
                              Nathaniel Hawthorne

                               The Scarlet Letter

                         Preface to the Second Edition

Much to the author's surprise, and (if he may say so without additional offence)
considerably to his amusement, he finds that his sketch of official life,
introductory to THE SCARLET LETTER, has created an unprecedented excitement in
the respectable community immediately around him. It could hardly have been more
violent, indeed, had he burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last
smoking ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage, against whom he is
supposed to cherish a peculiar malevolence. As the public disapprobation would
weigh very heavily on him, were he conscious of deserving it, the author begs
leave to say, that he has carefully read over the introductory pages, with a
purpose to alter or expunge whatever might be found amiss, and to make the best
reparation in his power for the atrocities of which he has been adjudged guilty.
But it appears to him, that the only remarkable features of the sketch are its
frank and genuine good-humour, and the general accuracy with which he has
conveyed his sincere impressions of the characters therein described. As to
enmity, or ill-feeling of any kind, personal or political, he utterly disclaims
such motives. The sketch might, perhaps, have been wholly omitted, without loss
to the public, or detriment to the book; but, having undertaken to write it, he
conceives that it could not have been done in a better or a kindlier spirit,
nor, so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect of truth.
    The author is constrained, therefore, to republish his introductory sketch
without the change of a word.
    
    SALEM, March 30, 1850.
 

                                The Custom-House

                      Introductory to »The Scarlet Letter«

It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself
and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical
impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the
public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the reader
- inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or
the intrusive author could imagine - with a description of my way of life in the
deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now - because, beyond my deserts, I was happy
enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion - I again seize the
public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House.
The example of the famous P. P., Clerk of this Parish, was never more faithfully
followed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth
upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his
volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than
most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than
this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could
fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of
perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world,
were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and
complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is
scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But
- as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in
some true relation with his audience - it may be pardonable to imagine that a
friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to
our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness,
we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but
still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent and within these
limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either
the reader's rights or his own.
    It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain
propriety, of a kind always recognized in literature, as explaining how a large
portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs
of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained. This, in fact, - a desire
to put myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the most
prolix among the tales that make up my volume, - this, and no other, is my true
reason for assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the
main purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of
the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to make one.
 
In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days
of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf, - but which is now burdened with
decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life;
except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length,
discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her
cargo of firewood, - at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the
tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of
buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty
grass, - here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening
prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick.
From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of
each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic;
but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and
thus indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam's government,
is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen
wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite
steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen
of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if
I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in
each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye and the general
truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community;
and especially to warn all citizens, careful of their safety, against intruding
on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as
she looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves
under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has
all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great
tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later, - oftener soon than
late, - is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of
her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.
    The pavement round about the above-described edifice - which we may as well
name at once as the Custom-House of the port - has grass enough growing in its
chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous
resort of business. In some months of the year, however, there often chances a
forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions might
remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last war with England,
when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own
merchants and ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin, while
their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of
commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four vessels
happen to have arrived at once, - usually from Africa or South America, - or to
be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent
feet, passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife
has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with
his vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his
owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme
of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that will
readily be turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities, such
as nobody will care to rid him of. Here, likewise, - the germ of the
wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant, - we have the smart young
clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already
sends adventures in his master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic
boats upon a mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor,
in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble, seeking
a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the captains of the rusty little
schooners that bring firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of
tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item
of no slight importance to our decaying trade.
    Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with other
miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time being, it made the
Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently, however, on ascending the steps,
you would discern - in the entry, if it were summer time, or in their
appropriate rooms, if wintry or inclement weather - a row of venerable figures,
sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back
against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard
talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of
energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human
beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or any thing
else but their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen-seated, like
Matthew, at the receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence,
like him, for apostolic errands - were Custom-House officers.
    Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain room
or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height; with two of its
arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the
third looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All
three give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and
ship-chandlers; around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and
gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping
of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor
is strewn with gray sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long
disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place,
that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the
broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a
stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, with a three-legged stool
beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm;
and, - not to forget the library, - on some shelves, a score or two of volumes
of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue Laws. A tin pipe
ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal communication with
other parts of the edifice. And here, some six months ago, - pacing from corner
to corner, or lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, and
his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper, - you might
have recognized, honoured reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his
cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the
willow branches, on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go
thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Loco-foco Surveyor. The
besom of reform has swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears his
dignity and pockets his emoluments.
    This old town of Salem - my native place, though I have dwelt much away from
it, both in boyhood and maturer years - possesses, or did possess, a hold on my
affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual
residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its
flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which
pretend to architectural beauty, - its irregularity, which is neither
picturesque nor quaint, but only tame, - its long and lazy street, lounging
wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New
Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other, - such being the
features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a
sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard. And yet, though invariably
happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack
of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is
probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into
the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original
Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and
forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here his
descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance
with the soil; until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the
mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part,
therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust
for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent
transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable
to know.
    But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first
ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was
present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts
me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in
reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a
residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and
steeple-crowned progenitor, - who came so early, with his Bible and his sword,
and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a
figure, as a man of war and peace, - a stronger claim than for myself, whose
name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator,
judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good
and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have
remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity
towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than
any record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too,
inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the
martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a
stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter
Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to
dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent,
and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning
under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events,
I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself
for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them - as I have heard, and
as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back,
would argue to exist - may be now and henceforth removed.
    Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would
have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins, that, after so long
a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss
upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim,
that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine
- if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success -
would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. »What
is he?« murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. »A writer of
story-books! What kind of a business in life, - what mode of glorifying God, or
being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, - may that be? Why, the
degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!« Such are the compliments
bandied between my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And
yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have
intertwined themselves with mine.
    Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these two
earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too,
in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy
member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations,
performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public
notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost out of sight; as old houses, here and
there about the streets, get covered half-way to the eaves by the accumulation
of new soil. From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the
sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the
quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place
before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered
against his sire and grandsire. The boy, also, in due time, passed from the
forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal
earth. This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and
burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite
independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround
him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant - who came himself from a
foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came - has little claim to be
called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which
an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot
where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the
place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and
dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the
chillest of social atmospheres; - all these, and whatever faults besides he may
see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as
powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my
case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of
features and cast of character which had all along been familiar here - ever, as
one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it
were, his sentry-march along the Main Street - might still in my little day be
seen and recognized in the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an
evidence that the connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last
be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be
planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same
worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their
fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed
earth.
    On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent,
unjoyous attachment for my native town, that brought me to fill a place in Uncle
Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else.
My doom was on me. It was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone
away, - as it seemed, permanently, - but yet returned, like the bad half-penny;
or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine
morning, I ascended the flight of granite steps, with the President's commission
in my pocket, and was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in
my weighty responsibility, as chief executive officer of the Custom-House.
    I doubt greatly - or rather, I do not doubt at all - whether any public
functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military line, has ever
had such a patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as myself. The
whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled, when I looked at them.
For upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the independent position of the
Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political
vicissitude, which makes the tenure of office generally so fragile. A soldier, -
New England's most distinguished soldier, - he stood firmly on the pedestal of
his gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of the
successive administrations through which he had held office, he had been the
safety of his subordinates in many an hour of danger and heart-quake. General
Miller was radically conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no
slight influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and with
difficulty moved to change, even when change might have brought unquestionable
improvement. Thus, on taking charge of my department, I found few but aged men.
They were ancient sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on
every sea, and standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous blast, had
finally drifted into this quiet nook; where, with little to disturb them, except
the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a
new lease of existence. Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men to
age and infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that kept death at
bay. Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic,
or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the
Custom-House, during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would
creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they
termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves to bed
again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the official breath of
more than one of these venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, on
my representation, to rest from their arduous labours, and soon afterwards - as
if their sole principle of life had been zeal for their country's service; as I
verily believe it was - withdrew to a better world. It is a pious consolation to
me, that, through my interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for
repentance of the evil and corrupt practices, into which, as a matter of course,
every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall. Neither the front nor the
back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.
    The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their venerable
brotherhood, that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and, though a faithful
Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his office with any reference
to political services. Had it been otherwise, - had an active politician been
put into this influential post, to assume the easy task of making head against a
Whig Collector, whose infirmities withheld him from the personal administration
of his office, - hardly a man of the old corps would have drawn the breath of
official life, within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the
Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such matters, it would
have been nothing short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those
white heads under the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern,
that the old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and
at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended my advent; to
see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale
at the glance of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or
another addressed me, the tremor of a voice, which, in long-past days, had been
wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough to frighten Boreas
himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old persons, that, by all
established rule, - and, as regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of
efficiency for business, - they ought to have given place to younger men, more
orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common
Uncle. I knew it too, but could never quite find in my heart to act upon the
knowledge. Much and deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably
to the detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my
incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom-House
steps. They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners,
with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice
in a forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old
sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be pass-words and countersigns
among them.
    The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had no great
harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts, and the happy consciousness of being
usefully employed, - in their own behalf, at least, if not for our beloved
country, - these good old gentlemen went through the various formalities of
office. Sagaciously, under their spectacles, did they peep into the holds of
vessels! Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and marvellous, sometimes,
the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip between their fingers! Whenever
such a mischance occurred, - when a wagon-load of valuable merchandise had been
smuggled ashore, at noonday, perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious
noses, - nothing could exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they
proceeded to lock, and double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing-wax, all
the avenues of the delinquent vessel. Instead of a reprimand for their previous
negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on their praiseworthy
caution, after the mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of the
promptitude of their zeal, the moment that there was no longer any remedy!
    Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish habit to
contract a kindness for them. The better part of my companion's character, if it
have a better part, is that which usually comes uppermost in my regard, and
forms the type whereby I recognize the man. As most of these old Custom-House
officers had good traits, and as my position in reference to them, being
paternal and protective, was favourable to the growth of friendly sentiments, I
soon grew to like them all. It was pleasant, in the summer forenoons, - when the
fervent heat, that almost liquefied the rest of the human family, merely
communicated a genial warmth to their half-torpid systems, - it was pleasant to
hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them all tipped against the wall,
as usual; while the frozen witticisms of past generations were thawed out, and
came bubbling with laughter from their lips. Externally, the jollity of aged men
has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a
deep sense of humour, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam
that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the
green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is real
sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying
wood.
    It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent all my
excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place, my coadjutors were
not invariably old; there were men among them in their strength and prime, of
marked ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and dependent
mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them. Then, moreover, the white
locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement
in good repair. But, as respects the majority of my corps of veterans, there
will be no wrong done, if I characterize them generally as a set of wearisome
old souls, who had gathered nothing worth preservation from their varied
experience of life. They seemed to have flung away all the golden grain of
practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting,
and most carefully to have stored their memories with the husks. They spoke with
far more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or yesterday's,
to-day's, or to-morrow's dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty years
ago, and all the world's wonders which they had witnessed with their youthful
eyes.
    The father of the Custom-House - the patriarch, not only of this little
squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of
tide-waiters all over the United States - was a certain permanent Inspector. He
might truly be termed a legitimate son of the revenue system, dyed in the wool,
or rather, born in the purple; since his sire, a Revolutionary colonel, and
formerly collector of the port, had created an office for him, and appointed him
to fill it, at a period of the early ages which few living men can now remember.
This Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or
thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green
that you would be likely to discover in a lifetime's search. With his florid
cheek, his compact figure, smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his
brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether, he seemed -
not young, indeed - but a kind of new contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape
of man, whom age and infirmity had no business to touch. His voice and laugh,
which perpetually reëchoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the
tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting out
of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion. Looking at him
merely as an animal, - and there was very little else to look at, - he was a
most satisfactory object, from the thorough healthfulness and wholesomeness of
his system, and his capacity, at that extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all,
the delights which he had ever aimed at, or conceived of. The careless security
of his life in the Custom-House, on a regular income, and with but slight and
infrequent apprehensions of removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass
lightly over him. The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the rare
perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of intellect, and the
very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients; these latter
qualities, indeed, being in barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from
walking on all-fours. He possessed no power of thought, no depth of feeling, no
troublesome sensibilities; nothing, in short, but a few commonplace instincts,
which, aided by the cheerful temper that grew inevitably out of his physical
well-being, did duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a
heart. He had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father
of twenty children, most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity, had
likewise returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been sorrow
enough to imbue the sunniest disposition, through and through, with a sable
tinge. Not so with our old Inspector! One brief sigh sufficed to carry off the
entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next moment, he was as ready
for sport as any unbreeched infant; far readier than the Collector's junior
clerk, who, at nineteen years, was much the elder and graver man of the two.
    I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think, livelier
curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was,
in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect in one point of view; so shallow, so
delusive, so impalpable, such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My
conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have
already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials
of his character been put together, that there was no painful perception of
deficiency, but, on my part, an entire contentment with what I found in him. It
might be difficult - and it was so - to conceive how he should exist hereafter,
so earthy and sensuous did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting
that it was to terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with
no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a larger
scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity from the
dreariness and duskiness of age.
    One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed
brethren, was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no
small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His gourmandism was a highly
agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast-meat was as appetizing as a
pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed
nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all his energies and
ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and
satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the
most eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of good
cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor
of pig or turkey under one's very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate,
that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still
apparently as fresh as that of the mutton-chop which he had just devoured for
his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every guest at
which, except himself, had long been food for worms. It was marvellous to
observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were continually rising up before him;
not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation, and
seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and
sensual. A tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of pork, a
particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps
adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams, would be remembered; while all
the subsequent experience of our race, and all the events that brightened or
darkened his individual career, had gone over him with as little permanent
effect as the passing breeze. The chief tragic event of the old man's life, so
far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died
some twenty or forty years ago; a goose of most promising figure, but which, at
table, proved so inveterately tough that the carving-knife would make no
impression on its carcass; and it could only be divided with an axe and handsaw.
    But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be glad to
dwell at considerably more length, because, of all men whom I have ever known,
this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer. Most persons, owing to
causes which I may not have space to hint at, suffer moral detriment from this
peculiar mode of life. The old Inspector was incapable of it, and, were he to
continue in office to the end of time, would be just as good as he was then, and
sit down to dinner with just as good an appetite.
    There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House portraits
would be strangely incomplete; but which my comparatively few opportunities for
observation enable me to sketch only in the merest outline. It is that of the
Collector, our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant military service,
subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western territory, had come
hither, twenty years before, to spend the decline of his varied and honourable
life. The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his threescore
years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly march, burdened
with infirmities which even the martial music of his own spirit-stirring
recollections could do little towards lightening. The step was palsied now, that
had been foremost in the charge. It was only with the assistance of a servant,
and by leaning his hand heavily on the iron balustrade, that he could slowly and
painfully ascend the Custom-House steps, and, with a toilsome progress across
the floor, attain his customary chair beside the fireplace. There he used to
sit, gazing with a somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures that came and
went; amid the rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, the discussion of
business, and the casual talk of the office; all which sounds and circumstances
seemed but indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to make their way into
his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance, in this repose, was mild and
kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression of courtesy and interest gleamed
out upon his features; proving that there was light within him, and that it was
only the outward medium of the intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in
their passage. The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the
sounder it appeared. When no longer called upon to speak, or listen, either of
which operations cost him an evident effort, his face would briefly subside into
its former not uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for,
though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age. The framework of his
nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet crumbled into ruin.
    To observe and define his character, however, under such disadvantages, was
as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew, in imagination, an old
fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its gray and broken ruins. Here and
there, perchance, the walls may remain almost complete; but elsewhere may be
only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its very strength, and overgrown, through
long years of peace and neglect, with grass and alien weeds.
    Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection, - for, slight as
was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of all
bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed so, - I could
discern the main points of his portrait. It was marked with the noble and heroic
qualities which showed it to be not by a mere accident, but of good right, that
he had won a distinguished name. His spirit could never, I conceive, have been
characterized by an uneasy activity; it must, at any period of his life, have
required an impulse to set him in motion; but, once stirred up, with obstacles
to overcome, and an adequate object to be attained, it was not in the man to
give out or fail. The heat that had formerly pervaded his nature, and which was
not yet extinct, was never of the kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze,
but, rather, a deep, red glow, as of iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity,
firmness; this was the expression of his repose, even in such decay as had crept
untimely over him, at the period of which I speak. But I could imagine, even
then, that, under some excitement which should go deeply into his consciousness,
- roused by a trumpet-peal, loud enough to awaken all of his energies that were
not dead, but only slumbering, - he was yet capable of flinging off his
infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the staff of age to seize a
battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a moment,
his demeanour would have still been calm. Such an exhibition, however, was but
to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him -
as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga, already cited as
the most appropriate simile - were the features of stubborn and ponderous
endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of
integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy
mass, and was just as unmalleable and unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of
benevolence, which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie,
I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates any or all the
polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain men with his own hand, for
aught I know; - certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep of
the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted its triumphant
energy; - but, be that as it might, there was never in his heart so much cruelty
as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing. I have not known the man,
to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently make an appeal.
    Many characteristics - and those, too, which contribute not the least
forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch - must have vanished, or been
obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful attributes are usually
the most evanescent; nor does Nature adorn the human ruin with blossoms of new
beauty, that have their roots and proper nutriment only in the chinks and
crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined fortress of
Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and beauty, there were points well
worth noting. A ray of humour, now and then, would make its way through the veil
of dim obstruction, and glimmer pleasantly upon our faces. A trait of native
elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth,
was shown in the General's fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers. An
old soldier might be supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but
here was one, who seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral
tribe.
    There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while the
Surveyor - though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon himself the
difficult task of engaging him in conversation - was fond of standing at a
distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous countenance. He seemed
away from us, although we saw him but a few yards off; remote, though we passed
close beside his chair; unattainable, though we might have stretched forth our
hands and touched his own. It might be, that he lived a more real life within
his thoughts, than amid the unappropriate environment of the Collector's office.
The evolutions of the parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old,
heroic music, heard thirty years before; - such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were
all alive before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and
ship-masters, the spruce clerks, and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the
bustle of this commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur
roundabout him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General
appear to sustain the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an
old sword - now rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle's front, and
showed still a bright gleam along its blade - would have been, among the
inkstands, paper-folders, and mahogany rulers, on the Deputy Collector's desk.
    There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the
stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier, - the man of true and simple energy.
It was the recollection of those memorable words of his, - »I'll try, Sir!« -
spoken on the very verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the
soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all perils, and
encountering all. If, in our country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honour,
this phrase - which it seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a
task of danger and glory before him, has ever spoken - would be the best and
fittest of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms.
    It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be
brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care
little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of
himself to appreciate. The accidents of my life have often afforded me this
advantage, but never with more fullness and variety than during my continuance in
office. There was one man, especially, the observation of whose character gave
me a new idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of business;
prompt, acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all perplexities, and
a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish, as by the waving of an
enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House, it was his proper
field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so harassing to the
interloper, presented themselves before him with the regularity of a perfectly
comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal of his class. He
was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all events, the main-spring
that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like
this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and
convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the duty
to be performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in
them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so
did our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met
with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity, -
which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime, - would he
forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear
as daylight. The merchants valued him not less than we, his esoteric friends.
His integrity was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice
or a principle; nor can it be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect
so remarkably clear and accurate as his, to be honest and regular in the
administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to any thing that came
within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same
way, though to a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an account,
or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word, - and it
is a rare instance in my life, - I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to
the situation which he held.
    Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took
it in good part at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so
little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it
whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable
schemes, with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years
within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild,
free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees
and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by
sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued
with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's hearth-stone; - it was time, at length,
that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with
food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was
desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it
as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and
lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates
to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities,
and never murmur at the change.
    Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my
regard. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were apart from me. Nature,
- except it were human nature, - the nature that is developed in earth and sky,
was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative delight, wherewith it
had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had
not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me. There would have been
something sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it
lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be
true, indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too
long; else, it might make me permanently other than I had been, without
transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I
never considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a
prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and
whenever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would
come.
    Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue, and, so far as I have
been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy,
and sensibility, (had he ten times the Surveyor's proportion of those
qualities,) may, at any time, be a man of affairs, if he will only choose to
give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains
with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me
in no other light, and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I
presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more
for me, if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the
least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of
Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House officer in his day, as well
as I. It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man who
has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's
dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his
claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond
that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I
especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke; but, at
any rate, I learned it thoroughly; nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did the
truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost me a pang, or require to be
thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer
- an excellent fellow, who came into office with me, and went out only a little
later - would often engage me in a discussion about one or the other of his
favourite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector's junior clerk, too, - a
young gentleman who, it was whispered, occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle
Sam's letter-paper with what, (at the distance of a few yards,) looked very much
like poetry, - used now and then to speak to me of books, as matters with which
I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it
was quite sufficient for my necessities.
    No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blazoned abroad on
title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue. The
Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on
pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of
dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost,
and gone regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle of fame, a
knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys it, was carried where it had
never been before, and, I hope, will never go again.
    But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts, that had
seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived
again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of bygone days awoke
in me, was that which brings it within the law of literary propriety to offer
the public the sketch which I am now writing.
    In the second story of the Custom-House, there is a large room, in which the
brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with panelling and plaster.
The edifice - originally projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial
enterprise of the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity destined never
to be realized - contains far more space than its occupants know what to do
with. This airy hall, therefore, over the Collector's apartments, remains
unfinished to this day, and, in spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky
beams, appears still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason. At one end
of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon another,
containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of similar rubbish
lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and
months, and years of toil, had been wasted on these musty papers, which were now
only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten corner,
never more to be glanced at by human eyes. But, then, what reams of other
manuscripts - filled, not with the dullness of official formalities, but with the
thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts - had gone
equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a purpose in their day,
as these heaped-up papers had, and-saddest of all - without purchasing for their
writers the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had
gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen! Yet not altogether worthless,
perhaps, as materials of local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the former
commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants,
- old King Derby, - old Billy Gray, - old Simon Forrester, - and many another
magnate in his day; whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb,
before his mountain-pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders of the greater
part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be
traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods
generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children look
upon as long-established rank.
    Prior to the Revolution, there is a dearth of records; the earlier documents
and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been carried off to Halifax,
when all the King's officials accompanied the British army in its flight from
Boston. It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going back, perhaps,
to the days of the Protectorate, those papers must have contained many
references to forgotten or remembered men, and to antique customs, which would
have affected me with the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian
arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.
    But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of some
little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner;
unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had
long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants,
never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy
tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant
interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity, - and exerting my
fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of
the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new region, and only Salem knew
the way thither, - I chanced to lay my hand on a small package, carefully done
up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an
official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed their stiff and
formal chirography on more substantial materials than at present. There was
something about it that quickened an instinctive curiosity, and made me undo the
faded red tape, that tied up the package, with the sense that a treasure would
here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds of the parchment cover, I
found it to be a commission, under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in
favour of one Jonathan Pue, as Surveyor of his Majesty's Customs for the port of
Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to have read (probably
in Felt's Annals) a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about fourscore
years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent times, an account of the
digging up of his remains in the little grave-yard of St. Peter's Church, during
the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my
respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of
apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle; which, unlike the head that it once
adorned, was in very satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the papers
which the parchment commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr.
Pue's mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the frizzled
wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.
    They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature, or, at
least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his own hand. I
could account for their being included in the heap of Custom-House lumber only
by the fact, that Mr. Pue's death had happened suddenly; and that these papers,
which he probably kept in his official desk, had never come to the knowledge of
his heirs, or were supposed to relate to the business of the revenue. On the
transfer of the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of no public
concern, was left behind, and had remained ever since unopened.
    The ancient Surveyor - being little molested, I suppose, at that early day,
with business pertaining to his office - seems to have devoted some of his many
leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other inquisitions of a
similar nature. These supplied material for petty activity to a mind that would
otherwise have been eaten up with rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did
me good service in the preparation of the article entitled »MAIN STREET,«
included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes
equally valuable, hereafter; or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they
go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil
ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any
gentleman, inclined, and competent, to take the unprofitable labour off my hands.
As a final disposition, I contemplate depositing them with the Essex Historical
Society.
    But the object that most drew my attention, in the mysterious package, was a
certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded. There were traces about
it of gold embroidery, which, however, was greatly frayed and defaced; so that
none, or very little, of the glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy
to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured
by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art,
not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of
scarlet cloth, - for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth, had reduced it to
little other than a rag, - on careful examination, assumed the shape of a
letter. It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb
proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had been
intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it
was to be worn, or what rank, honour, and dignity, in by-past times, were
signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world
in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving. And yet it strangely
interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and
would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most
worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic
symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the
analysis of my mind.
    While thus perplexed, - and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the
letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to
contrive, in order to take the eyes of Indians, - I happened to place it on my
breast. It seemed to me, - the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word, -
it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical,
yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth,
but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.
    In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto
neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been
twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find, recorded by the
old Surveyor's pen, a reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair. There
were several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars respecting the life
and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been rather a
noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors. She had flourished during a
period between the early days of Massachusetts and the close of the seventeenth
century. Aged persons, alive in the time of Mr. Surveyor Pue, and from whose
oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as
a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn aspect. It had been
her habit, from an almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a kind of
voluntary nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking upon
herself, likewise, to give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart;
by which means, as a person of such propensities inevitably must, she gained
from many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should imagine, was
looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying farther into the
manuscript, I found the record of other doings and sufferings of this singular
woman, for most of which the reader is referred to the story entitled »THE
SCARLET LETTER«; and it should be borne carefully in mind, that the main facts
of that story are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor
Pue. The original papers, together with the scarlet letter itself, - a most
curious relic, - are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to
whomsoever, induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight
of them. I must not be understood as affirming, that, in the dressing up of the
tale, and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the
characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within the limits
of the old Surveyor's half a dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have
allowed myself, as to such points, nearly or altogether as much license as if
the facts had been entirely of my own invention. What I contend for is the
authenticity of the outline.
    This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track. There
seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if the ancient
Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig,
- which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave, - had met me in
the deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his port was the dignity of one who
had borne his Majesty's commission, and who was therefore illuminated by a ray
of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike, alas! the
hang-dog look of a republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels
himself less than the least, and below the lowest, of his masters. With his own
ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the
scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own
ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty
and reverence towards him, - who might reasonably regard himself as my official
ancestor, - to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public.
»Do this,« said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head
that looked so imposing within its memorable wig, »do this, and the profit shall
be all your own! You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was
in mine, when a man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom. But,
I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's
memory the credit which will be rightfully its due!« And I said to the ghost of
Mr. Surveyor Pue, - »I will!«
    On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was the
subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro across my
room, or traversing, with a hundredfold repetition, the long extent from the
front-door of the Custom-House to the side-entrance, and back again. Great were
the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the Weighers and Gaugers,
whose slumbers were disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing
and returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to say
that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that my
sole object - and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man could ever put
himself into voluntary motion - was, to get an appetite for dinner. And to say
the truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east-wind that generally blew along the
passage, was the only valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise. So
little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom-House to the delicate harvest of
fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet
to come, I doubt whether the tale of »The Scarlet Letter« would ever have been
brought before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would
not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my
best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and
rendered malleable, by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge.
They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but
retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a
fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. »What have you to do with us?«
that expression seemed to say. »The little power you might once have possessed
over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have bartered it for a pittance of
the public gold. Go, then, and earn your wages!« In short, the almost torpid
creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair
occasion.
    It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam claimed
as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness held possession of
me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles into the country, whenever
- which was seldom and reluctantly - I bestirred myself to seek that
invigorating charm of Nature, which used to give me such freshness and activity
of thought, the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The
same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me
home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study.
Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted
only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth
imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in
many-hued description.
    If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be
deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the
carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly, - making every object so
minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility, - is a medium
the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive
guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the
chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case;
the picture on the wall; - all these details, so completely seen, are so
spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual
substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling
to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll,
seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse; - whatever, in a word,
has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of
strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by
daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral
territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and
the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.
Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping
with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form,
beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic
moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from
afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.
    The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the
effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the
room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam
from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold
spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and
sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It
converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the
looking-glass, we behold - deep within its haunted verge - the smouldering glow
of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove farther
from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with
this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things,
and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
    But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience, moonlight
and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in my regard; and
neither of them was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of a tallow-candle.
An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them, - of no
great richness or value, but the best I had, - was gone from me.
    It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the
narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most
ungrateful not to mention; since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me
to laughter and admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I
have preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous colouring
which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I
honestly believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might
readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of
this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back
into another age; or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy
matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was
broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would
have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of
to-day, and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualize the burden
that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible
value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary
characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of
life that was spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace, only because I
had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was
there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by
the reality of the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because
my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it. At some
future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken
paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the
page.
    These perceptions have come too late. At the instant, I was only conscious
that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil. There was no
occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a
writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good
Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is any thing but
agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away;
or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at
every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact, there
could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions in
reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favourable to
the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter
develop these effects. Suffice it here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of
long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage,
for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and
another, the very nature of his business, which - though, I trust, an honest one
- is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.
    An effect - which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every
individual who has occupied the position - is, that, while he leans on the
mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses,
in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the
capability of self-support. If he possess an unusual share of native energy, or
the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited
powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer - fortunate in the unkindly shove
that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world - may return
to himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He
usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust
out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as
he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity, - that his tempered steel and
elasticity are lost, - he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest
of support external to himself. His pervading and continual hope - a
hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of
impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive
throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death - is, that,
finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he
shall be restored to office. This faith, more than any thing else, steals the
pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking.
Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of
the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise
and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in
California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a
little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to
observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this
singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold - meaning no disrespect to the worthy old
gentleman - has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the
Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find
the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its
better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its
self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.
    Here was a fine prospect in the distance! Not that the Surveyor brought the
lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly undone, either
by continuance in office, or ejectment. Yet my reflections were not the most
comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into my
mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of
detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how
much longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess
the truth, it was my greatest apprehension, - as it would never be a measure of
policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself, and it being hardly in the
nature of a public officer to resign, - it was my chief trouble, therefore, that
I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the Surveyor-ship, and become much
such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of
official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this
venerable friend, - to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend
the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or the shade? A
dreary look-forward this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of
happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities!
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had
meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
    A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship - to adopt the tone
of P. P. - was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is
essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages of official
life, to view the incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration. His
position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency,
disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an
alternative of good, on either hand, although what presents itself to him as the
worst event may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a
man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control
of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or
the other must needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange,
too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the
bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious
that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human
nature than this tendency-which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours - to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of
inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to officeholders, were a literal
fact, instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is my sincere belief, that
the active members of the victorious party were sufficiently excited to have
chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It
appears to me - who have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as
defeat - that this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never
distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs.
The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and
because the practice of many years has made it the law of political warfare,
which, unless a different system be proclaimed, it were weakness and cowardice
to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them generous. They know
how to spare, when they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be
sharp, indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their
custom ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off.
    In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason to
congratulate myself that I was on the losing side, rather than the triumphant
one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of partisans, I began now,
at this season of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with which
party my predilections lay; nor was it without something like regret and shame,
that, according to a reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of
retaining office to be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell!
    The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to
think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater
part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and
consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the
worst, of the accident which has befallen him. In my particular case, the
consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested themselves to
my meditations a considerable time before it was requisite to use them. In view
of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my
fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of
committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to
be murdered. In the Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three
years; a term long enough to rest a weary brain; long enough to break off old
intellectual habits, and make room for new ones; long enough, and too long, to
have lived in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no advantage nor
delight to any human being, and withholding myself from toil that would, at
least, have stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded his
unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be
recognized by the Whigs as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs,
- his tendency to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind
may meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of
the same household must diverge from one another, - had sometimes made it
questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he
had won the crown of martyrdom, (though with no longer a head to wear it on,)
the point might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it
seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which he
had been content to stand, than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many
worthier men were falling; and, at last, after subsisting for four years on the
mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled then to define his position
anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy of a friendly one.
    Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or two,
careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's
Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a politically
dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being, all this
time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the
comfortable conclusion, that every thing was for the best; and, making an
investment in ink, paper, and steel-pens, had opened his long-disused
writing-desk, and was again a literary man.
    Now it was, that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr. Surveyor
Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little space was
requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought to work upon the
tale, with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even yet, though my thoughts
were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to my eye, a stern and
sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by genial sunshine; too little relieved by
the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of nature and
real life, and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them. This
uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly accomplished
revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped itself. It is
no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer's mind; for he
was happier, while straying through the gloom of these sunless fantasies, than
at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles,
which contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my
involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honours of public life, and the
remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines, of such antique date that they
have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again.1 Keeping up the
metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the
POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR; and the sketch which I am now
bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in
his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the
grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to
my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!
    The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old Inspector,
- who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed by a horse, some
time ago; else he would certainly have lived for ever, - he, and all those other
venerable personages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows
in my view; white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with,
and has now flung aside for ever. The merchants, - Pingree, Phillips, Shepard,
Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt, - these, and many other names, which had such a
classic familiarity for my ear six months ago, - these men of traffic, who
seemed to occupy so important a position in the world, - how little time has it
required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but recollection! It
is with an effort that I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon,
likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a
mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth,
but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to
people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque
prolixity of its main street. Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life.
I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me;
for - though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be
of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this
abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers - there has never been, for
me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the
best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and these
familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.
    It may be, however, - O, transporting and triumphant thought! - that the
great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the
scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among the sites
memorable in the town's history, shall point out the locality of THE TOWN-PUMP!
 

