as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are all speckled
and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves.”
“These men deceive themselves,” said Roger Chillingworth, with somewhat
more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with his
forefinger. “They fear to take up the shame that rightfully belongs to
them. Their love for man, their zeal for God’s service—these holy
impulses may or may not coexist in their hearts with the evil inmates
to which their guilt has unbarred the door, and which must needs
propagate a hellish breed within them. But, if they seek to glorify
God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands! If they would
serve their fellowmen, let them do it by making manifest the power and
reality of conscience, in constraining them to penitential
self-abasement! Would thou have me to believe, O wise and pious friend,
that a false show can be better—can be more for God’s glory, or man’
welfare—than God’s own truth? Trust me, such men deceive themselves!”
“It may be so,” said the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a
discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a
ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his too
sensitive and nervous temperament.—“But, now, I would ask of my
well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have
profited by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?”
Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild
laughter of a young child’s voice, proceeding from the adjacent
burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open window—for it was
summer-time—the minister beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl passing
along the footpath that traversed the enclosure. Pearl looked as
beautiful as the day, but was in one of those moods of perverse
merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely
out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until coming to the broad,
flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy—perhaps of Isaac Johnson
himself—she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother’s command
and entreaty that she would behave more decorously, little Pearl paused
to gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock which grew beside the
tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them along the lines of
the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the
burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered. Hester did not pluck
them off.
Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window and smiled
grimly down.
“There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human
ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child’s
composition,” remarked he, as much to himself as to his companion. “I
saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor himself with water at
the cattle-trough in Spring Lane. What, in heaven’s name, is she? Is
the imp altogether evil? Hath she affections? Hath she any discoverable
principle of being?”
“None, save the freedom of a broken law,” answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in a
quiet way, as if he had been discussing the point within himself,
“Whether capable of good, I know not.”
The child probably overheard their voices, for, looking up to the
window with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she
threw one of the prickly burrs at the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale. The
sensitive clergyman shrank, with nervous dread, from the light missile.
Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her little hands in the most
extravagant ecstacy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily looked
up, and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one another in
silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted—“Come away, mother!
Come away, or yonder old black man will catch you! He hath got hold of
the minister already. Come away, mother or he will catch you! But he
cannot catch little Pearl!”
So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking
fantastically among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature
that had nothing in common with a bygone and buried generation, nor
owned herself akin to it. It was as if she had been made afresh out of
new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life, and
be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her
for a crime.
“There goes a woman,” resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause, “who,
be her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of hidden
sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester Prynne the
less miserable, think you, for that scarlet letter on her breast?”
“I do verily believe it,” answered the clergyman. “Nevertheless, I
cannot answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face which I
would gladly have been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it
must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as
this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it up in his heart.”
There was another pause, and the physician began anew to examine and
arrange the plants which he had gathered.
“You inquired of me, a little time agone,” said he, at length, “my
judgment as touching your health.”
“I did,” answered the clergyman, “and would gladly learn it. Speak
frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death.”
“Freely then, and plainly,” said the physician, still busy with his
plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, “the disorder is a
strange one; not so much in itself nor as outwardly manifested,—in so
far, at least as the symptoms have been laid open to my observation.
Looking daily at you, my good sir, and watching the tokens of your
aspect now for months gone by, I should deem you a man sore sick, it
may be, yet not so sick but that an instructed and watchful physician
might well hope to cure you. But I know not what to say, the disease is
what I seem to know, yet know it not.”
“You speak in riddles, learned sir,” said the pale minister, glancing
aside out of the window.
“Then, to speak more plainly,” continued the physician, “and I crave
pardon, sir, should it seem to require pardon, for this needful
plainness of my speech. Let me ask as your friend, as one having
charge, under Providence, of your life and physical well being, hath
all the operations of this disorder been fairly laid open and recounted
to me?”
“How can you question it?” asked the minister. “Surely it were child’s
play to call in a physician and then hide the sore!”
“You would tell me, then, that I know all?” said Roger Chillingworth,
deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated
intelligence, on the minister’s face. “Be it so! But again! He to whom
only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes,
but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease,
which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all,
be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Your pardon
once again, good sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence. You,
sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest
conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit
whereof it is the instrument.”
“Then I need ask no further,” said the clergyman, somewhat hastily
rising from his chair. “You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the
soul!”
“Thus, a sickness,” continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an
unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but standing up and
confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked minister, with his low,
dark, and misshapen figure,—“a sickness, a sore place, if we may so
call it, in your spirit hath immediately its appropriate manifestation
in your bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your physician heal
the bodily evil? How may this be unless you first lay open to him the
wound or trouble in your soul?”
“No, not to thee! not to an earthly physician!” cried Mr. Dimmesdale,
passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind of
fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. “Not to thee! But, if it be the
soul’s disease, then do I commit myself to the one Physician of the
soul! He, if it stand with His good pleasure, can cure, or he can kill.
Let Him do with me as, in His justice and wisdom, He shall see good.
But who art thou, that meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust
himself between the sufferer and his God?”
With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.
“It is as well to have made this step,” said Roger Chillingworth to
himself, looking after the minister, with a grave smile. “There is
nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see, now, how passion
takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As with one
passion so with another. He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious
Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart.”
It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two
companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore.
The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that
the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of
temper, which there had been nothing in the physician’s words to excuse
or palliate. He marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had
thrust back the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which
it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly
sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in making the
amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to continue the care
which, if not successful in restoring him to health, had, in all
probability, been the means of prolonging his feeble existence to that
hour. Roger Chillingworth readily assented, and went on with his
medical supervision of the minister; doing his best for him, in all
good faith, but always quitting the patient’s apartment, at the close
of the professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon
his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale’s presence,
but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the threshold.
“A rare case,” he muttered. “I must needs look deeper into it. A
strange sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art’s
sake, I must search this matter to the bottom.”
It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, noon-day, and entirely unawares, fell into a
deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter
volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast
ability in the somniferous school of literature. The profound depth of
the minister’s repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one
of those persons whose sleep ordinarily is as light as fitful, and as
easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an
unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself
that he stirred not in his chair when old Roger Chillingworth, without
any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician
advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his hand upon his
bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that hitherto had always covered
it even from the professional eye.
Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.
After a brief pause, the physician turned away.
But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a
ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye
and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness
of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the
extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the
ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger
Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need
to ask how Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to
heaven, and won into his kingdom.
But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the
trait of wonder in it!
XI.
THE INTERIOR OF A HEART
After the incident last described, the intercourse between the
clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was really of
another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger
Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not,
indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread.
Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a
quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this
unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge
than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one
trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse,
the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of sinful
thoughts, expelled in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the
world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be revealed
to him, the Pitiless—to him, the Unforgiving! All that dark treasure to
be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so adequately
pay the debt of vengeance!
The clergyman’s shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme. Roger
Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less
satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence—using the
avenger and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning,
where it seemed most to punish—had substituted for his black devices. A
revelation, he could almost say, had been granted to him. It mattered
little for his object, whether celestial or from what other region. By
its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr.
Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul
of the latter, seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he
could see and comprehend its every movement. He became, thenceforth,
not a spectator only, but a chief actor in the poor minister’s interior
world. He could play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse him with a
throb of agony? The victim was for ever on the rack; it needed only to
know the spring that controlled the engine: and the physician knew it
well. Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a
magician’s wand, up rose a grisly phantom—up rose a thousand
phantoms—in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking
round about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his
breast!
All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil
influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its actual
nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully—even, at times, with
horror and the bitterness of hatred—at the deformed figure of the old
physician. His gestures, his gait, his grizzled beard, his slightest
and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments, were
odious in the clergyman’s sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of
a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was willing to
acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason
for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the
poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart’s entire substance,
attributed all his presentiments to no other cause. He took himself to
task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth,
disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his
best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a
matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity with
the old man, and thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting
the purpose to which—poor forlorn creature that he was, and more
wretched than his victim—the avenger had devoted himself.
While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by
some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of
his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a
brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it indeed, in great
part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions,
his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a
state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily
life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed
the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of
them were. There are scholars among them, who had spent more years in
acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr.
Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly
versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their youthful
brother. There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his,
and endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or granite
understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal
ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable, efficacious, and
unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were others again,
true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil
among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover,
by spiritual communications with the better world, into which their
purity of life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their
garments of mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was,
the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in
tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not the power of speech
in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole
human brotherhood in the heart’s native language. These fathers,
otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven’s last and rarest attestation of
their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought—had
they ever dreamed of seeking—to express the highest truths through the
humblest medium of familiar words and images. Their voices came down,
afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually
dwelt.
Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmesdale,
by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To the high
mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the
tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or
anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down on a
level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice
the angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very
burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful
brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with
theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent its own throb of
pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive
eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew
not the power that moved them thus. They deemed the young clergyman a
miracle of holiness. They fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven’s
messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very
ground on which he trod was sanctified. The virgins of his church grew
pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious
sentiment, that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it
openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice
before the altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.
Dimmesdale’s frame so feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in
their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward before them, and
enjoined it upon their children that their old bones should be buried
close to their young pastor’s holy grave. And all this time, perchance,
when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with
himself whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed
thing must there be buried!
It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to
reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value,
that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then
what was he?—a substance?—or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to
speak out from his own pulpit at the full height of his voice, and tell
the people what he was. “I, whom you behold in these black garments of
the priesthood—I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face
heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion in your behalf with
the Most High Omniscience—I, in whose daily life you discern the
sanctity of Enoch—I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam
along my earthly track, whereby the Pilgrims that shall come after me
may be guided to the regions of the blest—I, who have laid the hand of
baptism upon your children—I, who have breathed the parting prayer over
your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded faintly from a world which
they had quitted—I, your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am
utterly a pollution and a lie!”
More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a purpose
never to come down its steps until he should have spoken words like the
above. More than once he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long,
deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come
burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once—nay, more
than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had
told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the
vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable
iniquity, and that the only wonder was that they did not see his
wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning wrath of
the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the
people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him
down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it
all, and did but reverence him the more. They little guessed what
deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning words. “The godly
youth!” said they among themselves. “The saint on earth! Alas! if he
discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle
would he behold in thine or mine!” The minister well knew—subtle, but
remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in which his vague
confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself
by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one
other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief
of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed
it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his
nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did.
Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!
His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with the
old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light of the church
in which he had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale’s secret closet,
under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this
Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders,
laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much the more
pitilessly because of that bitter laugh. It was his custom, too, as it
has been that of many other pious Puritans, to fast—not however, like
them, in order to purify the body, and render it the fitter medium of
celestial illumination—but rigorously, and until his knees trembled
beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night
after night, sometimes in utter darkness, sometimes with a glimmering
lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the
most powerful light which he could throw upon it. He thus typified the
constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify
himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and
visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a
faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more
vividly and close beside him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a
herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister,
and beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining angels, who
flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they
rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded
father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother turning her face away
as she passed by. Ghost of a mother—thinnest fantasy of a
mother—methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her
son! And now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had
made so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along little Pearl, in
her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet
letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman’s own breast.
None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an
effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty
lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in
their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square,
leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that,
they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which
the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a
life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of
whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven
to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole
universe is false—it is impalpable—it shrinks to nothing within his
grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light,
becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth that
continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was the
anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in
his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of
gaiety, there would have been no such man!
On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but
forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new
thought had struck him. There might be a moment’s peace in it. Attiring
himself with as much care as if it had been for public worship, and
precisely in the same manner, he stole softly down the staircase, undid
the door, and issued forth.
XII.
THE MINISTER’S VIGIL
Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually
under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale
reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived
through her first hours of public ignominy. The same platform or
scaffold, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of seven
long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits who had
since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony of the
meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.
It was an obscure night in early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled
the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude
which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her
punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have
discerned no face above the platform nor hardly the outline of a human
shape, in the dark grey of the midnight. But the town was all asleep.
There was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it
so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other
risk than that the dank and chill night air would creep into his frame,
and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with
catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of
to-morrow’s prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that
ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody
scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of
penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with
itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends
rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the
impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own
sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably
drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse
had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what
right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for
the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it
press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good
purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of
spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another,
which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of
heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.
And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as
if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast,
right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there
had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without
any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked
aloud: an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten
back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the
background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and
terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it
to and fro.
“It is done!” muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands.
“The whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me here!”
But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater
power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town
did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry
either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches,
whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over the
settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through the
air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance,
uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows
of Governor Bellingham’s mansion, which stood at some distance, on the
line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate
himself with a lamp in his hand a white night-cap on his head, and a
long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost evoked
unseasonably from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At
another window of the same house, moreover appeared old Mistress
Hibbins, the Governor’s sister, also with a lamp, which even thus far
off revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face. She
thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward.
Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr.
Dimmesdale’s outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes
and reverberations, as the clamour of the fiends and night-hags, with
whom she was well known to make excursions in the forest.
Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham’s lamp, the old lady quickly
extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among the
clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The
magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness—into which,
nevertheless, he could see but little further than he might into a
mill-stone—retired from the window.
The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon
greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a long way off
was approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition, on here
a post, and there a garden fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and
there a pump, with its full trough of water, and here again an arched
door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the door-step.
