NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was already a man of forty-six, and a tale writer
of some twenty-four years' standing, when "The Scarlet Letter" appeared.
He was born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804, son of a sea-captain. He
led there a shy and rather sombre life; of few artistic encouragements,
yet not wholly uncongenial, his moody, intensely meditative temperament
being considered. Its colours and shadows are marvelously reflected in his
"Twice-Told Tales" and other short stories, the product of his first
literary period. Even his college days at Bowdoin did not quite break
through his acquired and inherited reserve; but beneath it all, his
faculty of divining men and women was exercised with almost uncanny
prescience and subtlety. "The Scarlet Letter," which explains as much of
this unique imaginative art, as is to be gathered from reading his highest
single achievement, yet needs to be ranged with his other writings, early
and late, to have its last effect. In the year that saw it published, he
began "The House of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of
the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it - defrauded of
art and the joy of life, "starving for symbols" as Emerson has it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, on May 18th, 1864.
The following is the table of his romances, stories, and other works:
Fanshawe, published anonymously, 1826; Twice-Told Tales, 1st Series,
1837; 2nd Series, 1842; Grandfather's Chair, a history for youth, 1845:
Famous Old People (Grandfather's Chair), 1841 Liberty Tree: with the last
words of Grandfather's Chair, 1842; Biographical Stories for Children,
1842; Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House
of the Seven Gables, 1851: True Stories from History and Biography (the
whole History of Grandfather's Chair), 1851 A Wonder Book for Girls and
Boys, 1851; The Snow Image and other Tales, 1851: The Blithedale Romance,
1852; Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852; Tanglewood Tales (2nd Series of the
Wonder Book), 1853; A Rill from the Town-Pump, with remarks, by Telba,
1857; The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni (4 EDITOR'S NOTE)
(published in England under the title of "Transformation"), 1860, Our Old
Home, 1863; Dolliver Romance (1st Part in "Atlantic Monthly"), 1864; in 3
Parts, 1876; Pansie, a fragment, Hawthorne' last literary effort, 1864;
American Note-Books, 1868; English Note Books, edited by Sophia Hawthorne,
1870; French and Italian Note Books, 1871; Septimius Felton; or, the
Elixir of Life (from the "Atlantic Monthly"), 1872; Doctor Grimshawe's
Secret, with Preface and Notes by Julian Hawthorne, 1882.
Tales of the White Hills, Legends of New England, Legends of the
Province House, 1877, contain tales which had already been printed in book
form in "Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses" "Sketched and Studies," 1883.
Hawthorne's contributions to magazines were numerous, and most of his
tales appeared first in periodicals, chiefly in "The Token," 1831-1838,
"New England Magazine," 1834,1835; "Knickerbocker," 1837-1839; "Democratic
Review," 1838-1846; "Atlantic Monthly," 1860-1872 (scenes from the
Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, and passages from Hawthorne's
Note-Books).
Works: in 24 volumes, 1879; in 12 volumes, with introductory notes by
Lathrop, Riverside Edition, 1883.
Biography, etc. ; A. H. Japp (pseud. H. A. Page), Memoir of N.
Hawthorne, 1872; J. T. Field's "Yesterdays with Authors," 1873 G. P.
Lathrop, "A Study of Hawthorne," 1876; Henry James English Men of Letters,
1879; Julian Hawthorne, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife," 1885; Moncure
D. Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1891; Analytical Index of
Hawthorne's Works, by E. M. O'Connor 1882.
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 imagin -
with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse.
And now - because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a
listener or two on the former occasion - I again seize the public by the
button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The
example of the famous "P. P. , Clerk of this Parish," was never more
faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts
his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who
will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will
understand him better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some
authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such
confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed only and
exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the
printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out
the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of
existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous,
however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts
are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true
relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend,
a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to
our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial
consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and
even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this
extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be
autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own.
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a
certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as
explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my
possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative
therein contained. This, in fact - a desire to put myself in my true
position as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the
tales that make up my volume - this, and no other, is my true reason for
assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the main
purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a
faint representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together
with some of the characters that move in it, among whom the author
happened to make one.
In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago,
in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf - but which is now
burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms
of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its
melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia
schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood - at the head, I say, of this
dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the
base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid
years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass - here, with a view from its
front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across
the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point
of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon,
floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus
indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam's goverment
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
thunder- bolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary
infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears by
the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of her
attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and
especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against intruding
on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless,
vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very moment to
shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I
presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eiderdown
pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her best of moods, and,
sooner or later - oftener soon than late - is apt to fling off her
nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling
wound from her barbed arrows.
The pavement round about the above-described edifice - which we may
as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port - has grass enough
growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by
any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year, however,
there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier
tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that period,
before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not
scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit
her wharves to crumble to ruin while their ventures go to swell,
needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or
Boston. On some such morning, when three or four vessels happen to have
arrived at once usually from Africa or South America - or to be on the
verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet
passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife
has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed shipmaster, just in port,
with his vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too,
comes his owner, cheerful, sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly
as his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in
merchandise that will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him under a
bulk of incommodities such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here,
likewise - the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn
merchant - we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as
a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his master's
ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a mill-pond. Another
figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor, in quest of a protection;
or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the
hospital. Nor must we forget the captains of the rusty little schooners
that bring firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of
tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing
an item of no slight importance to our decaying trade.
Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with
other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time being,
it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently, however, on
ascending the steps, you would discern - in the entry if it were summer
time, or in their appropriate rooms if wintry or inclement weathers 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, ill voices between a speech
and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants
of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on
charity, on monopolized labour, or anything else but their own independent
exertions. These old gentlemen - seated, like Matthew at the receipt of
custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic
errands - were Custom-House officers.
Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a
certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height,
with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid
dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow lane, and along a
portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of the shops of grocers,
block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the doors of which
are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts,
and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room
itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with
grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it
is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this
is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom
and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a
stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged stool
beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and
infirm; and - not to forget the library - on some shelves, a score or two
of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue
laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal
communication with other parts of be edifice. And here, some six months
ago - pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged tool,
with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down the columns
of the morning newspaper - you might have recognised, honoured reader, the
same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where the
sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches on the
western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him,
you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform
hath swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity
and pockets his emoluments.
This old town of Salem - my native place, though I have dwelt much
away from it both in boyhood and maturer years - possesses, or did
possess, a hold on my affection, the force of which I have never realized
during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical
aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with
wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty - its
irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame - its
long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of be
peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the
alms-house at the other - such being the features of my native town, it
would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a
disarranged checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere,
there is within me a feeling for Old Salem, which, in lack of a better
phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably
assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has stuck into the
soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original
Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild
and forest - bordered settlement which has since become a city. And here
his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly
substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily be
akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the
streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere
sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it
is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need
they consider it desirable to know.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that
first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky
grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can
remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the
past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the
town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of
this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor-who
came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street
with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and
peace - a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and
my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler
in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was
likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered
him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity
towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared,
than any record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son,
too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in
the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have
left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in
the Charter-street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not
crumbled utterly to dust I know not whether these ancestors of mine
bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their
cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences
of them in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer,
as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes,
and pray that any curse incurred by them - as I have heard, and as the
dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back,
would argue to exist - may be now and henceforth removed.
Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans
would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that,
after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so
much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an
idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise
as laudable; no success of mine - if my life, beyond its domestic scope,
had ever been brightened by success - would they deem otherwise than
worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one grey
shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story books What kind
of business in life - what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to
mankind in his day and generation - may that be? Why, the degenerate
fellow might as well have been a fiddler" Such are the compliments bandied
between my great grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time And yet,
let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have
intertwined themselves with mine
Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these
two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here;
always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced
by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after
the first two generations, performing any memorable deed, or so much as
putting forward a claim to public notice. Gradually, they have sunk almost
out of sight; as old houses, here and there about the streets, get covered
half-way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From father to son,
for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a grey-headed
shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the
homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the
mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against
his sire and grandsire. The boy, also in due time, passed from the
forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from
his world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with the
natal earth. This long connexion of a family with one spot, as its place
of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the
locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral
circumstances that surround him. It is not love but instinct. The new
inhabitant - who came himself from a foreign land, or whose father or
grandfather came - has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no
conception of the oyster - like tenacity with which an old settler, over
whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been embedded. It is no matter that the place
is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and
dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the
chillest of social atmospheres; - all these, and whatever faults besides
he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and
just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has
it been in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home;
so that the mould of features and cast of character which had all along
been familiar here - ever, as one representative of the race lay down in
the grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main
street - might still in my little day be seen and recognised in the old
town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connexion,
which has become an unhealthy one, should at least be severed. Human
nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and
re-planted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out
soil. My children have had other birth-places, and, so far as their
fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into
accustomed earth.
On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange,
indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill a
place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have
gone somewhere else. My doom was on me, It was not the first time, nor the
second, that I had gone away - as it seemed, permanently - but yet
returned, like the bad halfpenny, or as if Salem were for me the
inevitable centre of the universe. So, one fine morning I ascended the
flight of granite steps, with the President's commission in my pocket, and
was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in my weighty
responsibility as chief executive officer of the Custom-House.
I doubt greatly - or, rather, I do not doubt at all - whether any
public functionary of the United States, either in the civil or military
line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans under his orders as
myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest Inhabitant was at once settled when
I looked at them. For upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the
independent position of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out
of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure of
office generally so fragile. A soldier - New England's most distinguished
soldier - he stood firmly on the pedestal of his gallant services; and,
himself secure in the wise liberality of the successive administrations
through which he had held office, he had been the safety of his
subordinates in many an hour of danger and heart-quake General Miller was
radically conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight
influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and with
difficulty moved to change, even when change might have brought
unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking charge off my department, I
found few but aged men. They were ancient sea - captains, for the most
part, who, after being tossed on every sea, and standing up sturdily
against life's tempestuous blast, had finally drifted into this quiet
nook, where, with little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of
a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of
existence. Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men to age and
infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that kept death at
bay. Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and
rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never dreamed of making their appearance
at the Custom-House during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid
winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily
about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience,
betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of
abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these venerable
servants of the republic. They were allowed, on my representation, to rest
from their arduous labours, and soon afterwards - as if their sole
principle of life had been zeal for their country's service - as I verily
believe it was - withdrew to a better world. It is a pious consolation to
me that, through my interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for
repentance of the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a matter of
course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall. Neither the
front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to
Paradise.
The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their
venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and
though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his
office with any reference to political services. Had it been otherwise -
had an active politician been put into this influential post, to assume
the easy task of making head against a Whig Collector, whose infirmities
withheld him from the personal administration of his office - hardly a man
of the old corps would have drawn the breath of official life within a
month after the exterminating angel had come up the Custom-House steps.
According to the received code in such matters, it would have been nothing
short of duty, in a politician, to bring every one of those white heads
under the axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern that the
old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It pained, and at
the same time amused me, to behold the terrors that attended my advent, to
see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten by half a century of storm, turn ashy
pale at the glance of so harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as
one or another addressed me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past
days, had been wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely enough
to frighten Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these excellent old
persons, that, by all established rule - and, as regarded some of them,
weighed by their own lack of efficiency for business - they ought to have
given place to younger men, more orthodox in politics, and altogether
fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle. I knew it, too, but
could never quite find in my heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and
deservedly to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the
detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my incumbency,
to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down the Custom-House steps.
They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners,
with their chairs tilted back against the walls; awaking, however, once or
twice in the forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth
repetition of old sea-stories and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be
passwords and countersigns among them.
The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor had no
great harm in him. So, with lightsome hearts and the happy consciousness
of being usefully employed - in their own behalf at least, if not for our
beloved country - these good old gentlemen went through the various
formalities of office. Sagaciously under their spectacles, did they peep
into the holds of vessels Mighty was their fuss about little matters, and
marvellous, sometimes, the obtuseness that allowed greater ones to slip
between their fingers Whenever such a mischance occurred - when a
waggon-load of valuable merchandise had been smuggled ashore, at noonday,
perhaps, and directly beneath their unsuspicious noses - nothing could
exceed the vigilance and alacrity with which they proceeded to lock, and
double-lock, and secure with tape and sealing - wax, all the avenues of
the delinquent vessel. Instead of a reprimand for their previous
negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on their
praiseworthy caution after the mischief had happened; a grateful
recognition of the promptitude of their zeal the moment that there was no
longer any remedy.
Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish
habit to contract a kindness for them. The better part of my companion's
character, if it have a better part, is that which usually comes uppermost
in my regard, and forms the type whereby I recognise the man. As most of
these old Custom-House officers had good traits, and as my position in
reference to them, being paternal and protective, was favourable to the
growth of friendly sentiments, I soon grew to like them all. It was
pleasant in the summer forenoons - when the fervent heat, that almost
liquefied the rest of the human family, merely communicated a genial
warmth to their half torpid systems - it was pleasant to hear them
chatting in the back entry, a row of them all tipped against the wall, as
usual; while the frozen witticisms of past generations were thawed out,
and came bubbling with laughter from their lips. Externally, the jollity
of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect,
any more than a deep sense of humour, has little to do with the matter; it
is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny
and cheery aspect alike to the green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In
one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles
the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.
It would be sad injustice, the reader must understand, to represent
all my excellent old friends as in their dotage. In the first place, my
coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their
strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether superior
to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had
cast them. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to
be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair. But, as respects
the majority of my corps of veterans, there will be no wrong done if I
characterize them generally as a set of wearisome old souls, who had
gathered nothing worth preservation from their varied experience of life.
They seemed to have flung away all the golden grain of practical wisdom,
which they had enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most
carefully to have stored their memory with the husks. They spoke with far
more interest and unction of their morning's breakfast, or yesterday's,
to-day's, or tomorrow's dinner, than of the shipwreck of forty or fifty
years ago, and all the world's wonders which they had witnessed with their
youthful eyes.
The father of the Custom-House - the patriarch, not only of this
little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body
of tide-waiters all over the United States - was a certain permanent
Inspector. He might truly be termed a legitimate son of the revenue
system, dyed in the wool, or rather born in the purple; since his sire, a
Revolutionary colonel, and formerly collector of the port, had created an
office for him, and appointed him to fill it, at a period of the early
ages which few living men can now remember. This Inspector, when I first
knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and certainly one
of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green that you would be likely
to discover in a lifetime's search. With his florid cheek, his compact
figure smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk and
vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he seemed - not
young, indeed - but a kind of new contrivance of Mother Nature in the
shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no business to touch. His voice
and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed through the Custom-House, had
nothing of the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they
came strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of
a clarion. Looking at him merely as an animal - and there was very little
else to look at - he was a most satisfactory object, from the thorough
healthfulness and wholesomeness of his system, and his capacity, at that
extreme age, to enjoy all, or nearly all, the delights which he had ever
aimed at or conceived of. The careless security of his life in the
Custom-House, on a regular income, and with but slight and infrequent
apprehensions of removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass
lightly over him. The original and more potent causes, however, lay in the
rare perfection of his animal nature, the moderate proportion of
intellect, and the very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual
ingredients; these latter qualities, indeed, being in barely enough
measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on all-fours. He possessed
no power of thought no depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities:
nothing, in short, but a few commonplace instincts, which, aided by the
cheerful temper which grew inevitably out of his physical well-being, did
duty very respectably, and to general acceptance, in lieu of a heart. He
had been the husband of three wives, all long since dead; the father of
twenty children, most of whom, at every age of childhood or maturity, had
likewise returned to dust. Here, one would suppose, might have been sorrow
enough to imbue the sunniest disposition through and through with a sable
tinge. Not so with our old Inspector One brief sigh sufficed to carry off
the entire burden of these dismal reminiscences. The next moment he was as
ready for sport as any unbreeched infant: far readier than the Collector's
junior clerk, who at nineteen years was much the elder and graver man of
the two.
I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with, I think,
livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my
notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of
view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute nonentity,
in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind;
nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so
cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together that
there was no painful perception of deficiency, but, on my part, an entire
contentment with what I found in him. It might be difficult - and it was
so - to conceive how he should exist hereafter, so earthly and sensuous
did he seem; but surely his existence here, admitting that it was to
terminate with his last breath, had been not unkindly given; with no
higher moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field, but with a
larger scope of enjoyment than theirs, and with all their blessed immunity
from the dreariness and duskiness of age.
One point in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed
brethren was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made
no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat. His gourmandism was
a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast meat was as
appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute,
and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting
all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit of his
maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish,
poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing
them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the
date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savour of pig or turkey
under one's very nostrils. There were flavours on his palate that had
lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still
apparently as fresh as that of the mutton chop which he had just devoured
for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every
guest at which, except himself, had long been food for worms. It was
marvellous to observe how the ghosts of bygone meals were continually
rising up before him - not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for
his former appreciation, and seeking to repudiate an endless series of
enjoyment. at once shadowy and sensual, A tender loin of beef, a
hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken, or a
remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps adorned his board in the
days of the elder Adams, would be remembered; while all the subsequent
experience of our race, and all the events that brightened or darkened his
individual career, had gone over him with as little permanent effect as
the passing breeze. The chief tragic event of the old man's life, so far
as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and
died some twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure, but
which, at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife
would make no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with
an axe and handsaw.
But it is time to quit this sketch; on which, however, I should be
glad to dwell at considerably more length, because of all men whom I have
ever known, this individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer. Most
persons, owing to causes which I may not have space to hint at, suffer
moral detriment from this peculiar mode of life. The old Inspector was
incapable of it; and, were he to continue in office to tile end of time,
would be just as good as he was then, and sit down to dinner with just as
good an appetite.
There is one likeness, without which my gallery of Custom-House
portraits would be strangely incomplete, but which my comparatively few
opportunities for observation enable me to sketch only in the merest
outline. It is that of the Collector, our gallant old General, who, after
his brilliant military service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a
wild Western territory, had come hither, twenty years before, to spend the
decline of his varied and honourable life.
The brave soldier had already numbered, nearly or quite, his
three-score years and ten, and was pursuing the remainder of his earthly
march, burdened with infirmities which even the martial music of his own
spirit-stirring recollections could do little towards lightening. The step
was palsied now, that had been foremost in the charge. It was only with
the assistance of a servant, and by leaning his hand heavily on the iron
balustrade, that he could slowly and painfully ascend the Custom-House
steps, and, with a toilsome progress across the floor, attain his
customary chair beside the fireplace. There he used to sit, gazing with a
somewhat dim serenity of aspect at the figures that came and went, amid
the rustle of papers, the administering of oaths, the discussion of
business, and the casual talk of the office; all which sounds and
circumstances seemed but indistinctly to impress his senses, and hardly to
make their way into his inner sphere of contemplation. His countenance, in
this repose, was mild and kindly. If his notice was sought, an expression
of courtesy and interest gleamed out upon his features, proving that there
was light within him, and that it was only the outward medium of the
intellectual lamp that obstructed the rays in their passage. The closer
you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared. When
no longer called upon to speak or listen - either of which operations cost
him an evident effort - his face would briefly subside into its former not
uncheerful quietude. It was not painful to behold this look; for, though
dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age. The framework of his
nature, originally strong and massive, was not yet crumpled into ruin.
To observe and define his character, however, under such
disadvantages, was as difficult a task as to trace out and build up anew,
in imagination, an old fortress, like Ticonderoga, from a view of its grey
and broken ruins. Here and there, perchance, the walls may remain almost
complete; but elsewhere may be only a shapeless mound, cumbrous with its
very strength, and overgrown, through long years of peace and neglect,
with grass and alien weeds.
Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection - for, slight
as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of
all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed so,
- I could discern the main points of his portrait. It was marked with the
noble and heroic qualities which showed it to be not a mere accident, but
of good right, that he had won a distinguished name. His spirit could
never, I conceive, have been characterized by an uneasy activity; it must,
at any period of his life, have required an impulse to set him in motion;
but once stirred up, with obstacles to overcome, and an adequate object to
be attained, it was not in the man to give out or fail. The heat that had
formerly pervaded his nature, and which was not yet extinct, was never of
the kind that flashes and flickers in a blaze; but rather a deep red glow,
as of iron in a furnace. Weight, solidity, firmness - this was the
expression of his repose, even in such decay as had crept untimely over
him at the period of which I speak. But I could imagine, even then, that,
under some excitement which should go deeply into his consciousness -
roused by a trumpets real, loud enough to awaken all of his energies that
were not dead, but only slumbering - he was yet capable of flinging off
his infirmities like a sick man's gown, dropping the staff of age to seize
a battle-sword, and starting up once more a warrior. And, in so intense a
moment his demeanour would have still been calm. Such an exhibition,
however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor
desired. What I saw in him - as evidently as the indestructible ramparts
of Old Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile - was the
features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have
amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most
of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as
unmalleable or unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of benevolence
which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take
to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates any or all the
polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain men with his own hand,
for aught I know - certainly, they had fallen like blades of grass at the
sweep of the scythe before the charge to which his spirit imparted its
triumphant energy - but, be that as it might, there was never in his heart
so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing. I
have not known the man to whose innate kindliness I would more confidently
make an appeal.
Many characteristics - and those, too, which contribute not the least
forcibly to impart resemblance in a sketch - must have vanished, or been
obscured, before I met the General. All merely graceful attributes are
usually the most evanescent; nor does nature adorn the human ruin with
blossoms of new beauty, that have their roots and proper nutriment only in
the chinks and crevices of decay, as she sows wall-flowers over the ruined
fortress of Ticonderoga. Still, even in respect of grace and beauty, there
were points well worth noting. A ray of humour, now and then, would make
its way through the veil of dim obstruction, and glimmer pleasantly upon
our faces. A trait of native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine
character after childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's
fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be
supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one who
seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral tribe.
There, beside the fireplace, the brave old General used to sit; while
the Surveyor - though seldom, when it could be avoided, taking upon
himself the difficult task of engaging him in conversation - was fond of
standing at a distance, and watching his quiet and almost slumberous
countenance. He seemed away from us, although we saw him but a few yards
off; remote, though we passed close beside his chair; unattainable, though
we might have stretched forth our hands and touched his own. It might be
that he lived a more real life within his thoughts than amid the
unappropriate environment of the Collector's office. The evolutions of the
parade; the tumult of the battle; the flourish of old heroic music, heard
thirty years before - such scenes and sounds, perhaps, were all alive
before his intellectual sense. Meanwhile, the merchants and ship-masters,
the spruce clerks and uncouth sailors, entered and departed; the bustle of
his commercial and Custom-House life kept up its little murmur round about
him; and neither with the men nor their affairs did the General appear to
sustain the most distant relation. He was as much out of place as an old
sword - now rusty, but which had flashed once in the battle's front, and
showed still a bright gleam along its blade - would have been among the
inkstands, paper-folders, and mahogany rulers on the Deputy Collector's
desk.
There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating
the stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier - the man of true and simple
energy. It was the recollection of those memorable words of his - "I'll
try, Sir" - spoken on the very verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise,
and breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending
all perils, and encountering all. If, in our country, valour were rewarded
by heraldic honour, this phrase - which it seems so easy to speak, but
which only he, with such a task of danger and glory before him, has ever
spoken - would be the best and fittest of all mottoes for the General's
shield of arms.
It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health
to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike
himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities
he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my life have
often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fulness and variety
than during my continuance in office. There was one man, especially, the
observation of whose character gave me a new idea of talent. His gifts
were emphatically those of a man of business; prompt, acute, clear-minded;
with an eye that saw through all perplexities, and a faculty of
arrangement that made them vanish as by the waving of an enchanter's wand.
Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House, it was his proper field of
activity; and the many intricacies of business, so harassing to the
interloper, presented themselves before him with the regularity of a
perfectly comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal
of his class. He was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all
events, the mainspring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion;
for, in an institution like this, where its officers are appointed to
subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading
reference to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must
perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them. Thus, by an
inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did our man
of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met with.
With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity -
which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime -
would he forth-with, by the merest touch of his finger, make the
incomprehensible as clear as daylight. The merchants valued him not less
than we, his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect; it was a law of
nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor can it be
otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so remarkably clear and
accurate as his to be honest and regular in the administration of affairs.
A stain on his conscience, as to anything that came within the range of
his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same way, though
to a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an account, or an
ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word - and it is
a rare instance in my life - I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to
the situation which he held.
Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected.
I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into
a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to
gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil
and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; after
living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like
Emerson's; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging
fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery
Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics in
his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the
classic refinement of Hillard's culture; after becoming imbued with poetic
sentiment at Longfellow's hearthstone - it was time, at length, that I
should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food
for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was
desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked
upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well
balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that,
with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of
altogether different qualities, and lever murmur at the change.
Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in
my regard. I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.
Nature - except it were human nature - the nature that is developed in
earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative
delight wherewith it had been spiritualized passed away out of my mind. A
gift, a faculty, if it had not been departed, was suspended and inanimate
within me. There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary, in all
this, had I not been conscious that it lay at my own option to recall
whatever was valuable in the past. It might be true, indeed, that this was
a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too long; else, it might
make me permanently other than I had been, without transforming me into
any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I never considered
it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct,
a low whisper in my ear, that within no long period, and whenever a new
change of custom should be essential to my good, change would come.
Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as I
have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of
thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor's
proportion of those qualities), may, at any time, be a man of affairs, if
he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and
the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought me
into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably
knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a
page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had
read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had
those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns
or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House officer in his day, as well
as I. It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man
who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among
the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow
circle in which his claims are recognized and to find how utterly devoid
of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he
aims at. I know not that l especially needed the lesson, either in the way
of warning or rebuke; but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it
gives me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my
perception, ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In
the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer - an excellent
fellow, who came into the office with me, and went out only a little later
- would often engage me in a discussion about one or the other of his
favourite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector's junior clerk,
too a young gentleman who, it was whispered occasionally covered a sheet
of Uncle Sam's letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards)
looked very much like poetry - used now and then to speak to me of books,
as matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of
lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities.
No longer seeking or caring that my name should be blasoned abroad on
title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue. The
Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a stencil and black paint, on
pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes, and bales of all
kinds of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had
paid the impost, and gone regularly through the office. Borne on such
queer vehicle of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name
conveys it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope, will
never go again.
But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts that
had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly,
revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions, when the habit of
bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings it within the law of
literary propriety to offer the public the sketch which I am now writing.
In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room, in
which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with
panelling and plaster. The edifice - originally projected on a scale
adapted to the old commercial enterprise of the port, and with an idea of
subsequent prosperity destined never to be realized - contains far more
space than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall, therefore,
over the Collector's apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in
spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, appears still to
await the labour of the carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in a
recess, were a number of barrels piled one upon another, containing
bundles of official documents. Large quantities of similar rubbish lay
lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks,
and months, and years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which
were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this
forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes. But then,
what reams of other manuscripts - filled, not with the dulness of official
formalities, but with the thought of inventive brains and the rich
effusion of deep hearts - had gone equally to oblivion; and that,
moreover, without serving a purpose in their day, as these heaped-up
papers had, and - saddest of all - without purchasing for their writers
the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had gained
by these worthless scratchings of the pen. Yet not altogether worthless,
perhaps, as materials of local history. Here, no doubt, statistics of the
former commerce of Salem might be discovered, and memorials of her
princely merchants - old King Derby - old Billy Gray - old Simon Forrester
- and many another magnate in his day, whose powdered head, however, was
scarcely in the tomb before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle.
The founders of the greater part of the families which now compose the
aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty and obscure
beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the
Revolution, upward to what their children look upon as long-established
rank,
Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the earlier
documents and archives of the Custom-House having, probably, been carried
off to Halifax, when all the king's officials accompanied the British army
in its flight from Boston. It has often been a matter of regret with me;
for, going back, perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers
must have contained many references to forgotten or remembered men, and to
antique customs, which would have affected me with the same pleasure as
when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads in the field near the Old Manse.
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a discovery of
some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in
the corner, unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of
vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and
those of merchants never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily
decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters with the
saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow on the corpse of
dead activity - and exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise
up from these dry bones an image of the old towns 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 Pine, as Surveyor of His Majesty's Customs for
the Port of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. I remembered to
have read (probably in Felt's "Annals") a notice of the decease of Mr.
Surveyor Pue, about fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of
recent times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little
graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that edifice.
Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected predecessor,
save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of
majestic frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very
satisfactory preservation. But, on examining the papers which the
parchment commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's
mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the frizzled
wig had contained of the venerable skull itself.
They were documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature,
or, at least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his own
hand. I could account for their being included in the heap of Custom-House
lumber only by the fact that Mr. Pine'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, suppose, at that early
day with business pertaining to his office - seems to have devoted some of
his many leisure hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other
inquisitions of a similar nature. These supplied material for petty
activity to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up with rust.
A portion of his facts, by-the-by, did me good service in the
preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present
volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable
hereafter, or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a
regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever
impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of
any gentleman, inclined and competent, to take the unprofitable labour off
my hands. As a final disposition I contemplate depositing them with the
Essex Historical Society. But the object that most drew my attention to
the mysterious package was a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn
and faded, There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however,
was greatly frayed and defaced, so that none, or very little, of the
glitter was left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with
wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies
conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not
to be discovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag
of scarlet cloth - for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced
it to little other than a rag - on careful examination, assumed the shape
of a letter.
It was the capital letter A. By an accurate measurement, each limb
proved to be precisely three inches and a quarter in length. It had been
intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but
how it was to be worn, or what rank, honour, and dignity, in by-past
times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the
fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving.
And yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened themselves upon the
old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly there was
some deep meaning in it most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it
were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself
to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.
When thus perplexed - and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether
the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white
men used to contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians - I happened to
place it on my breast. It seemed to me - the reader may smile, but must
not doubt my word - it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation
not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the
letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and
involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.
In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto
neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been
twisted. This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find recorded by
the old Surveyor's pen, a reasonably complete explanation of the whole
affair. There were several foolscap sheets, containing many particulars
respecting the life and conversation of one Hester Prynne, who appeared to
have been rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors. She
had flourished during the period between the early days of Massachusetts
and the close of the seventeenth century. Aged persons, alive in the time
of Mr. Surveyor Pine, and from whose oral testimony he had made up his
narrative, remembered her, in their youth, as a very old, but not decrepit
woman, of a stately and solemn aspect. It had been her habit, from an
almost immemorial date, to go about the country as a kind of voluntary
nurse, and doing whatever miscellaneous good she might; taking upon
herself, likewise, to give advice in all matters, especially those of the
heart, by which means - as a person of such propensities inevitably must -
she gained from many people the reverence due to an angel, but, I should
imagine, was looked upon by others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying
further into the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and
sufferings of this singular woman, for most of which the reader is
referred to the story entitled "THE SCARLET LETTER"; and it should be
borne carefully in mind that the main facts of that story are authorized
and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pine. The original
papers, together with the scarlet letter itself - a most curious relic -
are still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever,
induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire a sight of them
I must not be understood affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale,
and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the
characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within the
limits of the old Surveyor's half-a-dozen sheets of foolscap. On the
contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly, or altogether,
as much license as if the facts had been entirely of my own invention.
What I contend for is the authenticity of the outline.
This incident recalled my mind, in some degree, to its old track.
There seemed to be here the groundwork of a tale. It impressed me as if
the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing
his immortal wig - which was buried with him, but did not perish in the
grave - had bet me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House. In his
port was the dignity of one who had borne His Majesty's commission, and
who was therefore illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so
dazzlingly about the throne. How unlike alas the hangdog look of a
republican official, who, as the servant of the people, feels himself less
than the least, and below the lowest of his masters. With his own ghostly
hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the
scarlet symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own
ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial
duty and reverence towards him - who might reasonably regard himself as my
official ancestor - to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before
the public. "Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically
nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig; "do
this, and the profit shall be all your own You will shortly need it; for
it is not in your days as it was in mine, when a man's office was a
life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom. But I charge you, in this matter
of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory the credit which
will be rightfully due" And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue - "I
will"
On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought. It was
the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while pacing to and fro
across my room, or traversing, with a hundredfold repetition, the long
extent from the front door of the Custom-House to the side entrance, and
back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector
and the Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the
unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning footsteps.
Remembering their own former habits, they used to say that the Surveyor
was walking the quarter-deck. They probably fancied that my sole object -
and, indeed, the sole object for which a sane man could ever put himself
into voluntary motion - was to get an appetite for dinner. And, to say the
truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally blew along
the passage, was the only valuable result of so much indefatigable
exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of a Custom-house to the
delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility, that, had I remained there
through ten Presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the tale of "The
Scarlet Letter" would ever have been brought before the public eye. My
imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with
miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The
characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by
any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take
neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained
all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed
and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What have you to do with us?"
that expression seemed to say. "The little power you might have once
possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone You have bartered it for a
pittance of the public gold. Go then, and earn your wages" In short, the
almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and
not without fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched numbness held
possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles into
the country, whenever - which was seldom and reluctantly - I bestirred
myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature which used to give me
such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across
the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the capacity
for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the
chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me when,
late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted only by the
glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary
scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in
many-hued description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so
white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly - making
every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide
visibility - is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get
acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery
of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate
individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or
two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the
wall - all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualised by the
unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become
things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this
change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in
her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse - whatever, in a word, has
been used or played with during the day is now invested with a quality of
strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by
daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a
neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where
the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the
nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here without affrighting us. It
would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to
look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting
quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would
make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred
from our fireside.
The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in producing
the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling,
and a reflected gleam upon the polish of the furniture. This warmer light
mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, and
communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to
the forms which fancy summons tip. It converts them from snow-images into
men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold - deep within its
haunted verge - the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite,
the white moon-beams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and
shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer
to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him,
if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them
look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in my
regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of
a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected
with them - of no great richness or value, but the best I had - was gone
from me.
It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing
out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I
should be most ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that
he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvel loins gifts as
a story-teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque force of his style,
and the humourous colouring which nature taught him how to throw over his
descriptions, the result, I honestly believe, would have been something
new in literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It
was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so
intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or
to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when,
at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the
rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been
to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day,
and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the burden that
began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and
indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents,
and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was
mine. The page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and
commonplace only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better
book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself
to me, just as it was written out by the reality of the flitting hour, and
vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted the insight,
and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At some future day, it may be,
I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs, and
write them down, and find the letters turn to gold upon the page.
These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless
toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs.
I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had
become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But,
nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion
that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your
consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you
find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be no
doubt and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions, in
reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very
favourable to the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I
may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here to say that a
Custom-House officer of long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy
or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by
which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his
business, which - though, I trust, an honest one - is of such a sort that
he does not share in the united effort of mankind.
An effect - which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every
individual who has occupied the position - is, that while he leans on the
mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength, departs from him. He
loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original
nature, the capability of self-support. If he possesses an unusual share
of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long
upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer -
fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle
amid a struggling world - may return to himself, and become all that he
has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually keeps his ground just
long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all
unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may.
Conscious of his own infirmity - that his tempered steel and elasticity
are lost - he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of
support external to himself. His pervading and continual hope - a
hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light
of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the
convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after
death - is, that finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence
of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than
anything else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever enterprise
he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so
much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while
hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should
he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is
so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of
glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe
how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this
singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold - meaning no disrespect to the worthy
old gentleman - has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that
of the devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or
he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his
soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and
constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis
to manly character.
Here was a fine prospect in the distance Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so
utterly undone, either by continuance in office or ejectment. Yet my
reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and
restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its poor
properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already accrued to
the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I could stay in
the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my
greatest apprehension - as it would never be a measure of policy to turn
out so quiet an individual as myself; and it being hardly in the nature of
a public officer to resign - it was my chief trouble, therefore, that I
was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much
such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious
lapse of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was
with this venerable friend - to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the
day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the
sunshine or in the shade? A dreary look-forward, this, for a man who felt
it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the whole
range of his faculties and sensibilities But, all this while, I was giving
myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for
me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship - to adopt
the tone of "P. P. " - was the election of General Taylor to the
Presidency. It is essential, in order to 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, lie would rather be injured than obliged.
Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to
observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and
to be conscious that he is himself among its objects There are few uglier
traits of human nature than this tendency - which I now witnessed in men
no worse than their neighbours - to grow cruel, merely because they
possessed the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to
office-holders, were a literal fact, instead of one of the most apt of
metaphors, it is my sincere belief that the active members of the
victorious party were sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our
heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity It appears to me - who
have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat - that
this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never
distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the
Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they
need them, and because the practice of many years has made it the law of
political warfare, which unless a different system be proclaimed, it was
weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has
made them generous. They know how to spare when they see occasion; and
when they strike, the axe may be sharp indeed, but its edge is seldom
poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the
head which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much
reason to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side rather than
the triumphant one. If, heretofore, l had been none of the warmest of
partisans I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be pretty
acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was it without
something like regret and shame that, according to a reasonable
calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office to be
better than those of my democratic brethren. But who can see an inch into
futurity beyond his nose? My own head was the first that fell
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless,
like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency
brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make
the best rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him. In
my particular case the consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed,
had suggested themselves to my meditations a considerable time before it
was requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of office, and
vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a
person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and although
beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In the
Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years - a term
long enough to rest a weary brain: long enough to break off old
intellectual habits, and make room for new ones: long enough, and too
long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no
advantage nor delight to any human being, and withholding myself from toil
that would, at least, have stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then,
moreover, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was
not altogether ill-pleased to be recognised by the Whigs as an enemy;
since his inactivity in political affairs - his tendency to roam, at will,
in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may meet, rather than
confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren of the same household
must diverge from one another - had sometimes made it questionable with
his brother Democrats whether he was a friend. Now, after he had won the
crown of martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it on), the point
might be looked upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it
seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of the party with
which he had been content to stand than to remain a forlorn survivor, when
so many worthier men were falling: and at last, after subsisting for four
years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled then to
define his position anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy of a
friendly one.
Meanwhile, the press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a week
or two careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like
Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as
a political dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human
being all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought
himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for the best;
and making an investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, had opened his
long-disused writing desk, and was again a literary man.
Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little
space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought to
work upon the tale with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even yet,
though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it wears, to
my eye, a stern and sombre aspect: too much ungladdened by genial
sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which
soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and undoubtedly should
soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to
the period of hardly accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil,
in which the story shaped itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack
of cheerfulness in the writer's mind: for he was happier while straying
through the gloom of these sunless fantasies than at any time since he had
quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which contribute to
make up the volume, have likewise been written since my involuntary
withdrawal from the toils and honours of public life, and the remainder
are gleaned from annuals and magazines, of such antique date, that they
have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty again. Keeping up the
metaphor of the political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the
POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR: and the sketch which I am now
bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to
publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes
from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world My blessing on my
friends My forgiveness to my enemies For I am in the realm of quiet
The life of the Custom - House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector - who, by-the-bye, l regret to say, was overthrown and killed by
a horse some time ago, else he would certainly have lived for ever - he,
and all those other venerable personages who sat with him at the receipt
of custom, are but shadows in my view: white-headed and wrinkled images,
which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung aside for ever. The
merchants - Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt -
these and many other names, which had such classic familiarity for my ear
six months ago, - these men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important
a position in the world - how little time has it required to disconnect me
from them all, not merely in act, but recollection It is with an effort
that
I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise,
my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist
brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth,
but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to
people its wooden houses and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque
prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my
life; I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much
regret me, for - though it has been as dear an object as any, in my
literary efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win
myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my
forefathers - there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a
literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I
shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need
hardly be said, will do just as well without me.
It may be, however - oh, transporting and triumphant thought I - that
the great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of
the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among
the sites memorable in the town's history, shall point out the locality of
THE TOWN PUMP.
THE PRISON DOOR
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey
steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and
others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of
which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it
among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the
virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In
accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of
Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of
Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground,
on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently
became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard
of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after
the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with
weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker
aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous
iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the
New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known
a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the
wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock,
pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found
something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower
of civilised society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted
almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-hush, 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 far authority for believing, it
had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she
entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding
it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to
issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than
pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let
us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the
track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and
sorrow
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 rioted culprit, on whom the sentence
of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment.
But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this
kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish
bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to
the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be
that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be
scourged out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white
man's firewater had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with
stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch,
like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate,
was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same
solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as befitted a people
among whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character
both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of
public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and
cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such
bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our
days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be
invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
It was a circumstance to he noted on the summer morning when our
story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the
crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction
might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any
sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale
from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not
unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the
scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a
coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding
than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or
seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every
successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more
delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not
character of less force and solidity than her own. The women who were now
standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of
the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether
unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen: and the
beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more
refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun,
therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round
and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly
yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was,
moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most
of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in
respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a
piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof if we women,
being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the
handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye,
gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now
here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the
worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not"
"People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her
godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should
have come upon his congregation. "
"The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch -
that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron. "At the very least, they
should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead.
Madame Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she - the
naughty baggage - little will she care what they put upon the bodice of
her gown Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like.
heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever"
"Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by
the hand, "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be
always in her heart. "
"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her
gown or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as
well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman
has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die; Is there not law for it?
Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the
magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own
wives and daughters go astray"
"Mercy on us, goodwife" exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there no
virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows?
That is the hardest word yet Hush now, gossips for the lock is turning in
the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself. "
The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared, in
the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and
gristly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his
staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in
his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which
it was his business to administer in its final and closest application to
the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he
laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew
forward, until, on the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him, by
an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped
into the open air as if by her own free will. She bore in her arms a
child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its
little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence,
heretofore, had brought it acquaintance only with the grey twilight of a
dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison.
When the young woman - the mother of this child - stood fully
revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the
infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly
affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was
wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging
that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she
took the baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty
smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her
townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth,
surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold
thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so
much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the
effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore, and
which was of a splendour in accordance with the taste of the age, but
greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the
colony.
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a
large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off
the sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from
regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness
belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too,
after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterised by
a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and
indescribable grace which is now recognised as its indication. And never
had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the antique interpretation of
the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known
her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous
cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty
shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was
enveloped. It may be true that, to a sensitive observer, there was some
thing exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which indeed, she had wrought
for the occasion in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy,
seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness
of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which
drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer - so that both men
and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now
impressed as if they beheld her for the first time - was that SCARLET
LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It
had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with
humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
"She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked one of
her female spectators; "but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy,
contrive such a way of showing it? Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh
in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they,
worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?"
"It were well," muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, "if
we stripped Madame Hester's rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for
the red letter which she hath stitched so curiously, I'll bestow a rag of
mine own rheumatic flannel to make a fitter one!"
"Oh, peace, neighbours - peace!" whispered their youngest companion;
"do not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she
has felt it in her heart. "
The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff. "Make way, good
people - make way, in the King's name!" cried he. "Open a passage; and I
promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child may
have a fair sight of her brave apparel from this time till an hour past
meridian. A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where
iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madame Hester, and
show your scarlet letter in the market-place!"
A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded
by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men
and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place
appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys,
understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a
half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to
stare into her face and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the
ignominious letter on her breast. It was no great distance, in those days,
from the prison door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner's
experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length; for
haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an agony from every
footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung
into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature,
however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the
sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present
torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a
serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of
her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of
the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest
church, and appeared to be a fixture there.
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine,
which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical
and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as
effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the
guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform
of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of
discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp,
and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was
embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can
be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature - whatever be the
delinquencies of the individual - no outrage more flagrant than to forbid
the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this
punishment to do. In Hester Prynne's instance, however, as not
unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore that she should stand a
certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about
the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was the most
devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing well her part, she
ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the
surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man's shoulders above the
street.
Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have
seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and
with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of
Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one
another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only
by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was
to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most
sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only
the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that
she had borne.
The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always
invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before
society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at
it. The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond
their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that
been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the
heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for
jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a disposition
to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and
overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the
governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the
ministers of the town, all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the
meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such personages could
constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty, or
reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the
infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest and effectual
meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The unhappy culprit
sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a
thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her
bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and
passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and
venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of
insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood
of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid
countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object.
Had a roar of laughter burst from the multitude - each man, each woman,
each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts -
Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful
smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure,
she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power
of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or
else go mad at once.
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the
most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least,
glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and
spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally
active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of
a little town, on the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than
were louring upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned
hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy
and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits
of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with
recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture
precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or
all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to
relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the
cruel weight and hardness of the reality.
Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view
that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been
treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence,
she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home: a
decayed house of grey stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining
a half obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique
gentility. She saw her father's face, with its bold brow, and reverend
white beard that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her
mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it always
wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often
laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway.
She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all
the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it.
There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a
pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the
lamp-light that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet
those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was
their owner's purpose to read the human soul. This figure of tile study
and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall,
was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the
right. Next rose before her in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and
narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge cathedrals, and the
public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a
continental city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion with
the mis-shapen 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!
THE RECOGNITION
FROM this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and
universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length
relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which
irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian in his native garb
was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the
English settlements that one of them would have attracted any notice from
Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other
objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian's side, and evidently
sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange
disarray of civilized and savage costume.
He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which as yet could
hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his
features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it
could not fail to mould the physical to itself and become manifest by
unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of his
heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate the
peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of this
man's shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first instant of
perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure, she
pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a force that the poor
babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not seem to hear it,
At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him,
the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly at
first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external
matters are of little value and import, unless they bear relation to
something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look became keen and
penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a
snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its
wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with some
powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instantaneously controlled by
an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might
have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost
imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature. When he
found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she
appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a
gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.
Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him, he
addressed him in a formal and courteous manner:
"I pray you, good Sir," said he, "who is this woman? - and wherefore
is she here set up to public shame?"
"You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend," answered the
townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion,
"else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne and her evil
doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master
Dimmesdale's church. "
"You say truly," replied the other; "I am a stranger, and have been a
wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea
and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk to the
southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian to be redeemed out of
my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne's
- have I her name rightly? - of this woman's offences, and what has
brought her to yonder scaffold?"
"Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your
troubles and sojourn in the wilderness," said the townsman, "to find
yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched out and punished
in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly New England.
Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain learned man,
English by birth, but who had long ago dwelt in Amsterdam, whence some
good time agone he was minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of
the Massachusetts. To this purpose he sent his wife before him, remaining
himself to look after some necessary affairs. Marry, good Sir, in some two
years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in Boston, no
tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young
wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance- "
"Ah! - aha! - I conceive you," said the stranger with a bitter smile.
"So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his
books. And who, by your favour, Sir, may be the father of yonder babe - it
is some three or four months old, I should judge - which Mistress Prynne
is holding in her arms?"
"Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel
who shall expound it is yet a-wanting," answered the townsman. "Madame
Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid their
heads together in vain. Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at
this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him. "
"The learned man," observed the stranger with another smile, "should
come himself to look into the mystery. "
"It behoves him well if he be still in life," responded the townsman.
"Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that
this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her
fall, and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the
bottom of the sea, they have not been bold to put in force the extremity
of our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But in
their great mercy and tenderness of heart they have doomed Mistress Prynne
to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and
then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life to wear a mark
of shame upon her bosom. "
"A wise sentence," remarked the stranger, gravely. bowing his head.
"Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious
letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that the
partner of her iniquity should not at least, stand on the scaffold by her
side. But he will be known - he will be known! - he will be known!"
He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and whispering a
few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the
crowd.
While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal,
still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger - so fixed a gaze that, at
moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world
seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her. Such an interview, perhaps,
would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did, with
the hot mid-day sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame;
with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the sin-born infant
in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a festival, staring at
the features that should have been seen only in the quiet gleam of the
fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or beneath a matronly veil at
church. Dreadful as it was, she was conscious of a shelter in the presence
of these thousand witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so many
betwixt him and her, than to greet him face to face - they two alone. She
fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the
moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these
thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind her until it had repeated her
name more than once, in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole
multitude.
"Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!" said the voice.
It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on which
Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to
the meeting-house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to be
made, amidst an assemblage of the magistracy, with all the ceremonial that
attended such public observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene
which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself with four
sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of honour. He wore
a dark feather in his hat, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a
black velvet tunic beneath - a gentleman advanced in years, with a hard
experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill-fitted to be the head
and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and
its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the
stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age;
accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little.
The other eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was surrounded were
distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms
of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of Divine institutions.
They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage. But, out of the whole human
family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and
virtuous persons, who should he less capable of sitting in judgment on an
erring woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than
the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face.
She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay
in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her
eyes towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.
The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and
famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like
most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of kind and
genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less carefully
developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter
of shame than self-congratulation with him. There he stood, with a border
of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap, while his grey eyes, accustomed
to the shaded light of his study, were winking, like those of Hester's
infant, in the unadulterated sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved
portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons, and had no more
right than one of those portraits would have to step forth, as he now did,
and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish
"Hester Prynne," said the clergyman, "I have striven with my young
brother here, under whose preaching of the Word you have been privileged
to sit" - here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a pale young
man beside him - "I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that
he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise
and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the people, as touching the
vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing your natural temper better
than l, he could the better judge what arguments to use, whether of
tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over your hardness and
obstinacy, insomuch that you should no longer hide the name of him who
tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes to me - with a young
man's over-softness, albeit wise beyond his years - that it were wronging
the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart's secrets in
such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I
sought to convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and
not in the showing of it forth. What say you to it, once again, brother
Dimmesdale? Must it be thou, or I, that shall deal with this poor sinner's
soul?"
There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the
balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport, speaking
in an authoritative voice, although tempered with respect towards the
youthful clergyman whom he addressed:
"Good Master Dimmesdale," said he, "the responsibility of this
woman's soul lies greatly with you. It behoves you; therefore, to exhort
her to repentance and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof. "
The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon
the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale - young clergyman, who had come from one of
the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into
our wild forest land. His eloquence and religious fervour had already
given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person of
very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow; large,
brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly
compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous
sensibility and a vast power of self restraint. Notwithstanding his high
native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air about this
young minister - an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened look - as
of a being who felt himself quite astray, and at a loss in the pathway of
human existence, and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own.
Therefore, so far as his duties would permit, he trod in the shadowy
by-paths, and thus kept himself simple and childlike, coming forth, when
occasion was, with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought,
which, as many people said, affected them like tile 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, ill whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!"
The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, silent prayer, as it
seemed, and then came forward.
"Hester Prynne," said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down
steadfastly into her eyes, "thou hearest what this good man says, and
seest the accountability under which I labour. If thou feelest it to be
for thy soul's peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made
more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy
fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity
and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step
down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of
shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty heart through life.