                               I. The Prison-Door

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats,
intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled
in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak,
and studded with iron spikes.
    The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness
they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their
earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a
cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this
rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the
first prison-house, somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably
as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round
about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated
sepulchres in the old church-yard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some
fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was
already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a
yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the
ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in
the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a
youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of
the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru,
and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the
soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.
But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild
rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might
be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he
went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token
that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
    This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but
whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after
the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, - or
whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the
footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door, - we
shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of
our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we
could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the
reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that
may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human
frailty and sorrow.
 

                              II. The Market-Place

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not
less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the
inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped
oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of
New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these
good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have
betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on
whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public
sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of
this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish
bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the
civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an
Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of
the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had
made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of
the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the
bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either
case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the
spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost
identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the
mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and
awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look
for, from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which,
in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be
invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
    It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story
begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd,
appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be
expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of
impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping
forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if
occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally,
as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of
old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from
them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of
ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom,
a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a
character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women, who were now
standing about the prison-door, stood within less than half a century of the
period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable
representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of
their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely
into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad
shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had
ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the
atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of
speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us
at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
    »Goodwives,« said a hard-featured dame of fifty, »I'll tell ye a piece of my
mind. It would be greatly for the public behove, if we women, being of mature
age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such
malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood
up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she
come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry,
I trow not!«
    »People say,« said another, »that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly
pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come
upon his congregation.«
    »The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch, - that is
a truth,« added a third autumnal matron. »At the very least, they should have
put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead. Madam Hester would have
winced at that, I warrant me. But she, - the naughty baggage, - little will she
care what they put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it
with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as
brave as ever!«
    »Ah, but,« interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the
hand, »let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her
heart.«
    »What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or
the flesh of her forehead?« cried another female, the ugliest as well as the
most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. »This woman has brought shame
upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in
the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it
of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!«
    »Mercy on us, goodwife,« exclaimed a man in the crowd, »is there no virtue
in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? That is the
hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips; for the lock is turning in the
prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself.«
    The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the
first place, like a black shadow emerging into the sunshine, the grim and grisly
presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side and his staff of office in
his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole
dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to
administer in its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching
forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder
of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the
prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and
force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free-will.
She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and
turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its
existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of
a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison.
    When the young woman - the mother of this child - stood fully revealed
before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely
to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might
thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress.
In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but
poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning
blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked
around at her townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red
cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold
thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much
fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last
and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a
splendour in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was
allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.
    The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large
scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine
with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of
feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked
brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the
feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity,
rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now
recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more
lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from
the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her
dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled,
to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and
ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive
observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which,
indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after
her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate
recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point
which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer, - so that both
men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now
impressed as if they beheld her for the first time, - was that SCARLET LETTER,
so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect
of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and
enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
    »She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain,« remarked one of the
female spectators; »but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive
such a way of showing it! Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the faces of
our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen,
meant for a punishment?«
    »It were well,« muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, »if we
stripped Madam Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for the red
letter, which she hath stitched so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of mine own
rheumatic flannel, to make a fitter one!«
    »O, peace, neighbours, peace!« whispered their youngest companion. »Do not
let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it
in her heart.«
    The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff.
    »Make way, good people, make way, in the King's name,« cried he. »Open a
passage; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and
child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel, from this time till an hour
past meridian. A blessing on the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where
iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madam Hester, and show
your scarlet letter in the market-place!«
    A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the
beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and
unkindly-visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for
her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys, understanding little of
the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her
progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face, and at the
winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was no
great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place.
Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey
of some length; for, haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an
agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had
been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our
nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the
sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present
torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene
deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal,
and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market-place. It
stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a
fixture there.
    In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now,
for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary
among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent in the
promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists
of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the
framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human
head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal
of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron.
There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature, - whatever be the
delinquencies of the individual, - no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the
culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to
do. In Hester Prynne's instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases,
her sentence bore, that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but
without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the
proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine.
Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus
displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man's shoulders
above the street.
    Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in
this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant
at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so
many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something
which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of
sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the
taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such
effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more
lost for the infant that she had borne.
    The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the
spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall have
grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering, at it. The witnesses of
Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were
stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a
murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social
state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present.
Even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have
been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified
than the Governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the
ministers of the town; all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the
meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such personages could
constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty or reverence of
rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal
sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was
sombre and grave. The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might,
under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her,
and concentred at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an
impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the
stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety
of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of
the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances
contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of
laughter burst from the multitude, - each man, each woman, each little
shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts, - Hester Prynne might
have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden
infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must
needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the
scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.
    Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most
conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered
indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images.
Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept
bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the
edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from
beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most
trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish
quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back
upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her
subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of
similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device
of her spirit, to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric
forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.
    Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that
revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading,
since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her
native village, in Old England, and her paternal home; a decayed house of gray
stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield
of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father's
face, with its bald brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the
old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and
anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her
death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her
daughter's pathway. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and
illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to
gaze at it. There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in
years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the
lamp-light that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those
same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's
purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as
Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with
the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in
memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, gray
houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint
in architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her, still
in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but feeding itself on
time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in
lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan
settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and levelling their stern regards
at Hester Prynne, - yes, at herself, - who stood on the scaffold of the pillory,
an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered
with gold thread, upon her bosom!
    Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast, that it
sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even
touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were
real. Yes! - these were her realities, - all else had vanished!
 