The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even
while firmly convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing
onward, in the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the
lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal his
long-hidden secret. As the light drew nearer, he beheld, within its
illuminated circle, his brother clergyman—or, to speak more accurately,
his professional father, as well as highly valued friend—the Reverend
Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at
the bedside of some dying man. And so he had. The good old minister
came freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had
passed from earth to heaven within that very hour. And now surrounded,
like the saint-like personage of olden times, with a radiant halo, that
glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin—as if the departed Governor
had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had caught upon
himself the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking
thitherward to see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates—now, in
short, good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps
with a lighted lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the
above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled—nay, almost laughed at
them—and then wondered if he was going mad.
As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely muffling
his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern before
his breast with the other, the minister could hardly restrain himself
from speaking—
“A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson. Come up hither, I pray
you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!”
Good Heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant he
believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered
only within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to
step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his
feet, and never once turning his head towards the guilty platform. When
the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister
discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the last few
moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his mind had
made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid
playfulness.
Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole
in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing
stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted
whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning
would break and find him there. The neighbourhood would begin to rouse
itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would
perceive a vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and
half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from door to
door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost—as he needs must
think it—of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its
wings from one house to another. Then—the morning light still waxing
stronger—old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his
flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing to put off their
night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who had never
heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would
start into public view with the disorder of a nightmare in their
aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King
James’ ruff fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of
the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father
Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking
ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about the glorified
saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders and deacons of Mr.
Dimmesdale’s church, and the young virgins who so idolized their
minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms, which
now, by-the-bye, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have
given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a
word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their
amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they
discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with
shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had stood!
Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,
unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of
laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish
laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart—but he knew not whether of
exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute—he recognised the tones of little
Pearl.
“Pearl! Little Pearl!” cried he, after a moment’s pause; then,
suppressing his voice—“Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?”
“Yes; it is Hester Prynne!” she replied, in a tone of surprise; and the
minister heard her footsteps approaching from the side-walk, along
which she had been passing. “It is I, and my little Pearl.”
“Whence come you, Hester?” asked the minister. “What sent you hither?”
“I have been watching at a death-bed,” answered Hester Prynne “at
Governor Winthrop’s death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe,
and am now going homeward to my dwelling.”
“Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,” said the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale. “Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you.
Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together.”
She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding
little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child’s other hand,
and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a
tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own pouring like a
torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the
mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his
half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.
“Minister!” whispered little Pearl.
“What wouldst thou say, child?” asked Mr. Dimmesdale.
“Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?” inquired
Pearl.
“Nay; not so, my little Pearl,” answered the minister; for, with the
new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so
long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was
already trembling at the conjunction in which—with a strange joy,
nevertheless—he now found himself—“not so, my child. I shall, indeed,
stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not to-morrow.”
Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister
held it fast.
“A moment longer, my child!” said he.
“But wilt thou promise,” asked Pearl, “to take my hand, and mother’s
hand, to-morrow noontide?”
“Not then, Pearl,” said the minister; “but another time.”
“And what other time?” persisted the child.
“At the great judgment day,” whispered the minister; and, strangely
enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth
impelled him to answer the child so. “Then, and there, before the
judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together. But the
daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”
Pearl laughed again.
But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and
wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those
meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to
waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its
radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud
betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of
an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street with the
distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always
imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden
houses, with their jutting storeys and quaint gable-peaks; the
doorsteps and thresholds with the early grass springing up about them;
the garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track,
little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green on either
side—all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to
give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they
had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with his hand over
his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on
her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link
between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn
splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and
the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.
There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes; and her face, as she
glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its
expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr.
Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his
hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.
Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred with less
regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many
revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword
of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the midnight sky,
prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded
by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for
good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to
revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously
warned by some spectacle of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by
multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of
some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the coloured,
magnifying, and distorted medium of his imagination, and shaped it more
distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea that
the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful
hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be
deemed too expensive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The
belief was a favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that
their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of
peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an
individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the
same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom
of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly
self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his
egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself
should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and
fate.
We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart
that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the
appearance of an immense letter—the letter A—marked out in lines of
dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point,
burning duskily through a veil of cloud, but with no such shape as his
guilty imagination gave it, or, at least, with so little definiteness,
that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.
There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr. Dimmesdale’s
psychological state at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward
to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl
was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at
no great distance from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him,
with the same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his
feature as to all other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new
expression; or it might well be that the physician was not careful
then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he
looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky,
and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester
Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then might Roger
Chillingworth have passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing there
with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid was the expression,
or so intense the minister’s perception of it, that it seemed still to
remain painted on the darkness after the meteor had vanished, with an
effect as if the street and all things else were at once annihilated.
“Who is that man, Hester?” gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with terror.
“I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!”
She remembered her oath, and was silent.
“I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!” muttered the minister again.
“Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless
horror of the man!”
“Minister,” said little Pearl, “I can tell thee who he is!”
“Quickly, then, child!” said the minister, bending his ear close to her
lips. “Quickly, and as low as thou canst whisper.”
Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, like human
language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing
themselves with by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any
secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a
tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the
bewilderment of his mind. The elvish child then laughed aloud.
“Dost thou mock me now?” said the minister.
“Thou wast not bold!—thou wast not true!” answered the child. “Thou
wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother’s hand, to-morrow
noon-tide!”
“Worthy sir,” answered the physician, who had now advanced to the foot
of the platform—“pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well, well,
indeed! We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be
straitly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our
sleep. Come, good sir, and my dear friend, I pray you let me lead you
home!”
“How knewest thou that I was here?” asked the minister, fearfully.
“Verily, and in good faith,” answered Roger Chillingworth, “I knew
nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the
bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill
might to give him ease. He, going home to a better world, I, likewise,
was on my way homeward, when this light shone out. Come with me, I
beseech you, Reverend sir, else you will be poorly able to do Sabbath
duty to-morrow. Aha! see now how they trouble the brain—these
books!—these books! You should study less, good sir, and take a little
pastime, or these night whimsies will grow upon you.”
“I will go home with you,” said Mr. Dimmesdale.
With a chill despondency, like one awakening, all nerveless, from an
ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.
The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse which
was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete with
heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it
is said, more souls than one, were brought to the truth by the efficacy
of that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude
towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter. But as he came
down the pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton met him, holding up a
black glove, which the minister recognised as his own.
“It was found,” said the Sexton, “this morning on the scaffold where
evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take
it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed, he
was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no
glove to cover it!”
“Thank you, my good friend,” said the minister, gravely, but startled
at heart; for so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost
brought himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary.
“Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!”
“And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle
him without gloves henceforward,” remarked the old sexton, grimly
smiling. “But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last
night? a great red letter in the sky—the letter A, which we interpret
to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was made an
angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there should be
some notice thereof!”
“No,” answered the minister; “I had not heard of it.”
XIII.
ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER
In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was
shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His
nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more
than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while
his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had
perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given
them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from all
others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate action of
his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to bear, and
was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale’s well-being and repose. Knowing
what this poor fallen man had once been, her whole soul was moved by
the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her—the outcast
woman—for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She
decided, moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little
accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of
right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw—or
seemed to see—that there lay a responsibility upon her in reference to
the clergyman, which she owned to no other, nor to the whole world
besides. The links that united her to the rest of humankind—links of
flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material—had all been
broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor
she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its
obligations.
Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in which
we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years had
come and gone. Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother, with the
scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery,
had long been a familiar object to the townspeople. As is apt to be the
case when a person stands out in any prominence before the community,
and, at the same time, interferes neither with public nor individual
interests and convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately
grown up in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human
nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it
loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet
process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded
by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
In this matter of Hester Prynne there was neither irritation nor
irksomeness. She never battled with the public, but submitted
uncomplainingly to its worst usage; she made no claim upon it in
requital for what she suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies.
Then, also, the blameless purity of her life during all these years in
which she had been set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in her
favour. With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no
hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could only be a
genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor wanderer to
its paths.
It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even the
humblest title to share in the world’s privileges—further than to
breathe the common air and earn daily bread for little Pearl and
herself by the faithful labour of her hands—she was quick to
acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man whenever benefits were
to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little substance
to every demand of poverty, even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw
back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or
the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered
a monarch’s robe. None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence
stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether
general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her
place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the
household that was darkened by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were
a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her
fellow-creature. There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort
in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of
the sick chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer’s hard
extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his
foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light
of futurity could reach him. In such emergencies Hester’s nature showed
itself warm and rich—a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to
every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with
its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed
one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may rather say,
the world’s heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor
she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her
calling. Such helpfulness was found in her—so much power to do, and
power to sympathise—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A
by its original signification. They said that it meant Able, so strong
was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.
It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine
came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the
threshold. The helpful inmate had departed, without one backward glance
to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts of those
whom she had served so zealously. Meeting them in the street, she never
raised her head to receive their greeting. If they were resolute to
accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on.
This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the
softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind. The
public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common
justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as
frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as
despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity. Interpreting
Hester Prynne’s deportment as an appeal of this nature, society was
inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance than she
cared to be favoured with, or, perchance, than she deserved.
The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer
in acknowledging the influence of Hester’s good qualities than the
people. The prejudices which they shared in common with the latter were
fortified in themselves by an iron frame-work of reasoning, that made
it a far tougher labour to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their
sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due
course of years, might grow to be an expression of almost benevolence.
Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their eminent position
imposed the guardianship of the public morals. Individuals in private
life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay,
more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not
of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance,
but of her many good deeds since. “Do you see that woman with the
embroidered badge?” they would say to strangers. “It is our Hester—the
town’s own Hester—who is so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick,
so comfortable to the afflicted!” Then, it is true, the propensity of
human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the
person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of
bygone years. It was none the less a fact, however, that in the eyes of
the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the
cross on a nun’s bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness,
which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril. Had she fallen among
thieves, it would have kept her safe. It was reported, and believed by
many, that an Indian had drawn his arrow against the badge, and that
the missile struck it, and fell harmless to the ground.
The effect of the symbol—or rather, of the position in respect to
society that was indicated by it—on the mind of Hester Prynne herself
was powerful and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her
character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago
fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might have been
repulsive had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it.
Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change.
It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and
partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad
transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been
cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock
of it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It was due in part to all
these causes, but still more to something else, that there seemed to be
no longer anything in Hester’s face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in
Hester’s form, though majestic and statue like, that Passion would ever
dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom to make it
ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from
her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman.
Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the
feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and
lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all
tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be
crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so
deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is
perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to
be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the
magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether Hester
Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so transfigured.
Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed
to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from
passion and feeling to thought. Standing alone in the world—alone, as
to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and
protected—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she
not scorned to consider it desirable—she cast away the fragment of a
broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in
which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active
and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had
overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and
rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was
their most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith
was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this
spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the
other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known
it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised by the
scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the seashore, thoughts
visited her such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England;
shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their
entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.
It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often
conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of
society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the
flesh and blood of action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, had
little Pearl never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have
been far otherwise. Then she might have come down to us in history,
hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect.
She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She might, and
not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of
the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan
establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother’s
enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon. Providence,
in the person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester’s charge, the
germ and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a
host of difficulties. Everything was against her. The world was
hostile. The child’s own nature had something wrong in it which
continually betokened that she had been born amiss—the effluence of her
mother’s lawless passion—and often impelled Hester to ask, in
bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor
little creature had been born at all.
Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference
to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to
the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she
had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as
settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep women quiet, as
it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a
hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society
is to be torn down and built up anew. Then the very nature of the
opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like
nature, is to be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to
assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other
difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these
preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still
mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she
has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never
overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be
solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they
vanish. Thus Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and
healthy throb, wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind;
now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from
a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a
home and comfort nowhere. At times a fearful doubt strove to possess
her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to Heaven,
and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.
The scarlet letter had not done its office. Now, however, her interview
with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his vigil, had given
her a new theme of reflection, and held up to her an object that
appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment. She
had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister struggled,
or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She saw that he
stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it.
It was impossible to doubt that, whatever painful efficacy there might
be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused
into it by the hand that proffered relief. A secret enemy had been
continually by his side, under the semblance of a friend and helper,
and had availed himself of the opportunities thus afforded for
tampering with the delicate springs of Mr. Dimmesdale’s nature. Hester
could not but ask herself whether there had not originally been a
defect of truth, courage, and loyalty on her own part, in allowing the
minister to be thrown into a position where so much evil was to be
foreboded and nothing auspicious to be hoped. Her only justification
lay in the fact that she had been able to discern no method of rescuing
him from a blacker ruin than had overwhelmed herself except by
acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth’s scheme of disguise. Under that
impulse she had made her choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared,
the more wretched alternative of the two. She determined to redeem her
error so far as it might yet be possible. Strengthened by years of hard
and solemn trial, she felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with
Roger Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin and half-maddened
by the ignominy that was still new, when they had talked together in
the prison-chamber. She had climbed her way since then to a higher
point. The old man, on the other hand, had brought himself nearer to
her level, or, perhaps, below it, by the revenge which he had stooped
for.
In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and do what
might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he had so
evidently set his gripe. The occasion was not long to seek. One
afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she
beheld the old physician with a basket on one arm and a staff in the
other hand, stooping along the ground in quest of roots and herbs to
concoct his medicine withal.
XIV.
HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play
with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked
awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a
bird, and, making bare her small white feet went pattering along the
moist margin of the sea. Here and there she came to a full stop, and
peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for
Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with
dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes,
the image of a little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate,
invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary
little maid on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say—“This is a
better place; come thou into the pool.” And Pearl, stepping in mid-leg
deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still
lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to
and fro in the agitated water.
Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician. “I would speak a word
with you,” said she—“a word that concerns us much.”
“Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth?” answered he, raising himself from his stooping posture.
“With all my heart! Why, mistress, I hear good tidings of you on all
hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and godly
man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me
that there had been question concerning you in the council. It was
debated whether or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet
letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my
intreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith.”
“It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the badge,”
calmly replied Hester. “Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall
away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should
speak a different purport.”
“Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better,” rejoined he, “A woman must
needs follow her own fancy touching the adornment of her person. The
letter is gaily embroidered, and shows right bravely on your bosom!”
All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was
shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had been
wrought upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much that
he had grown older; for though the traces of advancing life were
visible he bore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigour and
alertness. But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man,
calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had
altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching, almost
fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish and
purpose to mask this expression with a smile, but the latter played him
false, and flickered over his visage so derisively that the spectator
could see his blackness all the better for it. Ever and anon, too,
there came a glare of red light out of his eyes, as if the old man’s
soul were on fire and kept on smouldering duskily within his breast,
until by some casual puff of passion it was blown into a momentary
flame. This he repressed as speedily as possible, and strove to look as
if nothing of the kind had happened.
In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s
faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a
reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office. This unhappy
person had effected such a transformation by devoting himself for seven
years to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and deriving
his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he
analysed and gloated over.
The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne’s bosom. Here was another
ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.
“What see you in my face,” asked the physician, “that you look at it so
earnestly?”
“Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter
enough for it,” answered she. “But let it pass! It is of yonder
miserable man that I would speak.”
“And what of him?” cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he loved
the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only
person of whom he could make a confidant. “Not to hide the truth,
Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy with the
gentleman. So speak freely and I will make answer.”
“When we last spake together,” said Hester, “now seven years ago, it
was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as touching the former
relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder
man were in your hands there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent
in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings
that I thus bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other
human beings, there remained a duty towards him, and something
whispered me that I was betraying it in pledging myself to keep your
counsel. Since that day no man is so near to him as you. You tread
behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking. You
search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is
on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death, and still
he knows you not. In permitting this I have surely acted a false part
by the only man to whom the power was left me to be true!”
“What choice had you?” asked Roger Chillingworth. “My finger, pointed
at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon,
thence, peradventure, to the gallows!”
“It had been better so!” said Hester Prynne.
“What evil have I done the man?” asked Roger Chillingworth again. “I
tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned
from monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this
miserable priest! But for my aid his life would have burned away in
torments within the first two years after the perpetration of his crime
and thine. For, Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that could have
borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter. Oh, I
could reveal a goodly secret! But enough. What art can do, I have
exhausted on him. That he now breathes and creeps about on earth is
owing all to me!”
“Better he had died at once!” said Hester Prynne.
“Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!” cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting
the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. “Better had he
died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this man has suffered. And
all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy! He has been conscious of me.
He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him like a curse. He
knew, by some spiritual sense—for the Creator never made another being
so sensitive as this—he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his
heartstrings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him, which
sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that the eye and hand
were mine! With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he fancied
himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams and
desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse and despair of pardon, as a
foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant
shadow of my presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had
most vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual
poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed, he did not err, there was a
fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a
fiend for his especial torment.”
The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his hands
with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape, which
he could not recognise, usurping the place of his own image in a glass.
It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval
of years—when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind’s
eye. Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as he did now.
“Hast thou not tortured him enough?” said Hester, noticing the old
man’s look. “Has he not paid thee all?”
“No, no! He has but increased the debt!” answered the physician, and as
he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided
into gloom. “Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine years agone?
Even then I was in the autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn.
But all my life had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful,
quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own
knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter object was but
casual to the other—faithfully for the advancement of human welfare. No
life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich
with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you
might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others, craving
little for himself—kind, true, just and of constant, if not warm
affections? Was I not all this?”
“All this, and more,” said Hester.
“And what am I now?” demanded he, looking into her face, and permitting
the whole evil within him to be written on his features. “I have
already told thee what I am—a fiend! Who made me so?”
“It was myself,” cried Hester, shuddering. “It was I, not less than he.
Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?”
“I have left thee to the scarlet letter,” replied Roger Chillingworth.
“If that has not avenged me, I can do no more!”
He laid his finger on it with a smile.
“It has avenged thee,” answered Hester Prynne.
“I judged no less,” said the physician. “And now what wouldst thou with
me touching this man?”
“I must reveal the secret,” answered Hester, firmly. “He must discern
thee in thy true character. What may be the result I know not. But this
long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have
been, shall at length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow or
preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance his
life, he is in my hands. Nor do I—whom the scarlet letter has
disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering
into the soul—nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer
a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy.
Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him, no good for me, no
good for thee. There is no good for little Pearl. There is no path to
guide us out of this dismal maze.”
“Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee,” said Roger Chillingworth, unable
to restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a quality almost
majestic in the despair which she expressed. “Thou hadst great
elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than
mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee, for the good that has been
wasted in thy nature.”
“And I thee,” answered Hester Prynne, “for the hatred that has
transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out
of thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for
thine own! Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power that
claims it! I said, but now, that there could be no good event for him,
or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of
evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have
strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee, and thee
alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy will to
pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that
priceless benefit?”
“Peace, Hester—peace!” replied the old man, with gloomy sternness—“it
is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me
of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all
that we do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry, thou didst plant
the germ of evil; but since that moment it has all been a dark
necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of
typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend’s
office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as
it may! Now, go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man.”
He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of
gathering herbs.
XV.
HESTER AND PEARL
So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure with a face that haunted
men’s memories longer than they liked—took leave of Hester Prynne, and
went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there a herb,
or grubbed up a root and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray
beard almost touched the ground as he crept onward. Hester gazed after
him a little while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see
whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath
him and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown,
across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were
which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth,
quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with
poisonous shrubs of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under
his fingers? Or might it suffice him that every wholesome growth should
be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did
the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him?
Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving
along with his deformity whichever way he turned himself? And whither
was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a
barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen
deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable
wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous
luxuriance? Or would he spread bat’s wings and flee away, looking so
much the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?
“Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she gazed
after him, “I hate the man!”
She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or
lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days in
a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion
of his study and sit down in the firelight of their home, and in the
light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in that smile, he
said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books
might be taken off the scholar’s heart. Such scenes had once appeared
not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal medium
of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest
remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! She
marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She
deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured
and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the
smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it
seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth than any which
had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no
better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.
“Yes, I hate him!” repeated Hester more bitterly than before. “He
betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!”
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it
the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable
fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch than
their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached
even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they
will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long
ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven
long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much
of misery and wrought out no repentance?
The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the
crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on
Hester’s state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise
have acknowledged to herself.
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
“Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?”
Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for
amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At
first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image
in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as it declined to
venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable
earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or
the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made
little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells,
and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New
England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She
seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize of several
five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then
she took up the white foam that streaked the line of the advancing
tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it with winged
footsteps to catch the great snowflakes ere they fell. Perceiving a
flock of beach-birds that fed and fluttered along the shore, the
naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from
rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity
in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was
almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken
wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport, because it
grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the
sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.
Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and make
herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect
of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother’s gift for devising
drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid’s garb, Pearl
took some eel-grass and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom
the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother’s. A
letter—the letter A—but freshly green instead of scarlet. The child
bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with
strange interest, even as if the one only thing for which she had been
sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.
“I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?” thought Pearl.
Just then she heard her mother’s voice, and, flitting along as lightly
as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne dancing,
laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.
“My little Pearl,” said Hester, after a moment’s silence, “the green
letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know,
my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?”
“Yes, mother,” said the child. “It is the great letter A. Thou hast
taught me in the horn-book.”
Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there was that
singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black eyes,
she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any meaning
to the symbol. She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point.
“Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?”
“Truly do I!” answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother’s face.
“It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his
heart!”
“And what reason is that?” asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd
incongruity of the child’s observation; but on second thoughts turning
pale.
“What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?”
“Nay, mother, I have told all I know,” said Pearl, more seriously than
she was wont to speak. “Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking
with,—it may be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother dear, what
does this scarlet letter mean?—and why dost thou wear it on thy
bosom?—and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”
She took her mother’s hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes
with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious
character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really
be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what
she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a
meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect.
Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a
sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return
than the waywardness of an April breeze, which spends its time in airy
sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in
its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take
it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours it will sometimes,
of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful
tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its
other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this,
moreover, was a mother’s estimate of the child’s disposition. Any other
observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them
a far darker colouring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester’s
mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might
already have approached the age when she could have been made a friend,
and intrusted with as much of her mother’s sorrows as could be
imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the
little chaos of Pearl’s character there might be seen emerging and
could have been from the very first—the steadfast principles of an
unflinching courage—an uncontrollable will—sturdy pride, which might be
disciplined into self-respect—and a bitter scorn of many things which,
when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them.
She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable,
as are the richest flavours of unripe fruit. With all these sterling
attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her
mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this
elfish child.
Pearl’s inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet
letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch
of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed
mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of
justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked
propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask,
whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a purpose
of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith
and trust, as a spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might
it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her
mother’s heart, and converted it into a tomb?—and to help her to
overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor
asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart?
Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester’s mind, with
as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered
into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her
mother’s hand in both her own, and turning her face upward, while she
put these searching questions, once and again, and still a third time.
“What does the letter mean, mother? and why dost thou wear it? and why
does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”
“What shall I say?” thought Hester to herself. “No! if this be the
price of the child’s sympathy, I cannot pay it.”
Then she spoke aloud—
“Silly Pearl,” said she, “what questions are these? There are many
things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of
the minister’s heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the
sake of its gold thread.”
In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been
false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of
a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; as
recognising that, in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new
evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled. As for
little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of her face.
But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three
times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often at
supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed, and once after
she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming
in her black eyes.
“Mother,” said she, “what does the scarlet letter mean?”
And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being
awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that other
enquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her
investigations about the scarlet letter—
“Mother!—Mother!—Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”
“Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered her mother, with an asperity
that she had never permitted to herself before. “Do not tease me; else
I shall put thee into the dark closet!”
XVI.
A FOREST WALK
Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr.
Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences,
the true character of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For
several days, however, she vainly sought an opportunity of addressing
him in some of the meditative walks which she knew him to be in the
habit of taking along the shores of the Peninsula, or on the wooded
hills of the neighbouring country. There would have been no scandal,
indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman’s good fame,
had she visited him in his own study, where many a penitent, ere now,
had confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by the
scarlet letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or undisguised
interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that her conscious
heart imparted suspicion where none could have been felt, and partly
that both the minister and she would need the whole wide world to
breathe in, while they talked together—for all these reasons Hester
never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy than beneath the
open sky.
At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither the Rev. Mr.
Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that he had
gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian
converts. He would probably return by a certain hour in the afternoon
of the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took little
Pearl—who was necessarily the companion of all her mother’s
expeditions, however inconvenient her presence—and set forth.
The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the Peninsula to the
mainland, was no other than a foot-path. It straggled onward into the
mystery of the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and
stood so black and dense on either side, and disclosed such imperfect
glimpses of the sky above, that, to Hester’s mind, it imaged not amiss
the moral wilderness in which she had so long been wandering. The day
was chill and sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly
stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine
might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This
flitting cheerfulness was always at the further extremity of some long
vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight—feebly sportive, at
best, in the predominant pensiveness of the day and scene—withdrew
itself as they came nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the
drearier, because they had hoped to find them bright.
“Mother,” said little Pearl, “the sunshine does not love you. It runs
away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom.
Now, see! There it is, playing a good way off. Stand you here, and let
me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me—for I
wear nothing on my bosom yet!”
“Nor ever will, my child, I hope,” said Hester.
“And why not, mother?” asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the
beginning of her race. “Will not it come of its own accord when I am a
woman grown?”
“Run away, child,” answered her mother, “and catch the sunshine. It
will soon be gone.”
Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester smiled to perceive, did
actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it, all
brightened by its splendour, and scintillating with the vivacity
excited by rapid motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as
if glad of such a playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh
enough to step into the magic circle too.
“It will go now,” said Pearl, shaking her head.
“See!” answered Hester, smiling; “now I can stretch out my hand and
grasp some of it.”
As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge from the
bright expression that was dancing on Pearl’s features, her mother
could have fancied that the child had absorbed it into herself, and
would give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as they should
plunge into some gloomier shade. There was no other attribute that so
much impressed her with a sense of new and untransmitted vigour in
Pearl’s nature, as this never failing vivacity of spirits: she had not
the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter
days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors.
Perhaps this, too, was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy
with which Hester had fought against her sorrows before Pearl’s birth.
It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to
the child’s character. She wanted—what some people want throughout
life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanise and make
her capable of sympathy. But there was time enough yet for little
Pearl.
“Come, my child!” said Hester, looking about her from the spot where
Pearl had stood still in the sunshine—“we will sit down a little way
within the wood, and rest ourselves.”
“I am not aweary, mother,” replied the little girl. “But you may sit
down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile.”
“A story, child!” said Hester. “And about what?”