What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him - yea, compel him, as
it were - to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath granted thee an open
ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an open triumph over the evil
within thee and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him -
who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself - the bitter,
but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!"
The young pastor's voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and
broken. The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the
direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and
brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby at
Hester's bosom was affected by the same influence, for it directed its
hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms
with a half-pleased, half-plaintive murmur. So powerful seemed the
minister's appeal that the people could not believe but that Hester Prynne
would speak out the guilty name, or else that the guilty one himself in
whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be drawn forth by an inward
and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the scaffold.
Hester shook her head.
"Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven's mercy!" cried
the Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. "That little babe hath
been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou
hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to
take the scarlet letter off thy breast. "
"Never," replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into
the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. "It is too deeply
branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony as
well as mine!"
"Speak, woman!" said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding
from the crowd about the scaffold, "Speak; and give your child a father!"
"I will not speak!" answered Hester, turning pale as death, but
responding to this voice, which she too surely recognised. "And my child
must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an earthly one!"
"She will not speak!" murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the
balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his
appeal. He now drew back with a long respiration. "Wondrous strength arid
generosity of a woman's heart! She will not speak!"
Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit's mind, the
elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion,
addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but
with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he
dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods were
rolling over the people's heads, that it assumed new terrors in their
imagination, and seemed to derive its scarlet hue from the flames of the
infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal
of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference. She had
borne that morning all that nature could endure; and as her temperament
was not of the order that escapes from too intense suffering by a swoon,
her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a stony crust of
insensibility, while the faculties of animal life remained entire. In this
state, the voice of the preacher thundered remorselessly, but
unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the latter portion of her
ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and screams; she strove to hush
it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to sympathise with its trouble. With
the same hard demeanour, she was led back to prison, and vanished from the
public gaze within its iron-clamped portal. It was whispered by those who
peered after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the
dark passage-way of the interior.
THE INTERVIEW
After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a
state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant watchfulness, lest she
should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied mischief
to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving impossible to quell her
insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the
jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He described him as a man of
skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and likewise familiar
with whatever the savage people could teach in respect to medicinal herbs
and roots that grew in the forest. To say the truth, there was much need
of professional assistance, not merely for Hester herself, but still more
urgently for the child - who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal
bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and
despair, which pervaded the mother's system. It now writhed in convulsions
of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony
which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.
Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that
individual, of singular aspect whose presence in the crowd had been of
such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet letter. He was lodged in
the prison, not as suspected of any offence, but as the most convenient
and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrates should have
conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom. His name was
announced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer, after ushering him into the
room, remained a moment, marvelling at the comparative quiet that followed
his entrance; for Hester Prynne had immediately become as still as death,
although the child continued to moan.
"Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient," said the
practitioner. "Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in your
house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more
amenable to just authority than you may have found her heretofore. "
"Nay, if your worship can accomplish that," answered Master Brackett,
"I shall own you for a man of skill, indeed! Verily, the woman hath been
like a possessed one; and there lacks little that I should take in hand,
to drive Satan out of her with stripes. "
The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of
the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his
demeanour change when the withdrawal of the prison keeper left him face to
face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had
intimated so close a relation between himself and her. His first care was
given to the child, whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the
trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all other
business to the task of soothing her. He examined the infant carefully,
and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which he took from beneath
his dress. It appeared to contain medical preparations, one of which he
mingled with a cup of water.
"My old studies in alchemy," observed he, "and my sojourn, for above
a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of
simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the
medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours - she is none of mine -
neither will she recognise my voice or aspect as a father's. Administer
this draught, therefore, with thine own hand. " Hester repelled the
offered medicine, at the same time gazing with strongly marked
apprehension into his face.
"Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe?" whispered she.
"Foolish woman!" responded the physician, half coldly, half
soothingly. "What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable
babe? The medicine is potent for good, and were it my child - yea, mine
own, as well as thine! I could do no better for it. "
As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of
mind, he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered the
draught. It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech's pledge. The
moans of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually
ceased; and in a few moments, as is the custom of young children after
relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The physician,
as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his attention on the
mother. With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her pulse, looked into her
eyes - a gaze that made her heart shrink and shudder, because so familiar,
and yet so strange and cold - and, finally, satisfied with his
investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught
"I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe," remarked he; "but I have learned
many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them - a recipe
that an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were
as old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless
conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and
heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea.
"
He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest
look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and
questioning as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at her
slumbering child.
"I have thought of death," said she - " have wished for it - would
even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for
anything. Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou
beholdest me quaff it. See! it is even now at my lips. "
"Drink, then," replied he, still with the same cold composure. "Dost
thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so
shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better
for my object than to let thee live - than to give thee medicines against
all harm and peril of life - so that this burning shame may still blaze
upon thy bosom?" As he spoke, he laid his long 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 mayest live, take off this draught. "
Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the
cup, and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed,
where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the room
afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not but tremble at
these preparations; for she felt that - having now done all that humanity,
or principle, or, if so it were, a refined cruelty, impelled him to do for
the relief of physical suffering - he was next to treat with her as the
man whom she had most deeply and irreparably injured.
"Hester," said he, "I ask not wherefore, nor how thou hast fallen
into the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy
on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and
thy weakness. I - a man of thought - the book-worm of great libraries - a
man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream
of knowledge - what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own?
Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that
intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl's
fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I
might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of
the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men,
the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne,
standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment
when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might
have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our
path!"
"Thou knowest," said Hester - for, depressed as she was, she could
not endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame - "thou knowest
that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any. "
"True," replied he. "It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that
epoch of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless! My
heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill,
and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so
wild a dream - old as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was -
that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind to
gather up, might yet be mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee into my heart,
into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth which
thy presence made there!"
"I have greatly wronged thee," murmured Hester.
"We have wronged each other," answered he. "Mine was the first wrong,
when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with
my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophised in
vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me,
the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has
wronged us both! Who is he?"
"Ask me not?" replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face.
"That thou shalt never know!"
"Never, sayest thou?" rejoined he, with a smile of dark and
self-relying intelligence. "Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there are
few things whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the
invisible sphere of thought - few things hidden from the man who devotes
himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. Thou
mayest cover up thy secret from the prying multitude. Thou mayest conceal
it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this day,
when they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart, and give thee a
partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come to the inquest with other
senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in
books: as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will
make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself
shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine. "
The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that
Hester Prynne clasped her hand over her heart, dreading lest he should
read the secret there at once.
"Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine," resumed he,
with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. "He bears
no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost, but I shall
read it on his heart . Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall
interfere with Heaven's own method of retribution, or, to my own loss,
betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine that I shall
contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame, if as I judge,
he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide himself in outward
honour, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!"
"Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled; "but
thy words interpret thee as a terror!"
"One thing, thou that wast my wife, l would enjoin upon thee,"
continued the scholar. "Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep,
likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not to
any human soul that thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on this wild
outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer,
and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child,
amongst whom and myself there exist the closest ligaments. No matter
whether of love or hate: no matter whether of right or wrong! Thou and
thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where thou art and where he
is. But betray me not!"
"Wherefore dost thou desire it?" inquired Hester, shrinking, she
hardly knew why, from this secret bond. "Why not announce thyself openly,
and cast me off at once?"
"It may be," he replied, "because I will not encounter the dishonour
that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other
reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore,
thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom no tidings
shall ever come. Recognise me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe not
the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of. Shouldst thou fail me
in this, beware! His fame, his position, his life will be in my hands.
Beware!"
"I will keep thy secret, as I have his," said Hester.
"Swear it!" rejoined he.
And she took the oath.
"And now, Mistress Prynne," said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was
hereafter to be named, "I leave thee alone: alone with thy infant and the
scarlet letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to wear the
token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and hideous dreams?"
"Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the
expression of his eyes. "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the
forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove
the ruin of my soul?"
"Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile. No, not thine!"
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 stem featured
but with vigour to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm -
had held her up through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with
this unattended walk from her prison door, began the daily custom; and she
must either sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her
nature, or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to
help her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial
with it; so would the next day, and so would the next: each its own trial,
and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne.
The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same
burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling
down; for the accumulating days and added years would pile up their misery
upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her individuality,
she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist
might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of
woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be
taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast - at
her, the child of honourable parents - at her, the mother of a babe that
would hereafter be a woman - at her, who had once been innocent - as the
figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the infamy that
she must carry thither would be her only monument.
It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her - kept by no
restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan
settlement, so remote and so obscure - free to return to her birth-place,
or to any other European land, and there hide her character and identity
under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of
being - and having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to
her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself with a
people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned
her - it may seem marvellous that this woman should still call that place
her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But
there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has
the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger
around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event
has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly,
the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the
roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with
stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land,
still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester
Prynne's wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth -
even that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless
maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like garments put off
long ago - were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound her
here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be
broken. It might be, too - doubtless it was so, although she hid the
secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart,
like a serpent from its hole - it might be that another feeling kept her
within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there
trode, the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union
that, unrecognised on earth, would bring them together before the bar of
final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint futurity
of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of souls had
thrust this idea upon Hester's contemplation, and laughed at the
passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove to
cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened to
bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to believe - what,
finally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing a resident of New
England - was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to
herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of
her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame
would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that
which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.
Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town,
within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other
habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been built by an
earlier settler, and abandoned, because the soil about it was too sterile
for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere
of that social activity which already marked the habits of the emigrants.
It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the
forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby trees, such as
alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the cottage from
view, as seem to denote that here was some object which would fain have
been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little lonesome
dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the licence
of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester
established herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion
immediately attached itself to the spot. Children, too young to comprehend
wherefore this woman should be shut out from the sphere of human
charities, would creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the
cottage-window, or standing in the doorway, or labouring in her little
garden, or coming forth along the pathway that led townward, and,
discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would scamper off with a
strange contagious fear.
Lonely as was Hester's situation, and without a friend on earth who
dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She
possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded comparatively
little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her thriving infant and
herself. It was the art, then, as now, almost the only one within a
woman's grasp - of needle-work. She bore on her breast, in the curiously
embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill, of
which the dames of a court might gladly have availed themselves, to add
the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their
fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the sable simplicity that
generally characterised the Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an
infrequent call for the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste
of the age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind,
did not fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had
cast behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense
with.
Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of
magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a new
government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of policy,
marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a
studied magnificence. Deep ruffs, painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously
embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men
assuming the reins of power, and were readily allowed to individuals
dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and
similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too
- whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold
emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the
survivors - there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labour
as Hester Prynne could supply. Baby-linen - for babies then wore robes of
state - afforded still another possibility of toil and emolument.
By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be
termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable
a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even
to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible
circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what
others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which
must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and
fairly equited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with
her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for
ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had been wrought by her
sinful hands. Her needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor;
military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it
decked the baby's little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder
away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single
instance, her skill was called in to embroider the white veil which was to
cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever
relentless vigour with which society frowned upon her sin.
Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the
plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance
for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most
sombre hue, with only that one ornament - the scarlet letter - which it
was her doom to wear. The child's attire, on the other hand, was
distinguished by a fanciful, or, we may rather say, a fantastic ingenuity,
which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm that early began to
develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to have also a
deeper meaning. We may speak further of it hereafter. Except for that
small expenditure in the decoration of her infant, Hester bestowed all her
superfluous means in charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and
who not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time,
which she might readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she
employed in making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there
was an idea of penance in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up
a real sacrifice of enjoyment in devoting so many hours to such rude
handiwork. She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental
characteristic - a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the
exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the
possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive a
pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the
needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode of expressing, and
therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all other joys, she
rejected it as sin. This morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial
matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence,
but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong beneath.
In this matter, 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 moral interests,
yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside,
and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the
household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in
manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible
repugnance. These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides,
seemed to be the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It
was not an age of delicacy; and her position, although she understood it
well, and was in little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before
her vivid self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon
the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have already said, whom she sought out
to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched
forth to succour them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she
entered in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of
bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice,
by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and
sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer's
defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had
schooled herself long and well; and she never responded to these attacks,
save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek,
and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient - a
martyr, indeed but she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in spite of her
forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist
themselves into a curse.
Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the
innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her
by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal.
Clergymen paused in the streets, to address words of exhortation, that
brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful
woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the
Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the
discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had imbibed from
their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman
gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but one only
child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a
distance with shrill cries, and the utterances of a word that had no
distinct purport to their own minds, but was none the less terrible to
her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to
argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it
could have caused her no deeper pang had the leaves of the trees whispered
the dark story among themselves - had the summer breeze murmured about it
- had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud! Another peculiar torture was
felt in the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the
scarlet letter and none ever failed to do so - they branded it afresh in
Hester's soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet always
did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then, again, an
accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of
familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne
had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the
spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more
sensitive with daily torture.
But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she
felt an eye - a human eye - upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to
give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next
instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain; for,
in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. (Had Hester sinned alone?)
Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer
moral and intellectual fibre would have been still more so, by the strange
and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with those lonely
footsteps, in the little world with which she was outwardly connected, it
now and then appeared to Hester - if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless
too potent to be resisted - she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet
letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet
could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the
hidden sin in other hearts. She was terrorstricken 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.
PEARL
We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant that little creature,
whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a
lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty
passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the
growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and the
intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of
this child! Her Pearl - for so had Hester called her; not as a name
expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white,
unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she
named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price - purchased with all she
had - her mother's only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked this
woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous
efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like
herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished,
had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonoured
bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of
mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven! Yet these thoughts
affected Hester Prynne less with hope than apprehension. She knew that her
deed had been evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result
would be good. Day after day she looked fearfully into the child's
expanding nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity
that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being.
Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its
vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the
infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to have been
left there to be the plaything of the angels after the world's first
parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not
invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple,
always impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely
became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds. Her mother,
with a morbid purpose that may be better understood hereafter, had bought
the richest tissues that could be procured, and allowed her imaginative
faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the dresses
which the child wore before the public eye. So magnificent was the small
figure when thus arrayed, and such was the splendour of Pearl's own proper
beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a
paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her
on the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with
the child's rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl's
aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child
there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the
wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of an
infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of passion, a
certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of her changes,
she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to be herself - it
would have been no longer Pearl!
This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to
possess depth, too, as well as variety; but - or else Hester's fears
deceived her - it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which
she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her
existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose
elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or
with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety
and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered. Hester could
only account for the child's character - and even then most vaguely and
imperfectly - by recalling what she herself had been during that momentous
period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual world, and her
bodily frame from its material of earth. The mother's impassioned state
had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant
the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they
had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black
shadow, and the untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all,
the warfare of Hester's spirit at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She
could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her
temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency
that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning
radiance of a young child's disposition, but, later in the day of earthly
existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.
The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid
kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of
the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the
way of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the
growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne, nevertheless,
the loving mother of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the side
of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes,
she early sought to impose a tender but strict control over the infant
immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task was beyond her
skill. after testing both smiles and frowns, and proving that neither mode
of treatment possessed any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately
compelled to stand aside and permit the child to be swayed by her own
impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while
it lasted. As to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her
mind or heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in
accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while Pearl
was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that
warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist, persuade or
plead.
It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes
so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that
Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a
human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its
fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit
away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild,
bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and
intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might
vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes we
know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the
child - to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably began
- to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and earnest kisses -
not so much from overflowing love as to assure herself that Pearl was
flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when she was
caught, though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful
than before.
Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often
came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so dear,
and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears.
Then, perhaps - for there was no foreseeing how it might affect her -
Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and harden her small
features into a stern, unsympathising look of discontent. Not seldom she
would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and
unintelligent of human sorrow. Or - but this more rarely happened - she
would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out her love for her mother
in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart by
breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty
tenderness: it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these
matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some
irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the
master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible
intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the
placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet,
sad, delicious happiness; until - perhaps with that perverse expression
glimmering from beneath her opening lids - little Pearl awoke!
How soon - with what strange rapidity, indeed did Pearl arrive at an
age that was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother's ever-ready
smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would it have been
could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with
the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled
her own darling's tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of
sportive children. But this could never be. Pearl was a born outcast of
the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no
right among christened infants. Nothing was more remarkable than the
instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness:
the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her: the whole
peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children. Never
since her release from prison had Hester met the public gaze without her.
In all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there: first as the babe
in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother,
holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate
of three or four footsteps to one of Hester's. She saw the children of the
settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic
thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the Puritanic
nurture would permit! playing at going to church, perchance, or at
scourging Quakers, or taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or
scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and
gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she
would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they
sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath,
snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent
exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the
sound of a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue.
The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant
brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish,
unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child,
and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled
them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with
the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom.
These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value, and even comfort
for the mother; because there was at least an intelligible earnestness in
the mood, instead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the
child's manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here,
again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All
this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right, out of
Hester's heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of
seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be
perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne
before Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the
softening influences of maternity.
At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted not a
wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth from
her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects,
as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest
materials - a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower - were the puppets of
Pearl's witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became
spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner
world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary personages, old
and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged, black, and solemn, and
flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed
little transformation to figure as Puritan elders the ugliest weeds of the
garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most
unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she
threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting' up and
dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity - soon sinking down,
as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life - and succeeded by
other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the
phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the
fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a
little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties;
except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon
the visionary throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile
feelings with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her own
heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing
broadcast the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies,
against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad - then what
depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause - to
observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world,
and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause
in the contest that must ensue.
Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees,
and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which
made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a groan - "O Father in Heaven
- if Thou art still my Father - what is this being which I have brought
into the world?" And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware through
some more subtile channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn her
vivid and beautiful little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like
intelligence, and resume her play.
One peculiarity of the child's deportment remains yet to be told. The
very first thing which she had noticed in her life, was - what? - not the
mother's smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint,
embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards, and
with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile. By no means! But
that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware was - shall we say
it? - the scarlet letter on Hester's bosom! One day, as her mother stooped
over the cradle, the infant's eyes had been caught by the glimmering of
the gold embroidery about the letter; and putting up her little hand she
grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam, that
gave her face the look of a much older child. Then, gasping for breath,
did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavouring to
tear it away, so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent
touch of Pearl's baby-hand. Again, as if her mother's agonised gesture
were meant only to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her
eyes, and smile. From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester
had never felt a moment's safety: not a moment's calm enjoyment of her.
Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl's gaze might
never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it would
come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden death, and always with that
peculiar smile and odd expression of the eyes.
Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes while
Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are food of doing;
and suddenly for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered
with unaccountable delusions she fancied that she beheld, not her own
miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl's
eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the
semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a
smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit
possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery. Many a
time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less vividly, by the same
illusion.
In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after Pearl grew big
enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild
flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother's bosom; dancing up
and down like a little elf whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester's
first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But
whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her penance might
best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse,
and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl's wild eyes.
Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably hitting the mark, and
covering the mother's breast with hurts for which she could find no balm
in this world, nor knew how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being
all expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little
laughing image of a fiend peeping out - or, whether it peeped or no, her
mother so imagined it - from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.
"Child, what art thou?" cried the mother.
"Oh, I am your little Pearl!" answered the child.
But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down
with the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might
be to fly up the chimney.
"Art thou my child, in very truth?" asked Hester.
Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment,
with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl's wonderful
intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not acquainted
with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now reveal herself.
"Yes; I am little Pearl!" repeated the child, continuing her antics.
"Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!" said the mother
half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came
over her in the midst of her deepest suffering. "Tell me, then, what thou
art, and who sent thee hither?"
"Tell me, mother!" said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester,
and pressing herself close to her knees. "Do thou tell me!"
"Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!" answered Hester Prynne.
But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness
of the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because
an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger and touched
the scarlet letter.
"He did not send me!" cried she, positively. "I have no Heavenly
Father!"
"Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!" answered the mother.
suppressing a groan. "He sent us all into the world. He sent even me, thy
mother. Then, much more thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish child,
whence didst thou come?"
"Tell me! Tell me!" repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing
and capering about the floor. "It is thou that must tell me!"
But Hester could not resolve the query, using herself in a dismal
labyrinth of doubt. She remembered - betwixt a smile and a shudder - the
talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly elsewhere for
the child's paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given
out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring: such as, ever since old
Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of
their mother's sin, and to promote some foul and wicked purpose. Luther,
according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a brat of that
hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this inauspicious
origin was assigned among the New England Puritans.
THE GOVERNOR'S HALL
Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion of Governor Bellingham,
with a pair of gloves which she had fringed and embroidered to his order,
and which were to be worn on some great occasion of state; for, though the
chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler to descend a
step or two from the highest rank, he still held an honourable and
influential place among the colonial magistracy.
Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of
embroidered gloves, impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview
with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the
settlement. It had reached her ears that there was a design on the part of
some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of
principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her child. On the
supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin, these good
people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in the mother's
soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from her path. If the
child, on the other hand, were really capable of moral and religious
growth, and possessed the elements of ultimate salvation, then, surely, it
would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these advantages by being
transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne's. Among
those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to be one of
the most busy. It may appear singular, and, indeed, not a little
ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which in later days would have
been referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the select men of the
town, should then have been a question publicly discussed, and on which
statesmen of eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity,
however, matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less
intrinsic weight than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely
mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The
period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a
dispute concerning the right of property in a pig not only caused a fierce
and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in
an important modification of the framework itself of the legislature.
Full of concern, therefore - but so conscious of her own right that
it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on the one side,
and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the other -
Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl, of
course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly along by
her mother's side, and, constantly in motion from morn till sunset, could
have accomplished a much longer journey than that before her. Often,
nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to be taken
up in arms; but was soon as imperious to he let down again, and frisked
onward before Hester the grassy pathway, with many a harmless trip and
tumble. We have spoken of Pearl's rich and luxuriant beauty - a beauty
that shone with deep and vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes possessing
intensity both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy
brown, and which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was
fire in her and throughout her: she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of
a passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child's garb, had
allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play,
arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly
embroidered in fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength
of colouring, which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a
fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the
very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth.
But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the
child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the
beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her
bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter
endowed with life! The mother herself - as if the red ignominy were so
deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its form -
had carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many hours of morbid
ingenuity to create an analogy between the object of her affection and the
emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl was the one as well
as the other; and only in consequence of that identity had Hester
contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their player what passed for play
with those sombre little urchins - and spoke gravely one to another
"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and of a
truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along
by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!"
But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her
foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening gestures,
suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to
flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence
- the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment - whose
mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation. She screamed and
shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which, doubtless, caused
the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The victory
accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked up,
smiling, into her face.
Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor
Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which
there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns now
moss - grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many
sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have
happened and passed away within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there
was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the
cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human
habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed, a very
cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which
fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that, when the
sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and
sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful.
The brilliancy might have be fitted Aladdin's palace rather than the
mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with
strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the
quaint taste of the age which had been drawn in the stucco, when newly
laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the admiration of after
times.
Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house began to caper and
dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of sunshine should
be stripped off its front, and given her to play with.
"No, my little Pearl!" said her mother; "thou must gather thine own
sunshine. I have none to give thee!"
They approached the door, which was of an arched form, and flanked on
each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of which
were lattice-windows, the wooden shutters to close over them at need.
Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne gave a
summons, which was answered by one of the Governor's bond servant - a
free-born Englishman, but now a seven years' slave. During that term he
was to be the property of his master, and as much a commodity of bargain
and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf wore the customary garb of
serving-men at that period, and long before, in the old hereditary halls
of England, "Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?" Inquired
Hester.
"Yea, forsooth," replied the bond-servant, staring with wide-open
eyes at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he
had never before seen. "Yea, his honourable worship is within. But he hath
a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see his
worship now. "
"Nevertheless, I will enter," answered Hester Prynne; and the
bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and the
glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land,
offered no opposition.
So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of
entrance. With many variations, suggested by the nature of his building
materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode of social life,
Governor Bellingham had planned his new habitation after the residences of
gentlemen of fair estate in his native land. Here, then, was a wide and
reasonably lofty hall, extending through the whole depth of the house, and
forming a medium of general communication, more or less directly, with all
the other apartments. At one extremity, this spacious room was lighted by
the windows of the two towers, which formed a small recess on either side
of the portal. At the other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it
was more powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall windows which
we read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep and cushion
seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles
of England, or other such substantial literature; even as, in our own
days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre table, to be turned over by
the casual guest. The furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous
chairs, the backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken
flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste, the whole being of the
Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms, transferred hither
from the Governor's paternal home. On the table - in token that the
sentiment of old English hospitality had not been left behind - stood a
large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl peeped
into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a recent draught of
ale.
On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of
the Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their breasts, and others with
stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterised by the sternness
and severity which old portraits so invariably put on, as if they were the
ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing
with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of
living men.
At about the centre of the oaken panels that lined the hall was
suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic, but
of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured by a skilful
armourer in London, the same year in which Governor Bellingham came over
to New England. There was a steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget and
greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all, and
especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to glow with
white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about upon the
floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show, but had been
worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and draining 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 exigenties of this new country
had transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a statesman
and ruler.
Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as
she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house, spent some
time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate.
"Mother," cried she, "I see you here. Look! look!"
Hester looked by way of humouring the child; and she saw that, owing
to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was
represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly
the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed
absolutely hidden behind it. Pearl pointed upwards also, at a similar
picture in the head-piece; smiling at her mother, with the elfish
intelligence that was so familiar an expression on her small physiognomy.