                              III. The Recognition

From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal
observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved by
discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took
possession of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native garb, was standing there;
but the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements, that
one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne, at such a time;
much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By
the Indian's side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a
white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume.
    He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could hardly
be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a
person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mould the
physical to itself, and become manifest by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a
seemingly careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to
conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne,
that one of this man's shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first
instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure,
she pressed her infant to her bosom, with so convulsive a force that the poor
babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not seem to hear it.
    At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him, the
stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly, at first, like a
man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of
little value and import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind.
Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror
twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and
making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His
face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so
instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single
moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the
convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of
his nature. When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw
that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made
a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.
    Then, touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood next to him, he
addressed him in a formal and courteous manner.
    »I pray you, good Sir,« said he, »who is this woman? - and wherefore is she
here set up to public shame?«
    »You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,« answered the
townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion; »else
you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne, and her evil doings. She
hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale's
church.«
    »You say truly,« replied the other. »I am a stranger, and have been a
wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea and
land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk, to the southward;
and am now brought hither by this Indian, to be redeemed out of my captivity.
Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne's, - have I her name
rightly? - of this woman's offences, and what has brought her to yonder
scaffold?«
    »Truly, friend, and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles
and sojourn in the wilderness,« said the townsman, »to find yourself, at length,
in a land where iniquity is searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers
and people; as here in our godly New England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know,
was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long dwelt
in Amsterdam, whence, some good time agone, he was minded to cross over and cast
in his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose, he sent his wife
before him, remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs. Marry, good
Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in
Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his
young wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance -«
    »Ah! - aha! - I conceive you,« said the stranger, with a bitter smile. »So
learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his books. And
who, by your favour, Sir, may be the father of yonder babe - it is some three or
four months old, I should judge - which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?«
    »Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who
shall expound it is yet a-wanting,« answered the townsman. »Madam Hester
absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid their heads together
in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle,
unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him.«
    »The learned man,« observed the stranger, with another smile, »should come
himself to look into the mystery.«
    »It behooves him well, if he be still in life,« responded the townsman.
»Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this
woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall; -
and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the
sea; - they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous
law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But, in their great mercy and
tenderness of heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of
three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the
remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.«
    »A wise sentence!« remarked the stranger, gravely bowing his head. »Thus she
will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved
upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity
should not, at least, stand on the scaffold by her side. But he will be known! -
he will be known! - he will be known!«
    He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and, whispering a few
words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the crowd.
    While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal, still
with a fixed gaze towards the stranger; so fixed a gaze, that, at moments of
intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world seemed to vanish,
leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more
terrible than even to meet him as she now did, with the hot, midday sun burning
down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy
on her breast; with the sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn
forth as to a festival, staring at the features that should have been seen only
in the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or beneath a
matronly veil, at church. Dreadful as it was, she was conscious of a shelter in
the presence of these thousand witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so
many betwixt him and her, than to greet him, face to face, they two alone. She
fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when
its protection should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these thoughts, she
scarcely heard a voice behind her, until it had repeated her name more than
once, in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.
    »Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!« said the voice.
    It has already been noticed, that directly over the platform on which Hester
Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to the
meeting-house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to be made,
amidst an assemblage of the magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended
such public observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene which we are
describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself, with four sergeants about his
chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of honour. He wore a dark feather in his hat,
a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath; a
gentleman advanced in years, and with a hard experience written in his wrinkles.
He was not ill fitted to be the head and representative of a community, which
owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the
impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood, and the
sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and
hoped so little. The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was
surrounded, were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when
the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of divine
institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just, and sage. But, out of the
whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of
wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on
an erring woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the
sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed
conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and
warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony,
the unhappy woman grew pale and trembled.
    The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and famous
John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like most of his
contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit.
This last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than his
intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter of shame than
self-congratulation with him. There he stood, with a border of grizzled locks
beneath his skull-cap; while his gray eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of
his study, were winking, like those of Hester's infant, in the unadulterated
sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to
old volumes of sermons; and had no more right than one of those portraits would
have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt,
passion, and anguish.
    »Hester Prynne,« said the clergyman, »I have striven with my young brother
here, under whose preaching of the word you have been privileged to sit,« - here
Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a pale young man beside him, - »I
have sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you,
here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers, and in
hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin.
Knowing your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what
arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over
your hardness and obstinacy; insomuch that you should no longer hide the name of
him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes to me, (with a young
man's oversoftness, albeit wise beyond his years,) that it were wronging the
very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart's secrets in such broad
daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to
convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing
of it forth. What say you to it, once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou
or I that shall deal with this poor sinner's soul?«
    There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the
balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport, speaking in an
authoritative voice, although tempered with respect towards the youthful
clergyman whom he addressed.
    »Good Master Dimmesdale,« said he, »the responsibility of this woman's soul
lies greatly with you. It behooves you, therefore, to exhort her to repentance,
and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof.«
    The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale; a young clergyman, who had come from one of the great
English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into our wild
forestland. His eloquence and religious fervour had already given the earnest of
high eminence in his profession. He was a person of very striking aspect, with a
white, lofty, and impending brow, large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth
which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous,
expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint.
Notwithstanding his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an
air about this young minister, - an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened
look, - as of a being who felt himself quite astray and at a loss in the pathway
of human existence, and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own.
Therefore, so far as his duties would permit, he trode in the shadowy by-paths,
and thus kept himself simple and childlike; coming forth, when occasion was,
with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many
people said, affected them like the speech of an angel.
    Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor had
introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in the hearing of
all men, to that mystery of a woman's soul, so sacred even in its pollution. The
trying nature of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his lips
tremulous.
    »Speak to the woman, my brother,« said Mr. Wilson. »It is of moment to her
soul, and therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to thine own, in
whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!«
    The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it seemed,
and then came forward.
    »Hester Prynne,« said he, leaning over the balcony, and looking down
steadfastly into her eyes, »thou hearest what this good man says, and seest the
accountability under which I labour. If thou feelest it to be for thy soul's
peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to
salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and
fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him;
for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and
stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than
to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it
tempt him - yea, compel him, as it were - to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath
granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayst work out an open triumph
over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to
him - who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself - the bitter,
but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!«
    The young pastor's voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The
feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the
words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into
one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby, at Hester's bosom, was affected by
the same influence; for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr.
Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms, with a half pleased, half plaintive
murmur. So powerful seemed the minister's appeal, that the people could not
believe but that Hester Prynne would speak out the guilty name; or else that the
guilty one himself, in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn
forth by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the
scaffold.
    Hester shook her head.
    »Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven's mercy!« cried the
Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. »That little babe hath been
gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou hast heard.
Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet
letter off thy breast.«
    »Never!« replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into the
deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. »It is too deeply branded. Ye
cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine!«
    »Speak, woman!« said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from the
crowd about the scaffold. »Speak; and give your child a father!«
    »I will not speak!« answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding
to this voice, which she too surely recognized. »And my child must seek a
heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one!«
    »She will not speak!« murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the
balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He
now drew back, with a long respiration. »Wondrous strength and generosity of a
woman's heart! She will not speak!«
    Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit's mind, the elder
clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion, addressed to the
multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but with continual reference
to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the
hour or more during which his periods were rolling over the people's heads, that
it assumed new terrors in their imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet
hue from the flames of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her
place upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary
indifference. She had borne, that morning, all that nature could endure; and as
her temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense suffering by
a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a stony crust of
insensibility, while the faculties of animal life remained entire. In this
state, the voice of the preacher thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon
her ears. The infant, during the latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air
with its wailings and screams; she strove to hush it, mechanically, but seemed
scarcely to sympathize with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was
led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its iron-clamped
portal. It was whispered, by those who peered after her, that the scarlet letter
threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior.
 

                               IV. The Interview

After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a state of
nervous excitement that demanded constant watchfulness, lest she should
perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor
babe. As night approached, it proving impossible to quell her insubordination by
rebuke or threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to
introduce a physician. He described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes
of physical science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could
teach, in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest. To say
the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not merely for Hester
herself, but still more urgently for the child; who, drawing its sustenance from
the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the
anguish, and despair, which pervaded the mother's system. It now writhed in
convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral
agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.
    Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that
individual, of singular aspect, whose presence in the crowd had been of such
deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was lodged in the prison,
not as suspected of any offence, but as the most convenient and suitable mode of
disposing of him, until the magistrates should have conferred with the Indian
sagamores respecting his ransom. His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth.
The jailer, after ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at
the comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had
immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to moan.
    »Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient,« said the practitioner.
»Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in your house; and, I
promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more amenable to just authority
than you may have found her heretofore.«
    »Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,« answered Master Brackett, »I
shall own you for a man of skill indeed! Verily, the woman hath been like a
possessed one; and there lacks little, that I should take in hand to drive Satan
out of her with stripes.«
    The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of the
profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his demeanour
change, when the withdrawal of the prison-keeper left him face to face with the
woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had intimated so close a
relation between himself and her. His first care was given to the child; whose
cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the trundle-bed, made it of peremptory
necessity to postpone all other business to the task of soothing her. He
examined the infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case,
which he took from beneath his dress. It appeared to contain certain medical
preparations, one of which he mingled with a cup of water.
    »My old studies in alchemy,« observed he, »and my sojourn, for above a year
past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made
a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, woman!
The child is yours, - she is none of mine, - neither will she recognize my voice
or aspect as a father's. Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own
hand.«
    Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with strongly
marked apprehension into his face.
    »Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe?« whispered she.
    »Foolish woman!« responded the physician, half coldly, half soothingly.
»What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The medicine is
potent for good; and were it my child, - yea, mine own, as well as thine! - I
could do no better for it.«
    As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind, he
took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the draught. It soon
proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech's pledge. The moans of the little
patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually ceased; and in a few
moments, as is the custom of young children after relief from pain, it sank into
a profound and dewy slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed,
next bestowed his attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny, he
felt her pulse, looked into her eyes, - a gaze that made her heart shrink and
shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold, - and, finally,
satisfied with his investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught.
    »I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe,« remarked he; »but I have learned many new
secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them, - a recipe that an Indian
taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as old as
Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. That I
cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy passion, like
oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea.«
    He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest look
into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and questioning,
as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at her slumbering child.
    »I have thought of death,« said she, - »have wished for it, - would even
have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for any thing. Yet,
if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it.
See! It is even now at my lips.«
    »Drink, then,« replied he, still with the same cold composure. »Dost thou
know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so shallow? Even if
I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better for my object than to
let thee live, - than to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life,
- so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?« - As he spoke, he
laid his long forefinger on the scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch
into Hester's breast, as if it had been red-hot. He noticed her involuntary
gesture, and smiled. - »Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in
the eyes of men and women, - in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy
husband, - in the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayst live, take off
this draught.«
    Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the cup, and,
at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed where the child was
sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the room afforded, and took his own
seat beside her. She could not but tremble at these preparations; for she felt
that - having now done all that humanity, or principle, or, if so it were, a
refined cruelty, impelled him to do, for the relief of physical suffering - he
was next to treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably
injured.
    »Hester,« said he, »I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the
pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I
found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,
- a man of thought, - the book-worm of great libraries, - a man already in
decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge, - what
had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour,
how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil
physical deformity in a young girl's fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were
ever wise in their own behove, I might have foreseen all this. I might have
known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this
settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be
thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people.
Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married
pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the
end of our path!«
    »Thou knows,« said Hester, - for, depressed as she was, she could not
endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame, - »thou knows that I
was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any.«
    »True!« replied he. »It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that epoch
of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless! My heart was a
habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a
household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream, - old as
I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was, - that the simple bliss,
which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind to gather up, might yet be
mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and
sought to warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!«
    »I have greatly wronged thee,« murmured Hester.
    »We have wronged each other,« answered he. »Mine was the first wrong, when I
betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.
Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophized in vain, I seek no
vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me, the scale hangs
fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?«
    »Ask me not!« replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. »That
thou shalt never know!«
    »Never, sayest thou?« rejoined he, with a smile of dark and self-relying
intelligence. »Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there are few things, -
whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of
thought, - few things hidden from the man, who devotes himself earnestly and
unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. Thou mayst cover up thy secret from
the prying multitude. Thou mayst conceal it, too, from the ministers and
magistrates, even as thou didst this day, when they sought to wrench the name
out of thy heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I
come to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man,
as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a
sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall
feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be
mine!«
    The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that Hester
Prynne clasped her hands over her heart, dreading lest he should read the secret
there at once.
    »Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,« resumed he, with a
look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. »He bears no letter of
infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost; but I shall read it on his heart.
Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven's own method
of retribution, or, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe of human law.
Neither do thou imagine that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor
against his fame, if, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let
him hide himself in outward honour, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!«
    »Thy acts are like mercy,« said Hester, bewildered and appalled. »But thy
words interpret thee as a terror!«
    »One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,« continued the
scholar. »Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine! There
are none in this land that know me. Breathe not, to any human soul, that thou
didst ever call me husband! Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall
pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I
find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the
closest ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of right
or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where thou
art, and where he is. But betray me not!«
    »Wherefore dost thou desire it?« inquired Hester, shrinking, she hardly knew
why, from this secret bond. »Why not announce thyself openly, and cast me off at
once?«
    »It may be,« he replied, »because I will not encounter the dishonour that
besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other reasons.
Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore, thy husband be
to the world as one already dead, and of whom no tidings shall ever come.
Recognize me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe not the secret, above all,
to the man thou wottest of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his
position, his life, will be in my hands. Beware!«
    »I will keep thy secret, as I have his,« said Hester.
    »Swear it!« rejoined he.
    And she took the oath.
    »And now, Mistress Prynne,« said old Roger Chilling-worth, as he was
hereafter to be named, »I leave thee alone; alone with thy infant, and the
scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to wear the token
in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and hideous dreams?«
    »Why dost thou smile so at me?« inquired Hester, troubled at the expression
of his eyes. »Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us?
Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?«
    »Not thy soul,« he answered, with another smile. »No, not thine!«
 

                            V. Hester at Her Needle

Hester Prynne's term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door was
thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on all alike,
seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to
reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real torture
in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison, than even in
the procession and spectacle that have been described, where she was made the
common infamy, at which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she
was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative
energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of
lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and insulated event, to occur but
once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she
might call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many quiet years.
The very law that condemned her - a giant of stern features, but with vigour to
support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm - had held her up, through
the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk from her
prison-door, began the daily custom, and she must either sustain and carry it
forward by the ordinary resources of her nature, or sink beneath it. She could
no longer borrow from the future, to help her through the present grief.
To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would
the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably
grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still
with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to
fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their
misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her individuality,
she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might
point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty
and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with
the scarlet letter flaming on her breast, - at her, the child of honourable
parents, - at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, - at
her, who had once been innocent, - as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.
And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her only
monument.
    It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her, - kept by no
restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan
settlement, so remote and so obscure, - free to return to her birthplace, or to
any other European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new
exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of being, - and having
also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness
of her nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were
alien from the law that had condemned her, - it may seem marvellous, that this
woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must
needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible
and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels
human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great
and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and still the more
irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were
the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with
stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so
uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and
dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth - even that village of
rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in
her mother's keeping, like garments put off long ago - were foreign to her, in
comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her
inmost soul, but never could be broken.
    It might be, too, - doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from
herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent
from its hole, - it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and
pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode the feet of one with
whom she deemed herself connected in a union, that, unrecognized on earth, would
bring them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their
marriage-altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over
again, the tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester's contemplation,
and laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then
strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened
to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to believe, - what,
finally, she reasoned upon, as her motive for continuing a resident of New
England, - was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to
herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her
earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at
length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost;
more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.
    Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town, within
the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation,
there was a small thatched cottage. It had been built by an earlier settler, and
abandoned, because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while its
comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity which
already marked the habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking
across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump
of scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal
the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which would
fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little, lonesome
dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the license of the
magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established
herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately
attached itself to the spot. Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this
woman should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh
enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or standing in the
door-way, or labouring in her little garden, or coming forth along the pathway
that led townward; and, discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would
scamper off, with a strange, contagious fear.
    Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth who dared to
show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She possessed an art that
sufficed, even in a land that afforded comparatively little scope for its
exercise, to supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art -
then, as now, almost the only one within a woman's grasp - of needle-work. She
bore on her breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her
delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have
availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human
ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the sable
simplicity that generally characterized the Puritanic modes of dress, there
might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the
taste of the age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind,
did not fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast
behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with. Public
ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of magistrates, and all that
could give majesty to the forms in which a new government manifested itself to
the people, were, as a matter of policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted
ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully
wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to
the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were readily allowed
to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade
these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals,
too, - whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold
emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors, -
there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labour as Hester Prynne
could supply. Baby-linen - for babies then wore robes of state - afforded still
another possibility of toil and emolument.
    By degrees, nor very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be termed
the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny;
or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or
worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now,
sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or
because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it
is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours
as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify
itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had
been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle-work was seen on the ruff of the
Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it
decked the baby's little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away,
in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance,
her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil which was to cover the
pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever relentless vigour with
which society frowned upon her sin.
    Hester sought not to acquire any thing beyond a subsistence, of the plainest
and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child.
Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with only
that one ornament, - the scarlet letter, - which it was her doom to wear. The
child's attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, or, we might
rather say, a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy
charm that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared
to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it hereafter. Except for
that small expenditure in the decoration of her infant, Hester bestowed all her
superfluous means in charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and who
not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she
might readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in
making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of
penance in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of
enjoyment, in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in her
nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic, - a taste for the gorgeously
beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing
else, in all the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women
derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of
the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode of expressing, and
therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected
it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter
betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something
doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong, beneath.
    In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the world.
With her native energy of character, and rare capacity, it could not entirely
cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more intolerable to a woman's
heart than that which branded the brow of Cain. In all her intercourse with
society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it.
Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in
contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone
as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by
other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal
interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar
fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the
household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in
manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible
repugnance. These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to
be the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It was not an age
of delicacy; and her position, although she understood it well, and was in
little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid
self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tenderest
spot. The poor, as we have already said, whom she sought out to be the objects
of her bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succor them.
Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her
occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart;
sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a
subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser
expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow
upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long and well; she never
responded to these attacks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly
over her pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was
patient, - a martyr, indeed, - but she forbore to pray for her enemies; lest, in
spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly
twist themselves into a curse.
    Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable
throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying,
the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen paused in the street
to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and
frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share
the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find
herself the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for
they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this
dreary woman, gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but
one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a
distance with shrill cries, and the utterance of a word that had no distinct
purport to their own minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding
from lips that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion
of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper
pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves, -
had the summer breeze murmured about it, - had the wintry blast shrieked it
aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When
strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter, - and none ever failed to do
so, - they branded it afresh into Hester's soul; so that, oftentimes, she could
scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her
hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to
inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in
short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon
the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more
sensitive with daily torture.
    But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt an
eye - a human eye - upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a momentary
relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next instant, back it all
rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain; for, in that brief interval,
she had sinned anew. Had Hester sinned alone?
    Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer moral
and intellectual fibre, would have been still more so, by the strange and
solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with those lonely footsteps,
in the little world with which she was outwardly connected, it now and then
appeared to Hester, - if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be
resisted, - she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her
with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that
it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was
terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could
they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have
persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward
guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a
scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's? Or,
must she receive those intimations - so obscure, yet so distinct - as truth? In
all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome
as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent
inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes,
the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed
near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom
that age of antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with
angels. »What evil thing is at hand?« would Hester say to herself. Lifting her
reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the
form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously
assert itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to
the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life.
That unsunned snow in the matron's bosom, and the burning shame on Hester
Prynne's, - what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric thrill would
give her warning, - »Behold, Hester, here is a companion!« - and, looking up,
she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter,
shyly and aside, and quickly averted, with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks;
as if her purity were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose
talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or
age, for this poor sinner to revere? - Such loss of faith is ever one of the
saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in
this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet
struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.
    The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a
grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the
scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They
averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly
dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all
alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must
needs say, it seared Hester's bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth
in the rumour than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.
 