“Oh, a story about the Black Man,” answered Pearl, taking hold of her
mother’s gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously, into
her face.
“How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big, heavy
book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and
an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among the trees; and they
are to write their names with their own blood; and then he sets his
mark on their bosoms. Didst thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?”
“And who told you this story, Pearl,” asked her mother, recognising a
common superstition of the period.
“It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where you
watched last night,” said the child. “But she fancied me asleep while
she was talking of it. She said that a thousand and a thousand people
had met him here, and had written in his book, and have his mark on
them. And that ugly tempered lady, old Mistress Hibbins, was one. And,
mother, the old dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man’s
mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him
at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And dost thou
go to meet him in the nighttime?”
“Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?” asked Hester. “Not
that I remember,” said the child. “If thou fearest to leave me in our
cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I would very gladly go!
But, mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And didst thou
ever meet him? And is this his mark?”
“Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?” asked her mother.
“Yes, if thou tellest me all,” answered Pearl.
“Once in my life I met the Black Man!” said her mother. “This scarlet
letter is his mark!”
Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to secure
themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along the
forest track. Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which at
some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its
roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper
atmosphere. It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with
a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing
through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves. The trees
impending over it had flung down great branches from time to time,
which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black
depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages
there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand.
Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could
catch the reflected light from its water, at some short distance within
the forest, but soon lost all traces of it amid the bewilderment of
tree-trunks and underbrush, and here and there a huge rock covered over
with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed
intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing,
perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper
tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror
its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool. Continually, indeed,
as it stole onward, the streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet,
soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was
spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry
among sad acquaintance and events of sombre hue.
“Oh, brook! Oh, foolish and tiresome little brook!” cried Pearl, after
listening awhile to its talk, “Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit,
and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!”
But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest
trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help
talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl
resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed from a
well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed through scenes shadowed as
heavily with gloom. But, unlike the little stream, she danced and
sparkled, and prattled airily along her course.
“What does this sad little brook say, mother?” inquired she.
“If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee of it,”
answered her mother, “even as it is telling me of mine. But now, Pearl,
I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise of one putting aside
the branches. I would have thee betake thyself to play, and leave me to
speak with him that comes yonder.”
“Is it the Black Man?” asked Pearl.
“Wilt thou go and play, child?” repeated her mother, “But do not stray
far into the wood. And take heed that thou come at my first call.”
“Yes, mother,” answered Pearl, “But if it be the Black Man, wilt thou
not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his
arm?”
“Go, silly child!” said her mother impatiently. “It is no Black Man!
Thou canst see him now, through the trees. It is the minister!”
“And so it is!” said the child. “And, mother, he has his hand over his
heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book, the
Black Man set his mark in that place? But why does he not wear it
outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?”
“Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another time,”
cried Hester Prynne. “But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear
the babble of the brook.”
The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook, and
striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice.
But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling
its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had
happened—or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet
to happen—within the verge of the dismal forest. So Pearl, who had
enough of shadow in her own little life, chose to break off all
acquaintance with this repining brook. She set herself, therefore, to
gathering violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines that
she found growing in the crevice of a high rock.
When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two
towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained under
the deep shadow of the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along
the path entirely alone, and leaning on a staff which he had cut by the
wayside. He looked haggard and feeble, and betrayed a nerveless
despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably characterised him
in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situation where he
deemed himself liable to notice. Here it was wofully visible, in this
intense seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a
heavy trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait, as if
he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do
so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling
himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for
evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually
accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether
there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be
wished for or avoided.
To Hester’s eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no symptom of
positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl had
remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.
XVII.
THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before Hester
Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length
she succeeded.
“Arthur Dimmesdale!” she said, faintly at first, then louder, but
hoarsely—“Arthur Dimmesdale!”
“Who speaks?” answered the minister. Gathering himself quickly up, he
stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he
was reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his eyes anxiously in the
direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld a form under the trees,
clad in garments so sombre, and so little relieved from the gray
twilight into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened
the noontide, that he knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It
may be that his pathway through life was haunted thus by a spectre that
had stolen out from among his thoughts.
He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.
“Hester! Hester Prynne!”, said he; “is it thou? Art thou in life?”
“Even so.” she answered. “In such life as has been mine these seven
years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?”
It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another’s actual and
bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they
meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world
beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in
their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as
not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of
disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.
They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves, because the crisis flung
back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its
history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless
epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing
moment. It was with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow,
reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill
as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold
as it was, took away what was dreariest in the interview. They now felt
themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.
Without a word more spoken—neither he nor she assuming the guidance,
but with an unexpressed consent—they glided back into the shadow of the
woods whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap of moss where
she and Pearl had before been sitting. When they found voice to speak,
it was at first only to utter remarks and inquiries such as any two
acquaintances might have made, about the gloomy sky, the threatening
storm, and, next, the health of each. Thus they went onward, not
boldly, but step by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in
their hearts. So long estranged by fate and circumstances, they needed
something slight and casual to run before and throw open the doors of
intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led across the
threshold.
After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne’s.
“Hester,” said he, “hast thou found peace?”
She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.
“Hast thou?” she asked.
“None—nothing but despair!” he answered. “What else could I look for,
being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist—a
man devoid of conscience—a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts—I
might have found peace long ere now. Nay, I never should have lost it.
But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there
originally was in me, all of God’s gifts that were the choicest have
become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I am most
miserable!”
“The people reverence thee,” said Hester. “And surely thou workest good
among them! Doth this bring thee no comfort?”
“More misery, Hester!—Only the more misery!” answered the clergyman
with a bitter smile. “As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I
have no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined
soul like mine effect towards the redemption of other souls?—or a
polluted soul towards their purification? And as for the people’s
reverence, would that it were turned to scorn and hatred! Canst thou
deem it, Hester, a consolation that I must stand up in my pulpit, and
meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven
were beaming from it!—must see my flock hungry for the truth, and
listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were speaking!—and
then look inward, and discern the black reality of what they idolise? I
have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between
what I seem and what I am! And Satan laughs at it!”
“You wrong yourself in this,” said Hester gently. “You have deeply and
sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you in the days long past.
Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in
people’s eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and
witnessed by good works? And wherefore should it not bring you peace?”
“No, Hester—no!” replied the clergyman. “There is no substance in it!
It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance, I have had
enough! Of penitence, there has been none! Else, I should long ago have
thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to
mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you,
Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns
in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment
of a seven years’ cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for
what I am! Had I one friend—or were it my worst enemy!—to whom, when
sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake
myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul
might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me!
But now, it is all falsehood!—all emptiness!—all death!”
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet,
uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his
words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to
interpose what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke:
“Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for,” said she, “with whom
to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!” Again she
hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort.—“Thou hast long
had such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the same roof!”
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at
his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
“Ha! What sayest thou?” cried he. “An enemy! And under mine own roof!
What mean you?”
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she
was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so
many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose
purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his
enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was
enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur
Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this
consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she
left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a more
tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her
sympathies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. She now
read his heart more accurately. She doubted not that the continual
presence of Roger Chillingworth—the secret poison of his malignity,
infecting all the air about him—and his authorised interference, as a
physician, with the minister’s physical and spiritual infirmities—that
these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose. By means of
them, the sufferer’s conscience had been kept in an irritated state,
the tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to
disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth,
could hardly fail to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal
alienation from the Good and True, of which madness is perhaps the
earthly type.
Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once—nay, why
should we not speak it?—still so passionately loved! Hester felt that
the sacrifice of the clergyman’s good name, and death itself, as she
had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely
preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to
choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess,
she would gladly have laid down on the forest leaves, and died there,
at Arthur Dimmesdale’s feet.
“Oh, Arthur!” cried she, “forgive me! In all things else, I have
striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held
fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good—thy
life—thy fame—were put in question! Then I consented to a deception.
But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side!
Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man!—the physician!—he
whom they call Roger Chillingworth!—he was my husband!”
The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that violence of
passion, which—intermixed in more shapes than one with his higher,
purer, softer qualities—was, in fact, the portion of him which the
devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was
there a blacker or a fiercer frown than Hester now encountered. For the
brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his
character had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower
energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He sank down
on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.
“I might have known it,” murmured he—“I did know it! Was not the secret
told me, in the natural recoil of my heart at the first sight of him,
and as often as I have seen him since? Why did I not understand? Oh,
Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the horror of this
thing! And the shame!—the indelicacy!—the horrible ugliness of this
exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat
over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!—I cannot forgive
thee!”
“Thou shalt forgive me!” cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen
leaves beside him. “Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!”
With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around him, and
pressed his head against her bosom, little caring though his cheek
rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but
strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should
look her sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her—for
seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman—and still she
bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven,
likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of
this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could
not bear, and live!
“Wilt thou yet forgive me?” she repeated, over and over again. “Wilt
thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?”
“I do forgive you, Hester,” replied the minister at length, with a deep
utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. “I freely forgive
you now. May God forgive us both. We are not, Hester, the worst sinners
in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That
old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in
cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never
did so!”
“Never, never!” whispered she. “What we did had a consecration of its
own. We felt it so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it?”
“Hush, Hester!” said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. “No; I
have not forgotten!”
They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the
mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier
hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending,
and darkening ever, as it stole along—and yet it unclosed a charm that
made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after
all, another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and creaked
with a blast that was passing through it. The boughs were tossing
heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully
to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath,
or constrained to forbode evil to come.
And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led
backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the
burden of her ignominy and the minister the hollow mockery of his good
name! So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had ever been
so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here seen only by his
eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen
woman! Here seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and
man, might be, for one moment true!
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
“Hester!” cried he, “here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows
your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to
keep our secret? What will now be the course of his revenge?”
“There is a strange secrecy in his nature,” replied Hester,
thoughtfully; “and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his
revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret. He will
doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion.”
“And I!—how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this
deadly enemy?” exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself,
and pressing his hand nervously against his heart—a gesture that had
grown involuntary with him. “Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong.
Resolve for me!”
“Thou must dwell no longer with this man,” said Hester, slowly and
firmly. “Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!”
“It were far worse than death!” replied the minister. “But how to avoid
it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these withered
leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he was? Must I
sink down there, and die at once?”
“Alas! what a ruin has befallen thee!” said Hester, with the tears
gushing into her eyes. “Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no
other cause!”
“The judgment of God is on me,” answered the conscience-stricken
priest. “It is too mighty for me to struggle with!”
“Heaven would show mercy,” rejoined Hester, “hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it.”
“Be thou strong for me!” answered he. “Advise me what to do.”
“Is the world, then, so narrow?” exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her
deep eyes on the minister’s, and instinctively exercising a magnetic
power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold
itself erect. “Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder town,
which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as
this around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track? Backward to the
settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but, onward, too! Deeper it goes, and
deeper into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step;
until some few miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of
the white man’s tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would
bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one
where thou mayest still be happy! Is there not shade enough in all this
boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of Roger
Chillingworth?”
“Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!” replied the minister,
with a sad smile.
“Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!” continued Hester. “It
brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again.
In our native land, whether in some remote rural village, or in vast
London—or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy—thou
wouldst be beyond his power and knowledge! And what hast thou to do
with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better
part in bondage too long already!”
“It cannot be!” answered the minister, listening as if he were called
upon to realise a dream. “I am powerless to go. Wretched and sinful as
I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence
in the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my own soul is,
I would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare not quit my
post, though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is death and
dishonour, when his dreary watch shall come to an end!”
“Thou art crushed under this seven years’ weight of misery,” replied
Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. “But
thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as
thou treadest along the forest-path: neither shalt thou freight the
ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and
ruin here where it hath happened. Meddle no more with it! Begin all
anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial?
Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness
to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of
thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission,
the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or, as is more thy nature, be a
scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of the
cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and
die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another,
and a high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why
shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have
so gnawed into thy life? that have made thee feeble to will and to do?
that will leave thee powerless even to repent? Up, and away!”
“Oh, Hester!” cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light,
kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, “thou tellest of
running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must
die here! There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into
the wide, strange, difficult world alone!”
It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He
lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his reach.
He repeated the word—“Alone, Hester!”
“Thou shall not go alone!” answered she, in a deep whisper. Then, all
was spoken!
XVIII.
A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE
Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester’s face with a look in which hope
and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of
horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but
dared not speak.
But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for
so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had
habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether
foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance,
in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the
untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a
colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had
their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as
the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this
estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or
legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence
than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe,
the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of
her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was
her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame,
Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and
they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;
although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of
the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of
principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched
with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts—for those it was easy to
arrange—but each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head
of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only
the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its
prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed
him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all
alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he
might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue than if he had
never sinned at all.
Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven
years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation
for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more to
fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None;
unless it avail him somewhat that he was broken down by long and
exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the
very remorse which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed
criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard
to strike the balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death
and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that,
finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint,
sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and
sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom
which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that
the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in
this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded, so that the
enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and might even in
his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in preference to
that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined
wall, and near it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over
again his unforgotten triumph.
The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it suffice
that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.
“If in all these past seven years,” thought he, “I could recall one
instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of that
earnest of Heaven’s mercy. But now—since I am irrevocably
doomed—wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the
condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a
better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer
prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I any longer live without her
companionship; so powerful is she to sustain—so tender to soothe! O
Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me?”
“Thou wilt go!” said Hester calmly, as he met her glance.