That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in the mirror, with
so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made Hester Prynne feel
as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who was
seeking to mould itself into Pearl's shape.
"Come along, Pearl," said she, drawing her away, "Come and look into
this fair garden. It may be we shall see flowers there; more beautiful
ones than we find in the woods. "
Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of the
hall, and looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted with
closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt at
shrubbery. But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished as
hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard
soil, and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English
taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a
pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the intervening
space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath the
hall window, as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable
gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth would offer him. There
were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the
descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first
settler of the peninsula; that half mythological personage who rides
through our early annals, seated on the back of a bull.
Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would
not be pacified.
"Hush, child - hush!" said her mother, earnestly. "Do not cry, dear
little Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and
gentlemen along with him. "
In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue, a number of persons
were seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her
mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became
silent, not from any motion of obedience, but because the quick and mobile
curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of those new
personages.
THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER
Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap - such as elderly
gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their domestic privacy -
walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and
expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an
elaborate ruff, beneath his grey beard, in the antiquated fashion of King
James's reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of John the
Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and
severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in
keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he had
evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error to
suppose that our great forefathers - though accustomed to speak and think
of human existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and though
unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest of duty -
made it a matter of conscience to reject such means of comfort, or even
luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp. This creed was never taught, for
instance, by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose beard, white as a
snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham's shoulders, while its
wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet be naturalised in the
New England climate, and that purple grapes might possibly be compelled to
flourish against the sunny garden-wall. The old clergyman, nurtured at the
rich bosom of the English Church, had a long established and legitimate
taste for all good and comfortable things, and however stern he might show
himself in the pulpit, or in his public reproof of such transgressions as
that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial benevolence of his private life
had won him warmer affection than was accorded to any of his professional
contemporaries.
Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests - one, the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as having taken a
brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne's disgrace; and, in
close companionship with him, old Roger Chillingworth, a person of great
skill in physic, who for two or three years past had been settled in the
town. It was understood that this learned man was the physician as well as
friend of the young minister, whose health had severely suffered of late
by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the labours and duties of the
pastoral relation.
The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps,
and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall window, found himself
close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne,
and partially concealed her.
"What have we here?" said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise
at the scarlet little figure before him. "MI profess I have never seen the
like since my days of vanity, in old King James's time, when I was wont to
esteem it a high favour to be admitted to a court mask! There used to be a
swarm of these small apparitions in holiday time, and we called them
children of the Lord of Misrule. But how gat such a guest into my hall?"
"Ay, indeed!" cried good old Mr. Wilson. "What little bird of scarlet
plumage may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures when the sun
has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the
golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land.
Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen
thee in this strange fashion? Art thou a Christian child - ha? Dost know
thy catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or fairies whom we
thought to have left behind us, with other relics of Papistry, in merry
old England?"
"I am mother's child," answered the scarlet vision, "and my name is
Pearl!"
"Pearl? - Ruby, rather - or Coral! - or Red Rose, at the very least,
judging from thy hue!" responded the old minister, putting forth his hand
in a vain attempt to pat little Pearl on the cheek. "But where is this
mother of thine? Ah! I see," he added; and, turning to Governor
Bellingham, whispered, "This is the selfsame child of whom we have held
speech together; and behold here the unhappy woman, Hester Prynne, her
mother!"
"Sayest thou so?" cried the Governor. "Nay, we might have judged that
such a child's mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type of
her of Babylon! But she comes at a good time, and we will look into this
matter forthwith. "
Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall,
followed by his three guests.
"Hester Prynne," said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on the
wearer of the scarlet letter, "there hath been much question concerning
thee of late. The point hath been weightily discussed, whether we, that
are of authority and influence, do well discharge our consciences by
trusting an immortal soul, such as there is in yonder child, to the
guidance of one who hath stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls of this
world. Speak thou, the child's own mother! Were it not, thinkest thou, for
thy little one's temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken out of thy
charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly, and instructed in the
truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for the child in this kind?
"
"I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!" answered
Hester Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.
"Woman, it is thy badge of shame!" replied the stern magistrate. "It
is because of the stain which that letter indicates that we would transfer
thy child to other hands. "
"Nevertheless," said the mother, calmly, though growing more pale,
"this badge hath taught me - it daily teaches me - it is teaching me at
this moment - lessons whereof my child may be the wiser and better, albeit
they can profit nothing to myself. "
"We will judge warily," said Bellingham, "and look well what we are
about to do. Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this Pearl - since
that is her name - and see whether she hath had such Christian nurture as
befits a child of her age. "
The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair and made an effort to
draw Pearl betwixt his knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the touch or
familiarity of any but her mother, escaped through the open window, and
stood on the upper step, looking like a wild tropical bird of rich
plumage, ready to take flight into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not a little
astonished at this outbreak - for he was a grandfatherly sort of
personage, and usually a vast favourite with children - essayed, however,
to proceed with the examination.
"Pearl," said he, with great solemnity, "thou must take heed to
instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom the
pearl of great price. Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?"
Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the
daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child about
her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of those truths which the
human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager
interest. Pearl, therefore - so large were the attainments of her three
years' lifetime - could have borne a fair examination in the New England
Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms, although
unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works.
But that perversity, which all children have more or less of, and of which
little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune moment,
took thorough possession of her, and closed her lips, or impelled her to
speak words amiss. After putting her finger in her mouth, with many
ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson's question, the child
finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked
by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison-door.
This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the
Governor's red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window, together with
her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in coming
hither.
Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered
something in the young clergyman's ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of
skill, and even then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was startled
to perceive what a change had come over his features - how much uglier
they were, how his dark complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his
figure more misshapen - since the days when she had familiarly known him.
She met his eyes for an instant, but was immediately constrained to give
all her attention to the scene now going forward.
"This is awful!" cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the
astonishment into which Pearl's response had thrown him. "Here is a child
of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her! Without question,
she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present depravity, and
future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, we need inquire no further. "
Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms,
confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression.
Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep
her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights against
the world, and was ready to defend them to the death.
"God gave me the child!" cried she. "He gave her in requital of all
things else which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness - she is my
torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me,
too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved,
and so endowed with a millionfold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye
shall not take her! I will die first!"
"My poor woman," said the not unkind old minister, "the child shall
be well cared for - far better than thou canst do for it."
"God gave her into my keeping!" repeated Hester Prynne, raising her
voice almost to a shriek. "I will not give her up!" And here by a sudden
impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to
this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct her eyes.
"Speak thou for me!" cried she. "Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of
my soul, and knowest me better than these men can. I will not lose the
child! Speak for me! Thou knowest - for thou hast sympathies which these
men lack - thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother's
rights, and how much the stronger they are when that mother has but her
child and the scarlet letter! Look thou to it! I will not lose the child!
Look to it!"
At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester
Prynne's situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the young
minister at once came forward, pale, and holding his hand over his heart,
as was his custom whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament was thrown
into agitation. He looked now more careworn and emaciated than as we
described him at the scene of Hester's public ignominy; and whether it
were his failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his large dark
eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy depth.
"There is truth in what she says," began the minister, with a voice
sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall re-echoed and the
hollow armour rang with it - "truth in what Hester says, and in the
feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an
instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements - both seemingly so
peculiar - which no other mortal being can possess. And, moreover, is
there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this
mother and this child?"
"Ay - how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?" interrupted the Governor.
"Make that plain, I pray you!"
"It must be even so," resumed the minister. "For, if we deem it
otherwise, do we not hereby say that the Heavenly Father, the creator of
all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin, and made of no account
the distinction between unhallowed lust and holy love? This child of its
father's guilt and its mother's shame has come from the hand of God, to
work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so earnestly and with such
bitterness of spirit the right to keep her. It was meant for a blessing -
for the one blessing of her life! It was meant, doubtless, the mother
herself hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture to be felt at many
an unthought-of moment; a pang, a sting, an ever-recurring agony, in the
midst of a troubled joy! Hath she not expressed this thought in the garb
of the poor child, so forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears
her bosom?"
"Well said again!" cried good Mr. Wilson. "l feared the woman had no
better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!"
"Oh, not so! - not so!" continued Mr. Dimmesdale. "She recognises,
believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought in the existence of
that child. And may she feel, too - what, methinks, is the very truth -
that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul
alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan
might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is good for this poor,
sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of
eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care - to be trained up by her to
righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of her fall, but yet to
teach her, as if it were by the Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she
bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parents thither!
Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester
Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let us leave
them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!"
"You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness," said old Roger
Chillingworth, smiling at him.
"And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken,"
added the Rev. Mr. Wilson.
"What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham? Hath he not pleaded well
for the poor woman?"
"Indeed hath he," answered the magistrate; "and hath adduced such
arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so long,
at least, as there shall be no further scandal in the woman. Care must be
had nevertheless, to put the child to due and stated examination in the
catechism, at thy hands or Master Dimmesdale's. Moreover, at a proper
season, the tithing-men must take heed that she go both to school and to
meeting. "
The young minister, on ceasing to speak had withdrawn a few steps
from the group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the heavy
folds of the window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure, which the
sunlight cast upon the floor, was tremulous with the vehemence of his
appeal. Pearl, that wild and flighty little elf stole softly towards him,
and taking his hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek against
it; a caress so tender, and withal so unobtrusive, that her mother, who
was looking on, asked herself - "Is that my Pearl?" Yet she knew that
there was love in the child's heart, although it mostly revealed itself in
passion, and hardly twice in her lifetime had been softened by such
gentleness as now. The minister - for, save the long-sought regards of
woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of childish preference,
accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to
imply in us something truly worthy to be loved - the minister looked
round, laid his hand on the child's head, hesitated an instant, and then
kissed her brow. Little Pearl's unwonted mood of sentiment lasted no
longer; she laughed, and went capering down the hall so airily, that old
Mr. Wilson raised a question whether even her tiptoes touched the floor.
"The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess," said he to
Mr. Dimmesdale. "She needs no old woman's broomstick to fly withal!"
"A strange child!" remarked old Roger Chillingworth. "It is easy to
see the mother's part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher's research,
think ye, gentlemen, to analyse that child's nature, and, from it make a
mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father?"
"Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clue of
profane philosophy," said Mr. Wilson. "Better to fast and pray upon it;
and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless
Providence reveal it of its own accord Thereby, every good Christian man
hath a title to show a father's kindness towards the poor, deserted babe.
"
The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with
Pearl, departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it is averred
that the lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and forth into the
sunny day was thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins, Governor Bellingham's
bitter-tempered sister, and the same who, a few years later, was executed
as a witch.
"Hist, hist!" said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to
cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. "Wilt thou go with
us to-night? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I well-nigh
promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one. "
"Make my excuse to him, so please you!" answered Hester, with a
triumphant smile. "I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little
Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee
into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that
with mine own blood!"
"We shall have thee there anon!" said the witch-lady, frowning, as
she drew back her head.
But here - if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and
Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable - was already an
illustration of the young minister's argument against sundering the
relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus
early had the child saved her from Satan's snare.
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 arid proportion with the intimacy and sacredness of
their previous relationship. Then why - since the choice was with himself
- should the individual, whose connexion with the fallen woman had been
the most intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate his
claim to an inheritance so little desirable? He resolved not to be
pilloried beside her on her pedestal of shame. Unknown to all but Hester
Prynne, and possessing the lock and key of her silence, he chose to
withdraw his name from the roll of mankind, and, as regarded his former
ties and interest, to vanish out of life as completely as if he indeed lay
at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumour had long ago consigned him.
This purpose once effected, new interests would immediately spring up, and
likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of force
enough to engage the full strength of his faculties.
In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan
town as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning
and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common measure. As his
studies, at a previous period of his life, had made him extensively
acquainted with the medical science of the day, it was as a physician that
he presented himself and as such was cordially received. Skilful men, of
the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in the
colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the religious zeal that
brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In their researches into the
human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtle faculties of such
men were materialised, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence
amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve
art enough to comprise all of life within itself. At all events, the
health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to do with
it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deacon and
apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in
his favour than any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma.
The only surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that
noble art with the daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a
professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon
manifested his familiarity with the ponderous and imposing machinery of
antique physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched
and heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the
proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity,
moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs
and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients that these simple
medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a
share of his own confidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many
learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.
This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded at least the outward
forms of a religious life; and early after his arrival, had chosen for his
spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine, whose
scholar-like renown still lived in Oxford, was considered by his more
fervent admirers as little less than a heavenly ordained apostle,
destined, should he live and labour for the ordinary term of life, to do
as great deeds, for the now feeble New England Church, as the early
Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith. About this
period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun to fail.
By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the young
minister's cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study,
his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and more than all, to the
fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep
the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his
spiritual lamp. Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to
die, it was cause enough that the world was not worthy to be any longer
trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with characteristic
humility, avowed his belief that if Providence should see fit to remove
him, it would be because of his own unworthiness to perform its humblest
mission here on earth. With all this difference of opinion as to the cause
of his decline, there could be no question of the fact. His form grew
emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a certain
melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on any slight
alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart with first
a flush and then a paleness, indicative of pain.
Such was the young clergyman's condition, and so imminent the
prospect that his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when
Roger Chillingworth made his advent to the town. His first entry on the
scene, few people could tell whence, dropping down as it were out of the
sky or starting from the nether earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was
easily heightened to the miraculous. He was now known to be a man of
skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs and the blossoms of
wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the forest-trees
like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was valueless to common
eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby and other famous men -
whose scientific attainments were esteemed hardly less than supernatural -
as having been his correspondents or associates. Why, with such rank in
the learned world, had he come hither? What, could he, whose sphere was in
great cities, be seeking in the wilderness? In answer to this query, a
rumour gained ground - and however absurd, was entertained by some very
sensible people - that Heaven had wrought an absolute miracle, by
transporting an eminent Doctor of Physic from a German university bodily
through the air and setting him down at the door of Mr. Dimmesdale's
study! Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven promotes
its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what is called
miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a providential hand in
Roger Chillingworth's so opportune arrival.
This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician
ever manifested in the young clergyman; he attached himself to him as a
parishioner, and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from his
naturally reserved sensibility. He expressed great alarm at his pastor's
state of health, but was anxious to attempt the cure, and, if early
undertaken, seemed not despondent of a favourable result. The elders, the
deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens of Mr.
Dimmesdale's flock, were alike importunate that he should make trial of
the physician's frankly offered skill. Mr. Dimmesdale gently repelled
their entreaties.
"I need no medicine," said he.
But how could the young minister say so, when, with every successive
Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous
than before - when it had now become a constant habit, rather than a
casual gesture, to press his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his
labours? Did he wish to die? These questions were solemnly propounded to
Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder ministers of Boston, and the deacons of his
church, who, to use their own phrase, "dealt with him," on the sin of
rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly held out. He listened in
silence, and finally promised to confer with the physician.
"Were it God's will," said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in
fulfilment of this pledge, he requested old Roger Chillingworth's
professional advice, "I could be well content that my labours, and my
sorrows, and my sins, and my pains, should shortly end with me, and what
is earthly of them be buried in my grave, and the spiritual go with me to
my eternal state, rather than that you should put your skill to the proof
in my behalf. "
"Ah," replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness, which,
whether imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, "it is thus that a
young clergyman is apt to speak. Youthful men, not having taken a deep
root, give up their hold of life so easily! And saintly men, who walk with
God on earth, would fain be away, to walk with him on the golden pavements
of the New Jerusalem. "
"Nay," rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his heart,
with a flush of pain flitting over his brow, "were I worthier to walk
there, I could be better content to toil here. "
"Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly," said the physician.
In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the
medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease
interested the physician, but he was strongly moved to look into the
character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so different in
age, came gradually to spend much time together. For the sake of the
minister's health, and to enable the leech to gather plants with healing
balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest;
mingling various walks with the splash and murmur of the waves, and the
solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one was the guest
of the other in his place of study and retirement There was a fascination
for the minister in the company of the man of science, in whom he
recognised an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or scope;
together with a range and freedom of ideas, that he would have vainly
looked for among the members of his own profession. In truth, he was
startled, if not shocked, to find this attribute in the physician. Mr.
Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential
sentiment largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself
powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its passage continually
deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of society would he have been
what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential to his
peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it
confined him within its iron framework. Not the less, however, though with
a tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the
universe through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with
which he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open,
admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his
life was wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day-beams,
and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales from books.
But the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed with comfort. So
the minister, and the physician with him, withdrew again within the limits
of what their Church defined as orthodox.
Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, both as
he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the
range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown amidst
other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to
the surface of his character. He deemed it essential, it would seem, to
know the man, before attempting to do him good. Wherever there is a heart
and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the
peculiarities of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were
so active, and sensibility so intense, that the bodily infirmity would be
likely to have its groundwork there. So Roger Chillingworth - the man of
skill, the kind and friendly physician - strove to go deep into his
patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his
recollections, and probing everything with a cautious touch, like a
treasure-seeker in a dark cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator,
who has opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill to
follow it up. A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the
intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a
nameless something more let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive
egotism, nor disagreeable prominent characteristics of his own; if he have
the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have spoken
what he imagines himself only to have thought if such revelations be
received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by an uttered
sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word
to indicate that all is understood; if to these qualifications of a
confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognised character as
a physician; - then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the
sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream,
bringing all its mysteries into the daylight.
Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes above
enumerated. Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have
said, grew up between these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a
field as the whole sphere of human thought and study to meet upon; they
discussed every topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and
private character; they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed
personal to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied
must exist there, ever stole out of the minister's consciousness into his
companion's ear. The latter had his suspicions, indeed, that even the
nature of Mr.
Dimmesdale's bodily disease had never fairly been revealed to him. It
was a strange reserve!
After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr.
Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were lodged in the
same house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister's life-tide might
pass under the eye of his anxious and attached physician. There was much
joy throughout the town when this greatly desirable object was attained.
It was held to be the best possible measure for the young clergyman's
welfare; unless, indeed, as often urged by such as felt authorised to do
so, he had selected some one of the many blooming damsels, spiritually
devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. This latter step, however,
there was no present prospect that Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed
upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly
celibacy were one of his articles of Church discipline. Doomed by his own
choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his
unsavoury morsel always at another's board, and endure the life-long chill
which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's
fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent old
physician, with his concord of paternal and reverential love for the young
pastor, was the very man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of
his voice.
The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good
social rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on which
the venerable structure of King's Chapel has since been built. It the
graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson's homefield, on one side, and so was
well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited to their respective
employments, in both minister and man of physic. The motherly care of the
good widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front apartment, with a sunny
exposure, and heavy window-curtains, to create a noontide shadow when
desirable. The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to be from the
Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing the Scriptural story of
David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet, in colours still unfaded, but
which made the fair woman of the scene almost as grimly picturesque as the
woe-denouncing seer. Here the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich
with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and
monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they
vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often to
avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger Chillingworth
arranged his study and laboratory: not such as a modern man of science
would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling
apparatus and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the
practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such
commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves
down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to
the other, and bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one
another's business.
And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's best discerning friends, as we
have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence had
done all this for the purpose - besought in so many public and domestic
and secret prayers - of restoring the young minister to health. But, it
must now be said, another portion of the community had latterly begun to
take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the
mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see
with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it
forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and
warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so
unerring as to possess the character of truth supernaturally revealed. The
people, in the case of which we speak, could justify its prejudice against
Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious refutation.
There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who had been a citizen of
London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder, now some thirty
years agone; he testified to having seen the physician, under some other
name, which the narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with
Dr. Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the affair of
Overbury. Two or three individuals hinted that the man of skill, during
his Indian captivity, had enlarged his medical attainments by joining in
the incantations of the savage priests, who were universally acknowledged
to be powerful enchanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by
their skill in the black art. A large number - and many of these were
persons of such sober sense and practical observation that their opinions
would have been valuable in other matters - affirmed that Roger
Chillingworth's aspect had undergone a remarkable change while he had
dwelt in town, and especially since his abode with Mr. Dimmesdale. At
first, his expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like. Now there
was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously
noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight the oftener they
looked upon him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his laboratory
had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed with infernal fuel;
and so, as might be expected, his visage was getting sooty with the smoke.
To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion that
the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of special
sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by Satan
himself or Satan's emissary, in the guise of old Roger Chillingworth. This
diabolical agent had the Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into
the clergyman's intimacy, and plot against his soul. No sensible man, it
was confessed, could doubt on which side the victory would turn. The
people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see the minister come forth out
of the conflict transfigured with the glory which he would unquestionably
win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to think of the perchance mortal
agony through which he must struggle towards his triumph.
Alas! to judge from the gloom and terror in the depth of the poor
minister's eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory anything but
secure.
THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT
Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in
temperament, kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in all
his relations with the world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an
investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a
judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more
than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of
human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself. But, as he proceeded, a
terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity,
seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again until he
had done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like
a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a
grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's
bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. Alas, for
his own soul, if these were what he sought!
Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue
and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of
those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful doorway in
the hillside, and quivered on the pilgrim's face. The soil where this dark
miner was working bad perchance shown indications that encouraged him.
"This man," said he, at one such moment, to himself, "pure as they
deem him - all spiritual as he seems - hath inherited a strong animal
nature from his father or his mother. Let us dig a little further in the
direction of this vein!"
Then after long search into the minister's dim interior, and turning
over many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the
welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural piety,
strengthened by thought and study, and illuminated by revelation - all of
which invaluable gold was perhaps no better than rubbish to the seeker -
he would turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another
point. He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as
wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a man lies only half
asleep - or, it may be, broad awake - with purpose to steal the very
treasure which this man guards as the apple of his eye. In spite of his
premeditated carefulness, the floor would now and then creak; his garments
would rustle; the shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would
be thrown across his victim. In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose
sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual intuition,
would become vaguely aware that something inimical to his peace had thrust
itself into relation with him. But Old Roger Chillingworth, too, had
perceptions that were almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his
startled eyes towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful,
sympathising, but never intrusive friend.
Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual's
character more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts
are liable, had not rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no
man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter
actually appeared. He therefore still kept up a familiar intercourse with
him, daily receiving he old physician in his study, or visiting the
laboratory, and, for recreation's sake, watching the processes by which
weeds were converted into drugs of potency.
One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill
of the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he talked with
Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of unsightly
plants.
"Where," asked he, with a look askance at them - for it was the
clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straight forth
at any object, whether human or inanimate" where, my kind doctor, did you
gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?"
"Even in the graveyard here at hand," answered the physician,
continuing his employment. "They are new to me. I found them growing on a
grave, which bore no tombstone, no other memorial of the dead man, save
these ugly weeds, that have taken upon themselves to keep him in
remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some
hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to
confess during his lifetime. "
"Perchance," said Mr. Dimmesdale, "he earnestly desired it, but could
not. "
"And wherefore?" rejoined the physician.
"Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for
the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a
buried heart, to make manifest, an outspoken crime?"
"That, good sir, is but a phantasy of yours," replied the minister.
"There can be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy,
to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets
that may be buried in the human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of
such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden
things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy Writ, as
to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be
made, is intended as a part of the retribution. That, surely, were a
shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly err, are meant
merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings,
who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life
made plain. A knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest
solution of that problem. And, I conceive moreover, that the hearts
holding such miserable secrets as you speak of, will yield them up, at
that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable. "
"Then why not reveal it here?" asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing
quietly aside at the minister. "Why should not the guilty ones sooner
avail themselves of this unutterable solace?"
"They mostly do," said the clergyman, griping hard at his breast, as
if afflicted with an importunate throb of pain. "Many, many a poor soul
hath given its confidence to me, not only on the death-bed, but while
strong in life, and fair in reputation. And ever, after such an
outpouring, oh, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren!
even as in one who at last draws free air, after a long stifling with his
own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why should a wretched man -
guilty, we will say, of murder - prefer to keep the dead corpse buried in
his own heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the universe
take care of it!"
"Yet some men bury their secrets thus," observed the calm physician.
"True; there are such men," answered Mr. Dimmesdale. "But not to
suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by the
very constitution of their nature. Or - can we not suppose it? - guilty as
they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God's glory and man's
welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the
view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no
evil of the past be redeemed by better service. So, to their own
unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking
pure as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are all speckled and spotted
with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves. "
"These men deceive themselves," said Roger Chillingworth, with
somewhat more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with his
forefinger. "They fear to take up the shame that rightfully belongs to
them. Their love for man, their zeal for God's service - these holy
impulses may or may not coexist in their hearts with the evil inmates to
which their guilt has unbarred the door, and which must needs propagate a
hellish breed within them. But, if they seek to glorify God, let them not
lift heavenward their unclean hands! If they would serve their fellowmen,
let them do it by making manifest the power and reality of conscience, in
constraining them to penitential self-abasement! Would thou have me to
believe, O wise and pious friend, that a false show can be better - can be
more for God's glory, or man' welfare - than God's own truth? Trust me,
such men deceive themselves!"
"It may be so," said the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a
discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a ready
faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his too
sensitive and nervous temperament. - "But, now, I would ask of my
well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have
profited by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?"
Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild
laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding from the adjacent
burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open window - for it was
summer-time - the minister beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl passing
along the footpath that traversed the enclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful
as the day, but was in one of those moods of perverse merriment which,
whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely out of the sphere of
sympathy or human contact. She now skipped irreverently from one grave to
another; until coming to the broad, flat, armorial tombstone of a departed
worthy - perhaps of Isaac Johnson himself - she began to dance upon it. In
reply to her mother's command and entreaty that she would behave more
decorously, little Pearl paused gather the prickly burrs from a tall
burdock which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she
arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the
maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously
adhered. Hester did not pluck them off.
Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window and smiled
grimly down.
"There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human
ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child's
composition," remarked he, as much to himself as to his companion. "I saw
her, the other day, bespatter the Governor himself with water at the
cattle-trough in Spring Lane. What, in heaven's name, is she? Is the imp
altogether evil? Hath she affections? Hath she any discoverable principle
of being?"
"None, save the freedom of a broken law," answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in
a quiet way, as if he had been discussing the point within himself,
"Whether capable of good, I know not. "
The child probably overheard their voices, for, looking up to the
window with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she
threw one of the prickly burrs at the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive
clergyman shrank, with nervous dread, from the light missile. Detecting
his emotion, Pearl clapped her little hands in the most extravagant
ecstacy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily looked up, and all
these four persons, old and young, regarded one another in silence, till
the child laughed aloud, and shouted - "Come away, mother! Come away, or
yonder old black man will catch you! He hath got hold of the minister
already. Come away, mother or he will catch you! But he cannot catch
little Pearl!"
So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking
fantastically among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature that
had nothing in common with a bygone and buried generation, nor owned
herself akin to it. It was as if she had been made afresh out of new
elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life, and be a
law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a
crime.
"There goes a woman," resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause,
"who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of hidden
sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester Prynne the
less miserable, think you, for that scarlet letter on her breast?"
"I do verily believe it," answered the clergyman. "Nevertheless, I
cannot answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face which I would
gladly have been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it must needs
be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman
Hester is, than to cover it up in his heart. "
There was another pause, and the physician began anew to examine and
arrange the plants which he had gathered.
"You inquired of me, a little time agone," said he, at length, "my
judgment as touching your health. "
"I did," answered the clergyman, "and would gladly learn it. Speak
frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death. "
"Freely then, and plainly," said the physician, still busy with his
plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, "the disorder is a
strange one; not so much in itself nor as outwardly manifested, - in so
far, at least as the symptoms have been laid open to my observation.
Looking daily at you, my good sir, and watching the tokens of your aspect
now for months gone by, I should deem you a man sore sick, it may be, yet
not so sick but that an instructed and watchful physician might well hope
to cure you. But I know not what to say, the disease is what I seem to
know, yet know it not. "
"You speak in riddles, learned sir," said the pale minister, glancing
aside out of the window.
"Then, to speak more plainly," continued the physician, "and I crave
pardon, sir, should it seem to require pardon, for this needful plainness
of my speech. Let me ask as your friend, as one having charge, under
Providence, of your life and physical well being, hath all the operations
of this disorder been fairly laid open and recounted to me?"
"How can you question it?" asked the minister. "Surely it were
child's play to call in a physician and then hide the sore!"
"You would tell me, then, that I know all?" said Roger Chillingworth,
deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated
intelligence, on the minister's face. "Be it so! But again! He to whom
only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but
half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we
look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a
symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Your pardon once again,
good sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence. You, sir, of all men
whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest conjoined, and imbued,
and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.
"
"Then I need ask no further," said the clergyman, somewhat hastily
rising from his chair. "You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the soul!
"
"Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an
unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but standing up and
confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked minister, with his low, dark,
and misshapen figure, - "a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it,
in your spirit hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your
bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your physician heal the bodily
evil? How may this be unless you first lay open to him the wound or
trouble in your soul?"
"No, not to thee! not to an earthly physician!" cried Mr. Dimmesdale,
passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind of
fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. "Not to thee! But, if it be the
soul's disease, then do I commit myself to the one Physician of the soul!
He, if it stand with His good pleasure, can cure, or he can kill. Let Him
do with me as, in His justice and wisdom, He shall see good. But who art
thou, that meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust himself between the
sufferer and his God?"
With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.
"It is as well to have made this step," said Roger Chillingworth to
himself, looking after the minister, with a grave smile. "There is nothing
lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see, now, how passion takes hold
upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As with one passion so
with another. He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master
Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart. "
It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two
companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore. The
young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that the
disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of
temper, which there had been nothing in the physician's words to excuse or
palliate. He marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust
back the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which it was his
duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly sought. With
these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in making the amplest
apologies, and besought his friend still to continue the care which, if
not successful in restoring him to health, had, in all probability, been
the means of prolonging his feeble existence to that hour. Roger
Chillingworth readily assented, and went on with his medical supervision
of the minister; doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always
quitting the patient's apartment, at the close of the professional
interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon his lips. This
expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale's presence, but grew strongly
evident as the physician crossed the threshold.
"A rare case," he muttered. "I must needs look deeper into it. A
strange sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art's sake, I
must search this matter to the bottom. "
It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, noon-day, and entirely unawares, fell into a
deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume
open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in
the somniferous school of literature. The profound depth of the minister's
repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one of those persons
whose sleep ordinarily is as light as fitful, and as easily scared away,
as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an unwonted remoteness,
however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself that he stirred not in
his chair when old Roger Chillingworth, without any extraordinary
precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced directly in front
of his patient, laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the
vestment, that hitherto had always covered it even from the professional
eye.
Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.
After a brief pause, the physician turned away.
But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and honor! 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!
THE INTERIOR OF A HEART
After the incident last described, the intercourse between the
clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was really of
another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger
Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not,
indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread. Calm,
gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth
of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man,
which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever
wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one trusted friend, to whom
should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual
repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All
that guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose great heart would have
pitied and forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless - to him, the
Unforgiving! All that dark treasure to be lavished on the very man, to
whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of vengeance!
The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme
Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less
satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence - using the avenger
and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it
seemed most to punish - had substituted for his black devices A
revelation, he could almost say, had been granted to him. It mattered
little for his object, whether celestial or from what other region. By its
aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr. Dimmesdale, not
merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul of the latter,
seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and
comprehend its every movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator
only, but a chief actor in the poor minister's interior world. He could
play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The
victim was for ever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that
controlled the engine: and the physician knew it well. Would he startle
him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician's wand, up rose a
grisly phantom - up rose a thousand phantoms - in many shapes, of death,
or more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing
with their fingers at his breast!
All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil influence
watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its actual nature.
True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully - even, at times, with horror and
the bitterness of hatred - at the deformed figure of the old physician.
His gestures, his gait, his grizzled beard, his slightest and most
indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments, were odious in the
clergyman's sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a deeper
antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge
to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for such distrust
and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid
spot was infecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his
presentiments to no other cause. He took himself to task for his bad
sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson
that he should have drawn from them, and did his best to root them out.
Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle,
continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man, and thus gave
him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose to which - poor
forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched than his victim - the
avenger had devoted himself.
While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by
some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his
deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant
popularity in his sacred office. He won it indeed, in great part, by his
sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of
experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of
preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life. His
fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed the soberer
reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of them were.
There are scholars among them, who had spent more years in acquiring
abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale
had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in
such solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother. There
were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a
far greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or granite understanding; which,
duly mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a
highly respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical
species. There were others again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties
had been elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient
thought, and etherealised, moreover, by spiritual communications with the
better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced these
holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging to them.
All that they lacked was, the gift that descended upon the chosen
disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem,
not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of
addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.
These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last and rarest
attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly
sought - had they ever dreamed of seeking - to express the highest truths
through the humblest medium of familiar words and images. Their voices
came down, afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they
habitually dwelt.
Not improbably, it was to this latter class of ms that Mr.
Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To the
high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not
the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime
or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down on a
level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice
the angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden
it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of
mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received
their pain into itself and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand
other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive,
but sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them
thus. They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They fancied
him the mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love.
In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was sanctified. The
virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued
with religious sentiment, that they imagined it to be all religion, and
brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable
sacrifice before the altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.
Dimmesdale's frame so feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in
their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward before them, and
enjoined it upon their children that their old bones should be buried
close to their young pastor's holy grave. And all this time, perchance,
when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with
himself whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing
must there be buried!
It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon
all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had
not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then what was he? -
a substance? - or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out from
his own pulpit at the full height of his voice, and tell the people what
he was. "I, whom you behold in these black garments of the priesthood - I,
who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward, taking upon
myself to hold communion in your behalf with the Most High Omniscience -
I, in whose daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch - I, whose
footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track, whereby
the Pilgrims that shall come after me may be guided to the regions of the
blest - I, who have laid the hand of baptism upon your children - I, who
have breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen
sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted - I, your pastor, whom
you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!"
More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a
purpose never to come down its steps until he should have spoken words
like the above. More than once he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the
long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come
burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once - nay, more
than a hundred times - he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had
told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the
vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable
iniquity, and that the only wonder was that they did not see his wretched
body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning wrath of the Almighty!
Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in
their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him down out of the
pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and did but
reverence him the more. They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in
those self-condemning words. "The godly youth!" said they among
themselves. "The saint on earth! Alas! if he discern such sinfulness in
his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or
mine!" The minister well knew - subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he
was! - the light in which his vague confession would be viewed. He had
striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty
conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged
shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken
the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by
the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie,
as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his
miserable self!
His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with the
old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light of the church in
which he had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret closet, under
lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and
Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at
himself the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of that
bitter laugh. It was his custom, too, as it has been that of many other
pious Puritans, to fast - not however, like them, in order to purify the
body, and render it the fitter medium of celestial illumination - but
rigorously, and until his knees trembled beneath him, as an act of
penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter
darkness, sometimes with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own
face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he could throw
upon it. He thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he
tortured, but could not purify himself. In these lengthened vigils, his
brain often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen
doubtfully, and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of
the chamber, or more vividly and close beside him, within the
looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and
mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group
of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more
ethereal as they rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his
white-bearded father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother turning her
face away as she passed by Ghost of a mother - thinnest fantasy of a
mother - methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her
son! And now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had made
so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along little
Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the
scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast.
None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an
effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack
of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in their
nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square,
leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that,
they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which the
poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a life so
false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever
realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the
spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false
- it is impalpable - it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he
himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow,
or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth that continued to give Mr.
Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was the anguish in his inmost
soul, and the undissembled expression of it in his aspect. Had he once
found power to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would have been no
such man!
On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but
forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new
thought had struck him. There might be a moment's peace in it. Attiring
himself with as much care as if it had been for public worship, and
precisely in the same manner, he stole softly down the staircase, undid
the door, and issued forth.
THE MINISTER'S VIGIL
Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually
under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale reached
the spot where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived through her
first hours of public ignominy. The same platform or scaffold, black and
weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of seven long years, and
foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits who had since ascended it,
remained standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house. The minister
went up the steps.
It was an obscure night in early May. An unwearied pall of cloud
muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same
multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained
her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have
discerned no face above the platform nor hardly the outline of a human
shape, in the dark grey of the midnight. But the town was all asleep.
There was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so
pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other risk
than that the dank and chill night air would creep into his frame, and
stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and
cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and
sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen
him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come
hither? Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in
which his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and
wept, while fiends rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been driven
hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and
whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which
invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other
impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man!
what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is
for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it
press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good
purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of
spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which
intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying
guilt and vain repentance.
And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of
expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if
the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right
over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long
been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort
of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry
that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to
another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a
company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a
plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro.
"It is done!" muttered the minister, covering his face with his
hands. "The whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me here!"
But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater
power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town did
not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for
something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches, whose voices,
at that period, were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely
cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air. The clergyman,
therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered his eyes and
looked about him. At one of the chamber-windows of Governor Bellingham's
mansion, which stood at some distance, on the line of another street, he
beheld the appearance of the old magistrate himself with a lamp in his
hand a white night-cap on his head, and a long white gown enveloping his
figure. He looked like a ghost evoked unseasonably from the grave. The cry
had evidently startled him. At another window of the same house, moreover
appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor's sister, also with a lamp,
which even thus far off revealed the expression of her sour and
discontented face. She thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked
anxiously upward Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady
had heard Mr. Dimmesdale's outcry, and interpreted it, with its
multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the clamour of the fiends and
night-hags, with whom she was well known to make excursions in the forest.
Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old lady
quickly extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among
the clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The
magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness - into which,
nevertheless, he could see but little further than he might into a
mill-stone - retired from the window.
The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon
greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a long way off was
approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition, on here a
post, and there a garden fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and there
a pump, with its full trough of water, and here again an arched door of
oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the door-step. The Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly
convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in the
footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the lantern would fall
upon him in a few moments more, and reveal his long-hidden secret. As the
light drew nearer, be beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother
clergyman - or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as well
as highly valued friend - the Reverend Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr. Dimmesdale
now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some dying man. And so
he had. The good old minister came freshly from the death-chamber of
Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within that very
hour. And now surrounded, like the saint-like personage of olden times,
with a radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin - as
if the departed Governor had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as
if he had caught upon himself the distant shine of the celestial city,
while looking thitherward to see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its
gates - now, in short, good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his
footsteps with a lighted lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested
the above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled - nay, almost laughed at
them - and then wondered if he was gag mad.
As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely
muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern
before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly restrain
himself from speaking -
"A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson. Come up hither, I
pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!"
Good Heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant he
believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered only
within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to step
slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his feet, and
never once turning his head towards the guilty platform. When the light of
the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister discovered, by
the faintness which came over him, that the last few moments had been a
crisis of terrible anxiety, although his mind had made an involuntary
effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid playfulness.
Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole
in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing
stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether
he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning would
break and find him there The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself.
The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a
vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and half-crazed
betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from door to door,
summoning all the people to behold the ghost - as he needs must think it -
of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings from one
house to another. Then - the morning light still waxing stronger - old
patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and
matronly dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole
tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a
single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view with the
disorder of a nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would
come grimly forth, with his King James' ruff fastened askew, and Mistress
Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking
sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night
ride; and good Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a
death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams
about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders and
deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young virgins who so idolized
their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms, which
now, by-the-bye, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have
given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a
word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their
amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they
discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame,
and standing where Hester Prynne had stood
Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister,
unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of
laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish
laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart - but lie knew not whether of
exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute - he recognised the tones of little
Pearl.
"Pearl! Little Pearl!" cried he, after a moment's pause; then,
suppressing his voice - "Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?"
"Yes; it is Hester Prynne!" she replied, in a tone of surprise; and
the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the side-walk, along
which she had been passing. "It is I, and my little Pearl. "
"Whence come you, Hester?" asked the minister. "What sent you hither?
"
"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester Prynne "at
Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe, and
am now going homeward to my dwelling. "
"Come up hither, Hester, thou and Little Pearl," said the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale. "Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you.
Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together. "
She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding
little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's other hand,
and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a
tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own pouring like a
torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the
mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his
half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.
"Minister!" whispered little Pearl.
"What wouldst thou say, child?" asked Mr. Dimmesdale.
"`Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?"
inquired Pearl.
"Nay; not so, my little Pearl," answered the minister; for, with the
new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so
long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was
already trembling at the conjunction in which - with a strange joy,
nevertheless - he now found himself - " not so, my child. I shall, indeed,
stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not to-morrow. "
Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister
held it fast.
A moment longer, my child!" said he.
"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand, and mother's
hand, to-morrow noontide?
"Not then, Pearl," said the minister; "but another time. "
"And what other time?" persisted the child.
"At the great judgment day," whispered the minister; and, strangely
enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth impelled
him to answer the child so. "Then, and there, before the judgment-seat,
thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together. But the daylight of this
world shall not see our meeting!''
Pearl laughed again.
But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and
wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those
meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to
waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere So powerful was its
radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt
the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense
lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of
mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar
objects by an unaccustomed light The wooden houses, with their jutting
storeys and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds with the
early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with
freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and even in the
market-place margined with green on either side - all were visible, but
with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral
interpretation to the things of this world they had ever borne before. And
there stood the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne,
with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl,
herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in
the noon of that strange and solemn splendour, as if it were the light
that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who
belong to one another.
There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as she
glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its
expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr.
Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands
over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.
Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all
meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occured with less
regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations
from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a
bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian
warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of
crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever
befell New England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of
which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of
its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however,
its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld
the wonder through the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his
imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was,
indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in
these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might
not be deemed too expensive for Providence to write a people's doom upon.
The belief was a favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that
their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar
intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual
discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet
of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly
disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative
by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole
expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a
fitting page for his soul's history and fate.
We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and
heart that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the
appearance of an immense letter - the letter A - marked out in lines of
dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point,
burning duskily through a veil of cloud, but with no such shape as his
guilty imagination gave it, or, at least, with so little definiteness,
that another's guilt might have seen another symbol in it.
There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr. Dimmesdale's
psychological state at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward to
the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl was
hinting her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great
distance from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him, with the
same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his feature as to all
other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression; or it might
well be that the physician was not careful then, as at all other times, to
hide the malevolence with which he looked upon his victim. Certainly, if
the meteor kindled up the sky, and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness
that admonished Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment,
then might Roger Chillingworth have passed with them for the arch-fiend,
standing there with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid was the
expression, or so intense the minister's perception of it, that it seemed
still to remain painted on the darkness after the meteor had vanished,
with an effect as if the street and all things else were at once
annihilated.
"Who is that man, Hester?" gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with
terror. "I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!"
She remembered her oath, and was silent.
"I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!" muttered the minister again.
"Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless
horror of the man!"
"Minister," said little Pearl, "I can tell thee who he is!"
"Quickly, then, child!" said the minister, bending his ear close to
her lips. "Quickly, and as low as thou canst whisper. "
Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, like human
language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing
themselves with by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any
secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a
tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the
bewilderment of his mind. The elvish child then laughed aloud.
"Dost thou mock me now?" said the minister.
"Thou wast not bold! - thou wast not true!" answered the child. "Thou
wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother's hand, to-morrow
noon-tide!"
"Worthy sir," answered the physician, who had now advanced to the
foot of the platform - "pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well,
well, indeed! We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to
be straitly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our
sleep. Come, good sir, and my dear friend, I pray you let me lead you
home!"
"How knewest thou that I was here?" asked the minister, fearfully.
"Verily, and in good faith," answered Roger Chillingworth, "I knew
nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the
bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill
might to give him ease. He, going home to a better world, I, likewise, was
on my way homeward, when this light shone out. Come with me, I beseech
you, Reverend sir, else you will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty
to-morrow. Aha! see now how they trouble the brain - these books! - these
books! You should study less, good sir, and take a little pastime, or
these night whimsies will grow upon you. "
"I will go home with you," said Mr. Dimmesdale.
With a chill despondency, like one awakening, all nerveless, from an
ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.
The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse
which was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete
with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it
is said, more souls than one, were brought to the truth by the efficacy of
that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude
towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter. But as he came down
the pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton met him, holding up a black
glove, which the minister recognised as his own.
"It was found," said the Sexton, "this morning on the scaffold where
evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take it,
intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed, he was
blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no glove to
cover it!"
"Thank you, my good friend," said the minister, gravely, but startled
at heart; for so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost brought
himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary.
"Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!"
"And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs
handle him without gloves henceforward," remarked the old sexton, grimly
smiling. "But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last
night? a great red letter in the sky - the letter A, which we interpret to
stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this
past night, it was doubtless held fit that there should be some notice
thereof!"
"No," answered the minister; "I had not heard of it. "
ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER
In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was
shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His
nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more
than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while
his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had
perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given
them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from all
others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate action of his
own conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to bear, and was
still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's well-being and repose. Knowing what
this poor fallen man had once been, her whole soul was moved by the
shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her - the outcast woman -
for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided,
moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her
long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by
any standard external to herself, Hester saw - or seemed to see - that
there lay a responsibility upon her in reference to the clergyman, which
she owned to no other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that
united her to the rest of humankind - links of flowers, or silk, or gold,
or whatever the material - had all been broken. Here was the iron link of
mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties,
it brought along with it its obligations.
Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in which
we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years had come
and gone. Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother, with the scarlet
letter on her breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery, had long
been a familiar object to the townspeople. As is apt to be the case when a
person stands out in any prominence before the community, and, at the same
time, interferes neither with public nor individual interests and
convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately grown up in
reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human nature that,
except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily
than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be
transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new
irritation of the original feeling of hostility. In this matter of Hester
Prynne there was neither irritation nor irksomeness. She never battled
with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst usage; she
made no claim upon it in requital for what she suffered; she did not weigh
upon its sympathies. Then, also, the blameless purity of her life during
all these years in which she had been set apart to infamy was reckoned
largely in her favour. With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind,
and with no hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could
only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor
wanderer to its paths.
It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even the
humblest title to share in the world's privileges - further than to
breathe the common air and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself
by the faithful labour of her hands - she was quick to acknowledge her
sisterhood with the race of man whenever benefits were to be conferred.
None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of
poverty, even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in
requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments
wrought for him by the fingers that could have embroidered a monarch's
robe. None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence stalked through the
town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of
individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not
as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened
by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was
entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creature There glimmered the
embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token
of sin, it was the taper of the sick chamber. It had even thrown its
gleam, in the sufferer's bard extremity, across the verge of time. It had
shown him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast
becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him. In such
emergencies Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich - a well-spring of
human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the
largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow
for the head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy, or,
we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when
neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was
the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her - so much
power to do, and power to sympathise - that many people refused to
interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it
meant Abel, so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.
It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine
came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the threshold.
The helpful inmate had departed, without one backward glance to gather up
the meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts of those whom she had
served so zealously. Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head
to receive their greeting. If they were resolute to accost her, she laid
her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on. This might be pride, but
was so like humility, that it produced all the softening influence of the
latter quality on the public mind. The public is despotic in its temper;
it is capable of denying common justice when too strenuously demanded as a
right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the
appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its
generosity. Interpreting Hester Prynne's deportment as an appeal of this
nature, society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign
countenance than she cared to be favoured with, or, perchance, than she
deserved.
The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were
longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester's good qualities than the
people. The prejudices which they shared in common with the latter were
fortified in themselves by an iron frame-work of reasoning, that made it a
far tougher labour to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and
rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of
years, might grow to be an expression of almost benevolence. Thus it was
with the men of rank, on whom their eminent position imposed the
guardianship of the public morals. Individuals in private life, meanwhile,
had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had
begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin
for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good
deeds since. "Do you see that woman with the embroidered badge?" they
would say to strangers. "It is our Hester - the town's own Hester - who is
so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the
afflicted!" Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to tell the
very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would
constrain them to whisper the black scandal of bygone years. It was none
the less a fact, however, that in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus,
the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom It
imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk
securely amid all peril. Had she fallen among thieves, it would have kept
her sale. It was reported, and believed by many, that an Indian had drawn
his arrow against the badge, and that the missile struck it, and fell
harmless to the ground.
The effect of the symbol - or rather, of the position in respect to
society that was indicated by it - on the mind of Hester Prynne herself
was powerful and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her
character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago
fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might have been
repulsive had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it
Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change. It
might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and partly to
the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad transformation,
too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been cut off, or was so
completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once gushed
into the sunshine. It was due in part to all these causes, but still more
to something else, that there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester's
face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though majestic and
statue like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace;
nothing in Hester's bosom to make it ever again the pillow of Affection.
Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been
essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the
stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman
has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If
she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will
either be crushed out of her, or - and the outward semblance is the same -
crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The
latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and
ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were
only the magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether
Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so transfigured.
Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be
attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great
measure, from passion and feeling to thought. Standing alone in the world
- alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be
guided and protected - alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position,
even had she not scorned to consider it desirable - she cast away the
fragment a broken chain. The world's law was no law for her mind. It was
an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more
active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword
had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and
rearranged - not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was
their most real abode - the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith
was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit.
She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side
of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have
held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised by the scarlet letter.
In her lonesome cottage, by the seashore, thoughts visited her such as
dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that
would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they
have been seen so much as knocking at her door.
It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often
conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of
society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh
and blood of action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, had little Pearl
never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have been far
otherwise. Then she might have come down to us in history, hand in hand
with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect. She might, in
one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She might, and not improbably
would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of the period, for
attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan establishment. But,
in the education of her child, the mother's enthusiasm thought had
something to wreak itself upon. Providence, in the person of this little
girl, had assigned to Hester's charge, the germ and blossom of womanhood,
to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties. Everything was
against her. The world was hostile. The child's own nature had something
wrong in it which continually betokened that she had been born amiss - the
effluence of her mother's lawless passion - and often impelled Hester to
ask, in bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor
little creature had been born at all.
Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with
reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting
even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual
existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the
point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep women
quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a
hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is
to be torn down and built up anew. Then the very nature of the opposite
sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be
essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a
fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being
obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms until
she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change, in which,
perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be
found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any
exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her
heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish. Thus Hester Prynne, whose
heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clue in
the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable
precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly
scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times a fearful
doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl
at once to Heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice
should provide.
The scarlet letter had not done its office.
Now, however, her interview with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the
night of his vigil, had given her a new theme of reflection, and held up
to her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for
its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the
minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle.