                                   VI. Pearl

We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose innocent
life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal
flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion. How strange it seemed to
the sad woman, as she watched the growth, and the beauty that became every day
more brilliant, and the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the
tiny features of this child! Her Pearl! - For so had Hester called her; not as a
name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white,
unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she named
the infant Pearl, as being of great price, - purchased with all she had, - her
mother's only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked this woman's sin by
a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human
sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct
consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child,
whose place was on that same dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for ever
with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in
heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than
apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith,
therefore, that its result would be for good. Day after day, she looked
fearfully into the child's expanding nature; ever dreading to detect some dark
and wild peculiarity, that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she
owed her being.
    Certainly, there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its vigour,
and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the infant was
worthy to have been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, to be
the plaything of the angels, after the world's first parents were driven out.
The child had a native grace which does not invariably coexist with faultless
beauty; its attire, however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were
the very garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in
rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better understood
hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be procured, and allowed
her imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the
dresses which the child wore, before the public eye. So magnificent was the
small figure, when thus arrayed, and such was the splendour of Pearl's own proper
beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler
loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her, on the
darksome cottage-floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's
rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl's aspect was imbued with
a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children,
comprehending the full scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a
peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of an infant princess. Throughout all,
however, there was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never
lost; and if, in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would
have ceased to be herself; - it would have been no longer Pearl!
    This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the
various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too,
as well as variety; but - or else Hester's fears deceived her - it lacked
reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born. The child could
not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had been
broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and
brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst
which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be
discovered. Hester could only account for the child's character - and even then,
most vaguely and imperfectly - by recalling what she herself had been, during
that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual
world, and her bodily frame from its material of earth. The mother's impassioned
state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant
the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had
taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow,
and the untempered light, of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare
of Hester's spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize
her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some
of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart.
They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a young child's
disposition, but, later in the day of earthly existence, might be prolific of
the storm and whirlwind.
    The discipline of the family, in those days, was of a far more rigid kind
than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the rod,
enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the way of punishment
for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the growth and promotion of
all childish virtues. Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the lonely mother of this one
child, ran little risk of erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful,
however, of her own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender,
but strict, control over the infant immortality that was committed to her
charge. But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and frowns,
and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any calculable influence,
Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside, and permit the child to be
swayed by her own impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of
course, while it lasted. As to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed
to her mind or heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in
accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while Pearl was
yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that warned her
when it would be labour thrown away to insist, persuade, or plead. It was a look
so intelligent, yet inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but
generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help
questioning, at such moments, whether Pearl was a human child. She seemed rather
an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while
upon the cottage-floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look
appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange
remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hovering in the air and
might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence, and goes we
know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the
child, - to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably began, - to
snatch her to her bosom, with a close pressure and earnest kisses, - not so much
from overflowing love, as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and
not utterly delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when she was caught, though full of
merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than before.
    Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often came
between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so dear, and who was
all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then, perhaps, -
for there was no foreseeing how it might affect her, - Pearl would frown, and
clench her little fist, and harden her small features into a stern,
unsympathizing look of discontent. Not seldom, she would laugh anew, and louder
than before, like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or - but
this more rarely happened - she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob
out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that
she had a heart, by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself
to that gusty tenderness; it passed, as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all
these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some
irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word
that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence. Her only real
comfort was when the child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of
her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until - perhaps with
that perverse expression glimmering from beneath her opening lids - little Pearl
awoke!
    How soon - with what strange rapidity, indeed! - did Pearl arrive at an age
that was capable of social intercourse, beyond the mother's ever-ready smile and
nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would it have been, could Hester
Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other
childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled her own darling's tones,
amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children! But this could
never be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil,
emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing
was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child
comprehended her loneliness; the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle
round about her; the whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to
other children. Never, since her release from prison, had Hester met the public
gaze without her. In all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there; first
as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her
mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the
rate of three or four footsteps to one of Hester's. She saw the children of the
settlement, on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds,
disporting themselves in such grim fashion as the Puritanic nurture would
permit; playing at going to church, perchance; or at scourging Quakers; or
taking scalps in a sham-fight with the Indians; or scaring one another with
freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought
to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children
gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible
in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent
exclamations that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of
a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue.
    The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood
that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at
variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child; and therefore scorned
them in their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their tongues.
Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be
supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a
kind of value, and even comfort, for her mother; because there was at least an
intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice that so
often thwarted her in the child's manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless,
to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in
herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right,
out of Hester's heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of
seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be
perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before
Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening
influences of maternity.
    At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted not a wide and
various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth from her ever
creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch
kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials, a stick,
a bunch of rags, a flower, were the puppets of Pearl's witchcraft, and, without
undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama
occupied the stage of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of
imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged,
black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the
breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest
weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted,
most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she
threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing,
always in a state of preternatural activity, - soon sinking down, as if
exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life, - and succeeded by other
shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the
phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy,
however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be little more than
was observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the
dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she
created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child
regarded all these offspring of her own heart and mind. She never created a
friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon's teeth, whence
sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle. It was
inexpressibly sad - then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own
heart the cause! - to observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an
adverse world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good
her cause, in the contest that must ensue.
    Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees, and
cried out, with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which made
utterance for itself, betwixt speech and a groan, - »O Father in Heaven, - if
Thou art still my Father, - what is this being which I have brought into the
world!« And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware, through some more
subtle channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and beautiful
little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her
play.
    One peculiarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be told. The very
first thing which she had noticed, in her life, was - what? - not the mother's
smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint, embryo smile of the
little mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards, and with such fond discussion
whether it were indeed a smile. By no means! But that first object of which
Pearl seemed to become aware was - shall we say it? - the scarlet letter on
Hester's bosom! One day, as her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant's
eyes had been caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter;
and, putting up her little hand, she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but
with a decided gleam that gave her face the look of a much older child. Then,
gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively
endeavouring to tear it away; so infinite was the torture inflicted by the
intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand. Again, as if her mother's agonized
gesture were meant only to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her
eyes, and smile! From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had
never felt a moment's safety; not a moment's calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is
true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl's gaze might never once be
fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like
the stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile, and odd
expression of the eyes.
    Once, this freakish, elfish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester
was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and,
suddenly, - for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with
unaccountable delusions, - she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature
portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a
face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features
that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice,
in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then
peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though
less vividly, by the same illusion.
    In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after Pearl grew big enough to
run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild-flowers, and
flinging them, one by one, at her mother's bosom; dancing up and down, like a
little elf, whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester's first motion had been
to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But, whether from pride or
resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this
unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death,
looking sadly into little Pearl's wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers,
almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother's breast with hurts
for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to seek it in
another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and gazed
at Hester, with that little, laughing image of a fiend peeping out - or, whether
it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it - from the unsearchable abyss of her
black eyes.
    »Child, what art thou?« cried the mother.
    »O, I am your little Pearl!« answered the child.
    But, while she said it, Pearl laughed and began to dance up and down, with
the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly up
the chimney.
    »Art thou my child, in very truth?« asked Hester.
    Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with a
portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl's wonderful intelligence,
that her mother half doubted whether she were not acquainted with the secret
spell of her existence, and might not now reveal herself.
    »Yes; I am little Pearl!« repeated the child, continuing her antics.
    »Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!« said the mother, half
playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came over her, in
the midst of her deepest suffering. »Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent
thee hither?«
    »Tell me, mother!« said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and
pressing herself close to her knees. »Do thou tell me!«
    »Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!« answered Hester Prynne.
    But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of the
child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because an evil
spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger, and touched the scarlet
letter.
    »He did not send me!« cried she, positively. »I have no Heavenly Father!«
    »Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!« answered the mother, suppressing
a groan. »He sent us all into this world. He sent even me, thy mother. Then,
much more, thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish child, whence didst thou
come?«
    »Tell me! Tell me!« repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing, and
capering about the floor. »It is thou that must tell me!«
    But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal labyrinth
of doubt. She remembered - betwixt a smile and a shudder - the talk of the
neighbouring townspeople; who, seeking vainly elsewhere for the child's
paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor
little Pearl was a demon offspring; such as, ever since old Catholic times, had
occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of their mothers' sin, and
to promote some foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his
monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child
to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned, among the New England Puritans.
 

                            VII. The Governor's Hall

Hester Prynne went, one day, to the mansion of Governor Bellingham, with a pair
of gloves, which she had fringed and embroidered to his order, and which were to
be worn on some great occasion of state; for, though the chances of a popular
election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two from the highest
rank, he still held an honourable and influential place among the colonial
magistracy.
    Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of
embroidered gloves impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview with a
personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the settlement. It had
reached her ears, that there was a design on the part of some of the leading
inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in religion and
government, to deprive her of her child. On the supposition that Pearl, as
already hinted, was of demon origin, these good people not unreasonably argued
that a Christian interest in the mother's soul required them to remove such a
stumbling-block from her path. If the child, on the other hand, were really
capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed the elements of ultimate
salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these
advantages by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester
Prynne's. Among those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to
be one of the most busy. It may appear singular, and, indeed, not a little
ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which, in later days, would have been
referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the selectmen of the town,
should then have been a question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of
eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of
even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight than the welfare
of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of
legislators and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than
that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of property in a pig, not
only caused a fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony,
but resulted in an important modification of the framework itself of the
legislature.
    Full of concern, therefore, - but so conscious of her own right, that it
seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public, on the one side, and a
lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the other, - Hester Prynne
set forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion.
She was now of an age to run lightly along by her mother's side, and, constantly
in motion from morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey
than that before her. Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she
demanded to be taken up in arms, but was soon as imperious to be set down again,
and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway, with many a harmless
trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl's rich and luxuriant beauty; a beauty
that shone with deep and vivid tints; a bright complexion, eyes possessing
intensity both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and
which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was fire in her and
throughout her; she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment.
Her mother, in contriving the child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies
of her imagination their full play; arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic, of a
peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold
thread. So much strength of colouring, which must have given a wan and pallid
aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty,
and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the
earth.
    But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the child's
whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of
the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the
scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life! The mother
herself - as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain, that
all her conceptions assumed its form - had carefully wrought out the similitude;
lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the
object of her affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth,
Pearl was the one, as well as the other; and only in consequence of that
identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in
her appearance.
    As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the children of
the Puritans looked up from their play, - or what passed for play with those
sombre little urchins, - and spoke gravely one to another: -
    »Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a truth,
moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side!
Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!«
    But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her foot, and
shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening gestures, suddenly made a
rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight. She resembled, in
her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence, - the scarlet fever, or some
such half-fledged angel of judgment, - whose mission was to punish the sins of
the rising generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of
sound, which doubtless caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them.
The victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked up
smiling into her face.
    Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor Bellingham.
This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which there are specimens
still extant in the streets of our elder towns; now moss-grown, crumbling to
decay, and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences,
remembered or forgotten, that have happened, and passed away, within their dusky
chambers. Then, however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its
exterior, and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a
human habitation into which death had never entered. It had indeed a very cheery
aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of
broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell
aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if
diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might
have befitted Aladdin's palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan
ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures
and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age, which had been drawn in
the stucco when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the
admiration of after times.
    Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house, began to caper and dance,
and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine should be stripped
off its front, and given her to play with.
    »No, my little Pearl!« said her mother. »Thou must gather thine own
sunshine. I have none to give thee!«
    They approached the door; which was of an arched form, and flanked on each
side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of which were
lattice-windows, with wooden shutters to close over them at need. Lifting the
iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne gave a summons, which was
answered by one of the Governor's bondservants; a free-born Englishman, but now
a seven years' slave. During that term he was to be the property of his master,
and as much a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf
wore the blue coat, which was the customary garb of serving-men at that period,
and long before, in the old hereditary halls of England.
    »Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?« inquired Hester.
    »Yea, forsooth,« replied the bond-servant, staring with wide-open eyes at
the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had never before
seen. »Yea, his honourable worship is within. But he hath a godly minister or two
with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see his worship now.«
    »Nevertheless, I will enter,« answered Hester Prynne; and the bond-servant,
perhaps judging from the decision of her air and the glittering symbol in her
bosom, that she was a great lady in the land, offered no opposition.
    So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of entrance. With
many variations, suggested by the nature of his building-materials, diversity of
climate, and a different mode of social life, Governor Bellingham had planned
his new habitation after the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in his
native land. Here, then, was a wide and reasonably lofty hall, extending through
the whole depth of the house, and forming a medium of general communication,
more or less directly, with all the other apartments. At one extremity, this
spacious room was lighted by the windows of the two towers, which formed a small
recess on either side of the portal. At the other end, though partly muffled by
a curtain, it was more powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed
hall-windows which we read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep
and cushioned seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the
Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as, in our own
days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre-table, to be turned over by the
casual guest. The furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs, the
backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken flowers; and
likewise a table in the same taste; the whole being of the Elizabethan age, or
perhaps earlier, and heirlooms, transferred hither from the Governor's paternal
home. On the table - in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality had
not been left behind - stood a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had
Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a
recent draught of ale.
    On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of the
Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their breasts, and others with stately
ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterized by the sternness and severity
which old portraits so invariably put on; as if they were the ghosts, rather
than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and
intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men.
    At about the centre of the oaken panels, that lined the hall, was suspended
a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic, but of the most
modern date; for it had been manufactured by a skilful armorer in London, the
same year in which Governor Bellingham came over to New England. There was a
steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget, and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and
a sword hanging beneath; all, and especially the helmet and breastplate, so
highly burnished as to glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination
everywhere about upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle
show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training
field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the Pequod war.
For, though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and
Finch, as his professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had
transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a statesman and
ruler.
    Little Pearl - who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as she
had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house - spent some time looking
into the polished mirror of the breastplate.
    »Mother,« cried she, »I see you here. Look! Look!«
    Hester looked, by way of humoring the child; and she saw that, owing to the
peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in
exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent
feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it.
Pearl pointed upward, also, at a similar picture in the headpiece; smiling at
her mother, with the elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expression on
her small physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in
the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made Hester
Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who
was seeking to mould itself into Pearl's shape.
    »Come along, Pearl!« said she, drawing her away. »Come and look into this
fair garden. It may be, we shall see flowers there; more beautiful ones than we
find in the woods.«
    Pearl, accordingly, ran to the bow-window, at the farther end of the hall,
and looked along the vista of a garden-walk, carpeted with closely shaven grass,
and bordered with some rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. But the
proprietor appeared already to have relinquished, as hopeless, the effort to
perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil and amid the close
struggle for subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening.
Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin vine, rooted at some distance, had
run across the intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products
directly beneath the hall-window; as if to warn the Governor that this great
lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth would offer
him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees,
probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the
first settler of the peninsula; that half mythological personage who rides
through our early annals, seated on the back of a bull.
    Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would not be
pacified.
    »Hush, child, hush!« said her mother earnestly. »Do not cry, dear little
Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and gentlemen along
with him!«
    In fact, adown the vista of the garden-avenue, a number of persons were seen
approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her mother's attempt to
quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became silent; not from any notion
of obedience, but because the quick and mobile curiosity of her disposition was
excited by the appearance of these new personages.
 

                      VIII. The Elf-Child and the Minister

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap, - such as elderly gentlemen
loved to indue themselves with, in their domestic privacy, - walked foremost,
and appeared to be showing off his estate, and expatiating on his projected
improvements. The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his gray
beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James's reign, caused his head to look
not a little like that of John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by
his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frostbitten with more than autumnal age,
was hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he had
evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error to suppose
that our grave forefathers - though accustomed to speak and think of human
existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and though unfeignedly
prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest of duty - made it a matter of
conscience to reject such means of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly within
their grasp. This creed was never taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor,
John Wilson, whose beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over Governor
Bellingham's shoulder; while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might
yet be naturalized in the New England climate, and that purple grapes might
possibly be compelled to flourish, against the sunny garden-wall. The old
clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a long
established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable things; and
however stern he might show himself in the pulpit, or in his public reproof of
such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial benevolence of
his private life had won him warmer affection than was accorded to any of his
professional contemporaries.
    Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests; one, the Reverend
Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember, as having taken a brief and
reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne's disgrace; and, in close
companionship with him, old Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in
physic, who, for two or three years past, had been settled in the town. It was
understood that this learned man was the physician as well as friend of the
young minister, whose health had severely suffered, of late, by his too
unreserved self-sacrifice to the labours and duties of the pastoral relation.
    The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps, and,
throwing open the leaves of the great hall window, found himself close to little
Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne, and partially concealed
her.
    »What have we here?« said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise at the
scarlet little figure before him. »I profess, I have never seen the like, since
my days of vanity, in old King James's time, when I was wont to esteem it a high
favour to be admitted to a court mask! There used to be a swarm of these small
apparitions, in holiday-time; and we called them children of the Lord of
Misrule. But how gat such a guest into my hall?«
    »Ay, indeed!« cried good old Mr. Wilson. »What little bird of scarlet
plumage may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures, when the sun has
been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the golden and
crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land. Prithee, young
one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this strange
fashion? Art thou a Christian child, - ha? Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou
one of those naughty elfs or fairies, whom we thought to have left behind us,
with other relics of Papistry, in merry old England?«
    »I am mother's child,« answered the scarlet vision, »and my name is Pearl!«
    »Pearl? - Ruby, rather! - or Coral! - or Red Rose, at the very least,
judging from thy hue!« responded the old minister, putting forth his hand in a
vain attempt to pat little Pearl on the cheek. »But where is this mother of
thine? Ah! I see,« he added; and, turning to Governor Bellingham, whispered, -
»This is the selfsame child of whom we have held speech together; and behold
here the unhappy woman, Hester Prynne, her mother!«
    »Sayest thou so?« cried the Governor. »Nay, we might have judged that such a
child's mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type of her of
Babylon! But she comes at a good time; and we will look into this matter
forthwith.«
    Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall, followed by
his three guests.
    »Hester Prynne,« said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on the wearer of
the scarlet letter, »there hath been much question concerning thee, of late. The
point hath been weightily discussed, whether we, that are of authority and
influence, do well discharge our consciences by trusting an immortal soul, such
as there is in yonder child, to the guidance of one who hath stumbled and
fallen, amid the pitfalls of this world. Speak thou, the child's own mother!
Were it not, thinkest thou, for thy little one's temporal and eternal welfare,
that she be taken out of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly,
and instructed in the truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for the
child, in this kind?«
    »I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!« answered Hester
Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.
    »Woman, it is thy badge of shame!« replied the stern magistrate. »It is
because of the stain which that letter indicates, that we would transfer thy
child to other hands.«
    »Nevertheless,« said the mother calmly, though growing more pale, »this
badge hath taught me, - it daily teaches me, - it is teaching me at this moment,
- lessons whereof my child may be the wiser and better, albeit they can profit
nothing to myself.«
    »We will judge warily,« said Bellingham, »and look well what we are about to
do. Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this Pearl, - since that is her
name, - and see whether she hath had such Christian nurture as befits a child of
her age.«
    The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair, and made an effort to draw
Pearl betwixt his knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the touch or familiarity
of any but her mother, escaped through the open window and stood on the upper
step, looking like a wild, tropical bird, of rich plumage, ready to take flight
into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not a little astonished at this outbreak, - for
he was a grandfatherly sort of personage, and usually a vast favourite with
children, - essayed, however, to proceed with the examination.
    »Pearl,« said he, with great solemnity, »thou must take heed to instruction,
that so, in due season, thou mayst wear in thy bosom the pearl of great price.
Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?«
    Now Pearl knew well enough who made her; for Hester Prynne, the daughter of
a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child about her Heavenly Father,
had begun to inform her of those truths which the human spirit, at whatever
stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest. Pearl, therefore, so
large were the attainments of her three years' lifetime, could have borne a fair
examination in the New England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster
Catechism, although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those
celebrated works. But that perversity, which all children have more or less of,
and of which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune
moment, took thorough possession of her, and closed her lips, or impelled her to
speak words amiss. After putting her finger in her mouth, with many ungracious
refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson's question, the child finally announced that
she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of
wild roses, that grew by the prison-door.
    This fantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the Governor's
red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window; together with her recollection
of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in coming hither.
    Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered something in
the young clergyman's ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of skill, and even
then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was startled to perceive what a
change had come over his features, - how much uglier they were, - how his dark
complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more misshapen, - since
the days when she had familiarly known him. She met his eyes for an instant, but
was immediately constrained to give all her attention to the scene now going
forward.
    »This is awful!« cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the astonishment
into which Pearl's response had thrown him. »Here is a child of three years old,
and she cannot tell who made her! Without question, she is equally in the dark
as to her soul, its present depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen,
we need inquire no further.«
    Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms,
confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression. Alone in
the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep her heart alive,
she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready
to defend them to the death.
    »God gave me the child!« cried she. »He gave her, in requital of all things
else, which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness! - she is my torture, none
the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me too! See ye not, she is
the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a
million-fold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will
die first!«
    »My poor woman,« said the not unkind old minister, »the child shall be well
cared for! - far better than thou canst do it.«
    »God gave her into my keeping,« repeated Hester Prynne, raising her voice
almost to a shriek. »I will not give her up!« - And here, by a sudden impulse,
she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment,
she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct her eyes. - »Speak thou for me!«
cried she. »Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knows me
better than these men can. I will not lose the child! Speak for me! Thou
knows, - for thou hast sympathies which these men lack! - thou knows what is
in my heart, and what are a mother's rights, and how much the stronger they are,
when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter! Look thou to it! I
will not lose the child! Look to it!«
    At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester Prynne's
situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the young minister at
once came forward, pale, and holding his hand over his heart, as was his custom
whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament was thrown into agitation. He looked
now more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the scene of
Hester's public ignominy; and whether it were his failing health, or whatever
the cause might be, his large dark eyes had a world of pain in their troubled
and melancholy depth.
    »There is truth in what she says,« began the minister, with a voice sweet,
tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall reëchoed, and the hollow armour
rang with it, - »truth in what Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires
her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its
nature and requirements, - both seemingly so peculiar, - which no other mortal
being can possess. And, moreover, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in
the relation between this mother and this child?«
    »Ay! - how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?« interrupted the Governor. »Make
that plain, I pray you!«
    »It must be even so,« resumed the minister. »For, if we deem it otherwise,
do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the Creator of all flesh, hath
lightly recognized a deed of sin, and made of no account the distinction between
unhallowed lust and holy love? This child of its father's guilt and its mother's
shame hath come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who
pleads so earnestly, and with such bitterness of spirit, the right to keep her.
It was meant for a blessing; for the one blessing of her life! It was meant,
doubtless, as the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution too; a torture,
to be felt at many an unthought of moment; a pang, a sting, an ever-recurring
agony, in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath she not expressed this thought in
the garb of the poor child, so forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which
sears her bosom?«
    »Well said, again!« cried good Mr. Wilson. »I feared the woman had no better
thought than to make a mountebank of her child!«
    »O, not so! - not so!« continued Mr. Dimmesdale. »She recognizes, believe
me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought, in the existence of that child.
And may she feel, too, - what, methinks, is the very truth, - that this boon was
meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive, and to preserve
her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge
her! Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman that she hath an infant
immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care, -
to be trained up by her to righteousness, - to remind her, at every moment, of
her fall, - but yet to teach her, as it were by the Creator's sacred pledge,
that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parent
thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester
Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let us leave them as
Providence hath seen fit to place them!«
    »You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,« said old Roger
Chillingworth, smiling at him.
    »And there is weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken,« added
the Reverend Mr. Wilson. »What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham? Hath he
not pleaded well for the poor woman?«
    »Indeed hath he,« answered the magistrate, »and hath adduced such arguments,
that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so long, at least, as there
shall be no further scandal in the woman. Care must be had, nevertheless, to put
the child to due and stated examination in the catechism at thy hands or Master
Dimmesdale's. Moreover, at a proper season, the tithing-men must take heed that
she go both to school and to meeting.«
    The young minister, on ceasing to speak, had withdrawn a few steps from the
group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the heavy folds of the
window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure, which the sunlight cast upon the
floor, was tremulous with the vehemence of his appeal. Pearl, that wild and
flighty little elf, stole softly towards him, and, taking his hand in the grasp
of both her own, laid her cheek against it; a caress so tender, and withal so
unobtrusive, that her mother, who was looking on, asked herself, - »Is that my
Pearl?« Yet she knew that there was love in the child's heart, although it
mostly revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her lifetime had been
softened by such gentleness as now. The minister, - for, save the long-sought
regards of woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of childish preference,
accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to imply
in us something truly worthy to be loved, - the minister looked round, laid his
hand on the child's head, hesitated an instant, and then kissed her brow. Little
Pearl's unwonted mood of sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went
capering down the hall, so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question whether
even her tiptoes touched the floor.
    »The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess,« said he to Mr.
Dimmesdale. »She needs no old woman's broomstick to fly withal!«
    »A strange child!« remarked old Roger Chillingworth. »It is easy to see the
mother's part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher's research, think ye,
gentlemen, to analyse that child's nature, and, from its make and mould, to give
a shrewd guess at the father?«
    »Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clew of profane
philosophy,« said Mr. Wilson. »Better to fast and pray upon it; and still
better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless Providence reveal
it of its own accord. Thereby, every good Christian man hath a title to show a
father's kindness towards the poor, deserted babe.«
    The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with Pearl,
departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is averred that the
lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and forth into the sunny day was
thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins, Governor Bellingham's bitter-tempered
sister, and the same who, a few years later, was executed as a witch.
    »Hist, hist!« said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to cast a
shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. »Wilt thou go with us to-night?
There will be a merry company in the forest; and I wellnigh promised the Black
Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one.«
    »Make my excuse to him, so please you!« answered Hester, with a triumphant
smile. »I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little Pearl. Had they
taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and
signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!«
    »We shall have thee there anon!« said the witch-lady, frowning, as she drew
back her head.
    But here - if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and Hester
Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable - was already an illustration of the
young minister's argument against sundering the relation of a fallen mother to
the offspring of her frailty. Even thus early had the child saved her from
Satan's snare.
 