The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of
his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed,
unchristianised, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it were, with a
bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all
the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply
religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional
in his mood.
“Do I feel joy again?” cried he, wondering at himself. “Methought the
germ of it was dead in me! Oh, Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem
to have flung myself—sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—down upon
these forest leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new
powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the
better life! Why did we not find it sooner?”
“Let us not look back,” answered Hester Prynne. “The past is gone!
Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol I undo it
all, and make it as if it had never been!”
So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and,
taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered
leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the stream.
With a hand’s-breadth further flight, it would have fallen into the
water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry onward,
besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about.
But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel,
which some ill-fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be haunted
by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and unaccountable
misfortune.
The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden
of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She
had not known the weight until she felt the freedom! By another
impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and down
it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a
light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her
features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a
radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of
womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long
so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came
back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves
with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic
circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been
but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their
sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the
sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each
green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming
adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a
shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little
brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart of
mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature of the
forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher
truth—with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly-born, or
aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine,
filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the
outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been
bright in Hester’s eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale’s!
Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.
“Thou must know Pearl!” said she. “Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen
her—yes, I know it!—but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She is a
strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her dearly,
as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her!”
“Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?” asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily. “I have long shrunk from children, because
they often show a distrust—a backwardness to be familiar with me. I
have even been afraid of little Pearl!”
“Ah, that was sad!” answered the mother. “But she will love thee
dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her. Pearl!
Pearl!”
“I see the child,” observed the minister. “Yonder she is, standing in a
streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook. So
thou thinkest the child will love me?”
Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at some
distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled
vision in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of
boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or
distinct—now like a real child, now like a child’s spirit—as the
splendour went and came again. She heard her mother’s voice, and
approached slowly through the forest.
Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely while her mother sat
talking with the clergyman. The great black forest—stern as it showed
itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into
its bosom—became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it knew
how. Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to welcome
her. It offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding
autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood
upon the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with
their wild flavour. The small denizens of the wilderness hardly took
pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a brood of ten
behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented of her
fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A pigeon,
alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and uttered a
sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the lofty depths
of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or merriment—for the
squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little personage, that it is
hard to distinguish between his moods—so he chattered at the child, and
flung down a nut upon her head. It was a last year’s nut, and already
gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from his sleep by her light
footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting
whether it were better to steal off, or renew his nap on the same spot.
A wolf, it is said—but here the tale has surely lapsed into the
improbable—came up and smelt of Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage
head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the
mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised
a kindred wilderness in the human child.
And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the
settlement, or in her mother’s cottage. The Bowers appeared to know it,
and one and another whispered as she passed, “Adorn thyself with me,
thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!”—and, to please them,
Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and some
twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before her
eyes. With these she decorated her hair and her young waist, and became
a nymph child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest
sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned
herself, when she heard her mother’s voice, and came slowly back.
Slowly—for she saw the clergyman!
XIX.
THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE
“Thou wilt love her dearly,” repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the
minister sat watching little Pearl. “Dost thou not think her beautiful?
And see with what natural skill she has made those simple flowers adorn
her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds, and rubies in the wood,
they could not have become her better! She is a splendid child! But I
know whose brow she has!”
“Dost thou know, Hester,” said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet
smile, “that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath
caused me many an alarm? Methought—oh, Hester, what a thought is that,
and how terrible to dread it!—that my own features were partly repeated
in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them! But she
is mostly thine!”
“No, no! Not mostly!” answered the mother, with a tender smile. “A
little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child
she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks with those wild flowers
in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in dear old
England, had decked her out to meet us.”
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl’s slow advance. In her was
visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world,
these seven past years, as the living hieroglyphic, in which was
revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide—all written in this
symbol—all plainly manifest—had there been a prophet or magician
skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of
their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt
that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined when they
beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they
met, and were to dwell immortally together; thoughts like these—and
perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define—threw
an awe about the child as she came onward.
“Let her see nothing strange—no passion or eagerness—in thy way of
accosting her,” whispered Hester. “Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic
little elf sometimes. Especially she is generally intolerant of
emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But
the child hath strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee!”
“Thou canst not think,” said the minister, glancing aside at Hester
Prynne, “how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But, in
truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily won to be
familiar with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear,
nor answer to my smile, but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even
little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl,
twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first time—thou
knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst her with thee to the
house of yonder stern old Governor.”
“And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!” answered the
mother. “I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing. She
may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee!”
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on
the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who
still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk waiting to receive her. Just
where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and
quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all
the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of
flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than
the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl,
seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible
quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which Pearl
stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the
forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine,
that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the brook
beneath stood another child—another and the same—with likewise its ray
of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and
tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the child, in her
lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in
which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to
return to it.
There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother
were estranged, but through Hester’s fault, not Pearl’s. Since the
latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within
the circle of the mother’s feelings, and so modified the aspect of them
all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted
place, and hardly knew where she was.
“I have a strange fancy,” observed the sensitive minister, “that this
brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never
meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends
of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream?
Pray hasten her, for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my
nerves.”
“Come, dearest child!” said Hester encouragingly, and stretching out
both her arms. “How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish
before now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also. Thou
wilt have twice as much love henceforward as thy mother alone could
give thee! Leap across the brook and come to us. Thou canst leap like a
young deer!”
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed her
bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and now included
them both in the same glance, as if to detect and explain to herself
the relation which they bore to one another. For some unaccountable
reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child’s eyes upon himself, his
hand—with that gesture so habitual as to have become involuntary—stole
over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl
stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and
pointing evidently towards her mother’s breast. And beneath, in the
mirror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny image of
little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.
“Thou strange child! why dost thou not come to me?” exclaimed Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on her
brow—the more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like aspect
of the features that conveyed it. As her mother still kept beckoning to
her, and arraying her face in a holiday suit of unaccustomed smiles,
the child stamped her foot with a yet more imperious look and gesture.
In the brook, again, was the fantastic beauty of the image, with its
reflected frown, its pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving
emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl.
“Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!” cried Hester Prynne,
who, however, inured to such behaviour on the elf-child’s part at other
seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. “Leap
across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to
thee!”
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother’s threats any more than
mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion,
gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most
extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with
piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides, so that,
alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as
if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and
encouragement. Seen in the brook once more was the shadowy wrath of
Pearl’s image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot,
wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing its
small forefinger at Hester’s bosom.
“I see what ails the child,” whispered Hester to the clergyman, and
turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and
annoyance, “Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the
accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. Pearl
misses something that she has always seen me wear!”
“I pray you,” answered the minister, “if thou hast any means of
pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath
of an old witch like Mistress Hibbins,” added he, attempting to smile,
“I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in
a child. In Pearl’s young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a
preternatural effect. Pacify her if thou lovest me!”
Hester turned again towards Pearl with a crimson blush upon her cheek,
a conscious glance aside clergyman, and then a heavy sigh, while, even
before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly pallor.
“Pearl,” said she sadly, “look down at thy feet! There!—before thee!—on
the hither side of the brook!”
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated, and there lay the
scarlet letter so close upon the margin of the stream that the gold
embroidery was reflected in it.
“Bring it hither!” said Hester.
“Come thou and take it up!” answered Pearl.
“Was ever such a child!” observed Hester aside to the minister. “Oh, I
have much to tell thee about her! But, in very truth, she is right as
regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little
longer—only a few days longer—until we shall have left this region, and
look back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of. The forest
cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow
it up for ever!”
With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the
scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a
moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there
was a sense of inevitable doom upon her as she thus received back this
deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite
space! she had drawn an hour’s free breath! and here again was the
scarlet misery glittering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus
typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of
doom. Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and
confined them beneath her cap. As if there were a withering spell in
the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her womanhood,
departed like fading sunshine, and a gray shadow seemed to fall across
her.
When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to Pearl.
“Dost thou know thy mother now, child?”, asked she, reproachfully, but
with a subdued tone. “Wilt thou come across the brook, and own thy
mother, now that she has her shame upon her—now that she is sad?”
“Yes; now I will!” answered the child, bounding across the brook, and
clasping Hester in her arms “Now thou art my mother indeed! and I am
thy little Pearl!”
In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew down her
mother’s head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks. But then—by a
kind of necessity that always impelled this child to alloy whatever
comfort she might chance to give with a throb of anguish—Pearl put up
her mouth and kissed the scarlet letter, too.
“That was not kind!” said Hester. “When thou hast shown me a little
love, thou mockest me!”
“Why doth the minister sit yonder?” asked Pearl.
“He waits to welcome thee,” replied her mother. “Come thou, and entreat
his blessing! He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy mother,
too. Wilt thou not love him? Come he longs to greet thee!”
“Doth he love us?” said Pearl, looking up with acute intelligence into
her mother’s face. “Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three
together, into the town?”
“Not now, my child,” answered Hester. “But in days to come he will walk
hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our own; and
thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many things, and
love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him—wilt thou not?”
“And will he always keep his hand over his heart?” inquired Pearl.
“Foolish child, what a question is that!” exclaimed her mother. “Come,
and ask his blessing!”
But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with
every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice
of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favour to the clergyman. It
was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to him,
hanging back, and manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which,
ever since her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and
could transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different
aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all. The
minister—painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a
talisman to admit him into the child’s kindlier regards—bent forward,
and impressed one on her brow. Hereupon, Pearl broke away from her
mother, and, running to the brook, stooped over it, and bathed her
forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was quite washed off and diffused
through a long lapse of the gliding water. She then remained apart,
silently watching Hester and the clergyman; while they talked together
and made such arrangements as were suggested by their new position and
the purposes soon to be fulfilled.
And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The dell was to be
left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their
multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and
no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other
tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already
overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not
a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.
XX.
THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little Pearl,
he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should discover only
some faintly traced features or outline of the mother and the child,
slowly fading into the twilight of the woods. So great a vicissitude in
his life could not at once be received as real. But there was Hester,
clad in her gray robe, still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some
blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever
since been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with
earth’s heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together, and
find a single hour’s rest and solace. And there was Pearl, too, lightly
dancing from the margin of the brook—now that the intrusive third
person was gone—and taking her old place by her mother’s side. So the
minister had not fallen asleep and dreamed!
In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of
impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and
more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched
for their departure. It had been determined between them that the Old
World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter
and concealment than the wilds of New England or all America, with its
alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans
scattered thinly along the sea-board. Not to speak of the clergyman’s
health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life, his
native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure him
a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the higher the
state the more delicately adapted to it the man. In furtherance of this
choice, it so happened that a ship lay in the harbour; one of those
unquestionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without being
absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a
remarkable irresponsibility of character. This vessel had recently
arrived from the Spanish Main, and within three days’ time would sail
for Bristol. Hester Prynne—whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of
Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain and crew—could
take upon herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child
with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable.
The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the
precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would
probably be on the fourth day from the present. “This is most
fortunate!” he had then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate we hesitate to reveal.
Nevertheless—to hold nothing back from the reader—it was because, on
the third day from the present, he was to preach the Election Sermon;
and, as such an occasion formed an honourable epoch in the life of a
New England Clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable
mode and time of terminating his professional career. “At least, they
shall say of me,” thought this exemplary man, “that I leave no public
duty unperformed or ill-performed!” Sad, indeed, that an introspection
so profound and acute as this poor minister’s should be so miserably
deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him;
but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so
slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long since begun
to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any
considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the
multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the
true.
The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale’s feelings as he returned from his
interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and
hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway among the woods
seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less
trodden by the foot of man, than he remembered it on his outward
journey. But he leaped across the plashy places, thrust himself through
the clinging underbrush, climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow,
and overcame, in short, all the difficulties of the track, with an
unweariable activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how
feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled over the
same ground, only two days before. As he drew near the town, he took an
impression of change from the series of familiar objects that presented
themselves. It seemed not yesterday, not one, not two, but many days,
or even years ago, since he had quitted them. There, indeed, was each
former trace of the street, as he remembered it, and all the
peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and
a weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested one. Not the
less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of change. The
same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all the
well-known shapes of human life, about the little town. They looked
neither older nor younger now; the beards of the aged were no whiter,
nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it
was impossible to describe in what respect they differed from the
individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and
yet the minister’s deepest sense seemed to inform him of their
mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably as he
passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so very
strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale’s mind
vibrated between two ideas; either that he had seen it only in a dream
hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming about it now.
This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no
external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator
of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had
operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister’s
own will, and Hester’s will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore, but
the same minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to
the friends who greeted him—“I am not the man for whom you take me! I
left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy
tree trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister, and
see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy,
pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off garment!”
His friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him—“Thou art
thyself the man!” but the error would have been their own, not his.
Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In
truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in
that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now
communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he
was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a
sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional, in spite of
himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed
the impulse. For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The good old
man addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal privilege
which his venerable age, his upright and holy character, and his
station in the church, entitled him to use and, conjoined with this,
the deep, almost worshipping respect, which the minister’s professional
and private claims alike demanded. Never was there a more beautiful
example of how the majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the
obeisance and respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank,
and inferior order of endowment, towards a higher. Now, during a
conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary-bearded deacon, it was only by
the most careful self-control that the former could refrain from
uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose into his mind,
respecting the communion-supper. He absolutely trembled and turned pale
as ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself in utterance of these
horrible matters, and plead his own consent for so doing, without his
having fairly given it. And, even with this terror in his heart, he
could hardly avoid laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old
patriarchal deacon would have been petrified by his minister’s impiety.
Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the street,
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member of his
church, a most pious and exemplary old dame, poor, widowed, lonely, and
with a heart as full of reminiscences about her dead husband and
children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full
of storied gravestones. Yet all this, which would else have been such
heavy sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul, by
religious consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith she had
fed herself continually for more than thirty years. And since Mr.
Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam’s chief earthly
comfort—which, unless it had been likewise a heavenly comfort, could
have been none at all—was to meet her pastor, whether casually, or of
set purpose, and be refreshed with a word of warm, fragrant,
heaven-breathing Gospel truth, from his beloved lips, into her dulled,
but rapturously attentive ear. But, on this occasion, up to the moment
of putting his lips to the old woman’s ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the
great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture,
nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him,
unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul. The
instilment thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged
sister to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely
poisonous infusion. What he really did whisper, the minister could
never afterwards recollect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder in
his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to the good
widows comprehension, or which Providence interpreted after a method of
its own. Assuredly, as the minister looked back, he beheld an
expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine
of the celestial city on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.
Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church member, he
met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly-won—and won
by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale’s own sermon, on the Sabbath after his
vigil—to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the heavenly
hope that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark around
her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She was
fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew
well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her
heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to
religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan,
that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her
mother’s side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted,
or—shall we not rather say?—this lost and desperate man. As she drew
nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small compass, and
drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom
darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense of power
over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt
potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked look,
and develop all its opposite with but a word. So—with a mightier
struggle than he had yet sustained—he held his Geneva cloak before his
face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving
the young sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She ransacked her
conscience—which was full of harmless little matters, like her pocket
or her work-bag—and took herself to task, poor thing! for a thousand
imaginary faults, and went about her household duties with swollen
eyelids the next morning.
Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last
temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and
almost as horrible. It was—we blush to tell it—it was to stop short in
the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of little Puritan
children who were playing there, and had but just begun to talk.
Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken
seaman, one of the ship’s crew from the Spanish Main. And here, since
he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale
longed at least to shake hands with the tarry black-guard, and recreate
himself with a few improper jests, such as dissolute sailors so abound
with, and a volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and
heaven-defying oaths! It was not so much a better principle, as partly
his natural good taste, and still more his buckramed habit of clerical
decorum, that carried him safely through the latter crisis.
“What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?” cried the minister to
himself, at length, pausing in the street, and striking his hand
against his forehead.
“Am I mad? or am I given over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a
contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood? And does he
now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the performance of every
wickedness which his most foul imagination can conceive?”
At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed with
himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins,
the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been passing by. She made a
very grand appearance, having on a high head-dress, a rich gown of
velvet, and a ruff done up with the famous yellow starch, of which Anne
Turner, her especial friend, had taught her the secret, before this
last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder.
Whether the witch had read the minister’s thoughts or no, she came to a
full stop, looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and—though
little given to converse with clergymen—began a conversation.
“So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into the forest,” observed the
witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. “The next time I pray
you to allow me only a fair warning, and I shall be proud to bear you
company. Without taking overmuch upon myself my good word will go far
towards gaining any strange gentleman a fair reception from yonder
potentate you wot of.”
“I profess, madam,” answered the clergyman, with a grave obeisance,
such as the lady’s rank demanded, and his own good breeding made
imperative—“I profess, on my conscience and character, that I am
utterly bewildered as touching the purport of your words! I went not
into the forest to seek a potentate, neither do I, at any future time,
design a visit thither, with a view to gaining the favour of such
personage. My one sufficient object was to greet that pious friend of
mine, the Apostle Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious
souls he hath won from heathendom!”
“Ha, ha, ha!” cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high
head-dress at the minister. “Well, well! we must needs talk thus in the
daytime! You carry it off like an old hand! But at midnight, and in the
forest, we shall have other talk together!”
She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back her
head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognise a secret
intimacy of connexion.
“Have I then sold myself,” thought the minister, “to the fiend whom, if
men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen for
her prince and master?”
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by a
dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as
he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the
infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout
his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened
into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness,
unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever
was good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened him.
And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real
incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals,
and the world of perverted spirits.
He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the burial
ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study. The
minister was glad to have reached this shelter, without first betraying
himself to the world by any of those strange and wicked eccentricities
to which he had been continually impelled while passing through the
streets. He entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its
books, its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the
walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted him
throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and thitherward.
Here he had studied and written; here gone through fast and vigil, and
come forth half alive; here striven to pray; here borne a hundred
thousand agonies! There was the Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with
Moses and the Prophets speaking to him, and God’s voice through all.
There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished
sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had
ceased to gush out upon the page two days before. He knew that it was
himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered
these things, and written thus far into the Election Sermon! But he
seemed to stand apart, and eye this former self with scornful pitying,
but half-envious curiosity. That self was gone. Another man had
returned out of the forest—a wiser one—with a knowledge of hidden
mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached.
A bitter kind of knowledge that!
While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door of the
study, and the minister said, “Come in!”—not wholly devoid of an idea
that he might behold an evil spirit. And so he did! It was old Roger
Chillingworth that entered. The minister stood white and speechless,
with one hand on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the other spread upon his
breast.
“Welcome home, reverend sir,” said the physician “And how found you
that godly man, the Apostle Eliot? But methinks, dear sir, you look
pale, as if the travel through the wilderness had been too sore for
you. Will not my aid be requisite to put you in heart and strength to
preach your Election Sermon?”
“Nay, I think not so,” rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. “My
journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free air
which I have breathed have done me good, after so long confinement in
my study. I think to need no more of your drugs, my kind physician,
good though they be, and administered by a friendly hand.”
All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister with the
grave and intent regard of a physician towards his patient. But, in
spite of this outward show, the latter was almost convinced of the old
man’s knowledge, or, at least, his confident suspicion, with respect to
his own interview with Hester Prynne. The physician knew then that in
the minister’s regard he was no longer a trusted friend, but his
bitterest enemy. So much being known, it would appear natural that a
part of it should be expressed. It is singular, however, how long a
time often passes before words embody things; and with what security
two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may approach its
very verge, and retire without disturbing it. Thus the minister felt no
apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would touch, in express words,
upon the real position which they sustained towards one another. Yet
did the physician, in his dark way, creep frightfully near the secret.
“Were it not better,” said he, “that you use my poor skill tonight?
Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous
for this occasion of the Election discourse. The people look for great
things from you, apprehending that another year may come about and find
their pastor gone.”
“Yes, to another world,” replied the minister with pious resignation.
“Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good sooth, I hardly think to
tarry with my flock through the flitting seasons of another year! But
touching your medicine, kind sir, in my present frame of body I need it
not.”
“I joy to hear it,” answered the physician. “It may be that my
remedies, so long administered in vain, begin now to take due effect.
Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England’s gratitude, could
I achieve this cure!”
“I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend,” said the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale with a solemn smile. “I thank you, and can but requite
your good deeds with my prayers.”
“A good man’s prayers are golden recompense!” rejoined old Roger
Chillingworth, as he took his leave. “Yea, they are the current gold
coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King’s own mint mark on them!”
Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and requested
food, which, being set before him, he ate with ravenous appetite. Then
flinging the already written pages of the Election Sermon into the
fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with such an impulsive
flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only
wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn
music of its oracles through so foul an organ pipe as he. However,
leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved for ever, he drove
his task onward with earnest haste and ecstasy.
Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he
careering on it; morning came, and peeped, blushing, through the
curtains; and at last sunrise threw a golden beam into the study, and
laid it right across the minister’s bedazzled eyes. There he was, with
the pen still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable tract of
written space behind him!
XXI.
THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY
Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to
receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and little
Pearl came into the market-place. It was already thronged with the
craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in considerable
numbers, among whom, likewise, were many rough figures, whose attire of
deer-skins marked them as belonging to some of the forest settlements,
which surrounded the little metropolis of the colony.
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions for seven years past,
Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by its hue
than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had the
effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline; while
again the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight
indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own
illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the
marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was like
a mask; or, rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman’s features;
owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually
dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the
world with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen
before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some
preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and
have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance
and mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after
sustaining the gaze of the multitude through several miserable years as
a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to
endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a
kind of triumph. “Look your last on the scarlet letter and its
wearer!”—the people’s victim and lifelong bond-slave, as they fancied
her, might say to them. “Yet a little while, and she will be beyond
your reach! A few hours longer and the deep, mysterious ocean will
quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn on her
bosom!” Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to
human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester’s mind,
at the moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which
had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there not be an
irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless draught of the
cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood
had been perpetually flavoured. The wine of life, henceforth to be
presented to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and
exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker, or else leave an
inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness wherewith
she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest potency.
Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety. It would have been impossible to
guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to the
shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so
delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child’s apparel,
was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in
imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester’s simple robe. The dress,
so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable
development and outward manifestation of her character, no more to be
separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a butterfly’s
wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright flower. As with
these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea with her nature.
On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude
and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer
of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of
the breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in
the agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a
sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever kind, in
domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem on her
mother’s unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of her spirits, the
emotions which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester’s
brow.
This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather than
walk by her mother’s side.
She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and
sometimes piercing music. When they reached the market-place, she
became still more restless, on perceiving the stir and bustle that
enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like the broad and lonesome
green before a village meeting-house, than the centre of a town’s
business.
“Why, what is this, mother?” cried she. “Wherefore have all the people
left their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See,
there is the blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his
Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any
kind body would only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, the
old jailer, nodding and smiling at me. Why does he do so, mother?”
“He remembers thee a little babe, my child,” answered Hester.
“He should not nod and smile at me, for all that—the black, grim,
ugly-eyed old man!” said Pearl. “He may nod at thee, if he will; for
thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But see, mother,
how many faces of strange people, and Indians among them, and sailors!
What have they all come to do, here in the market-place?”
“They wait to see the procession pass,” said Hester. “For the Governor
and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great
people and good people, with the music and the soldiers marching before
them.”
“And will the minister be there?” asked Pearl. “And will he hold out
both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the
brook-side?”
“He will be there, child,” answered her mother, “but he will not greet
thee to-day, nor must thou greet him.”
“What a strange, sad man is he!” said the child, as if speaking partly
to herself. “In the dark nighttime he calls us to him, and holds thy
hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in
the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of
sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he
kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it
off! But, here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us
not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand
always over his heart!”
“Be quiet, Pearl—thou understandest not these things,” said her mother.
“Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how cheery
is everybody’s face to-day. The children have come from their schools,
and the grown people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose
to be happy, for, to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over them; and
so—as has been the custom of mankind ever since a nation was first
gathered—they make merry and rejoice: as if a good and golden year were
at length to pass over the poor old world!”
It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that
brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the
year—as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of
two centuries—the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy
they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the
customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared
scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general
affliction.
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the
market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic
gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the
sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of
England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as
stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had
they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would
have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets,
pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in
the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation
with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant
embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation, at such
festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of this kind in
the mode of celebrating the day on which the political year of the
colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered splendour, a
colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld in
proud old London—we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord
Mayor’s show—might be traced in the customs which our forefathers
instituted, with reference to the annual installation of magistrates.
The fathers and founders of the commonwealth—the statesman, the priest,
and the soldier—seemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and
majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as
the proper garb of public and social eminence. All came forth to move
in procession before the people’s eye, and thus impart a needed dignity
to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in relaxing
the severe and close application to their various modes of rugged
industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same piece and
material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the
appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the
England of Elizabeth’s time, or that of James—no rude shows of a
theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor
gleeman with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks
of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with
jests, perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective, by their
appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such
professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been
sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the
general sentiment which give law its vitality. Not the less, however,
the great, honest face of the people smiled—grimly, perhaps, but widely
too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and
shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the village-greens of
England; and which it was thought well to keep alive on this new soil,
for the sake of the courage and manliness that were essential in them.
Wrestling matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and
Devonshire, were seen here and there about the market-place; in one
corner, there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and—what attracted
most interest of all—on the platform of the pillory, already so noted
in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an exhibition with
the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the disappointment of the
crowd, this latter business was broken off by the interposition of the
town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty of the law to be
violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then
in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires
who had known how to be merry, in their day), that they would compare
favourably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even
at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the
generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of
Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn
again the forgotten art of gaiety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint
was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet
enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians—in their savage
finery of curiously embroidered deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and
yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and
stone-headed spear—stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity,
beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were
these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene.
This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners—a part
of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main—who had come ashore to
see the humours of Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes,
with sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide short
trousers were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a
rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some
instances, a sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf,
gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of
animal ferocity. They transgressed without fear or scruple, the rules
of behaviour that were binding on all others: smoking tobacco under the
beadle’s very nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a
shilling; and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts of wine or
aqua-vitae from pocket flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping
crowd around them. It remarkably characterised the incomplete morality
of the age, rigid as we call it, that a licence was allowed the
seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more
desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor of that day would
go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little
doubt, for instance, that this very ship’s crew, though no unfavourable
specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should
phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have
perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.
But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at
its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any
attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might
relinquish his calling and become at once if he chose, a man of probity
and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his reckless life,
was he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic
or casually associate. Thus the Puritan elders in their black cloaks,
starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbenignantly at
the clamour and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men; and it
excited neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen
as old Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the
market-place in close and familiar talk with the commander of the
questionable vessel.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as
apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a
profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his hat, which
was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather.