She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already
stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt that, whatever painful
efficacy there might be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom
had been infused into it by the hand that proffered relief. A secret enemy
had been continually by his side, under the semblance of a friend and
helper, and had availed himself of the opportunities thus afforded for
tampering with the delicate springs of Mr. Dimmesdale's nature. Hester
could not but ask herself whether there had not originally been a defect
of truth, courage, and loyalty on her own part, in allowing the minister
to be thrown into position where so much evil was to be foreboded and
nothing auspicious to be hoped. Her only justification lay in the fact
that she had been able to discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker
ruin than had overwhelmed herself except by acquiescing in Roger
Chillingworth's scheme of disguise. Under that impulse she had made her
choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared, the more wretched alternative
of the two. She determined to redeem her error so far as it might yet be
possible. Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial, she felt herself
no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth as on that night,
abased by sin and half-maddened by the ignominy that was still new, when
they had talked together in the prison-chamber. She had climbed her way
since then to a higher point. The old man, on the other hand, had brought
himself nearer to her level, or, perhaps, below it, by the revenge which
he had stooped for.
In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and do
what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he had so
evidently set his gripe. The occasion was not long to seek. One afternoon,
walking with Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she beheld the old
physician with a basket on one arm and a staff in the other hand, stooping
along the ground in quest of roots and herbs to concoct his medicine
withal.
HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and
play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked
awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird,
and, making bare her small white feet went pattering along the moist
margin of the sea. Here and there she came to a full stop, ad peeped
curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to
see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark,
glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image
of a little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her
hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid on her part,
beckoned likewise, as if to say - "This is a better place; come thou into
the pool. " And Pearl, stepping in mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet
at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind
of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.
Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician. "I would speak a
word with you," said she - "a word that concerns us much. "
"Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth?" answered he, raising himself from his stooping posture.
"With all my heart Why, mistress, I hear good tidings of you on all hands!
No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and godly man, was
discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there
had been question concerning you in the council. It was debated whether or
no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter might be taken
off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my intreaty to the worshipful
magistrate that it might be done forthwith. "
"It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the
badge," calmly replied Hester. "Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would
fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should
speak a different purport. "
"Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better," rejoined he, "A woman
must needs follow her own fancy touching the adornment of her person. The
letter is gaily embroidered, and shows right bravely on your bosom!"
All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and
was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had been
wrought upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much that he
had grown older; for though the traces of advancing life were visible he
bore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigour and alertness. But
the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet,
which was what she best remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and
been succeeded by a eager, searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded
look. It seemed to be his wish and purpose to mask this expression with a
smile, but the latter played him false, and flickered over his visage so
derisively that the spectator could see his blackness all the better for
it. Ever and anon, too, there came a glare of red light out of his eyes,
as if the old man's soul were on fire and kept on smouldering duskily
within his breast, until by some casual puff of passion it was blown into
a momentary flame. This he repressed as speedily as possible, and strove
to look as if nothing of the kind had happened.
In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's
faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a
reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office. This unhappy person
had effected such a transformation by devoting himself for seven years to
the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and deriving his
enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he
analysed and gloated over.
The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne's bosom. Here was another
ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.
"What see you in my face," asked the physician, "that you look at it
so earnestly?"
"Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter
enough for it," answered she. "But let it pass! It is of yonder miserable
man that I would speak. "
"And what of him?" cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he loved
the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only
person of whom he could make a confidant. "Not to hide the truth, Mistress
Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy with the gentleman. So
speak freely and I will make answer. "
"When we last spake together," said Hester, "now seven years ago, it
was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as touching the former
relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder man
were in your hands there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent in
accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that
I thus bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other human
beings, there remained a duty towards him, and something whispered me that
I was betraying it in pledging myself to keep your counsel. Since that day
no man is so near to him as you. You tread behind his every footstep. You
are beside him, sleeping and waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow
and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to
die daily a living death, and still he knows you not. In permitting this I
have surely acted a false part by the only man to whom the power was left
me to be true!"
"What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth. "My finger, pointed
at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon, thence,
peradventure, to the gallows!"
"It had been better so!" said Hester Prynne.
"What evil have I done the man?" asked Roger Chillingworth again. "I
tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned from
monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable
priest! But for my aid his life would have burned away in torments within
the first two years after the perpetration of his crime and thine. For,
Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine
has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter. Oh, I could reveal a goodly
secret! But enough. What art can do, I have exhausted on him. That he now
breathes and creeps about on earth is owing all to me!"
"Better he had died at once!" said Hester Prynne. "Yea, woman, thou
sayest truly!" cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting the lurid fire of
his heart blaze out before her eyes. "Better had he died at once! Never
did mortal suffer what this man has suffered. And all, all, in the sight
of his worst enemy! He has been conscious of me. He has felt an influence
dwelling always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense -
for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this - he knew
that no friendly hand was pulling at his heartstrings, and that an eye was
looking curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he
knew not that the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to
his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured
with frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse and
despair of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But
it was the constant shadow of my presence, the closest propinquity of the
man whom he had most vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by
this perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed, he did not err,
there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has
become a fiend for his especial torment."
The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his
hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape,
which he could not recognise, usurping the place of his own image in a
glass. It was one of those moments - which sometimes occur only at the
interval of years - when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to
his mind's eye. Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as he
did now.
"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the old
man's look. "Has he not paid thee all?"
"No, no! He has but increased the debt!" answered the physician, and
as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided
into gloom. "Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine years agone?
Even then I was in the autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn. But
all my life had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet
years, bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own knowledge, and
faithfully, too, though this latter object was but casual to the other -
faithfully for the advancement of human welfare. No life had been more
peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich with benefits
conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you might deem me
cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others, craving little for himself
- kind, true, just and of constant, if not warm affections? Was I not all
this?"
"All this, and more," said Hester.
"And what am I now?" demanded he, looking into her face, and
permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his features. "I
have already told thee what I am - a fiend! Who made me so?"
"It was myself," cried Hester, shuddering. "It was I, not less than
he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?"
"I have left thee to the scarlet letter," replied Roger
Chillingworth. "If that has not avenged me, I can do no more!"
He laid his finger on it with a smile.
"It has avenged thee," answered Hester Prynne.
"I judged no less," said the physician. "And now what wouldst thou
with me touching this man?"
"I must reveal the secret," answered Hester, firmly. "He must discern
thee in thy true character. What may be the result I know not. But this
long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have
been, shall at length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow or
preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance his
life, he is in my hands. Nor do I - whom the scarlet letter has
disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering into
the soul - nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer a
life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy. Do
with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him, no good for me, no good
for thee. There is no good for little Pearl. There is no path to guide us
out of this dismal maze. "
"Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee," said Roger Chillingworth,
unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a quality
almost majestic in the despair which she expressed. "Thou hadst great
elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than
mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee, for the good that has been
wasted in thy nature. "
"And I thee," answered Hester Prynne, "for the hatred that has
transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out of
thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for thine
own! Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power that claims
it! I said, but now, that there could be no good event for him, or thee,
or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and
stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path.
It is not so! There might be good for thee, and thee alone, since thou
hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy will to pardon. Wilt thou give
up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that priceless benefit?"
"Peace, Hester-peace!" replied the old man, with gloomy sternness -
"it is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me
of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that
we do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry, thou didst plant the
germ of evil; but since that moment it has all been a dark necessity. Ye
that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion;
neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from his
hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may! Now, go thy
ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man. "
He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of
gathering herbs.
HESTER AND PEARL
So Roger Chillingworth - a deformed old figure with a face that
haunted men's memories longer than they liked - took leave of Hester
Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there
a herb, or grubbed up a root and put it into the basket on his arm. His
gray beard almost touched the ground as he crept onward. Hester gazed
after him a little while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see
whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him
and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown, across its
cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were which the old
man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil
purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs of
species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or might
it suffice him that every wholesome growth should be converted into
something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone
so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it
rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity
whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he
not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot,
where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood,
henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could
produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bat's
wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier the higher he rose towards
heaven?
"Be it sin or no," said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she gazed
after him, "I hate the man?"
She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or
lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days in a
distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion of his
study and sit down in the firelight of their home, and in the light of her
nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order
that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken off
the scholar's heart. Such scenes had once appeared not otherwise than
happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal medium of her subsequent
life, they classed themselves among her ugliest remembrances. She
marvelled how such scenes could have been! She marvelled how she could
ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed in her crime most to
be repented of, that she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm
grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to
mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by
Roger Chillingworth than any which had since been done him, that, in the
time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself
happy by his side.
"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before. "He
betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with
it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable
fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than
their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even
for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have
imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have
done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under
the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery and wrought
out no repentance?
The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the
crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester's
state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise have
acknowledged to herself.
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"
Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss
for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At
first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a
pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and - as it declined to
venture - seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable
earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the
image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little
boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells, and sent out
more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the
larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horse-shoe
by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a
jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam that
streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze,
scampering after it with winged footsteps to catch the great snowflakes
ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that fed and fluttered
along the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles,
and, creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed
remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white
breast, Pearl was almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away
with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport,
because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as
wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.
Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and make
herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of
a little mermaid. She inherited her mother's gift for devising drapery and
costume. As the last touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some
eel-grass and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom the decoration
with which she was so familiar on her mother's. A letter - the letter A -
but freshly green instead of scarlet. The child bent her chin upon her
breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest, even as if the
one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out
its hidden import.
"I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?" thought Pearl.
Just then she heard her mother's voice, and, flitting along as
lightly as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne
dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.
"My little Pearl," said Hester, after a moment's silence, "the green
letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know, my
child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?"
"Yes, mother," said the child. "It is the great letter A. Thou hast
taught me in the horn-book. "
Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there was
that singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black
eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really attached any
meaning to the symbol. She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point.
"Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?"
"Truly do I!" answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's
face. "It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his
heart!"
"And what reason is that?" asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd
incongruity of the child's observation; but on second thoughts turning
pale.
"What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?"
"Nay, mother, I have told all I know," said Pearl, more seriously
than she was wont to speak. "Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been
talking with, - it may be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother
dear, what does this scarlet letter mean? - and why dost thou wear it on
thy bosom? - and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"
She took her mother's hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes
with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious
character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be
seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she
could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting-point
of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect Heretofore, the mother,
while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had
schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of
an April breeze, which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of
inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills
oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of
which misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your
cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair,
and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure
at your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother's estimate of the child's
disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits,
and have given them a far darker colouring. But now the idea came strongly
into Hester's mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and
acuteness, might already have approached the age when she could have been
made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother's sorrows as could
be imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the
little chaos of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging and could
have been from the very first - the steadfast principles of an unflinching
courage - an uncontrollable will - sturdy pride, which might be
disciplined into self-respect - and a bitter scorn of many things which,
when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them. She
possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are
the richest flavours of unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes,
thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her mother must be great
indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child.
Pearl's inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet
letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of
her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission.
Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and
retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; but never,
until now, had she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with that
design, there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence. If
little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a spirit messenger
no less than an earthly child, might it not be her errand to soothe away
the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart, and converted it into a
tomb? - and to help her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even
yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like
heart?
Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester's mind,
with as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered
into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her
mother's hand in both her own, and turning her face upward, while she put
these searching questions, once and again, and still a third time.
"What does the letter mean, mother? and why dost thou wear it? and
why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"
"What shall I say?" thought Hester to herself. "No! if this be the
price of the child's sympathy, I cannot pay it. "
Then she spoke aloud -
"Silly Pearl," said she, "what questions are these? There are many
things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of the
minister's heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of
its gold thread. "
In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been
false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of a
stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; as
recognising that, in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new
evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled. As for
little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of her face.
But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three
times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often at supper-time,
and while Hester was putting her to bed, and once after she seemed to be
fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming in her black eyes.
"Mother," said she, "what does the scarlet letter mean?"
And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being
awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that other
enquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her investigations
about the scarlet letter -
"Mother! Mother Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?"
"Hold thy tongue, naughty child!" answered her mother, with an
asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. "Do not tease me;
else I shall put thee into the dark closet!"
A FOREST WALK
Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr.
Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences, the
true character of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For several
days, however, she vainly sought an opportunity of addressing him in some
of the meditative walks which she knew him to be in the habit of taking
along the shores of the Peninsula, or on the wooded hills of the
neighbouring country. There would have been no scandal, indeed, nor peril
to the holy whiteness of the clergyman's good fame, had she visited him in
his own study, where many a penitent, ere now, had confessed sins of
perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by the scarlet letter. But,
partly that she dreaded the secret or undisguised interference of old
Roger Chillingworth, and partly that her conscious heart imparted
suspicion where none could have been felt, and partly that both the
minister and she would need the whole wide world to breathe in, while they
talked together - for all these reasons Hester never thought of meeting
him in any narrower privacy than beneath the open sky.
At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither the Rev. Mr.
Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that he had
gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian
converts. He would probably return by a certain hour in the afternoon of
the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took little Pearl -
who was necessarily the companion of all her mother's expeditions, however
inconvenient her presence - and set forth.
The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the Peninsula to
the mainland, was no other than a foot-path. It straggled onward into the
mystery of the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and stood
so black and dense on either side, and disclosed such imperfect glimpses
of the sky above, that, to Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the moral
wilderness in which she had so long been wandering. The day was chill and
sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly stirred, however,
by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine might now and then be
seen at its solitary play along the path. This flitting cheerfulness was
always at the further extremity of some long vista through the forest. The
sportive sunlight - feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant
pensiveness of the day and scene - withdrew itself as they came nigh, and
left the spots where it had danced the drearier, because they had hoped to
find them bright.
"Mother," said little Pearl, the sunshine does not love you. It runs
away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom.
Now, see! There it is, playing a good way off. Stand you here, and let me
run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me - for I wear
nothing on my bosom yet!"
"Nor ever will, my child, I hope," said Hester.
"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the
beginning of her race. "Will not it come of its own accord when I am a
woman grown?"
"Run away, child," answered her mother, "and catch the sunshine. It
will soon be gone. "
Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester smiled to perceive,
did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it,
all brightened by its splendour, and scintillating with the vivacity
excited by rapid motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as if
glad of such a playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to
step into the magic circle too.
"It will go now," said Pearl, shaking her head.
"See!" answered Hester, smiling; now I can stretch out my hand and
grasp some of it. "
As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge from
the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl's features, her mother
could have fancied that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would
give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as they should plunge
into some gloomier shade. There was no other attribute that so much
impressed her with a sense of new and untransmitted vigour in Pearl's
nature, as this never failing vivacity of spirits: she had not the disease
of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with
the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps this, too, was
a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with which Hester had
fought against her sorrows before Pearl's birth. It was certainly a
doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child's
character. She wanted - what some people want throughout life - a grief
that should deeply touch her, and thus humanise and make her capable of
sympathy. But there was time enough yet for little Pearl.
"Come, my child!" said Hester, looking about her from the spot where
Pearl had stood still in the sunshine - "we will sit down a little way
within the wood, and rest ourselves. "
"I am not aweary, mother," replied the little girl. "But you may sit
down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile. "
"A story, child!" said Hester. "And about what?"
"Oh, a story about the Black Man," answered Pearl, taking hold of her
mother's gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously, into
her face.
"How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big, heavy
book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an
iron pen to everybody that meets him here among the trees; and they are to
write their names with their own blood; and then he sets his mark on their
bosoms. Didst thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?"
"And who told you this story, Pearl," asked her mother, recognising a
common superstition of the period.
"It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where you
watched last night," said the child. "But she fancied me asleep while she
was talking of it. She said that a thousand and a thousand people had met
him here, and had written in his book, and have his mark on them. And that
ugly tempered lady, old Mistress Hibbins, was one. And, mother, the old
dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man's mark on thee, and
that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight, here in
the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And dost thou go to meet him in the
nighttime?"
"Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?" asked Hester.
"Not that I remember," said the child. "If thou fearest to leave me
in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I would very gladly
go! But, mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And didst thou
ever meet him? And is this his mark?"
"Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?" asked her
mother.
"Yes, if thou tellest me all," answered Pearl.
"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother. This scarlet
letter is his mark!"
Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to
secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along the
forest track. Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which at
some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its
roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper
atmosphere It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a
leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing through
the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves. The trees impending
over it had flung down great branches from time to time, which choked up
the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some
points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages there appeared a
channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand. Letting the eyes follow
along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from
its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all
traces of it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbush, and here
and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens. All these giant
trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the
course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing
loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest
whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a
pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet kept up a
babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young
child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how
to be merry among sad acquaintance and events of sombre hue.
"Oh, brook! Oh, foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried Pearl,
after listening awhile to its talk, "Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a
spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!"
But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest
trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help
talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl resembled
the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed from a well-spring
as mysterious, and had flowed through scenes shadowed as heavily with
gloom. But, unlike the little stream, she danced and sparkled, and
prattled airily along her course.
"What does this sad little brook say, mother? inquired she.
"If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee of
it," answered her mother, "even as it is telling me of mine. But now,
Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise of one putting
aside the branches. I would have thee betake thyself to play, and leave me
to speak with him that comes yonder,"
"Is it the Black Man?" asked Pearl.
"Wilt thou go and play, child?" repeated her mother, "But do not
stray far into the wood. And take heed that thou come at my first call. "
"Yes, mother," answered Pearl, "But if it be the Black Man, wilt thou
not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his
arm?"
"Go, silly child!" said her mother impatiently. "It is no Black Man!
Thou canst see him now, through the trees. It is the minister!"
"And so it is!" said the child. "And, mother, he has his hand over
his heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book,
the Black Man set his mark in that place? But why does he not wear it
outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?"
"Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another time,"
cried Hester Prynne. "But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear the
babble of the brook. "
The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook,
and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice.
But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its
unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened - or
making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen -
within the verge of the dismal forest. So Pearl, who had enough of shadow
in her own little life, chose to break off all acquaintance with this
repining brook. She set herself, therefore, to gathering violets and
wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines that she found growing in the
crevice of a high rock.
When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two
towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained under
the deep shadow of the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along the
path entirely alone, and leaning on a staff which he had cut by the
wayside. He looked haggard and feeble, and betrayed a nerveless
despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably characterised him in
his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situation where he deemed
himself liable to notice. Here it was wofully visible, in this intense
seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy trial to
the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason
for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have
been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root
of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might
bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock
over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was
too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.
To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no symptom of
positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl had
remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.
THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before Hester
Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length she
succeeded.
"Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at first, then louder, but
hoarsely - "Arthur Dimmesdale!"
"Who speaks?" answered the minister. Gathering himself quickly up, he
stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he was
reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his eyes anxiously in the direction
of the voice, he indistinctly beheld a form under the trees, clad in
garments so sombre, and so little relieved from the gray twilight into
which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide,
that he knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may be that his
pathway through life was haunted thus by a spectre that had stolen out
from among his thoughts.
He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.
"Hester! Hester Prynne!', said he; "is it thou? Art thou in life?"
"Even so. " she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven
years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?"
It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and
bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they
meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world
beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their
former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet
familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied
beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost. They were
awe-stricken likewise at themselves, because the crisis flung back to them
their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and
experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul
beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment. It was with fear,
and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that
Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the
chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was
dreariest in the interview. They now felt themselves, at least,
inhabitants of the same sphere.
Without a word more spoken - neither he nor she assuming the
guidance, but with an unexpressed consent - they glided back into the
shadow of the woods whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap of
moss where she and Pearl had before been sitting. When they found voice to
speak, it was at first only to utter remarks and inquiries such as any two
acquaintances might have made, about the gloomy sky, the threatening
storm, and, next, the health of each. Thus they went onward, not boldly,
but step by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in their
hearts. So long estranged by fate and circumstances, they needed something
slight and casual to run before and throw open the doors of intercourse,
so that their real thoughts might be led across the threshold.
After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's.
"Hester," said he, "hast thou found peace?"
She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.
"Hast thou?" she asked.
"None - nothing but despair!" he answered. "What else could I look
for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist -
a man devoid of conscience - a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts - I
might have found peace long ere now. Nay, I never should have lost it.
But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there
originally was in me, all of God's gifts that were the choicest have
become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I am most miserable!"
"The people reverence thee," said Hester. "And surely thou workest
good among them! Doth this bring thee no comfort?"
"More misery, Hester! - Only the more misery!" answered the clergyman
with a bitter smile. "As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I
have no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul
like mine effect towards the redemption of other souls? - or a polluted
soul towards their purification? And as for the people's reverence, would
that it were turned to scorn and hatred! Canst thou deem it, Hester, a
consolation that I must stand up in my pulpit, and meet so many eyes
turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven were beaming from it!
- must see my flock hungry for the truth, and listening to my words as if
a tongue of Pentecost were speaking! - and then look inward, and discern
the black reality of what they idolise? I have laughed, in bitterness and
agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am! And
Satan laughs at it!"
"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester gently.
"You have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you in
the days long past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth,
than it seems in people's eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence thus
sealed and witnessed by good works? And wherefore should it not bring you
peace?"
"No, Hester - no!" replied the clergyman. "There is no substance in
it] It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance, I have had
enough! Of penitence, there has been none! Else, I should long ago have
thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to
mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester,
that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret!
Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven
years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for what I am! Had I
one friend - or were it my worst enemy! - to whom, when sickened with the
praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and known as the
vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby.
Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood! - all
emptiness! - all death!"
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet,
uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his words
here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to interpose
what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke:
"Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she, "with
whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!" Again she
hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort "Thou hast long had
such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the same roof!"
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching
at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
"Ha! What sayest thou?" cried he. "An enemy! And under mine own roof!
What mean you?"
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she
was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so many
years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose purposes
could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy,
beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to
disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale.
There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this consideration;
or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the minister
to bear what she might picture to herself as a more tolerable doom. But of
late, since the night of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had
been both softened and invigorated. She now read his heart more
accurately. She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger
Chillingworth - the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all the air
about him - and his authorised interference, as a physician, with the
minister's physical and spiritual infirmities - that these bad
opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the
sufferer's conscience had been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of
which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt
his spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be
insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True,
of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.
Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once - nay, why
should we not speak it? - still so passionately loved! Hester felt that
the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death itself, as she had
already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely preferable to
the alternative which she had taken upon herself to choose. And now,
rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have
laid down on the forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's
feet
"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I have
striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast,
and did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good - thy life -
thy fame - were put in question!
Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though
death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That
old man! - the physician! - he whom they call Roger Chillingworth! - he
was my husband!"
The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that violence of
passion, which - intermixed in more shapes than one with his higher,
purer, softer qualities - was, in fact, the portion of him which the devil
claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was there a
blacker or a fiercer frown than Hester now encountered. For the brief
space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his character had
been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower energies were
incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He sank down on the ground,
and buried his face in his hands.
"I might have known it," murmured he - "I did know it! Was not the
secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart at the first sight of
him, and as often as I have seen him since? Why did I not understand? Oh,
Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the horror of this thing!
And the shame! - the indelicacy! - the horrible ugliness of this exposure
of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!
Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this! -I cannot forgive thee!"
"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, Singing herself on the fallen
leaves beside him. "Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!"
With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around him,
and pressed his head against her bosom, little caring though his cheek
rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but strove
in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should look her
sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her - for seven long
years had it frowned upon this lonely woman - and still she bore it all,
nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven, likewise, had
frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of this pale, weak,
sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear, and live!
"Wilt thou yet forgive me?" she repeated, over and over again. "Wilt
thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?"
"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister at length, with a
deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. "I freely
forgive you now. May God forgive us both. We are not, Hester, the worst
sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest!
That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in
cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did
so!"
"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its
own. We felt it so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it?"
"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No;
I have not forgotten!"
They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the
mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier
hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and
darkening ever, as it stole along - and yet it unclosed a charm that made
them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all,
another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and creaked with a
blast that was passing through it. The boughs were tossing heavily above
their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another, as if
telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or constrained to
forbode evil to come.
And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led
backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the
burden of her ignominy and the minister the hollow mockery of his good
name! So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had ever been so
precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here seen only by his eyes, the
scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here seen
only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for
one moment true!
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
"Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows
your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to keep
our secret? What will now be the course of his revenge?"
"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester,
thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his
revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret. He will
doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion. "
"And I! - how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this
deadly enemy?" exclaimed Arthur
Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself, and pressing his hand nervously
against his heart - a gesture that had grown involuntary with him. "Think
for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!"
"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly and
firmly. "Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!"
"It were far worse than death!" replied the minister. "But how to
avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these
withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he was?
Must I sink down there, and die at once?"
"Alas! what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the tears
gushing into her eyes. "Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no other
cause!"
"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken
priest. "It is too mighty for me to struggle with!"
"Heaven would show mercy," rejoined Hester, "hadst thou but the
strength to take advantage of it. "
"Be thou strong for me!" answered he. "Advise me what to do. "
"Is the world, then, so narrow?" exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her
deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power
over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold itself
erect. "Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder town, which
only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this
around us? Whither leads yonder forest-track? Backward to the settlement,
thou sayest! Yes; but, onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper into the
wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until some few miles
hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man's tread.
There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring thee from a world
where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be
happy! Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy
heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?"
"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the
minister, with a sad smile.
"Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!" continued Hester. "It
brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again. In
our native land, whether in some remote rural village, or in vast London -
or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy - thou wouldst be
beyond his power and knowledge! And what hast thou to do with all these
iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better part in bondage
too long already!"
"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were called
upon to realise a dream. "I am powerless to go. Wretched and sinful as I
am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence in
the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my own soul is, I
would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare not quit my post,
though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is death and dishonour,
when his dreary watch shall come to an end!"