                                 IX. The Leech

Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will remember, was
hidden another name, which its former wearer had resolved should never more be
spoken. It has been related, how, in the crowd that witnessed Hester Prynne's
ignominious exposure, stood a man, elderly, travel-worn, who, just emerging from
the perilous wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped to find embodied the
warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin before the people. Her
matronly fame was trodden under all men's feet. Infamy was babbling around her
in the public market-place. For her kindred, should the tidings ever reach them,
and for the companions of her unspotted life, there remained nothing but the
contagion of her dishonour; which would not fail to be distributed in strict
accordance and proportion with the intimacy and sacredness of their previous
relationship. Then why - since the choice was with himself - should the
individual, whose connection with the fallen woman had been the most intimate
and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate his claim to an inheritance so
little desirable? He resolved not to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal of
shame. Unknown to all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and key of her
silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of mankind, and, as
regarded his former ties and interests, to vanish out of life as completely as
if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumour had long ago
consigned him. This purpose once effected, new interests would immediately
spring up, and likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of
force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties.
    In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan town,
as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning and
intelligence of which he possessed more than a common measure. As his studies,
at a previous period of his life, had made him extensively acquainted with the
medical science of the day, it was as a physician that he presented himself, and
as such was cordially received. Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical
profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear,
partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic.
In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more
subtle faculties of such men were materialized, and that they lost the
spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism,
which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. At all
events, the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to
do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deacon and
apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his
favour, than any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only
surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the
daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger
Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity
with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every
remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as
elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In
his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties
of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients, that these
simple medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a
share of his own confidence as the European pharmacopoeia, which so many learned
doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.
    This learned stranger was exemplary, as regarded at least the outward forms
of a religious life, and, early after his arrival, had chosen for his spiritual
guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine, whose scholar-like renown
still lived in Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little
less than a heaven-ordained apostle, destined, should he live and labour for the
ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds for the now feeble New England
Church, as the early Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian
faith. About this period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently
begun to fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the
young minister's cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study,
his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and, more than all, by the fasts
and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness
of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some
declared, that, if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was cause enough,
that the world was not worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet. He himself,
on the other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his belief, that, if
Providence should see fit to remove him, it would be because of his own
unworthiness to perform its humblest mission here on earth. With all this
difference of opinion as to the cause of his decline, there could be no question
of the fact. His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet,
had a certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on any
slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart, with
first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of pain.
    Such was the young clergyman's condition, and so imminent the prospect that
his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when Roger Chillingworth
made his advent to the town. His first entry on the scene, few people could tell
whence, dropping down, as it were, out of the sky, or starting from the nether
earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was easily heightened to the miraculous.
He was now known to be a man of skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs,
and the blossoms of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from
the forest-trees, like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was valueless
to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby, and other famous men,
- whose scientific attainments were esteemed hardly less than supernatural, - as
having been his correspondents or associates. Why, with such rank in the learned
world, had he come hither? What could he, whose sphere was in great cities, be
seeking in the wilderness? In answer to this query, a rumour gained ground, -
and, however absurd, was entertained by some very sensible people, - that Heaven
had wrought an absolute miracle, by transporting an eminent Doctor of Physic,
from a German university, bodily through the air, and setting him down at the
door of Mr. Dimmesdale's study! Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew
that Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what is
called miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a providential hand in
Roger Chillingworth's so opportune arrival.
    This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician ever
manifested in the young clergyman; he attached himself to him as a parishioner,
and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from his naturally reserved
sensibility. He expressed great alarm at his pastor's state of health, but was
anxious to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken, seemed not despondent of
a favourable result. The elders, the deacons, the motherly dames, and the young
and fair maidens, of Mr. Dimmesdale's flock, were alike importunate that he
should make trial of the physician's frankly offered skill. Mr. Dimmesdale
gently repelled their entreaties.
    »I need no medicine,« said he.
    But how could the young minister say so, when, with every successive
Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous than
before, - when it had now become a constant habit, rather than a casual gesture,
to press his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his labours? Did he wish to
die? These questions were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder
ministers of Boston and the deacons of his church, who, to use their own phrase,
dealt with him on the sin of rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly
held out. He listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with the
physician.
    »Were it God's will,« said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in fulfilment
of this pledge, he requested old Roger Chillingworth's professional advice, »I
could be well content, that my labours, and my sorrows, and my sins, and my
pains, should shortly end with me, and what is earthly of them be buried in my
grave, and the spiritual go with me to my eternal state, rather than that you
should put your skill to the proof in my behalf.«
    »Ah,« replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness which, whether
imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, »it is thus that a young
clergyman is apt to speak. Youthful men, not having taken a deep root, give up
their hold of life so easily! And saintly men, who walk with God on earth, would
fain be away, to walk with him on the golden pavements of the New Jerusalem.«
    »Nay,« rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his heart, with a
flush of pain flitting over his brow, »were I worthier to walk there, I could be
better content to toil here.«
    »Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly,« said the physician.
    In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the medical
adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease interested the
physician, but he was strongly moved to look into the character and qualities of
the patient, these two men, so different in age, came gradually to spend much
time together. For the sake of the minister's health, and to enable the leech to
gather plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore,
or in the forest; mingling various talk with the plash and murmur of the waves,
and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one was the
guest of the other, in his place of study and retirement. There was a
fascination for the minister in the company of the man of science, in whom he
recognized an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or scope; together
with a range and freedom of ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among
the members of his own profession. In truth, he was startled, if not shocked, to
find this attribute in the physician. Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true
religionist, with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and an order of
mind that impelled itself powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its
passage continually deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of society would
he have been what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential
to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it
confined him within its iron framework. Not the less, however, though with a
tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the
universe through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with which
he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a
freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was wasting
itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams, and the musty fragrance,
be it sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and
chill to be long breathed, with comfort. So the minister, and the physician with
him, withdrew again within the limits of what their church defined as orthodox.
    Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinized his patient carefully, both as he saw
him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the range of thoughts
familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the
novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his character.
He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do
him good. Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the
physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale,
thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that the
bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork there. So Roger
Chillingworth - the man of skill, the kind and friendly physician - strove to go
deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his
recollections, and probing every thing with a cautious touch, like a
treasure-seeker in a dark cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator, who
has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow it
up. A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his
physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more,
- let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which must be born
with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this
last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought;
if such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by
an uttered sympathy, as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a
word, to indicate that all is understood; if, to these qualifications of a
confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognized character as a
physician; - then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be
dissolved, and flow forth in a dark, but transparent stream, bringing all its
mysteries into the daylight.
    Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes above
enumerated. Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have said,
grew up between these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a field as the
whole sphere of human thought and study, to meet upon; they discussed every
topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character; they
talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal to themselves; and
yet no secret, such as the physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of
the minister's consciousness into his companion's ear. The latter had his
suspicions, indeed, that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale's bodily disease had
never fairly been revealed to him. It was a strange reserve!
    After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr.
Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were lodged in the same
house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister's life-tide might pass under
the eye of his anxious and attached physician. There was much joy throughout the
town, when this greatly desirable object was attained. It was held to be the
best possible measure for the young clergyman's welfare; unless, indeed, as
often urged by such as felt authorized to do so, he had selected some one of the
many blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife.
This latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur Dimmesdale
would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if
priestly celibacy were one of his articles of church-discipline. Doomed by his
own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavory
morsel always at another's board, and endure the life-long chill which must be
his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's fireside, it truly seemed
that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent, old physician, with his concord of
paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very man, of all
mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.
    The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good social
rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on which the
venerable structure of King's Chapel has since been built. It had the
grave-yard, originally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on one side, and so was well
adapted to call up serious reflections, suited to their respective employments,
in both minister and man of physic. The motherly care of the good widow assigned
to Mr. Dimmesdale a front apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy
window-curtains to create a noontide shadow, when desirable. The walls were hung
round with tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events,
representing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the
Prophet, in colours still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the scene
almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here, the pale
clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers,
and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines,
even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained
often to avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger
Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern man of
science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling
apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practised
alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of
situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own
domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a
mutual and not incurious inspection into one another's business.
    And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as we have
intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence had done all
this, for the purpose - besought in so many public, and domestic, and secret
prayers - of restoring the young minister to health. But - it must now be said -
another portion of the community had latterly begun to take its own view of the
relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an
uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to
be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the
intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often
so profound and so unerring, as to possess the character of truths
supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case of which we speak, could
justify its prejudice against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy
of serious refutation. There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who had
been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder, now some
thirty years agone; he testified to having seen the physician, under some other
name, which the narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Doctor
Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the affair of Overbury.
Two or three individuals hinted, that the man of skill, during his Indian
captivity, had enlarged his medical attainments by joining in the incantations
of the savage priests; who were universally acknowledged to be powerful
enchanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their skill in the
black art. A large number - and many of these were persons of such sober sense
and practical observation, that their opinions would have been valuable, in
other matters - affirmed that Roger Chillingworth's aspect had undergone a
remarkable change while he had dwelt in town, and especially since his abode
with Mr. Dimmesdale. At first, his expression had been calm, meditative,
scholar-like. Now, there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had
not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight, the
oftener they looked upon him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his
laboratory had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed with infernal
fuel; and so, as might be expected, his visage was getting sooty with the smoke.
    To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion, that the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of especial sanctity, in
all ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by Satan himself, or Satan's
emissary, in the guise of old Roger Chillingworth. This diabolical agent had the
Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's intimacy, and
plot against his soul. No sensible man, it was confessed, could doubt on which
side the victory would turn. The people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see
the minister come forth out of the conflict, transfigured with the glory which
he would unquestionably win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to think of the
perchance mortal agony through which he must struggle towards his triumph.
    Alas, to judge from the gloom and terror in the depths of the poor
minister's eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory any thing but
secure!
 