There was a sword at his side and a sword-cut on his forehead, which,
by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display
than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this
face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without
undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring a
fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As
regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to
the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship
strolled idly through the market-place; until happening to approach the
spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognise, and
did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever
Hester stood, a small vacant area—a sort of magic circle—had formed
itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one
another at a little distance, none ventured or felt disposed to
intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the
scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve,
and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly, withdrawal
of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered a good
purpose by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together without
risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne’s repute
before the public, that the matron in town, most eminent for rigid
morality, could not have held such intercourse with less result of
scandal than herself.
“So, mistress,” said the mariner, “I must bid the steward make ready
one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or ship fever
this voyage. What with the ship’s surgeon and this other doctor, our
only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as there is a lot
of apothecary’s stuff aboard, which I traded for with a Spanish
vessel.”
“What mean you?” inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to
appear. “Have you another passenger?”
“Why, know you not,” cried the shipmaster, “that this physician
here—Chillingworth he calls himself—is minded to try my cabin-fare with
you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of your
party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of—he that is in
peril from these sour old Puritan rulers.”
“They know each other well, indeed,” replied Hester, with a mien of
calmness, though in the utmost consternation. “They have long dwelt
together.”
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But at
that instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in
the remotest corner of the market-place and smiling on her; a smile
which—across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk and
laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the
crowd—conveyed secret and fearful meaning.
XXII.
THE PROCESSION
Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider
what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of
affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a
contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of
magistrates and citizens on its way towards the meeting-house: where,
in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever since
observed, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election
Sermon.
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and stately
march, turning a corner, and making its way across the market-place.
First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps
imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill; but
yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and
clarion addresses itself to the multitude—that of imparting a higher
and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye.
Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant
the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence
throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed to be borne
upward like a floating sea-bird on the long heaves and swells of sound.
But she was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer of the
sunshine on the weapons and bright armour of the military company,
which followed after the music, and formed the honorary escort of the
procession. This body of soldiery—which still sustains a corporate
existence, and marches down from past ages with an ancient and
honourable fame—was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were
filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse, and
sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in an
association of Knights Templars, they might learn the science, and, so
far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the practices of war. The
high estimation then placed upon the military character might be seen
in the lofty port of each individual member of the company. Some of
them, indeed, by their services in the Low Countries and on other
fields of European warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the
name and pomp of soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in
burnished steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions,
had a brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the
military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer’s eye. Even in
outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty that made the
warrior’s haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age when
what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the
massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a
great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary right the quality
of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists
in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the
selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or
ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English
settler on these rude shores—having left king, nobles, and all degrees
of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of
reverence was strong in him—bestowed it on the white hair and venerable
brow of age—on long-tried integrity—on solid wisdom and sad-coloured
experience—on endowments of that grave and weighty order which gave the
idea of permanence, and comes under the general definition of
respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore—Bradstreet,
Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers—who were elevated to
power by the early choice of the people, seem to have been not often
brilliant, but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety, rather than
activity of intellect. They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in
time of difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the state like
a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of character
here indicated were well represented in the square cast of countenance
and large physical development of the new colonial magistrates. So far
as a demeanour of natural authority was concerned, the mother country
need not have been ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual
democracy adopted into the House of Peers, or make the Privy Council of
the Sovereign.
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the
anniversary was expected. His was the profession at that era in which
intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life;
for—leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements
powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to
win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political
power—as in the case of Increase Mather—was within the grasp of a
successful priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since
Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he
exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he
kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step as at
other times; his frame was not bent, nor did his hand rest ominously
upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength
seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual and imparted to him by
angelical ministrations. It might be the exhilaration of that potent
cordial which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest and
long-continued thought. Or perchance his sensitive temperament was
invigorated by the loud and piercing music that swelled heaven-ward,
and uplifted him on its ascending wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was
his look, it might be questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the
music. There was his body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed
force. But where was his mind? Far and deep in its own region, busying
itself, with preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately
thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard
nothing, knew nothing of what was around him; but the spiritual element
took up the feeble frame and carried it along, unconscious of the
burden, and converting it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon
intellect, who have grown morbid, possess this occasional power of
mighty effort, into which they throw the life of many days and then are
lifeless for as many more.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary
influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not, unless
that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her
reach. One glance of recognition she had imagined must needs pass
between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of
solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where,
sitting hand-in-hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk
with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known each
other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He, moving
proudly past, enveloped as it were, in the rich music, with the
procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in
his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his
unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit
sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that,
vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the
clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester, that
she could scarcely forgive him—least of all now, when the heavy
footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer,
nearer!—for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their
mutual world—while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold
hands, and found him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother’s feelings, or herself
felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the
minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering
up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight. When the whole
had gone by, she looked up into Hester’s face—
“Mother,” said she, “was that the same minister that kissed me by the
brook?”
“Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We must not
always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.”
“I could not be sure that it was he—so strange he looked,” continued
the child. “Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me now,
before all the people, even as he did yonder among the dark old trees.
What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his
hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me begone?”
“What should he say, Pearl,” answered Hester, “save that it was no time
to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place? Well
for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him!”
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale,
was expressed by a person whose eccentricities—insanity, as we should
term it—led her to do what few of the townspeople would have ventured
on—to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter in
public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence,
with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a
gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession. As this ancient
lady had the renown (which subsequently cost her no less a price than
her life) of being a principal actor in all the works of necromancy
that were continually going forward, the crowd gave way before her, and
seemed to fear the touch of her garment, as if it carried the plague
among its gorgeous folds. Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne—kindly
as so many now felt towards the latter—the dread inspired by Mistress
Hibbins had doubled, and caused a general movement from that part of
the market-place in which the two women stood.
“Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?” whispered the old
lady confidentially to Hester. “Yonder divine man! That saint on earth,
as the people uphold him to be, and as—I must needs say—he really
looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would think how
little while it is since he went forth out of his study—chewing a
Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I warrant—to take an airing in
the forest! Aha! we know what that means, Hester Prynne! But truly,
forsooth, I find it hard to believe him the same man. Many a church
member saw I, walking behind the music, that has danced in the same
measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian
powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us! That is but a
trifle, when a woman knows the world. But this minister. Couldst thou
surely tell, Hester, whether he was the same man that encountered thee
on the forest path?”
“Madam, I know not of what you speak,” answered Hester Prynne, feeling
Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and
awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal
connexion between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil
One. “It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister
of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.”
“Fie, woman—fie!” cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester.
“Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet
no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea, though no leaf of the
wild garlands which they wore while they danced be left in their hair!
I know thee, Hester, for I behold the token. We may all see it in the
sunshine! and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou wearest it
openly, so there need be no question about that. But this minister! Let
me tell thee in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one of his own
servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so that the
mark shall be disclosed, in open daylight, to the eyes of all the
world! What is that the minister seeks to hide, with his hand always
over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne?”
“What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?” eagerly asked little Pearl. “Hast
thou seen it?”
“No matter, darling!” responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence. “Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another.
They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince of Air! Wilt
thou ride with me some fine night to see thy father? Then thou shalt
know wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart!”
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the weird
old gentlewoman took her departure.
By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were
heard commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester
near the spot. As the sacred edifice was too much thronged to admit
another auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of
the pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon
to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct but varied murmur and flow
of the minister’s very peculiar voice.
This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher
spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and
cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and
emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart,
wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the
church walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intenseness, and
sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for
her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps,
if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and
have clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as
of the wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it
rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and power, until its
volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and solemn
grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was
for ever in it an essential character of plaintiveness. A loud or low
expression of anguish—the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be
conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility in every
bosom! At times this deep strain of pathos was all that could be heard,
and scarcely heard sighing amid a desolate silence. But even when the
minister’s voice grew high and commanding—when it gushed irrepressibly
upward—when it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the
church as to burst its way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself
in the open air—still, if the auditor listened intently, and for the
purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain. What was it? The
complaint of a human heart, sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its
secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind;
beseeching its sympathy or forgiveness,—at every moment,—in each
accent,—and never in vain! It was this profound and continual undertone
that gave the clergyman his most appropriate power.
During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the
scaffold. If the minister’s voice had not kept her there, there would,
nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence
she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense
within her—too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily
on her mind—that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was
connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.
Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother’s side, and was playing
at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd
cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright
plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to and
fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering
leaves. She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp and irregular
movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit, which
to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was
played upon and vibrated with her mother’s disquietude. Whenever Pearl
saw anything to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she
flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or thing
as her own property, so far as she desired it, but without yielding the
minutest degree of control over her motions in requital. The Puritans
looked on, and, if they smiled, were none the less inclined to
pronounce the child a demon offspring, from the indescribable charm of
beauty and eccentricity that shone through her little figure, and
sparkled with its activity. She ran and looked the wild Indian in the
face, and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence,
with native audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she
flew into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild
men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they gazed
wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the sea-foam had
taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted with a soul of the
sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in the night-time.
One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had spoken to
Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl’s aspect, that he attempted to
lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding it as
impossible to touch her as to catch a humming-bird in the air, he took
from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it, and threw it to
the child. Pearl immediately twined it around her neck and waist with
such happy skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and
it was difficult to imagine her without it.
“Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter,” said the seaman,
“Wilt thou carry her a message from me?”
“If the message pleases me, I will,” answered Pearl.
“Then tell her,” rejoined he, “that I spake again with the
black-a-visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring
his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy
mother take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her
this, thou witch-baby?”
“Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!” cried
Pearl, with a naughty smile. “If thou callest me that ill-name, I shall
tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship with a tempest!”
Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child returned to
her mother, and communicated what the mariner had said. Hester’s
strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on
beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom, which
at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minister and
herself out of their labyrinth of misery—showed itself with an
unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster’s intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to
another trial. There were many people present from the country round
about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had
been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumours, but who
had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after exhausting
other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude
and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could
not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that distance
they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal force of the
repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole gang of sailors,
likewise, observing the press of spectators, and learning the purport
of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their sunburnt and
desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even the Indians were affected
by a sort of cold shadow of the white man’s curiosity and, gliding
through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester’s
bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly
embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity among her
people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own interest in this
worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what they
saw others feel) lounged idly to the same quarter, and tormented Hester
Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool,
well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester saw and recognized
the selfsame faces of that group of matrons, who had awaited her
forthcoming from the prison-door seven years ago; all save one, the
youngest and only compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had
since made. At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the
burning letter, it had strangely become the centre of more remark and
excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more painfully, than
at any time since the first day she put it on.
While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the cunning
cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for ever, the
admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an
audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control. The
sainted minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the
marketplace! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to
surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both!
XXIII.
THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER
The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had
been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length came to
a pause. There was a momentary silence, profound as what should follow
the utterance of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed tumult,
as if the auditors, released from the high spell that had transported
them into the region of another’s mind, were returning into themselves,
with all their awe and wonder still heavy on them. In a moment more the
crowd began to gush forth from the doors of the church. Now that there
was an end, they needed more breath, more fit to support the gross and
earthly life into which they relapsed, than that atmosphere which the
preacher had converted into words of flame, and had burdened with the
rich fragrance of his thought.
In the open air their rapture broke into speech. The street and the
market-place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with applauses of
the minister. His hearers could not rest until they had told one
another of what each knew better than he could tell or hear.
According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so wise,
so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day; nor had
inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it
did through his. Its influence could be seen, as it were, descending
upon him, and possessing him, and continually lifting him out of the
written discourse that lay before him, and filling him with ideas that
must have been as marvellous to himself as to his audience. His
subject, it appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the
communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England
which they were here planting in the wilderness. And, as he drew
towards the close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon him,
constraining him to its purpose as mightily as the old prophets of
Israel were constrained, only with this difference, that, whereas the
Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was
his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly
gathered people of the Lord. But, throughout it all, and through the
whole discourse, there had been a certain deep, sad undertone of
pathos, which could not be interpreted otherwise than as the natural
regret of one soon to pass away. Yes; their minister whom they so
loved—and who so loved them all, that he could not depart heavenward
without a sigh—had the foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would
soon leave them in their tears. This idea of his transitory stay on
earth gave the last emphasis to the effect which the preacher had
produced; it was as if an angel, in his passage to the skies, had
shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant—at once a shadow
and a splendour—and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them.
Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—as to most men, in
their various spheres, though seldom recognised until they see it far
behind them—an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph than
any previous one, or than any which could hereafter be. He stood, at
this moment, on the very proudest eminence of superiority, to which the
gifts or intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation
of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England’s earliest
days, when the professional character was of itself a lofty pedestal.
Such was the position which the minister occupied, as he bowed his head
forward on the cushions of the pulpit at the close of his Election
Sermon. Meanwhile Hester Prynne was standing beside the scaffold of the
pillory, with the scarlet letter still burning on her breast!
Now was heard again the clamour of the music, and the measured tramp of
the military escort issuing from the church door. The procession was to
be marshalled thence to the town hall, where a solemn banquet would
complete the ceremonies of the day.
Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers were
seen moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew back
reverently, on either side, as the Governor and magistrates, the old
and wise men, the holy ministers, and all that were eminent and
renowned, advanced into the midst of them. When they were fairly in the
marketplace, their presence was greeted by a shout. This—though
doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the
child-like loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers—was felt to be
an irrepressible outburst of enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that
high strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears.