"Thou art crushed under this seven years' weight of misery," replied
Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. "But thou
shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as thou
treadest along the forest-path: neither shalt thou freight the ship with
it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here where
it hath happened. Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast thou
exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future
is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There
is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one. Be,
if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle of
the red men. Or, as is more thy nature, be a scholar and a sage among the
wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act!
Do anything, save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur
Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst
wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other
day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life? that have made thee
feeble to will and to do? that will leave thee powerless even to repent?
Up, and away!"
"Oh, Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light,
kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou tellest of
running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must die
here! There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the
wide, strange, difficult world alone!"
It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He
lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his reach.
He repeated the word - "Alone, Hester!"
"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper. Then, all
was spoken!
A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE
Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which hope
and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of
horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but
dared not speak.
But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and
for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had
habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether
foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a
moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed
forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was
to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were,
in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his
woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at
human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established;
criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for
the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the
fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to
set her flee. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other
women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her
teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught
her much amiss.
The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;
although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of
the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of
principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched
with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts - for those it was easy to
arrange - but each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head
of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only the
more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its
prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed him
in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all alive
and painfully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he might
have been supposed safer within the line of virtue than if he had never
sinned at all.
Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven
years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation for
this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more to fall,
what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None; unless it
avail him somewhat that he was broker, down by long and exquisite
suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the very remorse
which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and
remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard to strike the
balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death and infamy, and the
inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that, finally, to this poor pilgrim,
on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick, miserable, there appeared a
glimpse of human affection and sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in
exchange for the heavy doom which he was now expiating. And be the stern
and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the
human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and
guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel,
and might even in his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in
preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still the
ruined wall, and near it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over
again his unforgotten triumph.
The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it
suffice that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.
"If in all these past seven years," thought he, "I could recall one
instant of peace or hope, 1 would yet endure, for the sake of that earnest
of Heaven's mercy. But now - since I am irrevocably doomed - wherefore
should I not snatch the solace allowed to the condemned culprit before his
execution? Or, if this be the path to a better life, as Hester would
persuade me, I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it! Neither
can I any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she to
sustain - so tender to soothe! O Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes,
wilt Thou yet pardon me?"
"Thou wilt go!" said Hester calmly, as he met her glance.
The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect - upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of his
own heart - of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed,
unchristianised, lawless region His spirit rose, as it were, with a bound,
and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery
which had kept him grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply religious
temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood.
"Do I feel joy again?" cried he, wondering at himself. "Methought the
germ of it was dead in me! Oh, Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem to
have flung myself - sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened - down upon
these forest leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new
powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the better
life! Why did we not find it sooner?"
"Let us not lock back," answered Hester Prynne. "The past is gone!
Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol I undo it
all, and make it as if it had never been!"
So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter,
and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered
leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the stream. With
a hand's-breadth further flight, it would have fallen into the water, and
have give, the little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the
unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about. But there lay the
embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel, which some ill-fated
wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be haunted by strange phantoms of
guilt, sinkings of the heart, and unaccountable misfortune.
The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden
of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had
not known the weight until she felt the freedom! By another impulse, she
took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her
shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its
abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. There
played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender
smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson
flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long so pale. Her sex, her
youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call
the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves with her maiden hope, and a
happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if
the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two
mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a
sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood
into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the
yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the
solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the
brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its
merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a
mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature - that wild, heathen Nature of the
forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth -
with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly-born, or aroused
from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the
heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. Had
the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester's
eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale's!
Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.
"Thou must know Pearl!" said she. "Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen
her - yes, I know it! - but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She is
a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her dearly,
as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her!"
"Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?" asked the
minister, somewhat uneasily. "I have long shrunk from children, because
they often show a distrust - a backwardness to be familiar with me. I have
even been afraid of little Pearl!"
"Ah, that was sad!" answered the mother. "But she will love thee
dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her. Pearl! Pearl!"
"I see the child," observed the minister. "Yonder she is, standing in
a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook. So
thou thinkest the child will love me?"
Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at some
distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright-apparelled
vision in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of boughs.
The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or distinct - now like
a real child, now like a child's spirit - as the splendour went and came
again. She heard her mother's voice, and approached slowly through the
forest.
Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely while her mother sat
talking with the clergyman. The great black forest - stern as it showed
itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into its
bosom - became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it knew how.
Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to welcome her. It
offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding autumn, but
ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood upon the
withered leaves These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with their wild
flavour. The small denizens of the wilderness hardly took pains to move
out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a brood of ten behind her, ran
forward threateningly, but soon repented of her fierceness, and clucked to
her young ones not to be afraid. A pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed
Pearl to come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A
squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in
anger or merriment - for the squirrel is such a choleric and humorous
little personage, that it is hard to distinguish between his moods - so he
chattered at the child, and flung down a nut upon her bead. It was a last
year's nut, and already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from
his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively at
Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or renew his nap
on the same spot. A wolf, it is said - but here the tale has surely lapsed
into the improbable - came up and smelt of Pearl's robe, and offered his
savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that
the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all
recognised a kindred wilderness in the human child.
And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the
settlement, or in her mother's cottage. The Bowers appeared to know it,
and one and another whispered as she passed, "Adorn thyself with me, thou
beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!" - and, to please them, Pearl
gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the
freshest green, which the old trees held down before her eyes. With these
she decorated her hair and her young waist, and became a nymph child, or
an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with the antique
wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned herself, when she heard her mother's
voice, and came slowly back
Slowly - for she saw the clergyman.
THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE
"Thou will love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the
minister sat watching little Pearl. "Dost thou not think her beautiful?
And see with what natural skill she has made those simple flowers adorn
her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds, and rubies in the wood, they
could not have become her better! She is a splendid child! But I know
whose brow she has!"
"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet
smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath
caused me many an alarm? Methought - oh, Hester, what a thought is that,
and how terrible to dread it! - that my own features were partly repeated
in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them! But she is
mostly thine!"
"No, no! Not mostly!" answered the mother, with a tender smile. "A
little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child she
is. But how strangely beautiful she looks with those wild flowers in her
hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in dear old England,
had decked her out to meet us."
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In her was
visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world, these
seven past years, as the living hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the
secret they so darkly sought to hide - all written in this symbol - all
plainly manifest - had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read
the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the
foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt that their earthly lives
and future destinies were conjoined when they beheld at once the material
union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell
immortally together; thoughts like these - and perhaps other thoughts,
which they did not acknowledge or define - threw an awe about the child as
she came onward.
"Let her see nothing strange - no passion or eagerness - in thy way
of accosting her," whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic
little elf sometimes. Especially she is generally intolerant of emotion,
when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But the child
hath strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee!"
"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at Hester
Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But, in
truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily won to be familiar
with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to
my smile, but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I
take them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little
lifetime, hath been kind to me!
The first time - thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst
her with thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor. "
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!" answered
the mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing. She
may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee!"
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on
the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still
sat together on the mossy tree-trunk waiting to receive her. Just where
she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that
it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant
picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed
foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image,
so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat
of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself. It was
strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them
through the dim medium of the forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all
glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a
certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child - another and
the same - with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in
some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the
child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the
sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly
seeking to return to it.
There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and
mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since the
latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within the
circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified the aspect of them all,
that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and
hardly knew where she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this
brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet
thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends of our
childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream? Pray hasten
her, for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves. "
"Come, dearest child!" said Hester encouragingly, and stretching out
both her arms. "How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish before
now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also. Thou wilt have
twice as much love henceforward as thy mother alone could give thee! Leap
across the brook and come to us. Thou canst leap like a young deer!"
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed her
bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and now included them
both in the same glance, as if to detect and explain to herself the
relation which they bore to one another. For some unaccountable reason, as
Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand - with that
gesture so habitual as to have become involuntary - stole over his heart.
At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched out her
hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing evidently towards
her mother's breast. And beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was
the flower-girdled and sunny image of little Pearl, pointing her small
forefinger too.
"Thou strange child! why dost thou not come to me?" exclaimed Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on her
brow - the more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like aspect
of the features that conveyed it. As her mother still kept beckoning to
her, and arraying her face in a holiday suit of unaccustomed smiles, the
child stamped her foot with a yet more imperious look and gesture. In the
brook, again, was the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected
frown, its pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the
aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!" cried Hester Prynne,
who, however, inured to such behaviour on the elf-child's part at other
seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. "Leap
across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to thee!
"
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats any more than
mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion,
gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most
extravagant contortions She accompanied this wild outbreak with piercing
shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides, so that, alone as she
was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden
multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the
brook once more was the shadowy wrath of Pearl's image, crowned and
girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in
the midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester's bosom.
"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergyman, and
turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and
annoyance, "Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the
accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. Pearl misses
something that she has always seen me wear!"
"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of
pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath of
an old witch like Mistress Hibbins," added he, attempting to smile, "I
know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a
child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a
preternatural effect. Pacify her if thou lovest me!"
Hester turned again towards Pearl with a crimson blush upon her
cheek, a conscious glance aside clergyman, and then a heavy sigh, while,
even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly pallor.
"Pearl," said she sadly, "look down at thy feet! There! - before
thee! - on the hither side of the brook!"
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated, and there lay the
scarlet letter so close upon the margin of the stream that the gold
embroidery was reflected in it.
"Bring it hither!" said Hester.
"Come thou and take it up!" answered Pearl.
"Was ever such a child!" observed Hester aside to the minister. "Oh,
I have much to tell thee about her! But, in very truth, she is right as
regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little longer -
only a few days longer - until we shall have left this region, and look
back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of. The forest cannot hide
it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!"
With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the
scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a
moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was
a sense of inevitable doom upon her as she thus received back this deadly
symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite space! she
had drawn an hour's free breath! and here again was the scarlet misery
glittering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus typified or no,
that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom. Hester next
gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and confined them beneath her
cap. As if there were a withering spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the
warmth and richness of her womanhood, departed like fading sunshine, and a
gray shadow seemed to fall across her.
When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to Pearl
"Dost thou know thy mother now, child?", asked she, reproachfully,
but with a subdued tone. "Wilt thou come across the brook, and own thy
mother, now that she has her shame upon her - now that she is sad?"
"Yes; now I will!" answered the child, bounding across the brook, and
clasping Hester in her arms "Now thou art my mother indeed! and I am thy
little Pearl!"
In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew down
her mother's head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks. But then - by
a kind of necessity that always impelled this child to alloy whatever
comfort she might chance to give with a throb of anguish - Pearl put up
her mouth and kissed the scarlet letter, too
"That was not kind!" said Hester. "When thou hast shown me a little
love, thou mockest me!"
"Why doth the minister sit yonder?" asked Pearl.
"He waits to welcome thee," replied her mother. "Come thou, and
entreat his blessing! He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy
mother, too. Wilt thou not love him? Come he longs to greet thee!"
"Doth he love us?" said Pearl, looking up with acute intelligence
into her mother's face. "Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three
together, into the town?"
"Not now, my child," answered Hester. "But in days to come he will
walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our own;
and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many things, and
love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him - wilt thou not?"
"And will he always keep his hand over his heart?" inquired Pearl.
"Foolish child, what a question is that!" exclaimed her mother.
"Come, and ask his blessing!"
But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with
every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice of
her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favour to the clergyman. It was
only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to him,
hanging back, and manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which,
ever since her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and could
transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different aspects, with
a new mischief in them, each and all. The minister - painfully
embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a talisman to admit him
into the child's kindlier regards - bent forward, and impressed one on her
brow. Hereupon, Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the
brook, stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome kiss
was quite washed off and diffused through a long lapse of the gliding
water. She then remained apart, silently watching Hester and the
clergyman; while they talked together and made such arrangements as were
suggested by their new position and the purposes soon to be fulfilled.
And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The dell was to
be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their
multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no
mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to
the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and
whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more
cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.
THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little
Pearl, he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should discover
only some faintly traced features or outline of the mother and the child,
slowly fading into the twilight of the woods. So great a vicissitude in
his life could not at once be received as real. But there was Hester, clad
in her gray robe, still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast
had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since been
covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with earth's heaviest
burden on them, might there sit down together, and find a single hour's
rest and solace. And there was Pearl, too, lightly dancing from the margin
of the brook - now that the intrusive third person was gone - and taking
her old place by her mother's side. So the minister had not fallen asleep
and dreamed!
In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of
impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and
more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched
for their departure. It had been determined between them that the Old
World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter
and concealment than the wilds of New England or all America, with its
alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans
scattered thinly along the sea-board. Not to speak of the clergyman's
health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life, his
native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure him a
home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the higher the
state the more delicately adapted to it the man. In futherance of this
choice, it so happened that a ship lay in the harbour; one of those
unquestionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without being
absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a
remarkable irresponsibility of character. This vessel had recently arrived
from the Spanish Main, and within three days' time would sail for Bristol.
Hester Prynne - whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of Charity, had
brought her acquainted with the captain and crew - could take upon herself
to secure the passage of two individuals and a child with all the secrecy
which circumstances rendered more than desirable.
The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the
precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would
probably be on the fourth day from the present. "This is most fortunate!"
he had then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
considered it so very fortunate we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless - to
hold nothing back from the reader - it was because, on the third day from
the present, he was to preach the Election Sermon; and, as such an
occasion formed an honourable epoch in the life of a New England
Clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of
terminating his professional career. "At least, they shall say of me,"
thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no public duty unperformed or
ill-performed!" Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute
as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and
may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so
pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a
subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of
his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to
himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered
as to which may be the true.
The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings as he returned from his
interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried
him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway among the woods seemed wilder,
more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot
of man, than he remembered it on his outward journey. But he leaped across
the plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbush, climbed
the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in short, all the
difficulties of the track, with an unweariable activity that astonished
him. He could not but recall how feebly, and with what frequent pauses for
breath he had toiled over the same ground, only two days before. As he
drew near the town, he took an impression of change from the series of
familiar objects that presented themselves. It seemed not yesterday, not
one, not two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them.
There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he remembered it,
and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude of
gable-peaks, and a weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested
one. Not the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of
change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and
all the well-known shapes of human life, about the little town. They
looked neither older nor younger now; the beards of the aged were no
whiter, nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day;
it was impossible to describe in what respect they differed from the
individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet
the minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their mutability. A
similar impression struck him most remarkably a he passed under the walls
of his own church. The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar an
aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that
he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming
about it now.
This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no
external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of
the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had
operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own
will, and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had wrought
this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore, but the same
minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to the friends
who greeted him - "I am not the man for whom you take me! I left him
yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk,
and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his
emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be
not flung down there, like a cast-off garment!" His friends, no doubt,
would still have insisted with him - "Thou art thyself the man!" but the
error would have been their own, not his.
Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth,
nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in that
interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now
communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he
was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense
that it would be at once involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself,
yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse.
For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The good old man addressed
him with the paternal affection and patriarchal privilege which his
venerable age, his upright and holy character, and his station in the
church, entitled him to use and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost
worshipping respect, which the minister's professional and private claims
alike demanded. Never was there a more beautiful example of how the
majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and respect
enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank, and inferior order of
endowment, towards a higher. Now, during a conversation of some two or
three moments between the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and
hoary-bearded deacon, it was only by the most careful self-control that
the former could refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions
that rose into his mind, respecting the communion-supper. He absolutely
trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself in
utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own consent for so
doing, without his having fairly given it. And, even with this terror in
his heart, he could hardly avoid laughing, to imagine how the sanctified
old patriarchal deacon would have been petrified by his minister's
impiety.
Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the
street, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member
of his church, a most pious and exemplary old dame, poor, widowed, lonely,
and with a heart as full of reminiscences about her dead husband and
children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of
storied gravestones. Yet all this, which would else have been such heavy
sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul, by religious
consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith she had fed herself
continually for more than thirty years. And since Mr. Dimmesdale had taken
her in charge, the good grandam's chief earthly comfort - which, unless it
had been likewise a heavenly comfort, could have been none at all - was to
meet her pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed
with a word of warm, fragrant, heavenbreathing Gospel truth, from his
beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously attentive ear. But, on this
occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr.
Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no
text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then
appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the
human soul. The instilment thereof into her mind would probably have
caused this aged sister to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an
intensely poisonous infusion. What he really did whisper, the minister
could never afterwards recollect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder
in his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to the good
widows comprehension, or which Providence interpreted after a method of
its own. Assuredly, as the minister looked back, he beheld an expression
of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of the
celestial city on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.
Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church member, he
met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly-won - and won
by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale's own sermon, on the Sabbath after his
vigil - to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the heavenly
hope that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark around her,
and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She was fair and
pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew well that
he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her heart, which
hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth
of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely
led the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into
the pathway of this sorely tempted, or - shall we not rather say? - this
lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to
condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil
that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes.
Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she
did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence
with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So
- with a mightier struggle than he had yet sustained - he held his Geneva
cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition,
and leaving the young sister to digest his rudeness as she might. She
ransacked her conscience - which was full of harmless little matters, like
her pocket or her work-bag - and took herself to task, poor thing! for a
thousand imaginary faults, and went about her household duties with
swollen eyelids the next morning.
Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last
temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and
almost as horrible. It was - we blush to tell it - it was to stop short in
the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of little Puritan
children who were playing there, and had but just begun to talk. Denying
himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken seaman, one
of the ship's crew from the Spanish Main. And here, since he had so
valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale longed at
least to shake hands with the tarry black-guard, and recreate himself with
a few improper jests, such as dissolute sailors so abound with, and a
volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths! It
was not so much a better principle, as partly his natural good taste, and
still more his buckramed habit of clerical decorum, that carried him
safely through the latter crisis.
"What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?" cried the minister to
himself, at length, pausing in the street, and striking his hand against
his forehead.
"Am I mad? or am I given over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a
contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood? And does he
now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the performance of every
wickedness which his most foul imagination can conceive?"
At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed with
himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins, the
reputed witch-lady, is said to have been passing by. She made a very grand
appearance, having on a high head-dress, a rich gown of velvet, and a ruff
done up with the famous yellow starch, of which Anne Turner, her especial
friend, had taught her the secret, before this last good lady had been
hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury's murder. Whether the witch had read the
minister's thoughts or no, she came to a full stop, looked shrewdly into
his face, smiled craftily, and - though little given to converse with
clergymen - began a conversation.
"So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into the forest," observed
the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. "The next time I pray
you to allow me only a fair warning, and I shall be proud to bear you
company. Without taking overmuch upon myself my good word will go far
towards gaining any strange gentleman a fair reception from yonder
potentate you wot of. "
"I profess, madam," answered the clergyman, with a grave obeisance,
such as the lady's rank demanded, and his own good breeding made
imperative - " I profess, on my conscience and character, that I am
utterly bewildered as touching the purport of your words! I went not into
the forest to seek a potentate, neither do I, at any future time, design a
visit thither, with a view to gaining the favour of such personage. My one
sufficient object was to greet that pious friend of mine, the Apostle
Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath won from
heathendom!"
"Ha, ha, ha!" cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high
head-dress at the minister. "Well, well! we must needs talk thus in the
daytime! You carry it off like an old hand! But at midnight, and in the
forest, we shall have other talk together!"
She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back her
head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognise a secret intimacy
of connexion.
"Have I then sold myself," thought the minister, "to the fiend whom,
if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen for
her prince and master?"
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by
a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as he
had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the infectious
poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral
system. It bad stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid
life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked
malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good and
holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened him. And his
encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident, did but
show its sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals, and the world of
perverted spirits.
He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the burial
ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study. The
minister was glad to have reached this shelter, without first betraying
himself to the world by any of those strange and wicked eccentricities to
which he had been continually impelled while passing through the streets.
He entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books, its
windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the walls, with the
same perception of strangeness that had haunted him throughout his walk
from the forest dell into the town and thitherward. Here he had studied
and written; here gone through fast and vigil, and come forth half alive;
here striven to pray; here borne a hundred thousand agonies! There was the
Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to
him, and God's voice through all
There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished
sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had ceased
to gush out upon the page two days before. He knew that it was himself,
the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these
things, and written thus far into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to
stand apart, and eye this former self with scornful pitying, but
half-envious curiosity. That self was gone. Another man had returned out
of the forest - a wiser one - with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which
the simplicity of the former never could have reached. A bitter kind of
knowledge that!
While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door of
the study, and the minister said, "Come in!" - not wholly devoid of an
idea that he might behold an evil spirit. And so he did! It was old Roger
Chillingworth that entered. The minister stood white and speechless, with
one hand on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast.
"Welcome home, reverend sir," said the physician "And how found you
that godly man, the Apostle Eliot? But methinks, dear sir, you look pale,
as if the travel through the wilderness had been too sore for you. Will
not my aid be requisite to put you in heart and strength to preach your
Election Sermon?"
"Nay, I think not so," rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. "My
journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free air which
I have breathed have done me good, after so long confinement in my study.
I think to need no more of your drugs, my kind physician, good though they
be, and administered by a friendly hand. "
All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister with
the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his patient. But, in
spite of this outward show, the latter was almost convinced of the old
man's knowledge, or, at least, his confident suspicion, with respect to
his own interview with Hester Prynne. The physician knew then that in the
minister's regard he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest
enemy. So much being known, it would appear natural that a part of it
should he expressed. It is singular, however, how long a time often passes
before words embody things; and with what security two persons, who choose
to avoid a certain subject, may approach its very verge, and retire
without disturbing it. Thus the minister felt no apprehension that Roger
Chillingworth would touch, in express words, upon the real position which
they sustained towards one another. Yet did the physician, in his dark
way, creep frightfully near the secret.
"Were it not better," said he, "that you use my poor skill tonight?
Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong and vigorous for
this occasion of the Election discourse. The people look for great things
from you, apprehending that another year may come about and find their
pastor gone. "
"Yes, to another world," replied the minister with pious resignation.
"Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good sooth, I hardly think to
tarry with my 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!
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 sneer might have conceived, that, after sustaining the
gaze of the multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a
penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now,
for one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to
convert what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph. "Look your
last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!" - the people's victim and
lifelong bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little
while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer and the deep,
mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have
caused to burn on her bosom!" Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable
to be assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in
Hester's mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom from
the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might
there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless
draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years
of womanhood had been perpetually flavoured. The wine of life, henceforth
to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and
exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker, or else leave an inevitable
and 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 led'st me to him from the brook-side?"
"He will be there, child," answered her mother, "but he will not
greet thee to-day, nor must thou greet him. "
"What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking
partly to herself. "In the dark nighttime he calls us to him, and holds
thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And
in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of
sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses
my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it off! But,
here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor
must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always over his
heart!"
"Be quiet, Pearl - thou understandest not these things," said her
mother. "Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how
cheery is everybody's face to-day. The children have come from their
schools, and the grown people from their workshops and their fields, on
purpose to be happy, for, to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over
them; and so - as has been the custom of mankind ever since a nation was
first gathered - they make merry and rejoice: as if a good and golden year
were at length to pass over the poor old world!"
It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that
brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year -
as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two
centuries - the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they
deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the
customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared
scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general
affliction.
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the
market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic
gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny
richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed
as one great mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and
joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had they followed their
hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all
events of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and
processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in the observance of
majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation with solemnity, and
give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great robe
of state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on. There was some
shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on
which the political year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a
remembered splendour, a colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what
they had beheld in proud old London - we will not say at a royal
coronation, but at a Lord Mayor's show - might be traced in the customs
which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual
installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth
- the statesman, the priest, and the soldier - seemed it a duty then to
assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique
style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence.
All came forth to move in procession before the people's eye, and thus
impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly
constructed.
Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of rugged
industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same piece and material
with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which
popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of
Elizabeth's time, or that of James - no rude shows of a theatrical kind;
no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape
dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no
Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years
old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of
mirthful sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of
jocularity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid
discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which give law its
vitality. Not the less, however, the great, honest face of the people
smiled - grimly, perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as
the colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs
and on the village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to
keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness
that were essential in them. Wrestling matches, in the different fashions
of Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the
market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff;
and - what attracted most interest of all - on the platform of the
pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of defence were
commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the
disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off by the
interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the
majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of one of its
consecrated places.
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being
then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires
who had known how to be merry, in their day), that they would compare
favourably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even at
so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the
generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of
Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn
again the forgotten art of gaiety.
The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general
tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet
enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians - in their savage
finery of curiously embroidered deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and
yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and
stone-headed spear - stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity,
beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were these
painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene. This
distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners - a part of the
crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main - who had come ashore to see the
humours of Election Day. They were rough-looking desperadoes, with
sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers
were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate
of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some instances, a
sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes
which, even in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity.
They transgressed without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that
were binding on all others: smoking tobacco under the beadle's very nose,
although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and quaffing at
their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from pocket flasks, which
they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around them. It remarkably
characterised the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it,
that a licence was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their
freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element.
The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our
own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship's
crew, though no unfavourable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had
been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish
commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern court of
justice.
But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very much
at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any
attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might
relinquish his calling and become at once if he chose, a man of probity
and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his reckless life, was
he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic or
casually associate. Thus the Puritan elders in their black cloaks,
starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the
clamour and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men; and it excited
neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old
Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place in
close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.
The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as
apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a profusion
of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his hat, which was also
encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather. There was a
sword at his side and a sword-cut on his forehead, which, by the
arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display than hide. A
landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn
and shown them both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern
question before a magistrate, and probably incurring a fine or
imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As regarded the
shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to the character,
as to a fish his glistening scales.