                          X. The Leech and His Patient

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament, kindly,
though not of warm affections, but ever, and in all his relations with the
world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an investigation, as he imagined,
with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as
if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a
geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself.
But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still
calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free
again, until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor clergyman's
heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a
grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's
bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. Alas for his
own soul, if these were what he sought!
    Sometimes, a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue and
ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those
gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful door-way in the
hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim's face. The soil where this dark miner
was working had perchance shown indications that encouraged him.
    »This man,« said he, at one such moment, to himself, »pure as they deem him,
- all spiritual as he seems, - hath inherited a strong animal nature from his
father or his mother. Let us dig a little farther in the direction of this
vein!«
    Then, after long search into the minister's dim interior, and turning over
many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the welfare of his
race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened by
thought and study, and illuminated by revelation, - all of which invaluable gold
was perhaps no better than rubbish to the seeker, - he would turn back,
discouraged, and begin his quest towards another point. He groped along as
stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief
entering a chamber where a man lies only half asleep, - or, it may be, broad
awake, - with purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the
apple of his eye. In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the floor would now
and then creak; his garments would rustle; the shadow of his presence, in a
forbidden proximity, would be thrown across his victim. In other words, Mr.
Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual
intuition, would become vaguely aware that something inimical to his peace had
thrust itself into relation with him. But old Roger Chillingworth, too, had
perceptions that were almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled
eyes towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathizing, but
never intrusive friend.
    Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual's character more
perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts are liable, had not
rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no man as his friend, he could
not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared. He therefore still
kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily receiving the old physician in
his study; or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation's sake, watching the
processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.
    One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of the
open window, that looked towards the graveyard, he talked with Roger
Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of unsightly plants.
    »Where,« asked he, with a look askance at them, - for it was the clergyman's
peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straightforth at any object,
whether human or inanimate, - »where, my kind doctor, did you gather those
herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?«
    »Even in the grave-yard, here at hand,« answered the physician, continuing
his employment. »They are new to me. I found them growing on a grave, which bore
no tombstone, nor other memorial of the dead man, save these ugly weeds that
have taken upon themselves to keep him in remembrance. They grew out of his
heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and
which he had done better to confess during his lifetime.«
    »Perchance,« said Mr. Dimmesdale, »he earnestly desired it, but could not.«
    »And wherefore?« rejoined the physician. »Wherefore not; since all the
powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black
weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make manifest an unspoken crime?«
    »That, good Sir, is but a fantasy of yours,« replied the minister. »There
can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose,
whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried
with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must
perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor
have I so read or interpreted Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of
human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a part of the
retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations,
unless I greatly err, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction
of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark
problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to
the completest solution of that problem. And I conceive, moreover, that the
hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at
that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.«
    »Then why not reveal them here?« asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing quietly
aside at the minister. »Why should not the guilty ones sooner avail themselves
of this unutterable solace?«
    »They mostly do,« said the clergyman, griping hard at his breast, as if
afflicted with an importunate throb of pain. »Many, many a poor soul hath given
its confidence to me, not only on the death-bed, but while strong in life, and
fair in reputation. And ever, after such an outpouring, O, what a relief have I
witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air,
after long stifling with his own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why
should a wretched man, guilty, we will say, of murder, prefer to keep the dead
corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the
universe take care of it!«
    »Yet some men bury their secrets thus,« observed the calm physician.
    »True; there are such men,« answered Mr. Dimmesdale. »But, not to suggest
more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by the very
constitution of their nature. Or, - can we not suppose it? - guilty as they may
be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God's glory and man's welfare, they
shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because,
thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed
by better service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among
their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow; while their hearts are
all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves.«
    »These men deceive themselves,« said Roger Chillingworth, with somewhat more
emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with his forefinger. »They fear
to take up the shame that rightfully belongs to them. Their love for man, their
zeal for God's service, - these holy impulses may or may not coexist in their
hearts with the evil inmates to which their guilt has unbarred the door, and
which must needs propagate a hellish breed within them. But, if they seek to
glorify God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands! If they would
serve their fellow-men, let them do it by making manifest the power and reality
of conscience, in constraining them to penitential self-abasement! Wouldst thou
have me to believe, O wise and pious friend, that a false show can be better -
can be more for God's glory, or man's welfare - than God's own truth? Trust me,
such men deceive themselves!«
    »It may be so,« said the young clergyman indifferently, as waiving a
discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a ready
faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his too sensitive and
nervous temperament. - »But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled physician,
whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have profited by his kindly care of this
weak frame of mine?«
    Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild laughter
of a young child's voice, proceeding from the adjacent burial-ground. Looking
instinctively from the open window, - for it was summer-time, - the minister
beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that traversed
the inclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful as the day, but was in one of those
moods of perverse merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her
entirely out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until, coming to the broad, flat,
armorial tombstone of a departed worthy, - perhaps of Isaac Johnson himself, -
she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother's command and entreaty that
she would behave more decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly
burrs from a tall burdock, which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of
these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated
the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously
adhered. Hester did not pluck them off.
    Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window, and smiled
grimly down.
    »There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human
ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child's composition,«
remarked he, as much to himself as to his companion. »I saw her, the other day,
bespatter the Governor himself with water, at the cattle-trough in Spring Lane.
What, in Heaven's name, is she? Is the imp altogether evil? Hath she affections?
Hath she any discoverable principle of being?«
    »None, - save the freedom of a broken law,« answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in a
quiet way, as if he had been discussing the point within himself. »Whether
capable of good, I know not.«
    The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking up to the window,
with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the
prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrunk,
with nervous dread, from the light missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped
her little hands in the most extravagant ecstasy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had
involuntarily looked up; and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one
another in silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted, - »Come away,
mother! Come away, or yonder old Black Man will catch you! He hath got hold of
the minister already. Come away, mother, or he will catch you! But he cannot
catch little Pearl!«
    So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking fantastically
among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature that had nothing in
common with a bygone and buried generation, nor owned herself akin to it. It was
as if she had been made afresh, out of new elements, and must perforce be
permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself, without her
eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.
    »There goes a woman,« resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause, »who, be
her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of hidden sinfulness which
you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester Prynne the less miserable, think
you, for that scarlet letter on her breast?«
    »I do verily believe it,« answered the clergyman. »Nevertheless, I cannot
answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face, which I would gladly have
been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the
sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to
cover it all up in his heart.«
    There was another pause; and the physician began anew to examine and arrange
the plants which he had gathered.
    »You inquired of me, a little time agone,« said he, at length, »my judgment
as touching your health.«
    »I did,« answered the clergyman, »and would gladly learn it. Speak frankly,
I pray you, be it for life or death.«
    »Freely, then, and plainly,« said the physician, still busy with his plants,
but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, »the disorder is a strange one; not so
much in itself, nor as outwardly manifested, - in so far, at least, as the
symptoms have been laid open to my observation. Looking daily at you, my good
Sir, and watching the tokens of your aspect, now for months gone by, I should
deem you a man sore sick, it may be, yet not so sick but that an instructed and
watchful physician might well hope to cure you. But - I know not what to say -
the disease is what I seem to know, yet know it not.«
    »You speak in riddles, learned Sir,« said the pale minister, glancing aside
out of the window.
    »Then, to speak more plainly,« continued the physician, »and I crave pardon.
Sir, - should it seem to require pardon, - for this needful plainness of my
speech. Let me ask, - as your friend, - as one having charge, under Providence,
of your life and physical well-being, - hath all the operation of this disorder
been fairly laid open and recounted to me?«
    »How can you question it?« asked the minister. »Surely, it were child's play
to call in a physician, and then hide the sore!«
    »You would tell me, then, that I know all?« said Roger Chillingworth,
deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated
intelligence, on the minister's face. »Be it so! But, again! He to whom only the
outward and physical evil is laid open knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil
which he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole
and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in
the spiritual part. Your pardon, once again, good Sir, if my speech give the
shadow of offence. You, Sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is
the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit
whereof it is the instrument.«
    »Then I need ask no further,« said the clergyman, somewhat hastily rising
from his chair. »You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the soul!«
    »Thus, a sickness,« continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an unaltered
tone, without heeding the interruption, - but standing up, and confronting the
emaciated and white-cheeked minister with his low, dark, and misshapen figure, -
»a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit, hath
immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you,
therefore, that your physician heal the bodily evil? How may this be, unless you
first lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?«
    »No! - not to thee! - not to an earthly physician!« cried Mr. Dimmesdale,
passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind of
fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. »Not to thee! But, if it be the soul's
disease, then do I commit myself to the one Physician of the soul! He, if it
stand with his good pleasure, can cure; or he can kill! Let him do with me as,
in his justice and wisdom, he shall see good. But who art thou, that meddlest in
this matter? - that dares thrust himself between the sufferer and his God?«
    With a frantic gesture, he rushed out of the room.
    »It is as well to have made this step,« said Roger Chillingworth to himself,
looking after the minister with a grave smile. »There is nothing lost. We shall
be friends again anon. But see, now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and
hurrieth him out of himself! As with one passion, so with another! He hath done
a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his
heart!«
    It proved not difficult to reëstablish the intimacy of the two companions,
on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore. The young clergyman,
after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had
hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been nothing in
the physician's words to excuse or palliate. He marvelled, indeed, at the
violence with which he had thrust back the kind old man, when merely proffering
the advice which it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had
expressly sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in making the
amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to continue the care, which, if
not successful in restoring him to health, had, in all probability, been the
means of prolonging his feeble existence to that hour. Roger Chillingworth
readily assented, and went on with his medical supervision of the minister;
doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always quitting the patient's
apartment, at the close of a professional interview, with a mysterious and
puzzled smile upon his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale's
presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the threshold.
    »A rare case!« he muttered. »I must needs look deeper into it. A strange
sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art's sake, I must search
this matter to the bottom!«
    It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale, at noonday, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep
slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume open before him
on the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school
of literature. The profound depth of the minister's repose was the more
remarkable; inasmuch as he was one of those persons whose sleep, ordinarily, is
as light, as fitful, and as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a
twig. To such an unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into
itself, that he stirred not in his chair, when old Roger Chillingworth, without
any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced
directly in front of his patient, laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside
the vestment, that, hitherto, had always covered it even from the professional
eye.
    Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.
    After a brief pause, the physician turned away.
    But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly
rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features,
and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and
making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he
threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had
a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have
had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is
lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.
    But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was the trait of
wonder in it!
 

                          XI. The Interior of a Heart

After the incident last described, the intercourse between the clergyman and the
physician, though externally the same, was really of another character than it
had previously been. The intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently
plain path before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid out
for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet,
we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this
unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any
mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one trusted friend,
to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual
repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All that
guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and
forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving! All that
dark treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so
adequately pay the debt of vengeance!
    The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme. Roger
Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less satisfied
with the aspect of affairs, which Providence - using the avenger and his victim
for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it seemed most to punish
- had substituted for his black devices. A revelation, he could almost say, had
been granted to him. It mattered little, for his object, whether celestial, or
from what other region. By its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him
and Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul
of the latter seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and
comprehend its every movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but
a chief actor, in the poor minister's interior world. He could play upon him as
he chose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was for ever on
the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine; - and
the physician knew it well! Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the
waving of a magician's wand, uprose a grisly phantom, - uprose a thousand
phantoms, - in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking
roundabout the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his breast!
    All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the minister,
though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil influence watching over
him, could never gain a knowledge of its actual nature. True, he looked
doubtfully, fearfully, - even, at times, with horror and the bitterness of
hatred, - at the deformed figure of the old physician. His gestures, his gait,
his grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of
his garments, were odious in the clergyman's sight; a token, implicitly to be
relied on, of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was willing
to acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for such
distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one
morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his
presentiments to no other cause. He took himself to task for his bad sympathies
in reference to Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have
drawn from them, and did his best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this,
he nevertheless, as a matter of principle, continued his habits of social
familiarity with the old man, and thus gave him constant opportunities for
perfecting the purpose to which - poor, forlorn creature that he was, and more
wretched than his victim - the avenger had devoted himself.
    While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by some
black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his deadliest
enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his
sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His
intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and
communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the
prick and anguish of his daily life. His fame, though still on its upward slope,
already overshadowed the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as
several of them were. There were scholars among them, who had spent more years
in acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr.
Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed
in such solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother. There were
men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a far greater
share of shrewd, hard, iron or granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a
fair proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable,
efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were others,
again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil
among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealized, moreover, by
spiritual communications with the better world, into which their purity of life
had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments of mortality
still clinging to them. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon
the chosen disciples, at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would
seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of
addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language. These
fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last and rarest attestation of
their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought - had they ever
dreamed of seeking - to express the highest truths through the humblest medium
of familiar words and images. Their voices came down, afar and indistinctly,
from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt.
    Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmesdale, by
many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To their high
mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the tendency
been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath
which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down, on a level with the lowest;
him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have
listened to and answered! But this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies
so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated
in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own
throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive
eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew not the
power that moved them thus. They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of
holiness. They fancied him the mouthpiece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and
rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was
sanctified. The virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion
so imbued with religious sentiment that they imagined it to be all religion, and
brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice
before the altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale's
frame so feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in their infirmity,
believed that he would go heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their
children, that their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor's
holy grave. And, all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking
of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the grass would ever grow on
it, because an accursed thing must there be buried!
    It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured
him! It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things
shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine
essence as the life within their life. Then, what was he? - a substance? - or
the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out, from his own pulpit, at the
full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was. »I, whom you behold
in these black garments of the priesthood, - I, who ascend the sacred desk, and
turn my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion, in your
behalf, with the Most High Omniscience, - I, in whose daily life you discern the
sanctity of Enoch, - I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam along my
earthly track, whereby the pilgrims that shall come after me may be guided to
the regions of the blessed, - I, who have laid the hand of baptism upon your
children, - I, who have breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to
whom the Amen sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted, - I, your
pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!«
    More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a purpose
never to come down its steps, until he should have spoken words like the above.
More than once, he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and
tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened with the
black secret of his soul. More than once - nay, more than a hundred times - he
had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was
altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an
abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was,
that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes, by the
burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would
not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him
down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and
did but reverence him the more. They little guessed what deadly purport lurked
in those self-condemning words. »The godly youth!« said they among themselves.
»The saint on earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul,
what horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!« The minister well knew
- subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was! - the light in which his vague
confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making
the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a
self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He
had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And
yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie,
as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable
self!
    His inward trouble drove him to practices, more in accordance with the old,
corrupted faith of Rome, than with the better light of the church in which he
had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key,
there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had
plied it on his own shoulders; laughing bitterly at himself the while, and
smiting so much the more pitilessly, because of that bitter laugh. It was his
custom, too, as it has been that of many other pious Puritans, to fast, - not,
however, like them, in order to purify the body and render it the fitter medium
of celestial illumination, - but rigorously, and until his knees trembled
beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night after night,
sometimes in utter darkness; sometimes with a glimmering lamp; and sometimes,
viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he
could throw upon it. He thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he
tortured, but could not purify, himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain
often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully,
and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more
vividly, and close beside him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a herd of
diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him
away with them; now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as
sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the dead friends of
his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint-like frown, and his
mother, turning her face away as she passed by. Ghost of a mother, - thinnest
fantasy of a mother, - methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance
towards her son! And now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had
made so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne, leading along little Pearl, in her
scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first, at the scarlet letter on her
bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast.
    None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an effort of
his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack of substance, and
convince himself that they were not solid in their nature, like yonder table of
carved oak, or that big, square, leathern-bound and brazen-clasped volume of
divinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most
substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable
misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of
whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the
spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false, - it
is impalpable, - it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself, in so
far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases
to exist. The only truth, that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence
on this earth, was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled
expression of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a
face of gaiety, there would have been no such man!
    On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but forborne
to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new thought had struck
him. There might be a moment's peace in it. Attiring himself with as much care
as if it had been for public worship, and precisely in the same manner, he stole
softly down the staircase, undid the door, and issued forth.
 

                           XII. The Minister's Vigil

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually under the
influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale reached the spot, where,
now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived through her first hour of public
ignominy. The same platform or scaffold, black and weather-stained with the
storm or sunshine of seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of
many culprits who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony
of the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.
    It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled the
whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which had
stood as eyewitnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now
have been summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform,
nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight. But
the town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister might
stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east,
without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air would creep into his
frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh
and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and
sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in
his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it
but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled
with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced,
with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse
which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion
was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe,
just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor,
miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime?
Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if
it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose,
and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do
neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the
same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.
    And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation,
Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were
gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that
spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and
poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort of his will, or power to
restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the
night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the
hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and
terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and
fro.
    »It is done!« muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands. »The
whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!«
    But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater power,
to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town did not awake;
or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for something
frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches; whose voices, at that period,
were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode
with Satan through the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of
disturbance, uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the
chamber-windows of Governor Bellingham's mansion, which stood at some distance,
on the line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate
himself, with a lamp in his hand, a white night-cap on his head, and a long
white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost, evoked unseasonably
from the grave. The cry had evidently startled him. At another window of the
same house, moreover, appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor's sister, also
with a lamp, which, even thus far off, revealed the expression of her sour and
discontented face. She thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked
anxiously upward. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had
heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes
and reverberations, as the clamour of the fiends and night-hags, with whom she
was well known to make excursions into the forest.
    Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady quickly
extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among the clouds. The
minister saw nothing further of her motions. The magistrate, after a wary
observation of the darkness - into which, nevertheless, he could see but little
farther than he might into a mill-stone - retired from the window.
    The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon greeted
by a little, glimmering light, which, at first a long way off, was approaching
up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition on here a post, and there a
garden-fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full
trough of water, and here, again, an arched door of oak, with an iron knocker,
and a rough log for the door-step. The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these
minute particulars, even while firmly convinced that the doom of his existence
was stealing onward, in the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of
the lantern would fall upon him, in a few moments more, and reveal his
long-hidden secret. As the light drew nearer, he beheld, within its illuminated
circle, his brother clergyman, - or, to speak more accurately, his professional
father, as well as highly valued friend, - the Reverend Mr. Wilson; who, as Mr.
Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some dying man.
And so he had. The good old minister came freshly from the death-chamber of
Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within that very hour.
And now, surrounded, like the saint-like personages of olden times, with a
radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin, - as if the
departed Governor had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had
caught upon himself the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking
thitherward to see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates, - now, in
short, good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with a
lighted lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the above conceits to
Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled, - nay, almost laughed at them, - and then wondered
if he were going mad.
    As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely muffling his
Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern before his breast
with the other, the minister could hardly restrain himself from speaking.
    »A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson! Come up hither, I pray you,
and pass a pleasant hour with me!«
    Good heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant, he
believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered only within
his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward,
looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his feet, and never once turning
his head towards the guilty platform. When the light of the glimmering lantern
had faded quite away, the minister discovered, by the faintness which came over
him, that the last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety; although
his mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid
playfulness.
    Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole in
among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing stiff with
the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether he should be able
to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break, and find him there.
The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth
in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place
of shame; and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go, knocking from
door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost - as he needs must
think it - of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings
from one house to another. Then - the morning light still waxing stronger - old
patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly
dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous
personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads
awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a nightmare in their
aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James's
ruff fastened askew; and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest
clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a
wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father Wilson, too, after spending
half the night at a death- and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of
his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders
and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young virgins who so idolized
their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms; which, now,
by the by, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given
themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come
stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken
visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the red eastern
light upon his brow? Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half frozen to
death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had stood!
    Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,
unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of laughter. It
was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a
thrill of the heart, - but he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as
acute, - he recognized the tones of little Pearl.
    »Pearl! Little Pearl!« cried he, after a moment's pause; then, suppressing
his voice, - »Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?«
    »Yes; it is Hester Prynne!« she replied, in a tone of surprise; and the
minister heard her footsteps approaching from the sidewalk, along which she had
been passing. - »It is I, and my little Pearl.«
    »Whence come you, Hester?« asked the minister. »What sent you hither?«
    »I have been watching at a death-bed,« answered Hester Prynne; - »at
Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe, and am now
going homeward to my dwelling.«
    »Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,« said the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale. »Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you. Come up
hither once again, and we will stand all three together!«
    She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding little
Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's other hand, and took it.
The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life,
other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying
through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their
vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.
    »Minister!« whispered little Pearl.
    »What wouldst thou say, child?« asked Mr. Dimmesdale.
    »Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?« inquired
Pearl.
    »Nay; not so, my little Pearl!« answered the minister; for, with the new
energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so long been
the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was already trembling at
the conjunction in which - with a strange joy, nevertheless - he now found
himself. »Not so, my child. I shall, indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one
other day, but not to-morrow!«
    Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister held it
fast.
    »A moment longer, my child!« said he.
    »But wilt thou promise,« asked Pearl, »to take my hand, and mother's hand,
to-morrow noontide?«
    »Not then, Pearl,« said the minister, »but another time!«
    »And what other time?« persisted the child.
    »At the great judgment day!« whispered the minister, - and, strangely
enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth impelled him
to answer the child so. »Then, and there, before the judgment-seat, thy mother,
and thou, and I, must stand together! But the daylight of this world shall not
see our meeting!«
    Pearl laughed again.
    But, before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide
over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors, which
the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste, in the vacant
regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly
illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault
brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of
the street, with the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that
is always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden
houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and
thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots,
black with freshly turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the
market-place, margined with green on either side; - all were visible, but with a
singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the
things of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the
minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered
letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the
connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and
solemn splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the
daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.
    There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as she glanced
upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression
frequently so elfish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed
across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his
eyes towards the zenith.
    Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity
than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a
supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf
of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was
known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any
marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement
down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously
warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by
multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely
eyewitness, who beheld the wonder through the coloured, magnifying, and
distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his
after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations
should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A
scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a
people's doom upon. The belief was a favourite one with our forefathers, as
betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of
peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual
discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of
record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered
mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense,
and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature,
until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his
soul's history and fate.
    We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart,
that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of
an immense letter, - the letter A, - marked out in lines of dull red light. Not
but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a
veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at
least, with so little definiteness, that another's guilt might have seen another
symbol in it.
    There was a singular circumstance that characterized Mr. Dimmesdale's
psychological state, at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward to the
zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl was pointing her
finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the
scaffold. The minister appeared to see him, with the same glance that discerned
the miraculous letter. To his features, as to all other objects, the meteoric
light imparted a new expression; or it might well be that the physician was not
careful then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he
looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky, and
disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester Prynne and the
clergyman of the day of judgment, then might Roger Chillingworth have passed
with them for the arch-fiend, standing there, with a smile and scowl, to claim
his own. So vivid was the expression, or so intense the minister's perception of
it, that it seemed still to remain painted on the darkness, after the meteor had
vanished, with an effect as if the street and all things else were at once
annihilated.
    »Who is that man, Hester?« gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with terror. »I
shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!«
    She remembered her oath, and was silent.
    »I tell thee, my soul shivers at him,« muttered the minister again. »Who is
he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless horror of the
man.«
    »Minister,« said little Pearl, »I can tell thee who he is!«
    »Quickly, then, child!« said the minister, bending his ear close to her
lips. »Quickly! - and as low as thou canst whisper.«
    Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human
language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing
themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any secret
information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to
the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind. The
elfish child then laughed aloud.
    »Dost thou mock me now?« said the minister.
    »Thou wast not bold! - thou wast not true!« answered the child. »Thou
wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand, to-morrow noontide!«
    »Worthy Sir,« said the physician, who had now advanced to the foot of the
platform. »Pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well, well, indeed! We men
of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straitly looked after!
We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep. Come, good Sir, and my
dear friend, I pray you, let me lead you home!«
    »How knewest thou that I was here?« asked the minister, fearfully.
    »Verily, and in good faith,« answered Roger Chillingworth, »I knew nothing
of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the bedside of the
worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill might to give him ease.
He going home to a better world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward, when this
strange light shone out. Come with me, I beseech you, Reverend Sir; else you
will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see now, how they trouble
the brain, - these books! - these books! You should study less, good Sir, and
take a little pastime; or these night-whimseys will grow upon you!«
    »I will go home with you,« said Mr. Dimmesdale.
    With a chill despondency, like one awaking, all nerveless, from an ugly
dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.
    The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse which was
held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete with heavenly
influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it is said, more souls
than one, were brought to the truth by the efficacy of that sermon, and vowed
within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout
the long hereafter. But, as he came down the pulpit-steps, the gray-bearded
sexton met him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognized as his
own.
    »It was found,« said the sexton, »this morning, on the scaffold, where
evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take it,
intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed, he was blind
and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!«
    »Thank you, my good friend,« said the minister gravely, but startled at
heart; for, so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost brought himself
to look at the events of the past night as visionary. »Yes, it seems to be my
glove indeed!«
    »And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle him
without gloves, henceforward,« remarked the old sexton, grimly smiling. »But did
your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last night? A great red letter
in the sky, - the letter A, - which we interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our
good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held
fit that there should be some notice thereof!«
    »No« answered the minister. »I had not heard of it.«
 