Each felt the impulse in himself, and in the same breath, caught it
from his neighbour. Within the church, it had hardly been kept down;
beneath the sky it pealed upward to the zenith. There were human beings
enough, and enough of highly wrought and symphonious feeling to produce
that more impressive sound than the organ tones of the blast, or the
thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that mighty swell of many voices,
blended into one great voice by the universal impulse which makes
likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never, from the soil of New
England had gone up such a shout! Never, on New England soil had stood
the man so honoured by his mortal brethren as the preacher!
How fared it with him, then? Were there not the brilliant particles of
a halo in the air about his head? So etherealised by spirit as he was,
and so apotheosised by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps, in the
procession, really tread upon the dust of earth?
As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all eyes
were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to approach
among them. The shout died into a murmur, as one portion of the crowd
after another obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and pale he looked,
amid all his triumph! The energy—or say, rather, the inspiration which
had held him up, until he should have delivered the sacred message that
had brought its own strength along with it from heaven—was withdrawn,
now that it had so faithfully performed its office. The glow, which
they had just before beheld burning on his cheek, was extinguished,
like a flame that sinks down hopelessly among the late decaying embers.
It seemed hardly the face of a man alive, with such a death-like hue:
it was hardly a man with life in him, that tottered on his path so
nervously, yet tottered, and did not fall!
One of his clerical brethren—it was the venerable John Wilson—observing
the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the retiring wave of
intellect and sensibility, stepped forward hastily to offer his
support. The minister tremulously, but decidedly, repelled the old
man’s arm. He still walked onward, if that movement could be so
described, which rather resembled the wavering effort of an infant,
with its mother’s arms in view, outstretched to tempt him forward. And
now, almost imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he
had come opposite the well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold,
where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time between, Hester
Prynne had encountered the world’s ignominious stare. There stood
Hester, holding little Pearl by the hand! And there was the scarlet
letter on her breast! The minister here made a pause; although the
music still played the stately and rejoicing march to which the
procession moved. It summoned him onward—inward to the festival!—but
here he made a pause.
Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye upon him.
He now left his own place in the procession, and advanced to give
assistance judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale’s aspect that he must otherwise
inevitably fall. But there was something in the latter’s expression
that warned back the magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the
vague intimations that pass from one spirit to another. The crowd,
meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder. This earthly faintness, was,
in their view, only another phase of the minister’s celestial strength;
nor would it have seemed a miracle too high to be wrought for one so
holy, had he ascended before their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter,
and fading at last into the light of heaven!
He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms.
“Hester,” said he, “come hither! Come, my little Pearl!”
It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was
something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it. The child,
with the bird-like motion, which was one of her characteristics, flew
to him, and clasped her arms about his knees. Hester Prynne—slowly, as
if impelled by inevitable fate, and against her strongest will—likewise
drew near, but paused before she reached him. At this instant old Roger
Chillingworth thrust himself through the crowd—or, perhaps, so dark,
disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of some nether
region—to snatch back his victim from what he sought to do! Be that as
it might, the old man rushed forward, and caught the minister by the
arm.
“Madman, hold! what is your purpose?” whispered he. “Wave back that
woman! Cast off this child! All shall be well! Do not blacken your
fame, and perish in dishonour! I can yet save you! Would you bring
infamy on your sacred profession?”
“Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late!” answered the minister,
encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly. “Thy power is not what it
was! With God’s help, I shall escape thee now!”
He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.
“Hester Prynne,” cried he, with a piercing earnestness, “in the name of
Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last
moment, to do what—for my own heavy sin and miserable agony—I withheld
myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine thy
strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by the
will which God hath granted me! This wretched and wronged old man is
opposing it with all his might!—with all his own might, and the
fiend’s! Come, Hester—come! Support me up yonder scaffold.”
The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity, who stood more
immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by surprise, and so
perplexed as to the purport of what they saw—unable to receive the
explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any
other—that they remained silent and inactive spectators of the
judgement which Providence seemed about to work. They beheld the
minister, leaning on Hester’s shoulder, and supported by her arm around
him, approach the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the
little hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger
Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of
guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well entitled,
therefore to be present at its closing scene.
“Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,” said he looking darkly at the
clergyman, “there was no one place so secret—no high place nor lowly
place, where thou couldst have escaped me—save on this very scaffold!”
“Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!” answered the minister.
Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester, with an expression of doubt and
anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that there was a
feeble smile upon his lips.
“Is not this better,” murmured he, “than what we dreamed of in the
forest?”
“I know not! I know not!” she hurriedly replied. “Better? Yea; so we
may both die, and little Pearl die with us!”
“For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order,” said the minister; “and
God is merciful! Let me now do the will which He hath made plain before
my sight. For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste to take
my shame upon me!”
Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of little
Pearl’s, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and
venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his brethren; to the
people, whose great heart was thoroughly appalled yet overflowing with
tearful sympathy, as knowing that some deep life-matter—which, if full
of sin, was full of anguish and repentance likewise—was now to be laid
open to them. The sun, but little past its meridian, shone down upon
the clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he stood out
from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the bar of Eternal
Justice.
“People of New England!” cried he, with a voice that rose over them,
high, solemn, and majestic—yet had always a tremor through it, and
sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a fathomless depth of remorse
and woe—“ye, that have loved me!—ye, that have deemed me holy!—behold
me here, the one sinner of the world! At last—at last!—I stand upon the
spot where, seven years since, I should have stood, here, with this
woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have crept
hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful moment, from grovelling down
upon my face! Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears! Ye have all
shuddered at it! Wherever her walk hath been—wherever, so miserably
burdened, she may have hoped to find repose—it hath cast a lurid gleam
of awe and horrible repugnance round about her. But there stood one in
the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not
shuddered!”
It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the remainder
of his secret undisclosed. But he fought back the bodily weakness—and,
still more, the faintness of heart—that was striving for the mastery
with him. He threw off all assistance, and stepped passionately forward
a pace before the woman and the children.
“It was on him!” he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so determined
was he to speak out the whole. “God’s eye beheld it! The angels were
for ever pointing at it! (The Devil knew it well, and fretted it
continually with the touch of his burning finger!) But he hid it
cunningly from men, and walked among you with the mien of a spirit,
mournful, because so pure in a sinful world!—and sad, because he missed
his heavenly kindred! Now, at the death-hour, he stands up before you!
He bids you look again at Hester’s scarlet letter! He tells you, that,
with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears
on his own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more
than the type of what has seared his inmost heart! Stand any here that
question God’s judgment on a sinner! Behold! Behold, a dreadful witness
of it!”
With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from before
his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that
revelation. For an instant, the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude
was concentrated on the ghastly miracle; while the minister stood, with
a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest
pain, had won a victory. Then, down he sank upon the scaffold! Hester
partly raised him, and supported his head against her bosom. Old Roger
Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull countenance,
out of which the life seemed to have departed.
“Thou hast escaped me!” he repeated more than once. “Thou hast escaped
me!”
“May God forgive thee!” said the minister. “Thou, too, hast deeply
sinned!”
He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the
woman and the child.
“My little Pearl,” said he, feebly and there was a sweet and gentle
smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now
that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as if he would be
sportive with the child—“dear little Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now? Thou
wouldst not, yonder, in the forest! But now thou wilt?”
Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in
which the wild infant bore a part had developed all her sympathies; and
as her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that
she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with
the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl’s
errand as a messenger of anguish was fulfilled.
“Hester,” said the clergyman, “farewell!”
“Shall we not meet again?” whispered she, bending her face down close
to his. “Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely,
we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest far into
eternity, with those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what thou seest!”
“Hush, Hester—hush!” said he, with tremulous solemnity. “The law we
broke!—the sin here awfully revealed!—let these alone be in thy
thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God—when
we violated our reverence each for the other’s soul—it was thenceforth
vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure
reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most
of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear
upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep
the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this
death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these
agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever! Praised be His name!
His will be done! Farewell!”
That final word came forth with the minister’s expiring breath. The
multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe
and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur
that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit.
XXIV.
CONCLUSION
After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their
thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one
account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the
unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER—the very semblance of that worn by
Hester Prynne—imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin there were
various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been
conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the
very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun
a course of penance—which he afterwards, in so many futile methods,
followed out—by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others
contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long time
subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer,
had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and poisonous
drugs. Others, again and those best able to appreciate the minister’s
peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit upon
the body—whispered their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect
of the ever-active tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart
outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven’s dreadful judgment by the
visible presence of the letter. The reader may choose among these
theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the
portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its
deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation has fixed it in
very undesirable distinctness.
It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators
of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes
from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark
whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant’s. Neither, by
their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely
implied, any—the slightest—connexion on his part, with the guilt for
which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to
these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was
dying—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him
already among saints and angels—had desired, by yielding up his breath
in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly
nugatory is the choicest of man’s own righteousness. After exhausting
life in his efforts for mankind’s spiritual good, he had made the
manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the
mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we
are sinners all alike. It was to teach them, that the holiest amongst
us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly
the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of
human merit, which would look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a
truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr.
Dimmesdale’s story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with
which a man’s friends—and especially a clergyman’s—will sometimes
uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the
scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the
dust.
The authority which we have chiefly followed—a manuscript of old date,
drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some of whom had
known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the tale from contemporary
witnesses fully confirms the view taken in the foregoing pages. Among
many morals which press upon us from the poor minister’s miserable
experience, we put only this into a sentence:—“Be true! Be true! Be
true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait
whereby the worst may be inferred!”
Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost
immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale’s death, in the appearance and
demeanour of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength
and energy—all his vital and intellectual force—seemed at once to
desert him, insomuch that he positively withered up, shrivelled away
and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies
wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his
life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge; and
when, by its completest triumph consummation that evil principle was
left with no further material to support it—when, in short, there was
no more Devil’s work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the
unhumanised mortal to betake himself whither his master would find him
tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly. But, to all these shadowy
beings, so long our near acquaintances—as well Roger Chillingworth as
his companions we would fain be merciful. It is a curious subject of
observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing
at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of
intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for
the food of his affections and spiritual fife upon another: each leaves
the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and
desolate by the withdrawal of his subject. Philosophically considered,
therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one
happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky
and lurid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the
minister—mutual victims as they have been—may, unawares, have found
their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden
love.
Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to
communicate to the reader. At old Roger Chillingworth’s decease, (which
took place within the year), and by his last will and testament, of
which Governor Bellingham and the Reverend Mr. Wilson were executors,
he bequeathed a very considerable amount of property, both here and in
England to little Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne.
So Pearl—the elf child—the demon offspring, as some people up to that
epoch persisted in considering her—became the richest heiress of her
day in the New World. Not improbably this circumstance wrought a very
material change in the public estimation; and had the mother and child
remained here, little Pearl at a marriageable period of life might have
mingled her wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among
them all. But, in no long time after the physician’s death, the wearer
of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with her. For many
years, though a vague report would now and then find its way across the
sea—like a shapeless piece of driftwood tossed ashore with the initials
of a name upon it—yet no tidings of them unquestionably authentic were
received. The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend. Its
spell, however, was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the
poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the sea-shore where
Hester Prynne had dwelt. Near this latter spot, one afternoon some
children were at play, when they beheld a tall woman in a gray robe
approach the cottage-door. In all those years it had never once been
opened; but either she unlocked it or the decaying wood and iron
yielded to her hand, or she glided shadow-like through these
impediments—and, at all events, went in.
On the threshold she paused—turned partly round—for perchance the idea
of entering alone and all so changed, the home of so intense a former
life, was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear. But her
hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to display a
scarlet letter on her breast.
And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken shame!
But where was little Pearl? If still alive she must now have been in
the flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew—nor ever learned with
the fulness of perfect certainty—whether the elf-child had gone thus
untimely to a maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been
softened and subdued and made capable of a woman’s gentle happiness.
But through the remainder of Hester’s life there were indications that
the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest
with some inhabitant of another land. Letters came, with armorial seals
upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the
cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury such as Hester never
cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased and affection
have imagined for her. There were trifles too, little ornaments,
beautiful tokens of a continual remembrance, that must have been
wrought by delicate fingers at the impulse of a fond heart. And once
Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment with such a lavish richness
of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult had any infant
thus apparelled, been shown to our sober-hued community.
In fine, the gossips of that day believed—and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who
made investigations a century later, believed—and one of his recent
successors in office, moreover, faithfully believes—that Pearl was not
only alive, but married, and happy, and mindful of her mother; and that
she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at
her fireside.
But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England,
than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been
her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She
had returned, therefore, and resumed—of her own free will, for not the
sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it—resumed
the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards
did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful,
and self-devoted years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter
ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness,
and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon
with awe, yet with reverence too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish
ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people
brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel,
as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more
especially—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted,
wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion—or with the dreary
burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought came to
Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the
remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She
assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period,
when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a
new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation
between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in
life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined
prophetess, but had long since recognised the impossibility that any
mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman
stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a
life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must
be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise; moreover,
not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing
how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life
successful to such an end.
So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet
letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an
old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King’s Chapel
has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a
space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to
mingle. Yet one tomb-stone served for both. All around, there were
monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of
slate—as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex
himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance of an engraved
escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which may serve for
a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is
it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than
the shadow:—
“ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES”
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