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 flowers 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 at the 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 today; 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

widow’s 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 blackguard, 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 today? 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 today, 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 today. The children have come from their schools,

and the grown people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose

to be happy, for, today, 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-vitæ 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 heavenward,

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 market-place 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

today 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 market-place, 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

market-place! 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

market-place, 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.”