                          XIII. Another View of Hester

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was shocked at
the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His nerve seemed
absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more than childish
weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual
faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired a morbid
energy, which disease only could have given them. With her knowledge of a train
of circumstances hidden from all others, she could readily infer, that, besides
the legitimate action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been
brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's well-being and
repose. Knowing what this poor, fallen man had once been, her whole soul was
moved by the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her, - the outcast
woman, - for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided,
moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long
seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard
external to herself, Hester saw - or seemed to see - that there lay a
responsibility upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owed to no
other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest of
human kind - links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material - had
all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor
she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.
    Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in which we
beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years had come, and gone.
Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother, with the scarlet letter on her
breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object
to the townspeople. As is apt to be the case when a person stands out in any
prominence before the community, and, at the same time, interferes neither with
public nor individual interests and convenience, a species of general regard had
ultimately grown up in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human
nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more
readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be
transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new
irritation of the original feeling of hostility. In this matter of Hester
Prynne, there was neither irritation nor irksomeness. She never battled with the
public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst usage; she made no claim upon
it, in requital for what she suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies.
Then, also, the blameless purity of her life, during all these years in which
she had been set apart to infamy, was reckoned largely in her favour. With
nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no hope, and seemingly no
wish, of gaining any thing, it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that
had brought back the poor wanderer to its paths.
    It was perceived, too, that, while Hester never put forward even the
humblest title to share in the world's privileges, - farther than to breathe the
common air, and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself by the faithful
labour of her hands, - she was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race
of man, whenever benefits were to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of
her little substance to every demand of poverty; even though the bitter-hearted
pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door,
or the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a
monarch's robe. None so self-devoted as Hester, when pestilence stalked through
the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals,
the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as
a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble; as if its
gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with
her fellow-creatures. There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in
its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the
sick-chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's hard extremity,
across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the
light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach
him. In such emergencies, Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich; a
well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and
inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the
softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of
Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when
neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the
symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her, - so much power to do,
and power to sympathize, - that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A
by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was
Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.
    It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine came
again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the threshold. The helpful
inmate had departed, without one backward glance to gather up the meed of
gratitude, if any were in the hearts of those whom she had served so zealously.
Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive their greeting.
If they were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet letter,
and passed on. This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced
all the softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind. The public
is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice, when too
strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than
justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to
its generosity. Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal of this
nature, society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance
than she cared to be favoured with, or, perchance, than she deserved.
    The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer in
acknowledging the influence of Hester's good qualities than the people. The
prejudices which they shared in common with the latter were fortified in
themselves by an iron framework of reasoning, that made it a far tougher labour
to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were
relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be an
expression of almost benevolence. Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom
their eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals.
Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her
frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token,
not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but
of her many good deeds since. »Do you see that woman with the embroidered
badge?« they would say to strangers. »It is our Hester, - the town's own Hester,
- who is so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the
afflicted!« Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to tell the very
worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to
whisper the black scandal of bygone years. It was none the less a fact, however,
that, in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the
effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of
sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril. Had she fallen
among thieves, it would have kept her safe. It was reported, and believed by
many, that an Indian had drawn his arrow against the badge, and that the missile
struck it, but fell harmless to the ground.
    The effect of the symbol - or rather, of the position in respect to society
that was indicated by it - on the mind of Hester Prynne herself, was powerful
and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been
withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare
and harsh outline, which might have been repulsive, had she possessed friends or
companions to be repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had
undergone a similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of
her dress, and partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad
transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been cut off,
or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once
gushed into the sunshine. It was due in part to all these causes, but still more
to something else, that there seemed to be no longer any thing in Hester's face
for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though majestic and
statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing
in Hester's bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute
had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a
woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the
feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived
through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will
die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or - and
the outward semblance is the same - crushed so deeply into her heart that it can
never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has
once been woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again,
if there were only the magic touch to effect the transfiguration. We shall see
whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched, and so transfigured.
    Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to
the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and
feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world, - alone, as to any dependence
on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected, - alone, and
hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it
desirable, - she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world's law was
no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly
emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries
before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these
had overthrown and rearranged - not actually, but within the sphere of theory,
which was their most real abode - the whole system of ancient prejudice,
wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this
spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other
side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known of it, would
have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In
her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to
enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as
perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as
knocking at her door.
    It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform
with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The
thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of
action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, had little Pearl never come to her
from the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise. Then, she might have
come down to us in history, hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress
of a religious sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess.
She might, and not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern
tribunals of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the
Puritan establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother's
enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon. Providence, in the
person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester's charge the germ and blossom
of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties. Every
thing was against her. The world was hostile. The child's own nature had
something wrong in it, which continually betokened that she had been born amiss,
- the effluence of her mother's lawless passion, - and often impelled Hester to
ask, in bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor
little creature had been born at all.
    Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to
the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest
among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided
in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation,
though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns,
it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of
society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the
opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to
be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair
and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman
cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have
undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence,
wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never
overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved,
or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish. Thus,
Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered
without a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an
insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild
and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times, a
fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send
Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice
should provide.
    The scarlet letter had not done its office.
    Now, however, her interview with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night
of his vigil, had given her a new theme of reflection, and held up to her an
object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment.
She had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister struggled, or,
to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She saw that he stood on the
verge of lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it. It was impossible to
doubt, that, whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of
remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand that proffered
relief. A secret enemy had been continually by his side, under the semblance of
a friend and helper, and had availed himself of the opportunities thus afforded
for tampering with the delicate springs of Mr. Dimmesdale's nature. Hester could
not but ask herself, whether there had not originally been a defect of truth,
courage, and loyalty, on her own part, in allowing the minister to be thrown
into a position where so much evil was to be foreboded, and nothing auspicious
to be hoped. Her only justification lay in the fact, that she had been able to
discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker ruin than had overwhelmed
herself, except by acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth's scheme of disguise.
Under that impulse, she had made her choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared,
the more wretched alternative of the two. She determined to redeem her error, so
far as it might yet be possible. Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial,
she felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth as on
that night, abased by sin, and half maddened by the ignominy that was still new,
when they had talked together in the prison-chamber. She had climbed her way,
since then, to a higher point. The old man, on the other hand, had brought
himself nearer to her level, or perhaps below it, by the revenge which he had
stooped for.
    In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and do what
might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he had so evidently
set his gripe. The occasion was not long to seek. One afternoon, walking with
Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she beheld the old physician, with a
basket on one arm, and a staff in the other hand, stooping along the ground, in
quest of roots and herbs to concoct his medicines withal.
 

                         XIV. Hester and the Physician

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with the
shells and tangled seaweed, until she should have talked awhile with yonder
gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird, and, making bare her
small white feet, went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and
there, she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left by the
retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out
of the pool, with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in
her eyes, the image of a little maid, whom Pearl, having no other playmate,
invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid,
on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say, - »This is a better place! Come
thou into the pool!« And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white
feet at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind
of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.
    Meanwhile, her mother had accosted the physician.
    »I would speak a word with you,« said she, - »a word that concerns us much.«
    »Aha! And is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth?« answered he, raising himself from his stooping posture. »With
all my heart! Why, Mistress, I hear good tidings of you on all hands! No longer
ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your
affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been question
concerning you in the council. It was debated whether or no, with safety to the
common weal, yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life,
Hester, I made my entreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done
forthwith!«
    »It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this badge,«
calmly replied Hester. »Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of
its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different
purport.«
    »Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better,« rejoined he. »A woman must
needs follow her own fancy, touching the adornment of her person. The letter is
gaily embroidered, and shows right bravely on your bosom!«
    All this while, Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was
shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had been wrought
upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much that he had grown
older; for though the traces of advancing life were visible, he bore his age
well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigour and alertness. But the former aspect of
an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what she best
remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager,
searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish
and purpose to mask this expression with a smile; but the latter played him
false, and flickered over his visage so derisively, that the spectator could see
his blackness all the better for it. Ever and anon, too, there came a glare of
red light out of his eyes; as if the old man's soul were on fire, and kept on
smouldering duskily within his breast, until, by some casual puff of passion, it
was blown into a momentary flame. This he repressed as speedily as possible, and
strove to look as if nothing of the kind had happened.
    In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty
of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of
time, undertake a devil's office. This unhappy person had effected such a
transformation by devoting himself, for seven years, to the constant analysis of
a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to
those fiery tortures which he analyzed and gloated over.
    The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's bosom. Here was another ruin,
the responsibility of which came partly home to her.
    »What see you in my face,« asked the physician, »that you look at it so
earnestly?«
    »Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter enough
for it,« answered she. »But let it pass! It is of yonder miserable man that I
would speak.«
    »And what of him?« cried Roger Chillingworth eagerly, as if he loved the
topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only person of
whom he could make a confidant. »Not to hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my
thoughts happen just now to be busy with the gentleman. So speak freely; and I
will make answer.«
    »When we last spoke together,« said Hester, »now seven years ago, it was
your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy, as touching the former relation
betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your
hands, there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent, in accordance with your
behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself; for,
having cast off all duty towards other human beings, there remained a duty
towards him; and something whispered me that I was betraying it, in pledging
myself to keep your counsel. Since that day, no man is so near to him as you.
You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking.
You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on
his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death; and still he knows you
not. In permitting this, I have surely acted a false part by the only man to
whom the power was left me to be true!«
    »What choice had you?« asked Roger Chillingworth. »My finger, pointed at
this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon, - thence,
peradventure, to the gallows!«
    »It had been better so!« said Hester Prynne.
    »What evil have I done the man?« asked Roger Chillingworth again. »I tell
thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned from monarch
could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable priest! But
for my aid, his life would have burned away in torments, within the first two
years after the perpetration of his crime and thine. For, Hester, his spirit
lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden
like thy scarlet letter. O, I could reveal a goodly secret! But enough! What art
can do, I have exhausted on him. That he now breathes, and creeps about on
earth, is owing all to me!«
    »Better he had died at once!« said Hester Prynne.
    »Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!« cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting the
lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. »Better had he died at once!
Never did mortal suffer what this man has suffered. And all, all, in the sight
of his worst enemy! He has been conscious of me. He has felt an influence
dwelling always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense, - for
the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this, - he knew that no
friendly hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking
curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that
the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he
fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams, and
desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste
of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my
presence! - the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!
- and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst
revenge! Yea, indeed! - he did not err! - there was a fiend at his elbow! A
mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial
torment!«
    The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his hands with
a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape, which he could not
recognize, usurping the place of his own image in a glass. It was one of those
moments - which sometimes occur only at the interval of years - when a man's
moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had
never before viewed himself as he did now.
    »Hast thou not tortured him enough?« said Hester, noticing the old man's
look. »Has he not paid thee all?«
    »No! - no! - He has but increased the debt!« answered the physician; and, as
he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided into
gloom. »Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine years agone? Even then, I
was in the autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn. But all my life had
been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully
for the increase of mine own knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter
object was but casual to the other, - faithfully for the advancement of human
welfare. No life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so
rich with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you might
deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others, craving little for
himself, - kind, true, just, and of constant, if not warm affections? Was I not
all this?«
    »All this, and more,« said Hester.
    »And what am I now?« demanded he, looking into her face, and permitting the
whole evil within him to be written on his features. »I have already told thee
what I am! A fiend! Who made me so?«
    »It was myself!« cried Hester, shuddering. »It was I, not less than he. Why
hast thou not avenged thyself on me?«
    »I have left thee to the scarlet letter,« replied Roger Chillingworth. »If
that have not avenged me, I can do no more!«
    He laid his finger on it, with a smile.
    »It has avenged thee!« answered Hester Prynne.
    »I judged no less,« said the physician. »And now, what wouldst thou with me
touching this man?«
    »I must reveal the secret,« answered Hester, firmly. »He must discern thee
in thy true character. What may be the result, I know not. But this long debt of
confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at length
be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and
his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in thy hands. Nor do I, - whom
the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot
iron, entering into the soul, - nor do I perceive such advantage in his living
any longer a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy.
Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him, - no good for me, - no good
for thee! There is no good for little Pearl! There is no path to guide us out of
this dismal maze!«
    »Woman, I could wellnigh pity thee!« said Roger Chillingworth, unable to
restrain a thrill of admiration too; for there was a quality almost majestic in
the despair which she expressed. »Thou hadst great elements. Peradventure, hadst
thou met earlier with a better love than mine, this evil had not been. I pity
thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature!«
    »And I thee,« answered Hester Prynne, »for the hatred that has transformed a
wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out of thee, and be once
more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for thine own! Forgive, and leave
his further retribution to the Power that claims it! I said, but now, that there
could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together
in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling, at every step, over the guilt
wherewith we have strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee,
and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged, and hast it at thy will to
pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that priceless
benefit?«
    »Peace, Hester, peace!« replied the old man, with gloomy sternness. »It is
not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me of. My old
faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we
suffer. By thy first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but, since
that moment, it has all been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not
sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have
snatched a fiend's office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower
blossom as it may! Now go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man.«
    He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of gathering
herbs.
 

                              XV. Hester and Pearl

So Roger Chillingworth - a deformed old figure, with a face that haunted men's
memories longer than they liked - took leave of Hester Prynne, and went stooping
away along the earth. He gathered here and there an herb, or grubbed up a root,
and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground,
as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a
half-fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would
not be blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere
and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they
were, which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth,
quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with
poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his
fingers? Or might it suffice him, that every wholesome growth should be
converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun,
which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as
it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity,
whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not
suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due
course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever
else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with
hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bat's wings and flee away, looking so
much the uglier, the higher he rose towards heaven?
    »Be it sin or no,« said Hester Prynne bitterly, as she still gazed after
him, »I hate the man!«
    She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or lessen
it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days, in a distant land,
when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion of his study, and sit down
in the fire-light of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile. He
needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so
many lonely hours among his books might be taken off the scholar's heart. Such
scenes had once appeared not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through
the dismal medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her
ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! She
marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed it
her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured, and reciprocated,
the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes
to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by
Roger Chillingworth, than any which had since been done him, that, in the time
when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by
his side.
    »Yes, I hate him!« repeated Hester, more bitterly than before. »He betrayed
me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!«
    Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the
utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was
Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened
all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble
image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.
But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken?
Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much
of misery, and wrought out no repentance?
    The emotions of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the crooked
figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester's state of mind,
revealing much that she might not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.
    He being gone, she summoned back her child.
    »Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?«
    Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for
amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At first, as
already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water,
beckoning the phantom forth, and - as it declined to venture - seeking a passage
for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon
finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere
for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them
with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any
merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore.
She seized a live horseshoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers,
and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white
foam, that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the
breeze, scampering after it with winged footsteps, to catch the great
snow-flakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds, that fed and
fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of
pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed
remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white breast,
Pearl was almost sure, had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a
broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport; because it
grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the
sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.
    Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds, and make
herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a
little mermaid. She inherited her mother's gift for devising drapery and
costume. As the last touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass, and
imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom, the decoration with which she was
so familiar on her mother's. A letter, - the letter A, - but freshly green,
instead of scarlet! The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated
this device with strange interest; even as if the one only thing for which she
had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.
    »I wonder if mother will ask me what it means!« thought Pearl.
    Just then, she heard her mother's voice, and, flitting along as lightly as
one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne, dancing, laughing,
and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.
    »My little Pearl,« said Hester, after a moment's silence, »the green letter,
and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know, my child, what
this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?«
    »Yes, mother,« said the child. »It is the great letter A. Thou hast taught
it me in the horn-book.«
    Hester looked steadily into her little face; but, though there was that
singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black eyes, she could
not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any meaning to the symbol. She
felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point.
    »Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?«
    »Truly do I!« answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's face. »It
is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!«
    »And what reason is that?« asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd
incongruity of the child's observation; but, on second thoughts, turning pale.
»What has the letter to do with any heart, save mine?«
    »Nay, mother, I have told all I know,« said Pearl, more seriously than she
was wont to speak. »Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking with! It may
be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet
letter mean? - and why dost thou wear it on thy bosom? - and why does the
minister keep his hand over his heart?«
    She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an
earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character. The
thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be seeking to approach
her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as
she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an
unwonted aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the
intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other
return than the waywardness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy
sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of
moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in
requital of which misdemeanours, it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose,
kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your
hair, and then begone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure
at your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother's estimate of the child's
disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and
have given them a far darker colouring. But now the idea came strongly into
Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might
already have approached the age when she could be made a friend, and entrusted
with as much of her mother's sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence
either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl's character,
there might be seen emerging - and could have been, from the very first - the
steadfast principles of an unflinching courage, - an uncontrollable will, - a
sturdy pride, which might be disciplined into self-respect, - and a bitter scorn
of many things, which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of
falsehood in them. She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and
disagreeable, as are the richest flavors of unripe fruit. With all these
sterling attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her
mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this elfish
child.
    Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter
seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious
life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission. Hester had often
fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing the
child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought
herself to ask, whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a
purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith
and trust, as a spirit-messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be
her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart, and
converted it into a tomb? - and to help her to overcome the passion, once so
wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same
tomb-like heart?
    Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's mind, with as
much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered into her ear.
And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her mother's hand in both
her own, and turning her face upward, while she put these searching questions,
once, and again, and still a third time.
    »What does the letter mean, mother? - and why dost thou wear it? - and why
does the minister keep his hand over his heart?«
    »What shall I say?« thought Hester to herself. - »No! If this be the price
of the child's sympathy, I cannot pay it!«
    Then she spoke aloud.
    »Silly Pearl,« said she, »what questions are these? There are many things in
this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of the minister's heart?
And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of its gold thread!«
    In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to
the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of a stern and
severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; as recognizing that, in
spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or
some old one had never been expelled. As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon
passed out of her face.
    But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three times, as
her mother and she went homeward, and as often at supper-time, and while Hester
was putting her to bed, and once after she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl
looked up, with mischief gleaming in her black eyes.
    »Mother,« said she, »what does the scarlet letter mean?«
    And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being awake was
by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that other inquiry, which she
had so unaccountably connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter:
-
    »Mother! - Mother! - Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?«
    »Hold thy tongue, naughty child!« answered her mother, with an asperity that
she had never permitted to herself before. »Do not tease me; else I shall shut
thee into the dark closet!«
 