After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship
strolled idly through the marketplace; until happening to approach the
spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognise, and did
not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester
stood, a small vacant area - a sort of magic circle - had formed itself
about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one another at a
little distance, none ventured or felt disposed to intrude. It was a
forcible type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter enveloped
its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve, and partly by the
instinctive, though no longer so unkindly, withdrawal of her
fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered a good purpose by
enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together without risk of being
overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne's repute before the public,
that the matron in town, most eminent for rigid morality, could not have
held such intercourse with less result of scandal than herself.
"So, mistress," said the mariner, "I must bid the steward make ready
one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or ship fever
this voyage. What with the ship's surgeon and this other doctor, our only
danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as there is a lot of
apothecary's stuff aboard, which I traded for with a Spanish vessel. "
"What mean you?" inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to
appear. "Have you another passenger?
"Why, know you not," cried the shipmaster, "that this physician here
- Chillingworth he calls himself - is minded to try my cabin-fare with
you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of your party,
and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of - he that is in peril
from these sour old Puritan rulers. "
"They know each other well, indeed," replied Hester, with a mien of
calmness, though in the utmost consternation. "They have long dwelt
together. "
Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But at
that instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in the
remotest comer of the market-place and smiling on her; a smile which -
across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk and
laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the crowd -
conveyed secret and fearful meaning.
THE PROCESSION
Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider
what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of
affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a
contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of magistrates
and citizens on its way towards the meeting-house: where, in compliance
with a custom thus early established, and ever since observed, the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election Sermon.
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and
stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the
market-place. First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments,
perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great
skill; but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum
and clarion addresses itself to the multitude - that of imparting a higher
and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye.
Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the
restless agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence
throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed to be borne upward
like a floating sea-bird on the long heaves and swells of sound. But she
was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the
weapons and bright armour of the military company, which followed after
the music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession. This body of
soldiery - which still sustains a corporate existence, and marches down
from past ages with an ancient and honourable fame - was composed of no
mercenary materials. Its ranks were filled with gentlemen who felt the
stirrings of martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of
Arms, where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn
the science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military
character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member of the
company. Some of them, indeed, by their services in the Low Countries and
on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won their title to assume
the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in
burnished steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a
brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the
military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even in
outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty that made the warrior's
haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age when what we call
talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials
which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The
people possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which, in
their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion, and
with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public
men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both.
In that old day the English settler on these rude shores - having left
king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the
faculty and necessity of reverence was strong in him - bestowed it on the
white hair and venerable brow of age - on long-tried integrity - on solid
wisdom and sad-coloured experience - on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gave the idea of permanence, and comes under the
general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore
- Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers - who were
elevated to power by the early choice of the people, seem to have been not
often brilliant, but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety, rather than
activity of intellect. They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time
of difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a line
of cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of character here
indicated were well represented in the square cast of countenance and
large physical development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a
demeanour of natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not
have been ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted
into the House of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently
distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the
anniversary was expected. His was the profession at that era in which
intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for
- leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements
powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win
the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power - as in
the case of Increase Mather - was within the grasp of a successful priest.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since
Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he
exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he kept
his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step as at other
times; his frame was not bent, nor did his hand rest ominously upon his
heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not
of the body. It might be spiritual and imparted to him by angelical
ministrations. It might be the exhilaration of that potent cordial which
is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest and long-continued
thought. Or perchance his sensitive temperament was invigorated by the
loud and piercing music that swelled heaven-ward, and uplifted him on its
ascending wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be
questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale ever heard the music. There was his
body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his
mind? Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural
activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon to
issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing of what
was around him; but the spiritual element took up the feeble frame and
carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting it to spirit
like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid, possess
this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life of
many days and then are lifeless for as many more.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary
influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not, unless that
he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her reach. One
glance of recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them. She
thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of solitude, and love, and
anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand-in-hand, they had
mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the
brook. How deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man?
She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped as it were, in
the rich music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he,
so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far
vista of his unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him!
Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and
that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt
the clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester,
that she could scarcely forgive him - least of all now, when the heavy
footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!
- for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world
- while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found
him not.
Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or herself
felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the minister.
While the procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering up and down,
like a bird on the point of taking flight. When the whole had gone by, she
looked up into Hester's face -
"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by the
brook?"
"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother. "We must
not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest. "
"I could not be sure that it was he - so strange he looked,"
continued the child. "Else I would have run to him, and bid him kiss me
now, before all the people, even as he did yonder among the dark old
trees. What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped
his hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me begone?"
"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was no
time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place?
Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him!"
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale,
was expressed by a person whose eccentricities - insanity, as we should
term it - led her to do what few of the townspeople would have ventured on
- to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter in public.
It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a triple
ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a gold-headed
cane, had come forth to see the procession. As this ancient lady had the
renown (which subsequently cost her no less a price than her life) of
being a principal actor in all the works of necromancy that were
continually going forward, the crowd gave way before her, and seemed to
fear the touch of her garment, as if it carried the plague among its
gorgeous folds. Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne - kindly as so many
now felt towards the latter - the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins had
doubled, and caused a general movement from that part of the market-place
in which the two women stood.
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?" whispered the old
lady confidentially to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That saint on earth, as
the people uphold him to be, and as - I must needs say - he really looks!
Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would think how little
while it is since he went forth out of his study - chewing a Hebrew text
of Scripture in his mouth, I warrant - to take an airing in the forest!
Aha! we know what that means, Hester Prynne! But truly, forsooth, I find
it hard to believe him the same man. Many a church member saw I, walking
behind the music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when
Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland
wizard changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows
the world. But this minister. Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he
was the same man that encountered thee on the forest path?"
"Madam, I know not of what you speak," answered Hester Prynne,
feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and
awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal
connexion between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil One.
"It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister of the
Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. "
"Fie, woman - fie!" cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester.
"Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet no
skill to judge who else has been there? Yea, though no leaf of the wild
garlands which they wore while they danced be left in their hair! I know
thee, Hester, for I behold the token. We may all see it in the sunshine!
and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou wearest it openly, so
there need be no question about that. But this minister! Let me tell thee
in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one of his own servants, signed and
sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he
hath a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be disclosed, in
open daylight, to the eyes of all the world! What is that the minister
seeks to hide, with his hand always over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne?"
"What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?" eagerly asked little Pearl.
"Hast thou seen it?"
"No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a
profound reverence. "Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another. They
say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince of Air! Wilt thou ride
with me some fine night to see thy father? Then thou shalt know wherefore
the minister keeps his hand over his heart!"
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the
weird old gentlewoman took her departure.
By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the
meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were heard
commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester near the
spot. As the sacred edifice was too much thronged to admit another
auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of the
pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon to her
ears, in the shape of an indistinct but varied murmur and flow of the
minister's very peculiar voice.
This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, insomuch that a
listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher
spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and
cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and
emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever
educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the church
walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intenseness, and sympathized so
intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely
apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps, if more distinctly
heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged the
spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as of the wind sinking
down to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it rose through
progressive gradations of sweetness and power, until its volume seemed to
envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and solemn grandeur. And yet,
majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was for ever in it an
essential character of plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of anguish
- the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering
humanity, that touched a sensibility in every bosom! At times this deep
strain of pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard sighing
amid a desolate silence. But even when the minister's voice grew high and
commanding - when it gushed irrepressibly upward - when it assumed its
utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church as to burst its way
through the solid walls, and diffuse itself in the open air - still, if
the auditor listened intently, and for the purpose, he could detect the
same cry of pain. What was it? The complaint of a human heart,
sorrow-laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt or
sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching its sympathy or
forgiveness, - at every moment, - in each accent, - and never in vain! It
was this profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman his most
appropriate power.
During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the
scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would,
nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she
dated the first hour of her life of ignominy. There was a sense within her
- too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind -
that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this
spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.
Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the sombre crowd
cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright
plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro,
half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering leaves.
She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement. It
indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly
indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon and
vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw anything to
excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she flew thitherward, and,
as we might say, seized upon that man or thing as her own property, so far
as she desired it, but without yielding the minutest degree of control
over her motions in requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled,
were none the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from
the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her
little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She ran and looked the wild
Indian in the face, and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own.
Thence, with native audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic,
she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild
men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they gazed
wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the sea-foam had
taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted with a soul of the
sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in the night-time.
One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had spoken to
Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that he attempted to lay
hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding it as impossible to
touch her as to catch a humming-bird in the air, he took from his hat the
gold chain that was twisted about it, and threw it to the child. Pearl
immediately twined it around her neck and waist with such happy skill,
that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and it was difficult to
imagine her without it.
"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the
seaman, "Wilt thou carry her a message from me?"
"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.
"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the
black-a-visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring his
friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy mother take
no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her this, thou
witch-baby?"
"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!" cried
Pearl, with a naughty smile. "If thou callest me that ill-name, I shall
tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship with a tempest!"
Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child returned
to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had said. Hester's
strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on
beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom, which at
the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minister and herself out
of their labyrinth of misery - showed itself with an unrelenting smile,
right in the midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to another
trial. There were many people present from the country round about, who
had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had been made
terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumours, but who had never
beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after exhausting other modes
of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish
intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not bring them
nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that distance they accordingly
stood, fixed there by the centrifugal force of the repugnance which the
mystic symbol inspired. The whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the
press of spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came
and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even
the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's
curiosity and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black
eyes on Hester's bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this
brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity
among her people Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own interest
in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what
they saw others feel) lounged idly to the same quarter, and tormented
Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool,
well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester saw and recognized the
selfsame faces of that group of matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming
from the prison-door seven years ago; all save one, the youngest and only
compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since made. At the
final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had
strangely become the centre of more remark and excitement, and was thus
made to sear her breast more painfully, than at any time since the first
day she put it on.
While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the
cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for ever, the
admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an
audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control. The sainted
minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the
marketplace! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise
that the same scorching stigma was on them both!
THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET
The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had
been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length came to a
pause. There was a momentary silence, profound as what should follow the
utterance of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed tumult, as if
the auditors, released from the high spell that had transported them into
the region of another's mind, were returning into themselves, with all
their awe and wonder still heavy on them. In a moment more the crowd began
to gush forth from the doors of the church. Now that there was an end,
they needed more breath, more fit to support the gross and earthly life
into which they relapsed, than that atmosphere which the preacher had
converted into words of flame, and had burdened with the rich fragrance of
his thought.
In the open air their rapture broke into speech. The street and the
market-place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with applauses of the
minister. His hearers could not rest until they had told one another of
what each knew better than he could tell or hear.
According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so wise,
so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day; nor had
inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did
through his. Its influence could be seen, as it were, descending upon him,
and possessing him, and continually lifting him out of the written
discourse that lay before him, and filling him with ideas that must have
been as marvellous to himself as to his audience, His subject, it
appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the communities of
mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they were here
planting in the wilderness. And, as he drew towards the close, a spirit as
of prophecy had come upon him, constraining him to its purpose as mightily
as the old prophets of Israel were constrained, only with this difference,
that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their
country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for
the newly gathered people of the Lord. But, throughout it all, and through
the whole discourse, there had been a certain deep, sad undertone of
pathos, which could not be interpreted otherwise than as the natural
regret of one soon to pass away. Yes; their minister whom they so loved -
and who so loved them all, that he could not depart heavenward without a
sigh - had the foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would soon leave
them in their tears. This idea of his transitory stay on earth gave the
last emphasis to the effect which the preacher had produced; it was if an
angel, in his passage to the skies, had shaken his bright wings over the
people for an instant - at once a shadow and a splendour - and had shed
down a shower of golden truths upon them.
Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale - as to most men,
in their various spheres, though seldom recognised until they see it far
behind them - an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph than any
previous one, or than any which could hereafter be. He stood, at this
moment, on the very proudest eminence of superiority, to which the gifts
or intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest
sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England's earliest days, when the
professional character was of itself a lofty pedestal. Such was the
position which the minister occupied, as he bowed his head forward on the
cushions of the pulpit at the close of his Election Sermon. Meanwhile
Hester Prynne was standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the
scarlet letter still burning on her breast!
Now was heard again the clamour of the music, and the measured tramp
of the military escort issuing from the church door. The procession was to
be marshalled thence to the town hall, where a solemn banquet would
complete the ceremonies of the day.
Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers
were seen moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew back
reverently, on either side, as the Governor and magistrates, the old and
wise men, the holy ministers, and all that were eminent and renowned,
advanced into the midst of them. When they were fairly in the marketplace,
their presence was greeted by a shout. This - though doubtless it might
acquire additional force and volume from the child-like loyalty which the
age awarded to its rulers - was felt to be an irrepressible outburst of
enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that high strain of eloquence which
was yet reverberating in their ears. Each felt the impulse in himself, and
in the same breath, caught it from his neighbour. Within the church, it
had hardly been kept down; beneath the sky it pealed upward to the zenith.
There were human beings enough, and enough of highly wrought and
symphonious feeling to produce that more impressive sound than the organ
tones of the blast, or the thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that
mighty swell of many voices, blended into one great voice by the universal
impulse which makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never, from
the soil of New England had gone up such a shout! Never, on New England
soil had stood the man so honoured by his mortal brethren as the preacher!
How fared it with him, then? Were there not the brilliant particles
of a halo in the air about his head? So etherealised by spirit as he was,
and so apotheosised by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps, in the
procession, really tread upon the dust of earth?
As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all eyes
were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to approach
among them. The shout died into a murmur, as one portion of the crowd
after another obtained a glimpse of him. How feeble and pale he looked,
amid all his triumph! The energy - or say, rather, the inspiration which
had held him up, until he should have delivered the sacred message that
had brought its own strength along with it from heaven - was withdrawn,
now that it had so faithfully performed its office. The glow, which they
had just before beheld burning on his cheek, was extinguished, like a
flame that sinks down hopelessly among the late decaying embers. It seemed
hardly the face of a man alive, with such a death-like hue: it was hardly
a man with life in him, that tottered on his path so nervously, yet
tottered, and did not fall!
One of his clerical brethren - it was the venerable John Wilson -
observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the retiring wave
of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward hastily to offer his
support. The minister tremulously, but decidedly, repelled the old man's
arm. He still walked onward, if that movement could be so described, which
rather resembled the wavering effort of an infant, with its mother's arms
in view, outstretched to tempt him forward. And now, almost imperceptible
as were the latter steps of his progress, he had come opposite the
well-remembered and weather-darkened scaffold, where, long since, with all
that dreary lapse of time between, Hester Prynne had encountered the
world's ignominious stare. There stood Hester, holding little Pearl by the
hand! And there was the scarlet letter on her breast! The minister here
made a pause; although the music still played the stately and rejoicing
march to which the procession moved. It summoned him onward - inward to
the festival! - but here he made a pause.
Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye upon
him. He now left his own place in the procession, and advanced to give
assistance judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale's aspect that he must otherwise
inevitably fall. But there was something in the latter's expression that
warned back the magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the vague
intimations that pass from one spirit to another. The crowd, meanwhile,
looked on with awe and wonder. This earthly faintness, was, in their view,
only another phase of the minister's celestial strength; nor would it have
seemed a miracle too high to be wrought for one so holy, had he ascended
before their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading at last into the
light of heaven!
He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms.
"Hester," said he, "come hither! Come, my little Pearl!"
It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was
something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it. The child, with
the bird-like motion, which was one of her characteristics, flew to him,
and clasped her arms about his knees. Hester Prynne - slowly, as if
impelled by inevitable fate, and against her strongest will - likewise
drew near, but paused before she reached him. At this instant old Roger
Chillingworth thrust himself through the crowd - or, perhaps, so dark,
disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of some nether region -
to snatch back his victim from what he sought to do! Be that as it might,
the old man rushed forward, and caught the minister by the arm.
"Madman, hold! what is your purpose?" whispered he. "Wave back that
woman! Cast off this child All shall be well! Do not blacken your fame,
and perish in dishonour! I can yet save you! Would you bring infamy on
your sacred profession?"
"Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late!" answered the minister,
encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly. "Thy power is not what it
was! With God's help, I shall escape thee now!"
He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.
"Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the name
of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last
moment, to do what - for my own heavy sin and miserable agony - I withheld
myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine thy strength
about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by the will which God
hath granted me! This wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all
his might! - with all his own might, and the fiend's! Come, Hester - come!
Support me up yonder scaffold. "
The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity, who stood
more immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by surprise, and so
perplexed as to the purport of what they saw - unable to receive the
explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any other -
that they remained silent and inactive spectators of the judgement which
Providence seemed about to work. They beheld the minister, leaning on
Hester's shoulder, and supported by her arm around him, approach the
scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the little hand of the
sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger Chillingworth followed, as
one intimately connected with the drama of guilt and sorrow in which they
had all been actors, and well entitled, therefore to be present at its
closing scene.
"Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he looking darkly at
the clergyman, "there was no one place so secret - no high place nor lowly
place, where thou couldst have escaped me - save on this very scaffold!"
"Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!" answered the minister.
Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester, with an expression of doubt
and anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that there was a
feeble smile upon his lips.
"Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in the
forest?"
I know not! I know not!" she hurriedly replied "Better? Yea; so we
may both die, and little Pearl die with us!"
"For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order," said the minister;
"and God is merciful! Let me now do the will which He hath made plain
before my sight. For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste to
take my shame upon me!"
Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of little
Pearl's, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and venerable
rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his brethren; to the people, whose
great heart was thoroughly appalled yet overflowing with tearful sympathy,
as knowing that some deep life-matter - which, if full of sin, was full of
anguish and repentance likewise - was now to be laid open to them. The
sun, but little past its meridian, shone down upon the clergyman, and gave
a distinctness to his figure, as he stood out from all the earth, to put
in his plea of guilty at the bar of Eternal Justice.
"People of New England!" cried he, with a voice that rose over them,
high, solemn, and majestic - yet had always a tremor through it, and
sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a fathomless depth of remorse and
woe - "ye, that have loved me! - ye, that have deemed me holy! - behold me
here, the one sinner of the world! At last - at last! - I stand upon the
spot where, seven years since, I should have stood, here, with this woman,
whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have crept
hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful moment, from grovelling down upon
my face! Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears! Ye have all shuddered
at it! Wherever her walk hath been - wherever, so miserably burdened, she
may have hoped to find repose - it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and
horrible repugnance round about her. But there stood one in the midst of
you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!"
It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the remainder
of his secret undisclosed. But he fought back the bodily weakness - and,
still more, the faintness of heart - that was striving for the mastery
with him. He threw off all assistance, and stepped passionately forward a
pace before the woman and the children.
"It was on him!" he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so
determined was he to speak out tile whole. "God's eye beheld it! The
angels were for ever pointing at it! (The Devil knew it well, and fretted
it continually with the touch of his burning finger!) But he hid it
cunningly from men, and walked among you with the mien of a spirit,
mournful, because so pure in a sinful world! - and sad, because he missed
his heavenly kindred! Now, at the death-hour, he stands up before you! He
bids you look again at Hester's scarlet letter! He tells you, that, with
all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his
own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more than the
type of what has seared his inmost heart! Stand any here that question
God's judgment on a sinner! Behold! Behold, a dreadful witness of it!"
With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from
before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe
that revelation. For an instant, the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude
was concentrated on the ghastly miracle; while the minister stood, with a
flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain,
had won a victory. Then, down he sank upon the scaffold! Hester partly
raised him, and supported his head against her bosom. Old Roger
Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull countenance, out
of which the life seemed to have departed,
"Thou hast escaped me!" he repeated more than once. "Thou hast
escaped me!"
"May God forgive thee!" said the minister. "Thou, too, hast deeply
sinned!"
He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the
woman and the child.
"My little Pearl," said he, feebly and there was a sweet and gentle
smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now
that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as if he would be sportive
with the child - "dear little Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now? Thou wouldst
not, yonder, in the forest! But now thou wilt?"
Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief,
in which the wild infant bore a part had developed all her sympathies; and
as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she
would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the
world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a
messenger of anguish was fulfilled.
"Hester," said the clergyman, "farewell!"
"Shall we not meet again?" whispered she, bending her face down close
to his. "Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we
have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest far into
eternity, with those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what thou seest!"
"Hush, Hester - hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we
broke I - the sin here awfully revealed! - let these alone be in thy
thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God - when
we violated our reverence each for the other's soul - it was thenceforth
vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure
reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of
all, in my afflictions. By 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.
CONCLUSION
After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their
thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one
account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.
Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the
unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER - the very semblance of that worn by
Hester Prynne - imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin there were
various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural.
Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when
Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of
penance - which he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out -
by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others contended that the
stigma had not been produced until a long time subsequent, when old Roger
Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear,
through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again and those
best able to appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the
wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body - whispered their belief,
that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active tooth of remorse,
gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven's
dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. The reader may
choose among these theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire
upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase
its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation has fixed it in
very undesirable distinctness.
It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were
spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed
their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any
mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant's. Neither, by
their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied,
any - the slightest - connexion on his part, with the guilt for which
Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to these
highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying -
conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already
among saints and angels - had desired, by yielding up his breath in the
arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is
the choicest of man's own righteousness. After exhausting life in his
efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death
a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful
lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike. It
was to teach them, that the holiest amongst us has but attained so far
above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down,
and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look
aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be
allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's story as only an
instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man's friends - and
especially a clergyman's - will sometimes uphold his character, when
proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him
a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.
The authority which we have chiefly followed - a manuscript of old
date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some of whom had
known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the tale from contemporary
witnesses fully confirms the view taken in the foregoing pages. Among many
morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience,
we put only this into a sentence: - "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show
freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst
may be inferred!"
Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost
immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale's death, in the appearance and demeanour
of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy -
all his vital and intellectual force - seemed at once to desert him,
insomuch that he positively withered up, shrivelled away and almost
vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the
sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist
in the pursuit and systematic exercise revenge; and when, by its
completest triumph consummation that evil principle was left with no
further material to support it - when, in short, there was no more Devil's
work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanised mortal
to betake himself whither his master would find him tasks enough, and pay
him his wages duly. But, to all these shadowy beings, so long our near
acquaintances - as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions we would
fain be merciful. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry,
whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its
utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and
heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his
affections and spiritual fife upon another: each leaves the passionate
lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the
withdrawal of his subject. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two
passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in
a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the
spiritual world, the old physician and the minister - mutual victims as
they have been - may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred
and antipathy transmuted into golden love.
Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to
communicate to the reader. At old Roger Chillingworth's decease, (which
took place within the year), and by his last will and testament, of which
Governor Bellingham and the Reverend Mr. Wilson were executors, he
bequeathed a very considerable amount of property, both here and in
England to little Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne.
So Pearl - the elf child - the demon offspring, as some people up to
that epoch persisted in considering her - became the richest heiress of
her day in the New World. Not improbably this circumstance wrought a very
material change in the public estimation; and had the mother and child
remained here, little Pearl at a marriageable period of life might have
mingled her wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among
them all. But, in no long time after the physician's death, the wearer of
the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with her. For many years,
though a vague report would now and then find its way across the sea -
like a shapeless piece of driftwood tossed ashore with the initials of a
name upon it - yet no tidings of them unquestionably authentic were
received. The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend. Its spell,
however, was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the poor
minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the sea-shore where Hester
Prynne had dwelt. Near this latter spot, one afternoon some children were
at play, when they beheld a tall woman in a gray robe approach the
cottage-door. In all those years it had never once been opened; but either
she unlocked it or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she
glided shadow-like through these impediments - and, at all events, went
in.
On the threshold she paused - turned partly round - for perchance the
idea of entering alone and all so changed, the home of so intense a former
life, was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear. But her
hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to display a
scarlet letter on her breast.
And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken shame!
But where was little Pearl? If still alive she must now have been in the
flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew - nor ever learned with the
fulness of perfect certainty - whether the elf-child had gone thus
untimely to a maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been
softened and subdued and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness. But
through the remainder of Hester's life there were indications that the
recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest with
some inhabitant of another land. Letters came, with armorial seals upon
them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the cottage there
were articles of comfort and luxury such as Hester never cared to use, but
which only wealth could have purchased and affection have imagined for
her. There were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a
continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate fingers at
the impulse of a fond heart And once Hester was seen embroidering a
baby-garment with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have
raised a public tumult had any infant thus apparelled, been shown to our
sober-hued community.
In fine, the gossips of that day believed - and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who
made investigations a century later, believed - and one of his recent
successors in office, moreover, faithfully believes - that Pearl was not
only alive, but married, and happy, and mindful of her mother; and that
she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at her
fireside.
But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New
England, that in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here
had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence.
She had returned, therefore, and resumed of her own free will, for not the
sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it - resumed
the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did
it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and
self-devoted years that made up Hester's life, the scarlet letter ceased
to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and
became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe,
yet with reverence too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor
lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all
their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had
herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially - in the
continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or
erring and sinful passion - or with the dreary burden of a heart
unyielded, because unvalued and unsought came to Hester's cottage,
demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted
and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm
belief that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown
ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order
to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of
mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she
herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognised
the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should
be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even
burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming
revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and
wise; moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy;
and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a
life successful to such an end.
So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the
scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near
an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel
has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a
space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle.
Yet one tomb-stone served for both. All around, there were monuments
carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate - as the
curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the
purport - there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore
a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief
description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved
only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: -
"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"