                               XVI. A Forest Walk

Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr. Dimmesdale,
at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences, the true character of
the man who had crept into his intimacy. For several days, however, she vainly
sought an opportunity of addressing him in some of the meditative walks which
she knew him to be in the habit of taking, along the shores of the peninsula, or
on the wooded hills of the neighbouring country. There would have been no
scandal, indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman's good fame,
had she visited him in his own study; where many a penitent, ere now, had
confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by the scarlet
letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or undisguised interference of
old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that her conscious heart imputed suspicion
where none could have been felt, and partly that both the minister and she would
need the whole wide world to breathe in, while they talked together, - for all
these reasons, Hester never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy than
beneath the open sky.
    At last, while attending in a sick-chamber, whither the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that he had gone, the
day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian converts. He would
probably return, by a certain hour, in the afternoon of the morrow. Betimes,
therefore, the next day, Hester took little Pearl, - who was necessarily the
companion of all her mother's expeditions, however inconvenient her presence, -
and set forth.
    The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the peninsula to the
mainland, was no other than a footpath. It straggled onward into the mystery of
the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and stood so black and dense
on either side, and disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that, to
Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which she had so long
been wandering. The day was chill and sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of
cloud, slightly stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering
sunshine might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This
flitting cheerfulness was always at the farther extremity of some long vista
through the forest. The sportive sunlight - feebly sportive, at best, in the
predominant pensiveness of the day and scene - withdrew itself as they came
nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the drearier, because they had
hoped to find them bright.
    »Mother,« said little Pearl, »the sunshine does not love you. It runs away
and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see!
There it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch
it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom
yet!«
    »Nor ever will, my child, I hope,« said Hester.
    »And why not, mother?« asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the beginning of
her race. »Will not it come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?«
    »Run away, child,« answered her mother, »and catch the sunshine! It will
soon be gone.«
    Pearl set forth, at a great pace, and, as Hester smiled to perceive, did
actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it, all
brightened by its splendour, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid
motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a
playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step into the magic
circle too.
    »It will go now!« said Pearl, shaking her head.
    »See!« answered Hester, smiling. »Now I can stretch out my hand, and grasp
some of it.«
    As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge from the
bright expression that was dancing on Pearl's features, her mother could have
fancied that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would give it forth
again, with a gleam about her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier
shade. There was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense of
new and untransmitted vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never-failing vivacity of
spirits; she had not the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these
latter days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors.
Perhaps this too was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with which
Hester had fought against her sorrows, before Pearl's birth. It was certainly a
doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child's character. She
wanted - what some people want throughout life - a grief that should deeply
touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy. But there was
time enough yet for little Pearl!
    »Come, my child!« said Hester, looking about her, from the spot where Pearl
had stood still in the sunshine. »We will sit down a little way within the wood,
and rest ourselves.«
    »I am not aweary, mother,« replied the little girl. »But you may sit down,
if you will tell me a story meanwhile.«
    »A story, child!« said Hester. »And about what?«
    »O, a story about the Black Man!« answered Pearl, taking hold of her
mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously, into her
face. »How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him, - a big, heavy
book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an iron
pen to every body that meets him here among the trees; and they are to write
their names with their own blood. And then he sets his mark on their bosoms!
Didst thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?«
    »And who told you this story, Pearl?« asked her mother, recognizing a common
superstition of the period.
    »It was the old dame in the chimney-corner, at the house where you watched
last night,« said the child. »But she fancied me asleep while she was talking of
it. She said that a thousand and a thousand people had met him here, and had
written in his book, and have his mark on them. And that ugly-tempered lady, old
Mistress Hibbins, was one. And, mother, the old dame said that this scarlet
letter was the Black Man's mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when
thou meetest him at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And
dost thou go to meet him in the night-time?«
    »Didst thou ever awake, and find thy mother gone?« asked Hester.
    »Not that I remember,« said the child. »If thou fearest to leave me in our
cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I would very gladly go! But,
mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And didst thou ever meet him?
And is this his mark?«
    »Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?« asked her mother.
    »Yes, if thou tellest me all,« answered Pearl.
    »Once in my life I met the Black Man!« said her mother. »This scarlet letter
is his mark!«
    Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to secure
themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along the forest-track.
Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which, at some epoch of the
preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the
darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere. It was a little dell
where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on
either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and
drowned leaves. The trees impending over it had flung down great branches, from
time to time, which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and
black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages, there
appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand. Letting the eyes
follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from
its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of
it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and here and there a
huge rock, covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of
granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook;
fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper
tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its
revelations on the smooth surface of a pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole
onward, the streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy,
like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without
playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance and events of
sombre hue.
    »O brook! O foolish and tiresome little brook!« cried Pearl, after listening
awhile to its talk. »Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all
the time sighing and murmuring!«
    But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-trees,
had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about
it, and seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch
as the current of her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had
flowed through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom. But, unlike the little
stream, she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily along her course.
    »What does this sad little brook say, mother?« inquired she.
    »If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee of it,«
answered her mother, »even as it is telling me of mine! But now, Pearl, I hear a
footstep along the path, and the noise of one putting aside the branches. I
would have thee betake thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that
comes yonder.«
    »Is it the Black Man?« asked Pearl.
    »Wilt thou go and play, child?« repeated her mother. »But do not stray far
into the wood. And take heed that thou come at my first call.«
    »Yes, mother,« answered Pearl. »But, if it be the Black Man, wilt thou not
let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his arm?«
    »Go, silly child!« said her mother, impatiently. »It is no Black Man! Thou
canst see him now through the trees. It is the minister!«
    »And so it is!« said the child. »And, mother, he has his hand over his
heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book, the Black
Man set his mark in that place? But why does he not wear it outside his bosom,
as thou dost, mother?«
    »Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another time!« cried
Hester Prynne. »But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear the babble of
the brook.«
    The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook, and
striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice. But the
little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible
secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened - or making a prophetic
lamentation about something that was yet to happen - within the verge of the
dismal forest. So Pearl, who had enough of shadow in her own little life, chose
to break off all acquaintance with this repining brook. She set herself,
therefore, to gathering violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines
that she found growing in the crevices of a high rock.
    When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two towards
the track that led through the forest, but still remained under the deep shadow
of the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along the path, entirely alone,
and leaning on a staff which he had cut by the way-side. He looked haggard and
feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air, which had never so
remarkably characterized him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other
situation where he deemed himself liable to notice. Here it was wofully visible,
in this intense seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy
trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait; as if he saw no
reason for taking one step farther, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have
been glad, could he be glad of any thing, to fling himself down at the root of
the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew
him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame,
no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object
to be wished for, or avoided.
    To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no symptom of
positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl had remarked, he
kept his hand over his heart.
 

                      XVII. The Pastor and his Parishioner

Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by, before Hester Prynne could
gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length, she succeeded.
    »Arthur Dimmesdale!« she said, faintly at first; then louder, but hoarsely.
»Arthur Dimmesdale!«
    »Who speaks?« answered the minister.
    Gathering himself quickly up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by
surprise in a mood to which he was reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his
eyes anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld a form
under the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and so little relieved from the
gray twilight into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the
noontide, that he knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may be, that
his pathway through life was haunted thus, by a spectre that had stolen out from
among his thoughts.
    He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.
    »Hester! Hester Prynne!« said he. »Is it thou? Art thou in life?«
    »Even so!« she answered. »In such life as has been mine these seven years
past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?«
    It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily
existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim
wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of
two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now
stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state,
nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and
awe-stricken at the other ghost! They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves;
because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each
heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless
epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment. It was
with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity,
that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill
hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest
in the interview. They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same
sphere.
    Without a word more spoken, - neither he nor she assuming the guidance, but
with an unexpressed consent, - they glided back into the shadow of the woods,
whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap of moss where she and Pearl
had before been sitting. When they found voice to speak, it was, at first, only
to utter remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintance might have made,
about the gloomy sky, the threatening storm, and, next, the health of each. Thus
they went onward, not boldly, but step by step, into the themes that were
brooding deepest in their hearts. So long estranged by fate and circumstances,
they needed something slight and casual to run before, and throw open the doors
of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led across the threshold.
    After a while, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's.
    »Hester,« said he, »hast thou found peace?«
    She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.
    »Hast thou?« she asked.
    »None! - nothing but despair!« he answered. »What else could I look for,
being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist, - a man
devoid of conscience, - a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts, - I might
have found peace, long ere now. Nay, I never should have lost it! But, as
matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in
me, all of God's gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of
spiritual torment. Hester, I am most miserable!«
    »The people reverence thee,« said Hester. »And surely thou workest good
among them! Doth this bring thee no comfort?«
    »More misery, Hester! - only the more misery!« answered the clergyman, with
a bitter smile. »As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have no faith
in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul, like mine, effect
towards the redemption of other souls? - or a polluted soul, towards their
purification? And as for the people's reverence, would that it were turned to
scorn and hatred! Canst thou deem it, Hester, a consolation, that I must stand
up in my pulpit, and meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light
of heaven were beaming from it! - must see my flock hungry for the truth, and
listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were speaking! - and then look
inward, and discern the black reality of what they idolize? I have laughed, in
bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I
am! And Satan laughs at it!«
    »You wrong yourself in this,« said Hester, gently. »You have deeply and
sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you, in the days long past. Your
present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people's eyes. Is
there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works? And
wherefore should it not bring you peace?«
    »No, Hester, no!« replied the clergyman. »There is no substance in it! It is
cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance I have had enough! Of
penitence there has been none! Else, I should long ago have thrown off these
garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me
at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly
upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knows what a relief it is,
after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes
me for what I am! Had I one friend, - or were it my worst enemy! - to whom, when
sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be
known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive
thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But, now, it is all falsehood! -
all emptiness! - all death!«
    Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet, uttering
his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his words here offered her
the very point of circumstances in which to interpose what she came to say. She
conquered her fears, and spoke.
    »Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for,« said she, »with whom to
weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!« - Again she hesitated,
but brought out the words with an effort. - »Thou hast long had such an enemy,
and dwellest with him under the same roof!«
    The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at his
heart as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
    »Ha! What sayest thou?« cried he. »An enemy! And under mine own roof! What
mean you?«
    Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she was
responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so many years, or,
indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one, whose purposes could not be
other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever mask
the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a
being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was
less alive to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own
trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a
more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her
sympathies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. She now read his
heart more accurately. She doubted not, that the continual presence of Roger
Chillingworth, - the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all the air about
him, - and his authorized interference, as a physician, with the minister's
physical and spiritual infirmities, - that these bad opportunities had been
turned to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had been
kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome
pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth,
could hardly fail to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from
the Good and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.
    Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once, - nay, why should
we not speak it? - still so passionately loved! Hester felt that the sacrifice
of the clergyman's good name, and death itself, as she had already told Roger
Chillingworth, would have been infinitely preferable to the alternative which
she had taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this
grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have lain down on the forest-leaves,
and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.
    »O Arthur,« cried she, »forgive me! In all things else, I have striven to be
true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and did hold fast
through all extremity; save when thy good, - thy life, - thy fame, - were put in
question! Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though
death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old
man! - the physician! - he whom they call Roger Chillingworth! - - he was my
husband!«
    The minister looked at her, for an instant, with all that violence of
passion, which - intermixed, in more shapes than one, with his higher, purer,
softer qualities - was, in fact, the portion of him which the Devil claimed, and
through which he sought to win the rest. Never was there a blacker or a fiercer
frown, than Hester now encountered. For the brief space that it lasted, it was a
dark transfiguration. But his character had been so much enfeebled by suffering,
that even its lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle.
He sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.
    »I might have known it!« murmured he. »I did know it! Was not the secret
told me in the natural recoil of my heart, at the first sight of him, and as
often as I have seen him since? Why did I not understand? O Hester Prynne, thou
little, little knows all the horror of this thing! And the shame! - the
indelicacy! - the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart
to the very eye that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for
this! I cannot forgive thee!«
    »Thou shalt forgive me!« cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves
beside him. »Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!«
    With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around him, and
pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his cheek rested on the
scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but strove in vain to do so.
Hester would not set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face. All
the world had frowned on her, - for seven long years had it frowned upon this
lonely woman, - and still she bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm,
sad eyes. Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the
frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could
not bear, and live!
    »Wilt thou yet forgive me?« she repeated, over and over again. »Wilt thou
not frown? Wilt thou forgive?«
    »I do forgive you, Hester,« replied the minister, at length, with a deep
utterance out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. »I freely forgive you now.
May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world.
There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has
been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a
human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!«
    »Never, never!« whispered she. »What we did had a consecration of its own.
We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?«
    »Hush, Hester!« said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. »No; I have
not forgotten!«
    They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the mossy
trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was
the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as
it stole along; - and yet it enclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and
claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment. The forest was
obscure around them, and creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The
boughs were tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned
dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath,
or constrained to forebode evil to come.
    And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led backward
to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the burden of her
ignominy, and the minister the hollow mockery of his good name! So they lingered
an instant longer. No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of
this dark forest. Here, seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn
into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur
Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true!
    He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
    »Hester,« cried he, »here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows your
purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to keep our
secret? What will now be the course of his revenge?«
    »There is a strange secrecy in his nature,« replied Hester, thoughtfully;
»and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his revenge. I deem it not
likely that he will betray the secret. He will doubtless seek other means of
satiating his dark passion.«
    »And I! - how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this deadly
enemy?« exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself, and pressing his
hand nervously against his heart, - a gesture that had grown involuntary with
him. »Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!«
    »Thou must dwell no longer with this man,« said Hester, slowly and firmly.
»Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!«
    »It were far worse than death!« replied the minister. »But how to avoid it?
What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these withered leaves,
where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he was? Must I sink down there,
and die at once?«
    »Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee!« said Hester, with the tears gushing
into her eyes. »Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no other cause!«
    »The judgment of God is on me,« answered the conscience-stricken priest. »It
is too mighty for me to struggle with!«
    »Heaven would show mercy,« rejoined Hester, »hadst thou but the strength to
take advantage of it.«
    »Be thou strong for me!« answered he. »Advise me what to do.«
    »Is the world then so narrow?« exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her deep eyes
on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power over a spirit
so shattered and subdued, that it could hardly hold itself erect. »Doth the
universe lie within the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was
but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder
forest-track? Backward to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too!
Deeper it goes, and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at
every step; until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige
of the white man's tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring
thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayst
still be happy! Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to hide
thy heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?«
    »Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!« replied the minister, with
a sad smile.
    »Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!« continued Hester. »It brought
thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again. In our native
land, whether in some remote rural village or in vast London, - or, surely, in
Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy, - thou wouldst be beyond his power and
knowledge! And what hast thou to do with all these iron men, and their opinions?
They have kept thy better part in bondage too long already!«
    »It cannot be!« answered the minister, listening as if he were called upon
to realize 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 any thing, 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!«
    »O 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 shalt 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; criticizing 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, unchristianized, 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! O 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 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
farther 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 deathlike
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 the 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 a 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 recognized a kindred wildness 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 Brook-Side

»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 - O 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 our 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 years past, 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 nor eagerness - in thy way of
accosting her,« whispered Hester. »Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic little
elf, sometimes. Especially, she is seldom tolerant 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 knows 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
farther side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat
together on the mossy treetrunk, 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 was 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 which 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. »O, 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, dear 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
a 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 seaboard. 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 questionable
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. »That 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, nor 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, nor 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 weathercock at every point where his
memory suggested one. Not the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive
sense of change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met,
and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the little town. They looked
neither older nor younger, now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could
the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to
describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he had so
recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the minister's deepest sense seemed
to inform him of their mutability. A similar impression struck him most
remarkably, as he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so
very strange, and yet so familiar, an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind
vibrated between two ideas; either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto,
or that he was merely dreaming about it now.
    This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no
external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of the
familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had operated on his
consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own will, and Hester's
will, and the fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation. It
was the same town as heretofore; but the same minister returned not from the
forest. He might have said to the friends who greeted him, - »I am not the man
for whom you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret
dell, by a mossy tree-trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your
minister, and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy,
pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung down there like a cast-off garment!« His
friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him, - »Thou art thyself the
man!« - but the error would have been their own, not his.
    Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other evidences
of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth, nothing short of
a total change of dynasty and moral code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate
to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled
minister. At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or
other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional; in
spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed
the impulse. For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The good old man
addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal privilege, which his
venerable age, his upright and holy character, and his station in the Church,
entitled him to use; and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping
respect, which the minister's professional and private claims alike demanded.
Never was there a more beautiful example of how the majesty of age and wisdom
may comport with the obeisance and respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower
social rank and inferior order of endowment, towards a higher. Now, during a
conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
and this excellent and hoary-bearded deacon, it was only by the most careful
self-control that the former could refrain from uttering certain blasphemous
suggestions that rose into his mind, respecting the communion-supper. He
absolutely trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself,
in utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own consent for so doing,
without his having fairly given it. And, even with this terror in his heart, he
could hardly avoid laughing to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon
would have been petrified by his minister's impiety!
    Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the street, the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member of his church; a
most pious and exemplary old dame; poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart as
full of reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead friends
of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied grave-stones. 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 Ann 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 recognize a secret intimacy of connection.
    »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 his 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 me-thinks, 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 to-night? 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.«
    »Yea, 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
seven 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 life-long 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 upon 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 flavored? The wine of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips,
must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden
beaker; or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of
bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest
potency.
    Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety. It would have been impossible to
guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to the shape of
gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have
been requisite to contrive the child's apparel, was the same that had achieved a
task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester's
simple robe. The dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence,
or inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, no more to
be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a butterfly's wing, or
the painted glory from the leaf of a bright flower. As with these, so with the
child; her garb was all of one idea with her nature. On this eventful day,
moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood,
resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and
flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed.
Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them;
always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever
kind, in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem on her
mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of her spirits, the emotions
which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester's brow.
    This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather than walk
by her mother's side. She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate,
and sometimes piercing music. When they reached the market-place, she became
still more restless, on perceiving the stir and bustle that enlivened the spot;
for it was usually more like the broad and lonesome green before a village
meeting-house, than the centre of a town's business.
    »Why, what is this, mother?« cried she. »Wherefore have all the people left
their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See, there is the
blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his Sabbath-day clothes,
and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any kind body would only teach him
how! And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and smiling at me.
Why does he do so, mother?«
    »He remembers thee a little babe, my child,« answered Hester.
    »He should not nod and smile at me, for all that, - the black, grim,
ugly-eyed old man!« said Pearl. »He may nod at thee if he will; for thou art
clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But, see, mother, how many faces
of strange people, and Indians among them, and sailors! What have they all come
to do here in the market-place?«
    »They wait to see the procession pass,« said Hester. »For the Governor and
the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great people and
good people, with the music, and the soldiers marching before them.«
    »And will the minister be there?« asked Pearl. »And will he hold out both
his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the brook-side?«
    »He will be there, child,« answered her mother. »But he will not greet thee
to-day; nor must thou greet him.«
    »What a strange, sad man is he!« said the child, as if speaking partly to
herself. »In the dark night-time, 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 every
body's face to-day. The children have come from their schools, and the grown
people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy. For,
to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so - as has been the
custom of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered - they make merry and
rejoice; as if a good and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old
world!«
    It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that brightened the
faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year - as it already was,
and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries - the Puritans
compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human
infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of
a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities
at a period of general affliction.
    But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the market- 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 - deemed 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 or 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
hundreds of 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 gives 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 differing 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 deer-skin 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 humors 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 characterized the incomplete morality of
the age, rigid as we call it, that a license 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 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 recognize, 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 were 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 gives 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 made 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 angelic 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 - or 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 was
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 connection 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 it
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 the 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 intentness, and
sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her,
entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps, if more
distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged the
spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as of the wind sinking down
to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it rose through progressive
gradations of sweetness and power, until its volume seemed to envelop her with
an atmosphere of awe and solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice
sometimes became, there was for ever in it an essential character of
plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of anguish, - the whisper, or the
shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a
sensibility in every bosom! At times this deep strain of pathos was all that
could be heard, and scarcely heard, sighing amid a desolate silence. But even
when the minister's voice grew high and commanding, - when it gushed
irrepressibly upward, - when it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so
overfilling the church as to burst its way through the solid walls, and diffuse
itself in the open air, - still, if the auditor listened intently, and for the
purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain. What was it? The complaint of a
human heart, sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of
guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching its sympathy or
forgiveness, - at every moment, - in each accent, - and never in vain! It was
this profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman his most
appropriate power.
    During all this time Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the scaffold.
If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would nevertheless have
been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the first hour of
her life of ignominy. There was a sense within her, - too ill-defined to be made
a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind, - that her whole orb of life, both
before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave
it unity.
    Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was playing at
her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd cheerful by her
erratic and glistening ray; even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole
tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed, amid
the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but, oftentimes, a
sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit,
which to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tiptoe dance, because it was played
upon and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw any thing 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 spoke 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 her 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 roundabout, 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 self-same 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 other 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 spoke 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 recognized 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 of 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 clangor 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 was 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 childlike loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers - was felt to be an
irrepressible outburst of the 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 etherealized by spirit as he was, and so
apotheosized 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 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 deathlike hue; it was hardly
a man with life in him, that tottered on his path so nervelessly, 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, - onward 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 judgment 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 roundabout 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 child.
    »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 concentred 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 for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman
in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was all
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 so 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 connection, 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 among 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 and 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
unhumanized 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
life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate
hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object. 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 tost 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, all 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 fullness 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 sombre-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
recognized 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 tombstone 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 might 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.«
 

                                      Note

1 At the time of writing this article, the author intended to publish, along
with »The Scarlet Letter,« several shorter tales and sketches. These it has been
thought advisable to defer.
